VASSALS OF THE LODE-STAR By Gardner F. Fox 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."