Chapter II

FROM ANOTHER PLANET.

That was the last of the incidents at the White Camp. But such an affair could not be kept secret. The world rang with it.

For a time, however, it seemed destined forever to be shrouded in mystery. Professor White died without recovering consciousness. The body of the man we had shot, and the strange winged girl with him, remained as the only tangible evidence. The giant figure which had made off into the forest was not caught. Nor were any of the missing girls recovered.

There was a weapon found in the road that night where we gathered over the two bodies. It was quite evidently the projector of the blue-green bolts. A small, globular affair, with a mesh of wires across its face, a firing mechanism, and what seemed a queer form of storage battery in its handle.

What current it may have used could not be determined. The thing was empty of charge when found; evidently its last available shot had been the blue-green stab which sizzled past me.

The two bodies were examined by many learned men before they were interred. Obviously the winged girl was nothing of Earth. Nor could the man be identified with any race on this planet. Yet the two were clearly not of the same race.

One extremely curious circumstance was brought out by this investigation. The man's body was short and abnormally thick-set; ape-like, but with a flabby, pallid, hairless skin. A man of such build would normally weigh a full hundred and seventy pounds. I was present at the investigation. Gazing at the body, I was convinced it would weigh a hundred and seventy. Yet on the scales it weighed a hundred and twenty-two. A different density. I felt of the body. Small-boned—a light skeleton. And the flesh was putty-like, with what seemed microscopic air-cells in it.

The girl was an extraordinarily beautiful little creature. Fantastic, with those great blue-feathered wings arching out from her shoulder-blades. But her face, composed now in death, was humanly beautiful, with a delicate ethereal beauty.

She seemed certainly no more than sixteen years old. A clear white skin which in life might have been flushed rose-pink. Long pale-golden hair. Blue eyes. A queerly frail-looking body, yet rounded almost to matured girlhood.

She was four feet seven inches tall. Such a girl might have weighed a hundred pounds. This one, with allowances for the weight of the wings, weighed only sixty-five pounds.

Queer, inexplicable facts! And I could not forget that this dying winged girl had tried to speak to us in English! That, to me, seemed most inexplicable of all.

By the end of August the world was beginning to talk less of the affair. Then, on August 30 Dr. Grenfell made public his paper of theory, and explanation—and warning. It was more startling than anything which had gone before.

I give here, not the original paper which was couched in the more technical and detailed phraseology of science, but the transcription made for the general public which Dr. Grenfell gave me to put on the air:

"The affair at the White Camp occurred on the night of August 10. On the previous night upon one of the star-field photo-diagram plates made in the routine work of the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, a dot of curious aspect showed which had no logical right to be there. With a subsequent, longer exposure made a few minutes later, that dot became a tiny hairline streak of light, proving that it was in motion.

"Observations made at the Lowell Observatory that night established the conviction that the dot was something extremely small and quite close to the Earth—only a few thousand miles beyond the upper reaches of our atmosphere.

"The Mount Wyndam Observatory, near Summit, New Jersey, made similar observations during the early evening of August 10th. But the dot was moving fast, and soon disappeared to the northward. And the sky became overcast as the evening advanced, preventing further observation.

"The inescapable conclusion of both observatories is that this was some form of interplanetary vehicle hovering above our earth. Spectrographs showed it to be shining with reflected sunlight. How far away it was, how great its velocity, or what was its size, could not be determined.

"Other strange facts came to light during that memorable week of August 10th to 17th. Many of them apparently were unrelated. On the night of August 10th, a shooting star of abnormal aspect was reported by many eyewitnesses in Maine. It fell very slowly from a point near the zenith toward the northern horizon. The 'star' was pale-white.

"A meteor, which generally is a mere fragment of star-dust burning with the heat of friction as it hits our atmosphere, blazes with a streak of fire for an instant; and then, consuming itself, burns out and vanishes. But this was different. It seemed floating down, glowing with a silvery light. A few moments, and then it disappeared from view.

"The observatory at Flagstaff saw nothing of this. But at Mount Wyndam they saw it! The thing seemed a silvery metallic ball. It glowed with friction-heat and with sunlight. But when it descended into the night-shadow of Earth, it was seen no more. The time was 8:55 P. M.

"This, we believe, was a smaller vehicle descending from the larger one hovering out there in Space. As a tender comes from a liner lying outside the shoals, this silver ball came down with its human occupants and landed somewhere in the forests or upon one of the lakes in Maine!

"And other facts: This smaller vehicle—though there may have been several of them—was observed subsequent to August 10th, upon at least two occasions by pilots of our patrol flyers. The sky, day and night in Maine and vicinity, was during that week almost constantly obscured by heavy clouds. At a hundred thousand feet such vehicles would be safe from discovery.

"One of our climbing planes, with Navy pilot Rankin, present holder of the altitude record, on the night of August 12th, and again during the day, ascended over Quogg, Maine, to a height of sixty-five thousand feet—but discovered nothing. As a matter of fact, an interplanetary vehicle—these silver balls for instance—could easily attain a velocity enabling them to follow the night-shadow around the world.

"We are forced to the conclusion that the attacks upon the White Camp and elsewhere in Maine were made by beings of human form and intelligence from another planet. But which one? To our knowledge, whether or not any of the other planets of the Solar System are inhabited has been problematical. Yet here is proof!

"We believe that these beings came from the planet Mercury, and have now returned there. Many astronomical and astro-physical phenomena recently observed lead to that conclusion. And so do the biological facts concerning the two bodies. Much of this is of too technical a nature to include here. I need only explain that Mercury revolves about the Sun once in eighty-eight of our days. That is the length of its year. On August 10th it and the Earth were near inferior conjunction, i. e., at their closest points to each other.

"The marauders came then! They have gone back now, for Mercury, moving faster in its orbit than does the Earth, is rapidly drawing away from us.

"But why did they come? Certainly not with friendly intentions! Nor yet with the boldness of an invasion—an attempted conquest. These were prowlers in the night, using every effort for secrecy. Abducting our women—our young girls. Again, that is an inescapable conclusion: they made no move, did nothing save for the purpose of abduction.

"A dozen young girls have vanished. The prowlers have gone, back into Interplanetary Space to Mercury or wherever they are native. The menace is over.... But is it?

"We killed one of these men. And his companion, a strangely fantastic young girl with wings. She was a beautiful girl, no more than a child—in racial appearance no more like him than he was to an Earth-man. And, dying, she spoke English! That is indeed beyond all possible explanation by the deductions of our logical science. Even the wildest conjecture cannot encompass it.

"But we may imagine that she was not friendly to him and his fellows. A captive perhaps. With her dying breath she gasped something about warning us. Of what? Presumably the abduction of our women. And our imagination flings out—can there be so few women upon Mercury that the men must needs come to Earth to steal ours?

"Is the menace over? When the winged girl and the man were shot by our guards that night of August 17th at the White Camp, the gigantic figure of a man escaped into the forest. It seems impossible—with our aërial patrol, our multiplicity of watchers in the neighborhood—that one of the vehicles could have taken him away. We believe he is still on Earth. Every effort is being made to find him, but so far without success.

"Will the marauders come back—to rescue him, or to pursue their mysterious purpose? Can we believe that if the men of Mercury desire our women, the abductions are not to be planned upon a larger scale? Was this not a mere tentative foray to learn of conditions here?

"We believe just that! And when will the real attack be made? Mercury is speeding away from us now. Thousands, millions of miles are being added to the distance between it and the Earth. In eighty-eight days from August 10 last Mercury will have completed one revolution about the Sun. But during that time the Earth will have moved along a distance requiring twenty-eight days more for Mercury to overtake us.

"Therefore, during the first week of next December Mercury and the Earth will again be approaching inferior conjunction, again at their closest point to each other. At that time we may expect another attack! Undoubtedly it will be of far greater proportions, menacing the safety of our women everywhere in the world!"