Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 63: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

munication with Mars, the only other planet inhabited by intelligent beings. For over five thousand years, our interplanetary ships had visited their planet, and their ships had made friendly calls on Magong, carrying passengers, man- ufactured merchandise, and raw materials. A colony of their pale, white peo- ple, whose faces I wish we had never seen, was founded on one of our con- tinents and treated with every friendly consideration by our rulers: that is, my ancestors. A colony of our stalwart yellow people had also settled on Mars, and had been received with every appearance of good will. , Before I was sixteen years of age I had learned to navigate an ether ship, and when I had demonstrated to my father’s satisfaction that I was a thor- ough master of interplanetary navigation, he permitted me a leave of absence © of two years for the purpose of visiting the inner planets—Earth, Venus and Mercury. This trip was mostly for my own education, as all three of the plan- ets had been explored thousands of years before, and had subsequently been visited at regular intervals by our scientific expeditions for the purpose of tabulating the evolutionary changes taking place on them. Mercury had developed nothing but the most lowly vegetable organisms. Venus teemed - with life, ranging from the microscopic, unicellular animalcules to gigantic, four-footed reptiles, which roamed through her great forests of fern and fungi, some of them feeding on these and other primordial thallophytic growths, some preying on these herbivora or on the lesser creatures coex- istent with them on that planet. Some of them had evolved membranous wings with which they flapped clumsily from place to place, but there were no birds or mammals, Among the plants, none flowered or bore fruit or seeds. All reproduced by spores or spawn or by simple fission. On the Earth, a higher order of evolution was in progress. Many of the plants, having developed specialized sexual organs, flowered and bore fruit. Birds forsook the ways and forms of their reptilian ancestors—evolved a thousand shapes and hues—cultivated glorious plumage and melodious voices. Mammals suckled and reared their young, and man, the greatest mammal of them all, was slowly battling his way to world supremacy with crude weapons and implements of wood and stone. a On my return to Magong, after visiting the inner planets, I importuned my father to permit me to visit Jupiter. This he flatly refused to-do. The trip, he said, was too long and dangerous for one of my years. Furthermore, only one, out of a thousand of our most skillful and experienced navigators, who had attempted the trip, had returned to tell of it. I had to be content, there- fore, with several trips-to Mars, where I, as Crown Prince of Magong, was always received with such pomp and splendor that I wished I might be per- mitted to go incognito and mingle with the common people—but even this small pleasure was denied me. aA ae At twenty-five, I was made commander-in-chief of Magong’s interplanetary navies. Shortly thereafter, trouble developed between my father and Lido Kan, Supreme Ruler of Mars. It seems that. a number of Martians, jealous of the economic progress made by our colonists on that planet, had gone to 61 : i comichbooks,. com