The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “He came through the Fire Zone recently,” Tal nodded. “From some isolated cave beyond. He is not quite—” Tal stopped but the innuendo was plain.

  “We are not playing a game here, dark man,” the commander said, as if to a child. “We are fighting.”

  Paige groaned aloud. Anger surged in his veins.

  “You idiot!” he yelled in English. “Go ahead and murder your troops. I don’t care!” He bit his lip, gripping himself. Once more, desperately, he tried to explain the flanking movement.

  “Evan Paige, you must stop,” interposed Tal, glancing apologetically at his superior officer. “You are trying to tell us our business. Now come with me to the rear lines.”

  Paige flung his hand off with almost a snarl, and kept on speaking. Two other officers had come up, listening. Sudden fire seemed to strike in their minds. The military men looked at one another, and then at Paige.

  “Perhaps it is worth a try!” mused the commander.

  “Sir, it would be a mistake,” Tal deprecated. “My poor friend’s mind thinks up all sorts of queer ideas.”

  Paige glared at the young albino. There was something strange in his attitude. Had Reena perhaps told him of Paige’s kiss, and thus stirred his jealousy? Or was it something deeper, more vital?

  The commander hesitated, trying to make up his mind.

  “You have nothing to lose,” Paige stated flatly.

  “By the head of Luth, no!” the commander exclaimed. “We will try this so-called flanking, dark man. If it fails, we will all die anyway.”

  Paige himself led the men. Single file, a thousand Dorthians crept warily along the left wall, where numerous overhangs and outjuttings cast shadows. An hour later they were lined in two close phalanxes, one kneeling, one standing, as Paige ordered.

  Paige waited tensely. They were barely in time. There was a sudden ominous hush from the enemy. Then they came, in Hun-like tides, charging across the space. Paige held buck the signal to fire till the last moment.

  Then his arm flung down.

  A withering crossfire burst from his troops, into the side ranks of the unsuspecting enemy. It was slaughter. The Uldornians pressed forward against the fire from front and side, by sheer momentum. But when Paige gave the order to charge, pressing them into a disorganized mass from his side, they broke. In a half hour the battlefield was clear, except for the dead. The Uldornians had lost heavily. And they hadn’t gained an inch.

  The Dorthian commander, facing Paige again, saluted. “You are hereby appointed my second-in-command!” he said directly. “That was a magnificent maneuver!”

  All the officers murmured agreement. But Paige noted that Tal Rithor’s face was expressionless. He did not show resentment, for being displaced. There was a queer, indefinable air about him, of cold watchfulness.

  The commander’s face fell into worried lines, the next moment. “But it will still go hard with us. The Uldornians are here in full force. They will attack again and again.”

  And they did.

  HOURS flew by. Hours of humming death, dying men, grim struggle for mastery. Paige used all the tricks he knew from Earth’s battlefields: double flanking, sniping, fake counter-attacks, anything and everything to harass the enemy. They might ordinarily have won hours before. Instead, now, the chances were better than even that the Dorthians could hold out till adequate reinforcements came.

  But the enemy prepared for a final gigantic assault. Dorthian lookouts made out the massing of all their troops, behind their lines. Conferring with the officers on this, Paige outlined a daring maneuver. It would be a triple flanking movement. Two thousand men were to slip past the Uldornian left flank, when they charged, and come up from the rear! The enemy, still amazed and baffled at the flanking that robbed them of quick victory, would hardly conceive of attack on their rear.

  Paige and Tal Rithor led the men. They reached their position and waited. Heart pounding, Paige looked for the enemy to appear. And then, suddenly, he was aware that Tal was gone!

  There was little time to think that over, or look for him.

  The grand attack came, like a juggernaut, wave after wave of men.

  While the left flank engaged the van of the attack, Paige waved his men past. A thousand went down, under fire, but the other thousand straggled through, reformed, and swung in a wide circle, to fall on the Uldornian rear.

  Just as Paige was congratulating himself on success, it happened.

  Five thousand yelling, vengeful Uldornians leaped from a concealed vantage, as though waiting for them. They fell on the Dorthian force devastatingly. The Dorthians could not retreat. Paige cursed as his men were decimated on all sides. This shattered the whole Dorthian plan. Uldornian victory was assured.

  As though waiting for them!

  This phrase had stuck in Paige’s mind, all the while that he fought hopelessly, firing from one knee. The Uldornian detachment had been waiting. How had they divined a strategy they knew nothing about?

  There was one possible answer, though Paige hated to think of it—the disappearance of Tal Rithor!

  But nothing mattered any more.

  Paige was marked for death. He felt as he had that day against the Martians, with the regiment doomed. Here he could not even run, with limiting walls on every side. He could only keep firing, accounting for as many of the enemy as possible, before the shot with his number on it arrived.

  He glanced around. Not one of his men was alive, for yards around. He was marooned in an island of dead bodies.

  Up ahead, a body of blue-uniformed men came surging toward him. He fired into their massed numbers, taking savage delight in seeing three men go down like tenpins. Then they spread. The men at both extremes kneeled, taking careful aim at him. Paige got one, but knew he couldn’t get the other.

  He heard the vicious hiss of a bolt and felt a jerk as the gun in his hands took the shot. He was unarmed now! Then he noticed the men running up without firing. They were going to capture him alive! A moment later they gripped his arms and were hustling him back to their lines, out of the battle zone.

  Paige turned back to look. Far across the battlefield strewn with bodies he could see the waves of blue-uniformed Uldornians sweeping past the tube-station and into the city proper. The fight was practically over. The city had fallen.

  When Paige turned his eyes back, he looked directly into the face of Tal Rithor, smiling triumphantly. He had come up from the enemy camp.

  “Renegade!” snarled Paige.

  “Call it what you want,” Tal replied. “The fall of this city was planned, with my aid, weeks ago.” His smile became threatening. “I think King Luth will be interested in seeing the man who caused so many of his troops to be killed needlessly. I told them to take you alive.”

  VII

  HOURS later, rough hands woke Paige from the sleep of utter exhaustion he had fallen into. He was still chained before the enemy headquarters, where they had herded him after the defeat. But now he was not alone. Dozens of Dorthian men were chained nearby, obviously high officials of the fallen city, now prisoners of war. They sat dejected, silent, bitter.

  Paige suddenly sprang to his feet and strained at his bonds. The door of the temporary barracks had opened and Reena Meloth stood framed in it! Behind her came Tal, holding her arm. Seeing Paige, she struggled as though to run to him, but Tal held her firmly.

  “No. You will never have each other!” Tal grated. “After we rescued Evan Paige from the Fire Zone, your attitude toward me changed, Reena. This is my revenge. You must take me or—” He waved around at the Uldornian soldiers suggestively.

  “Snake!” ground out Paige, wrenching futilely at his chains.

  Reena’s eyes met his. Paige thrilled, for in them he saw a glowing light meant for him. Tal, proving himself a renegade to their people, was no longer between them. The swift reversal of relationship left Paige almost giddy with joy, for a moment.

  Only for a moment. Then crushing realization swept over him. He ha
d gained that and lost everything else. A prisoner of the Uldornians, separated from Aronson and Sparky, perhaps for the duration of war. Fool! He had recklessly thrown aside his mission to save upper Earth. What could he do now?

  Paige groaned from the bottom of his soul. Sparky was right. They should never have left the upper world, to embark on this mad adventure. At least, before the Martians, they would have had an honorable death.

  His tortured thoughts were interrupted as a murmur of excitement rose among the Uldornians. All eyes turned.

  From the tunnel passageway that crossed the former “border” of Dorthia and Uldorn came a procession. The enemy king, a short albino man with a long blond mustache, strode at the head of resplendently uniformed troops who marched with strutting legs. A cheer rose from the Uldornians as their king paused at the border-marking, gestured disdainfully, and stepped into Dorthian “territory.”

  Paige watched wonderingly.

  How like a re-enactment of similar scenes on Earth it was I Before the Martians had come, a dictator in Europe had thus stepped triumphantly into captured territory. Nothing new under the sun, or under Earth’s crust itself!

  All the Uldornian army had gathered to watch this momentous occasion. They cheered and raised their arms in salute as Kink Luth of Uldorn stepped onto a stone dais erected for him.

  “I take over this liberated city, in the name of Uldorn!” he spoke. His voice held emotional overtones that quivered through the giant cavern.

  “My praises to my valiant army, for their splendid efficiency. This marks our first step in the conquest of the degenerate Dorthian state. Our victorious, invincible forces will sweep onward. In capturing this tube-station, we have access to dozen of other city-caverns, which will be taken under our beneficent wing. Soon our army will be hammering at the very heart of the enemy region. Dorthia will be ours and we will rule the universe!”

  Rule the universe I He had used a word that translated that way to Paige, and Paige grinned mirthlessly. Little did King Luth realize that his rock-bound “universe” lay under another world!

  The speech went on, in similar vein. Paige could have written the words for him. Upper world dictators had preceded him. The high-pitched tones worked the crowd into an emotional frenzy. The army would go on in its conquest with renewed faith in their “cause,” whatever nebulous thing it was. Paige didn’t know enough of their language to get that clear, but he knew it wasn’t important. He’d heard something like it before.

  Paige’s mind reviewed its own thoughts. Bitterly he hated King Luth and his program of conquest. If it weren’t for that, the Dorthians might have listened to him and investigated, his story of upper Earth holocaust. As it was, the underworld people would be engaged in this struggle for mastery of the “universe” for years. If ever they did penetrate to the upper world, it would be only to find an alien race of monsters firmly entrenched.

  Paige groaned mentally to himself again. Up above, the human race wiped out. Below, the human race under the control of a dictatorial regime. Cruel fate had dealt a double blow to the race of creatures who had struggled up so agonizingly from the ape.

  AN hour later, his official speech-making over, King Luth looked over his Dorthian prisoners, contemptuously sentencing them to death. Finally he stopped before Paige and Reena.

  Tal saluted him.

  “Ah, yes, Tal Rithor,” nodded the king. “I have been told. For your part in our victory, I hereby appoint you governor of this city!”

  Tal beamed, looking at Paige and Reena. They turned their eyes away in loathing. For this he had sold himself to the enemy. With a malicious grin, Tal pointed to Paige.

  “This is the dark man, sire, who was also mentioned to you.”

  The King of Uldorn turned his pale eyes balefully on Paige.

  “Then you are the one, dark man, who so organized the Dorthians that they held out for senseless hours? It was an added cost to us of thousands of brave soldiers!”

  His glare changed to thoughtfulness. “You must be a military genius. Are you a Dorthian? You have a remarkably dark skin. It does not matter, however. I will offer you leniency. If you reveal to us your strange new method of warfare, you will be absolved from blame for what happened before!”

  Paige straightened his shoulders and shook his head firmly. “I am not a Dorthian. But neither will I lift one finger to help you!”

  The king’s face darkened. “Then I sentence you to banishment above the Fire Zone, in the Heavy Region! You will wander there for days, lost, and finally die of madness!”

  Paige’s heart leaped. Banishment above the Fire Zone! That way led to the upper world! Perhaps, winning his way up again, he might still do something about his mission; try again to have an Earth expedition come down.

  He hastily wiped a faint smile of satisfaction from his face and tried to look properly dismayed.

  Tal Rithor had been watching him narrowly.

  “No, sire!” he interposed quickly. “This dark man came from a cave above the Fire Zone!”

  King Luth looked astonished. “Go on!” he commanded.

  Tal told the story of Paige’s rescue from the lava flows, and also the arrival of Dr. Aronson, months before.

  “Thus these three dark men have come down from some city-cavern above the Fire Zone,” Tal concluded. “I have listened to their stories closely. They describe their cavern in such terms that it must be the largest in existence! Furthermore—”

  He paused and went on tensely. “I have surmised that their cavern may be the key to a quick conquest of Dorthia!”

  King Luth started, no less than Paige and Reena.

  Tal went on slowly.

  “They speak of their cavern being above both Dorthia and Uldorn. If there is a way down to Dorthia, there must be one to Uldorn. If their story is true, that their cavern is a huge one, it must also lie above other sections of Dorthia. Perhaps other passages lead to Dorthian caverns, or can be quickly blasted out. The Uldornian forces could then attack Dorthia in a totally unexpected quarter!”

  Paige gasped.

  The whole thing was ridiculous, nonsensical. To carry out any such plan as Tal’s, an army of Uldornians would have to march way across Earth, searching all other natural caves like Mammoth for possible entrances to the underworld caverns. Dr. Aronson himself suspected that Carlsbad, Yellowstone, and many natural caves in out-of-way places had access to the underworld, if once they were meticulously searched for.

  But it remained that Tal had no conception of the hugeness of the outside world. Obviously, he thought of it simply as a large “cave,” extending perhaps a few dozen miles.

  “Is this true, dark man?” demanded King Luth.

  “Of course not!” scoffed Paige. “It is true that I came from a world above both Dorthia and Uldorn, but you would never find other passages to attack Dorthia.”

  Tal and King Luth exchanged glances.

  The king smiled a slow, knowing smile. “So! Now I am sure there must be such a passage, else you would not be so quick to deny it! You are a bad actor, dark man. You refused to help me before, earning death. I give you another chance. Show us the way to your cavern, and to one other passage to Dorthia, and you will be spared!”

  Paige laughed aloud.

  “I couldn’t if I wanted to!” he retorted. “I could lead an army of yours up there, all right. But it would walk its legs off trying to find another natural cave for a way down. I’d have to walk it from Kentucky to New Mexico, to the Carlsbad Cavern, as a possibility. That’s only about two thousand miles—half-way across all Dorthia! No, King Luth, I can’t help you in that, even assuming I wanted to!”

  Again Tal and the king exchanged glances.

  “He seeks to confuse us,” observed Tal. “He is trying to cover up the fact that his cavern is the way to quick conquest of Dorthia!”

  “You fools!” snapped Paige, humor leaving him. “When I tell you the truth, you don’t believe it. If you’d only believe my story as it is—
but, of course, you won’t, any more than the Kal of Dorthia. What’s more, if your army went up there, it would run smack into the Martian forces.”

  Paige stopped, choking. He staggered mentally. They weren’t the fools—he was! He didn’t speak for a minute, his mind churning.

  King Luth, watching him, waved a hand. “You still refuse. Therefore, you must die.”

  “Wait!” Paige took a deep breath. He was trembling. Sweat beaded his forehead. “I don’t want to die!” There was a whine in his voice.

  The king smiled triumphantly at Tal. “He has broken down!” To Paige he said: “Will you show us the way to your cavern world, then?”

  Paige nodded, haggardly.

  REENA, who had listened silently all the while, darted him a strange, shocked glance. Her eyes seemed to plead with him, but Paige looked away. Then her lips curled. Deliberately, she shrank away from him, with an expression of loathing.

  “Reena!” Paige stammered. “Reena, please! After all, it’s my life. What can I do?”

  To himself Paige was saying: “Make this good! Don’t overplay your hand, but make it good!”

  Out of the corner of his eyes he watched Tal. Somewhat suspicious of the abrupt breakdown on Paige’s part, Tal now grinned in satisfaction. It pleased him that Reena showed the same contempt for Paige that she had shown for Tal.

  Paige turned away from the stony-faced girl, hoping he wasn’t making too melodramatic an air out of it “Listen, then. Here’s how it must be done. My people are numerous, in our cavern above the Fire Zone. We have armed forces, too. It will be best for you to send a large force along with me, to reach another cave-entrance to Dorthia.” King Luth looked perturbed. “You have armed forces? Then perhaps it would gain us little.”

  Paige called forth all the histrionic powers at his command. He looked as relieved as he could.

  “Yes!” he hastened to assure. “You would have to fight my people first. It might gain you nothing. I speak the truth. I want to save my life. I will take your first offer, to show you our military tactics.”