QUEST'S END
By BASIL WELLS
Thig's quest was not yet finished, for the Hordes
of Ortha had sent another ship across the Void.
Only he could halt Earth's destruction—with
a weapon that was but a thought in his mind.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"I was a fool," gritted Thig. His eye crowded the eyepiece of thecompact metal case on the table before him. The window was open andthe ugly metal snout of the instrument pointed toward the easternhorizon. "I should have expected the men of Ortha to send a secondexpedition to Earth!"
Thig's compact body stiffened angrily. He came to his feet, his gazeroaming about the familiar disorder of the little boathouse. Here hecame daily to write the lusty sagas of the Old West that had made thename of Lewis Terry familiar to millions of readers. Here beside thepot-bellied iron stove with the single cracked lid, he had workedlong hours, striving vainly to forget that he was an alien being fromanother distant world.
Curiosity, a trait that no other Orthan had possessed for manythousands of years, had impelled him to construct a small, butpowerful, etherscope, and trace the fate of the space ship he haddeserted. It had been built of odds and ends of material at night, butit opened the heavens before him. He saw planets and suns, countlesslight years distant many of them, and eventually he found Ortha—intime to see the space ship being boarded out in space by patrollingHordemen, and quickly destroyed. They were taking no chances on thespread of the contagion from Earth among the Orthans.
For the good of the Horde, the alien that was Lewis Terry knew, thepatrolmen would transmit the information they received, and thendestroy themselves. In their narrow philosophy of life only the Hordemattered. He had been like that when his name was Thig, and thememories of Lewis Terry were not yet part of his life.
And now another space ship was coming to Earth, coming to check onthe findings of that earlier ill-fated expedition, and he alone couldcheckmate them!... If he had only kept watch on Ortha!
He had two months, possibly a few days more than that, in which todestroy this second expedition that meant conquest and certain deathfor all Earth's warring millions! Two months to prepare!
For the good of Ellen and the children, the children of the dead manwhose identity he had stolen, he must succeed. The lusty primitives ofthis rich green world must never be replaced by the disciplined robotrace that was the Horde.
He covered his typewriter. The lock snapped with finality as he turnedthe key. He flexed the muscles of great arms, much too powerful forthe meek appearance of the writer they were, and the blood beat hotthrough his squat body.
"You're staying locked," he said slowly, "until the last Hordeman iswiped from the face of Earth." He smiled grimly as he reflected thathis hero was trapped atop a waterless butte with a horde of Apacheshowling 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 fortwo years. Thig cleared each jet carefully, and then, finding themunharmed, he bored high into the stratosphere. Behind him the submarinepatrol and the air-raid posts went mildly insane. They knew that somestrange craft had roa