Chapter I: Front Matter

THE WAR-NYMPHS of VENUS

By RAY CUMMINGS

The voluptuous golden civilization of Arron was
doomed. Licentious laughter echoed through the
water-kingdom, unmindful of the relentless,
clanking invasion of the Gorts. What fools, this
handful of warrior-maidens led by a puny Earthman,
to pit their thin strength against Tollgamo's iron army!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1941.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I was fishing for tarpon, lolling back in the stern of my small boat. The outboard motor, running at trolling speed, was a puttering purr in the drowsing watery silence. It was sunset of a summer evening of 1948. The Gulf of Mexico, out beyond the mouth of the little Florida bayou inlet across which I was heading, was a glassy expanse, blood-red in the light of the huge setting sun.

To the south lightning was playing along the orange sky. I recall that a vague uneasiness was upon me. Because a storm might be coming? Surely it was not that. I was within three miles of the small island where young Jack Allen and I were camping. It was my intention to head for there presently, especially as there had been no sign of tarpon. Allen had been too lazy to come fishing; he had said he would loaf and have supper ready for us at dark.

My name is Kent Fanning. Jack Allen and I were of an age--twenty-four, that summer. With our business in New York, we were here on vacation, having a permit to fish and to camp on the small, uninhabited island.

The intermittent lightning at the southern horizon rose higher. Faint muttering thunder was audible. A massive grey-white cloud was down there now, a thunderhead, coming northward with the storm behind it. I had decided to pull in my line and head for the island when suddenly I had a strike, the big reel humming as the line went out. A tarpon? I hooked it, shut off the motor, sat erect with my stout rod braced in the leather socket of my belt. I was prepared for a long struggle.

And then, two hundred yards or so from me, the water broke with a floundering splash. I gasped, stared numbed. A floundering, oblong pink-white thing was there at the end of my line. A slim white arm flailed up as the thing turned, swimming on the surface frantically away from me. Pink-white limbs gleaming in the moonlight. Streaming tawny hair, like seaweed--hair in which my hook seemed to be caught.

A girl! I had her at the boat in a moment, floundering in the moonlight, gasping, still trying to twist around and disentangle my hook from her long streaming hair. A small, slim figure, white-limbed yet flushed like moonlit coral. There was a brief dangling robe wetly clinging to her. It was of gleaming lustrous green as though perhaps it was a fabric of softly woven metal, painted green by the sea.

An extraordinary yet very human girl.

Just a few seconds of my stricken amazement. I recall that I gasped inanely.

"Well--why good Heavens--"

Her gasping laugh rippled like the splashing water in the moonlight. "Sorry! I got some frightened to be confused."

English! Strangely intoned with little rippling liquid syllables. Like nothing I had ever heard before and yet my own language.

She had pulled my hook from the gleaming tawny tresses of her hair. Then she flung up a coral-white arm. I bent, seized her wrist, drew her up and she came with a nimble, skilled little leap and landed on her feet in the boat beside me!