There in the street almost below him stood Zuldi and six other of the hated creatures, their scaly, bloated bodies smeared with a green substance as protection against the rigors of light. Thick-lensed glasses shaded their eyes.
Zuldi, croaking loudly to attract attention, was waving his arms and pointing downward at the broken body of Captain Simms that lay at his feet. Beside the dead man lay the tangled mass of what might once have been a radio, a radio that would never send its message to distant Earth.
Zuldi stopped his shouting, and spat upon the man in the dust and sent a heavily-clawed foot raking over the already lacerated chest. He was using Captain Simms as an example to all other Earthians in the city.
Guyard felt a hot bitterness rising uncontrollably within him. He flung the window open, jerked the gun from his belt and centered the sights upon the center of Zuldi's bone-crested forehead.
"Damn him!" he breathed. "I'll...."
It was Marene who knocked the gun down before he had a chance to fire. A great fear was in her eyes as she wrested the weapon from his fingers. "You can't do it, Father! You can't do it!" She thrust the gun into a pocket beneath her short coat.
"Putting Zuldi out of the way would not help us," she reminded him. "The other Earthians had guns. They would discover that you had a gun and guess that others would only kill you. They would end our chances to fight the black ship when it comes."
A semblance of reason came back to Guyard. For the past two years, he had, when not training Zurk's mind, been turning out gun after gun in his small, electric furnace. Those guns had been secretly distributed to the men of the city to use when the right moment came. And now he had come very nearly to ruining those chances.
He began speaking, as if thinking aloud. "They have dismantled our spaceship, broken our radios and killed every man who has tried to get a message through to Earth. They have taken our youth, searched out our secret laboratories and killed our scientists."
His eyes were blazing. "But this time we are going to fight!"