Quest's End

Thig's quest was not yet finished, for the Hordes of Ortha had sent another ship across the Void. Only he could halt Earth's destruction—with a weapon that was but a thought in his mind.
I was a fool, gritted Thig. His eye crowded the eyepiece of the compact metal case on the table before him. The window was open and the ugly metal snout of the instrument pointed toward the eastern horizon. I should have expected the men of Ortha to send a second expedition to Earth!
Thig's compact body stiffened angrily. He came to his feet, his gaze roaming about the familiar disorder of the little boathouse. Here he came daily to write the lusty sagas of the Old West that had made the name of Lewis Terry familiar to millions of readers. Here beside the pot-bellied iron stove with the single cracked lid, he had worked long hours, striving vainly to forget that he was an alien being from another distant world.
Curiosity, a trait that no other Orthan had possessed for many thousands of years, had impelled him to construct a small, but powerful, etherscope, and trace the fate of the space ship he had deserted. It had been built of odds and ends of material at night, but it opened the heavens before him. He saw planets and suns, countless light years distant many of them, and eventually he found Ortha—in time to see the space ship being boarded out in space by patrolling Hordemen, and quickly destroyed. They were taking no chances on the spread of the contagion from Earth among the Orthans.
For the good of the Horde, the alien that was Lewis Terry knew, the patrolmen would transmit the information they received, and then destroy themselves. In their narrow philosophy of life only the Horde mattered. He had been like that when his name was Thig, and the memories of Lewis Terry were not yet part of his life.
And now another space ship was coming to Earth, coming to check on the findings of that earlier ill-fated expedition, and he alone could checkmate them!... If he had only kept watch on Ortha!