Free The Earth Gods Are Coming by Kenneth Bulmer

ache and a great longing for vague and wondrous deeds and visions that would not come quite clear in his mind.
    Gerda and Linda had stopped swinging their hips. Both girls stared about and then, together, collapsed, held up only by Inglis and Sammy. Hannah had been little affected and had now calm control of Ranee. Toni had been dealt with by M'Banga, and, now, she whirled from him, sobbing, to collapse as the other girls had done. M'Banga stood, stiffly erect, both his hands outstretched, gripping tightly onto nothing. Sammy was being sick over the side and Anton was yelling with pain of his broken arm.
    Suddenly, the power had gone and sanity had crept back into the world.
    He looked up. The flier was lifting. As he watched it dwindled in size, shrank to a black streamlined shape outlined against the yellow light from the hatch. The doors of the hatch rolled shut. In all that immense flank only the rows of portholes now showed to break the sweep that denoted the speed and power contained within it. The alien battleship of the Evil Ones moved slowly ahead, rising, gaining speed, beginning to push aside restraining air with that familiar supersonic wail. The ship became a black dot vanishing against the sky.
    Into the silence washed back the plunk of waves, the creak and groan of wood and the flap of sails. A shrill liquid cluttering began from the alien sailing ships.
    Inglis shut his eyes, pressed hard until the sparks flew, opened his eyes and began to shout.
    "Sammy, no time to be sick! Look at Anton's arm. M'Banga, sort out the girls, revive them, make them comfortable. Hannah, if you feel fit enough, help M'Banga." He began to lash his crew on, giving them orders and tasks that would keep them occupied. He didn't want them to begin to explore the feelings he knew must exist in their minds, the vague and yearning emotions that spilled formless colors and desires in his own brain and that had been generated by the alien mental control. Terrans were familiar enough with the tricks of mechanical and electronic control of the brain. That he could recognize what had happened took away none of the horror.
    If only he could rid himself of the fuzzy cap of blurring vagueness that stultified his mind and thinking processes. Giving orders, reorganizing the ship and her crew and devising plans to deal with the next emergency—the aliens and their sailing ships—were difficult processes, demanding a conscious effort for each thought. It was like trying to work out abstruse calculations after an all night binge. His mind kept flying off on tangents that led, excruciatingly and tantalisingly to misty veiled shapes inhabiting four caves, shot through with the green murkiness of the undersea.
    "The girls are completely exhausted," M'Banga reported. They had been laid out on clothes, made comfortable; all had a bloodless and waxen quality about their skins that worried Inglis. Then he saw that Sammy and Anton, too, were yellow in the same way and his own hands, held with that damned tremble he could not quell before his face, were like yellow claws. M'Banga was gray. They were all in a state of semi-shock. The girls had suffered most through their physiology; the female anatomy was more suited to that seductive hip-wriggle than the male. Glancing over the side, Inglis realized why they had all been undulating and hip-swinging like that.
    One of the alien commands had been to rub tails, and the small forms of the sailors crowding the ships were still at it. As he looked at them he saw their broad, flat, meaty tails curving about, sliding one against another, slapping hard, slipping, caressing—no doubt that was a racial characteristic of friendship, like a handshake, and the tail-less humans had been trying to wave their residual bones in time to the tune called from the flier.
    "A real coccygeal kick," M'Banga said, rubbing the affected part tenderly. "Ow! I'm sore."
    "Does your head feel as though you'd been drinking solidly all