Part 4

* * * * *

Karola swayed against Thor. They stood tightly together for a moment.

"Jolly nice going," said a voice.

Peter Gordon swung a leg over the shield-wall and came toward him. "We watched from the grass. You can play that axe like a Norse raider. Got his gatestone, eh?"

Thor handed it to him. "This means we split up. You go your way, to the settlements. I go a different route."

"Man, you don't know the way!"

"I'll find it."

Thor went and lifted a rotted plank. The red gatestone still lay in the crotch of the beams, winking at him. He took and put it in his pocket. "Now, if Aava hunts us, one of us will still get through the barriers."

Thor put an arm around Karola's waist and held her against him. He said, "This is a Viking longboat. It is from a past day in the history of my planet."

Peter Gordon murmured, "What queer things this space of Aava has snatched from the universe. I wouldn't be surprised to learn, when all our chips are in, that a great many disappearances on Earth are due to this place.

"Remember the _Cyclops_ that went off the face of the ocean in 1920? And do you recall the _Copenhagen_? And, back in 1755, a quay with a lot of people on it just puffed out of existence, disappearing all at once, in Lisbon, Portugal. There have been other disappearances from the Earth. None perhaps as sensational as those I mentioned.

"There's something wrong with this world we're in. It doesn't hew to a lot of natural laws we know."

Thor said, "There are no trees. Just rock and sand."

"Mean anything to you?"

"I'm not sure. There's something tugging and pulling in my mind, but it hasn't caught hold yet. And the weapons we use. Bows and swords and axes. There isn't a modern weapon in the lot."

Gordon grimaced. "Aava and his androids get the loot of the worlds, you know. They grab whatever drops on the planet. If he found guns or worse, he might horde them somewhere. The androids do not have the intelligence to use them. Besides, Aava doesn't trust his androids."

"Yes. Well, we do all right with what we have. But that thought in my mind--I want to follow it up. Karola!"

"Yes, Thor?"

Her violet eyes smiled into his. He kissed the tip of her nose. "You go with Peter and Slag."

"Oh, no, darling. I don't want to leave you. I--"

Thor squeezed her hand. "This is serious business, sweet stuff. I want to find the Discoverer. He has a method of transportation, Peter, that's a dilly. He calls it astral projection."

Gordon looked interested, icy blue eyes lighting. "I've read up on that, you know. It's some sort of yogi business. Certain Eastern fakirs claim to be able to do it. You know, he sits down and pays his brother a visit one hundred and some odd miles away. That sort of stuff.

"I've often thought that mental telepathy was a form of fumbling astral projection. The Duke University experiments proved amazingly accurate. And then there were the Sherman and Wilkins tests."

"I remember those. They worked quite well. I see what you're driving at. You think that the human mind is a sort of sending and receiving set, that it can communicate--"

"Communicate at first, then travel. That would explain your Discoverer."

"If he could teach me to travel that way," Thor mused, "we might really get somewhere against Aava."

Suddenly he bent and kissed Karola, and pushed her toward Gordon. "Take care of her, Peter. You too, Slag. I'll find you, somehow, sometime soon."

He dropped over the side of the longboat and waved an arm at the three black silhouettes that stared down at him. Then he turned and, as nearly as he could judge, went loping across the grasses in the direction in which he had last beheld the Discoverer.

* * * * *

Thor did not find the Discoverer for three days. And then it was the Discoverer who found him.

He came out of sleep one morning, with the mists all around him and the warm rock under him to stare at the great bulk of the sprawling being that lay and watched him. Thor sat and rubbed his eyes. He got to his feet.

"I have been hunting you, Thor Masterson. Astrally, that is. I found you two days ago, but we were far apart."

"And I--I hunted you. I want to learn about Aava. I--"

"I can help you. Some time after you left me, I began experimenting with my astral projection technique. I learned that, chronologically, I was not hampered in the least by normal bonds. Back on my home planet of Flormaseron, I was not hampered by the bonds of space, but the barriers of Time limited me. I could not go far into the past, nor far into the future. Here, I can do either."

"You can't call that witchcraft," Thor went on. "There is a science to it, but we just don't know the rules of that science. Just as, back in Roman days, atoms existed even if the Romans didn't know of them."

"There are some laws," said the Discoverer. "You have the beginning of them. You can launch your mind from your body and see what occurs elsewhere. Come, Thor. Lie down. I want to show you what happened here in the space of the green flame billions of years ago."

"Will that help me to conquer Aava? I want to visit him now, to learn what he does, what he plans--"

"I do not know whether it will help you conquer him, but it might help you understand him. And understanding is usually a prerequisite to any form of victory."

Thor lay back on the warm rock, moving his head slightly to find a more comfortable pillow on the hollowed rock. His arms he dropped to his sides, relaxing all through his big body. His chest rose and fell more slowly. His legs flattened against the stone. He closed his eyes and lay quiescent.

"Relax still more," whispered the Discoverer. "Sink deep, and deeper still. You must sever all bonds with your flesh. Sink--"

He was going down and around into a bottomless vortex of darkness. He fought to get down into the heart of that fancied whirlpool, down where its own power could drag him free. He fought, and struggled, fiercely.

He reached it. He hung in sunlighted air, looking at his prone body near the slumped mass of the Discoverer.

"Good. You did that all yourself, I think now you may do that without my help. But we waste time. Rise with me!"

An invisible tentacle touched him, flooded him with power. He rose high into the cloudless blue skies of Aava's planet, soaring sunward. Beneath him the red grasslands and grey rock spread out in vast splendor.

Soon now he was high enough to see the great globe that was the planet in all its entirety, slowly revolving. Out in space, in the vast distances between the suns, he floated bodiless. The planet receded, became a dot.

"Now we will go back, far in Time."

"How?"

"Think and will it. Your astral self, your _ka_ or twin-soul, is a creature of mind, not matter."

Thor thought, hanging there in black space. And, as he thought, with each bit of energy he threw into his will and into his brain, there was a change. The suns and the planets were moving. They sped like balls batted across a net by hundreds of players. They slid in ancient grooves, rotating and retreating, going back the paths of their orbits. A ball of raging fire looped at them. Thor paused in instinctive dismay; he sought to turn and flee, dreading the vast sun coming at him.

"Move not. It can not harm you."

He was in the midst of a roaring red inferno, feeling nothing of its annihilating heat. An instant later it was gone, raging gustily down the tracks of Time.

Thor stared. There were fewer stars now, only a couple of hundred of parsecs away. This universe was retreating away from him.

"We must follow!"

"No need. They will return."

"But an expanding universe means that it will be retreating now, going back to ultimate beginnings--"

"Our universe--the universe of Earth and Flormaseron--is an expanding universe. But here, in Aava's worlds, there is no room for expansion. This is a finite universe, gigantic, but rimmed with some strange force that keeps it separate from our universe.

"Here the suns and planets rotate around each other, but at the same time they revolve inside this space. They traverse this great bubble thousands of times through the ages. Watch. You will see them return."

Thor hung there, in utter blackness. And then, far and faint, in the opposite direction from which the suns had gone, they came. At first they were pinpoints, then dots. They came nearer, great fiery orbs.

"Two hundred million years have passed, Thor Masterson. Let us drop down, toward the planet of Aava."

There was only one vast desert of sand facing them, as they hovered above the surface of the slowly revolving planet. Dunes a hundred miles high, whipped with savage and incessant winds. They saw sandstorms that were titanic in their fury.

"Sand," thought Thor. "Mile after mile of silicon dioxide."

"Drop down. Go through the sand."

Grayish granules all around him, bringing the sensation of suffocation until he grew used to it. The gray darkened and grew black as pitch.

"Rock," whispered the Discoverer. "Be cautious, now."

They slid from the blackness into the green light. This was a cave, seemingly endless. Embedded into walls and sides, glittering and sparkling, were bits of onyx, carnelian, opal and amethyst. Thor caught his breath at the iridescent wonder of the jewelled cavern.

"Far off, Thor, to the right. Look there."

Brilliant green fire, rising and falling. Alive, and waiting.

"Aava!"

"Careful. Think not so harshly. He will be aware of you. Come. It is time to go."

They went back, high into space.

Once again the planets and the stars left them alone, and again they came. But this time the planet Aava was molten, filled with shooting flames, burning with white, silvery flames.

Thor and the Discoverer went down into the bowels of the planet, seeking Aava. They found the green flame burning with brilliance in a sea of molten rocks. It leaped and danced, and gathered bits of matter around it, as though weaving a garment for itself.

"That is the oval in which we saw him encased," said Thor. "Pure quartz. When hot, it goes cherry-red."

"This is four hundred million years ago. He is truly eternal."

There was amusement in the Discoverer's mind as he said, "We will go back even further, back to the remotest beginnings. And even then, Aava was."

* * * * *

Eight times the universe came to them and receded. At last they stood in utter darkness, for a long time. There were no stars, no suns. There was emptiness.

"We are in the very dawn of all things. We are so far back that there is no Time, no Space. Only emptiness."

"If there is nothing, what are we here for?"

"Wait."

Faint rosy shafts of light streamed up from nothingness, incredible distances away. The light bathed them, sent tingles of electrical power throbbing through their beings. Although he was only brain, Thor felt that force. It was something from beyond, godlike.

Where there had been emptiness, was now matter. Here and there were stars.

"Is this creation?"

"Call it creation. Call it a life-force coming from somewhere that our animal minds can never fathom. Say the force gathered the floating electrons and bound them into balled suns. And in one of the suns, we will find what we seek."

They hunted through the weird wonders of this weird universe. And deep in the heart of a gigantic star that pulsed and threw its forces hundreds of thousands of miles high, they saw it.

A green blob, restlessly burning, circling within itself, like a fluid always in motion. Cradled and warmed by the heat of the star, given not only existence, but life itself by the rosy shafts of light, was Aava.

"Not eternal. But almost so."

"Master of this cancerous universe, this alien from known Time and known Space. Remember, the only thing that penetrated the force-shell around this space-cancer was the light, the rosy light."

"Aava is not absorbed by the sun."

"He is different."

"And being composed as we are composed would be gone in less than a fraction of a second, in that heat."

The Discoverer whispered, "Is that knowledge any help to you, Thor Masterson?"

"I don't know. The idea in the back of my head, that hammered away at me ever since I met Aava--I almost have it. It is there, if I can find a way to--"

_Loneliness!_

Hanging in this space, hundreds of millions of years from his body, Thor Masterson was alone.

"Discoverer! Where are you? Speak to me!"

There was empty silence.

Thor wondered. He was not afraid, for fright is a bodily thing, where the heart pumps faster and the skin grows white while the blood is sucked into the belly. This feeling was different.

He knew he was alone, that something had happened to the Discoverer. He called and received no answer.

Can I return? Thor asked himself. Can my mind span the countless eons between my body and my brain? He had learned all he could, out here in the beginnings of things. It was time to go back, now.

He took thought, calmly and dispassionately. There was no panic in him. He was a child with a new toy, turning it and examining it, feeling it bend to pressure, putting it to mouth to know its taste. Slowly he forced his brain into patterns, forming it with mental energy, twisting it into different shape.

Thor had to go forward in Time, swiftly. He must learn what had happened to the Discoverer, quest after Aava. He thought, and in thinking, found a new delight.

How long he hung there in the black voids, he never knew. But up from darkness came a white ball of flame that was Aava's planet, with its sun and attendant moons. They circled in darkness, weird and eerie in their iridescent brilliance.

I have succeeded, he reflected. That is the planet, bubbling with molten rock. Inside that sphere, Aava is fashioning a garment for himself, moulding it from crystal quartz. Somewhere on the other side of the universe, the sun that held him spewed him out, with the nucleus for his planet and its moons. I am speeding into the future.

Again and again Aava's planet and its sun and moons returned, to flee across the gulfs of space. Ten times they came and went; the last time, Thor knew he would have to wait no longer.

He dropped toward the planet as it circled its sun. He swept through heaviside and stratosphere. He plummeted into fluffy cloudbanks. Beneath him he could see red grasslands and bare rock. Across one rock was slumped the massive form of the Discoverer.

To one side of the Discoverer lay the body of Thor Masterson. The brain that was part of that body entered it.

There was coldness and a sense of numbness. He could not move a muscle.

Thor sent relays of orders along his nerves into every part of his body. A muscle twitched. He opened his eyes.

It took time, returning from such a journey; but at last Thor could move his arms. He rubbed his chest and loins, massaged his legs. Weakly, he stood up.

"Discoverer!"

It was a cry of anguish. The blob of jellied flesh lay seared and burned. Little blisters covered the massy body like globules of sweat. Where the blisters were greatest, the outer mass of the body was broken open into crevices, like the cracks in a human brain.

"Aava did this," whispered Thor. "They brought him in the urn, and he killed the Discoverer. And he spared me. That was a blunder."

It occurred to him that he was granted life because Aava thought he could use him. "He'll see. I'll show him what I can do."

Raging, he brought out the gatestone, staring at it. "You hear me, Aava? I'll get you yet. I'll find a way to beat you. There must be a way. There has to be a way!"

The ruby lay, warmly glowing. Aava was not inside its red crystalline substance. Thor closed his fist on the ruby and shook it back and forth. He culled oaths from lumber camp and battlefield. He swore them all.

He spent himself, there on the red grasslands. Dry-eyed, but grieving, he put out a hand and touched the blistered body. He whispered a farewell under his breath and turned his head to the north.

* * * * *

All night long Thor went at an easy lope across the plains. Just as dawn came up with red lances of light across the horizon, he stopped and turned the gatestone.

"If he wants me, he'll have to find me," he said. "I'll lead him a chase that--"

The rest choked off in water. He was in blue depths, in cold clear water that was so transparent he could see a shimmering forest of crimson coral and white sands far below him. Thor swam upward, aided by the natural buoyancy of his big body.

He treaded water a hundred yards from a shore where dead bodies lay scattered like leaves after a windstorm. There two androids lay broken in half; beyond them a fighter clad in reddish fur rotted. The rising sun glinted on a shattered spear in the hands of a Zarathzan, slid on to the blade of a sword buried in an android's skull.

He clambered, dripping, from the sea. Sorrowing, he walked among the bodies, recognizing many beside whom he had fought in the women's compound.

Something groaned, ahead of him. It was Morlon, hairy torso riddled with arrows, his black fur dyed red. Thor knelt and lifted his head to a knee.

"Aava came into the gatestone you gave Peter Gordon, Thor," muttered the dying man. "He saw where we went. We fled as swiftly as we could with the women, but Aava's androids crossed the Undying Sea in ships and caught us."

Thor's lips curled in anger. "Always Aava!"

"We fought a rear-guard fight, all the way. I fell here. I don't know what happened to the others. They went on--"

* * * * *

The giant Morlon stiffened suddenly, muscles ridging over legs and arms. His eyes rolled backwards.

Thor put him down on the sandy shore, gently.

He went on, along the path made clear by fallen bodies, by dropped weapons. Here was havoc wrought on man and android by sharp steel, by the honed edge of war-arrows and spears. Thor saw that there lay more androids than men.

Toward evening he heard them. Hoarse war-cries throbbed in the air. He crawled up over a lip of rock.

Before him lay the settlement, a low-walled city of kiosks and towers, their dun clay surfaces ornamented with ochre and vermilion. On its broad walls were archers and spearmen, patrolling during a lull in the battle. The low tents of the androids penned in the city, ringing it with pointed pennon-poles.

Thor gathered himself. He lifted his axe, swung it loosely to accustom his hand and arm to its feel. There was no way leading between those robot-tents, but Thor knew there was an invisible path leading to the settlement walls, a road he had to cleave with axe and feet.

He stood up, grim and gaunt against the bright sky.

Standing, he could see beyond the lip of rock, away to his right. Androids were tied to chains there, pulling. They were dragging great wagons filled with huge urns. Aava-in-the-urn! He was coming, to blast the walls with his titanic power!

Thor stifled a sob of anger and leaped forward. He ran as runs the deer, barely touching the passing ground with his feet, but flying swiftly. His axe was steady in his hand.

This was his one chance, when they were bringing Aava to the city. The androids would be occupied with their master. They would not be prepared for anyone trying to get _in_ the city.

If anyone noticed him, they paid him no heed. He was almost under the walls when three androids sprang from the shelter of a tent to meet him with naked swords.

Thor never stopped his rush. The axe lifted and swung, went back and swung up again. One android remained standing, coming in swiftly, throwing himself in a desperate lunge.

Thor sidestepped, pecked with the point of the axe right into the middle of the forehead. There was a sharp scream, and then the ponderous gates were opening before him. Thor dove through as spears whistled over his head.

Yorg grinned, slapping Thor on naked shoulder. "We thought you dead. Gordon and Kor Tan will be glad to see you."

"And Karola?"

Yorg laughed. "She pines, the yellow one. But come."

Along clay-brick streets they went, as Thor told of the urns they were bringing from the shore. He scowled and shook his white-furred head. "We cannot last when Aava sears holes in our walls. The androids will come, and then the Outlaws will be no more."

"If we had some wood on this accursed planet," growled Thor, "I might be able to rig a catapult."

He explained the function of the catapult to Yorg, who nodded, lips tightly drawn. In his eyes was the flicker of a new hope. "It might be. We gather what we can from the spacewrecks that the planet gathers. Other things we steal. We have some wood stored. And some cording. I will get to work at once."

Yorg led Thor to a great circular building with walls of glass, where sunlight fused across a tile floor, making the room alive with light. A girl with long yellow hair turned from a group at the end of the chamber. She screamed her delight.

"Thor! Peter, Slag, it's Thor!"

Their delight chased the worry from their eyes and faces for a few moments, as they shook his hand and pounded his shoulders. Peter Gordon said, "Jolly good to have you back, old man. But I'm afraid even having you here won't do any good. The androids have us surrounded. You say they are bringing Aava in the urns. Looks as though it's all over."

"Not yet," Thor growled, and told them of the Discoverer, and the astral voyage they had made.

Gordon wrinkled furrowed brows. "Can't see what good knowing that is, you know. It--"

"Think, man. I'm not too good at chemistry, but there are clues and hints all over this planet. Most of it is sand, rolling mile after mile. Even the red grasslands have sandy beds. And the rocks. There is almost as much rock as sand. What do you and the robots build your cities of? Clay! What jewels are embedded in the cave where Aava dwells? Opal, onyx, carnelian, jasper!

"Aava lives in a circle of pure quartz. Look!"

* * * * *

Thor put his hand in his pocket, drew out tiny green flecks of crystal, "I got this by scraping the urn where Aava appeared to his androids in the temple. It's glass! Something in Aava's nature was hardened by oxygen, and the sand in the substance of the urn turned into glass!

"When the Discoverer took me out into space and back in Time, when I saw the worlds of this space-realm created, one thing struck me. I watched Aava and his planet evolve from an empty void, saw the planet grow and take form.

"Gordon, I saw no fern forests, no great jungles of vegetation whose rotting and sinking into peat bogs gave us coal. Coal is carbon. And there were no petroleum wells, and petroleum is a compound of hydrocarbons."

Gordon rubbed his chin, frowning. "It's all jolly interesting, old man."

Thor waved a hand. "Can't you see? It all argues just one thing. No coal, no oil. No forms of carbon at all. Just quartz, sand, onyx, jasper, clay, carnelian, opal, rock--all forms of silicon.

"Aava is silicate life, where we are carbon life!"

The Englishman whistled low.

Thor went on, "Silicon is almost as ingenious as carbon. Both have a valence of six. Both unite with other substances to form various compounds. But, just as life with carbon structure cannot stand its own refuse--the carbon dioxide that we exhale when we breathe, so life with a silicate base cannot stand its own refuse--silicon dioxide--or _sand_!"

"Afraid I'm rather stupid, old man. Not following you very well."

"Human beings exhale carbon dioxide when they breathe, after taking the oxygen into their lungs to help release their energy. But if they breathed only that refuse, or carbon dioxide, they would soon die. The same with a being formed of silicon, such as Aava is. He forms sand--silicon dioxide--as his debris when he removes the oxygen from the air that is necessary to his life. Suppose we fed only sand to Aava?"

"You mean it would smother him?"