Get Off My World

by Eando Binder

  As if in answer to his demand, the door swung open. An albino guard motioned and said, “Follow me. You are to be examined for your mental status.”

  As they followed the guard down a curving corridor, Sparky whispered in English. “Listen. They’re going to ask us if we believe we came from the upper world. If we say yes, we’re given the kook ticket and kept here as ‘incurably insane’ or something. So why don’t we outfox them and say that we ‘woke up’ and we know the upper world is pure drivel?”

  “Deny the truth?” spat Paige. “I’ll never be a sniveling coward like that…”

  “It might be wise,” put in Dr. Aronson, sighing. “It might be our only chance of being released. Otherwise, they might keep us here for who knows how long?”

  Paige simmered down. More rational thoughts came into his seething mind. “Maybe you’re right. We can still do something as free men, but not as patients in a padded cell. All right, we’ll try it.”

  They were ushered into a room where an albino doctor with straggly white hair fringing his bald head looked at them keenly—and in curiosity. Several male nurses were in the background, apparently working on medical apparatus.

  “Be at ease, gentlemen,” said the doctor suavely. “I am Doctor Ghoz.” Aronson had explained that medical doctors were “doctor,” whereas scientists were “Sur.”

  Dr. Ghoz waved them to chairs, then squinted his eyes. “Which of you wants to tell me about the…eh…upper world?”

  Sparky took the lead at a silent sign from Paige. “Upper world? What’s that?”

  The doctor jerked upright, totally taken by surprise. “But I thought…uh…the report said…” He stopped and composed himself. “You know what I mean,” he said, leaning forward in a conspiratorial manner. “You can safely tell me about the upper world, the place where the rock ends and there is…ah…wide open space.”

  “Why, doctor, that’s ridiculous,” said Sparky indignantly, as if his intelligence were being insulted. “Everybody knows the rock universe is infinite in all directions. What do you think we are—crackbrains?”

  Paige had to hide a smile at Sparky’s sarcastic remarks, yet delivered with an air of innocence. The albino doctor was more confused than ever, and twisted his hands together nervously. Then he gripped himself and held up some papers.

  “Nevertheless,” he half-shouted. “Only hours ago, in front of witnesses—including the Kal of Dorthia himself—you loudly claimed that you had come from an upper world and that your machine was showing you scenes of that place. Do you deny this?”

  Paige felt his heart sink. This was not going to be easy. His thoughts whirled, seeking a plausible story. But Sparky was already talking, in easy tones, as if unruffled.

  “No, we admit it. But look, doctor—” he put an intensely earnest look on his face, “—haven’t you ever let your imagination run away with you? My friend Paige and I just let our imagination run away too far, and then we talked Dr. Aronson into it against his wishes. I guess—” he stuck out his chest manfully at the confession, “—I guess we were sick for a while, eh?”

  He tapped his forehead, significantly.

  “Yeah, sick,” he went on, looking pathetic. “We got this…uh…delusion of coming from another kind of world. It seemed so real to us that we even built the view-machine to show that crazy upper world that doesn’t exist. Paige is an electronics expert and faked it up good. Yet he didn’t know he was cheating. He thought he was really tuning in the upper world. Funny, eh, doctor?” Sparky gave a loud laugh.

  Then he sobered and looked appealingly at the doctor. “But the shock of being brought here to the funnyhouse…uh… Malmind Ward cleared our minds. Now we know how sick we were before. But we’re well now.”

  Paige held his breath. Was the albino doctor swallowing the story, with all its holes? One of the attendants now shoved a paper in the doctor’s hand. It seemed to be a graph.

  Dr. Ghoz stood up and rocked back and forth on his heels.

  “So the upper world is a pure myth, eh?”

  “Sure, doc. Just a goofy sickness we had.”

  “And you don’t believe there are billions of human beings up there, unknown to this…er…inner world?”

  “Aw, doc, now it’s getting you too. That’s crazy, man.”

  “Nor do you maintain that alien invaders—” the doctor coughed as if to conceal a grin, “—have attacked that upper world and are decimating the people there, in order to take over the world?”

  Sparky slapped his knee. “Haw! That’s the nuttiest tiling I ever heard of. Did we really say that before? Now I can see just how silly our sickness made us. Well, doc, that’s over and done with. Our minds are clear. When will you release us?”

  Dr. Ghoz glared. “Maybe never,” he thundered. He waved behind them. A device on wheels was there, aiming a faint blue ray at the back of their heads. “That malword ray was trained on you all the time.”

  Something leaped into Paige’s mind—lie detector.

  Chapter 9

  Dr. Ghoz held up the chart. “This chart of your involuntary reactions, while you answered questions, shows that you lied every time.”

  Sparky gulped. “Huh? Lied?”

  “Yes,” hissed the albino doctor. “You still believe in the upper world, in a world of humans up there, and a savage invasion by a ruthless enemy. That is plain from this mal-word graph.”

  Sparky threw up his hands. “Well, you can’t blame us for trying.”

  Paige felt cold as Dr. Ghoz sat down and signed a paper with a quick flirt of his hand. “There,” he snapped. “I’ve just signed the official diagnosis for you three—Psychosis, Tenth Degree. That’s the worst there is. As for a cure, I doubt it, not when you will play such a shoddy game with the cunning of madmen. Go to your cell and stay there.

  Angrily the doctor waved them out. Then his face turned pitying. “I’m sorry for you poor souls. The kind of deep-rooted delusion you have, so wild and impossible, means you are hopeless cases.”

  Paige felt like Galileo, when the church had forced him to recant his heretical statement that the earth revolved around the sun. Or like Columbus when people scorned him for saying the world was round. Or like the witnesses who had been called liars by the French Academy of Sciences up to 1804 for claiming they saw “stones fall from the sky”—meteorites.

  To Dr. Ghoz, and all the underworld people, the concept of an outer world beyond their caves was the grandest delusion possible. Especially when that impossible world was supposedly peopled by humans who were being viciously attacked by an alien enemy from the stars. The stars? The innerworld people had never seen a star. And space or spaceships, travelling untold trillions of miles…how could that be accepted by people whose entire “universe” was 4000 miles of rock?

  Paige’s nerves quivered. “They might keep us here all our lives,” he muttered to his companions when they were back in their cell.

  Sparky winced. “Sorry, Sarge. Guess I bungled our story.”

  “It made no difference what story you told,” said Aronson, dejectedly. “We were fools to hope we could deceive them.”

  “If Reena could see me now.” It was the first time Paige had thought of the angelic girl who had rescued them from the Fire Zone. Her vision rose in his mind now of her alabaster beauty and soft pink eyes. Would he ever see her again? That touched off a spark within him.

  “Escape,” he barked. “We’ve got to escape from this loony bin.”

  “But how?” murmured Aronson. “It’s heavily guarded, isolated from everything else, hanging in zero-g in the middle of nowhere.”

  “And I suppose we’re locked in,” said Paige without getting up.

  Sparky sauntered to the door and turned the knob, at the same time putting his shoulder against it to prove it locked—only the door flew o
pen and he catapulted into the hall. As Paige and Aronson darted out the door, Sparky got up with a rueful scowl.

  “Of all the dirty tricks, not locking us in.”

  “Did they make a mistake?” said Paige in wild hope. “Come on…”

  “But where, Sarge? How do we escape?”

  “A guard coming,” warned Aronson.

  They stiffened. There was no place to hide. The guard saw them and expressed no surprise. “Don’t act so guilty,” he said pleasantly. “Everybody’s door is unlocked. You have the run of the place.” As he went on he turned his face with a mocking smile. “You see, nobody has ever escaped from Malmind Ward.”

  Sheepishly, the three looked at one another. Then Paige clenched a fist. “They may be too over-confident. Let’s roam around and see the whole place and learn the routine of daily life. Then sometime, somehow, we’ll plan how to break out.”

  But the words rang dolefully in his mind—nobody has ever escaped from Malmind Ward.

  In the following days, unhindered, they mingled with the other inmates in various large lounges. There were the usual moody types who sat alone and heard nothing when spoken to, the compulsive talkers who uttered a stream of nonsense that nobody listened to, and the wild-eyed, the sad, the broken, the smilers who smiled at nothing. Some sang, some moaned, some cried. Now and then one would screech loudly and have to be led away.

  “A fine batch of busted brains,” growled Sparky. “If we have to live with them, we will go off our rockers.”

  One of the inmates had been watching them intently, yet he did not look mentally disturbed. He had a long, grave face and wise-looking eyes. He slowly edged toward them where the three sat together on a couch. Finally, he leaned over with a sidelong glance at the nearest guard, who paid no attention.

  “Greetings, friends,” he whispered in a deep voice. “Tell me, are you the new arrivals I’ve heard about who talk about the upperworld?”

  “Yeah,” grinned Sparky. “And even you aren’t crazy enough to believe in that.”

  “Ah, but you’re wrong.” The mysterious stranger winked at them solemnly. “I’m here for the same reason, you see.”

  Paige sat up, staring at him. His skin did look a shade darker than the average albino. A man from upper earth, if he were down in this sunless place long enough, would lose his normal tan. Prison pallor up above was well known.

  “You came from upper earth?” said Paige eagerly.

  The man nodded. “My name is Evans.” He smiled briefly. “Yes, like your first name, Evan. I know all those things because I’m a trusted inmate and work in the main office where the records are.”

  “So they clapped you in this booby hatch too,” said Sparky, sympathetically, “when you tried to tell of the upperworld. How long you been here?”

  “I’ve lost track of time,” said Evans, “but it’s several years.”

  Sparky winced. Then he said, “Hey, that means you came down before the Martian invas…” The rest was unsaid as Paige squeezed his arm tightly. Paige’s look plainly told Sparky not to shock the man with that horrifying revelation. Not yet, anyway.

  “How did you get down here?” Evans now asked. “How did you get down through the jelly zone?”

  Sparky’s eyes flew open. “Come again? Jelly zone?”

  “Yes,” said Evans, a bit impatiently. “You know, it comes before the Fire Zone. Where the rock turns to quivering jelly and you have to dive down, holding your breath.” A gleam came into his eye. “But even that isn’t as bad as the syrup zone where the caverns are flooded with sticky goo and wading through it is a nightmare.”

  Paige, Aronson, and Sparky exchanged stricken glances. “We…uh…didn’t come through any jelly zone or syrup zone, sir…”

  Instant suspicion leaped into the man’s face. “You didn’t? Then you’re impostors. You didn’t come from the upper world. Impostors!” His voice was a shout now and guards came running to hustle him away.

  Sparky looked half-sick. “And to think we were taken in by that screwball for a moment. Next we’ll meet Napoleon.”

  “That name, Evans,” mused Paige. “Evidently he saw my first name ‘Evan’ in the files and made his last name ‘Evans’—with the cunning of the mad. But what a letdown. I thought we had an ally.”

  They subsided into a depressed silence.

  * * * *

  Back in their cell a few days later, Paige spoke tersely. “We’ve got to escape from this snakepit. I’ve been looking over the place. Malmind Ward is a smaller version of Centropolis with the same concentric layers of living spaces. The outer shell is our only hope but all the windows are barred. However, the big thing is that people have to come in and out, and supplies have to be brought in.”

  “That’s done,” nodded Aronson, “through one big hatchway in the hull. A jet-ship comes once a week to bring new inmates or carry away discharged patients, and to unload supplies.”

  “That’s the time for us to sneak out. Any idea when the next jet-ship is due?”

  “Tomorrow, I think,” said Aronson. “We were brought in six days ago.”

  “Then tomorrow we’ll slip out when the hatch opens for the jet-ship.”

  “If we’re lucky,” added Aronson gloomily. “But then what, even if we succeed? The jet-ship is always heavily guarded. To sneak aboard is impossible…”

  “We don’t sneak aboard,” interrupted Paige. “We only want to get outside. Up on top the outer shell in the free air.”

  “But then what?” protested Aronson. “How do we escape from the outer shell itself?”

  “Leave that to me,” said Paige enigmatically.

  With the freedom of the place, Paige and his companions were able to watch idly at the hatchway, the next day, as it was opened for the jet-ship that had landed outside. Guards put up a ramp and clumped outside in their magnetic shoes. They filed back in with a half-dozen new inmates, who were cowed and entered listlessly. Then the guards went out again and began unloading the ship, heaping boxes and drums beside the hatchway, to be taken down inside later.

  “Now’s our chance,” hissed Paige. “Follow me out and hide behind that pile of supplies.”

  Nobody was in the corridor now. They crept up the ramp and darted behind the pile, out of sight of the ship and the guards. Paige ran his eye over the heaped-up supplies, breathed an “ah,” then reached for a huge metal can that probably held some liquid concentrate food. He tipped it off the pile and in the zero-g it half-rolled and half-flew toward the guards, bowling several off their feet. As they floundered in the air and the other guards pulled them down, Paige led his companions in a swift crouching race across the metal hull.

  When the curvature of the shell hid them from the view of the guards, he halted, panting.

  “Made it,” gasped Sparky.

  “But now,” said Dr. Aronson anxiously, “we have to leave the hull of Malmind Ward, entirely. And we only have an hour or so before they’ll discover our absence below.” He turned to Paige doubtfully. “And this is where you said or implied that it was easy to leave.”

  “It is,” grinned Paige, sitting down and starting to take off his shoes. “We simply remove our magnetic shoes and jump off.”

  Aronson rapped his knuckles against his forehead in self-reproof. “Of course. How could I miss it? We’re in zero-g and weigh nothing. A sufficient push of our muscles to move our inherent mass and we will lift ourselves off the hull. Of course it actually takes just as much effort to hurl our mass away, as any jump, but the beauty of it is there is no gravity to pull us back. We’ll just keep going away. We can keep on floating through the central hollow until we reach some part of the rock walls.”

  “Sure it will work?” said Sparky dubiously. “Sounds like magic.” Some things, in the strange physics of non-gravitational space,
were beyond his grasp.

  Chapter 10

  With their magnetic shoes off, they held hands at Paige’s bidding.

  “Aim well past Centropolis, the global city, toward that rock wall beyond it. It’s about fifty miles. I don’t know just how long it’ll take to get there, depending on our jumping velocity, but it won’t matter. We’ll float like feathers all the way. And we can’t ‘fall’ anywhere. When I count three, we all jump together. Ready?”

  At their nod, Paige started the count: “One…two…THREE.”

  They all leaped upward in good unison. They went five feet…ten feet…twenty feet…and kept going. “That sure feels funny,” marveled Sparky, “not to fall back.”

  Behind them the globular metal form of Malmind Ward began to recede. It almost seemed like they were standing still and the Ward was moving away from them. Ahead to one side lay the larger globe of Centropolis. But beyond that lay the rock wall of the hollow, their destination.

  “Escape from Malmind Ward was easy,” agreed Aronson in a joyful voice.

  And then it happened.

  “Hey, some sort of breeze coming up,” remarked Sparky. “It’s getting stronger…and blowing us sideways.”

  Paige was puzzled. A definite current of air had arisen around them, blowing them off course. They were helpless to do anything about it. Sparky tried flailing his arms and legs but got nowhere.

  Soon the draft became a powerful blow that caught them up like corks and tossed them sideward instead of forward. They began to revolve around the Malmind Ward like satellites in orbit.

  “I get it,” exploded Paige, in sharp panic. “They created a sort of whirlpool of air around the ward. It’ll whirl us around and gradually spiral us back down to the hull.”

  “They made sure after all,” said Aronson dully, “that nobody could escape just by jumping off. We should have known it was too easy.”