Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow….

  The blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed him with those savage blows upon the head.

  Even Torp gave way to the primitive rage of his ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his unconscious body.

  Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible for his sudden madness.

  The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the weapon. He tugged it free.

  In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face, the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard Torp scuffle out of silence, and a choked cry in the man’s throat squalled out into a senseless whinny.

  Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and chest. He was a madman!

  The deadly attack of Thig, his own violent avenging of Kam’s death, and now the apparent return to fin of the man he had killed had all served to jolt Ilk rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove. The shock had been too much for the established thought processes of the Orthan.

  So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad stare set him to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that victory had given him to drive him along.

  He had saved a world’s civilization from extinction! The thought sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all.

  He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship’s log and read the last few nervously scrawled lines:

  Planet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended. Already I feel the insidious virus of. …

  And there his writing ended abruptly.

  Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship’s path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message.

  Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of a half-dozen spaceships in miniature nested within the great ship’s hull, and cut free from the mother vessel.

  He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new body was strangely exhilarating and heady. It was the newest of the emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months before, when he had felt the wa illness of Ellen’s lips tight against his.

  Ile swung about to the port, watched the flaming ,hive-rockets of the great exploratory ship hurl it inward far-away Ortha, and there was no regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of las first existence.

  He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart thrilled to the memories of the starry night and perfect exciting day he had spent on his three-month trip over Earth.

  He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching the ship echoed through the hull-plates.

  He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that crowded his mind.

  He shivered suddenly, remembering his utter callousness the first time he had sent a spaceship whipping down toward the hills and valleys below. And there was a sickness within him when he fully realized that, despite his acquired memory and traits, he was an alien from outer space.

  He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight differences in his appearance from an Earthman’s, and his fingers trembled a bit as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes then, and memories were hot, bitter pains.

  Earth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde’s creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and now, for the rest of his life, he must make it up to the dead man’s family.

  The knowledge that Ellen’s love was not really meant for him would be a knife twisting in his heart, but for her sake he must endure it. Her dreams and happiness must never be shattered.

  The bulge of Earth was flattening out now, and he could see the outlines of Long Island in the growing twilight.

  A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically. He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about them…

 

 

  Quest of Thig, Basil Wells

 

 

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