Get Off My World Page 10

  “What?” For the first time the commander turned, surprised. He started at sight of the dark-skinned man, in a uniform that was not even regulation. “Who are you?”

  “Tal Rithor knows me.”

  “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 using their language.

  “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 back 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, a day later.

  * * * *

  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 counterattacks, anything and everything to harass the enemy. They might ordinarily have won their victory 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, 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.

  This thought… As though waiting for them…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.” And Paige knew that was no favor.

  * * * *

  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 had 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 upperworld, to embark on this mad adventure. At least, battling 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 could hardly believe his luck. This was just what he wanted, with a chance to try the plan he had told Aronson and Sparky. If the Kal of Dorthia could not be swayed, maybe King Luth of Uldorn could, and would believe in the upperworld story. By being taken prisoner, Paige had at one stroke gotten within range of his plan. Somehow he had to get the King’s ear…

  But first, Paige watched wonderingly as a strange ceremony unfolded, here beneath earth’s crust.

  How like a re-enactment of similar scenes on earth it was. 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 array had gathered to watch this momentous occasion. They cheered and raised their arms in salute as King 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 dozens 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. 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—that would soon be ruled by a nonhuman overlord.

  The speech went on, in similar vein. Paige could have written the words for him. Upperworld 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, just as silly.

  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 upperworld, 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. 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.”

  King Luth’s face darkened, and he glared ferociously.

  “But wait, Sire,” said Paige quickly, holding up a hand. “I have a very good reason for refusing to help—because I want you to cease fighting Dorthia and battle another enemy.”

  “Another enemy?” King Luth half-glanced over his shoulder, then his face reddened. “What nonsense is this? Only Dorthia is my enemy…”

  “The other enemy,” said Paige, “is there.” Paige was pointing straight up.

  “A cavern community above us? That is impossible, ridiculous.”

  Here we go again, thought Paige, sickeningly. He must try other tactics. “Sire, you look like an intelligent man, perhaps more so than the Kal of Dorthia, whom I have met.”

  Paige could almost see King Luth starting to puff up at the flattery. “Go on. You have something to say, I perceive.”

  “You can win far greater glory than merely conquering a cave empire down here,” Paige went on, trying to play the albino conquistador like a sounding board. “There is a cavern 100 times 100 times 100 larger than any cave known down here, which your armies can invade. That immense cavern, Sire, has no visible roof.”

  The King jerked. He bit at the dangling hook again. “No visible roof? Then how huge is it?”

  Paige flung his arms out. “So huge it never ends…”

  “Wait, Sire,” interposed Tal, angrily. “This man is trying to deceive you with the same mad tale he inflicted on me, about an impossible upperworld that doesn’t exist.”

  The King turned cold eyes on Tal. “I will form my own judgments, Tal Rithor. You will remain silent until I hear the man out.”

  Paige could not help grinning as Tal choked, hung his head, and stepped back silently.

  “This huge cavern is inhabited, I presume,” said King Luth, turning to Paige. “Can I conquer it?”

  “Yes, I believe you can…er…in a sense. That is, if you defeat the enemy, who are—” Paige took a breath, “—non-human!”

  The Uldornian overlord started stupidly for a moment. “You mean…they are not human? Who…? what…? where…?”

  Paige had to plunge on now. “They are alien beings from another world, Sire. You will understand when you lead your armies up there to the Endless Cavern. They came across space…that is…across an empty space from far away and…”

  Now Paige floundered, especially when he was transfixed by King Luth’s eye, in which a towering rage was fo
rming. “Now I see Tal is right. You are inventing a wild myth, for some incredible reason, perhaps hoping to divert my forces and save Dorthia.” He raised his voice to a shout. “You have failed!”

  Chapter 14

  Paige shrank back. How had he hoped that King Luth would believe him, anymore than the Kal of Dorthia? His ace in the hole hadn’t won the jackpot. He had lost his shirt.

  “For concocting such a malminded tale,” the King was saying, “I should…but wait. I’ll give you one more chance. Your mad gift of story-telling still does not cancel out the genius you showed in warfare. So once again I ask—will you reveal your war arts to us, to be used against Dorthia?”

  Paige didn’t answer. He just spat on the ground.

  King Luth’s pink-red eyes seemed to spit out flame, in turn. In a deadly voice he said, “Then I sentence you to banishment above the Fire Zone in the Heavy Region. You will wander there for days, where none of our people live. You will become lost and finally die of madness.”

  In contrast to the grim words, Paige’s heart leaped. Banishment above the Fire Zone—that way led to the upper world. It would be a stroke of luck. Perhaps, winning his way up again to the outer world, he might still do something about his great mission. He might try again to have an earth expedition come down with him to see that the underworld civilization really existed, and make formal contact with them. Then—a grand alliance of the underworld and upperworld to battle the alien invaders of earth.

  As this rosy new hope flashed through his mind, Paige hastily wiped a faint smile of satisfaction from his face and tried to look properly dismayed.

  Tal Rithor had been watching him narrowly, however.

  “Sire, you are playing into his hands,” he interposed quickly. “This dark man came from a cave above the Fire Zone, as he has just told you. You can ignore his wild embellishments about its having no roof and the aliens. But banishing him beyond the Fire Zone will only allow him to escape and return to his own unknown cavern, escaping death or punishment.”