Part 4

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 are _ardth_, 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."

"It _is_ important! I feel I don't understand _how_ important you really are."

Grimly he said, "Now if only we could convince the _ardth_ and 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. The _ardth_ are 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 from _hibithus_-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 had _ardth_ lettering 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 the _ardth_ when 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 the _ardth_ taken 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 an _ardth_ voice 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 an _ardth_ word. 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 the _ardth_ bothered to have a car at all. If the Glow was all rumor had it to be, the _ardth_ would have to build a new car every time this journey was taken. But the ritual of the thing! The _ardth_ must maintain their superstitious hold on the Trylla.

He smiled. The _ardth_! They were his race, a people that called a planet called Earth their home. It sounded so like the Tryllan word _ardth_, 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 uniformed _ardth_ officers, 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 the _ardth_," 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 the _ardth_ welfare."

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--the _ardth_!"

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 the _ardth_?"

"Tyr is the only hope the _ardth_ have," 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 the _ardth_-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, you _ardth_! 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? You _can_ go 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 was _ardth_. I, too, am _ardth_. If I can save the _ardth_, I shall."

He turned toward Commander Mason and said. "And, being an _ardth_, 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."

End of Project Gutenberg's The Man the Sun-Gods Made, by Gardner F. Fox