The Earth Lords

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Two strong desires tugged at him, pulling him in opposite directions. With all the emotion built up over his time of living and laboring under killing conditions, he yearned to turn back and get out of this mine. But something even stronger pulled him onward, the way Emma had gone, to find her and get her free if she was held in any way.

  He went on, turning his back on the hope of daylight and freedom for a while longer. Guiding himself with the fingertips of his left hand against the main tunnel wall, he followed its pit-dark way in the direction he had seen Emma disappear.

  Out of old habit, he counted his steps as he took them; he had reached six hundred and fifty-one steps when the toes of his right foot, moving forward, struck painfully once more against something vertical and solid.

  He moved up to find out what it was; and it was a solid wall of rock, the tunnel’s end.

  He stood, unable to believe what he had found. And in that moment of stillness, things began to happen.

  It was as if the whole tunnel end around him suddenly tilted downward. The rock wall pulled away, vanishing from before him; and he lost his footing, pitching forward onto an incline whose surface seemed as polished and slick as if it had been greased.

  He slid down the incline, gathering speed swiftly as he went. Without warning he plunged into moving water, shocking in its iciness, water too deep for him to stand up in. He went under and came back up, sputtering, fighting for air and against the current that was whirling him away. His head banged hard against rock, and he was forced under water again. Now there was no longer any air above him. He understood suddenly that the underground stream had entered a stretch where it filled its tunnel completely to the rock roof above it. There was no choice for him. His only hope was to swim forward with the current on the chance that he could reach a point where there was once more air and space above him, before his strength and breath were exhausted. He was a powerful swimmer. He swam now, knowing his life depended on it, coming up every so often to paw at the rock overhead. But each time he failed to find any air space. His senses began to slip away . . . .

  . . . It seemed to be some long time afterward—at least, he was vaguely aware that there had been moments of memory before this present, definite awareness. They had been moments filled either with strange dreams or glimpses of things that made no sense. Of people passing about him as he lay in some sort of bed. Of the bed itself moving, with him in it. Of a huge room holding what seemed to be an enormous tangle of crystal and highly polished metal, and an aperture into which he and his bed slid for a moment before darkness descended again.

  But this time he was not only awake, but aware of being awake—only things were still not right. He lay on his back, still in the bed; but he was filled with a dreamy lassitude so great that to move the smallest part of him was simply too much trouble. It was not, he understood, that he could not move if he wanted to, but that the energy of wanting to was greater than he cared to expend.

  Meanwhile, around him stood three small, thinly bearded figures, not much more than four feet tall, any of them, and all wrapped in togas of white cloth like those worn by ancient Romans in the pictures in the books he had read as a boy. The three were talking to each other in some garbled tongue that he yet somehow understood.

  “. . . how disgusting!” one of them was saying, staring at Bart’s body, which had somehow become dressed in only a pair of dark trousers, “and to think—”

  “We can’t be sure there’s anything to speak of, there,” snapped one of the others, the middle one, young, with glittering eyes and broad shoulders. “What I say is, don’t coddle him. Put him down with the Steeds. If there’s anything worthwhile there, it’ll show up.”

  “Clearly, he was escaping from the mine, when the safety trap at the entrance caught him,” said the third, whose beard was white and who had not spoken before. “That’s an indication of some unusual qualities, surely.”

  “Nonsense!” It was the broad-shouldered one again. “Found himself loose and wandered by chance into the main gallery, I’d say! Oh, by all means, give him the benefit of the doubt, but make him show us there’s something there, first. You can’t argue with that.”

  “I suppose not,” said the third. Bart thought he heard a faint note of regret in the small, piping voice. These before him were not children, he realized without any real interest in the matter. All of their heads bulged unnaturally above the eyebrows, and they were small; but their arms and legs, emerging from the white wrappings of their clothing, were muscled like the limbs of the adults they were—even the arms and legs of the white-bearded one.

  “Well, that’s settled, then?” said the broad-shouldered one.

  He flung his right hand upward with the index finger extended as if he was about to stab Bart with it, and unconsciousness returned.

  When Bart woke the next time he was in what seemed to be a sort of barracks. Two rows of beds faced each other, with the head of each bed against one of the long walls of the rectangular room. Next to each bed was a piece of furniture that seemed to be both nightstand and chest of drawers. The walls and ceiling were of some smooth, white material; but the floor was a maze of tiny red or black tiles no more than an inch square, laid together in a multitude of interlocking geometric patterns that, however, made up no overall shape or picture. There were twenty beds on each side of the room and perhaps a dozen of these held the sleeping figures of men dressed as Bart was, in trousers of one solid color or another, but naked from the waist up. Three others were playing what seemed to be some sort of dice game on the tightly stretched blanket of a made-up bed, and four more were sitting talking in another group farther down the room.

  Like Bart himself, they were all young men, clean-shaven and with hair cut short. The sight of them made Bart suddenly conscious of a coolness about his ears and the lower half of his face. He put his hand up and felt that his own beard was gone and his hair had been cut short.

  He looked again at the men about him. They were massively muscled and looked to be in superb health and training. As Bart watched them, one of the four who was in the group that was talking glanced over and saw him watching them.

  “Ho!” said the man. He was dark-haired and dusky skinned with what Bart would have ordinarily guessed as the features of someone from one of the Algonquian Indian tribes; but he spoke in English and his accent was, if anything, Scandinavian. “He’s awake. One of you go tell Chandt.”

  “You tell him, Ozzard,” said one of the others. “You’re the one who saw he was awake.”

  The one called Ozzard gave the other a long, level look.

  “Someday,” he said.

  “Any time,” said the other. “But you better not waste time telling Chandt, now.”

  Ozzard got up and came down the room, watching Bart. He went past and out a door that was only a few feet from the foot of Bart’s bed. The other three who had been talking went back to their conversation without paying any further attention to Bart. Bart thought of getting up and going over to them. Then he decided to wait for this Chandt, whoever he might be. In unknown situations, his father had said, the first to make a move gives away free information to any possible opponent.

  After only three or four minutes, Ozzard returned, following behind a shorter and slimmer, but an even wider-shouldered man in at least his mid-thirties.

  Like all the rest, he was clean-shaven, shirtless and his trousers were black, upheld by a wide, black leather-looking belt.

  The skin of his face, like that of his upper body, had a yellowish tint to it; and there were heavy Oriental folds above his eyelids that gave his gaze a catlike look. His face as a whole was triangular and ageless, with the only lines being two deep parentheses that curved down from the sides of his nose around the corners of his mouth. His eyes, slitted under the heavy lids, were like the rest of his face—expressionless.

  His upper body was strange. It did not vee-in dramatically to his waist as did those of Ozzard and the other men upright i
n the room. The shorter man’s waist was scarcely narrower than his chest. But at the same time it was the most muscular torso Bart had ever seen. The abnormally broad shoulders sloped downward at a decided angle from a long, corded neck. But the shoulders themselves were minimized by the thickness of the body below them; so that the impression was of an unnatural length of arm, though Chandt’s arms were, Bart saw, actually not out of proportion to the rest of him at all. His legs in their black trousers were slightly bowed.

  Unthinkingly, Bart got to his feet as this man approached; and having done so was astonished to find his muscles responding so smoothly and competently after whatever long time had passed since he had fallen through the end of the main tunnel in the mine. He had unthinkingly been prepared to find himself stiff or weakened, as if from a long illness requiring much time in bed. Either his body had been exercised regularly during the periods when he was unconscious, in some manner he had forgotten, or . . . he could not think of any other way he could have been kept in condition over that period of time, at least a good share of which it would seem that he had been bedridden.

  Not that he was not changed. He could see the thick callosities upon his ankles below the bottom of the trousers, where the leg-irons had been. His arms were shrunken with the weight he had lost in the mine, making the muscles upon them stand out unnaturally. But he was apparently rested and able to move like someone who had never been off his feet except for nighttime rest.

  The shorter man, who must be Chandt, had come to a halt facing Bart; and, this close up, Bart was even more impressed than he had been at first glance over the other. Bart, since he had come into his full growth, had seldom met another man whom he had much doubt he could handle physically, without weapons and hand to hand. But now, for the first time, he looked at someone he had to doubt he could master.

  Chandt, in spite of his relative slimness and shortness, gave an impression of invincibility. Bart, used himself to being underestimated by others, did not make the mistake of underestimating the man he looked at now. Some of that mass in Chandt were unusually thick bones, but the rest was simply muscle, muscle like sculptured stone.

  In this body Chandt moved as lightly as a boy of twelve. He carried his considerable weight as if it were nothing; and there was a strange, flowing grace to his movements, which made Bart watch him with added interest. Bart’s father had taught him a number of physical fighting movements that Lionel had called simply “tricks.” But Bart, young as he was, had noticed that they all made use of a turning, flowing movement of the body; and it was exactly that sort of movement that Chandt showed as he came toward Bart’s bed—and which had brought Bart unthinkingly to his own feet, so that he was upright and balanced by the time Chandt reached him.

  He thought now, watching the other man, that Chandt in his turn had noticed the way Bart moved. But the other said nothing about it.

  “You’re awake. Good,” was all Chandt said. He turned and left the room again. Ozzard and Bart were left standing face to face; and Ozzard grinned at Bart.

  “You know?” said Ozzard. “Your breath stinks. Come to think of it, all of you stinks. You better go take a bath.”

  His grin persisted, and the look on his face said that he expected Bart to do no such thing. Bart did not grin back. He had no real fear of this man; but it had been only a few minutes since he had come fully awake in a strange place, and he did not feel like fighting at the moment.

  At the same time, the situation was clearly like that of a lone wolf who joins a strange pack. The other men who were awake had already gotten up from their beds and were drifting down toward Ozzard and himself, with interest on their faces.

  Ozzard took a step toward Bart, but also to one side, toward the center of the aisle space between the two rows of beds. There were about fifteen feet of clear space between the feet of the opposing beds and all the length of the room, if necessary. As Ozzard stepped aside, his forearms alone raised, his hands palm up and spread a little outward, almost as if he was about to beckon Bart toward him. Bart stepped forward and at an angle also, closing the distance between them, but his own arms raised until his hands were level with his eyes, the left slightly in front of the right.

  They were now only a little more than an arm’s length apart. Ozzard moved forward abruptly, one quick step that had come without any tensing of his body by way of warning. The big right hand of the bronze-skinned man closed crushingly on Bart’s left wrist and the weight of Ozzard’s body shifted onto his own right leg.

  But before he could make the throw he clearly intended, Bart’s hand below his held wrist had turned and glided up and over the wrist of Ozzard’s holding hand, so that the power of Bart’s arm as a whole came against the muscles of Ozzard’s thumb. The thumb released and Bart’s arm was free.

  As Ozzard blinked, dumbfounded, Bart hit the other man quickly with his own free right hand, bringing his fist into Ozzard’s neck. The blow had been aimed at Ozzard’s Adam’s apple and would have crushed it and possibly killed him if it had connected squarely; but Bart had deliberately aimed just slightly off-target. Still, the fist took Ozzard in the throat hard enough to make him take one long step back, choking. Bart closed with him, throwing his arms around the other’s waist, burying his chin in the hollow between Ozzard’s neck and collarbone. He locked his arms together behind Ozzard’s back, clasping his right hand around his left wrist, and began to squeeze the barrel of the other man’s body.

  Ozzard’s hands pummeled Bart’s back in the area of his kidneys, but the angle was wrong for him to get any force into the blows. Failing at this, he shot his legs forward between Bart’s, so as to bring them both to the floor, where the shock of landing might give him a chance to break loose, or to use his legs against Bart’s body. But Bart stayed on his feet, literally holding Ozzard up off the floor and tightening his grip. Bart felt Ozzard’s spine beginning to curve inward under the increasing pressure on it as he brought that pressure to bear. If he kept this up, in a very little while that spine would break—

  “Give up?” said Bart. But the other kept up his struggling and did not answer.

  A massive blow struck Bart suddenly between his own spine and right shoulder blade . . . and at once the strength went out of his right arm. His right hand lost its grip on his left wrist and the two fell apart. In the same moment, Chandt was between him and Ozzard, pushing them apart.

  Ozzard let himself be pushed, his face staring at Bart with an unbelieving look on it. Bart felt his own now limp and helpless right arm taken by Chandt, who towed him away through the group of men who had gathered to watch the fight; and continued to pull him along until they were out of the room and in a corridor that ran past its entrance.

  Chandt let go of his arm. Life was coming back into it, in tingling, pins-and-needles fashion from the shoulder down. Bart, on the basis of what his father had taught him with his “tricks,” had no doubt that the other man had paralyzed his arm by hitting a nerve center. Which raised a question that eventually might become important in this place where men picked fights like children in a schoolyard. The question was how many nerve centers and which ones Chandt could be effective against? Bart himself had been taught an elbow pinch that would do to another’s lower arm what Chandt had just done to his whole limb; plus half a dozen other nerve points that could be struck effectively when the opponent was in the proper position, so that the attacked nerve center was not at that moment covered by muscle.

  He suspected that Chandt knew more nerve center points to attack than he did, possibly considerably more. It might be a good idea if he could figure out some way of finding out all the other knew and learn it, himself.

  Chandt was looking at him earnestly.

  “Sometimes, a little fighting is all right,” said Chandt. “But only at the right times, and only a certain amount of fighting. You understand?”

  Bart nodded.

  “Come with me,” said Chandt.

  Bart went with him. Chandt took him
along the corridor, stopping now and then to show him, wordlessly and with a single wave of his hand from the entrances to them, a gymnasium with running track, a swimming pool, and a room with straight chairs and small square tables, at each of which perhaps four men could sit, with a bar along one wall, and bottles racked behind it.

  “Here, you can drink,” said Chandt, breaking his silence for once, “but only when you’ve been told you can.”

  Bart nodded again. It occurred to him that the last drink he had taken had been the one after his nighttime encounter with the two cougars. Except at unusual times like that he was indifferent to alcohol and a little contemptuous of it—possibly because he had found he needed to drink more than other men if he really wanted to feel any effects from it. But it was also true that he did not care all that much for those effects.

  Chandt led him on. There was a room rather like the surgery of a medical doctor, but with only a few strange instruments around a sort of reclining chair, rather than the usual array of medicine bottles and surgical instruments. No framed degree hung on a wall.

  Finally, Chandt brought him to a room with long tables served by wooden benches.

  “Sit,” said Chandt, indicating the end of one of the benches.

  Bart obeyed. Chandt clapped his hands once and sat down beside him. They waited. After several minutes a small, very ordinary man wearing a long white apron below a white shirt, and who would have made Arthur Robeson look robust by comparison, came out of a farther door in the room, carrying a wooden bowl and spoon, which, at a gesture from Chandt, he set down in front of Bart. He said nothing but directed a glance at Chandt that was almost one of fear. Chandt nodded and the man went back out by the same doorway through which he had come.

  “Eat,” said Chandt to Bart, pointing at the bowl.

  Instinctively, Bart was tempted to refuse such an abrupt command—the kind of order one might have given to an animal. But the bowl was filled with some sort of stew that sent up an appetizing odor; and he found, suddenly, that he was very hungry indeed. He remembered that he had weight to gain back, and he picked up the spoon to taste what had been served.