A week passed before he had the opportunity to obtain a second fix; then, hours later, he was standing beside the wreck of the courier ship. It had plunged into a deep cleft in the rocks and was now half covered by sand; it began to seem less of a miracle that the Hammerhead fliers had not found it. Troy shut off the quavering signal projector, discovered next that the emergency tank had a living occupant, but left Newland where he was while he hurriedly examined the rest of the ship. The courier was hopelessly damaged, but before Troy concluded the examination, his plan against the Hammerheads had been born, at least as a possibility. It took more than two and a half years then to convert the possibility into an operation which seemed at last to have something better than a fighting chance to succeed. For, of course, Troy had told no one of the discovery. A few words might have gained him eager helpers, but might also have reached a man paralyzed by the fear of torture to the extent that he would reveal everything to safeguard himself. Troy left his rooms, locking the outer door behind him. Moving thirty feet down the narrow steel-floored passage behind the power plant, he entered one of the tool rooms, again closing and locking the door as he went through. It had been a much more difficult and lengthy undertaking to drill a tunnel from the station's lowest level up to the force-screened Hammerhead hangar outside than to carve an additional room out of the rock, but it had been completed months before. The tunnel's hidden station entrance was beneath the tool room floor, the other opening out of the polished rock base of the hangar twenty feet from one of the interstellar drones. The most careful human scrutiny would hardly have read any significance there into the hairline crack which formed an irregular oval on the rock; and since Troy hadn't been found out, he could assume that the Hammerheads' powers of observation were no more acute. It had been night in the surrounding desert for some hours by now, but the hangar was brightly lit--a very unusual occurrence at such a time. Troy paused, momentarily disconcerted, studying the scene in the hangar through the vision screen installed in the tunnel just below the exit. If the Hammerheads--there were only Hammerheads--present--were initiating some major new activity in the next day or two, his plans might be, if not ruined, at least very dangerously delayed. He counted over a hundred of the creatures, mostly assembled near the far end of the hangar in three orderly groups. A few officers stood together, somewhat closer to him.