A Brand New World by Ray Cummings

That midnight of February 10th, Hulda and Dan stood on the small Porto Rican trail, facing at a brief distance the white girl in the moonlight. She answered Hulda's call; in a queerly small voice her words came to them:

"_Zetta! Zetta! Zetta! _"

There was a brief silence. Dan murmured, "Let's go nearer."

Slowly, carefully, they advanced; fearful of again frightening her. But this time she did not move. She stood watchful, trembling slightly, but held her ground. And presently they were confronting her. She was shorter even than Hulda; very slim and frail. A young girl just reaching maturity. A rose, not yet full-blown. The thought occurred to Dan. But the comparison was wrong. Not a rose, for this was a flower of young womanhood of a species no one of earth could name.

She seemed, aside from her snow-white hair, no more than a strangely beautiful girl of earth. But to both Dan and Hulda came again, more strongly than before, the feeling of her strangeness. There was something singularly unusual in her aspect. And this they both recall clearly; as they stood there for a silent instant confronting her, both were conscious of sensations indescribable, as though they were feeling something within themselves -- something vague, elusive -- something no mortal of Earth had ever felt before. And, perhaps, hearing something -- so faint, so ethereal they could not define it -- faint as though it were sound heard not by their ears, but by their minds.

And they saw something, too, which perhaps no mortal eyes had ever seen before. An aura, a dim, very faint red radiance shone around the three of them as they stood there together in the moonlight. Hulda and Dan remembered it was something like that.

They stood for a moment, stricken with wonder at their sensations; and perhaps the strange girl was less timorous as she saw their attitude of awe. She stared up into Dan's face, and smiled. Queerly wistful; trusting. A gentle little creature! And he stared down into her dark eyes and found them shimmering pools of iridescence. Then again she spoke, other words in a strange, liquid tongue, soft, with curiously clipped, intoned syllables.

Dan shook his head. "We can't understand you. Can you understand us? " He smiled; and Hulda smiled.

"She's not afraid of us," said Dan. The girl was waving a hand with what they knew was a gesture of negation. She could not understand their language; and when Dan tried Spanish -- realizing it was futile; and tried his imperfect French -- her gesture continued.

He tried again. "Dan! Dan! Dan! " he said, and struck his chest. And Hulda indicated herself with "Hulda! Hulda!"

The girl's eager face brightened. They had established communication; the first communication between Xenephrene and our earth!

The girl cried, "Zetta, Zetta," and laid her hand on her breast.

It was the first communication between the worlds. What dire events, tragedies, amazing things to transpire before the last communication was over!

It is not my purpose, and again, I have no space in which to narrate all the details of these days. The girl was persuaded to follow Dan and Hulda, and through all that February she lived with the Cains in the plantation house, guarded and kept hidden, though the news of her presence could not be entirely concealed.

The silver ball in the coconut grove was a vehicle in which, by some method unknown to earth, this girl -- this Zetta, as she called herself -- had come from her world, to ours. And she had not come alone. A man had come with her -- he seemed to be of middle age. He lay dead near the vehicle. Perhaps the victim of an accident; or perhaps the girl had killed him.

There was no one, as yet, to say. Zetta could not, apparently, understand any earth language; and her language sounded hopeless to fathom. She seemed intelligent, docile, willing and anxious to be kept with the Cains; eager, it seemed at first, to be in the room with them -- to hear them talk. But after that first night, she did not speak again; and they thought she had fallen into a sullen silence.

There is so much I have to tell! Astronomers at Quito had seen this silver vehicle enter the earth's atmosphere that night of February 10th; and had seen another, infinitely larger, which they believed had started from the surface of Xenephrene.

Dan notified father of his strange visitor, of course. Father sent instructions. The authorities of Porto Rico buried the man's body, and set a guard to watch constantly over the vehicle as it lay in the grove. Scientists came to inspect it, and could understand but vaguely its mechanism.

Two weeks passed. Father was in Miami then; and near the end of February he started by government plane for Porto Rico.

Conditions all over the world were far worse now. We only had a vague picture; the radio and television were operating intermittently -- but all the regular channels for the dissemination of news were paralyzed. And, too, the governments withheld, or distorted to a less terrible aspect such reports as were available.