He seized her. "Look here, who the devil are you?" "Me? I am Ah-li, Goddess of the Marlans." "Well," he said. "Whatever that is. Anyway, be reasonable. I'm Roy Atwood. I've just come from Earth. You came from there, too, of course. When did you come? Your people, are they around here?" She seemed only able to stare at him as though numbed. Seemingly, she understood his words, but certainly not their meaning. "The Earth?" she murmured at last. "What is that? My people? They are here, of course. The Marlans." Her slim white arm gestured out over the forest-top. "I am Goddess Ah-li." Wonderment was in her dark eyes and in her voice. "And now you come--a God, like me." Her voice faltered. She was trying to smile. "I am afraid I do not understand," she murmured. "A Man-God coming here to rule with me. Never did I think that could happen." * * * * * For a moment, as he sat there clutching the girl in the tangled vines of the swaying forest-top, Atwood was at a loss for words. Beyond doubt, English was this girl's native language. Had some Earth-explorers landed here, bringing her when she was an infant? Earth-people who had died or been killed when the girl was too young to have learned anything? But her mature, fluent English belied that. In all those years, from infancy to maturity, alone here with what apparently were primitive natives of the planetoid, she would have forgotten her Earth-language. She was staring at him blankly, her wonderment matching his own. "When did you come here?" he demanded. "Can't you remember?" "Oh, yes," she smiled. "I was born--I appeared here in the forest--it was, how you would say, about two thousand of our days ago." With the day here about half that of Earth, she was naming something less than three Earth-years. "You appeared here in the forest?" he prompted. "Yes. From the sky I came. The Marlans saw me coming down. In my God-chariot." She gestured. "Like yours there, it must have been. Only mine, they tell me, burst into flame and destroyed itself when it touched the ground." A miracle surely. But to Atwood, the miracle was that from a wrecked, flaming little spaceship, somehow she must have escaped alive. Had she come alone, or with others who, doubtless, in the wreck of the ship, had been cremated so that remains of them had never been found? "And you can't remember that coming?" Atwood demanded. "Oh, yes. When human life came to me I was among the Marlans. I could not talk their language, then, but only the language of the Gods. This language of yours," she added. "God-language of you and of me." Weird. She was so obviously sincerely truthful; she believed it. Naïve, child-like. Yet there was upon her, implanted by her belief, an aspect of power. A consciousness that she was a Goddess here. A radiance of her power, and a humility--a feeling of responsibility to One on High, who had sent her here as His servant.