Queen of the Blue World

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 his wet hair away from his aching forehead.

It was hot there in the tiny cabin of the wing with the rocket blasts thrumming behind them. Rurak dropped the sweat-sticky circle of his radiophone and peered down at the foul blueness of the swampland. A range of low hills shouldered aside the oozy floor of liquid mud, and blue jungle crept high up along their rocky slopes almost to their barren upper tips. Beyond the hills he could see where the outer limits of the coastal swamp ended and the level stretches of the Mossy Plains spread away endlessly.

Insect-men, or Yzaps, with almost human intelligence and organization inhabited Earth--or more properly Soora in the Martian tongue--and bat-like monstrosities swarmed thick above the rocky uplands between the blue swamplands and the plains of moss that stretched now before his gaze.

Rurak Dun felt the sweat bead on the tip of his nose. The thick humid air of Terra choked him and he wondered. After so many years would there be any shred of the wreckage left above the lush foliage of the jungle? After the light-helioed message that the Indra was about to crash on Earth there had been no other message from Prince Hudar Kel and his party.

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.

Tis had climbed into the gun turret in the cabin's narrow rear but he understood nothing of how to fire that weapon. Rurak regretted that he had not brought along one of his own comrades. Perhaps together they could have driven off the thuftars.

The wing bucked and spun in a tight circle while Rurak let his guns spray at their ultimate capacity. Thuftars fell, many of them, but scores of them remained. They were too many. Rurak dove away then, sounding for the ground. Perhaps under the trees of the hilltop beside the Indra he could take shelter--drive the scaly beings off.

Blue lacy fronds of the hilltop forest were almost beneath his landing gear when he felt the first impact of a diving thuftar's weight. Again and again the wing quivered as more thuftars struck and clung. The controls were frozen. Slowly the wing nosed over and sideslipped, and then the upper branches of the forest swallowed them all.

Rurak saw a network of interlacing great branches and thick vines snaking through them. A wall of blue jungle came smashing inward against the wing's frail cabin and then a prolonged splintering crash sounded as though from a great distance.

Curiously he watched himself grope feebly among the shattered debris of what had been the instrument panel for the radiophone. He laughed even as he watched. The wing was a hopeless wreck.

Tis, the Yzap native, crawled out of the shattered turret and helped Rurak to climb into the vine-latticed branches about them. He hoped that Rurak would remember to take along his rocket pistol and some shells and was pleased to see Rurak obediently follow his will. It was strange to float here impartially a few feet above his own dazed body. There was no pain, just a dull aching void far back in his brain.

He watched the figures of Rurak Dun and Tis slowly descending and somehow he was descending with them. They dropped a last few feet to the mossy soil beneath the great trees and he felt the jar jolt up to his brain. The misty something that seemed to have separated him from his body was dissolving. He could feel pain and taste the salty warmth of sweat in his mouth.

An ominous black wall of metal reared itself out of the jungle a few yards away and he sensed that here was the handiwork of some intelligent creature. There was an oval window of transparent material staring like some empty eyesocket out of the wall at him. Memory jabbed feebly at him and presently he recalled what this must be.... The Indra!