After that first foray Thig raided many an outlying island, and looted the sunken transports that lay in the shallowed water between some of the captured islands. He mounted a heavy machine gun in the nose of his agile little craft, and many a yellow man never returned to his home landing field. By days he hid near his objectives, in the jungle or the shallow water in the shadows of a jutting coral reef, and by night he moved like a giant crab, in his space suit, among the sunken ships.
His stores of explosives he concealed in a great ring around the heart of the island—the only practical landing spot for the space cruiser, already slackening its terrific drive as it passed Pluto. How many tons of the deadly material he had collected he could not tell, but there was already sufficient to blow the island and everything upon it into oblivion.
Time was growing short. Less than a day remained in which to bait the trap with his own ship for bait. The cruiser's detectors would pick up the trylerium's characteristic radiations from the pitted walls of his rocket jets—the blasting jets of all space ships were made of trylerium—and they would land nearby.
That he would be blown up, too, in the explosion did not matter greatly, thought Thig. Ellen, the wife of the man he had helped kill, and the children, would be safe. Earth could go on in its own bloody blundering way to a glorious future.
But first he must bring back another load, the final link in the deadly ring about the landing place. Morning was at hand. He would have to work fast. He left the load where it lay and blasted off.
The great bomber, with the circles painted on its wings, passed over the little island. It returned. The pilot shouted and bombs intended for a target several hundred miles to the south took their final plunge earthward.
The ship was bullet-scarred—off its course—and since this was Japanese-dominated water his mistake was only natural. He took the caches of munitions for enemy supply dumps.
It was his last mistake. The island dissolved into splintered fragments, and with it went the bomber and its brave crew.