“And the guardhouse is not that large,” Chester said.
“What does that mean?” Carl asked.
“It means I know where we are, and how to get away from here.” Chester A. Arthur squatted on the rock and turned from Carl to O’Malley, staring them both intently in the face. “And I know what we should do when we get away from here. That’s what I came along to tell you. There’s only one logical thing. It’s been staring me in the face, but I’ve been unwilling to see it.”
“I don’t think I’m overly fond of yer imagery,” O’Malley said. “What should we do?”
“How are we getting away from there?” Carl asked.
“The rumbling noise,” Chester said. “It’s not your overworked imagination, O’Malley, it’s a subway.”
“A which?” O’Malley asked.
“A sort of a train that goes through a hole in the ground.”
“What’s it doing down there?” O’Malley asked.
Chester shrugged. “Nobody knows,” he said. “It’s incredibly ancient. Been here longer than we have. It’s from the elder civilization.”
“What does that mean?” Carl asked.
Chester put his arm on Carl’s shoulder. “Are you ready for that great truth I warned you about?”
Carl nodded. “I suppose so,” he said. “If my knowing it is what got me here, then I should really know it, shouldn’t I?”
Chester nodded. “Then here it is: This is not the Earth.”
There was a prolonged silence while both Carl and O’Malley stared at him. The waves hitting the beach made the only sound.
“This,” Carl repeated, “is not the Earth?”
“Ye’re not having us on?” O’Malley demanded.
“That’s what I found out,” Chester said, “and that’s why I’m here.”
“Then where are we,” Carl asked, “and where is Earth?”
“How do you know?” O’Malley asked.
“My historical research,” Chester said. “Earth has only one moon. A few other little things like that. So I started to dig. I found the maps of this planet and compared them with the historical maps of Earth. They’re different.”
“Well,” Carl said, “it’s been a long time. Things change over a long time.”
“The shape and number of the continents don’t change in the few thousand years you’re calling a long time,” Chester told him. “This, I repeat, is not Earth. These trees are not Earth trees, this ocean is not an ocean of Earth, this atmosphere is not Earth’s air. We have been lied to all our lives about the basic fact of our existence. Something even more basic and important than the phony war games you were playing. Our ancestors are not buried in the soil of this planet. The pyramids, weather-beaten with age, are, at most, a couple of hundred years old. Probably not that.”
“Ye said ye had a plan, and knew what we should do,” O’Malley said. “What is it we should do?”
“Escape,” Chester said.
O’Malley sighed. “Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do these past weeks? Is that not what I’ve been doing out here in the rain?”
“I didn’t mean from the island,” Chester said, “but from the planet. We leave here and make our way to Sanloo and the spaceport. Once there, we must board a ship and leave this planet, whatever its name is, and find our way to Earth—the real Earth.”
“And then what?” O’Malley asked.
“And then find a way to stop this farce, to let the people of this planet live useful lives that are not play-acting. And without Guests looking over their shoulders with every act.”
Carl thought back over his past, remembering the times he had been fighting for his life with two or three flitters hovering over him and various nonhuman heads peering down through the viewports. “I’m for that,” he said.
“What can the three of us possibly do against this whole planet, do ye suppose?” O’Malley asked.
“It won’t be against the whole planet,” Chester said. “Just the fives.”
“Well, then,” O’Malley amended, “what can we three do against all the fives?”
“I don’t know,” Chester said. “We’ll have to find out.”
O’Malley shrugged. “Why not?” he said.
The three of them stayed there talking until the sun went down. Then Carl stretched out on a clear plot of grass near the downed log and stared up at the heavens, leaving the other two to stay up on their rock and debate. These are the wrong stars, he found himself thinking. These are not the stars my ancestors saw. He felt immeasurably cheated by not having been told in his youth. The fact that the wars he’d been fighting since he was fourteen were only games didn’t bother him much; he had never really thought of them as anything else. The higher strategies were out of his sphere anyway. But the stars . . .
“You know,” Carl said to nobody in particular, “when I was a kid I used to spend nights lying on the grass and staring at the stars and thinking about all the ages of people before me who had stared at the same stars. Only they didn’t.”
“I know what you mean, Carl,” Chester said. “I used to wander about to the different mounds and wonder what fabled cities lay buried under them, and what mythical people had walked the streets. New York, perhaps, or Rome, or Carthage. Only they weren’t.”
“What are the mounds, then?” Carl asked.
Chester shrugged. “Traces of the elder race,” he replied. “Just like the subway.”
“What elder race?”
“Some people that lived here before we Earthmen arrived, and disappeared before we got to meet any of them. We have found pictures of them, and they don’t correspond to any of the intelligent races we know about. Which doesn’t mean anything, of course; the universe is too large for our knowledge to be anything but fragmentary.”
“And the cities they built are now mounds, but yet their subways still work?”
“Apparently the cities are from their prehistory,” Chester said, “while the subways are from right before they left.”
Something strange impinged upon Carl’s consciousness. It took him a few seconds to figure out what it was, then he realized that the ground beneath him was beginning to rumble.
“It’s happening,” O’Malley said. “Feel it?”
“Indeed,” Chester said.
“Why is it that we can hear it here,” Carl asked, “and not in camp?”
Chester shook his head. “Not sure,” he said. “Perhaps it’s closer to the surface here, perhaps it’s merely a different rock formation.”
“Well,” O’Malley said, patting his downed log fondly. “There’s little point in staying around here any longer. Let’s get back to camp, where the transportation is.”
Chapter Nine
O’Malley slept in a bed that night for the first time in a month. The unaccustomed softness kept him awake, and he stayed up most of the night smiling softly into the darkness. When Carl woke up O’Malley was finally asleep, but he was still smiling.
Chester A. Arthur came into the barracks while Carl was standing in line, patiently waiting his turn at the basin. “Put your coveralls on,” Chester said. “I’ve got to show you something. Where’s O’Malley?”
“Still asleep,” Carl said.
“Wake him,” Chester said, “and meet me outside.”
So Carl woke O’Malley and ducked, as O’Malley reacted with a clenched fist to being pulled from his dream.
“Oh, it’s ye, lad,” O’Malley said, sitting up and scratching his hair. “What’s happening?”
“Chester wants us outside,” Carl said. “I don’t know why. It’s ten minutes to breakfast.”
“Breakfast?” O’Malley asked, rubbing his hands together. “Now, I could use some breakfast, indeed I could. What sort of provender does this miserable island supply?”
“There are two basic breakfasts for the prisoners,” Carl said. “The first is thick corn gruel, and the second is thin corn gruel. The second is more common than the first.”
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“Ye know how to excite a man’s appetite,” O’Malley told him, pulling his coveralls on. “Give me a second at the tile wall and I’ll be with ye.”
When they got outside Chester led them around two buildings and to the side of the guardhouse. “Look,” he said.
In the clearing in front of the guardhouse a line of prisoners were having leg shackles put on by a very bored pair of blacksmiths.
“For this,” O’Malley said, “ye’re having us miss our gruel? I’ve seen it before.”
“Have you?” Chester asked. “Then don’t you notice anything odd about it?”
O’Malley stared. “Nope,” he said finally. “That’s the way we did it in our little squirage jail in my sector.”
“But that wasn’t how they did it when they brought us here,” Chester said. “Remember?”
“Sure it is,” O’Malley said. “They cuffed our legs.”
“Like that?”
O’Malley stared again. “No,” he said. “Come to think of it, not like that at all. They had shiny cuffs that opened with a tiny key. Very fancy.”
“And a lot easier to open and close than those great iron rings,” Chester said.
“That’s true,” O’Malley admitted. “Then why do ye suppose they’re going back to the old way?”
“See those three gentlemen sitting across the field?” Chester asked.
“Aye. Ye mean the ones in the fancy uniforms. What of them?”
“What do you think of them, Carl?”
Carl squinted across the field at the three men, who were sitting around a low wooden table sipping from glass mugs. “Two uniforms, I would say,” Carl said. “An officer and a sergeant. The third is civilian dress of some sort, although I’ve never seen the like before.”
“If I’ve got it figured out properly,” Chester said, “they’re our tickets out of here.”
“I’m all agog,” O’Malley said without enthusiasm. “Explain yourself.”
“The second day we were here,” Chester said, “I noticed another pickup like this. As soon as the preparations are complete, those prisoners are going to be led into the guardhouse. And, as I should have realized earlier, they are not going to come out again.”
“Yer subway,” O’Malley said.
“Right. They’re going off to work in some sector, and the men in the gray uniforms are their escorts.”
O’Malley nodded his head sadly. “I should have guessed,” he said. “And ye’re going to suggest any second that we march out there and get ourselves shackled to the rest of them.”
“Not a bit of it,” Chester said.
“That’s a relief,” Carl said, trying to fight down the feeling of imminent doom that was building inside of him.
“We’re going to dispose of those gentlemen in the gray suits,” Chester said, “and take their places.”
“You’re crazy,” Carl said, as the feeling of doom settled in his stomach. “We could never get near them. And what good will it do?”
“The problem,” Chester explained, “has been finding a way to get into the underground railway. We certainly can’t go in as prisoners. Not that the place is particularly well guarded; they rely mostly on secrecy. What prisoner would want to break into the guardhouse? But there are certain to be enough guards just casually hanging around to overpower the three of us, or at least give the alarm.
“I first thought of us going in as guards, since the different shifts don’t seem to know each other very well, but that presented some insurmountable problems. It might work for one man with a lot of nerve and commensurate luck, but never for three. Then, this morning, I woke up to a lot of yelling going on outside my barracks. These poor unfortunates were being rounded up and marched to the guardhouse to be shackled. I remembered the last time, and the men in gray. And it came to me.”
Carl had control of his stomach again. “Let’s hear it,” he said.
“Those men,” Chester said, nodding his chin toward the uniformed visitors across the field, “don’t know the guards, and the guards don’t know them. And the new shift of guards comes on duty in about ten minutes, so the ones they pass going out won’t even be the same ones they passed coming in.”
“Those men,” O’Malley said, “are about fifteen feet from the nearest building, clear out in the open. How do ye expect to—ah—get their attention?”
“Ah,” Chester said. “For that we need the aid of a guard.”
Carl shook his head. “Which guard,” he asked, “would you like me to ask?”
“All you want to do is borrow his costume for a few minutes,” Chester said. “O’Malley will help you persuade one.”
And so ten minutes later Carl, newly shaved and with his moustache trimmed for maximum effect, donned a guard’s uniform. The guard, trussed up and gagged, glared at him and mouthed inarticulate curses through the gag.
“Keep a civil tongue in yer head,” O’Malley snapped, kicking the guard in the foot.
“What do you care what he’s saying,” Carl said. “You can’t understand him with that gag in his mouth.”
“No, but I can imagine what I’d be saying in his position, and I don’t want to hear it,” O’Malley said. “I think I’ll take him out of here and put him under cover for a while.” O’Malley tossed the guard over his shoulder like a sack of millet and stalked out of the barracks room with him.
Carl strode back and forth between the rows of cots in the empty barracks, practicing walking like a guard. There was a certain strut in the stride of the camp guards that was not in the walk of the prisoners, and if Carl didn’t have it another guard would immediately spot him as a phony, probably without even knowing why.
When he felt he had the walk down, Carl headed back to where Chester A. Arthur was waiting. He walked conscientiously down the middle of the street, looking neither to the right nor the left, despite a strong urge to dash into the nearest doorway every time anyone—prisoner or guard—came in sight.
When Carl came up to the building behind which Chester was waiting, Chester clapped his hands softly together in appreciation. “Very good,” he said. “As you walked up I was deciding between trying to explain what I was doing here or clobbering you. You make a very convincing guard.”
“I’d better,” Carl said. “What next?”
“Go out there and get that officer to walk around this corner,” Chester instructed him.
“How?”
“I don’t know. You’re the corporal. Say something that will get yon gray-clad officer off his duff and around this corner. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“OK,” Carl said doubtfully. “Let me think for a moment.” He paused and considered, drawing on his lifetime of military experience to come up with a statement that would draw the officer away from his companions. Then he strode out to the table around which the gray-uniformed soldiers were sitting.
“Good morning, sir,” Carl said, snapping an informal salute. “The Adjutant would like to see you in his office. He sent me to escort you.”
The gray-clad officer looked up lazily and returned the salute. “Adjutant?” he asked. “Adjutant? I didn’t know you people had an adjutant.”
“Yes, sir,” Carl said. He offered no further explanation, but just waited silently.
“Do you know what it might be about?” the officer asked.
“No, sir,” Carl said.
“Oh, well,” the officer sighed. “More administrative details.” He turned to the civilian. “If you will excuse me, sir?”
“Of course, of course,” the civilian said. “But I tell you, Colonel Nottoway, these persons are more trouble than they’re worth. More trouble.”
“You’re the one that makes the money in dealing in these persons,” Colonel Nottoway said. “I’d much prefer to be up north on the line with my troops.”
“I didn’t make the regulations, Colonel,” the civilian said. “I’m just as much a slave of them as you are.”
“Perhaps,” the colo
nel said. He gestured toward the men being shackled in the middle of the field. “But not as much as those—persons—there. That right, Mr. Effingham?”
Effingham gave a heavy chuckle that shook his portly frame. “That’s right, Colonel. Indeed, sir, that is correct.”
Colonel Nottoway rose. “Lead on,” he said to Carl. “I’d like to get this business completed as soon as possible.”
“Yes, sir,” Carl said. “So would I, sir, believe me.” He led the way around the corner, and Colonel Nottoway followed.
As they disappeared from the view of the colonel’s companions, Chester stepped out from the side of the building. “Excuse me, sir,” he said.
“Well, what is it?” Colonel Nottoway demanded, staring distastefully at the prison-garbed scarecrow.
“I just want to hear you speak, sir,” Chester said, respectfully. “Idiom, accent, and the like.”
“What do you mean?” the colonel said impatiently. “Get out of my way, man.”
“You think you’re someone in that fancy uniform, don’t you, sir?” Chester said. “The aura of self-importance fairly radiates from you. I’d say you’re a man used to having his own way. Is that right?”
Colonel Nottoway was obviously puzzled by the dichotomy presented by the man in front of him, blocking his way. He looked like a prisoner, but wasn’t awed by authority. The most insulting words came out of the man’s mouth in the most respectful tones. The colonel didn’t understand. This was the impression Chester was looking for. If the colonel were insufficiently impressed, he would just walk by; if he were overly frightened, he would call for help.
“I am used to having my own way, that’s true,” the colonel said. “I command a brigade of troops in my sector, some three thousand men, none of whom would dare accost me as you have just done. If you have a point, make it; otherwise get out of my way.”
“That should be sufficient, thank you, Colonel,” Chester said, stepping aside to allow the colonel to pass.
The colonel sniffed and took two steps. Then Chester clopped him neatly by the side of the head with a sock filled with dirt, and the colonel fell neatly on his face.
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