Blue vegetation, red insect-men, hideous
green thuftars.... Earth was a strange
sight to those first space-spanning Martians.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Winter 1941.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"No sign of the Indra!" shouted Rurak Dun, with an angry toss of hiswet hair away from his aching forehead.
It was hot there in the tiny cabin of the wing with the rocket blaststhrumming behind them. Rurak dropped the sweat-sticky circle of hisradiophone and peered down at the foul blueness of the swampland. Arange of low hills shouldered aside the oozy floor of liquid mud, andblue jungle crept high up along their rocky slopes almost to theirbarren upper tips. Beyond the hills he could see where the outer limitsof the coastal swamp ended and the level stretches of the Mossy Plainsspread away endlessly.
Insect-men, or Yzaps, with almost human intelligence and organizationinhabited Earth—or more properly Soora in the Martian tongue—andbat-like monstrosities swarmed thick above the rocky uplands betweenthe blue swamplands and the plains of moss that stretched now beforehis gaze.
Rurak Dun felt the sweat bead on the tip of his nose. The thick humidair of Terra choked him and he wondered. After so many years wouldthere be any shred of the wreckage left above the lush foliage of thejungle? After the light-helioed message that the Indra was about tocrash on Earth there had been no other message from Prince Hudar Keland his party.
And now, seventeen years later, another space ship had been sent tosearch for Prince Kel. His father, the Emperor, had died and withinthree days both his elder brothers succumbed to the same mysteriousmalady that had taken their father's life. Before the New Year a newruler must be found ... and Earth and Mars were again in apposition!
"Nidan," clicked the mandibles of the hideous insect man who sharedthe cabin with Rurak Dun, "I see a ship-from-the-Sky."
Rurak's gray eyes narrowed in the golden flesh of his sweating face.Then he shouted and snapped on his radiophone.
"Gor!" he shouted, "Gor."
"Uh?" grunted a lazy voice in his receiver.
"I've found them," Rurak told him swiftly. "On a level hilltop in theswamp! The Indra seems rather battered—trees growing up through onesection of her hull—but there are signs of life about her. ProbablyYzaps who have built a village there. Going down to investigate."
"Nidan!" shrieked the Earthling Tis, brandishing the old metal knifethe Tekna's cook had given him, "thuftars attacking! Many thuftars!"
Rurak dropped the mouthpiece and swung his visual scope around thehorizon.
Scores of vast green thuftars were circling above and about him, theirhideous green shapes, travesties of the human form, gathering for aconcerted attack upon his frail wing. They wheeled easily throughEarth's atmosphere, although no wings or any other evidence of howthey maintained flight was visible. Their scaly bodies terminated inhorny, reptilian hands and feet, and their triple-spiked ears lent theultimate in grotesquerie to their appearance.
The thuftars' shrill whistling skirled hideously and constantly as theydove in toward the wing. Rurak tripped the guns again and again as hedove and climbed among that circling swarm of scaly harpies and many athuftar's greenish blood sprayed from its burst body over its fellows.