Katha slipped a hand into his and said, "You can do it, Tyr. Yes, you can!"
He shook his head, but he went and stood before the machines. With narrowed eyes, he studied curving generators and domed turbines. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he began to understand them. If only—
A beam of yellow sunlight swam through a glassine vent in the wall, quivering, moving. It touched Tyr, laving his brown face and dark hair in its radiance. The sunlight was hot and soothing. Tyr smiled faintly, knowing that the light was opening the secret facets of his brain, feeding energy to them, making his mind work whether he wanted it to or not.
He was understanding these silent machines, now.
He touched a button, and watched an engine throb and hum, coming to life. Where the blue discs were was its outlet. They turned red, and glowed. When they went white, a blast of power would splay out, and he did not want that to happen, yet. He shut the power off.
Katha walked with him. "You know?" she asked softly.
"I know."
"There is a kitchenette off to one side," she said. "I am going to prepare food for myself. Then tell me your plans!"
When she left him, Tyr turned back to the metal giants, touching levers and rods. He lost himself in their intricacies as a boy does with new and complicated toys.
He did not hear Katha cry out from the next chamber. He did not hear the footsteps. He did not see the girl who came with Gaarn and Texel to stand in the doorway, a solar gun in her white hand.
A ball of flame exploded amid the coils and antennae of a big machine. Another fell onto a huge dynamo. Still another whistled shrilly as it clove a path through cones and hoops.
Tyr whirled, but it was too late. Fay was firing rapidly, as fast as she could depress the stud. The yellow blasts ate and drank their way through the machines until every one lay smashed and wrecked.
Tyr laughed bitterly.
"Destroy your every chance," he said. "Your freedom lies on the floor, amid those twisted metal things."
Fay lifted the gun and aimed it at him. She said coldly, "Theardthshall never receive our weapons, Tyr. I destroyed them before you could bring theardthto them."
"I would never bring theardth! What mad poison eats in your brains, you Trylla? Without weapons, what may I do?"
"The Old Ones shall never get them!"
"The Old Ones do not need these things. They have better ones. A hundred years ago they beat men who used these weapons. In that time they have new weapons, better weapons! What would theardthwant with things like these?"
There was doubt in the eyes of some, but Fay lifted her gun. Tyr walked toward her, seeing the red hate in her eyes. Her finger touched the stud and balls of yellow fire leaped for him, splashed across his chest.
He went on, unstoppable. The energy from the yellow balls poured into him. Muscles rippled on his arms as he reached out and took the gun away from her.
With white hand pressed to her writhing mouth, Fay stared at him in dumb awe. Tyr wrapped his fingers around the gun. The metal crumpled in his hand. When he opened his hand the remnants bounced on the floor.
Tyr put a hand to Fay's shoulder and pushed her aside. Gaarn and young Texel watched him with fascinated, frightened eyes. He lunged into the chamber where Katha had cried out.
"Katha!" he called.
She lay on a long white table, and there were strong steel straps holding her. Her clothing was somewhat torn. Her dark eyes met his from the corners as her red mouth smiled a little.
He lunged into the chamber where Katha lay. Her dark eyes met his.
He lunged into the chamber where Katha lay. Her dark eyes met his.
He lunged into the chamber where Katha lay. Her dark eyes met his.
"I tried to warn you. The Trylla do not like theardth. They wanted me alive to learn secrets from me." She made a grimace. "I don't know whether I could have stood up to torture."
"There's no need of it, now," he grunted, putting his hands under the straps and bursting them. He lifted her and held her on his chest.
"I am no longer god of the Trylla," he rasped bitterly, looking down at her. "I am hated by them. Now I am—nothing!"
She was very round and soft on his ribs. Tyr tightened his arm, watching her mouth. Katha made a face and mocked him.
"Man or god—you hurt!"
He eased his arms a little, still holding her tightly. He went down the corridor of the arches as Fay and the others watched from the shadows. His footfalls were soft, but deadly. It was as though his feet intoned adanse macabrefor the Tryllan race.
Tyr carried the girl to her jet plane that had been hidden among the rocks. He lifted her into it and swung up, both hands on the smooth plasticine handles. The door clicked behind him.
Katha dropped into a red leather seat before an intricate control-board. Her white fingers touched pins. The ship rumbled and shuddered. Slowly it trundled forward, gathering momentum. From the port window, Tyr watched the white dome of the Barrow falling away below. He turned his eyes to the front, seeing her lift the plane over a fringe ofhibithus-trees to arrow into the cloudless sky.
"Katha, I am homeless."
Homeless and a wanderer, without a people. The Trylla had been his people, if a god ever had people. Now they had turned against him, broken with him, even tried to kill him. There was bitterness on his tongue and in his heart. A bitterness that burned and galled.
From the depths of his anguish, he cried, "I want to be a part of something, Katha! I am neither Tryllan norardth. What am I?"
The woman caught his hand and pressed it to her lips. She whispered softly, "To me you are always a god, Tyr. I love you. You love me."
"I have you. Yes, that makes up for everything else."
He sighed, "But I keep telling myself that I have failed. That I have not done all I could to free the Trylla."
"What of the tower, Tyr? You said it had strange things in it. Perhaps it is a laboratory, of sorts. I might make tests there, of you, seek to know your purposes, your abilities."
"Yes, the tower. I'd forgotten that. It could be a home to us. Anardth-woman and a—an unknown!"
"I amardthno longer. I gave that up when I came after you. I knew what I was doing."
He knelt and caught her to him, saying, "There is no place for either of us, except with the other. Two wanderers."
"Two wanderers," she sighed. "With a purpose. A mad, insane belief in themselves. To fight even when there is no chance of victory!"
The tower stood gaunt and lonely, rising up into a blue sky. Baked dirt powdered into clouds under their feet as they walked toward it. The tower was strong and thickly built, and it towered above the flat earth in its loneliness. In that respect, it was a little like Tyr himself, Katha thought. She studied the flat buttresses and arched windows.
"Anardth-man built that," she said.
"If he did, he made it a laboratory and home at the same time."
Katha furrowed her thin black brows. "But whatardthever built such a tower on Lyallar?" she wondered.
Tyr pushed open the big wooden door. The round room was walled with dials and panels, cool and dim. It gave off a faint and musky smell. A circular table was covered with vials and belljars and retorts. Shelves lined the walls, and bottles lined the shelves. At the far side of the room, a metal stairway twisted its way to the upper floors.
Katha wandered around, delight shining in her eyes. She lifted vials and smelled at chemicals. Laughter gurgled in her throat.
"But this is marvelous. It's almost as complete as my own lab. Now who built this place, Tyr? Can you tell me?"
He showed her a big book bound in tooled leather.
"William Rohrig!" she cried at sight of the golden letters stamped into the cover. "Why—why, he was anardthgenius! We often wondered what became of him! He was to travel to Antares, to study life conditions on one of its outer planets. Commander Mason would be delighted—"
She broke off, glancing sideways at Tyr.
He said, "If it were not for me, you could go back. You could go anyhow. I—"
Her white palm covered his mouth. "Don't say it, Tyr. We'll see this through, you and I."
"If there were only some way in which I could convince theardththat they and the Trylla could live in peace! The Trylla mistrust me and theardthhate me, for I threaten their power. Katha, Katha! There is no answer."
"There is always an answer to a problem. The only trouble is, it takes a long time to see it."
While Tyr worked at the table, making tests and experiments under Katha's guidance, to test the powers of his mind, Katha made the tower her own. Sunlight bathed Tyr through an open window. Above him he heard her footsteps going to and fro, heard her lifting things, and the squeals of delight when she unearthed notebooks that had once been Rohrig's.
They spent their days in work and laughter. Katha made many tests on him, saying, "You are a biological miracle, darling. I don't know much about miracles, so I have to learn, slowly and gropingly."
But she never completed her findings. For one day she discovered, tucked into a corner of the big desk on the second floor, a dusty old diary. For three hours she sat entranced with it, never stirring, until Tyr came hunting her, anxious over her silence. He found her with tears in her eyes, her white teeth nibbling at her full lower lip.
She looked up at his entrance whispering, "Do you know your name, Tyr? Your full name?"
"Tyr. A ring round my neck bore it."
"Those were only your initials. Your real name is Theodore Young Rohrig. Your father was William Rohrig. You areardth, Tyr!"
He stared at her. She clapped her hands, black eyes glowing.
"He knew about you. Oh, he was brilliant, Tyr—or Ted! He knew your function. He called you a mutant, darling. No stomach, no lungs, no need for water. The future man! I can see, now that my eyes have been opened. It is Nature, striving all the time for perfection, equipping her products with the necessities to get along in their environments! In you she is fitting man for space travel, darling!
"Out there among the stars, without lungs and with no need for food or water, you could strip a ship down and really travel. Light-years wouldn't mean a thing to you. Just a battery of sun-lamps to feed you. You wouldn't age hardly at all, for you derive your heat from outside sources, instead of generating it in your tissues, as normal men do! Your organs merely transmit the heat and energy into your muscles and brain. There is no food to be digested and churned into energy, to be broken into heat-energy in the cells. Your energy comes from outside!"
"You make it sound important."
"Itisimportant! I feel I don't understandhowimportant you really are."
Grimly he said, "Now if only we could convince theardthand the Trylla of that!"
Katha caught his arm, saying fiercely, "Tyr—Ted—oh, I'll call you Tyr! You can't give up. You must fight. Theardthare fighters, Tyr. Your father was a fighter. He came here with his wife because he had space leprosy! That's right. And his wife came with him. You were born on Lyallar—far, so far from your home planet. He died a long time ago, did William Rohrig, but his fighter's heart didn't die."
A red fingernail stabbed into the flesh of his chest. "That heart is in you, Tyr. It wants to fight. Maybe it doesn't know how, but you are sad only for that reason. You aren't fighting!"
Tyr whispered hoarsely, "Tell me how, Katha. How shall I fight?"
"How do you want to fight? What does your heart and your brain tell you?"
He stood and let the sunlight hit his forehead. It grew hotter and hotter as he stood there, and inside his skull he felt something stirring, and knew it for his opening brain.Fight them where they are most vulnerable, Tyr. Hit them at their core!The inner voice that was his thought whispered again,Destroy the Glow!
"I must destroy the Glow," he said to her.
Katha shuddered, whispered in horror, "You cannot! You would die from it long before you ever came to it. The Glow is terrible, awesome, Tyr!"
The sunlight made a pattern on his chest as he turned. "Nevertheless, that is what I must do."
The woman bowed her head and took his hand.
The city of Mart sprawled like a lazing slug upon the prairie. Aircraft sped across its walls, winging into illimitable distances. The deep hum of tradesmen's voices as they called their wares mingled with the smooth roll of gyrocars, rising to form the soul of the great metropolis. Armed guards clanged along the tops of the pyramidal walls.
A tall man clad like a mountain shepherd, in wool cloak and hood, stalked beside a woman who went with downbent head, clinging to his arm. Once in a while the woman whispered to him, and the man made a turn into a different street.
They had dust on their cloaks and dust on their feet, those two. Occasionally the woman stumbled, for she was a born actress. Yet an airplane lay less than three miles from the city walls, hidden by boughs torn fromhibithus-trees.
"We are almost at the Commune," whispered the woman.
"There are no people here," the man said.
"Your Trylla approach not near to the building that houses the Glow. They fear it too much."
They went faster, lengthening their steps. Opposite a tall white building that hadardthlettering graven into its stone, they slowed and the woman spoke again.
"That is where the Glow is, hidden deep in the bowels of earth beneath the Citadel. Always are there guards there. They must be overcome."
The man threw back the cloak, revealed big chest and long arms naked under it. Head flung back, he studied the building eagerly.
"They will be overcome!"
The cloak fell to the flagging and the golden giant was gone in long strides that carried him to the doors of the Citadel and within them. The woman stood watching, then bent and lifted his fallen cloak, threw it over her arm, and followed.
Inside the darkness of the Citadel, Tyr went on bare feet, with uncanny silence. A guard came toward him, and he darted into the shadows. When the guard was five paces away, Tyr struck.
He lowered the guard, and went on. Voices came from ahead of him.
"This Tyr will know how strong are theardthwhen he learns what has befallen Zarman!"
"Aye! I wonder what has become of him? Is he dead?"
"Not he. He bides his time. He hopes for a rising of the Trylla!"
"With Zarman and his crew to be executed today, what chance have the Trylla?"
Tyr was turned to stone. His heart hammered inside his chest. Zarman to die! But how had theardthtaken him? Once captured, he would be twice as wary! His hands lifted in the shadows toward the guards, but he held them still.
Tyr swung about and went on.
He did not know of the men outside in the street who halted suddenly and looked at Katha excitedly. Their footfalls as they ran across the street toward her went unheard by him as he raced along the corridors of the Citadel.
Katha had no chance to scream. A wrist jammed her throat and anardthvoice whispered, "Traitress!"
Tyr ran on.
A heavy throb pounded through the steel corridors, and along the polished runways, and into the panelled rooms of the Citadel. Deep down, seemingly in the guts of the planet, came the monotonous, frightening beat and thunder of the Glow, pulsing in a powerful rhythm. Not many men stayed long in this building, and the guards were changed every few hours. No one had run into it with such gladness as did Tyr, ever.
His feet barely touched the floor as he ran. He flexed his muscles, testing his strength. He was fit and ready from a week of lying in blazing sunlight, from basking under sun-lamps arranged by Katha to aid her in her tests.
A guard saw him and yanked at a gun, but Tyr took his face in the palm of his hand and banged his head against the polished steel wall, and left him twitching but alive. Tyr ran swiftly now, heading down and always downward along the ramps, deeper into the earth.
The farther he went, the more sullen grew the throb and roar. It pounded at the temples, shook the walls, surging all around.
On a lintel before a metal elevator was inscribed anardthword. Tyr knew it to be the warning of the Glow. But he put out his hand and opened the elevator door and stepped within. He threw the switch.
There was a falling sensation for a moment, but that passed as Tyr walked around his little cell, working his arms and legs. He was tense and excited, waiting, waiting. This was to be the test. Katha said if he lived through it, that it would be the most marvelous sensation of his entire life. That it would, in some alchemic way, transmute him.
It was warm now. The car was falling faster and faster. Tyr wondered why theardthbothered to have a car at all. If the Glow was all rumor had it to be, theardthwould have to build a new car every time this journey was taken. But the ritual of the thing! Theardthmust maintain their superstitious hold on the Trylla.
He smiled. Theardth! They were his race, a people that called a planet called Earth their home. It sounded so like the Tryllan wordardth, meaning old, that the Trylla had always called them that. Even the Earthmen accepted the term.
Hot was the car, like some monstrous bubble of fiery air. The light, yellow and brilliant and blinding, came seeping in through cracks in the jointures of the door.
The metal of the car was turning red, deepening to a cherry rose, fading to a cold blue, dawning to a pale white....
In the Auditorium of Ancestors, Space Commander Mason sat languidly on the highbacked ivory throne under an arched canopy. Sprayed fanwise before him were gorgeously uniformedardthofficers, stiff-backed as they faced the girl with black hair and black eyes.
Fifteen feet from the throne, Katha stood with head flung back, smiling at Commander Mason. "Your men are efficient, Space Commander," she said. "They found me on the street."
"There is no one as lovely as Katha among theardth," smiled Mason. "There is no one as treacherous, either."
"I fled to Tyr because I felt him to be of help to us. He is—and will be a help. He has gone now to destroy the Glow."
Mason was out of his seat in one tremendous explosion of speed. His hands caught her arms.
"Destroy the Glow? Are you mad? Is he? Nothing can destroy the Glow! What secret does he know?"
"No secret, other than himself. He is Tyr."
Mason clenched a fist, saying, "You said he could help us. It is no help to destroy the Glow!"
"He cannot destroy it. He will learn that!"
"I think he will, too. It will destroy him, long before he reaches it. But I have spoken enough with you. You must die for actions performed detrimental to theardthwelfare."
Space Commander Mason clapped his hands. Guards entered a doorway, and behind them came ragged men with flogged backs, bleeding, wearing manacles. Katha started toward them, before Mason caught her.
She called, "Which of you is Zarman?"
A big man lifted a face swollen with beatings. His eyes were sullen as he looked across the room, at a group of Trylla clad in rainbowed silk garments. Otho smirked beside Fay, who wore a gigantic emerald necklace on her white throat. Her hand fingered it lovingly. On her hand gleamed a golden ring with the letters TYR engraven on it.
"She bears the ring of Tyr," rasped Zarman. "She came to us with a lying message and we believed her. She led us to—theardth!"
Fay tossed her blonde curls indifferently, and glanced down at the necklace that once had belonged to Queen Yatha-sath.
Commander Mason cleared his throat.
"Take them all, including Katha, to the Square of Dying. We will witness their hanging together."
Tyr laughed aloud and stretched, feeling a mad inferno of fire bathing him. His pores were opening, one by one, accepting that insane incandescence with a strange and alien hunger. A man would have died in madness long ago, but Tyr did not die.
He watched the metal of the car weep itself into globous molten droplets of metal that bulged and oozed and bubbled. A cable parted, and the car plunged free.
There was brightness here, all around him as he watched the car flare in riotous colors. The irridescent hues of red and blue and white flashed for a quivering instant, then puffed into mist that was like a bath of minute motes of color.
Tyr reached for an outcropping of volcanic rock, and clung to it. He lifted himself, and stood on a stone ledge.
Beneath him, suspended in a mighty chasm, was the Glow.
The Glow was a tiny sun!
It hung in an endless abyss. It pulsed and throbbed and quivered, and shot streamers of fire upwards and around it. From its moving core, the leaping tongues shot out, expending its energy and, by its own inconceivable heat, restoring the elements to begin the process all over again.
Many ages ago, the Earthmen discovered solar energy. When deVries invented the multilinear umbra-cell, he discovered that it would hold hordes of hydrogen atoms that could be heated to a point that made them an atomic sun. From these bits of power scientists built small suns of their own, and hung them in deep abysses. From their everlasting power they sapped the energy needed to drive their machines and light their homes. They fed the solar power through tentacles of spun carborungsten into generators and dynamos.
The Earthmen took these suns with them across the voids, to planets like Lyallar, and strung them in their deepest chasms. And where went the suns, they were objects of dread and awe.
This one was no object of dread to Tyr.
Standing on the lip of rock, he laughed and raised his arms, and felt that titanic heat and energy flow directly into him. Tyr had no need for carborungsten cables to power the dynamo of his body. The follicles of his skin opened their hungry mouths and sucked that energy into him.
Tyr was changing, standing there.
He was becoming energy itself, every pore and organ of him filling to capacity with the heat and light of that glowing orb. He was charged to bursting.
Tyr turned to the jagged stone wall, and began to climb.
A gallows stood in the Square of Dying, lifting its black arms toward a blue sky. From the crosspiece hung plasticine nooses, like silvery webs. Men and one woman stood below those hoops of transparent plastic, on a raised platform.
Space Commander Mason said to Katha, "You realize now that your man-god Tyr is nothing compared to theardth?"
"Tyr is the only hope theardthhave," she whispered. "I have told you his father was William Rohrig."
"A tale calculated to amaze me. I do not believe you."
"I told you how his body is different, that it can sop up solar energy and translate it into terms of human energy without wear or tear on his system. That he is future man, man in a body fitted to venture out in space, far beyond where we have gone."
"I still do not believe."
A man came and looped the noose around the woman's neck. She shook her head when he would have covered it with a purple mask.
"I tell you now, Commander Mason, that the only one who can renew the Glows is Tyr. Our electro-astrogines have informed us that the elements needed to make new Glows exists only on the planets close to the great suns. Every expedition we sent to those planets perished of heat before they reached them.
"One man could make such a trip—Tyr."
Mason grinned at her. "You're mad, Katha. Executioner, throw the bolt." The executioner put his hand on the lever and swung it over.
Tyr climbed the black rock swiftly. Hands and feet felt for and found niches in the rough surface. Up and up he went. Once he stood on a narrow ledge and craned his neck, staring at the blackness where the carborungsten cables gaped their dark orifices. He was going up there, to those cables, and rip them out. He would smash the dynamos, and nothing could stop him.
Over the lip of a metal cable-mouth he went, and his hands showed bright in the darkness as he seized the wires and pulled, ripping them from welded sockets. He tore and broke with his glowing hands, passing them under and over the cables, and tearing.
As he destroyed, he walked. With his fists he battered against a wall of metal and splintered it. He stepped through and walked toward the dynamos that were lazily rotating. Some of them already had come to a halt.
Tyr touched the engines with his hands and summoned the energies of his body. The metal cracked under the strain of that superhuman power. Casings split and bearings crumpled.
Tyr walked on.
The executioner threw the lever, and nothing happened. Katha laughed softly, and there was a light in her dark eyes that made Space Commander yearn.
She whispered, "He has won!"
Mason roared, "Throw the auxiliary engines over!"
But the auxiliary engines were dead, too. Now theardth-men murmured and whispered among themselves, for the unnatural quiet of the Citadel was hammering their eardrums.
Footsteps sounded on the flagging.
Something tall and something bright was crossing the Street of Space and entering the Square. It was shaped like a man, but its gleaming yellowness was so brilliant that it hurt the eyes to see it.
"Tyr!" screamed Katha.
Space Commander Mason shuddered and put a trembling hand across his eyes. He looked smaller, frail in his dark cloak, standing before the giant who was coming toward him. His officers fell away from him as Tyr came on. To one side a girl with an emerald necklace dropped and lay in a huddled heap on the ground.
From the throats of the manacled Tryllans a roar went up.
"Our god has come for vengeance!"
"Yield, youardth! Yield to Tyr!"
"See how he shines in his glory!"
Twenty feet from Mason, Tyr came to a stop, for fear that the heat his body emanated would blast the man.
"Free Katha and Zarman and the others," the yellow giant said.
Mason nodded.
"Stay away from me," he warned Katha, seeing her leaping from the dais of the gallows. "I am still overcharged with energy. It will fade in a little while. Wait."
Tyr looked at Mason.
"Zarman will be governor of Lyallar. Otho must die. Fay—Fay will be banished for her treachery. Let her keep the emeralds. She will die if we take them from her. The Trylla will live in peace and friendship with the Earth peoples. It is my order."
Zarman came forward and held out his hand to Space Commander Mason who took it thoughtfully. The man with the bald head swung on Tyr.
"Then it is true what Katha said? Youcango near a sun? It makes your body like—that?"
"It fills it with heat and light. And heat and light are energy. My body is energy, right now. Later, that peak of pure energy will fade. It will resume its normal look. But potentially, it is always as you see it now ... needing only a sun to make it so."
Katha looked at Mason, across the cobblestones of the square.
She said, "I told you Tyr is the one to renew the Glows. He would not die on a planet near enough to the sun for the elements we need."
"I will do that," agreed Tyr. "I am no longer god of the Trylla. I brought them their freedom. I have discharged the responsibility they put about my shoulders when they made me their god.
"My father wasardth. I, too, amardth. If I can save theardth, I shall."
He turned toward Commander Mason and said. "And, being anardth, I am under your orders, sir."
Mason drew a deep breath, took off his hat and ran his hand over his bald head. His face wrinkled with amazement, changing to a shy smile.
"My orders, Tyr? Hmm. The first thing you ought to do is—cool off. Then, when you're able to do it safely, take this woman Katha into your arms and kiss her for her belief in you! After that—you might consider mating with her. Your children will carry a torch, Tyr. To the true ends of the world."