Then darted straight at Jonathan.
Jonathan threw every bit of mental power at his control into his defense, but the first bubble did not break before it got within three feet of him. The others fell apart easily after that.
Jonathan frowned, and an automatic hung in the air before him. It turned to grey mists and faded, struck by a bolt of liquid fire.
Morka Kar rasped laughter, "Do better Earthling. We of Zarathza have forgotten weapons such as that."
A haze of colorless hue quivered in front of the Zarathzan. It seemed only a heat haze; but when he saw the sandy waste inside the shimmer, when he saw grey and rolling ocean instead of the sand, and saw ocean turn to roaring flames, he knew he looked on a weapon utterly foreign to Earth thought.
His knuckles bulged until the skin over them whitened in the fury of his concentration. Gasping, he saw the shimmer fade.
He cast a beam of radio-waves; saw them strike a beam of like power and shatter, useless. He hurled acid. It met an alkali. He threw a bullet and watched it melt in a shield of heat that turned the lead to smoke.
All the while the Zarathzan taunted him, shrilling, "Ape. Go back to the steamy jungles of your planet, ape. We do not need a loose-brain here. Go back, ape!"
A red triangle formed in the air before Morka Kar even as he spoke. It glowed and burned with green hell-fires. Jonathan dropped water on it and the green fires raged and grew and expanded, feeding on the water.