We stood tense. Like animals abruptly scenting danger, yet having no least idea what it was, or from whence it could come.... And abruptly in the silence, the murmuring little radio here changed from music to a newscaster's flash.
"Nereid listen—news of you—" I murmured.
Something had been seen, late this afternoon, dropping swiftly from the sky—something, a meteorite?—the few eyewitnesses differed in trying to describe it. "Mysterious missile drops into the Gulf ten miles off lonely Palmetto Key." The newscaster drew on his imagination, conjecturing what the round shining thing could have been, which two fishing boats had reported seeing coming hurtling down from the afternoon sky, dropping into the glassy Gulf.
I smiled at Nereid as for a moment we stood listening. Her little falling space-cylinder already was causing comment. I could envisage the incredulous amazement of the authorities at Tampa when I took her there, told them who she was. The world would ring with it. Blaring newscasters: "Stranded Venus girl! Marooned on Earth! Venus inhabited! Venus threatened with bloody revolution! Appeals to Earth for help! Daughter of two worlds brings secret of spaceflight to Earth, and loses it on her arrival!"
And some would try to be humorous: "Girl from Venus brings gift of spaceflight secret, and loses it before she can give it to us! Isn't that what you would expect of a woman?" "Kent Fanning and weird girl try to hoax scientists—"
Somehow as I thought of it, resentment sprang within me at what this would do to the gentle little Nereid. Allen and I, tomorrow when the storm was over, would have to take her to Tampa, of course. Or perhaps we would take her to some scientific Society, with less publicity. And an effort would be made to recover her cylinder, with its precious secret.
It was my swift flow of thoughts as for that moment the newscaster droned on. And suddenly his voice changed. He had been describing the mysterious falling of what quite evidently had been Nereid's little vehicle. And now another Press Bulletin had reached him.
"Mysterious airship descends from the stratosphere, lands in the Gulf near Palmetto Key, off west coast of Florida. At sunset tonight—"
Nereid gripped me with a little gasping cry as we listened. A gleaming metal thing, flatly oblong with a turret globe at bow and stern, had been distantly seen by a tramp freighter which was heading westward into the Gulf, bound for Mexico. A metal ship—blood-red with the sunset on it—slowly floating down; rotating slowly, weirdly on its horizontal axis.... It had been seen to land on the Gulf surface. And then slowly submerge, heading shoreward like a plunging submarine as it vanished!
Nereid murmured, "Tollgamo, he has a ship like that! But my father has none! Oh Kent—"