Caught up in a mad space-time snarl, making their
last grim stand against a surging android horde,
the outlawed man-beasts of the Settlements could
not see why mighty-thewed Thor Masterson of Terra
chose instead to battle a strange green flame!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_In that dim dawn of all things, when Time was unmeasured and Space was
an empty void, before the strange mating of these two and the birth of
the cosmos, the Rebel lived. Its streams flowed forth from unfathomable
errors, seventeen-hundred billion years ago. It was a cancer of Space,
and when Space met Time and flowed with it toward eternity, the Rebel
fought. Time and Space sought to disgorge it, for it was the Rebel,
and its own great tendrils of Space and Time heaved and raged like the
corona of a giant sun. The tendrils leaped and danced, and once in a
while they touched reality. And when they did...._
* * * * *
The purple light came first, tinting the library of the old house, and
flooding across rugs and books on the shelves. Then the mansion rocked
and tilted as though being lifted and torn loose from its foundation.
Thor Masterson came up from his chair, brown eyes staring. His flannel
shirt opened to disclose tanned chest and thick neck. He saw the
purple light, but he did not think of it as a pathway between worlds.
He felt the tilting of the house, but he did not think of it as riding
down the cosmic corridor through which it was being transported.
The mansion rocked and turned slowly. If Thor could have had time, he
might have tried to reason, but there was no time--
A woman stood in the center of the rug, a woman with long yellow hair
and gauze trousers and jeweled girdle. A dwarf-man with a big club
leaped for her, snarling. The woman whirled, a slim dagger glittering
in her right hand.
Thor Masterson came alive. He drove forward. His big right fist,
scarred with battles in Oregon lumber camps and wise to the ways of
axes and bounding footballs and enemy jaws, swept up in a short arc.
The dwarf-man seemed to leap backward. He fell against an antique
secretary, splintering wood. Slumping toward the floor, he lay still.
The girl screamed.
Again the mansion was rocking and tilting, lifting and falling. A chair
skidded into a corner, and a heavy picture dropped with a shattering of
glass and frame.
Thor Masterson thought of hurricanes and cyclones and tidal waves. He
held the girl against him, looking into her frightened violet eyes.
"Easy does it. Just take it easy. Relax. It's like skiing. If you're
not stiff, you won't get broken bones."
The violet eyes told Thor that she hadn't the slightest conception
of what he said, but his tones made her generous red mouth yield a
tremulous smile. She relaxed and lay against him.
* * * * *
Thor stared out the window. There should be the elms of the Midwestern
campus out there, but all he could see were pale purple mists. Thor
went toward the window and peered out. Midwestern University, where
Thor had come from lumber camp and battlefield, ought to be showing its
greystone buildings soon. But the more Thor stared into the lavender
mists, the colder became his heart.
Because, as the clouds shifted to reveal darker spaces, Thor could see
stars glittering in the blackness. He thought, _Something has lifted
the house right off the campus. Something has us in its grip. We're
being taken away from the Earth--taken out in space._ For he knew from
the star formations that he could see momentarily, that something was
moving him and the house swiftly across the void.
The house bumped, pitching at a gentle angle. The floor was like the
deck of a ship caught in the trough of a wave. Thor rolled with it,
legs straddled.
The front door cracked open as the house settled onto something solid.
The purple mists began to flee before the pale yellow light streaming
through the door and window.
Thor walked with the girl to the doorway and stood on the cracked sill,
looking out. _I'm delirious_, he thought. _I've read some fantastic
tale and gotten drunk, and this is the result. What I'm looking at is
the chaos of a surrealist nightmare._
Sprawling grey rock humped itself into impossible contortions under the
warmth of a great yellow sun. Where the rock disappeared, red grass
swayed its blades. Low mists hung in the distance.
The girl whimpered. She whispered in a language that made Thor think of
jewels in a tumbling spring, clicking and clacking. He grinned down at
her.
"Don't ask me, sweet stuff," he said. "Offhand I'd say that Dali had
us in one of his landscapes. And you wouldn't know about him. But as
far as any explanation of where we are or what happened, I'm up a
tree. Still, I rather imagine that something went wrong with the space
coordinates."
He went on dreamily, "We don't know an awful lot about space. Maybe
it moves along with the rest of the expanding universe, and maybe it
doesn't. But if a certain segment of space was addicted to going off on
a tangent--away from its usual sphere--it could conceivably snatch up
whatever was in its path, and sort of kidnap it. Get it, sweet stuff?"
Like a woman, she ignored everything but the one thing. Seriously she
repeated, "Sweet stoff. Sweet stoff."
Thor laughed, "That's you." He touched her with his finger. She shook
her head vigorously, making the yellow hair fly out fanwise.
"Karola, Karola," she said insistently.
"Karola. Okay. I'm Thor."
The violet eyes were sliding over him, taking in his big frame and
long legs. Thor flushed a little, reading the frank admiration in her
eyes. Felling logs and playing an all-Conference grade of tackle on the
football team had built up an already good physique. But the years of
logging and football and fighting had left little time for women. And
Karola was a woman among women.
She laughed at him, and said something.
"We'd better take a look around," he said, carefully looking over her
golden head.
* * * * *
He was staring at grey rock as he spoke. Above it a shape took form out
of empty air. It was a man, standing and staring at them. It was as
though he had slid sideways out of another dimension. The man watched
them with unblinking eyes. He fumbled at a red jewel that hung on a
chain at his chest.
An instant later, the man was gone.
"A swell place this is, where a man appears and disappears right in
front of you," he said disgustedly. "If they can come and go when and
where they please, what chance have we?"
Riotous ideas of invisible men swarming about him and overcoming him
capered through his brain. Unconsciously he tensed, preparing for
trouble. But nothing happened. Slowly he relaxed.
"Guess they aren't coming at us, after all. He was just a look-out."
The girl was talking that queerly jewel-talk of hers.
He cut in with, "Sweet stuff, you and I are going to understand each
other if we're staying together. And since I like the idea of having
you around--and since I've a hunch we'll never get back to where we
came from, we might as well begin right now."
Thor pointed to things and sang out his words for them. The girl
listened, head to one side, nodding. She repeated after him, syllable
after syllable. They wandered across the grey rock, the man bulking big
alongside the woman. Thor knew it would take time, but the girl was
eager. Her violet eyes flickered swiftly after his pointing finger and
her mouth readily formed the words.
Suddenly Karola gasped and caught his arm with a hand that dug long
nails into his flesh. "Slag!" she cried, and flung up a white arm.
Thor saw the house tilted across lava-like rocks. It looked distorted
without the elms around it, and the background of grey stone university
buildings. The mansard roof was buckled in spots as though under the
sledge of a mad giant. Windows gapped without panes of glass, and rungs
in split porch railings stuck up like broken teeth. But the dwarf-man
leaping from the open doorway was what brought him to his feet.
The girl jabbered in alarm, but Thor grinned and waited. Not for
nothing had he been born and raised in a lumber camp. He had fought men
with fists and axe-handles. The club was just another axe-handle to
him, a little heavier and metal-shod, but as easily eluded.
The dwarf-man halted and looked at them. He called out to the girl.
Thor saw that his words calmed her, even as she showed surprise.
The dwarf-man threw the club away and knelt.
Karola frowned and tossed her long yellow hair back over her head. Thor
saw she was struggling for words, that she wanted to tell him good
news. He fancied that the dwarf-man was trying to make friends.
"That's all right with me," he chuckled, and went and held out his
hand. After a moment of scrutiny, the dwarf-man took it.
"Slag," said Karola, touching the dwarf.
Thor studied him, seeing tremendous shoulders and, hanging from them,
long arms that were heavy with red hair. Matted red locks fell to
either side of bright blue eyes in a grotesquely ugly face where big
nose and broad lips gave him the look of a cheery gnome. A leathern
girdle was twisted around his waist. Short legs, thick with muscles,
were slightly bowed.
"I'm Thor, Slag. We'll get along, you and I. But no more fighting with
Karola."
The dwarf-man grunted and slapped his stomach. His gesture reminded
Thor that he was hungry himself.
They walked over the barren rock. In the distance Thor could see where
the stone fell away and the earth began. He began to trot. Those red
grasses might lure animals to feed. And thinking of steaks cooked over
an outdoors fire brought saliva to his lips.
For three hours they stalked through the red grass. And then, around a
black outcropping of basalt, Thor sighted two small deer.
Slag started to run, but Thor caught him by the arm.
"The club, man. Give it to me."
Reluctantly, Slag loosened his grip. Thor glanced at the club, hefting
it. It was heavy, but balanced perfectly. Often, in the Oregon camps,
Thor had thrown axes at a mark, axes less perfectly balanced than this
club.
He took off his shoes. In socked feet he crept nearer the deer. Thor
was glad the wind was blowing away from the animals and into his face.
Otherwise....
The club swung easily in his hand. He moved it faster, around and up.
Then he flung it, shoulder and body behind the toss. Sunlight glinted
from the red metal embedded in the clubhead.
The club thudded home on the temple of the nearer deer. The animal went
over sidewise and lay still.
Slag gave a great cry of amazement. Looking down at them from his black
pedestal, Thor felt a kinship toward the dwarf. He liked him. It had
never entered Slag's head to throw his club. The blue eyes worshipped
Thor, looking up at him. They made him feel good.
And the violet eyes. Thor looked down into them and liked what he
saw. His hands felt the need of losing themselves in that thick tawny
hair that flooded the girl's white shoulders. And that red mouth that
spilled the jewel-sounds so easily was ripe for kisses.
Slag ran ahead toward the deer, but Karola waited for him as he leaped
from the basalt rock. Her hand nestled in his, and her violet eyes
flirted with him. Thor grinned and stepped along beside her toward his
kill. What did it matter if he was somewhere undreamed of? What matter
that they were worlds apart? He was a man with a woman, a man who had
killed his first food. His chest rose with added power, and the muscles
tingled in legs and arms.
Slag tore the deer apart with powerful hands, and Thor roasted the
sweet flesh over a fire of dried twigs. As they ate, the giant sun sank
low on the distant horizon. Strange stars came to life in an azure sky,
twinkling and throbbing. They were queerly distorted, Thor noticed. In
his astronomy classes, he had picked up a smattering of star clusters
and formations, but these he saw now, from the little hill where the
fire flared, were peculiarly distorted.
"Almost as though I were looking at them through rippled glass," he
said.
Under the shadow of a scooped-out rock, they slept, huddled together
for warmth.
* * * * *
For many days the three wandered across the red grasslands of the
strange planet. Always they found an unbroken strata of rock crust
interlayered with lush lawnland. Occasionally a herd of tiny deer swept
by, and from these they made their meals.
Thor grew hard and tanned with the wild life. The muscles that had seen
him through lumber camp and football field waxed even stronger. His
clothes wore to thinness, and shredded in places. Slowly he learned the
jewel-language, and in turn Karola grew familiar with his tongue.
He taught Slag to hurl his club, and wrestled with him when he felt the
need of violent exercise. The dwarf-man worshipped him, but he entered
into their games with feigned rage.
Karola told him something of her past. She was priestess of Klogor on a
small planet that swung around a sun invisible from Earth. Her temple
had been raided by the dwarf-men, and as she and Slag struggled before
an altar, something had come and snatched them up, and whirled them
around and around.
"Klogor is our god," said the girl. "I called on him, but he did not
hear. I was bred into his service, but he failed me in my need."
Slag rumbled, "This is my god," and shook his big club.
"You may need it," said Thor dryly. "Look!"
They were sitting on the edge of a rock, baking in the hot sun. Below
them spread the red meadows, rolling in even swells across a valley
toward jagged rocks that rose high into the pale sky. In the middle of
the meadow, ankle-high in the grass, three men were standing.