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. Europe was enveloped in snow to the Mediterranean; the Barbary coast was jammed with refugees. London and Paris, like New York, were threatened with complete abandonment. In Canada, they said--like Scandinavia, north Interior Europe and Asia of the far north--there was less panic, less disaster. These people were accustomed to intense cold and equipped to withstand it. In the Canadian rural district, the farmers shut themselves up with their winter fundamentals of food as had been their custom, and were said to be making out fairly well. But the big centers of population, dependent upon transportation and industry, were devastated. Greater Montreal was abandoned in February. Transportation everywhere in the United States was kept partially open, but only by efforts born of the frantic desperation of necessity. The new Arctic airplanes, recently developed, were being hastily manufactured in quantity, in government plants established in Florida and Southern California, and were as hastily put into service to bear the people southward. The railroads of our northern States kept open for a while with snow plows loaned by the great Canadian trunk lines which had long since succumbed. Steamship service along the Atlantic Coast ventured no farther north than Charleston, South Carolina. The North Atlantic was filled with ice floes driven south by the constant storms; the Polar ice field was reported now as extending nearly down to the former New York-Liverpool steamship lanes.