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!
He had two months, possibly a few days more than that, in which to destroy this second expedition that meant conquest and certain death for all Earth's warring millions! Two months to prepare!
For the good of Ellen and the children, the children of the dead man whose identity he had stolen, he must succeed. The lusty primitives of this rich green world must never be replaced by the disciplined robot race that was the Horde.
He covered his typewriter. The lock snapped with finality as he turned the key. He flexed the muscles of great arms, much too powerful for the meek appearance of the writer they were, and the blood beat hot through his squat body.
"You're staying locked," he said slowly, "until the last Hordeman is wiped from the face of Earth." He smiled grimly as he reflected that his hero was trapped atop a waterless butte with a horde of Apaches howling below.
"Hope you can stick it out for eight or nine weeks without water, Brazos," he said to the typed pages he was leaving.
The life boat lifted sluggishly from the sands that had covered it for two years. Thig cleared each jet carefully, and then, finding them unharmed, he bored high into the stratosphere. Behind him the submarine patrol and the air-raid posts went mildly insane. They knew that some strange craft had roared up from the beach on Long Island, but they were never to know what it was.
Ellen, Lewis Terry's wife, clenched the short letter that her husband had pressed into her hand as he kissed her earlier that evening. She did not know that he was really Thig, nor did the letter reveal that fact. If he was to die, he would die Lewis Terry. The letter told her simply that he must go away on a secret mission for several months. She understood now why the unshed tears had been bright in his eyes.
Over the United States Thig blasted the life boat, and across the Pacific. He was getting as far from Long Island as he could, and one of his plans to destroy the Orthans called for many tons of explosives. Explosives, he told himself grimly, that the yellow men would furnish.