out before." He left the subject as Bill frowned at him, quite uncomprehending, and said to the alien, "What do you want here?"

"Your planet."

The words were rasped out without emotion, but they were as cold as the wind of January that played outside the theater. Trace said, "Why?"

"Need worlds. Chwosst long ago full, more worlds needing." He labored ahead, perfectly in command of the English he knew, seeking now and again for words beyond his ken, substituting others that were yet clear to the enthralled listeners. For five minutes he talked, and eight and ten, to the three humans in the projection booth; outside his bird-footed, one-eyed compatriots padded the empty town, whose inhabitants they had eliminated with the handguns that morning, down to the last dog and canary. Now they had found the dead alien and the two helmets, now they sought those who squatted in the theater; beyond the town lay the ravaged country, and across its face stretched the lines of thousands upon thousands of quiescent green saucers, some spied on by other survivors of humanity, others proud in a total destruction wrought by their all-shattering rays. Of all of this Trace Roscoe was aware, and still the story of the captive green man pinned him without movement to the closing trap of the theater. Once he thought of Jane Kelly. This thought he battled down, because Trace Roscoe was engaged in a war, and he couldn't have any personal dreams at all....

Gradually the queer speech of the world-assassin painted the portrait of his race, his mission, and his egocentric soul.

CHAPTER VII

So long ago that there were no words for the incredible period of time that lay between then and now, the planet Chwosst, fourteenth from the sun Tsloahn in the star system Lluagor, had become overcrowded to the point of danger. The dominant race of Chwosst were the two-toed one-eyed green men who called themselves Graken, which signified The Mighty, or All-Consuming. The other races of life on the planet were insignificant, small rodent-like beasts used for food by the Graken, who were wholly carnivorous.

They conquered the principles of space travel and sent out fleets of ships—these early craft were bullet-shaped, much as the designers of the first potential rockets of Earth had shaped their creations—and within a hundred-year space they had perfected these so that travel was negligibly dangerous. In their own system they had discovered one other planet 

 Prev. P 24/48 next