"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.
[Illustration: _He sought to turn and flee._]
"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."