And now, seventeen years later, another space ship had been sent to search for Prince Kel. His father, the Emperor, had died and within three days both his elder brothers succumbed to the same mysterious malady that had taken their father's life. Before the New Year a new ruler must be found ... and Earth and Mars were again in apposition!
"Nidan," clicked the mandibles of the hideous insect man who shared the 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 the swamp! The Indra seems rather battered—trees growing up through one section of her hull—but there are signs of life about her. Probably Yzaps who have built a village there. Going down to investigate."
"Nidan!" shrieked the Earthling Tis, brandishing the old metal knife the Tekna's cook had given him, "thuftars attacking! Many thuftars!"
Rurak dropped the mouthpiece and swung his visual scope around the horizon.
Scores of vast green thuftars were circling above and about him, their hideous green shapes, travesties of the human form, gathering for a concerted attack upon his frail wing. They wheeled easily through Earth's atmosphere, although no wings or any other evidence of how they maintained flight was visible. Their scaly bodies terminated in horny, reptilian hands and feet, and their triple-spiked ears lent the ultimate in grotesquerie to their appearance.
The thuftars' shrill whistling skirled hideously and constantly as they dove in toward the wing. Rurak tripped the guns again and again as he dove and climbed among that circling swarm of scaly harpies and many a thuftar's greenish blood sprayed from its burst body over its fellows.