The Earth Lords

by Gordon R. Dickson

  When he got older he gradually became aware how unusual this ability was, not only in himself but in his father; but he owned it nonetheless by that time and learned to follow his father’s example of not drawing the attention of others unduly to it.

  But now, here in the mine, it was a lifesaver. He searched through his mental library for anything that might amuse and instruct him; and so, even as he worked, or lay in the damp, odiferous darkness of the sleeping platform, he was able to put his surroundings away from him while he reread the books in his memory—both for mental relief from those surroundings, and for anything that might help him get away from them.

  It paid off. Knowledge, he knew, was power; and from the beginning he set up systems to collect information about his situation.

  All knowledge was potentially useful. It did not matter if an immediate use for it was not visible at the time the knowledge presented itself. It could still be learned and stored against the moment when it would become useful—as his training in the use of accents had been momentarily useful with Morrison, even though it had not kept him from ending up here.

  Consequently, from the first day he had been taken out to work, he had estimated the length of step that the chain permitted him. He had counted the distances, the turns, the climbings and descendings of each trip; and in the succeeding days put them all together in a map that was constantly growing in his mind.

  For days at a time they would be taken from their dormitory to work in only one part of the mine. But eventually, they would be shifted to some other place, when the vein of gold ore they drilled for, blasted for, and collected after blasting, had run out. On the way to each different destination they passed other tunnel mouths. At rare times they had glimpses of larger, lit caverns, blasted out of the solid rock. All of these places and the routes to and from them had been stored away on the map building in Bart’s mind.

  “This way . . .”

  It was the voice of Gregory, their guard and leader, also the man who actually handled the explosives. The explosives were packed into the holes they drilled, to set off explosions that loosened the ore they then gathered; and which they then put in the small, high-sided metal cars, pulled by the mules, who also worked here in the darkness and dampness. Gregory, up front with a revolver at his belt and a ready rod of polished, three-foot hardwood in one fist, a lantern in the other.

  “Stop!” It was Gregory’s voice, this time unusually subdued, There was the feel of a new draft of air on Bart’s face as utter darkness suddenly descended. Up front, Gregory had suddenly blown out his lantern, and now not even faint glimmers of light were lancing back occasionally between the moving bodies in front of Bart. Bodies which had obediently-stopped.

  “All right, come on now. Pick up your chains.” It was Gregory again, but now speaking in something barely above a whisper. “I don’t want to hear a sound, you understand me? Not a sound!”

  Bart reached down like the others to pick up the length of chain that connected the shackle on the ankle of his right leg with that on the right leg of the man in front of him. As quietly as possible, they moved ahead—and came out into a room so large that the few lamps burning on its far wall were dimmed by distance.

  “We wait here,” Gregory whispered. “There’ll be people coming through. If one of them so much as looks this way because of a noise you’ve made . . .”

  Bart moved, as silently as possible, out sideways, half a step from behind the man in front of him, to get a better view. He was aided by the fact that the tunnel they had just emerged from had now entered this larger cavern at an angle, so that they now stood almost in echelon, able to look clearly across at the other side where the far lights burned like yellow glowworms, at distances Bart estimated to be about thirty feet apart. The walls of the roughly circular chamber in which they now stood ran clear to his left, without an opening until it came to an entrance against the lighted far wall, wide enough for three people to walk through side by side and obviously the opening of the main tunnel leading forward to the front entrance of the mine. But to his right an undulation outward of the rock wall hid the continuance of the main tunnel deeper into the mine.

  Their work gang had been in the process, Bart knew from his mental map, of being taken to a new workplace. They had crossed this particular large cavern before, he was sure, but always it had been simply a vast dark space, with no lights on the other side to show it to their eyes—the light they ordinarily traveled in was too weak to illuminate such a space.

  Now there were lighted lamps, stationed at intervals along the far wall, and Bart could see the length of that wall and a blackness that must be a tunnel opening, off at the left end of the wall. It was unusual for so much light to be anywhere in these tunnels, he knew, even though it was still not enough light to illuminate the work party that crouched at the other side of the chamber. It must be that something was about to happen.

  They waited in silence, and Bart pondered. He suspected that Gregory—who answered to bosses of his own—had made some mistake, such as misjudging the time, so that they were here when they should not be. Which would mean Gregory’s retaliation for any noise that would betray their presence would be even more savage than his usual wont—and in the past months, Bart had seen men die under that polished wooden club.

  He tried to think what could be happening, that shackled slaves like themselves should not be allowed to have sight of. He came up with the notion that someone important might be passing through the mine—although he could not for the life of him imagine who such people might be, or why they might be there. He, himself, had never lost hope of getting out of here, someday; but he knew that most of his fellow prisoners had long given up hope and that their overseers had no real fear of anyone escaping. Even if one of them could get loose from the chain or slip off without being seen at some time when they were off the chain, whoever did so would get lost in the lightless tunnels; and even if by some miracle such an escapee found his way to the front of the mine, he would still have to pass a sort of guard post that Bart had been told of, up where the mine opened to the surface.

  He remembered no such guardhouse himself because he had been unconscious when he had been brought in. But the other men had talked of it. The thought of it did not stop him. Just as he was slowly putting together a knowledge of the pattern of the tunnels in his mind, so he would work out ways of getting past whatever guards might bar his way at the mine entrance. There might be more than one and they might be armed; but they would also be complacent about the inability of any one of their charges trying to escape. They would be unsuspecting when he finally came to them; and all he needed was to get his hands on the revolver of one guard to get past them all.

  Happily, the one thing their captors did for them was feed them as much as they could eat. The food was mainly vegetables in a sort of meat gravy. But in spite of the fact that the food was plentiful, he had felt a weakness growing on him, and he knew he had been losing weight. He would have to make his escape soon. There was no such thing as medical attention for the slaves. Their guards’ one cure for any hurt or illness was rest. And with that rest the slave either recovered or died.

  The man with the swollen leg—Hatfield, his name was, Bart remembered—had died three days after Bart had first been brought in. The rock that had broken his leg had also gotten dirt into the wound, and the leg had been already gangrenous by the time Bart was made to lie down and be chained up alongside him on the community plank bed.

  But before he died, Hatfield had told Bart some things. One of them had been a description of the guardhouse, because Hatfield had been brought in on his feet, at gunpoint. Another—

  Bart’s thoughts were interrupted by the first sounds that signaled someone was either approaching the large chamber they were in, or passing by it in one of the tunnels connected to it. The echoes in this underground labyrinth reflected sounds around in all directions, so much so that under certain conditions you could swear someone was co
ming toward you, when actually they were going away from you.

  But, in this case, it became clear shortly that the sounds were not only coming toward them but coming directly and relatively rapidly. For a moment, Bart puzzled over that rapidity, then realized that he was not hearing the customary sound of feet marching in unison and the sound of chains being dragged.

  Whoever approached was not bound with iron like Bart and his fellows.

  What he was hearing was only the clump and shuffle of boots, and occasionally the sound of voices, distorted by echoes to incomprehensibility. Even as he thought that, the first of those he was hearing stepped into view from the tunnel entrance under the lamps to his left—the tunnel evidently came in at an angle that had prevented him from seeing lights approaching down its length.

  The figure he saw was one he knew—though he had not seen the man since his first day at the mine. It was Sorley. He wore his revolver in its holster as usual; but his stick was not in his hand. It was hung on his belt at one side.

  A second figure came into view behind Sorley; and—wonder of wonders, Bart knew this one, too. Not only did Bart know him, but the man who followed the leader of the mine guards was almost the last person Bart had expected to see down here, walking freely and apparently willingly to some destination along the lighted section.

  It was Arthur Robeson.

  The rumor, then, about which Bart had asked Emma had been true. For before he died, one of the things Hatfield had told Bart had been that the people running the mine were Scottites. The gold they mined was for the purpose of mounting an armed Scottite revolution that would overthrow the present Canadian government in eastern Canada. That was why they could not operate the mine with ordinary hired miners. They must get out the gold in secrecy, refine it in secrecy, and sell it secretly, exchanging it for the supplies they would need or the allies who could be bought.

  So Arthur was one of them, after all. Not only that, but if the rumor about him had been true in this, it was probably true all the way and he had been one of them from before the time Bart, his father, and Louis Riel had gone down over the border into the States. And probably Arthur had knowingly connived in luring Bart to Shunthead and captivity, then.

  Bart watched Arthur now, walking past in the lighted distance. From Arthur’s viewpoint, the place Bart stood with his co-workers would be seen only as black darkness. Arthur strode freely and lightly, as a man does who wears no leg-irons and no chains; and the trousers, shirt, boots and jacket he wore were clean and unworn.

  Following Arthur came several more guards carrying lanterns, mixed with people Bart did not know, but obviously free and dressed as if they had just come from the surface..Then, without warning, there emerged into his line of sight a figure that checked his breathing.

  It was apparently the figure of a younger man or a boy; but even at this distance, in this light, Bart was not to be fooled. It was Emma.

  She was dressed in men’s clothing, with her hair either cut off or done up high on her head. In either case, it was hidden by a man’s cap she wore.

  Arthur, he had not been too shocked to see, now that he thought of it. But Emma—he could not believe it. She could not be one of the Scottites. She could not have lied to him about her brother. It was not in her. He had never known her to lie to anyone in her life.

  But there she was; and there she passed, cut off from view suddenly by the outcurving of the rock wall to Bart’s right. Within seconds the rest of the party had also disappeared.

  They were gone; and the momentary glimpse of a life beyond the mine that they had brought for a moment into it was gone.

  “Move now!” came the hoarse whisper of Gregory. “But keep it quiet. Pick up those chains and don’t let them clank. You know what’ll happen to any of you who makes a noise!”

  They moved off, Bart’s mind full of the brief image of Emma. Through the long hours of work that followed, he carried it like a private picture in his memory. Through the same hours, also, his mind was busy, fitting what he had just seen and what it might mean, into his already accumulated information about the mine and its operators. He was still studying its possible meanings when they at last stepped back into their sleeping chamber, left in darkness for the eleven or so hours before they would be wakened to another time of work.

  He lay waiting for the few muttered conversations to cease, and for his chain-mates, particularly those who lay on either side of him, to fall asleep. At last, he was sure that those two in particular slept, and that it was likely most of the others did also.

  He sat up silently in the utter darkness, reached down to his right ankle and felt with careful fingers for the staple through which passed the chain that bound him together with the others on this bed.

  The fingers of both hands found the staple; and in the lightlessness, Bart smiled. Last night it had given a bit more to the pressure of his hands.

  The nights of all the time he had been here, he had been working on that staple. It was made of three-eighths-inch diameter iron rod bent into the shape of a loop; and the legs of its open side driven into holes in the iron band of the leg-iron around his right ankle.

  The leg-iron itself was made of three-inch-wide iron bar stock, and the white-hot ends of the staple had been driven through two holes drilled in this metal so that the staple stood at right angles to the flanges of the leg-iron. The staple’s curved end stood two and three-eighths inches out beyond the surface of the leg-iron, and so gave room for the chain to pass through it. The links of the chain were made of seven-sixteenth-inch bar stock and the total chain weighed, at Bart’s estimation,‘two to two and three-quarters pounds per running foot; and since there were about fifty feet of chain, that made for a total of nearly a hundred and fifty pounds of chain holding the sleeping men prisoner.

  Ordinarily, that staple was capable of resisting the strength in any human hands. In fact, for the first months it had seemed to ignore all the pressure even his strength could put on it.

  But sometime after that, he had found it slightly bent to one side.

  One of the things Bart had learned from both his mother and father had been patience. All those first months he had worked on it, not only with fingers, but with the heels of both hands, putting pressure on it to bend to his right. It was not until well into the third month that a rare chance came for him, during working hours, to momentarily direct the glowworm illumination of his caplamp directly on the staple. Then for the first time he had seen confirmation of what his fingers had seemed to feel in the darkness. The staple was now visibly, if only slightly, leaning toward the right.

  That very night, he began to put pressure on it to bend it back toward the left.

  A couple months later, in another stolen moment of illumination when the guard’s attention and that of his chain-mates was elsewhere, Bart had seen the staple now leaning at a slight angle to the left.

  Once more, that same night, he had reversed the pressure be was applying; and in a bit over a month, according to the calendar he kept in his mind, he once again stole a moment and saw the staple leaning to the right.

  He kept the calendar by using a memory method of visualizing what he wanted to remember—another of those tricks his father had taught him. In this case he visualized it as a massively heavy, square board, painted white and upheld at one comer by Morrison, at the other by Sorley, and with the numbers painted inside large black-edged squares in thick red ink, as the work-periods passed.

  So he had continued working, with imperceptible progress at first, and then visible nightly changes, bending the staple first one way, then the other.

  Last night he had been able, with the fingers of both hands, to bend the staple as far as the chain would allow it to go. He had been sure that he was near the point where the fatigued metal would break under his hands. But he had made himself let go of the staple, forcing himself to sleep for the rest of the period allotted them for that purpose. The metal was weakening fast, breaking down under th
e constant flexing, but he did not want it to break until he was ready to try his escape.

  But the sight of Emma, here, had brought a fever to be free upon him. He took hold of the staple again now, and began to bend it once more to the right.

  He could feel it move as he put pressure on it. It bent slowly to his right, and he reversed his efforts. Now it bent to the left. To the right again . . . Again, and again, the time needed less and less each time . . .

  There was a sudden ping that seemed to sound as loud as a revolver shot in his ears, even over the snores of those of his chain-mates who slept noisily.

  He had frozen, instantly, at the sound that had seemed to him to echo through the room. Now he stayed still, holding his breath, waiting for any evidence that the noise had roused any of his fellow workers. But it had not.

  He waited, still without moving, counting the passage of the slow seconds in his mind like a child . . . “un Napoleon, deux Napoleons, trois Napoleons . . .”

  Unmoving, he counted ten minutes that way, counting to one hundred and then keeping track of the hundreds on his fingers. But by the end of that time, still, none of those around him had made any sound or movement to indicate that the sound of the breaking staple had wakened them. He let himself move.

  He felt down around the staple, and found that the left leg of it had snapped, just at the point where it had flexed against the flange of the leg iron. He was able to get his right thumb through the curve of the staple, now, and he flexed the unbroken leg to his right. Once . . . twice, faster and faster—another ping.