Part 5

"You're thinking of human death. This is different. Why must all death be a matter of limp, lifeless clay? Why couldn't silicon beings die and become--"

"Of course. Sand and the heat generated by Aava's flame, plus the high silicate content in the flame itself--_glass_!"

"And glass is a form of death."

Gordon stared at him with wide blue eyes. "Man, man. You've solved it. But how can we get that sand onto Aava without getting killed ourselves? Even supposing we can get out of this trap?"

"You'll have to create a diversion. An attack on the urns. At night. I'll slip out and get to the Undying Sea. I'll swim underwater. I'll need a length of clay pipe to breathe through. And before I go, I want to make one more trip to the Mountains of Distortion. I remember there was a lot of sand over the cave of Aava. I want to check that. If true, one man might kill him. I'm going to try, anyhow."

Thor walked around the room, eyes gleaming brightly. He said, "Peter, we have a world here that we can make our own. We're locked inside a bubble of space, a cancerous growth that keeps this universe and our old universe apart. We are free to make whatever kind of place we want, in here. It's up to us to do it. We can't fail."

Outside the walls, they heard the deep-throated roar of the androids as the urns rolled forward. Gordon said simply, "If you succeed, it will have to be soon. Or there will be none left to profit by it!"

IV

Sunlight glinted on the flat surface of the Undying Sea. Near its sandy shore, an almost naked man clambered wet and dripping from its waters. In his right hand he carried a giant axe. In his left was a length of clay tubing. He paused and tossed the tube into the water, watched the ripples spread as it hit and sank.

Thor Masterson turned his face toward the black hulk of mountain far to the west. Around his loins was wrapped a cloth fitted with strips of toughened leather. Soft skin sandals protected his feet from the bite and burn of hot sands and rocks.

He ran smoothly, easily as the American Indian, at a lope that decimated distance. When sweat beaded his body, he found a pool and lay in its cool waters until fit to go on. Hammering away at him was the remembrance of the Outlaw settlement, of the androids storming the walls, of the urns rolling forward and tilting. Once in a while a stone from Yorg's crude catapults would overturn an urn, but the hits would be scarce.

While the attack went on, he lay on a smooth table and disassociated his astral self from his body. In spirit form he roamed the planet, seeking Aava. Deep in the bowels of the black mountain he had finally found him.

Thor dared not reveal his presence, or Aava would have lashed out with that titanic power that was destructive even to his projected self. Instead, he went down from the thin crust of rock over Aava, sinking through the golden granules of what had once been a great desert, to the fine crust of jewel-embedded rock that was the roof of Aava's cave.

Between jewels, hovering in rock and sand, Thor had looked down on the Green Flame.

Aava was verdant brilliance in the red quartz oval, his inner fires moving fluidly, pulsing, beating. He seemed to slumber, thoughts far away. Thor knew where his thoughts were: at the Outlaw settlement.

Thor looked around him, studying the thin crust of rock, the jewels, the over-hanging sands. Beneath the rock crust was a lip of stone bridge, five feet down from the rock roof. Thor had grinned, and slid back up through the sand and stone.

The rock cut into his feet as he climbed. Up sheer cliffsides, using fingers to clutch at stone projections, digging holes with his toes where no holds ought to be dug, hugging stone with his chest and belly, he went. By inch and by foot he climbed.

Night came while he stood on a yard-wide natural path. Thor grunted, eyeing it. Sleep was what he wanted, sleep was what his tired muscles craved. But he went on.

Into the darkness, where a misstep would send him plummeting to jagged rocks thousands of feet below, Thor crept. He crawled, vertically.

Above him he could see green light, faint tendrils of it.

That was the crevice, the entrance to the Cave of Aava.

* * * * *

And at the Outlaw settlement, Peter Gordon whistled arrows at the heads of the androids surging through the break in the walls that had just been blasted by the urns. But arrows and spears could not stay such as the androids. With sword and axe they hewed their path above the bleeding, dying corpses of the outlaws.

Karola shuddered beside him, handing him arrows. "Will Thor find Aava? Will he be in time to help us?"

"Jove, I hope so. But it looks bad, Karola. Very bad."

The girl grimaced, and closed white fingers on the hilt of a slim dagger. "They'll never take me back. Never!"

"Got the bounder!... No, I know. Aava hopes to breed a race of living beings with artificial insemination. But he needs women for that, and so far we've kept him from them--"

Below the balcony where they stood, they saw Slag and Yorg lead a charge with club and sword. The red dwarf howled his oaths as he slammed and battered at android skulls. Yorg, grunting and panting, used his blade like a scalpel.

"They're holding, Karola. The jolly blighters are driving them back."

"No, no. There--another blast by Aava-in-the-urn. Another group!"

The fresh androids drove into Slag and Yorg's flank, wedged in the screaming fighters, threw them back on themselves. A hairy red arm wielded a club like a blackjack. A white-furred arm cut and stabbed with a sword. But the androids came forward. They rolled over the outlaws.

Gordon said sadly, "We'd best fall back, Karola. We can't hold them any longer."

* * * * *

Here in the cave opening, Thor stood up and moved his axe, testing its heft. Green light danced and flared on the broad blades. Thor grinned wolfishly, and went forward.

Stepping carefully, using the shadows of the stalagmites to hide his giant frame, Thor went deeper into the cave, closer to the green flame that flared in the bowels of the mountain. It was warm here, for Aava was a thing of fire.

On the skin sandals that gave no sound, he stepped forward. He walked in the myriad light that the flame plucked from the gems and spread throughout his cave.

He could see the bridge of rock that lifted its stone arc high to the towering, shadowy roof of the cave. Up there, in the black shadows, he could stand on that bridge and be close to the roof--close enough to swing an axe.

Thor sped silently across the empty space between tumbled rock slabs. He leaped for the bridge and ran up its curving back.

* * * * *

Slag and Yorg bled from a score of wounds as they fought their fight by the settlement gate with club and sword. Side by side, two against an army, they dug bleeding feet into stone streets, and fought like madmen.

They piled androids in front and to the sides. They made a funereal mountain of wrecked, synthetic bodies.

Slag and Yorg would die here.

They knew it, yet they fought on. The others needed time to get to the circular tower, to fight their last stand against Aava. So the club and the sword stayed swinging, and the pile grew higher.

Now they could hear the trundling of the urn-wagons.

Yorg panted, "They come nearer, Slag."

"It will not be long. You are good fighter, Yorg."

The androids fell away. An urn was coming up. Behind it, androids massed with spears and swords, ready to attack when these madmen were wiped from their path.

Yorg rested on his blade and grinned at Slag. "Thor would attack that urn and tip it. Then the androids would get the force of it. It would kill a lot, facing that army."

Slag grunted and gripped his club.

The urn began to tilt toward the two bloody fighters. Yorg growled in his throat, and the red dwarf and the white ape leaped forward.

They struck the urn with their feet, at its apex. The clay vase shuddered and swung back. A green light reared up, blazing fury and annihilation.

Slag and York fell forward, over the lip of the urn as it dropped toward the androids.

A beam of green blight swept outward, over the massed androids. As a breath blows out the candleflame, so the green fire blew away the androids.

But Slag and York had fallen into that flame, unable to halt their forward impetus. The green flame touched them first, and destroyed them. They were dwarf and ape one moment, nothingness the next.

Watching from a slit in the tower wall, Karola rubbed tears from her wet cheeks with the back of her hand.

* * * * *

Far beneath him, the floor of the cave was dark and broken. There on the stone bridge, with the jewel-embossed roof so near, Thor was in a different world.

He stood now on the tip of the bridge's arc. The thin crust of roof was within reach of his axe. Thor looked down, full into the red quartz oval where green Aava slumbered, moving and radiating always.

"He's at the settlement. He's blasting away at something," Thor whispered.

He swung the axe in circles. He stood on tiptoes and the muscles of his naked back and thickly thewed arms bunched and bulged. With a sob of fury, Thor drove his axe at the crust of roof.

Sparks glinted. A flake of quartz fell away, dropped to the floor below and bounded. Echoes sprang up, dancing the length of the cave.

Thor attacked the roof with insane fury.

Flakes and chips of roof showered below, all along the cave-floor. Thor sobbed with the strain of his eerie battle. His lungs heaved. His arm rose and fell, rose and fell. Sparks grew to myriad thousands as the keen edge of the war-axe bit and dug in the stone.

Over the clatter and clang of steel and stone, rose an ominous thunder. Aava was being awakened from his slumbers. The green of the cave grew brighter, more freshly verdant. The red of the carnelians became purple; the purple of the amethysts, black.

Thor slashed and cut unceasingly.

Like a volcano gathering itself to spew its lava, Aava rumbled. With fire and with fury, he quested for the source of the falling rock.

A tongue of flame leaped up to stand for one long instant beside Thor. He grimaced and drove his axe without stay. The keen biting edges would not last long, now. They were almost done. A streak down the flat side of one axe-blade told him it would give, soon.

And the roof showed no sign of cracking!

* * * * *

The men and women in the tower watched the circle of urns gathering around them, tilting upwards. Hugging the walls and shadows of the buildings, the androids watched.

Arrows thudded down onto the androids attending the urns. But when two fell, four leaped from the darkness to take their places.

High in the tower, Peter Gordon fed his arrows to the attackers. The string of his bow was warm. His fingers were blistered, raw with continual friction. But his lips were tight, and his pale blue eyes were icy.

Karola bit her full red lower lip, shaking her long yellow hair from her eyes and wiping those same eyes surreptitiously with the palm when they grew moist.

The urns were facing the tower at last. Gordon dropped his bow, put out a hand, burying his fingers in the smooth flesh of Karola's nude shoulder.

"All over, all over. Jolly good fight while it lasted."

"Thor, Thor," Karola whimpered.

In another instant, the urns would thunder out their destructive fury. But the moment lingered into minutes, and still the urns were silent.

A wondering babble broke from the throats of the androids. Some of them bent and stared within the urns, where tiny green flames flickered. Those green flames should have annihilated the last of the outlaw settlement. Yet they did not.

Karola looked at Peter Gordon.

"Do you think--Thor--?"

* * * * *

Aava knew he was on the rock bridge now. Thor knew that Aava knew, and still he dug and battered his axe upward. He had a depression sculpted from the roof. A few more blows and--

The axe dug in. Thor pulled it loose.

He heard Aava, then. A blast of titanic heat, of power unimaginable, came roaring up at him.

Thor leaped outward, away from the bridge.

For a moment he hung a hundred feet above the jagged floor of the cave. In that instant, Aava hurled himself upward, filling the cave with radiance and intolerable heat.

Thor threw wide his arms, closed them on a stalactite dropping its thin rock formation from the roof. His legs spraddled the drooping stone, hugging it.

Aava raged, biting and burning at the stone bridge, seeking his quarry. Sullenly, he dropped back within the quartz oval.

Thor almost missed the bridge, leaping back for it. His hands scrabbled at the loose shale, sliding and slipping, before his fingers tightened on a rough projection.

With insane might, he flung himself and his axe again at the depression. Before Aava gathered himself once more, he had to do it.

The axe dug in. When he pulled it loose, a few flecks of sand slid with it. The thin grains showered downward, running in a steady stream.

"Earthling, stop! The sand must not come down on me. Stop and--"

The voice of Aava rose to a shrill crescendo, battering at his ears. But Thor worked on. His axe arm lifted. The crack widened. Tons of sand hung above that thin roof, on delicate balances. By opening the roof even so slightly as he had done, he was destroying that balance. An incredible weight of sand was waiting, waiting--

Aava rose in all his might and splendour, to seal the crack.

And the sand fell.

Thor reeled back, battered by thundering deserts.

He hung on what was left of the rock bridge, staring. Upreared in green iridescence, showered by falling tons of sand that formed a tan curtain around him, Aava writhed. His great bulk was twisted into strange convolutions, distorted grotesqueries of liquid movement. A great spray of fire lapped out and upward to seal the gap through which the sand streamed downward. It rose against the falling tons, and was pressed back and down.

Thor huddled in the darkness, cold and numb. He was watching the death of a god, a god that he had killed.

The sand showered down, lapping and laving at the monstrous green tentacle that was Aava as he died.

* * * * *

The androids stared deep within the bowl of the urns. The green filament was out, dead. They glanced in fright at the stone tower and stared at one another.

"Aava is dead! The Lord Aava is no more!"

Peter Gordon notched an arrow to his bowstring, sent it whizzing down and into the braincase of a robot. The flying arrow was like a signal. Spears and arrows darkened the sky. The androids fell in scores.

For a moment the androids stood undecided. And then, with a yell that sent shivers up the backs of the Outlaws, so vibrant was its grief, they turned and sped from the city, out across the plains, scattering.

"We will hunt them down," smiled Gordon. "There is nothing to fear, now. It is all a matter of time.

"Karola! Karola! The settlement has triumphed!"

She brushed back thick yellow hair from wet violet eyes. She turned and stumbled to the door. Catching herself Karola laughed over her shoulder, "I'm going to Thor. I want to find Thor."

"Good idea. Jolly good idea, at that. We'll all go. In the boats at the Undying Sea. I haven't sailed a boat in years. Say, Thor will need a fleet for his new world, won't he? I think I'd fit perfectly as admiral. Admiral Peter Gordon. Doesn't sound bad at all, does it?"

Gordon discovered he would have to save his breath, to keep up with Karola's long white legs. He grinned and loped on.

* * * * *

Thor came up from his crouch, coughing in the dusty, sand-clogged air. Aava was one solid pillar of far-flung glass, etched and sculpted by his own death-agonies into something that looked like windblown moss.

The sand had clogged at the opening in the roof. In one last, despairing lunge, Aava had sealed his nemesis. But it was too late to save him. His very being sucked in all those granules, whipped them around in the fiery core of him and fused them with the silicon and sodium in his body. For one instant, Aava had become a mad factory.

Thor came forward, put out a palm and placed it against the smooth surface of the tall glass column. The glass was still warm. The bits of ferrous silicate that had given Aava his distinctive colouring were imparting that same warm green to the dead image.

"As though a sculptor had carved him," whispered Thor.

Outside the cave entrance, the sun was shining and a fresh wind was whipping the mountainside.

Seeing the ships crossing the Undying Sea, noting the shaken swords and lances, Thor grew hot with emotion.

A girl with yellow hair dived into the water, climbed dripping onto shore, and set out for him. After her streamed the others, all with new hope, new life in their breasts.

Thor grinned. He ran to meet Karola, arms hungry for her.