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.