which my hook seemed to be caught.

A girl! I had her at the boat in a moment, floundering in the moonlight, gasping, still trying to twist around and disentangle my hook from her long streaming hair. A small, slim figure, white-limbed yet flushed like moonlit coral. There was a brief dangling robe wetly clinging to her. It was of gleaming lustrous green as though perhaps it was a fabric of softly woven metal, painted green by the sea.

An extraordinary yet very human girl.

Just a few seconds of my stricken amazement. I recall that I gasped inanely.

"Well—why good Heavens—"

Her gasping laugh rippled like the splashing water in the moonlight. "Sorry! I got some frightened to be confused."

English! Strangely intoned with little rippling liquid syllables. Like nothing I had ever heard before and yet my own language.

She had pulled my hook from the gleaming tawny tresses of her hair. Then she flung up a coral-white arm. I bent, seized her wrist, drew her up and she came with a nimble, skilled little leap and landed on her feet in the boat beside me!

II

I find myself now somewhat at a loss accurately and yet succinctly to depict that next hour or two. You who read this of course have heard much of the strange affair from newscasters and from the public prints. Garbled reports, some of them. Others pedantic with technical details of science. I am no scientist. It is my purpose here merely to give a factual account of the weird incidents which brought to me, Kent Fanning, a person certainly of no importance save perhaps to myself, a sudden prominence not in one world, but in two.

Queer that throughout my lifetime there had always been talk that some day, here on Earth, scientists would discover the secret of spaceflight; that then intrepid adventurers would journey out into space. But as you all know now, the reverse, so seldom anticipated, was true. Another world came to us, in the person of this strange Venus girl; came indeed by utter chance, or destiny if you will; to me.

Venus; the Earth. Of all known planets, the two most close, and most alike. There are things brewing in the Universe of which none of us can be aware, of course. A myriad things. And here was one of them. Unknown to us, Venus and the Earth already were intermingled, fused into the beautiful little person of this 

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