"Naturally not!" The speaker's voice showed as much surprise as it was possible for an Orthan to display. "We can take no chances on the madness infecting any of us before we carry this information back to Ortha."
"I will tell you as much as I know," said Thig. "It is fortunate that I am outside the ship."
"Yes," agreed the voice. "Better that one die instead of four. The resources of the Horde must be conserved."
All through that first night after the space ship landed beside his little life boat, Thig lay on his sleeping deck trying to work out another method to overcome the four Hordemen inside their sturdy cruiser.
Explosives were out; he had lost his opportunity to blast the great ship into shards when the Allied bomber had mistaken them for Japanese supplies. Trickery that would permit him to gain entrance was negated by the sealed ports and locks of the space cruiser. He could not blast an opening through the ship's skin with his decomposition blaster—it was designed to destroy only flesh or vegetable matter.
Nor could he lure a Japanese or Allied force of bombers to attack the Orthan ship. The weapons of the space cruiser would destroy such crude-winged mechanisms as might be thrown against them, and her own hull could not be damaged save by the most concentrated surprise attack. He knew how the Earthmen would work—a cautious bomber or two could attack first, and then, too late, a swarm of fighting planes and bombers would follow.
He could not lure brave Allied fliers to their death in any such fashion, nor did he think that the yellow airmen could cause any worth-while damage—not that he cared how many of them were destroyed! He might be an alien being from another world, but there was now no more loyal American than Thig. He had permitted the identity of Lewis Terry to overcome his own entirely.
No, he would have to solve this problem by himself. Upon Thig, and Thig alone, rested the future of the two billions of mankind. If the Horde saw through his fanciful story about the disease that was carried from Venus in the bodies of Kam and Torp, Earth would soon be overrun by the Horde. The Horde was unimaginative and logical in all that it did, a robot race of super ant-beings—and they would destroy all the human race to prevent any future revolt.
But if he could somehow thwart them; destroy this expedition, or send back another mute shipload of dead bodies as he had already done, Earth might not be visited again for several centuries. And she would be ready then, with a fully developed science of her own, to beat off any invasion from Ortha.