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. He landed at last on a rocky strip of island that was outside the combat zone, and there commenced to lay out his trap. It would take many tons of explosives to penetrate the tough hull of the space ship he knew, but the ship must be destroyed. He had considered building a huge heat blaster, but the time was too limited and he knew how powerful were the protective shells of a space ship's skin. Gadgets he had considered; tricks that might gain for him entry into the ship where he could turn his own decomposition blaster on his brothers--all the tricks of the writing trade had passed muster before his mind's eye--but inevitably he returned to the decision that explosives gave the only certain means of destruction. There was an island not far from his landing place where the men with yellow skins had stored a great quantity of munitions and supplies. The fighting front was far to the East and at night no great precautions were taken. Any approaching fleet of bombers or surface ships would be detected long before they could reach this island. Nothing but submarines.