all through that saturday night, rain drummed down mercilessly and unseasonably on sweetwater beach. thunder pealed and lightning flared. in between, mel armstrong heard the steady boom of the pacific surf not a block from his snug little duplex apartment. mel didn't mind any of it. he was in bed, slightly swacked and wholly comfortable. he dozed, and now and then woke up far enough to listen admiringly to the racket.
at nine a. m., when he opened his eyes once more, he discovered the room was full of summer sunshine. beyond his window gleamed a cloudless sky, and only the occasional gusts of wind indicated there had been anything like a storm during the night.
an exceptionally beautiful sunday morning—made more beautiful, perhaps, by the fact that it marked the beginning of mel armstrong's annual two-week paid vacation. mel was a salesman for marty's fine liquors, a wholesale house. he was twenty-eight and in fairly good shape, but his job bored him. this morning, for the first time in months, he was fully aware of that. perhaps it was the weather. at any rate, he had a sense, almost a premonition, of new and exciting events approaching him rapidly. events that would break down the boundaries of his present humdrum existence and pitch him into the life of romantic adventure that, somehow, he seemed to have missed so far....
recognizing this as a day-dream, but unwilling to give it up completely, mel breakfasted unhurriedly in his pajamas. then, struck by a sudden, down-to-earth suspicion, he stuck his head out of his living room window.
as he'd guessed, there were other reminders of the storm in the narrow courtyard before the window. branches and assorted litter had blown in, including at least one soggily dismembered sunday paper. the low rent he paid for his ground-floor apartment in the oceanview courts was based on an understanding with the proprietor that he and the upstairs occupant of the duplex would keep the court clean. the other five duplexes that fronted on the court were bulging with vacationing visitors from the city, which made it a real chore in summer.
unfortunately, he couldn't count on his upstairs neighbor, a weird though rather amiable young character who called herself maria de guesgne. maria went in for painting abstractions, constructing mobiles, and discussing the works of madame blavatsky. she avoided the indignity of manual toil.
mel made himself decent by exchanging his pajamas for swimming trunks. then he got a couple of brooms and a hose out of a garage back of the court and went to work.
he'd cleared the courtyard by the time the first of the seasonal guests began to show up in their doorways, and went on to inspect another, narrower court behind his duplex, which was also his responsibility. there he discovered maria de guesgne propped on her elbows on her bedroom window sill, talking reproachfully to a large gray tomcat that was sitting in the court. both turned to look at mel.
"good morning, mel!" maria said, with unusual animation. she had long black bangs which emphasized her sallow and undernourished appearance.
"morning," mel replied. "scat!" he added to the cat, which belonged to somebody else in the neighborhood but was usually to be found stalking about the oceanview courts.
"you shouldn't frighten poor cat," said maria. "mel, would you look into the bird box?"
"bird box?"
"the one in the climbing rose," said maria, leaning precariously from the window to point. "to your left. cat was trying to get at it."
the bird box was a white-painted, weather-beaten little house set into a straggly rose bush that grew out of a square patch of earth beside mel's bedroom window. the box was about ten feet above the ground.
mel looked up at it.
"i'm sure i heard little birds peeping in it this morning!" maria explained sentimentally.
"no bird in its senses would go into a thing like that," mel assured her. "i don't hear anything. and besides—"
"please, mel! we don't want cat to get them!"
mel groaned, got a wobbly step-ladder out of the garage and climbed up. the gray cat walked over and sat down next to the ladder to watch him.
he poked at the box and listened. no sound.
"can't you open the top and look in?" maria inquired.
holding the box in one hand, mel tentatively inserted his thumbnail into a crack under its top and pushed. the weathered wood splintered away easily.
"don't break it!" maria cried.
mel put his eye to the crack he'd made. then he gasped, jerked back, letting go of the box, teetered wildly a moment and fell over with the step-ladder. the cat fled, spitting.
"oh, my!" said maria, apparently with some enjoyment. "poor mel! are you hurt?"
mel stood up slowly. the bright morning world seemed to be spinning gently around him, but it wasn't because of his fall. "of course not," he said. his voice quavered somewhat.
"oh?" said maria. "well, then—are there any little birds in the nest?"
mel swallowed hard. "no," he said. he bent over and carefully picked up the ladder and placed it against the wall. the action made it unnecessary to look at her.
"eggs?" she asked in a hopeful tone.
"no eggs either! no nothing!" his voice was steady again, but he had to get rid of maria. "well, i'll clean up this court now, i guess. uh—maybe you'd like to come down and lend a hand?"
maria replied promptly that she certainly would like to, but she hadn't had breakfast yet; and with that she vanished from the window.
mel looked round stealthily. the cat was watching from the door of the garage, but no one else was in sight.
hurriedly, he replaced the step-ladder under the bird nest and climbed up again.
setting the box carefully down on the table in his living room, he locked the apartment door and closed the venetian blinds. all this had been done in a sort of quiet rush, as if every second counted, which it did in a way. mel wasn't going to believe, even for a moment, that what he thought he'd seen in that box could be really there; and he couldn't disprove it fast enough to suit him. but something warned him that he wouldn't want to have any witnesses around when he did take his second look.
then, as he turned from the window, he heard a thin piping cry, a voice as tiny as the peeping of a mouse, coming from the table, from the box.
an instant fright reaction froze him where he stood. the sounds stopped again. there was a brief, faint rustle, like the stirring of dry parchment, and then quiet.
the rustling, he thought, must have been the wings—he'd been sure they had wings. otherwise—
it could all have been an illusion, he told himself. an illusion that transformed a pair of featherless nestlings into something he still didn't want to give a name to. color patterns of jade and pink flashed into his memory next, however, which made the bird theory shaky. say a rather small green-and-pink snake then, or a lizard—
except, of course, for the glassy glitter of the wings. so make it instead, mel thought desperately, a pair of big insects, like dragonflies, only bigger....
he shook his head and moistened his lips. that wouldn't explain that tiny voice—and the more he tried to rationalize it all, the more scared he was getting. assume, he took the mental jump, he really had seen the figures of two tiny, naked, green-and-pink people in there—with wings! one didn't have to drag in the supernatural to explain it. there were things like flying saucers, presumably, and probably such beings might exist on other worlds.
the thought was oddly reassuring. he still felt as if he'd locked himself in the room with things potentially in the class of tarantulas, but there was excitement and wonder coming up now. with a surge of jealous proprietorship, he realized that he didn't want to share this discovery with anybody else. later, perhaps. right now, it was his big adventure.
the room was too dim to let him distinguish anything inside the box as he had outdoors, and he was still reluctant to get his face too close to it. he gave it a gingerly rap with his knuckle and waited. no sound.
he cleared his throat. "hello?" he said. immediately, that seemed like an idiotic approach. worse than that, it also brought no reaction.
for the first time, mel had a sense of worry for the occupants of the box. there was no way of guessing how they'd got in there, but they might be sick or dying. hurriedly he brought a lamp over to the table and tried to direct light inside, both through the round hole in its side and through the opening he'd made in the top. it wasn't very effective and produced no stir within.
with sudden decision, he shoved one hand into the opening, held the box with the other and broke off the entire top. and there they were.
mel stared at them a long time, his fears fading slowly. they were certainly alive! one was green, a tiny body of luminous jade, and the other was silkily human-colored, which was why he had been confused on that point. the wings could hardly be anything else, though they were very odd-looking, almost like thin, flexible glass.
he couldn't force himself to touch them. instead, he laid a folded clean towel on the table and tilted the box very slowly over it. a series of careful tappings and shakings brought the two beings sliding gently out onto the towel.
two delicately formed female figurines, they lay there a moment, unmoving. then the green one passed a tiny hand over her forehead in a slow, completely human gesture, opened slanted golden eyes with startled suddenness and looked up at mel.
he might still have thought he was dreaming, if his attention hadn't been caught just then by a detail of undream-like realism. the other, the human-colored one, seemed to be definitely in a family way.
they were sitting on the folded bath towel in a square of afternoon sunlight which came in through the kitchenette window. the window was high enough up so nobody could look in from outside, and they seemed to want the warmth of the sun more than anything else. they did not appear to be sick, but they were still rather languid. it wasn't starvation, apparently. mel had put bits of a variety of foods on a napkin before them, and he changed the samples as soon as his guests indicated they weren't interested. so far, canned sardine was the only item that had attracted them at all, and they hadn't done much more than test that.
between moments of just marveling at them, assuring himself they were there and not an illusion, and wondering what they were then and where they'd come from, mel was beginning to get worried again. for all he knew, they might suddenly die on the bath towel.
"miss green," he said in a very low voice—he didn't want to give maria de guesgne any indication he was in the house—"i wish you could tell me what you like to eat!"
miss green looked up at him and smiled. she was much more alert and vivacious than the other one who, perhaps because of her condition, merely sat or lay there gracefully and let miss green wait on her. the relationship seemed to be about that of an elf princess and her personal attendant, but they were much too real-seeming creatures to have popped out of a fairy tale, though their appearance did arouse recurrent bursts of a feeling of fairy tale unreality, which mel hadn't known since he was ten. but, tiny as they were, miss green and the princess primarily gave him the impression of being quite as functional as human beings or, perhaps, as field mice.
he would have liked to inspect the brittle-seeming wings more closely. they seemed to be made up of numerous laminated, very thin sections, and he wondered whether they could fly with them or whether their race had given up or lost that ability.
but touching them might have affected their present matter-of-fact acceptance of him, and he didn't want to risk that....
a door banged suddenly in the apartment overhead. a moment later, he heard maria coming down the hall stairs.
mel stood up in sudden alarm. he'd known for some time that his neighbor had supplied herself with a key to his apartment, not to pry but with the practical purpose of borrowing from the little bar in mel's living room when she was out of both money and liquor. she rarely took much, and until now he'd been more amused than annoyed.
he went hurriedly into the living room, closing the door to the kitchenette behind him. if maria knocked, he wouldn't answer. if she decided he was out and came in to steal his liquor, he would pretend to have been asleep in the chair and scare the hell out of her!
she paused before the apartment door a moment, but then went out into the court.
mel waited until her footsteps died away, going toward the street. as he opened the door to the kitchenette, something buzzed noisily out of the living room past his shoulder—a big, unlovely looking horsefly. the apartment screens didn't fit too well, and the fly probably had been attracted by the smell of food.
startled, he stopped to consider the new problem. there was a flyswatter hanging beside the door, but he didn't want to alarm his guests—and then, for the first time, he saw miss green's wings unfold!
she was up on her feet beside the princess, who remained sitting on the towel. both of them were following the swift, erratic course of the big fly with more animation than they'd shown about anything so far.
miss green gave a sudden piping cry, and the glassy appendages on her back opened out suddenly like twin transparently gleaming fans, and blurred into motion too swift for mel to follow.
miss green rose into the air like a tiny human helicopter, hands up before her as if she were praying.
it wasn't till the horsefly swerved from the kitchenette window and came buzzing back that mel guessed her purpose.
there was a sharper, fiercer drone like a hornet's song as she darted sideways into the insect's path. mel didn't see her catch it. its buzzing simply stopped, and then she was dropping gently back to the towel, with the ugly black thing between her hands. it looked nearly as big as her head.
there was an exchange of cheerful piping cries between the two. miss green laughed up at mel's stupefied face, lifted the motionless fly to her mouth and neatly bit off its head.
mel turned hurriedly and went into the living room. it wasn't, he told himself, really so very different from human beings eating a chicken. but he didn't feel up to watching what he knew was going to be a dismemberment and a feast.
at any rate, the horsefly had settled the feeding problem. his guests could take care of themselves.
that night, miss green hunted down a few moths. mel woke up twice with the sudden sharp drone in his ears that told him she had just made her catch. both times, it was a surge of unthinking physical fright that actually roused him. awake, and remembering the disproportion in size between himself and the huntress, his reaction seemed ridiculous; but the second time he found he was reluctant to go back to sleep until it would appear that miss green was done with her foraging.
so he lay awake, listening to the occasional faint indications of her continuing activity within his apartment, and to more familiar sounds without. a train rattled over a crossing; a police siren gave a sudden view halloo and faded into silence again. for a long time, there was only the whispering passage of distant cars over wet pavements, and the slow roll and thump of the surf. a haze of fog beyond the window turned the apartment into a shut-off little world of its own.
miss green moved about with no more than a whisper of air and the muted pipe of voices from the top of the kitchenette cupboard to show where she was. mel had put a small carton up there, upholstered with the towel and handkerchiefs and roofed over with his best woolen sweater, to make a temporary home for his guests. the princess hadn't stirred from it since, but miss green remained busy.
he started suddenly to find her hovering directly over his bed, vaguely silhouetted against the pale blur of the window. as he stared, she settled down and came to rest on the blanket over his chest, effortlessly as a spider gliding down along its thread. her wings closed with a faint snap.
mel raised his head carefully to squint down along the blanket at her. it was the first time either of them had made anything resembling a friendly advance in his direction; he didn't want to commit any blunders.
"hello," he said quietly.
miss green didn't reply. she seemed to be looking up at the window, disregarding him, and he was content to watch her. these strange creatures seemed to have some of the aloofness of cats in their manner, and they might be as easily offended.
she turned presently, walked up over the blanket and perched herself on mel's pillow, above his head and somewhat to his right. and there she stayed silently. which seemed catlike, too: the granting of a reserved and temporary companionship. he would not have been too surprised to hear a tiny purring from above his ear. instead, drowsily and lulled in an odd way by miss green's presence, he found himself sinking back into sleep.
it wasn't surprising either that his mind should be filled for a time with vague pictures of her, but when the room about him seemed to have expanded into something like a faintly luminous fish-bowl, he knew he was dreaming. there were others present. they were going somewhere, and he had a sense of concern, which had to do either with their destination or with difficulties in getting there. then a realization of swift, irrevocable disaster—
there were violent lurchings as the luminosity about him faded swiftly into blackness. he felt a terrible, energy-draining cold, the wet clutch of death itself, then something like a soundless explosion about him and anguished cryings. the motion stopped.
blackness faded back to gray, but the cold remained. icy water was pounding down on him now, as if he were fighting his way through a vertical current carrying somebody else. a desperate hunt for refuge—and finding it suddenly, and slipping inside and relaxing into unconsciousness, to wait for the return of warmth and life....
mel's eyes opened. the room was beginning to lighten with morning. he turned his head slowly to look for miss green. she was still there, on the pillow beside his head, watching him; and there was something in her position, in the unwinking golden eyes, even in her curious fluff of blue-white hair, that reminded him now less of a cat than a small lizard.
he didn't doubt that she had somehow enabled him to share the experience that in part explained their presence here. without thinking he asked aloud "what happened to the others?"
she didn't move, but he was aware of a surge of horrified revulsion. then before his open eyes for a moment swam a picture of a bleak, rain-beaten beach ... and, just above the waterline, in a cluster of harsh voices, jabbing beaks and beating wings, great gulls were tearing apart a strange jetsam of tiny bodies too weakened to escape—
a small, plaintive crying came from the kitchenette. the picture faded as miss green soared into the air to attend to her princess.
mel breakfasted in the living room, thoughtfully. he couldn't quite understand that luminous vehicle of theirs, or why it should have succumbed to the rain storm of saturday night, which appeared to be what had happened. but his guests obviously were confronted with the problem of getting back to wherever they'd come from—and he didn't think miss green would have confided in him if he wasn't somehow expected to be helpful in solving the problem.
there was a thump on the sill outside his bedroom window, followed by an annoyed meowing. the gray cat that had been spying on the bird box seemed to suspect he was harboring the refugees. mel went out into the little courtyard through the back door of the duplex and chased the animal away. the fog, he saw, was thinning out quickly; in an hour or so it would be another clear day.
when he came in, miss green fluted a few soft notes, which mel chose to interpret as gratitude, from the top of the cupboard and withdrew from sight again.
one couldn't think of them, he decided, as being exactly like any creatures of earth. the cold rain had been very nearly deadly to them, if the memory miss green had transmitted to him was accurate—as destructive as it had been to their curious craft. almost as if it could wash right through them, to drain vital energies from their bodies, while in the merely foggy air of last night she had seemed comfortable enough. it indicated different tolerance spans with more sharply defined limits.
the thought came into his mind:
venus?
it seemed possible, even if it left a lot to explain. mel got up in sudden excitement and began to walk about the room. he knew not much was known about the second planet, but he had a conviction of being right. it struck him he might be involved in an event of enormous historical significance.
then, stopping for a moment before the window, he saw it—
apparently high in the gray sky overhead, a pale yellow circle moved, much smaller than the sun, but like the disk of the sun seen ghostlike through clouds. instantly, another part of his dream became clear to him.
he lost his head. "miss green! come here, quick!"
a buzz, the swift drone of wings, and she was beside him, perching on his shoulder. mel pointed.
she gave a lamenting little cry of recognition. as if it had been a signal, the yellow circle darted sideways in a long streaking slant, and vanished. miss green fled to report to the princess, while mel stayed at the window, and quickly returned to him again. evidently she was both excited and distressed, and he wondered what was wrong. if that apparition of pale light had been one of their vessels, as her behavior indicated, it seemed probable that its mission was to hunt for survivors of the lost globe.
miss green seemed either less sure of that, or less confident that the rescue would be easily effected. some minutes later, she pointed to a different section of the sky, where the yellow circle—or another very like it—was now moving slowly about. presently it vanished again, and when it reappeared for the second time, it was accompanied by two others.
meanwhile, miss green might have been transmitting some understanding of the nature of her doubts to mel, because the ghostly vagrants now gave him an immediate impression of insubstantiality: not space-spanning luminous globes but pictured shapes projected on the air. his theory of interplanetary travelers became suddenly much less probable.
in the next few moments, the concept he was struggling with abruptly completed itself in his mind, so abruptly, in fact, that there was no longer any question that it had originated with miss green. the rescue craft mel thought he was seeing actually were just that.
but the pictures in the sky were only signals to possible survivors that help was approaching. the globes themselves were elsewhere, groping their way blindly and dangerously through strange dimensions that had nothing to do with the ones mel knew.
and they were still, in some manner his imagination did not even attempt to clarify, very, very "far away."
"i was wondering what you'd done with the bird box," maria de guesgne explained. "it's not there in the bush any more!"
mel told her annoyedly that the bird box had been damaged by the storm, and so he'd thrown it into the incinerator.
"well," maria said vaguely, "that's too bad." her handsome dark eyes were shifting about his living room meanwhile, not at all vaguely. mel had left the apartment door partly open, and she had walked right in on her way to the market. when she wasn't drinking or working herself up to a bout of creative painting, which seemed to put her into a tranced sort of condition, maria was a highly observant young woman. the question was now how to get her out of the apartment again before she observed more than he wanted her to.
"how does it happen you're not at work on monday afternoon?" she inquired, and set her shopping bag down on the armchair.
keeping one eye on the kitchenette door, mel explained about his vacation. miss green hadn't been in sight for almost an hour; but he wasn't at all sure she mightn't come out to inspect the visitor, and the thought of maria's probable reactions was unnerving.
"two weeks?" maria repeated chattily. "it'll be fun having you around for two weeks—unless you're going off to spend your vacation somewhere else. are you?"
"no," mel said. "i'm staying here—"
and at that moment, miss green came in through the kitchenette door.
at least, mel assumed it was miss green. all he actually saw was a faint blur of motion. it went through the living room, accompanied by a high-pitched hum, and vanished behind maria.
"good lord!" she cried, whirling. "what's that? oh!" the last was a shrill yelp. "it stung me!"
mel hadn't imagined miss green could move so fast. rising and falling with furious menace, the sound seemed to come from all points of the room at once, as maria darted out of the apartment. clutching her shopping bag, mel followed her out hastily and slammed the door behind them. he caught up with maria in the court.
she was rubbing herself angrily.
"i'm not coming into that apartment again, mel armstrong," she announced, "until you've had it fumigated! that thing kept stinging me! what was it, anyway?"
"a wasp, i guess." mel felt weak with relief. she hadn't really seen anything. "here's your bag. i'll chase it out."
maria stalked off, complaining about screens that didn't even protect people against giant wasps.
mel found the apartment quiet again and went into the kitchenette. miss green was poised on the top edge of the cupboard, a gold-eyed statuette of victory, laughing down at him, the laminated wings spread and raised behind her like iridescent glass fans. mel looked at her with a trace of uneasiness. she had some kind of small white bundle in her arms, and he wondered whether it concealed the weapon with which she'd stung maria.
"i don't think you should have done that," he told her. "but she's gone now."
looking rather pleased with herself, miss green glanced back over her shoulder and piped a few questioning notes to the princess. there was a soft reply, and she soared down to the table, folded her wings and knelt to lay the bundle gently down on it. she beckoned to mel.
mel's eyes popped as she unfolded the bundle. perhaps he really shouldn't have been surprised.
he was harboring four guests now—the princess had been safely delivered of twins.
at dusk, miss green widened the biggest slit in the bedroom screen a little more and slipped out to do her own kind of shopping, with a section of one of mel's handkerchiefs to serve as a bag.
mel left the lights out and stayed at the window. he felt depressed, but didn't quite know why—unless it was that so many odd things had happened since sunday morning that his mind had given up trying to understand them.
he wasn't really sure now, for example, whether he was getting occasional flash-glimpses of those circular luminous vessels plowing through another dimension somewhere, or whether he was half asleep and imagining it. usually it was a momentary glow printed on the dark air at the edge of his vision, vanishing before he could really look at it.
he had a feeling they had managed to come a good deal closer during the day. then he wondered briefly whether other people had been seeing strange light-shapes, too, and what they might have thought the glimpses were.
spots before their eyes, probably.
miss green was back with a soft hum of wings, on the outer window sill, six feet from where he sat. she pushed the knotted scrap of cloth through the screen. there was something inside it now; it caught for a moment on the wires. mel started up to help, then checked himself, afraid of feeling some bug squirming desperately inside; and while he hesitated, she had shoved it through. she followed it, picked it up again and flew off to the living room. after a moment she returned with the empty cloth and went out again.
she made eight such trips in the next hour, while night deepened outside and then began to lighten as a half-moon shoved over the horizon. mel must have dozed off several times; at least, he suddenly found himself coming awake, with the awareness that something had just landed with a soft thump on the window sill outside.
it wasn't miss green. he saw a chunky shadow at one corner of the window, and caught the faintest glint of green eyes peering into the room. it was the cat from the courtyard.
in the same moment, he heard the familiar faint hum, and miss green appeared at the opposite end of the sill.
afterward, mel realized he'd simply sat there, stiffening in groggy, sleep-dazed horror, as the cat-shadow lengthened and flowed swiftly toward the tiny humanoid figure. miss green seemed to raise both arms over her head. a spark of brilliant blue glowed from her cupped hands and extended itself in an almost invisible thread of fire that stabbed against the cat's forehead. the cat yowled, swung aside and leaped down into the court.
mel was on his feet, shaking violently, as miss green slipped in through the screen. he heard maria open her window upstairs to peer down into the court, where the cat was making low, angry sounds. apparently it hadn't been hurt, but no wonder maria had suspected that afternoon she'd been stung by a wasp! or that miss green's insect victims never struggled, once she had caught them!
he pulled down the shade and stood undecided in the dark, until he heard her piping call from the living room. it was followed by an impatient buzzing about the standing lamp in there, and mel concluded correctly that he was supposed to turn on the light.
he discovered her on the living room table, sorting out the plunder she had brought back.
it wasn't a pile of electrocuted insects, as he had expected, but a puzzlingly commonplace collection—little heaps of dry sand from the beach, some small white pebbles, and a sizable bundle of thin twigs about two inches in length. since she was disregarding him, he shifted the lamp over to the table to see what this human-shaped lightning bug from another dimension was going to do next.
that was the way he felt about miss green at the moment....
what she did was to transport the twigs in two bundles to the top of the cupboard, where she left them with the princess. then she came back and began to lay out a thin thread of white sand on the dark, polished surface of the table.
mel pulled up his armchair, poured himself a glass of brandy, lit a cigarette, and settled down to watch her.
