A Brand New World by Ray Cummings

In the flat light of dawn we must have looked ashen as we stood there on the roof top with Zetta's scream ringing in our horrified ears. I remember standing transfixed just an instant. Father made a leap toward the stairway that led down into the house, but a cry from Hulda checked him.

"Look! The guards -- look there!"

We were at a corner of the roof where it projected and gave a side view of the building. In the twilight I could see the ground -- a garden path between flowering shrubs; the burnished side wall of the house; the lower windows, with shutters slanting out; and an upper window, diagonally beneath us, Zetta's room! It seemed so. It was opened; another scream from Zetta came through it.

I recall that my confusion was mingled with a sense of relief -- this cry seemed to hold not so much terror as anger and words of command.

It all happened in no more than an instant, while we hung over the roof parapet, watching. From the ground a figure leaped upward -- a great brown thing with spindly legs, shining shell of jointed body and a head with thin waving arms beside it.

From within the room a commotion now sounded, a struggle -- the scratching of giant insect legs, the pad of human feet. The thing on the ground outside came sailing up with its leap; it clutched the casement, went scuttling in the window.

Father left us and ran down the staircase from the roof, but we did not heed his going. Then from the window a man's body was tumbled out. The grotesque forms of two great insects showed there; they were in the room, pushing the man through the window. He fell lightly to the ground; lay huddled, writhing in a heap. From the window they leaped down after him. A thing with brown spreading wings came sailing down from the foliage; a dozen others were leaping from unseen places.

Zetta appeared at the window. Zetta, unharmed. She gazed down but behind her, father appeared and drew her back into the room. On the ground a score of the insect guards were writhing, scratching, pawing over the body of Zetta's assailant. One scuttled away with a fragment, and two others chased it.

"It's perfectly clear to me," said father. "Kean, this blackguard Graff tried to abduct Zetta. What will your government say to that, when I tell them this morning? Are we to have these Brauns committing crimes right here in Garla?"

We were all in father's living room, half an hour after the attack on Zetta. Kean had come; he stood now before us respectfully listening to father's indignant words. He was a slim young fellow, as short as Freddie and as slender; a smooth, white-skinned youth, in leather, sleeveless jacket and short, wide-flaring leather trousers. Bareheaded, his thick, white hair hung long to his ears, with a thong binding it about his forehead. His face was pleasant, with a delicacy of cast suggesting girlishness, but his mouth was wide and firm-lipped, his chin strong and thoroughly masculine.

I liked him at once, this Kean. He smiled at us and shook our hands. He spoke English, like Zetta, with that quaint, clipped accent.

Zetta had not been hurt. She had been awakened by an intruder at her window. An insect guard evidently had followed him in, had attacked him. The rest we witnessed.

"Who was he? " Kean demanded.

She shook her head. "I do not know."

Father said: "You never saw him before?"

"No, never. I think not."

"A Braun?"

"Oh, yes."

Kean gestured. "If we had him, we could tell -- "

"He is -- gone now," said Zetta. I shuddered at the memory. Gone indeed!