Many years ago, in the southern provinces of New Thundera, I met Tygra. He was no ordinary member of his clan after all he was Tygra, Thundercat, of Tygra City. He was Tygra City -- he designed it, he built it, he made it live. In the sandy regions of the lower hemisphere, where the land had failed to settle entirely, where fires and earthquakes might level and destroy ordinary communities and yet in spite of those dangers Tygra City steadily grew streets and avenues into the wilderness. There in the outskirts the two worlds blended seamlessly into one another, there but alas not any more.

Although his mind was divided into dozens of enterprises, not the least of which was rebuilding New Thundera and, of course, his work with in the Thundercat Council, his heart remained in Tygra City, that mushrooming town, the first he had planed on the newly-restored planet. It was his ‘child,’ it was that most intimate expression of himself and he spoke fondly of it.

Tygra was that rare sort of individual imbued with wise judgment, the sort of judgment that great statesmen hold. He cut through the difficulties of life with the full force of his personality, by putting himself into everything he created. It was sheer ability and inexhaustible genius that permeated all that he touched -- the man had power, undeniable power.

I saw him once only and at that for a few minutes but I have never and will never forget him. We came across him on a surveying expedition where the forest melts away into the plains of the low desert. The stature of the tiger was impressive. More than once I caught myself thinking of a mountain or of an elemental force of nature. Juxtaposed in utter, in hysterical paradox was his gentleness. Why, it was the gentleness of a woman.

Our meeting was coincidence, for we were in a region where distances were measured by hours, by days and where the chances of finding anyone else there in that most inhospitable place was next to none. For many days our nightly camps were pitched in spots of ethereal, eternal beauty tinged with a loneliness akin to the vast nothingness of space. On one side vast mountains slopes were smothered with dense forest that hid meadows of soft grass and while on the other side, stretched for more miles than mere mortals could count, ran the desolate alkali plains of grainy desert sand. We were tethered for the night beneath the stars. Two male pumas were cooking dinner. The smell of bacon over a wood fire mingled with the keen and fragrant air -- and suddenly the proximity alarms sounded.

I saw in the shadows a tall, reddish figure black-stripped come out of a sleek vehicle. Two small Thunderians that I immediately recognized were WileyKat and WileyKit unboarded quickly after that -- the two ‘ghosts’ remained respectfully silent in the shadows throughout. The figure searched with its eyes only for a while but at the same time Grune looked up from the frying pan and exclaimed:

"Tygra?" The next words were addressed to his companion -- under his breath but I heard loudly, clearly. "He’s all broken up! Just look at the eyes, the face."

I, too, had noticed it. It was the face of a man tortured, distressed in the throws of extraordinary emotion. Death was behind the eyes, not in them.

We learned that he had been exploring for some time and was headed yet further south, to the very edge of the continent where the ice cap slowly formed. He had just left Tygra City, the apple of his eye. But there was something wrong, there was something wrong with his town. No one had asked him outright, it was strangely evident in his tone of voice and then, just then, he began.

"I’m glad I found you, there’s something wrong with," he stopped for a moment though in disbelief of what he and only he knew from the truth of his own senses, "with Tygra City." The terror of what he must have experienced emerged. The drama was frightening, genuinely grotesque: at once to see him there seated on a log, the glow of dull firelight on his contorted face, then at once to speak something so simple and to transform before us into what I will only say was once a man.

"They heard it, too," Tygra said while he pointed to the twins were seated behind him. "They saw it." He looked up into the black, starry sky -- there was not a cloud, there was not even a fine mist or vapor anywhere. "It’s hard on our trail, it’s still on our trail right now! By Jagga! By Jagga! Will it ever cease!" For a moment, for the way he covered his head with his arms while he spoke I thought that he expected something to drop on us from the air, from the thin air.

The darkness and the void that surrounded our camp seemed then to hide terror in its obscured folds. The winds seemed to whisper incantations to unmask and to unveil, in macabre glory, those horrors that adults spend lifetimes to suppress and to hold down there, down there in the murky depths of the soul.

"Something’s gone wrong with Tygra City." What an ominous statement of disaster! and spoken the way a husband would say: "My wife is dying." He was so sure of it and it was incredible because we all knew that Tygra did not imagine things.

Gloom settled over our lonely camp. Sounds emerged from the trees in the distance. Just the way Tygra was sitting there, watching the sky, peering into that darkness that scoured the desert, why it sent cold shivers throughout my body. My hands felt cold and tingly, my legs were restless -- not to mention the state of my mind. I, for one, was not about to go to bed.

He expected something -- but what? What was following him? Across the wilderness, above in the star-dotted sky, something was "hard on our trail."

In the middle of awkward silences the tiger began to ask questions, nonsense questions, the sorts of questions that simply did not go with a campfire in the exact center of nowhere. He asked me especially since I was human and not Thunderian and knew of other planets, of other worlds that he was curious about. Grune sat up next to me and, in his lowest voice wondered with me about our distinguished guest’s sanity. He told me stories only whispered in New Thundera about Tygra’s ‘adventures’ in Third-Earth, stories I have no desire to recount here any further.

Tygra asked me what I knew, if I knew anything about dying men appearing at a distance to those who loved them. He had read such tales before: "I have heard of them, but are they true or are they only superstition?" I tried to satisfy him as best as I could with some well-documented experiences. Whether he believed them or not I could not say but his swift mind jumped at a flash to the point. "If that stuff is true then it would appear that the dying man has a duplicate of himself -- a spirit that gets loose and active at the time of his death that heads straight for those he loved best."

"Yes, that would seem to be what happens."

He then startled us with a question that made even the pumas drop their jaws. Tygra whispered it while he looked over his shoulder at the face of the night: "Couldn’t it then be possible, since man and Nature are made from the same elements, that places, too, have duplicates that appear, that get loose when they are destroyed?"

I found it exceedingly difficult in that situation to explain that such a theory had been philosophized at least once before and long, long time past to account for the strange and inexplicable visions of scenery people sometimes have. Or more to the point: a city might have a definite ‘personality,’ the integral sum of all of its inhabitants -- moods, feelings, thoughts even but of the multitude. While metaphysical, that ‘personality’ could effect definable and observable changes in a man’s character when he goes from one city to another. There was no time to tell him that for as quickly as he had asked the twins leapt to their feet ready to attack. Tygra himself stood, his face was the color of ash and pale, the perfect expression of death incarnate.

"Tygra City," he cried, "that’s my child! It’s loose, it’s looking for me, the man who made it and loved it better than anything or anyone. By Jagga, by Jagga!" His eyes welled with tears that trickled freely. "It’s dying, it’s dying and I cannot save it!"

He tried to stagger away but I caught his arm. All the sounds of our camp died away, faded away into the night while the darkness crept closer. For a while, for too long a while nothing happened then Tygra turned around and raised his head to the stars though he saw something.

"Hear that?" he whispered to me. "It’s coming, it’s what I've been hearing for two days and two nights. Listen!" He became frantic and animated then stood still, as still as death.

We heard nothing -- my party and me -- we heard nothing at all.

I pointed to Grune and his companion to the horizon above the scattered rows of the trees of the forest. I thin mist was coming down from the sky and with it, growing swiftly nearer, were coming noises that were beyond question the noises of a city rushing through the heavens. The pumas were ready with their weapons but I was overwhelmed that something alive had come upon us from the sky. I felt that a gigantic being had swept against us through the night, destructive and evil -- yet it was not one being but many, many at once. My mind failed me, I could not even observe what was happening clearly. I stared dizzy and bewildered in every direction. At the end even the power of movement failed me -- I stood in place, frozen in terror. The twins, too, stood like stone statues.

The sounds around us grew into a roar. The distant murmur was a Babel of shouting, a tempest of voices calling, crying, shrieking. Cars and vehicles of all variety clamored busy streets along side the screaming of women and children. When it was above us I saw building shake, I saw roads quiver and then the sounds of booming, tumbling, breaking.

The destruction was accompanied by thunder.

Yes, the city -- Tygra City -- fled past us through the sky. How long it lasted it was impossible to say. I watched helplessly a scene of desolating disaster, a scene in which life went overboard wholesale like insects into a blazed fire. Burning, smoking, savage flaming. The next thing I knew it had passed away into tranquility so quickly, so suddenly that it was as if what we had seen had never happened.

I stepped back, I had not moved until then. Grune held me, kept me from going any further. Strangest of all I understood right there why the phantasmic vision had ended so abruptly. The ‘personality’ of the city, set free and loosened in the moment of its death, had returned to him who gave it birth, him who loved it and of whose life it was actually an expression. The ‘being’ of Tygra City was literally nothing more than a ‘projection,’ an ‘emanation’ of its creator and, in death, it had returned to him with an accumulated power that was impossible for even a Thundercat to resist. For years he had provided it with life -- but gradually. It then rushed back to its source concentrated in full, in a single, horrific moment.

"That’s him," I heard someone say. I looked down. I saw the kittens turn over the body. The face was calm but that was all. The body from the neck down had exploded and had emptied the corpse entirely of its internal structures. The organs had spewed into the air in a dense cloud and burnt to cinders in a matter of seconds to spread all over the campgrounds in a soft ash.

We carried the mangled remains to the nearest settlement almost a thousand miles away to the east. There we got the news that Tygra City had been wiped out by fire and earthquake exactly two days and two nights before. The loss of life was in the tens of thousands. Even now, years and years past, I can still hear that doomed town, crying, screaming, rushing headlong through the sky.