strange girl—the blood of Venus, the blood of Earth flowing in her veins.

You had not heard of George Peters, doubtless. Nor had I! A research chemist and physicist, in New York City, about 1930. He was a young man then; I think, twenty-eight. He sought no publicity. A wealthy man. With some twenty companions, all of them scientists, some of them older than himself, he was working, not on the secret of spaceflight, but with a ray—a vibration—which he hoped might reach some distant planet, as a means of communication if there should be inhabitants there.

Ironically he did not know he had succeeded! And it was men from Venus—the villainous Tollgamo of whom now you have heard so much—who was attracted by his signals and came to him; abducting him and his companions so that all that was known, here on earth was that one morning George Peters' laboratory was found wrecked, and he and his companions were gone.

"George Peters, that is my father," the girl was telling me now as I headed the small open boat for the island where young Allen and I were camping.

And she had come to Earth—the first time in her sixteen years that she had been off Venus; stolen a small spaceflight cylinder from her father. Her Venus people needed help from the threat of Tollgamo. All that was good and beautiful on Venus and in her Arone world of love and music and beauty, was to be destroyed by the monstrous threat of this Dictator from his mechanized realm of the Gorts.

"Wait," I said, as she poured it at me, at times only half coherent. "You came here to Earth, for help? You came alone?"

"Yes. You have not, father thinks, yet discovered the secret of spaceflight. He was sending the cylinder, with drawings and scientific details of how spaceflight was accomplished by Tollgamo and his evil men. And so I came. We want that you should build a spaceship and come to Venus. Your men, and some of your weapons of war, to help us fight Tollgamo."

And she had dropped here into the Gulf of Mexico, wrecked the little one-man space-vehicle so that she barely escaped with her life. And it sank, with its secret of spaceflight obliterated by the sea, even if by some chance the little metal mechanisms themselves could be recovered.

I think that she had given no thought to that realization as she swam to save herself and suddenly found my trolling hooks entangled in her hair. Nereid of the sea. Far more like her Venus 

 Prev. P 3/48 next