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.