NO0

The length of the chain that dragged behind

like all the lengths of that chain that bound the
moving line of raggedly dressed men together,
pulled at his ankle and rang on the rocky floor of
the tunnel. But he no longer noticed its sound or its
weight. As always, his mind was at work on other

matters; and his body automatically followed the
movements of the man one step in front of him...


He was taller than most of the men on the chain;
and during the first few weeks here in the mine

where they lived and worked, he had taken several
hard blows on the head before learning to respond
to that warning immediately and without question.
But now he knew when such bumps were coming,
just as he - evidently alone among all the men on
the chain - knew the route they were on and the
destination in the mine to which they were headed.


He knew these things because he had qualities of
survival in him that his captors did not guess, nearly
all of them the result of things learned either during
his childhood years in the Indian camp or later from
his father. Most of the captured men driven to work
here died in a matter of months, if not mere weeks;
but long before they died, they sank into an apathy
in which they did not talk and hardly seemed to
think at all. Seeing this, Bart had deliberately kept
his brain busy every moment of his every waking
hour, in the long months he estimated he had been
imprisoned here . . .

lso
	by Gordon R. Dickson
in Sphere Books."


THE DORSAl SERIES:

DORSAl

SOLDIER, ASK NOT

TACTICS OF MISTAKE

THE SPIRIT OF DORSAI

LOST DORSAl

THE FINAL ENCYCLOPAEDIA
THE CHANTRY GUILD


WAY OF THE PILGRIM
THE FOREVER MAN
TIME STORM
NECROMANCER
MASTERS OF EVERON
ANCIENT, MY ENEMY

AORDON R. DICKSON


GThe Earth Lords


SPHERE BOOKS LIMITED

A SPHERE BOOK


First published in the United States of America by
The Berkley Publishing Group in 1989

Published by Sphere Books Ltd 1989

Copyright © Gordon R. Dickson 1989

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser.

ISBN 0 0747 40242 6


Reproduced, printed and bound in Great Britain by

Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading


Sphere Books Ltd

A Division of

Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd
27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ

A member of Maxwell Pergamon Publishing Corporation plc

TO PAT OANES,

who appeared in our lives just in time
to rescue both my mother and myself.

Acknowledgments


1 want to express my appreciation in particular
to David Wixon and Sandra Miesel, whose
research and work in a large number of different
areas helped make this book .possible; as well as
to a number of other experts in various fields to
whom I turned for help and was given it.

one


IT was EARLY spring yet, this high up, and the pony came
gratefully to the top of the little hill. Bart Dybig stopped to let the
beast catch its breath, while he looked over the tiny settlement in
the river valley below before riding down into it. He was too heavy
for the pony, that was the truth of it; though so compact was the
bone and muscle of his solid body that most people would have
guessed him thirty or more pounds less than his real weight.

Now that he was here, he found himself of two minds about
riding down into that place. The whole reason for his coming this
long distance was to do so. At the same time the habit of being by
himself had brought him almost to the point of avoiding society
completely. He had a strange feeling of uneasiness about what
riding down the hill into the settlement before him might lead him
into.

But there was nothing in what he saw to justify such a feeling.
The settlement itself was ordinary-looking enough. Some eight
buildings were strung out on either side of a single street, a small
distance back from the thin blue line of the small river that had its
home in this valley. All the buildings were of logs; and only one,
in the center of the settlement on the far side of the street from
Bart's point of view, had anything resembling an actual second
story. It also had a couple of fairly good-sized windows fronting
the street, and an open porch--accumulation of luxuries on this
west Canadian frontier in 1879--that strongly suggested that the
front part of the building, at least, was more store than living
quarters.

He rode the pony at a walk down the hill toward the settlement.
The closer he got, the more the place rang a note of warning in a
part of his mind that the time with Louis Riel had honed to
constant awareness of possible danger. Since leaving Louis in his
exile in the United States and returning to Canada, he had been
passed on westward from group to group of m6tis--those people
who re the result of the interbreeding of the early European

Cordon R. Dickson


furtrappers and the nati Indians. B's father had n Euroan
n if or men, Indi, white d mixed-b alike, had
combin in aiding himand B's mother had en a Ce
Indi whose ne in English tslat to "Listens to Trees.'"

Both of his p¢n re dead nowB's mother by a ging
fever when he six old, and his father, in Montana, in the
United S, by a rifle bullet from a distant ssina bullet
clely intended for Rid, the t men de side by side. Riei had
ead low the er, after the mtis had risen for their righ
d had their uprising put down by soldie from eastern Canada;
d Bt's fatr, wi Bt, had gone with the m6tis leader.

His fath had en a cio adviser to Riel, who alone sid
Bm had come to understd the innate gentlene in the physically
fful d brillit, but misshan little man. When his fath
had di, afar only a ek of fever fm an inftion brought on
by bullet, which had lged t dp in the older man's y to
remove, Bm had considered himself relead of any fuaher
duty to Rid. After working a few a to rai money that would
t him f to tmel, Bt had returned to Canada in search of a
lative he h never known he had until the delirium of his father's
dying hour.

All that Bm had n able to gath, putting together the
fmgn of his father's brief, feved utterances, s that the
iative a m and named, or call, "Didi," and that she
to fnd somewhe in the Canadian Rky Mountains,
mt probly somewhe on the western side of that range.

The m6tis who had main in Cada had aid Ba d
p him on fm gup to group. His clothing, the brown Indian
es ich he had inherit fm his Ce mother, his we way of
lking d riding, w his prt among them. He was m6tis
himlf, and lk it. In their small ttlements he had felt,
momentily at let, at home and for the moment safe, although
the a pri, if a small one, on his head fm the days of the
llion. But
he did not feel at home or fe as he e down into this
lement on t map in his ddlegs Moby. The
blind but flys to listened to instinct wiin him was sounding
a signal,

Uniy, in his rifle in i dle abbd and
ch e heavy 1 in the holster at his lt, hidden under
his leat jact. For e fit time it struck him what
efi him aut e gup of hous fo him. The no

THE EARTHLORDS
	3


children to be seen about, nor any dogs.

True, there were no adults to be seen, either; but at this time of
the spring afternoon they could be up and out, away from home, or
inside the buildings, out of sight. He headed toward the large
building that he had assumed to be a store, though this place was
beyond the very end of the high western plains, in the beginnings of
the Rocky Mountains. Any goods that came in here for store sale
,ould necessarily have come by pack horse. There was a hitching
rail before the store building, but no horses at it.

It was the more surprising, in light of the quietness of the place
and his own feeling of inner warning, that just as he rode up to the
hitching rail a man he recognized came out of the front door of the

store--and the feeling of fate chimed loudly within him.
"Arthur!" said Bart.

The other turned and stared, still holding the bale of furs he had
brought out. Slowly, he put the bale down on the floor of the porch,

against the log wall, and stared at Bart, clearly without recognition.
The lack of recognition, at least, was not so surprising.

Now in his twenty-fifth year, Bart had changed from the barely
adult young man Arthur Robeson had last seen in the town of Sainte
Anne, far to the east on the central plains, where they had grown up
together. For one thing, Bart had come into his full weight and
strength--that strength he had inherited from his father, but in as
far greater measure as his larger body had outstripped the older
man's small one.

With that development had come a squareness, a biocklike
appearance that made other men walk around him unthinkingly.
These things had come with the years of the 1870s. Now, in 1879,
that growth had hardened on him. He stood five feet eleven inches
in his stocking feet, which was tall compared to the average of the
people around him; but there was no lack of men taller--and
bigger--than he was.

The difference that set him apart from everyone else was not in
his height, but in the unusual development of his body. His
shoulders, as his father's had been, we-e almost unnaturally square
and wide, and his chest was massive; but the real difference in him
was his legs, disproportionatdy thick though now hidden by the
wide leather trousers. The power of those legs had even surprised
him, at times. At eighteen he had lifted horses, quite easily, on his
shoulders until their hooves cleared the ground. He had done this to
win bets and to show off, on several occasions--until he found that
advertising his strength this way only seemed to increase the

4
	Gordon R. Dickson


isolation which both he and his father had always seemed to feel
from the world in general around them. Once he had realized this,
he had stopped showing off. In fact, he had ended by sidestepping
situations in which his strength night be noticed at all.

So it was not surprising then that the slim, white-skinned,
brown-haired Scotsman who had known him as a boy did not
recognize this thick-bodied stranger in the leather shirt, trousers
and jacket. This armed stranger with the large head in which the
heavy bones of brow and cheeks were prominent under the black
hair and the tanned skin, and the face below the cheekbones hidden
by the full, bushy, black beard Bart had grown to disguise himself
when he slipped back across the border from the U.S.

For a moment Bart felt again the empty sense of isolation. Then
he reminded himself that they had never been close anyway; and it
did not matter about Arthur. What mattered--and he felt a sudden
leap of joy within him--was that if Arthur were here, it was more
than possible that Arthur's sister Emma was also here--even
possible she was still unmarried. Emma, with whom Bart had
fallen in love as a boy in school--those few years of school before
the tide of the rebellion claimed him, young as he was. It might, in
fact, have been Emma's liking for him that fed Arthur's dislike; for
Arthur, although he showed little affection for his sister, had always
wanted all of her attention. Their family had been storekeepers even
then, back in Sainte Anne; and their mother, particularly, had
always thought of their family as better than the m6tis around them.

But suddenly Bart was ashamed of himself for remembering
Arthur so unkindly. If the other was willing to let bygones be
bygones, now that. they were all grown up, be could be willing also
to start over from scratch in their acquaintanceship.

"Don't you know me, Arthur?" Bart said accordingly, halting
his horse by the hitching rail, dropping its reins over the wooden
bar and looking up at the other man, who stood on the porch above
him. "I'm Bart Dybig."

"Bm't?" Arthur still stared at him, but now as if trying to see
through the beard to the boy he had known. "What are you doing
hexe? The last I heard you'd gone to Montana with Rid."

"I'm looking for someone I heard was here--Telesphore Daudet.
You know him?"

"Yes," said Arthur, his face still uneasy. "tie lives here. Or at
least he did--his squaw still does. But he ent hunting, off into the
mountains, some weeks ago, and he's never come back. Something
may have happened to him out there."

	THE EARTH LORDS
	5

Bart frowned. Telesphore Daudet, he had been told at the last
settlement of m6tis he had visited, had been the man who could
direct him on into the mountains, to where his father had, in his
ravings, mentioned that some relatives of theirs lived.

The name of Telesphore Daudet was all Bart had to go on; such
clues as Bart had been able to glean from his father's dying words
had been vague, and it required the right man to be able to listen to
such words and suggest the place they might refer to. The last such
man, far east of here, had said Daudet might be a man to talk to,
and he had tracked that name here to Mossby.

"You knew him?" Arthur asked, from up on the porch.
"No," answered Bart cautiously, "I was just dropping by with a
message from an old friend of his." He put the problem of Daudet
from his mind for the moment.

"Have you been here yourself, long?" he asked Arthur. "What

about Emma? Is she still with you?"
"About five years," said Arthur.
"And Emma?"

"Yes." The word came out of Arthur slowly and reluctantly.
Evidently Arthur was still possessive of his sister.

"Then she'd be inside there?" said Bart, nodding at the store.
I'll just step in and say hello to her. It'll be good to see her, too."

Arthur took a short step toward the front door, almost as if he
would move between it and Bart. But Bart was coming up the steps,
moving with all the casual but unstoppable progress of a boulder
rolling downhill; and at the last moment Arthur turned and opened
the door for him.

"I think she's probably up to her ears in work in the back,"
Arthur said. "It might be better not to disturb her now."

"Come on now, Arthur," said Bart, continuing past the other
man into the interior, "she won't mind a moment or two, after all
these years .... "

Within, the front lower half of the house had been partitioned off
and fitted with counters and shelves to hold the goods of the store.
So, thought Bart, he had been right. The air was strong with the
aromas of pelts, woolen goods, liquid parafin--that fuel for lamps
some people were beginning to call "kerosene"--and several
dozen other odors. In appearance, it was no different from any of
the small settlement stores Bart had been stepping into all his life,
not only in the western Canada fur country, but down in Montana
territory as well.

Except that behind the main counter at the back of the store, just

coming in through a door that must lead to a back room, was a
slim, small young woman. She had straight blond hair and blue
eyes, in a round fae that was not conventionally pretty but. had a
serene happiness about it that made it, and had always made it, Bart
thought, beautiful.

"It's Bart Dybig, Emma," said Arthur, quickly and harshly
behind Bart.

Emma's expression of pleasant welcome for a stranger was
wiped out by one of happy recognition.

"Bart!" she cried, dropping onto the counter the armful of pelts
she was carrying and coming out through an opening in it to grasp
both of Bart's outstretched hands with her own. "And with a beard

like that! Oh, it's good to see you again, Bart!"
	happi
	He
was suddenly warm with happiness. Not merely the

hess that being with her had always kindled in him, but a particular
powerful joy that she should he so pleased to see him again. The

sense of isolation and loneliness was utterly wiped away.

	"It's wonderful to see yuu, Emma," he said.

He had completely forgotten Arthur, the store, everything but the
two of them and their joined hands--when the voice of the other
man jolted him out of it.

"Bart's just passing through, Emma," said Arthur. "He came
by with a message for Telesphore Daudet from a friend of
Telphore's."

"And Teksphore's been gone for weeks!" said Emma without
letting go of Bait's hands. "We're worried about him. Was he a
friend of yours, Bart?"

"No," said Bart. "I never heard of him until I was asked to drop
by here. I didn't know you two were here."

"But we've been here for five years. Do you realize how long it's
been since we've seen each other? You'll stay with us while you're

here, Bart; and we'll have a special dinner tonight."

"There's no extra room," said Arthur.

"We can clear the furs off that bunk in the back room, the bunk
we always give to the pack-train handlers when they come--what's
wrong with you, Arthur?" said Emma, for the first time taking her
eyes off Bart and looking over at her brother.

It had always been Arthur's habit to bully his sister and order her
about; and Emma had almost always let herself be bullied and
ordered. But on the few occasions when Bart had seen her face up
to Arthur, he had noticed that it was always Arthur who backed
down. It was that way now.

	THE, EARTH LORDS
	7


"We've got all these furs to sort and get ready before the
pack-train comes to take them east," he muttered, looking away
from his sister. "And what'll we do when the pack-train handler
gets here if we've somebody already staying in that bunk?"

"He can find a place to stay with someone else in town. Don't be
stupid, Arthur[" said Emma. She let go of Bart's hands and
reached up to her hair. "I'm covered with dirt and dust. We've
bn cleaning out the back room, as Arthur says--getting the

winter pelts ready to send off to market."

"Tell me what I can do," said Bart.

His words were automatic. Anyone, even a complete stranger,
was always offered food and shelter. And any such stranger always
turned to immediately to help his hosts with whatever chores or
other work had them busy at the moment.

"You can help me sort the furs that're left. Arthur grades well,
but sometimes I'm a little faster at it than he is. And Arthur can
bale the sorted furs, while you carry them out to the porch ready for
the pack-train to pick up."

"I'll help you sort," said Arthur. "Bart can carry them out."
It was a small meanness, to deprive the two of them of being
together during what remained of the afternoon; but Bart did not
greatly mind. Just to be under the same roof with Emma had always
seemed to bring happiness to him. Also, the prepared and tied
bales were heavy. Arthur had made a load of just one as Bart was
riding up. But Bart himself could have carded four of them without
thinking. He reminded himself to take them one at a time, like
Arthur, to give the other as little reason for annoyance as possible.

The two men followed her back into the storeroom. This room at
the moment was a place of dark and dusty corners, glaringly lit at
its center by the white-hot, glowing mantles of two parafin lamps
set on flour barrels. The air, too, was full of dust and hair from the
fur of the pelts; and boxes of goods were stacked everywhere.

"This whole place really should be put in some sort of order,"
said Emma, replacing a stray strand of blond hair which had fallen
onto her forehead, "but we never seem to have time."

By which she probably meant, thought Bart, that she could not
get Arthur to give the time to cooperate with her in straightening
out the room. The odors of the skins and all the detritus of the
previous winter that had come in with them, was thick in Bart's
nostrils as he began to work.

"There's two bales of beaver pelts already tied up and ready t¢
take out, Bart," said Emma, as she reached the small mountain of

ting up tt-. mx ps rye st sotd Out 	"


evidently sorting was no the only wrk at which Arthur was slow.
He made hard work of getting the pelts baled and since Bart could
not carry them Oue by one out to the pon:h until they we fled up,
both men were well behind Emma by the time she dusted her hands


"That's that, then," she said. "VII clean up and start to work on
dinner while you two are getting the rest of those baled and
outside. ' '

"You could give me a hand baling, then, Burt," said Arthur.
"Glad to," said Bart, moving to this new woA and still being
careful not to make up his bales so fast as to show up Arthur's
slowness and clumsiness. Together, they finished up the baling and
carrying out of the bales to the porch, where Arthur covered them
with a tarp and tied it down against possible wind and rain. He
turned to Bart, dusting his hands as his sister had, but with no
mention of cleaning himself up.

"Care for a drink?" he asked.

"It'd taste good," said Bart.

Arthur led him on back through the store and back room to a
stair that brought them up into the living quarters occupying the
whole second story of the house. It was apparently divided into a
living room with a table for eating at one end of it, two bedrooms
and a kitchen. From the kitchen now came the sounds of Emma
moving about and the good aromas of food.

Arthur led him to a tall cabinet, opened the upper of its two
doors, and from a shelf produced a dark bottle and a couple of
small glasses. He filled the glasses three-quarters full and handed
one to Bart.

"Well, here's luck to both of us," he said and tossed his drink
down. Bart followed his example. It was a western-made corn
whisky, not so raw as trade liquor, but not much of an improvement
over what was sold across the counters of most stores like
this--though Bart had seen none downstairs.

The whisky seemed to have given Arthur the gift of reading
thoughts.

"I don't sell alcohol," he said. "Only causes trouble in a place
like this. But for our own use.., another?"

"Thanks," said Bart.

Arthur refilled the glasses.

This time, Arthur sipped more slowly at his glass, but not very
much so. Bar followed his example. Even so, it was only a couple
of minutes before Arthur was pouring them a third drink, without
even asking Bart if he wanted to be refilled.

"... You were asking if anyone around here had a horse for
sale," Arthur said, pidcing up the conversation where it had been
intuped by his pouring. "'What's wrong with that pony of
yours?"

Bart thought it best not to mention the matter of his weight.
"I'd like to carry more gear and supplies," he said. "I'm
he,led into the mountains, and if I have to end up wintering up
there, I'll need more than I've got now. More blankets, more
clolhes and flour. More ammunition...'"

"Well, anyway, there's no horses available around here. You
know these--" Arthur checked. He had clearly been about to say
"these mtis," but the alcohol had not had a chance to work
enough in him to give him the courage for it. "--these people.
They go just about every place on foot. What horses there are, the
ones who own them won't want to part with--"

He broke off to turn his head toward the doorless entrance to the

kitchen where Emma was audible but invisible around a corner.
"--Isn't that right, Emma?"

He had shouted the last line. Emma called back.

"Isn't what right, Arthur?"

"There' re no horses for sale around here!'"

"No, I don't think so. The pack-train handler may have an extra
one he'd let go."

"Don't believe her," said Arthur, dropping his voice and
turning back to Bart. "That pack-train may lose horses along the
way. Any spares the train-handler's bringing along he'll want to
keep. No, I'm afraid yu're out of luck."

He poured himself another drink and moved the neck of the
bottle into position over Ban's glass. But Bart already had it
covered with one square, thick hand.

"All for ou, is that it?" said Arthur. This time the alcohol put a
noticeable jeer in his voice.

"Enough for now, anyway," said Bart.

It was a question, he thought, why Arthur should be forcing
whisky on the two of them like this. If Arthur had turned into a
drunk since he had last seen him--but there had been no sign of
that in the man Bart had first seen on the porch. On the other hand,

Arthur could hardly be expecting to outdrink Bart, who clearly Fannm as they passed him.

outweighed the Scotsman by a considerable amount. He sat up in his chair.

	Actually, Bart could have drunk half the bottle before dinner "You're going out walking--"

	without losing his own manners; but it seemed to him that by "Just sit there and digest your dinner, Arthur," said Emma.

	refusing to drink himself, he might put a period to Arthur's"I'll do the dishes later. And you'd better bring the accounts up to

drinking,
	tare with the of ilmse furs we sorted and baled today."

In fact, that was what happened. Arthur defiantly finished his "I'll do it," said Arthur. He all but scowled at Bart. Otherwise,

fourth glass of whisky but made no further efforts to refill his glass. e made no more objection to his sister going walking in public

That at least, thought Bart, made it clear that the store owner hadith a man.

nothecome, like so many on the western frontier, a slave to the They vcent down the stairs, out of the building and into what

boule when it was available.
	for the settlement's main street. It was trodden free of grass

Some ten minutes later, Emma called them both to the table,rod other growing things, but it was late enough in the spring that
which was now set with plates, silverware and filled dishes, he ground was no longer muddymand yet early enough that the

	"You killed a chicken!" said Arthur as soon as he had finishedittle evening breeze was not able to raise clouds of dust. They

saying grace after they had taken their seats at the table. olled down between the double row of structures.

	"It's an occasion," said Emma calmly. The store building had been made of peeled logs; but most of

	Chickens were a delicacy out here. It was not that they could nothese others were constructed of logs with the bark still on them.

	find their own food once snow was offthe ground, but that they hadi'he shagginess this gave their appearance seemed to make them

	to he protected against hawks from the sky and four-footedmrt of the ground on which they sat--ground which ran clear and

	marauders on the groundmto say nothing of humans unlikely oriee from the river and the valley wall on the far side to the more

	unable to raise their own fowl. Then in the icy, below-zero wintergentle slope that was the valley wall on this side, down which Bart

	the birds had to be housed indoors and their quarters cleaned andl come.

cared for.
	"Arthur said at dinner you were hunting for your relatives and

	But the tone in Arthur's now noticeably alcohol-tuned voiceu thought they were off somewhere in the Rockies," she said.

	seemed not so much to be objecting to the slaughter of one of the "That's right," Bart answered. "Father only mentioned them

	prized birds as to the guest for whom it had been slaughtered. ce. I don't even know their names. But I got the clear idea they

	"Will you pass the gravy, Bart?" said Emma, handing on the'ed at some place in the mountains. Any place in there is bound to

	plate of chicken parts herself. "And you, Arthur, hand me thee small enough so that if I mention the name Dybig, and I've got

biscuits, if you will."
	elatives around, someone should be able to tell me."

The bowls of food were passed from hand to hand above the "After you find them, what'll you do? Stay?" she asked. "Or

circle of the tabletop. In her quiet way, Emma was a good cook;rill you he coming back this way?"

and the chicken, gravy and potatoes, to say nothing of the young "I'd be coming back this way in any case," said Bart, looking

spring asparagus, added up to a meal such as Bart had not had in aown at her. "Emma, I've never forgotten you, you know. I used to

long time. Afterward, Arthur went to sit in one of the iivingroomlink of you, no matter where I was."

chairs while Ba helped Emma clear the table. But once the dishes "I thought of you, too, Bart," she said--and his heart jumped;

were in the kitchen, she merely rinsed and stacked them.
	ut she went on in the same soft voice, looking straight ahead of

"I can wash up later," she said, drying her hands on a smaller, "but Arthur needs someone to look after him. Now that both
towel. "Right now, while there's still some twilight left, you and llother and Father are gone, there's no one but me to do it."

	are going for a walk, Bart."
	The message was clear enough; but Bart's feelings were so strong

	"'Fine!" he said.
	ey broke out into words in spite of himself.

	They went out through the living room.
	"There's no one to take care of me, either," he said.

	"We're going for a turn up and down the street, Arthur," sai "You're a great deal more capable than Arthur, Bart." She

	12
	Gordon R. Dickson
	|


looked up at him. "And I've an obligation by blood to care for m)
brother."

"But not to throw your life away on him!"

"God will decide whether I throw my life away or not," Emml
said. She put her small hand on the slave over his massive rigb
forearm. "Dear BarL you know how I'd feel ill was frc¢ to fecl a
way | wanted. But a person's duty comes first, before anythin/.
Didn't you follow Louis Riel down into exile in the United Stat
because of duty to your own father?"

"He wanted me to," growled Bart.

"And my father would have wanted me to be a help and aid
Arthur as long as I was needed," she said. "I'll tell you what you
do, Bar. Go find your relatives. Maybe when you come ba¢
things'll have changed and I'll be more free. Then we can g
married--that is, if you still want me."

"It'll be a cold day in--on the face of the sun when I don't!"
growled.

She ignored his near slip into profanity.

"It's too bad our fathers, yours and mine," she said thoughtful
ly, "won't be around to see it."

Bart checked himself from saying what he badly wanted
say--that his father, in spite of his short stature and spidero
ugliness, had been a brilliant, responsible man with a strong sens
of independence and what was right. While Emma's father h
been another Arthur, if more religious about it; a selfish, narrow
minded and bigoted man who had leaned all his weight on his wi
while she lived, and on Emma after his wife's death--for all tha
Emma at that time had been only thirteen years old.

Emma, he knew, had not seen her father that way. In fact, Emr
found good in everyone, whether it was there or not, he told himsel
grimly. Which was perhaps a noble thing to do but led to situation
like this one, which was unfair to her and hard on Bart.

He remembered a woman visitor to Sainte Anne, where they ha
all lived when both he and Emma had been young, asking Emma i
her family were Quakers.

"Oh, no!" Emma had answered, shocked, for her father
mother had been strict Presbyterians; and at that age neither Emn
nor Bart, who had been with her at the moment of the visitor'!
question, had had any real notion of what a Quaker was. They
knew that it was something religious other than Emma's Protestanl
ism, and Bart's father's absent-minded observance of Roma
Catholic rites:

	THE EARTH LORDS
	13

It had not been until he went down into the States that Bart had
encountered some actual members of the Society of Friends--
those nicknamed Quakers--and for the first time understood how
Emma could have been taken for someone brought up in their
forms of religion. In all his life he had never seen Emma angr at
anyone or without an excuse for anyone else, no matter what he or
she had done. Her own life of automatically doing for others, she
seemed to believe, was nothing unusual or remarkable.

"Her goodness is built into her bones," Bart's father had said in
one of his rare moments of paying anything much more than
passing attention to the people they lived among.

It was true. Emma did not think of herself as good, or kind or
dutiful. Whatever she did, from putting in long hours at their store
in Sainte Anne, or doing all the housework by herself after her
mother's death, was simply what she assumed anyone else would
do in her position; unless something beyond their power prevented
them.

And one result from that was that it had always been a waste of
time for Bart to argue that she owed something to herself.

chapter
two


THEY HAD REACHED the end of the short street of buildings. There
was a small graveyard with seven wooden crosses, of varying ages
and sizes, standing in it, beyond the last house on the right side',
but that hardly counted as part of the living settlement. They
turned about and began walking back toward the store.

So far no one had come out of any of the houses to look at
them. This was, of course, still the dinner hour, since Emma,
Bart and Arthur had eaten, if anything, a little early. But no on
had emerged to meet the stranger, which was peculiar in a little
out-of-the-way place like this where strangers must come seldom
A couple of faces had looked out the tiny windows which were the
most in the way of a view on the world the buildings owned; bu
they had been the faces of children.

There was, it occurred to Bart, the unpalatable possibility that
Arthur and Emma--or more likely just Arthur alone--wer
disliked enough in the settlement so that no one wanted to have
anything to do with a friend of theirs. The possibility reminde
him of another, disquieting question. Bart would have preferr
not to ask Emma about it; but since he was headed into strang
territory from which he might not come back, he wanted to kno
how she was placed with these same neighbors who surroundel
her.

"Emma," he said; and the word seemed to come out suddenly
so that she looked up at him at once. For, after his giving up o
any hope of getting her to consider leaving Arthur, they had beel
walking side by side in silence.

"Emma," he said again, more quietly, "there were rumor,
when we went down to Montana that Arthur had become involvet
with the Scottites. I told people it made no sense. But... h
wasn't, was he? I mean he didn't get himself into anything tha
would give people reason to jump to that conclusion about him?'

"Arthur?" Emma laughed. "A storekeeper has to keep th
goodwill of his customers unless he wants to lose them, you kno,

THE EARTH LORDS

that, Ban. Most of our customers thought the world of Louis
Riel."

"Are you sure he couldn't have done something without you
knowing it that could have got such a rumor started?" Bart said.
"It could be dangerous if he had, and neither of you'd realized it.

You know how the mEtis still feel about Thomas Scott."

"Of course I know," she said.

And of course she did, as everyone did.

In 1867, the Canadian Federation had been formed, and soon
thereafter it began to look as if the Hudson's Bay Company, which
had title to almost all the land between Ontario and the Pacific
coast, would turn over its holding to the new nation.

The m6tis community in the area of the Red River Valley--
which was to be the center of Louis Riel's power base--generally
had little desire to be Canadian. But a vocal minority that was
pro-Canadian soon made itself heard, particularly among the
non-mEtis elements of the population; and their presence caused a
friction that soon led to an uprising.

Into this turbulent situation had walked Louis Rid. He was a
' m6tis and a lawyer from MontrEal with radical leanings. He had

returned to St. Boniface, near Winnipeg, after receiving a letter
from Ban's father, who did not visibly involve himself in politics,
but who kept his eye on all that was going on around him. Not even
Bart understood exactly what his father's position was, and where
the older man's interest lay. Lionel Dybig was considered by most,
who did not know of the strength in his small body, to be
essentially an invalid incapable of ordinary work--but one who did
not need to do so, since he was well enough off financially to live
without working. A smart but harmless bookworm, was the general
concensus of people regarding him. A few other, brighter-thanaverage
people who knew him, like Louis Riel, knew better.

Rid was a racial patriot, proud of both his French and Indian
ancestry. He also believed in nonviolence, and had been proud of
the fact that he had been able to bring the mEtis of the Red River
Valley under his leadership without any violence.

Some of the people in that territory did not agree either with him
or his policies; and in the self-defense of a peaceful community, he
was forced to jail them. Mostly, these were the open advocates of
violence among the so-called "Canadian Party," and one of them
was the man named Thomas Scott.

The majority of tlae mEtis were French and Roman Catholic.
Scott was a Protestant Irishman and a thoroughgoing bigot,

16 Gordon R. Dickson

originally from Ontario; and he was one of the jailed group that
later escaped and tried to create a countermovement among the
local people. Scott himself tried to assassinate Louis Riel.

He was recaptured and once more imprisoned, but continued
from his cell to try to fight for his way of doing things. The trouble
he created was dangerous enough so that Riel's party brought him
to trial for. his crimes. He was found guilty and executed.

The execution aroused violent feelings in eastern Canada. A
military expedition was sent out, and it put down Riel's party. Rid
himself, and Lionel Dybig with him, decided to go into exile in the
United States. And because his father was going, Bart went over the
border into Dakota, and then to Montana. Bart stayed in the U.S.
until his father's death emphasized his sense of difference from
those around him; then his loneliness drove him back to Canada, to
try to find the relatives in the western mountains he had heard his
father refer to on that one occasion. Surely, he thought, he had
someone he belonged to.

He knew that meanwhile, back up in Canada, a group of
followers of the dead Thomas Scott had banded together, calling
themselves Scottites; and apparently still dreamed of an armed
control of the Canadian government, so as to run it their way. They
were generally despised among the m6tis, but they survived. If
Arthur had had his name associated with them, even by purely
casual rumor, the eventual result could mean trouble for him--and
for Emma.

"I'll be truthful Bart," said Emma now, "Arthur does things he
doesn't tell me about. But as I say, the store is our living. I can't
believe he'd be foolish enough to get mixed up with the Scottites. If
there was any rumor like that, one of them would have told me
about it, and no one has."

"Good, then," said Bart, relieved.

They were almost back at the store. In part, the quickness of
their return was caused by the shortness of the street itself; but it
was also partly due to the silence between them that had followed
Bart's words--a companionable silence, however.

It was strange,, thought Bart, that after so long a time apart, they
should need to talk so little, and be so comfortable without words
needing to be spoken. No, he corrected himself, it was not strange
at all It was because they knew and understood each other so well.
For the first time, the small coal of a dangerous anger kindled itself
deep inside him. Why should Arthur be allowed to stand in the way

of their being together, as surely all Emma's instincts must tell her
they should be?

But to that, there was no good answer; and as long as Emma
refused to change the situation, Bart himself was helpless. Abruptly
now, he felt baffled. Ven the rebellion had been quashed and they
had left Canada, Emma's family had already left Sainte Anne,
following the death of their only surviving parent--their father--
eight months before. When Ba had followed Rid into exile,
therefore, he was leaving a place where he felt he had no close ties
to anyone; and he had given up hope of ever wing Emma again.
Now, this sudden rediscovery of her and the sudden rekindling of
the hope that perhaps he might have her with him for the rest of his
life, after all, had left him no longer sure that he wanted to continue
searching for his lost relatives--or anything else except staying here
and somehow forcing her to free herself of Arthur.

However, to do that would be to force Emma against the grain of
her conscience--and that he could not do.

As if she had been able to read his thoughts, she suddenly took
his hand in hers now as they walked--a shocking thing for a single
woman to do in public in a small community of this time and place;
but then Emma had always been a law unto herself. On the other
hand, thought Bart, if there was anyone anywhere around that
wanted to make some objection to what she had just done--Bart
felt the sullen coal within him flicker with the first brightness of
flame, and the heavy muscles across his stomach tightened. He
looked deliberately up and down the street into the windows of the
houses there, but there was no one to be seen looking out at them
now, not even children.

"Bart," Emma said; and he thought he had never heard anything
more soft and gentle than her voice when she lowered it as she did
now to speak to him privately. "You know if it wasn't for Arthur
I'd follow you anywhere. Have faith, dear. God is always on the
side of those who do right; and what's right is for me to stay and
help Arthur while you go search for your people. I'll wait and hope,
Bart. Can't you do the same?"

His hand closed around her much smaller one.

"If that's what it takes," he said. "I'!! wait--"

He broke off, for Arthur had just walked into sight around the
farther front corner of the store. He was towing by a halter a
heavy-headed, long-eared beast.

"Look what I got you, Bart!" he called triumphantly. "You

	18
	Cordon R. Dickson

needed a horse. Well, here's something better than a horse;
especially up in the mountains where a horse might panic and go off
the sid of a cliff with you on him. A mule's got too much sense for
that; and here's a mule for you."

Bart and Emma had come together with him by the time he had

finished speaking, and they all stood together in front of the store.
"Not that it's for sale," Arthur went on.

Either the drinks he had had before dinner were still working in
him, or he had had a few more. His gestures were a little loose and
his face was flushed, his voice uncontrolled. He laughed now, and
the laugh was louder than was called for by the situation. "It needs
returning to the man who owns it; but you can use it along the way,
since he's where you want to go, anyway. I've got a map, too. I'll
show you."

"Arthur, what is all this?" demanded Emma. She had let go of
Bart's hand at the appearance of her brother.

"'Bart here wanted a bigger horse so he could pack more gear and
supplies," said Arthur to her. "Well, this is a mule that Guillaume
Barre's cousin borrowed from a man named Charles Vaitc, up at
Shunthead; and that's where you want to go from here, anyway.
That's the place where it's most likely somebody might know
where your relatives are."

He passed the rope from the mule's halter into B''s hand.
"You can peg him out back overnight and decide how you want
to use him in the morning. Probably want to ride your horse until
you hit the steep mountains; and until then, of course, there's no
better pack animal than a mule. After you peg him out, come on
upstairs and I'll give you the map Guillaume drew me."

The twilight had been fading steadily. But there was enough light
left for Bart to see that Arthur had found him a good, healthy
animal of generous size.

"I'll do that," he said, and started leading the mule around the
back of the store. "Thanks, Arthur."

"Think nothing of it," said Arthur, and laughed again a little
too loudly. As he went around the corner of the store, Bart heard
Emma behind him, speaking to her brother.

"Shuntbead?" she was saying. "I never heard of it."

"Why should you," said her brother, "you're only a vman!"
The daylight was almost gone. Bart found a sledgehammer in the
store and a decent piece of wood out back for a stake and drove it
into the ground too far for the mule to jerk it out. Then he ran his
hands completely over the animal's body; and, as far as eyes and

	THE EARTH LORDS
	19

touch could tell him, there were no galls or sores and the mule was
in fine condition.

He went back into the store to put the sledgehammer back where
he had found it, and found himself wondering at Arthur's efforts to
help him out. Of course, Arthur would want to see him gone as
soon as possible. The whole world might trust Emma to keep her
word and stay with her brother; but that brother had no faith in
himself and therefore little faith in others.

By the time Bart got back upstairs Arthur had gone to bed and
the snoring of someone heavy with drink could be heard coming
from the larger, front bedroom. A map drawn in ink on the back of
a public notice sign lay on the kitchen table. Bart looked at it and
put it in .a breast pocket of the shirt inside his jacket. He looked
toward the sound from the front bedroom.

"Does he do this often7" Bart asked Emma, who was finishing
up the washing of the dishes.

"Almost never." She frowned. "He gets terrible hangovers if he
drinks at all; and he usually stays clear of it."

"Is this Guillaume Barre a drinker?" Bart asked. "If he is, he
could have led Arthur into it, tonight. We had a couple of drinks

before dinner, but the food should have taken care of that."
Emma shook her head.

"I don't really know Guillaume Barre," she said. "He came in
with a load of prime pelts only a few weeks ago, and he's been
around ever since, though he's gone days, hunting I guess. I
suppose he drinks. Most trappers drink themselves insensible
whenever they come out of the woods and get their hands on a
bottle. In fact, they buy their needs for next winter, drink until the
money left over runs out, and that's the last we see of them until
next year. He's staying with the Pinaud family--that's two houses
down on the right."

"I think I might drop down there," mused Bart. "Barre could
tell me a little more about this Shunthead place and the way to it;

and I could thank him for letting me take the mule back."

He stood next to her at the sink, hesitating.

"Unless," he said tentatively, "you've got some time to just sit
and talk..."

She turned to face him.

"No, Bart," she said, "I'm going to bed now; and so should
you, as soon as possible. We both have to get up early if we're
going to get in a good day."

"Yes," he said emptily. The urge to put his arms around her was

20 Gordon o Dickson

	almost overpowering, but his early upbringing and hers, as well as

	her attitude, made an invisible wall around her. "Then... I'll see

you in the morning."
	'[

	"In the morning, Bart dear," she said.

He turned and left her, going down the stairs out of the door and
into the settlement street. He found the house she had spoken of,
but its windows were dark. In itself, this was not surprising. Most
people out here went to bed right after dinner and rose with the
dawn or before it; and most of the other houses along the street were
also already dark.

Bart knocked on the door anyway, and when there was no
answer, opened the door which custom would naturally have left
unlocked, and stepped into the darkness within.

There was no light within the house whatsoever, not even that
from the coals of a fire in a fireplace just used for cooking or banked
against the owner's return. Bart searched in one capacious side
pocket of his long leather jacket until he found a wooden match,
struck its head with his thumbnail as he held it up in his right hand,
and looked around in its sudden, yellow light as the head burst into
ttame o

It was an ordinary cabin, untidy and dirty as such a cabin could
be when its occupant had no interest in keeping it clean. There were
a couple of stools, a table, a fireplace with nothing but some cold
burnt ends of logs and white ash in it, and a bunk against one wall
beyond the fireplace, with the blankets half out of it and spilled on
to the floor. No one had been here for hours, nor was there any sign
that anyone was likely to return here soon.

The match burned dangerously low toward the skin of the fingers
with which Bart was holding it. He shook it out, turned to the door
and went out again, back to the store.

Inside, in the back room there, be found a parafin lamp burning
on a flour barrel, beside a bunk fastened to a wall by the foot of the
stairs. Blankets that had been washed and aired recently had been
neatly spread on it to make up a bed. Bart smiled, for Emma's hand
was as visible here as if he had seen her making the bed ready
herself.

He glanced up the stairs, but everything was quiet and dark
above, He shrugged, took off his outer clothes and went to
bed--but from old habit be put his revolver and knife under the
flour-sack pillow.

He ake instantly to the sound of movement overhead but,
realizing he had roused at the first noise, lay still and waited while

	THE, F4RTH LORDS
	21


Emma--it must be Emma--completed her getting up and walked
into the kitchen area. His senses told him that while it was not yet
dawn, sunrise could not be far off. Probably the dark sky was
lightening a bit in the east, but he of course could not see that from
here in the back room. He continued to wait while Emma moved
about the kitchen for fifteen minutes or so, then rose silently and

dressed, putting his knife and pistol back in place at his belt.
Then he went upstairs.

"Arthur?" he asked, to Emma's back as she stood at the stove,
frying what his nose told him was bacon.

"Arthur'll sleep late today," she said. "He'll feel too bad to get
up until long after you've gone, Bart."

She turned to face him, and smiled at him. He smiled back,
happily.

"Emma," he said, "I love you."

Abruptly, her face became serious.

"You mustn't say such things," she said, "not until I'm free to
hear them."

But then she smiled again.

"I think of you always," she said softly. "Now, sit down and
have your breakfast."

She gave him the oatmeal they had both grown up on, with
brown sugar syrup to pour on it, half a dozen eggs and possibly half
a pound of bacon along with the better part of a loaf of bread and
currant preserves, all washed down with freshly made black coffee
in large amounts.

"I haven't eaten food this good in years," he told her.

She beamed at the compliment.

"Would you like some more bacon and eggs?" she asked.

He shook his head. She would be familiar with the need of
travelers to load up at the beginning of the day, not knowing when
their next real meal would be or what shape it might take; but she
could not know the size of his adult appetite. He could have eaten
another meal like the one she had just given him, and not been
overfull; but there was no need for her to know that now, and it was
another of the differences he was a bit shy about; but he had already
eaten better than he had for a very long time.

"I've had breakfast," he said, "and I've got to start loading up

ready to leave. Can I buy some things from the store downstairs?"
"Of course.' '

She led him down into the front room. He picked out some sacks
of flour, bacon, salt, matches, dried beans, extra tarps, blankets

and a rain slicker;, most of the homely necessities needed by a man
alone in the wilderness--as well as a few little luxuries such as
crackers and tinned peaches and sardines. From one of the match
boxes he took a small handful of matches and put them in the side
pocket of his jacket.
"I always keep some there for emergencies," he told her.

"Emergencies?" she asked him. "You've got flint and steel, of
course?' '

"Of course," he said. "But sometimes a match is handier."

He paid her in American silver. She pushed the coins back across
the counter at him.

"You don't have to do that," she said. "We can carry you on the
books the way we'd carry any trapper, until next spring---or
forever, if it comes to that. There's always those who don't come
back the following spring."

I'll be back," he told her, pushing the money once more to
her, "and besides I've got plenty of cash from working below the
border."

She picked up the coins.

I'll put you on the books anyway," she said, "and keep this for

you. If you ever need it, all you have to do is ask me for it.'"
"All right," he said. "If that's how you want it."

They went back upstairs, and she handed him a bag filled with
lumpy objects, its opening closed with a drawstring, then further
sealed with wax.

"I made you some hardcakes," she said. "Be sure you remelt
the wax to seal it again after you've taken one out, or seal it again
with something like pine resin. The cakes are loaded with dried
blueberries and sweetening, and the flies will want to get to them,
given half a chance."

Hardcakes were small, fried cakes in which cornmeal, or
anything else available, essentially held together the greatest
possible mixture of fat and sugar; the fat usually being animal fat
and the sugar, out here, being anything from ordinary sugar to the
dried blueberries she had mentioned, raisins or anything sweet. The
hardcakes were treats. They also were a food that could be eaten
without cooking, and were a source of quick energy for someone
lacking the time or opportunity to stop and build a fire for a proper
meal.

"You think of everything," he said, taking the bag from her.
"How can I thank you for things like this?"

	THE ,ARTH LORDS
	23

.
	"You know I love doing it," she said.

He carried the sack of hardcakes, along with most of the items he
had selected in the store below, out back to the mule. He would
have carried the whole load himself if his arms had been long
enough. As it was, Emma brought the smaller and lighter items
behind him. It was a fresh, cool, bright morning, a little damp from
a brief rainshower probably just before he had awakened; and the
peaks of the mountains stood up on the western horizon. The mule
took uncomplainingly to being packed with not only the things he
had bought from the store, but some of the extras he had been
packing on the pony. The horse would now find its load lightened
by that much, at least.

"Well," he said finally, turning to Emma. The sun was just up
over the far wall of the valley opposite the direction he must go,
according to the map Arthur had left for him. "Goodbye for a little
while, Emma."

She held out both hands to him. He took them . . . so small they
were.., in his own two hands. Again the urge was all but
overpowering to put his arms around her, to kiss her--but he could
feel that she did not want him to do more than hold her hands, for
the moment.

	"For as long as it takes, Bart," she said.

Her eyes were very clear blue, looking up at him. He could
hardly believe that she could look so lovingly at what he knew she
must he seeing, the brows and cheekbones large and prominent
under the densely black hair, fight-cuffed against his large skull.
The beard, full and dark and thick, hiding a jaw as fiercely
prominent as the cheekbones and forehead; hair and beard together
framing eyes of a glinting, dark brown. A face to make people
stand aside from it, not love its owner as she plainly loved him; for
all that she would not give up her duty to Arthur and go away with
him.

But then, Emma had always seen more in people than others
saw. His father, in particular, had given her credit for having
unusual perception and intelligence; and when his father gave that
sort of compliment...

But none of it mattered now. It was time for him to go. He made
himself let loose her hands, and they dropped to her sides like slain
birds.

"I'll be back," he said again; and swung himself up over the
pony, which he had saddled some minutes earlier.

Emma handed up the end of the rope fastened to the mule's:
halter, and he took it.


	"Thanks. Goodbye, Emma. I'll be back."
	|

	"I know you will."

	He shook up the rins of his pony and rode off. The mule

	followed after without protest.
	|

chapter
three


IT wAS NOT until he rode out into the settlement street that the
feeling of uneasiness struck him. From where he was he could
see, only a little way farther beyond the houses and the tiny
graveyard, the valley slope down which he had approached
Mossby. That slope continued a short distance past the town to
the edge of the river; and it ran alongside the river, rising to the
place where the river first came into sight between two hills.

When he had come, no one had been expecting him. But the
slope before him was wooded. The way he must go, up alongside
the river, he was open and exposed to any rifleman who now might
be hidden in the trees that covered most of the ground to the far
wall of the small valley. There was absolutely no reason to expect
such a rifleman, but he had a sudden, inexplicable feeling inside
him that someone was up there. He turned to look behind him and
saw that Emma had followed him out of the yard behind the store,
still smiling.

She continued to follow him as he rode past the buildings and
the graveyard, out into the open land. By the last house she halted,
and stood watching him as he went. And the apprehension lifted.
Just as he had felt the reasonless certainly that a gun was waiting,
aimed at him from the trees on the crest of the valley rise, perhaps
beyond the river, he also was suddenly certain that it would not
fire as long as Emma was standing there, watching.

She watched him out of sight and no gun sounded.

Nearly a mile from the settlement, the trees on the left bank of
the river, up which he rode, closed in on the water; and the
underbrush between them was too thick for riding. He turned and
swam the river with both animals, emerging on the tree-crowned
bank of the far side. But as he passed into the trees, he passed
beyond the point where he could see back to the settlement--or
Emma, watching there, could see him.

The uneasy feeling he had had was gone. After all, he thought,
even if there had been someone there with a rifle, that person

	26
	Gordon R. Dicon


might have had nothing against him specifically, might not even
have known who he was, but been on guard against a possible
enemy who had nothing to do with Bart. There were many men on
the frontier who had reason to be wary of strangers.

He rode on, alone but cheerfully now that the feeling was gone.
The map he was following was simple and straightforward
enough. Like most maps in this country that had been opened to
Europeans by the fur traders, whoever had drawn it originally had
thought in terms of canoe routes; and so the paper Bart had been
given had shown a route following a sequence of three rivers, with
the first important one--not the one he was on now--eventually
flowing into the second, and a route over land where he would
leave the second river to take the third, on the western watershed
of the Rockies.

It was easy enough going; and the mule gave him no trouble.
However, on the afternoon of the sixth day after leaving Mossby,
the uneasiness that had touched him as he rode away from Emma
came back on him. Only now, it was the feeling of someone
deliberately stalking him. He continued to travel just as he had
been doing, but he kept eyes, ears and nose alert for any sign that
could back up the feeling.

However, there was nothing. And yet the feeling, instead of
going away, persisted and even grew until it was strong within him
as he camped for the night.

Here, where the end of day had caught him, the second of his
three rivers ran narrow and deep between vertical cliffs of eighty
to a hundred feet. So the camp he made was on a shadowed,
mossy ledge among thick but stunted spruce and pine; and the
roar of the river below hid any sound he might hear of someone
approaching. And once the sun was gone he was effectively blind
as well as deaf.

He did not like camping under these conditions, but the end of
the daylight left him no choice. He unloaded the pony and mule
and tied them out among the trees only a couple of dozen feet
from his fire. Then he set about preparing some of his bacon with
an amount of the dried beans he had had soaking in a closed flask,
tied to his saddle throughout the day.

The beans took longer than the bacon to cook, even with the
day's soaking, so that it was deep dark and no moon visible
because of thick cloud cover by the time the food was ready to eat.
He had made an amount that suited his large appetite, and he
stuffed himself with everything he had cooked, leaving nothing;

	THE EARTH LORDS
	27

for he had decided to get out of here at the first glimmer of
daylight, without waiting to make any kind of breakfast.

Meanwhile both the pony and the mule had been quiet, which
gave him a certain amount of reassurance. He let the fire burn
down to coals against the boulder before which he had deliberately
built it; and, warmed by the reflected heat from the fire-warmed
stone, rolled himself in his blankets and let himself go off to
sleep.

He woke suddenly, at once fully awake and alert. The cloud
cover had thinned, and a small pale moon could be glimpsed
through thin parts of it at stray moments, high overhead. It must
be well past midnight, he thought; and he closed his hands, one
around the rifle he had taken to bed with him, the other on the butt
of his revolver.

He lay still. The feeling of an inimical presence nearby was as
strong as a rank smell in his nostrils. But as he continued to lie
still, waiting, no betraying sound or odor came to him to help him
identify it, or tell where about him it might he.

There was an uneasy stir from one of his animals. He glanced
in their direction, wishing the moon would come full out; or that
he dared to give away the fact he was no longer sleeping by putting
some more wood on the fire, so that he could see better. The pony
moved; he heard though he could not see it. It was completely
hidden in darkness; but he could just make out the head of the
mule, who had not moved but stood now, stock-still but head-on
to a niche between two huge boulders, with its rear hooves facing
outward and its ears upright and listening.

Plainly, both beasts were feeling what he was feeling. Perhaps,
with their animal hearing, they had heard what he had not. The
mule, at least, had moved into a position of defense--anything
coming at it would face those lashing rear hooves. The pony, less
intelligent, was the likely target if what was out there in the dark
was animal, rather than human.

If it was human, the chances were that he was the target.

It was strange, as strange as his fear of a hidden rifleman among
the trees when he had left Mossby. The price on his head was
enough to attract a casual bounty hunter who just happened to
cross Bart's path. But it was not enough to make it worth anyone's
time to trail him for it. Particularly since any such person must
know that Bart would not be an easy man to take or kill; so that
trying to collect the bounty could be a dangerous business. And
Bart's habit of avoiding closeness with people generally had kept


	28
	Cordon R. Dickson
	I
	THE EARTH LORDS
	29


him from making personal enemies--at least the sort of enemies
that might take the trouble to hunt him down.

The minutes slipped by without a sign or a sound. Still, Bart
waited. The pony neighed, suddenly, a frightened sound.

Moving abruptly, Bart reached out from his blankets, snatched
up a handful of small twigs and threw them on the red coals of the
fire. They did not catch for a moment, but the coals, disturbed,
brightened; and a small flame licked up from one blackened bit of
log. In that extra light, Bart caught a glimpse of the pony; and, on

top of a boulder six feet above it, a pair of glowing eyes.
Cougar.

He was out of the blanket, on his feet and firing the rifle even as
the eyes sailed through the air toward the pony. The crash of the
rifle, the kick of its butt against his shoulder combined with the
thud of a body falling almost at his feet. The twigs had caught,
now, and flame was rising from them, illuminating the two
equines and the camp area clearly.

The cougar lay still, stretched out and dead on the stony ground
a long step" from Bart's feet. The rifle bullet had gone through its
throat and head as it leaped. Bart lowered the rifle. A cougar. The
only predator other than a grizzly or a hungry wolf that would be
likely to try taking a prey as large as the pony in single attack; and
often a night hunter. He should have guessed that it might be a
cougar that had been shadowing them all day, hoping for a chance
at one of his animals.
A flicker of movement seen out of the corner of his right eye
made him duck instinctively; and a heavy blow sent him tumbling
to the ground, losing his grip on the rifle. Even as he went down, a
thought flashed through his mind.

There had not been one cougar but two, a mated pair, perhaps,
hunting together. It was rare but it happened. He scrabbled at his
belt holster for the revolver, found it fallen away, too, and reached
instead for his knife. At the same time he was rolling over on his
back and drawing his knees up tight against his body to protect his
stomach and chest.

He had a glimpse in the dim firelight of a gray body leaping at
him--from the direction of his legs. He had his hand on the hilt
of his knife now, but no time to get it out, and the angle of the
beast's attack made the knife awkward to use. He lashed out with
both feet and all the heavy power of his massive thigh muscles
behind the movement.

His heels slammed into the leaping body in midair. The big cat

glanced off to one side and upward; then, dropped--over the edge
of the cliff to the riverbed a hundred feet below, with a yowl of
surprise and alarm that fell away into silence below. For a moment
Bart lay where he was, catching his breath.

There were no more enemies to fear now; and the instinctive
feeling in him was now gone. For more than two c6ugars to hunt
together was unheard of.

The pony was neighing shrilly and pulling wildly at its
neckrope. The mule still stood in a position of defense and turned
itself slightly to put its rear hooves toward Bart as Bart got to his
feet and shakily went about collecting his dropped rifle and
revolver. The mule's eyes continued to be rolled back, watching
him, ready to act if he came within kicking range.

Bart stayed well clear and the pony began to calm down. He sat
down by the fire and threw several more, larger, branches on it.
Then he got back up and walked over to where his saddlebags lay,
with the saddle on the other side of his fire. From the left boot he
removed a pint bottle of whisky and took a couple of swallows. He
recorked the bottle tightly, then put it back into the small nest of
hay that protected it against accidental blows and breakage.

The fire was blazing strongly now. He got out his coffee pot,
which he had cleaned and packed away before going to sleep, in
preparation for his planned early start in the morning. He threw a
handful of new coffee grounds into it and added water from his
canteen and put it on the coals. He sat there, watching the flames
of the fire as the pot came to the boil, feeling the alcohol inside
him gradually beginning to make its calming effect felt.

Then he sat, drinking, and as the level of the coffee in the pot
slowly dropped, he began to notice a lightening of the sky. They
were closer to dawn, then, than he had thought. He finished the
coffee and set about getting the pony saddled and the load on the
mule. By the time they were ready it was almost light enough to
travel. He had another half cup of coffee, carefully put out the fire
and left.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, and he was not visited again
by the feeling of being watched or pursued. He came at last to the
portage across to the third river. Like most portages, it was
passable enough for human animals on two legs, even those
loaded down with more than a hundred pounds of canoe gear or
supplies, but impassable to four-legged beasts like the two with
him. He had to cut a way through for the horse and mule,
including the chopping through and clearing of two good-sized



	30
	Gordon R. Dickson
	I

trees, over which the human portagers would merely have clan
bered, before he could bring them all safely to the third river.

The portage came out at the point where the third river joinedi
fourth that was not on his map and that was navigable downstrea
by canoe. The third river itself was not. It was a racehorse of wat
from the high mountains, forty yards wide and not much mo,
than a yard deep, foaming around boulders of all sizes an
stampeding downhill at twenty to thirty miles an hour. He bega
to pick his way up along one side of it, riding around obstacl
when these intervened on the bankside. The far bank looked likeif
would be easier going; but to try to cross the river, alone or wit!
the horses, would have been suicide.

In the late afternoon, he encountered a wagon trail fro
somewhere else downslope, which he could follow upriver in th!
direction he was going. The road curved in toward the river fror
somewhere else off through the mountains--evidently there
another town or settlement not too far away, and perhaps havingi
quicker route by river to larger centers of civilization in son¢
mountain valley or even down on the coast. The road showed the
signs of frequent use. It was a "corduroy" road, surfaced .with thi
narrow, trirpmed stems of small trees, laid down side by side, t
form a surface that would not go into impassable muddy ru
under the wagon wheels.

He took it, as an easier route to Shunthead; and one lati
afternoon he came up over a steep crest of rock to look down int0
narrow, rocky valley with a lake at its bottom hardly wider tha
the river had been. Buildings constructed of boards clung to th
side of the nearer of the two steeply inclined slopes. The roal
went at an angle down the slope, to a precarious platform of roc
and earth; where it did a switchback and then angled in thi
opposite direction to deal with the steep pitch of the valleysidt
until it reached the gentler slopes just above the lakeshore, o
which the buildings were erected.

One glance at those buildings was enough. The name of thf
place should have told him, as well as the fact that it was a mule h
was returning. For that matter, the corduroy road itself had been
strong indication that it must lead to a mining camp, since only
mine would require the bringing in of equipment and supplie
heavy enough to require the use of wagons. There was no farmint
this far up in these mountains. The only use for mules here could
be for hauling, in and out of and around a mine--and this was
mine.

THE FMRTH LORDS $1


Now that he hal made the identification, it was easy to pick out
the miners' bunkhouse, the c.okshed, the offices and other
buildings used by the staff, as separate from the one or two
residences that would be occupied by those in charge here, who
ran the mine. There was even the waterwheel-driven sawmill,
sited on a stream that spilled over the valley wall about two
hundred yards away and plunged down a steep ravine into the lake
below. At the moment, the sluice gates in its wooden dam were
open and its waterwheel stood motionless, clear of the water. He
saw no other human or animal in sight. It was possible that
everyone was at work. But as at Mossby, the absence of people
moving about between the buildings roused an uneasiness in him.

He picked out the largest of the staff buildings and rode to the
three steps that rose to the small landing before its front door. He
dismounted. The pony had been trained to stand with its reins
trailing, "ground-hitched." The mule he untied from the lead
rope that had tethered it to his saddle leather, and retied the rope
to the end of the two-by-four handrail of the steps.

As he was doing this, a man came out of the door and stood on
the landing. He was tall, middle-aged, very erect and with a
noticeable pot belly. His hair was gray and thinning, and a gray
mustache drooped its ends around the corners of his mouth.

"Here, you!" he said. His voice was baritone and slightly

hoarse. "This is private property. I don't think we know you."
"I rather think not," said Bart, glancing up at him.

Bart had deliberately colored his voice with the accent of
someone who was upper class English; and as he had expected,
the contrast between his appearance and the accent checked the
other for a wordless moment.

Bart, however, had unavoidably reminded himself once more of
his father; and of his real schooling, which had taken place
between his father and himself in that private life they shared and
which the world had never suspected. As a boy, Bart had
necessarily to attend the small school that was held in Sainte Anne
so as not to attract attention to himself or his father; but it had
been a chore--until he got to know Emma and the school became
a place where he could see her. It would have been too easy in the
classroom for him to score a hundred per cent correct on all the
tests, and even to correct the occasional mistake of the teacher,
who himself had only had a high school education.

Bart's father had taught him many unusual things, including a
number of different accents, not only in English, but in French. If

	32
	Gordon R. Dickson


the man on the landing had spoken to Bart in French, he couP'
have replied as easily with an upper-class Parisian accent.
father had also taught Bart smatterings of other languages--so
German, Italian and Latin; as well as a great deal of the scien
and technical knowledge of the nineteenth century world, fr0
beyond the boundaries, and in most cases beyond the imagin!
tions, of the Canadians and Americans Bart was later to deal wit

What the older man had not taught his son was anything ab0i
his father's boyhood and family--an exception Bart had n
realized for a long time simply because he had known no othi
way. And somehow the boy had been brought to understand thi
questions about these things would not be welcome to him.

"I was headed up this way, so the storekeeper in Mossby asks
me to deliver a mule he said you'd lent to a man named Guillaur
Barre," Bart said in the same accent, mounting the steps. "Ther,
it is, tied to the handrail down there. I don't suppose you'd care
sell me another one--or this one, if you've been getting on
right without it. As you see, I've got quite a bit of stuff to pack.
may be wintering here in the mountains."

He was on the landing by the time he had finished this speec
and was interested to discover that the other man was a good de
shorter than his first appearance on the raised platform of t
landing would have given anyone to believe. The mine man had
imposing upper body and arms, but his legs were short, so that,
they stood facing each other on a level, the other was revealed,
spite of his erectness, to be a good four or five inches shorter th
Bart.

• 'Oh?" he said now, still clearly off balance from the control
between Bart's language and appearance. "Well, I don't know.
mean--well, come in."

He opened the door behind him and backed through it. Ba
followed him through into what seemed to be an outer office
There were two tall secretary's desks and writing stools, althougl
no one else was in view at the moment, and a sort of bench alon
the wall with a couple of instruments that Bart took to b
microscopes. There was a dustiness and an air of relative unuse
the room. An open door in a far wall gave a glimpse of wh
seemed to be another office in the rear of the building.

"Well, we..." The mine man was clearly flounderir
"... appreciate your bringing the mule back. If there's anythiq
we can do by way of return..."

"As a matter of fact, there is," said Bart, and he repeate'

I
	THE EARTH LORDS
	33


much of his previous words about needing anothcr mule.

"Sell you a mule?" said the man. "By the way, my name is
Alan Morrison." Bart chose not to ask about the man Arthur had
named, Charles Waite.

"Bart Dybig," said Bart.

They shook hands.

"About selling me a mule . . ." said Bart.

"Oh yes. I'm afraid that's not up to me. I'd have to have you
talk to our stock handler. Of course, I'll explain to him . . . come
with me; and we'll go find Sorley. He's the stock handler."

Morrison started up and reached for the door handle. Bart
moved so that he stood in the way of its being opened.

"First," he said, "you might want to give me a receipt?"
"Receipt?"

"Yes, you know," Bart came down a little harder on the
accent, "for the mule I've brought you. Just so I've something to
show the man I got it from that I did what I promised to do with
the animal."

"Ah. Of course," said Morrison. He turned back to one of the
desks, took a piece of paper, dipped a pen into an inkwell and
scribbled on the piece of paper.

Bart watched him curiously. There was something wrong here
but he could not put his finger on exactly what it was. Receipts
were normally never asked for or given out in the western prairie
and mountains for animals lent and returned like this. This man
Morrison might be from the east of Canada, but he would know
that much if he was on the staff at a western mine like this. Of
course it had been Bart who had asked for the receipt, as a sort of
test and stall...

Granted, the man had been surprised and for some reason
shaken by Bart's arrival. The fact still remained that he was acting
strangely; and Bart's ever-ready wariness was stronger than ever.
He studied Morrison as the other stood at the desk, writing.
Plainly, he was not armed in any way; and unarmed he should be
no serious threat to Bart, even if Bart had not had both knife and
revolver at the belt under his jacket.

The situation was puzzling. But Bart actually did need a
replacement for the mule, if he was to give it up: Also, Arthur had
said that here there would be people who would know about Bart's
relations, if the knowledge existed. But when Arthur had said
that, Bart had taken it for granted that he was being directed to a
town or settlement. Why should miners, who were usually from

some other part of Canada or the U.S. originally, and normal!
did not know an}' territory but that immediately surrounding
mine, have an) information about where relatives of Bart mighty
living?

Morrison finished his writing and handed, the receipt to B
with a snappiness that was almost a flourish. Evidently he
getting over his initial uncertainty with Bart. Bart glanced at t[
receipt. It was a simple few lines giving the date and noting that
mule named Sidewinder, originally lent to Guillaume Barre,
been returned this day by Bart Dybig--with Morrison's signatu
at the bottom.

"Come with me," said Morrison. "We'll find Sorley and
him about selling you a mule. We're having to make some repair
at the moment and there's only a few men around to do that a
some general cleanup while the mine's idle. We'll look over in th
bunkhouse. Sorley was up late last night as I seem to remember.
think he may be catching a nap."

Morrison led the way out of the building and down the stepl:
The day had turned cloudless and now in the later hours of th
afternoon, the hale rock under their feet and the naked grani
walls of the two close valley sides had warmed from the sun an
now threw back their radiated heat at everything in between the
so that Bart felt the heat like a blow as he walked with Morriso
across to the long, t-story building.

So the mine was all but shut down at the moment? That would
explain the fact that he had seen no one moving outside t
buildings when he came in; but it did not feel right. The wh0
mine did not feel right; and Morrison himself rang as false as:
lead dollar.

When they reached the bunkhouse, which again had three step
up to a small landing before the door they approached, Morris
reached the landing, then stood aside to let Bart go first. B,
stopped and shook his head. His suspicions must have bee
showing, for Morrison did not urge him to go forward, but put k
hand on the knob and pushed the door open, shouting as he di

SO.

"Sorley?"

There was the mutter of something unintelligible from withi
and Morrison entered. Bart stepped through after him,
stopped, one pace inside the building.

The whole lower floor of the building was one large room.
that room, only the near end was occupied with cots, spaced ap

	THE EARTH LORDS
	35


by small chests of drawers. There were ten cots in all, and six of
these were occupied by men half asleep and just waking up, in
various stages of undress.

It was none of this, however, that rang a sense of danger, loud
and clear inside Bart. What had checked him so suddenly barely
inside the door was the fact that from the dust on the empty
section of the floor to the clutter around the beds that stood close
together at this end, clearly the whole space had not been filled
with cots for a long time, if ever. And it was clear from inside that
the second story that had been promised by the outside appearance
of the building did not exist, or if it did it had no floor, and
was open to Barf's view from the doorway. The open expanse
almost shouted at him that the building was a fake, a mockup.

But he had no time to do more than notice this. He became
aware suddenly that Morrison had stepped to one side and back
against the wall to the right of the door through which they had
both just entered. Even as he turned his head to see what the other
man was doing, he caught sight of Morrison's hand closing on and

pulling down a wooden lever set in the wall, a lever connected by a
movable joint to a length of two-by-four going upward--and in

the next second something fell on and all around him.

It was a net.

Instinctively, he tried to throw it off, and his arms became
entangled; while at the same time, as he tried to turn, his legs
became tangled also in the meshes and he fell. A moment later,
the men from the cots were all over him.

Something hard hit the back of his head, and that was the last
sight he had of the interior of the bunkhouse.

It seemed to him that he was only unconscious for a second, no
longer than the time it takes an eye to blink; but when he opened
his eyes, he was someplace else. Just where, he did not at first
notice, for with the return of consciousness a blinding headache
i had exploded in his skull.
t He fought that as his Indian childhood had taught him to fight
tall pain--by putting it off at arm's length from him, treating it as

if it was something separate and apart from himself. It was a
knack, no more. As a very young child he had tried earnestly to
I master the technique and failed utterly; until one day, suddenly, it
worked. As he later tried to describe it to his father, it was a sort

of forgetting of the pain even as it happened, split-second by
t split-second. The pain had not gone away; it had simply become
something that could be recognized or disregarded at will.

	36
	Cordon R. Dickson


	So, now, with his headache from the blow on the head.

	"... Good," he heard Morrison's voice saying. "I was afra

your man had hit him too hard and wasted him. You've got to tra
those men of yours, Sorley. We need them to get us people ill
this, but we need the people they get us to be alive and able.'

Bart looked up. He was lying on a sort of tray with one foot ov
a blacksmith's anvil, in what seemed to be a rocky cave ab0
twelve feet in diameter. The blacksmith, a short, square man wi
a gray spade beard and a leather apron under a checked shi
pocked with small black burn-holes, was just finishing up tl
fastening of a hinged ring, made out of three-inch wide bar sto¢
around Bart's right ankle. He was closing the ring by hammeri
the white-hot legs of a staple through two holes drilled in tl
turned-up ends of the open part of the ring. The legs of the stap
were several inches from Bart's leg, but their heat was cl0
enough to his skin to make Bart put his pain-control trick to w0
a second time.

Morrison stood watching. With him was a tall, thi¢
shouldered, clean-shaven man of about forty, with a smooth
polished, three-foot length of inch-thick wooden rod tucked und
his arm. He was dressed in dark, baggy trousers and a dark n
shirt that was open at the collar, showing a muscular neck.

"Just lie still," said this man to Bart, taking the rod from um
his arm and holding it ready in his fist. Bart made no move. T}
were three to his one. Still, on his feet, he might have tried i
luck against them even though the man holding the stick handl
it as if he had had some experience using it. But attempti
anything starting from his present awkward horizontal positi
was plainly foolish.

The stick-handler, thought Bart, must be the Sorley wh
Morrison named earlier and who he had been talking to just nc
Bart tried to remember if Sorley had been one of those they
wakened on entering the bunkhouse, but could not. The questi
was chased from his mind by the realization that already ent
cling his other ankle was a ring like the one now being put arou
his right ankle.

"What do you think you're doing?" Bart said to Morrison
"We're a long way from courts of law out here," s:
Morrison, "so we make our own justice. Did you think
wouldn't recognize Guillaume Barre because you've growr
beard? Or that we'd forgot you stole the mule in the first pla
Borrowed it, indeed!"

	THE EARTH LORDS
	37

"Mule stealing--just like horse stealing--," said Sorley.
Incongruously, he had a high-pitched, rasping tenor voice. "In
lots of places they'd hang you for that. You've just been sentenced
to ten years' work in the mine."

Bart ignored the clean-shaven man. He kept his eyes fixed on
Morrison.

"Along with those other workers you need?" he asked the
pot-bellied man.

Morrison did not look at him or answer him.

"Your story about Guillaume Barre's as much of a lie as that
so-called bunkhouse you took me to," said Bart. "Who are you
anyway? What're you mining here that you can't do it with

regularly hired miners, aboveboard and honestly?"

Morrison turned to Sorley.

"Take him to the latrine," Morrison said, "then chain him up
to wait for the shift just coming off work."

He went out. The blacksmith, his work finished, shoved Bart's
leg off the anvil and it fell heavily to the floor. Bart started to sit
up and found the stick hovering in the air inches in front of his
face.

"When I tell you," said Sorley, "and only when someone tells
you, do you do anything from now on. Get that straight!"

Bart said nothing. Perhaps half a minute went by and the stick
did not move. Then it was withdrawn from before his face.

"Now you can sit up," said Sorley. "In fact, stand up! Stand
up and move where I tell you to move to."

Bart got up. On his feet again, he was able to see that Sorley
wore a revolver in a holster at his belt. It was a good thing, thought
Bart, he had not tried to attack them all from his lying down
position.

Sorley herded Bart out the door of what was obviously an
underground blacksmith shop, into a tunnel lit at only the point
where they emerged, by a parafin lamp fixed to one rocky wall. A
faint breeze blew in Bart's face, back past him through the
doorway. It must, he thought, be caused by whatever vent
connected the blacksmith's shop to the surface--the gases from
such Work would have to be carried away somehow.

"Stand still!" said the voice of Sorley behind him; and he felt a
blow against his back in the area of his right kidney--probably
from the end of Sorley's rod. A moment later Sorley came around
in front of him, carrying a cap with what looked like a small lamp
attached to the front of it. He lit the small lamp with a

flint-and-steel sparker, and a pale glow washed out from it intot

darkness of the tunnel. Sodey jammed the hat onto Bart's

and stepped once more around behind him. The

hammer in hand, followed along.

"To your left. Move, now!" said Sodey from behind.

He moved, the light from the lamp on his cap showing the

walls of a tunnel about six feet wide and the same distance i

height, opening out of darkness before him as he

They came close to an outhouse odor which turned out to

from a dark opening in the rock off to his left.

"Stop!" said Sorley. "The latrine. Use it while you can.

won't get another chance for twelve hours."

Bart turned and went in, leaving Sorley waiting outside.

was called a latrine was clearly an abandoned length

which was now given over to be a place for the disposal

bodily wastes. He took Sorley's advice and when he was

came back out again.

"Now," said Sorley. "Straight ahead."

They continued to another opening, this one also lit by

fastened to the rock wall of the tunnel beside it. This opening

smelled, but more of unwashed bodies and clothing than

else. At Sorley's direction he turned in and his lamp lit

chamber hewn out of the rock, with what looked like a

wooden table down one wall. The table was empty except

man with a badly swollen leg. The man lay flat on the

secured there by a chain that was fastened to the rocky wall at

far end of the room, and then ran through the staple on one

man's leg irons; it was held to the near wall by a massive

Sorley lit a lamp inside the chamber.

"Go lie down beside him!'Y He prodded Bart forward.

moved down along the table, climbed up and, lay down next to thi

man with the swollen leg, who stared at him with interest--

seemed to. It was hard to read his expression, for hair and bear

tangled together hid nearly all his face. His clothes were torn an!

worn to rags.

Sorley had meanwhile unlocked the padlock. He came do

with the free end, poked it through the staple on Bart's righ!

leg-iron and pulled it on through. He pinched out the wick of t

lamp in Bart's hat. The blacksmith stood close at hand, watching

	hammer in hand.
	I

	"Save your carbide for work hours," Sorley said.

	He went back up to the far end of the room, carrying the end

	THE EARTH LORDS
	39

chain, which he refastened to a heavy bolt set in the rock of the
ill there, locking it in place with the padlock.

"Now lie quiet until your shift comes back. Then you'll be


He turned out the lamp he had lit and left, leaving Bart, with
te other man, in darkness except for what little light reflected
to their rocky prison from the lamp in the tunnel, outside the
pening.

The man beside Bart stirred his leg on the bare boards. His
aice came hoarsely out of the darkness, like the voice of a man
ho has gone so long without talking that his vocal cords have
early forgotten how to work.
"Welcome to hell, friend."

four


TH LENGTH OF the chain that dragged behind Bart, like all
lengths of that chain that bound the moving line of ragged
dressed men together, pulled at his ankle and rang on the rock
floor of the tunnel. But he no longer noticed its sound or
weight. As always, his mind was at work on other matters; and h
body automatically followed the movements of the man one st
in front of him, the leagth of that step determined by a pi
dropped through the link of chain just before the chain pass
through the staple on the right leg-iron of the man ahead.

They moved in unison because they had to, because their
were spaced apart and linked together by the chain; but Io
practice had made that unison almost an instinctive movement.

"Duck," the word came back down the line of men, pas
from each one to the man behind him.

Bart was fifth in the line of eight, and far enough from t
guard in front with his lantern so that the warning was ordinarili
necessary. As usual, the small lamps by which they worked
which were a part of the caps they wore had been put out bef0
they were moved, so that they would be that much less likely t
know where they were being taken. But Bart knew anyway. Just
he now knew the low point in the tunnel ceiling was coming!
However, he ducked and dutifully repeated the word back over hi
shoulder even as he bent his knees and his neck.

He was taller than most of the men on the chain; and during t
first few weeks here in the mine where they lived and w,rked,
had taken several hard blows on the head before learning t
respond to that warning immediately. . and without question. Th
sickening crack of the r6ck against his thankfully thick skull
in his memory now, even though time had turned the lesson int
an unthinking reflex. But now he knew when such bumps wed
coming, just as he--evidently alone among all the men on
chain--knew the route they were on and the destination in t
mine to which they were headed.

i

	TIlE EARTH LORDS
	I

	He knew these things because he had qualities of survival in him

	that his captors did not guess, nearly all of them the result of things

	learned either during his childhood years in the Indian camp or later

	from his father. Most of the captured men driven to work here died

	in a matter of months, if not mere weeks; but long before they died,

	they sank into an apathy in which they did not talk and hardly

	seemed to think at all. Seeing this, Bart had deliberately kept his

	brain busy every moment of his every waking hour, in the long

	months he estimated he had been imprisoned here.

	He had found in himself two tools for doing this; and the first was

	a legacy from his father. His father had not only been an

	omnivorous reader, always surrounded by books; he had also hada

	prodigious memory. And Bart, growing up at his side, had thought

	it only natural that anyone should remember word for word a book

	he had read once; consequently, with his child's retentive memory

	he had stored in the back of his head everything he read, so that by

	concentrating a little he could see it all, page by page in his mind,

	and reread it as if it was physically before him.

	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

ordon R. Dckson


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 ma
who actually handled the explosives. The explosives were packed
into the holes they drilled, to set off explosions that loosened th
ore they then gathered; and which they then put in the small
high-sided metal cars, pulled by the mules, who also worked he
in the darkness and dampness. Gregory, up front with a revolver a
his belt and a ready rod of polished, three-foot hardwood in on
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 utte
darkness suddenly descended. Up front, Gregory had suddenl
blown out his lantern, and now not even faint glimmers of lig
were lancing back occasionally between the moving bodies in fron:
of Bart. Bodies which had obediently stopped.

"All right, come on now. Pick up your chains." It was GregoI
again, but now speaking in something barely above a whisper.
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 chaiI
that connected the shackle on the ankle of his right leg with that
the right leg of the man in front of him As quietly as possible,
moved ahead--and came out into a room so large that the fei
lamps burning on its far wall re dimmed by distance.

We wait here, Gregory whispered. There 11 be people
coming through. If one of them so much as looks this way becaus
of a noise you've made . . ."

Bart moved, as silently as possible, out sideways, half a stq
from behind the man in front of him, to get a better view. He w
aided by the fact that the tunnel they had just emerged from ha
now entered this larger cavern at an angle, so that they now stoo
almost in echelon, able to look clearly across at the other si
where the far lights burned like yellow glowworms, at distanc
Bart estimated to be about thirty feet apart. The walls of

I

THE EARTH LORDS 43


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 frout 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--tbe 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,
en 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 wuld 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
verseers had no real fear of anyone escaping. Even if one of them
zould get loose from the chain or slip off without being seen at
ome 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
.scapee found his way to the front of the mine, he would still have
:o pass a sort of guard post that Bart had been told of, up where the
nine opened to the surface.

He remembered no such guardhouse himself because he had

	44
	Gordon R. Dickson


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
wund, 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 coming 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 rclatively
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.

THE EARTH LORDS
	45


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
¢as 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 foltowed 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 coworkers
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.

	46
	Gordon R. Dickson


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

She was dressed in men's clothing, with her hair either cut off!
done up high on her head. In either case, it was hidden by a man
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
the Scottites. She could not have lied to him about her brother.
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. Withi!
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
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
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 f0
the eleven or so hours before they would be wakened to anotho
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
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 whichf
passed the chain that bound him together with the others on thisi
bed.

The fingers of both hands found the staple; and in th¢l
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 r
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
ere 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 heals 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 he 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 corner 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

	48
	Gordon R. Dickson

first, and then visible nightly changes, bending the staple first
way, then the other.

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

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

He could feel it move as he put pressure on it. It bent slowly1
his right, and he reversed his efforts. Now it bent to the left. To
right again . . . Again, and again, the time needed less and le
each time ....

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

He had frozen, instantly, at the sound that had seemed to him
echo through the room. Now he stayed still, holding his breat
waiting for any evidence that the noise had roused any of his fell0
workers. But it had not.

He waited, still without moving, counting the passage of the slo
seconds in his mind like a child... "un Napoleon, deu
Napoleons, trois Napoleons . . ."

Unmoving, he counted ten minutes that way, counting to on
hundred and then keeping track of the hundreds on his fingers. Bu
by the end of that time, still, none Of those around him had ma
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
had snapped, just at the point where it had flexed against the flan
of the leg iron. He was able to get his ight thumb through the cur
of the staple, now, and he flexed the unbroken leg to his right
Once... twice, faster and faster--another ping.

Again he went through the slow process of waiting to see if t[
noise had awakened any of his chain-mates, this time holding tt
broken-off top end of the staple in his fingers.

But they slept on. At the end of another ten minutes he put t
end of the staple into the one pocket of his leather jacket which sti

'HE EAR'H LORDS


had no hole. There should be no evidence left behind that would let
his guards guess how he had escaped. He got a grim pleasure from
imagining their puzzlement. He would simply, inexplicably, be
gone from the chain and the chamber.

He moved more carefully and silently than he had ever moved in
his life before. Now, with escape close, he was determined not to
be tripped up by any small clumsiness or mistake. Carefully he
checked with his fingers along the lengths of chain to right and left
of the leg-iron that had held the staple. There was slack in the
linked metal both ways and that slack lay silently on the boards of
their common bed-surface.

His fingers felt their way back to the now topless staple. They
closed on the chain that lay between the broken uprights. Slowly
and as silently as possible he began to lift up, freeing the chain from
what was left of the staple.

The links of iron chinked against each other as they were
lifted--but there was no change in the night sounds around him.
No sign of the sleepers waking. His movement of that part of the
chain he held necessarily made audible movements in its further
links where they lay on the wooden planks at each side of his right
leg. Small movements, but to him the noise each made in. moving
was heart-stopping.

But the sleepers continued to sleep, the snorers to snore. The
moment finally came when the chain was completely free of the
staple, and he was able to draw back his leg--carefully, so that
the leg iron itself would not scrape on the boards below it--and
lay the freed length of chain silently down.

He waited again for a couple of minutes. Then, slowly and in
utter silence, he began to lift his body on his arms to the foot of the
bed, then to extend first his right leg, then his left, silently over the
edge of the bed onto the floor below. And finally to lever himself
forward and stand upright, legs well apart, so that the irons still on
his legs should not strike against each other and make more noise.

At last, he stood upright and free in the utter darkness. He felt
behind him with the palm of his hand for ends of the planks that
made up the bed. When he found them, he turned, using them as a
guide, and began softly, step by step, to move toward the entrance
that would let him out into the tunnel beyond.

He knew the distance to that entrance to the inch. His eyes had
measured it at every opportunity. His mind had divided that
distance countless times by the length of the foot movements he was
used to taking as part of the chained line of men, so that he knew

	50
	Gordon R. Dickson


the number of steps he must take to leave the sleeping chamber
With his left hand touching the ends of the bedkplanks as he went
he moved slowly past the sleepers.., until at last his outstretche
right hand touched the rough rock at the right edge of the entrance.!

His left hand went on to find the left edge of the entrance. He
found it; and he turned, following his left hand around the corner of
the hewn rock, into the tunnel, facing now in the direction the map
in his head had told him would lead him eventually toward the front
of the mine and the exit; past whatever guardhouse existed there, to
the surface and freedom.

"Rapidly he left the sleeping chamber behind him. His shoes, like
those of all the prisoners who had been there more than a fen
months, had fallen apart quickly in the damp air and on the rocky
surfaces; and he moved silently in bare feet protected by the thick
callouses on their soles.

The barriers to escape for the prisoners had always been massive
but clumsy, just like the mining itself. One of the prisoners who
had come after Bart into their chained working group, but who had
lasted only a month or so before dying, had once been a miner; and
he had told the rest of them that those in charge here were working
the mine both carelessly and amateurishly. They were working only
on the richest veins they could find, and driving more tunnel than
they needed in proportion to the ore they brought out. They seemed
to prefer to use brute strength rather than cleverness in getting gold
from the rock.

The same attitude was apparent in the way they held theil
prisoners. The prisoners were not worked effectively. The killin$
conditions under which they lived wasted a large amount of the
strength they originally had when they were first brought in, and the
work that might have been gotten out of them under more humane
conditions. In the same way the barriers to their escape were
obvious but simple. The leg-irons and the chains were one; the
lightlessness that the prisoners were kept in at all times except when
they were either working or going to and from work, was another.

But Bart had now defeated both things. True, his mental map did
not show all of the tunnels and workings of the mine, but it showed
enough of them so that he could deduce the mine's general pattern.

That pattern, happily, was excessively simple. For all practical
purposes the mine was all on one level. When an ore-bearing vein
plunged downward too steeply, the mine managers simply went and
found another vein, rather than digging down and creating a lower

THE EARTH LORDS
	51


level of tunnels and workings. Also, even on its single level, the
pattern was a simple layout of workings and tunnels branching out
on both sides from a single main tunnel, that lit way through which
Arthur, Emma and the rest had moved as Bart and his team had
stood and watched them pass.

Those who managed the mine evidently had assumed that even if
a prisoner should get loose, he would still be helpless by reason of
the utter darkness of the tunnels. They had evidently believed this
because they, themselves, would have been helpless, there in the
dark. So they had not imagined someone like Bart, who would
learn to live by touch, to know by feel the very walls he passed; and
who had counted his steps, translating them into actual feet and
inches. Essentially, he told himself, now, all he had to do was find
his way to the central tunnel and then follow that toward the front of
the mine rather than to its rear.

In the darkness, even the guards like Gregory would never have
been able to do this. But Bart went as confidently, once he had left
the sleeping chamber, as if the route was brightly lit all the way.

Ironically, in this case, he was discarding all the other routes he
had worked out over the months in his head, and was simply
following the route Gregory had taken them on earlier this same
laboring period, to the new vrking. That way had led them
directly to the large chamber and the main tunnel. It had to be the
main tunnel, or the party containing Arthur and Emma would not
have passed through it. To say nothing of the fact that their route
had lamps permanently fixed to its wail, which was a sure
indication that it could only be the main tunnel.

He could hear as he went the sound of his regular breathing and
the light scrape of his foot callouses on the rocky floor underfoot,
even these slight sounds magnified by the echoes of the mine, and
by the lack of competing sounds for his ears. Under the light touch
of his fingertips--right hand against rocky wall, now--the rough
surface of the tunnel side slipped past.

His legs still automatically moved in the short, regular steps
conditioned in them by the length of chain that had measured him
from the man who had walked just in front of him. He was content
that they should move that way, so that he could be sure of the
distance covered with each step and the accuracy of his count of the
distance to the entrance in the wall of this tunnel that he sought
next.

Twice his fingertips lost contact with rock and touched air for a

	52
	Gordon R. Dickson


brief moment before they made contact with the stone side of the
tunnel again. But these were side tunnel entrances he knew and had
expected.

Only forty-two more steps now, according to his mental map,
before he came to the tunnel junction he sought; the one at which
Gregory had made his first turn yesterday on his way leading them
to a new work-place and site of that chamber where he had
glimpsed Arthur and Emma.

Forty-two, forty-one, forty.., he counted off the steps; and, as
he counted the numeral one his fingers slid once more into empty
air.

He halted; and turned right.

His right hand reached out and found the wall of the other tunnel
leading away from the one he had been following at an angle of
some forty degrees. He began to move along this new route.
Roughly an eighth of a mile of underground going; and, five turns
later, he stepped into the large chamber.

There re no lamps illuminating the far wall now. Bart stood
for a moment, staring into darkness but seeing, in his mind's eye,
the chamber just as he had seen it that one time previously. So far
he had encountered no light in any tunnel, nor heard any sound that
might indicate anne else was moving in the mine near him. But
now, as soon as he should cross the chamber to the wall where the
lamps had burned, he would be both in unfamiliar territory and in
the one tunnel where his chances of encountering someone would
be considerably increased.

He hesitated, searching the darkness before him with his nose
sniffing for any scent of burning lamp fuel and his ears strained to
pick up any sound, no matter how distant, of movement along the
way he planned to go.

But he smelled and heard nothing.

Satisfied, he began to move again. Fifteen hours before ther
would have been no doubt about which way he would have gone. He
would have turned and follo,ed the left wall with his hand--a wall
he had seen had only one other tunnel opening before the opening
of the main tunnel leading to the mine entrance, so that he could
not go wrong.

Now there was still no doubt. But it was not to the left he would
turn. It was to the right, in the way the party they had watched had
taken Emma.

chapter
five


THERE WERE TWO ways of crossing the iightless space before him.
One was to feel his way around the wall to his right until he came
to the opening that would be another entrance. Whatever entrance
he found that way should stand a very large chance of being the
opening to the main tunnel that Emma's party had taken. He
remembered, though, that outward-curving wall he had seen in
silhouette against the dim lighting in the chamber, before--he
had not been able to see past it, and there remained the chance
that between where he stood now and the main tunnel he wanted
to follow, there might be other tunnel openings. If there were one
or more stch intervening entrances and he simply turned into the
first opening he came to, thinking it was the main tunnel, he could
indeed become lost.

His other route was to trust to the image of the room in his
memory, and walk directly forward across the open middle of the
chamber until he came to the far wall. Any wall encountered by
going straight forward in a straight line must be the wall he had
seen lit up, essentially that part of the main tunnel with the
fixed--if now unlit--lamps, which ran through the chamber. He
need only turn right then, keeping his fingers touching the wall,
and he would be certain to be headed down the main route in the
way Emma and the others had gone.

The second way was the sure one--unless he went astray in the
darkness with no wall to touch; and walked in a curve or off at an
angle, so that he hit the wall to his left or right before he came up
against the wall straight ahead. He knew that in the dark most men
tended to walk at a slight angle or a curve when thinking they were
traveling in a straight line. If he ended up doing that, he would
already be lost. For he would then have no way of knowing which
way to turn, right or left, to go where he wanted. He could end up
at the mine entrance or in some abandoned tunnel.

He stood for a second more, thinking it over. Even as he
thought, he could see clearly in his mind's eye how the chamber

	54
	Cordon R. Dickson


had looked. It could not be more than fifty feet to the wall he
wanted to reach. He must take the bold way.

He closed his eyes and let go of the wall he presently touched.
Touching nothing, hands outstretched, he concentrated on the
picture in his mind. Then, step by step, he began to walk across
it--not the real, darkness-filled chamber which his body
occupied--but that remembered room in his mind.

He counted his steps as he went. Fifty feet had been his
estimate at the time; and he must trust himself. Fifty feet would
have been a little over thirty-four of his chain-limited--and now
accustomed--steps. If he hit a wall mor than half a dozen steps
before then, he had most certainly curved off and gone astray. If
he went more than a few steps beyond those thirty-four it was
possible that he had simply made the distance longer by angling
off in coming to the wall he sought--but there would also be a
strong possibility that he had taken a large curve into some farther
intervening section of the chamber, or toward a side wall. In either
case he would then face the question whether to continue to go to
his right, hoping that whatever entrance he came to was the right
entrance.

"... twenty-four," he counted in his mind, "twenty-five,

twenty-six, twenty-seven..."

--so far, so good.

"... twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Thirty." He was getting
close to the critical number of thirty-four. "Thirty-one, thirtytwo,
thirty-three, thirty-four--"

He paused at thirty-four and reached out as far as he could in
front of him; but felt only air.

He began to move again, slowly, one step at a time.
"Thirty-five... thirty-six . . ." He was walking now with
his arms at full length before him like a blind man feeling his way
in unfamiliar territory--"thirty-seven . . . thirty-eight..."

His fingers still touched nothing but air. He stopped. He could
feel his heart pounding in his chest; and, almost savagely, he
willed it to slow down. He ordered his mind and body to
calmness. Panic would do nothing to help him if he was indeed
astray. He took up his careful movement forward with arms
outstretched.

"Thirty-nine--"

His fingers bumped hardness. He stepped hastily forward in the
first long stride he had taken in a year and a half; and the toes of
his right foot bumped cruelly against rough, vertical stone. He

flung his whole body against it, the right side of his face pressed to
it, his arms outstretched and his hands laid flat against its surface
in a feeling of relief as strong as love.

For several moments he merely stood clinging to it as someone
lost overboard from a ship might cling to a piece of drifting timber
he had been swept against by the waves.

Gradually, the feeling of relief ebbed.

He had found a wall. But was it the wall he sought7

If this was the one he had seen Arthur and Emma pass, there
ere the lanterns fixed to it, half a foot or so below ceiling level,
and at a distance from each other that he had estimated at some
thirty feet. He reached with his hands high on the wall and went
right.

He reached up to touch the corner above him where wall met
ceiling. He could reach it easily with his upraised arm half bent.
Holding it so, he shuffled along, counting his steps to measure the
distance.

"One, two, three--"

His forearm below his wrist jarred painfully against something
hard and thin, projecting at right angles from the wall. Almost in
the same moment his elbow touched something underneath it.

He felt downward with his hand, and his fingers touched the
slick glass sides of a mine lantern in its metal case. He felt a
second's longing for one of the matches he always used to carry,
but they had been taken from him long ago, with anything else
that might have been of use to him. Then common sense
reasserted itself, and he remembered he dared not light it, in any
case. Not only would its illumination attract the attention and
curiosity of anyone looking down the tunnel, but the fact of the
matter was that the darkness gave him an advantage over anyone
coming toward him. In fact, if anyone should come, his first effort
should be to put out any light the other was carrying.

He dropped his arm. The lantern did not matter, anyway. It was
merely proof of what he had needed to know. He was against the
wall he had had to find. He needed now only to keep it on his left,
to go in the way Emma had gone.

His sense of relief was a calmer, but a more lasting thing, this
time. He made himself stop and think.

He had been in a number of different parts of the mine in the
past months. Sometimes the rkings they were taken to required
crossing the main tunnel, according to the map in his head, and
sometimes they simply went deeper into the rock, but stayed on

56 odon R. Dickson

the same side of the main tunnel.

It should be safe to assume that they would always be working at
the farthest point at which the mine had followed the veins of gold
ore into the mountain. If that was so, then it was only reasonable
to assume that the main tunnel--though Bart's working group ha
never worked on it--was only driven forward when necessary to
keep up with the progress of the workings that were being dug
forward on either side of it.

He had always assumed, therefore, that the main tunnel went
merely to a dead end; no farther than the farthest of the workings
to which he had been taken.

So, since only yesterday Gregory had taken them to a new
working, crossing the main tunnel here in the process, then the
main tunnel itself should go for only a short distance more, then
stop.

But if that was so, what was that considerable party doing,
headed down it, beyond the chamber in which he had seen them?
Above all, where had Emma and her brother been taken?

Certainly not just to see the wall of rock at the end of a tunnel.
Where was Emma now?

She could not have been brought into the mine for any good
reason. The only reason for being here was to take out gold-laden
ore; and she was not physically fitted to be a miner--for that
matter, Arthur would probably have lasted no more than a week or
two in one of the chained groups.

They must have been headed toward something Bart could not
even imagine. There remained, he knew, the possibility that
Emma and her group had returned up the tunnel in the time
that had passed since he had seen them. But he did not believe
that. Whatever it was that they went to, it must be important, and
that implied time--it was more likely than not that they were still
down that tunnel to his right. Something inside him was certain
Emma had gone down it and not rome back. Perhaps Arthur had
been condemned by his fellow Scottites to something, and Emma
had insisted on sharing whatever sentence had been given to her
brother. It would be just like her to do something like that.

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 o 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 surf/ce 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

I

swimmer, lie 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
sensel 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

58 Cordon R. Dickson

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. "Wht 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 weremeven 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 heard was gone and
his hair had been cut short.

He looked again at the men about him. They were massively
muscled and looked to he 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

Gordon R. Dickson


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 in 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 (3handt 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 be 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

	62
	Gordon R. Dickson


stepped aside, his forearms alone raised, his hands palm up and
spread a little outward, almost as if he was about to beckon B
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 ap..
Ozzard moved forward abruptly, one quick step that had
without any tensing of his body by way of warning. The big right
hand of the bronze-skinned man closed crushingly on Bar'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 thum
released and Bart's arm was free.

As Ozzard blinked, dumbfounded, Ban 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
vuld 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. ,Bar,,
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

	64
	Gordon R. Dickson

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 Ban, pointing at the bowl.
Instinctively, Ban 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.

It was what it looked like, a meaty stew--not just with meat
flavor in the gravy of it, but with large chunks of what seemed to
taste like goat meat, although the dish had been so spiced with
cinnamon that it was hard to be certain. In any case, it tasted good,
and he got to work on it.

"I am Chandt," said Chandt.

Bart nodded, for his mouth was full. He swallowed.

"Dybig," he said. He met the other's eyes briefly and then
returned to his eating. "I heard the men call you Chandt."

"I don't care if you fight," said Chandt. "But if you do, you
mustn't hurt the other men seriously, for then they can't work for
the Lords. Learn to fight so that you win; but do not harm them
much. Here you cannot die, but you can be not-well; and anyone
who's not-well deprives some Head of his services until he's well
again. And that is bad."

THE EARTH LORDS
	65


Bart stopped eating to look at the other man.

"I know I'm below the mine," he said. "There's no windows
anywhere around here." He looked up at the lights over their heads
which made the room as bright as day. There had been similar
lights in all the rooms he had seen so far. They were round globes
that radiated illumination. Bart had at first assumed without
thinking that the globes enclosed gas lamps, but now, examining
them more closely he could see nothing inside them but brightness
that he could not examine closely.

Chandt had not replied.


"Where am I, then?" he asked Chandt.

"There is no special name for it," said Chandt. "It is away from
ordinary Earth and Time. Some call it 'Hell, but its proper name is
the Inner World."

"Hell?" Bart stared at him. The chained men in the mine had
called that Hell but with obvious bitterness and hatred. Chandt, on
the other hand, now pronounced the word almost worshipfully, as
if he had said not "Hell" but "Heaven."

"All the new ones ask where they are." Chandt looked away
from him, at the wall--no, through the wall. There was a look in
his eyes that was thoughtful and sad. "All of them wonder why

some rail this Hell. It's because they don't understand, at first."
"What don't we new ones understand?"
Chandt looked back at him, into Bart's eyes.

"You died," he said. "Just as all of us here did. Probably you
can remember, if you think hard enough about it, exactly how you
died. But whether you remember or not, now you are with the rest
of us in Hell for eternity; and here you will spend all your days from
now on serving the Heads."

He stopped speaking, and sat watching Bart. Bart sat in silence
himself for a moment, thinking.

"I don't believe I died," he said, finally.

Chandt continued to look at him. The expression of thoughtfulhess
mixed with something sad was there in his eyes again, but now
directed at Bart.

"It doesn't matter whether you remember or not," said Chandt.
"Most of us here in the end remember bow they died, but not all. It
makes no difference. Those who call it Hell mean "the word with no
discourtesy. We use it because to the Lords "'Heaven" is a special
place from which they, alone, came; and which brute beasts like
ourselves have never known and can never know. The closest we can
come to Heaven is to exist to serve the Lordly class. There are also

	66
	Gonion £ Dickson


the Hybrids, who are the children of those who take human
concubines; but you'll learn more about them later."

"Who are 'Lords'?" asked Bart. He had almost finished the
bowl of stew. "Can I have some more of this?"

"Clap your hands," said Chandt absently. "'One clap for one
bowl. If there are more of you, one clap for every bowl you want.
Would you like something to drink with it? You can have water or
beer."

Bart clapped his hands once, then turned back to Chandt.
"Beer," said Bart. At least it would have more taste than gter.
"The LofdsT" he reminded the other. Chandt looked through him
with that sad and distant look that had been in the shorter man's

eyes since Bart had asked where this place was.

"In a minute," he said.

They sat in silence until the white-aproned man brought 8art
another full bowl and spoon and took away the utensils he had
brought the first time.

"Beer. One," said Chandt to the serving man, who vent off
without a word and was back shortly with one of the largest
drinking glasses Bart had ever seen, filled with a brown liquid that
fizzed and held a head of foam above it. As the man left, Bart tasted
the liquid. It was sweet, more like a nonalcoholic root beer than
ordinary beer; but since he did not care whether it was alcoholic or
not, that made no difference.

He put the glass down and turned to Chandt, ready to remind the
other man again about his question. But Chandt spoke before B
could.

"Who and what the Lords are, you'll find out for yourself,"
Chandt said. "I'll tell you this much. They are an Elder Race, older
than we who call ourselves men. They have many strange powers.
My people had known of the Lords for many generations before I
came to serve them; but the world you live in is one of the Lords
hate, with good reason."

"Your people?" said Bart. "Who are your people?"

"They live far from this place. On the plains to the west of
Cathay. Whether they're still there I don't know. It may be the
world has killed them off, otherwise they would have conquered it.
I come from a race of conquerors. At one time we had conquered
all but a few small pieces of the world."

"When was this?" Bart had stopped eating to stare at him.

"A very long time ago. I was one of them, then. We rode west,
and farther west yet, conquering as we went. I told you most

THE EARTHLORDS
	67


remember their deaths, in time. I remember mine. It was at a bend
in the river. We were only a small part of Ogotai's force and the
Germans trapped us there, many to our one. In the bend where we
were, it was all marsh and our horses' legs sank deep in the muck,
so that they were hampered. On his horse, any one of us was
unconquerable, but without his horse a Mongol is only half a
Mongol. Still, we slew most of them before they killed us. They
had to kill us all to stop us; and so we died and I came to be a
servant of the Lords. In other places, then here, in the Inner
World."

"When did you and the Lords come here?" Bart watched the
other carefully.

Chandt shrugged.

"Who can tell time in Hell? Here we are beyond time. But I have
worn out fourteen belts serving the Heads."

Bart looked down at the broad band of black leather that
encircled the tree-trunklike waist of the other man. How quickly
would something like that wear thin? In any case he did not believe
what Chandt was telling him.

"You were one of the Mongols who tbught at the time of
Ghengis Khan?" he asked.

"I fought under the Great Khan, yes," said Chandt.

Ghengis Khan, Bart remembered from the history books he had
devoured in his father's study, was a Mongol chieftain who had
lived in the twelfth century. He had pulled together the multitude of
tribes of Mongols into one force, with which he conquered India,
China and as far west as eastern Europe. he had lived.

There were historians who felt that he would undoubtedly also have
conquered Europe if he had lived.

It was unthinkable that Chandt had lived that long. As unthinkable
as that the Lords, whose group must include the three
big-skulled, thin-limbed individuals he remembered seeing briefly
during an interlude in his unconsciousness, could be an Elder Race
of the sort Chandt described.

"You mean you've lived since the time of the Great Khan and
never grown old?" Bart said.

"Yes," said Chandt. "There is no change here; and no one ever
dies unless killed. The Heads have taken us beyond ordinary death.
And now you, too."

At that moment a tiny, very sweet bell chimed on the air. It
chimed again; and Bart traced the sound to Chandt's belt, to which
were clipped five small metal clips, each with a different colored

Cordon R. Dickson


jewel. It was impossible to say which jewel had made the sound, or
how.

"I had forgotten, in all this talk," said Chandt.

He reached down and took from his belt a clip with a yellow,
cat's-eye colored jewel. It ceased sounding the moment he touched
it.

He handed it to Bart.

"Fasten this to your belt and always answer when it sounds, no
matter what you are doing at the time. Say '/hear.' Say it now."

"I hear," echoed Bart, feeling foolish, speaking to the empty
air.

"And now we will go," said Chandt, rising. "For you are
called. I had not thought it would be this quickly."

chapter
six


BART FOLLOWED CHANDT out of the room. Within himself he had
abruptly become alive. His goal, here as it had been in the mine,
was to escape--except that the purpose was doubly imperative,
because he would not be escaping alone. He would be taking
Emma with him--because the only reasonable deduction was that
Emma was in this place also. She and her brother would not have
been in the mine as mere sightseers. They had to have been
headed toward the end of the tunnel that had dumped him in the
underground river. Although for Emma's party there must have
been some way to activate a bridge over that river.

So she must be here, and somehow he would bring her out of
this place with him when he went. Of course, by the same line of
reasoning her brother must be here as well. But whether she would
insist on Arthur's being taken along also was a bridge Bart uld
cross when he came to it.

First things first. And the first thing he needed to know was all
there was to be learned about this place connected with the mine.
Particularly, he must make himself a mental map here as he had in
the mine; the memory system of counted steps and turns that he
had developed while wearing the leg-irons could be used here in
the light as well as in the dark of the mine tunnels.

So it was he began his mental map with his first turn to the right
as they left the eating room, counting his first step up the corridor.
He continued as they went on past the other rooms Chandt had
shown him. They went for some distance and eventually came to
the end of the tunnel--or corridor would be a better name for it,
the bright lights and the light-colored walls gave more an
impression of being inside a building above ground than buried
deep in the earth.

In that end wall was set a tall door of metal with its surface
carved in bas-relief to show undersized children being whipped or
otherwise tortured and made to dance or do balancing tricks. Bart
stared at the figures with astonishment.

"Can you blame the Lords that they call us brute beasts?" said
Chandt as he opened the door.

He pushed Bart inside; and Bart found himself in a small,
square room with smoothly finished walls, floor and ceiling, but
otherwise either cut from the surrounding rc.k or panelled with
slabs of it. Four very large men i.n gray, knee-length tunics, belted
at the waist, and short boots of dark brown leather--men larger
than himself and those he had seen in the dormitory, and muscled
in proportion--took hold of him; and he elected not to struggle as
they put on him a tough, thick leather jacket of a dun brown.

It was like no garment Bart had ever seen before, for there were
no sleeves, in the real sense of that word--only casings within the
outer shell into which he was made to put his arms--in effect
locking those limbs helplessly in front of him once those dressing
him had buckled tight the straps that closed the garment at his
back.

None of the four, or Chandt, who stood watching, said a word
as this process of encasing Bart went on. Once he was completely
fastened within it, one of the men took hold of a leather cord
which depended from the middle of the chest area of the garment
and pulled Bart after him, out a farther door of the room and into
a completely different scene. Another of the men followed after
Bart, silently. Behind him came Chandt.

Bart was once more in a corridor, but here thick carpets
cushioned the floor beneath the soles of the light, moccasinlike
shoes they had furnished him at whatever time they had dressed
him in the trousers in which he had awakened. The walls of the
corridor were panelled in dark wood which shone under softer
light from the globes overhead in a ceiling that was twice as high
as the ones Bart had seen up until now.

The corridor led them out into a very large room indeed, with a
ceiling three or four times the height of the corridors back in the
area where Bart had awakened. They had come out into it by one
of a number of doors that pierced one wall under an overhead,
open gallery that ran the full length of the of the wall over their
heads. Opposite it was what seemed to be a great stained-glass
window, easily twelve feet high and twice that in width, lit from
behind so that the figures it showed glowed in the same quiet
lighting that had illuminated the carpeted corridor that had gotten
them here.

Alerted by Chandt's question earlier, Bart now noticed that all

THE EARTH LORDS
	71


the children depicted had enlarged heads--not so abnormally
enlarged as those of the three figures at his bedside in the episode
he remembered from a break in his earlier unconsciousness, but
larger than they should be. He had not recognized this difference
in them at first, the starved scrawniness of their bodies and the
things pictured being done to them having too overwhelmed his
attention to give him a chance to pick out fine details.

They came out through the pillared archways thatupheld the
gallery overhead, into the carpeted open spaces of the room. A
profusion of low, upholstered seats and tables, clumped into
islands that made a series of scattered lounges, seemed to fill the
vast space; and yet there was a great deal of open space between
those islands. They crossed between them and went to a pair of
great metal doors, that were again carved much as had been the
metal door Bart had seen earlier.

His escorts pressed a metal stud that was mounted on the
doorframe to the left of the doors. The doors swung inward, away
from him; and he found himself looking down yet another
carpeted corridor.

Standing in the center of this corridor, just inside the doorway,
was a middle-aged man. Unlike most of those Bart had so far seen
in this place, this man was not a particularly well-muscled
specimen. In fact, he was no more than ordinary, physically, and
he looked thin after the others Bart had so far met in this
place--except for the food-server.

This new man wore a short robe or tunic, a knee-length garment
belted at the waist, of a light brown color. His legs were naked
below this, and on his sockless feet were leather sandals with thin,
soft-lobking soles.

He looked at Bart, and at the two escorts.

"This one'll do," he said. His voice was soft, tenor, and a
little husky, but it reminded Bart of the voice of a singer he had
met once in an opera house in Denver some years back.

The escort who held the strap attached to Bart's leather
body-casing let it drop. He, his fellow, and Chandt turned away,
going without a word back out through the doors. These closed
behind them, and Bart turned back from watching them go to find
the eyes of the man in the robe watching him with what seemed to
be amusement.

His eyes were a bright blue, and the face was slim, almost
ascetic. Like all the rest Bart had seen here below, he was

clean-shaven; but his hair was brown and thinning back from his
forehead. It had been cut short and combed smoothly into place.
He smellod of soap.

"That's good," he said now. Like all the rest so far down here,
he spoke in English. "You act like you've got some brains. That's
very good. But I hope you don't let them carry you away and
tempt you to do anything contrary to what you're told. Believe
me, if you did you'd only make trouble for yourself--and the rest
of us."

He turned and began to walk away down the corridor.

"Follow me." He did not bother to turn his head as he gave tM
order. "Don't talk."

Bart followed him, shrugging, and staggered a bit, finding that
bodily movement such as a shrug could throw him off-balance as
long as his arms were held tight against his chest this way. But he
got himself back under control and continued to follow.

At the end of the corridor, perhaps a hundred feet or slightly
more down the way, were a pair of doors that exactly matched
those at the head of the passage. The stranger strode directly up to
the doors and pressed the metal button beside them. This time the
doors swung open toward Bart and his guide.

Two people were in evidence beyond the doors, both dressed
exactly as was Bart's guide; and both well-formed, clean-shaven,
middle-aged men. No words were spoken as Barf's guide stepped
to the side and motioned Bart to enter ahead of him. Bart did so,
and heard the doors close softly behind him. The guide had stayed
in that bare passageway, and Bart was alone with the two new
strangers.

Bart, in a wry, way, was once more feeling the old stir of
rebellion--and he amused himself with it, by checking his first
impulse, which was to ask questions. He suspected these men
were expecting any newcomer to babble questions; so he deliberately
stood silent, once more following his father's precept about
making the first move.

The room he had entered was small, with a door at each side
wall, to his left and right. Both the middle-aged men were
standing near the back wall, which appeared to be of bare but
white-washed rock. Each door was of a single wooden panel,
again set with bronze fittings. The wood of each door was carved,
but Bart could not see the details of that carving.

Bart deliberately looked around him, then returned his attention
to the two waiting men, and found them watching him. Still, they

said no word, and Bart remained silent, simply watching them and
waiting. After a moment, one of the two looked away from him
and moved closer to his companion; they did not look at each
other, but it was almost as if they had drawn together for mutual
protection. Bart grinned at them.

Again he heard the hell-sound that he had heard in the dining
area; this time, however, it seemed to come to his ears out of the
air, from no definite point. Instantly the two faces hefore him lit
up, and they moved. One went to Bart's right, toward the door on
that side of the room;the other moved to Bart's left, and took a
position near him. This one motioned Bart to turn and follow the
other- man, so Bart turned to his right, realizing that this put the
man on his left directly hehind him. But there was no point in
worrying about that, he thought; he was already helpless, for the
most part.

The door opened and again he was led through and into a
strange room. Without a word the two men conducted Bart down
another passageway--this one narrower and lower of ceiling than
the preceding one, but with softer, more yellowish lighting and
deep carpeting into which his feet sank.

On the walls, here, heavy tapestries hung from metal fittings set
into the wooden overhead panels, and were so close together that
their separations were hidden in the folds of the hanging cloth.
They were all of a thick cloth like velvet, mostly of a maroon
background color and with detailed scenes of some story seeming
to be worked into them in threads of gold, black, blue, green and
silver. Bart watched with interest as he moved down the passage,
turning his head to try to see both sides, for there seemed to be a
different narrative going on on each side of him.

In fact, now he thought of it, the two sides were vastly different.
On his right, in rich, warm colors, the cloth seemed to be laying
out scenes of life in what he thought were medieval-era palaces--
there were lordly men and beautiful women, eating well, listening
to singers and watching jugglers, riding horses, and doing other
things which seemed to date from the Europe of several centuries
ago. He had no time to investigate these tapestries further, for
those on his left were demanding more and more of his attention.

These tapestries had seemed at first to be of a set with the
others, in style and colors; but as Bart watched them more closely,
he saw that they set out the same sort of scenes of princely
entertainments, but with a difference. The tapestries on that side
showed a variety of cruelties--deer being torn apart by slavering

Gordon R Dickson

hounds as mounted lords and ladies watched and laughed;
hunchbacks being exhibited in chains for amusement; bears being
cgged into fighting each other--over and over, it seemed to BarL
the scenes were of handsome, cruelly laughing faces.

He came back to himself with a start. He had become so
wrapped up in watching the walls that he had not noticed the end
of the passageway approaching. But now they had arrived, the
door there had opened, and he was being passed into the custody
of yet another ordinary-looking man.
Thisonc was also dressed as the others had been; but he was
older, with thinning, gray hair and a wrinkled, pale face. His eyes
were brown, standing out darkly under this lighting and against
the paleness of his other features. Even as Bart finished noticing
this, he heard the door close behind him. The man before him
spoke.

"You're new," the man said. "You're strong. But you don't
know anything about our ways here. So listen and do what I tell
you. Only that."

He paused, watching Bart, his head cocked slightly to his right,
the dark brown eyes glinting with the lids half closed upon them.
He se, med satisfied with Bart's silence and went on.

"You're never to speak unless ordered to," he said. "Never
move until directed. Never laugh here. In your own quarters you
can laugh, but nowhere within these doors. Never scratch or
fidget. Hold still when your handlers place the chair upon your
back, and stand straight so as to keep the Lord as level and still as
possible."

He stopped again now, watching Bart closely. For the first time,
Bart felt doubt. To continue his silence and impassivity in the face
of people was a form of what had been called "dumb insolence."
This man was now beginning to recognize that. Now he was
deliberately waiting for Bart to acknowledge these instructions in
some way--and the rebellion inside Bart wanted to keep on
disappointing that expectation.

But perhaps he was not being wise.

He reminded himself that what he needed most was information.
And it would be easier come by if his captors thought him
duller and weaker than he was. It was much better to sacrifice that
bit of pride that was keeping him silent. By asking questions he
could appear normal, even dull; and at the same time perhaps pick
up some more information ....
"Where am I?" he asked; and he knew that only a bare instant

had really passed since the other had ceased talking and begun
watching him.

"Silence!" The voice of the other was louder and suddenly
savage, but satisfied now. "Didn't I just tell you never to speak
unless you were told toT' And he raised a hand that now, Bart
saw, held a slender rod. Before Bart had time to wonder what the
other expected to do with that tiny stick, the other had touched its
metal-shod end to Bart's cheek--and it felt as if a very small
horse had just kicked Bart in the head.

Bart's head jerked back from the rod, and he heard himself give
a grunt, even as he realized that the spot the rod had touched now
felt as if it had been touched by red-bot metal, and the area around
it tingled as if the nerves had been put to sleep and were just now
waking up. He became suddenly aware that he had backed up a
step and tried to bring his arms up in front of his face; only,
because those arms were still bound before him, the movement
had almost thrown him off-balance.

He watched the man in front of him. Yes, the other had wanted
that; some excuse to use his rod so that Bart would feel its power.
He heard his own breathing rasp in his throat. His eyes had begun
to water and his nose to run; and, in spite of his understanding of
what had happened, a grim fury had been kindled in him, along
with a deep sense of his helplessness.

"I can do that to you any time," the other man said to him.
The man's eyes were wide as he watched Bart. His nose seemed
sharper now, and the skin stretched more tightly over his
cheekbones. As Bart recovered his own control, he could hear the
breathing of the other man, quiet, but deep and rapid. The other
either enjoyed the giving of pain, or lived in some deep fear of
consequences to himself if Bart should fail to follow these orders.

Bart said nothing and made himself stand utterly still. After
nearly a full minute of silence, the other slowly began to relax.
His arms came back down to his sides, and the rod was tucked
back into some fold of his robe, out of Bart's sight. The man's
eyes returned to a more normal width and his head cocked slightly
to one side, consideringly.

"That's better," he said.

He turned and pushed a button on the wall behind him, and in a
moment a door opened.

Three men came through the door, all dressed in robes like that
of the man before him. They were younger than the other, and two
of them were carrying some sort of leather-covered device that

76 Gordon R. Dickson

bore a vagtle resemblance to a saddle--but a saddle with back and
arm rests. The third man closed the door behind him and then
stationed himself in front of it, taking a wide-legged stance with
his arms folded across his chest. His right hand held a rod like the
one that had just been used on Bart. And Bart now saw that the
older man had now moved to stand before the other door, by
which Bart had earlier entered the room. The other two men
paused in front of Bart.

"Turn around," one said. He was the slightest person Bart had
yet seen in his place, swarthy of feature and with an accent that
Bart could not place. He said nothing further, and Bart turned to
face the wall behind him.

He heard movement behind him. In a moment his back was
touched. He kept himself still, and felt a weight descend on his
shoulders. From the corners of his eyes he could see movements,
and he felt straps being tightened around his chest, fitting snugly
enough to define and lodge under the elbows of the arms hidden
within the leather garment. His shoulders seemed to each be held
in a vise that distributed into his body the weight that had settled
above his back, seemingly centered behind and above his backbone.

"Turn
around," he heard again; the command was punctuated"
by a light tap on his left temple area; and automatically he
swiveled in that direction as he turned. He found himself looking
at the four men again.

"Now follow these men," the older one said. "I'll be behind
you."

The fourth man opened the door opposite the one the three had
come through, and the three preceded Bart through it. On the
other side, as it closed, the three moved to the left and vanished
through another doorway, while Bart was commanded to move
ahead. Following orders from the man behind him, Bart was
directed to another door, through it, and down a short hallway,
until they came to a high-ceilinged, round room. It had the usual
deep carpet and very little by way of furniture; but there was a
wide staircase with a heavy balustrade that curved upward to the
right. At the height of four feet or so up the staircase was an
elevated platform, a kind of landing that had a vertical,
unrailinged side in the little alcove that was formed by the curve of
the stairs.

They stopped and waited for some time, which Bart used to
look about him. The room had a rich, cloth covering glued to the

walls, which were themselves curved, giving the room a round,
foyer look. There were six sconces topped with lit globes, set into
the wall at intervals. They were made of what seemed to be
ornately carved metal that was gold or gold-colored, and stood out
sharply against the cream and light pink of the wall-covering.

Overhead, the walls curved to come to a point above the center
of the room, very high; but the center of the ceiling was obscured
by a large, crystal chandelier that seemed to shed no light of its
own, but glistened and reflected in a myriad of pinpoints the light
that shone from the glass globes in the sconces below and
surrounding it.

They stood and waited.

seven


IN THE MOMENT of rest which had unexpectedly come upon him,
Bart took time out to try and put the discomfort of the chair on his
back out of his mind and examine the mental map he had been
making as far as it had so far developed.

As far as he could judge, now that he had the completed,
proportioned line of his journey in his mind's eye to examine, he
seemed to have come in along a straight line from the section that
held the Steeds' dormitories and other rooms such as the one
where the four men had harnessed him; and then he had made a
turn, a sharp right angle to another straight-line trip along a
section made up entirely of these carpeted rooms and tunnels;
these seemed to lie in relation to the line of the first section of
rooms as the crossbar lies in relation to the vertical line of the
letter T--His
thoughts were abruptly interrupted.

From somewhere out of sight on the balcony level above them,
that level to which the wide, curving stairway ascended, figures had
just appeared. Bart's first reaction was that they were children in
elaborate robelike costumes. Then he saw that they were a man and
a woman, but both were the size of the three he remembered briefly
standing over him and talking. In fact the man of the pair
approaching could have been the white-bearded one of the three.
He and the woman with him were a good deal less than five feet
tall. The man's head was bald except for a tuft of white hair above
each ear, and his face, above the narrow shoulders, sported a wispy
wh)te beard like that grown by the very old of those human races
who normally had little or no facial hair, such as Orientals or the
Indians of the Americas. There was something definitely familiar
about the man--and in a moment Bart was sure: the one
descending the stairs was indeed one of the three who had stood
over him in that momentary episode of consciousness before he
woke up in the dormitory. He was the one who had pointed out the
fact that evidently Bart had been escaping from the mine when he

	V/K EAR'/'H LORDS
	79


had fallen into their hands--and he had mentioned the fact as if it
was a point in Bart's favor.

Bart was suddenly, irrationally, cheered. He might not have
fallen among friends, he thought, but pedaps he had fallen in with
one of the lesser of his enemies. For, clearly, with the one of the
three who had talked of making use of him here, he had simply
exchanged one form of slavery for another.

It did not matter, he told himself now. Wherever he was,
whoever held him, he would escape. The determination to do that
was as much a built-in part of him as his body and mind.

But he had no time to think about that now. He was being
fascinated by the other small person who was accompanying the
little man down the stairs--not arm-in-arm, but close enough so
that the impression of intimacy was almost the same.

The other had seemed to he a beautiful blue-eyed young girl of
somewhere between nine and twelve years of age. Now it was plain
that she was a mature woman, if still much younger than her
companion. And whereas the man wore a rather plain, robelike
costume, up close the woman's dress was long and lacy, sweeping
the carpet on the stairs behind her as she came down; and her blond
hair was put up in an elaborate coiffure high on her head. The effect
was rather like that of a young girl dressed up in her mother's best
party gown. Like the man the exposed parts of her--arms, neck
and face--were white with the whiteness of skin that has not seen
the sun in years, if ever.

It was puzzling to Bart to see someone even this young so closely
partnered with someone as obviously old as the small man beside
her; for their intimacy was rather that of man and wife than
grandfather and granddaughter. It was only when they came to the
midway point of the stairs, much closer to him, and he saw the faint
lines of crow's-feet around the outer corners of her eyes, that all at
once he became aware of the cleverly applied makeup on her face,
and realized that the high-piled hair on her head helped to hide the

fact that her head, also, bulged. Then he began to understand.
Perhaps they were, indeed, husband and wife.

Clearly, the man and the woman with him were what Chandt had
called "Lords." But they seemed to Bart to be an almost gentle
couple, although that impression was somewhat marred by the slim
rod attached to the waist of the clothing of each. For the first time,
Bart found himself wondering which of the two he was supposed to
carry.
"In there--the alcove."

Gordon R. L)ickson


The whisper came from the man behind Bart, and at the same
time Bart felt the end of the other's rod--with no shock to it
now--pushing him forward. He moved into the alcove mentioned,
a small space of floor semi-enclosed by the curve.of the staircase.
The landing was just about level with his chest--a small space of
flooring larger than one of the steps that interrupted their descent at
that point..

"Turn." The whisper again.

He turned, putting his back to the landing.

"Back up." Bart backed until he felt the edge of the landing
touch his back, just above his ribs. "Stand still."

Sure of what was coming, Bart braced himself in position.

He barely heard the soft feet of the small man and woman reach
the landing and stop.

There was a moment of silence; and then he felt weight settle on
his shoulders and back. Either the man or woman was now in the
saddle they had fastened upon him.

There came a very light tap upon the top of his head. He heard,
however, no verbal order, and so he did nothing--although he
noted that unconsciously be had been resettling his body, shifting
his stance to compensate for the new weight bearing on it. For the
chair and the weight of whoever was in it, small though they might
be, was still enough to throw him considerably off-balance backward.
There was a tap on the back of his head.

"Forward!" It was the voice of the man who had guided him
here.

He took a cautious step forward, and then another. It was going
to be difficult until he got used to balancing the weight on him,
which threatened to drag him over backward. A touch on his right
temple from the rod of his rider.


Bart made a ninety-degree turn to his left. The rod tapped him
on the left temple--and he was already turning to his right when
the whisper to do so came again behind him. Another tap, another
turn, another tap, and he ended up facing once more up the stairs.
The woman still stood on the landing, watching. It was the man,
then, on his back.

But the two successive turns in opposite directions had disturbed
his new precarious balance. He swayed--but his sway was halted
by the end of the rod of the man behind him digging into his side.
This time the rod did not carry the powerful blow he had felt once
before; rather, it seemed to have a sharp, pinlike point, which felt

as if it sank deep into his side.

A second later that rod was knocked away-by the smaller rod of
his rider; and out of the corner of his eye, Bart saw the man bowing
deeply before the rider.

"Ne le touche pas plus!" the xrds came, unexpectedly, in
French from above Bart's head, in the slightly hoarse tenor voice of
an old man. Surprise held Bart still for a second. His rider had
clearly interfered to save Bart punishment with his order to the man
behind Bart not to much him again.

Once again, as in Bart's first remembered moment with the three
standing over him, whoever it was who now rode him had shown a
sort of kindness to him.

Small taps of the rider's rod against Bart's right temple turned
him once more with his back to the staircase. He moved, wavering
only slightly, and completed the turn with much more control than
he had shown in that sort of movement before. His guide was still
in view.

"Va t'en.t'' came the ridcr's voice.

Bowing repeatedly, the guide came around from behind Bart and
then backed away toward the door until he had reached it. Then he
turned and went out, closing the door behind him. Bart felt the
v, eight of his rider shift on his back--he moved his own feet,
widening his stance to compensate--and then the rider's voice,
speaking again in that odd, almost understandable tongue he
remembered from his moment of consciousness. The pronunciation
was off, he told himself, that was most of his trouble with it. If he
could just hear the words spoken a little differently . . .

The woman ansvred, from the staircase behind them.

A light tap of the rider's rod against the back of his skull started
Bart moving. He went forward, toward the door by which he had
entered and through which the man who had ordered him about had
just left. As he approached, it opened in front of him. There was
another tap on the back of Bart's head, and he continued his
movement along the corridor stretching before him. He was
learning that the only way he could balance his rider properly was
to move in a semi-hunched position that threw their mutual center
of gravity forward over his legs. It was an awkward and unnatural
position in which to walk, but it was the only way that would vrrk.

As he went, however, Bart found himself growing more familiar
with the needs of his burden. He found his steps picking up a
smoothness and ease that he had not thought would come to him
this quickly.

T, corridor led them into a series of rooms, through which
Bart's rider steered him. Bart noticed that one of the differences of
this section was that all the rooms here--which like every place
here underground must have been carved .out of the rock--were
very high-ceilinged, for no conceivable reason except the taste of
those who had caused them to be made so. The doorways were ALSO
higher than necessity alone would require and their tops arched to
high peaks, as in the architecture of Moorish cultures.

For the next three hours, obeying the light rod-taps of his rider,
Bart roamed the corridors and rooms of what he came to realize
was a vast underground establishment; and the map in his mind
grew busily. Very plainly, he was not going to learn the overall
layout of a place this size in one day.

Once he had discovered the trick of maintaining his balance with
a rider on his back and with his hands secured in front of him, there
had seemed no great work to the job of carrying the small old man
about. The weight of the Lord, he estimated, could not be more
than ninety pounds or so; and the chair contraption stopped onto
Bart would add less than five pounds to that.

As a matter of weight to be carried, therefore, it should be
nothing to someone his size. Nonetheless, as the time he spent
moving around under these conditions went on, the task grew
harder, the burden he bore seemed to become heavier and heavier.
After all, perhaps it was as Chandt had suggested and this was
really Hell.

By the end of the three hours the muscles of his shoulders and the
area of his neck felt as if they were clamped in a vise of hot metal.
For the first time he began to fear that the cramping would become
unbearable, and he would run amok in a frantic effort to get chair
and rider off him. He could feel his neck and face growing red and
hot, and was unable to do anything about the sweat that occasionally
trickled into an eye. More and more he longed to be able to move
his arms about, to windmill them and stretch his shoulder
muscles--but after these hours it was a question whether he would
be able to move his arms at all when they were finally freed.

But, in spite of the growing agony of his neck and back, at all
times he kept up his observation of the places through which he was
directed.

These caverns seemed to extend over a sizable volume of the rock
underground much mot.than the extent of the mine had been.
The mine that now must be either off to one side or overhead of this
place where he now trudged--for unlike the mine, this placI

THE EARTH LORDS
	83


seemed to possess a number of levels.

The other people Bart and his rider encountered seemed to fall

into three classes. Most of them seemed to be servants--or slaves.
Invariably these were dressed either in short tunics or--if they
seemed to have some authority among their own kind--somewhat
longer robes. Always these robes were of solid colors, brown, gray
or blue. Occasionally, they encountered a man or woman dressed in
what Bart thought of as 'city clothes,' the kind of clothing he
always thought of the people in large, eastern cities as wearing.
This was the only familiar form of dress he saw; and those who
wore it were treated with great respect by those of the tunic classes.
In return, the city-dressed ignored those in tunics, but were polite
and respectful to all the small people they met, whether they were
riding a Steed like Bart, or on foot.

Like the servant or slave class, they addressed any small man or
woman they encountered as "Lord" or "Lady."

As for the Lords and Ladies, themselves, whom Bart saw busily
occupied at incomprehensible tasks in a number of rooms filled
with strange devices with which they tinkered, these were apparently
a law unto themselves as far as clothing went. They dressed in all
sorts of fashions, although the togalike garment worn by Bart's
Lord was the type most commonly seen.

Toward the end of the third hour, when Bart was beginning to
think he could not last much longer, they passed briefly through a
room that had to be entered past two guards holding what looked
like oddly lumpy rifles--but who stood aside at the sight of Bart's
rider.

It was a strange room. To begin with, they crossed only one end

of it; and it was much longer than it was wide. This distance was
almost filled by great pipes, as cleanly white as if they had been
freshly painted, running lengthwise through the room. Some of
these pipes radiated a fierce heat, others an equal aura of icy
coldness. The length of the great room was such that the farther
ends of the pipes were almost out of sight. Their nearer ends, which
Bart and his rider passed, plunged into the stone floor and wherever
they went was also out of sight. The room must have been
painstakingly carved out of the rock, itself; and all of the exposed
stone surface of the walls was highly polished, as was the floor. The
stone was of a pale pink color here, except for a wide vein of a
darker gray material that, at this end of the room, ran down one
wall, across the floor and up the other side wail.

In the far distance Bart could barely see that the pipes turned

	84
	Cordon R. Dick.son


downward there as well, disappearing into the floor of the room;
and somewhere beyond that point was something that caught the
eye and dominated the farther wall, a thick, metallic pillar rising
vertically from out of sight below, to out of sight above in a room
that must be both higher and deeper than this one.

Whatever explanation there was for all this, the labor involved in
what Bart now saw must have been incredible. At the direction of
his rider, he passed through a farther door in the near end of the
long chamber, and a short distance down another corridor found
himself suddenly in the midst of a large, book-crammed library.

A tap on the left side of his head directed him down the carpeted
floor between two floor-to-ceiling walls of laden bookshelves, and
to a door which opened before them.

They stepped through into what was obviously a spacious office
with a desk and chair scaled to the height of one of the little people.
Furniture of comparable height was about the room. A man
waring city clothes--a suit of dark brown and a white shirt with
brown vertical striping under a black bow tie--turned from the
room's large desk, upon which he had been arranging some papers,
and came to stand before them.

A tap, for the first time, came directly on top of Bart's head.
For a moment, he did not understand; and the tap came again.
Then, he understood. His eyes darted quickly about the room
and settled on a small wooden landing stage at the right side of the
room. He moved tcw, wd it and turned, backing carefully into
position before it; and gratefully, with a gratitude as deep as he had
ever experienced in his life, he felt the weight of his rider leave the
saddle on his back. There was only one more thing he could want.
The man in city clothes went around to the back of Bart and took
care of that.

A second later, the weight of the chair itself disappeared from
Bart's back; and Ba sraightened up to the sudden shooting agony
of pains in his shoulder and back muscles, but with a blissful sense,
at last, of the freedom to stand straight.

BEHIND HIM, BART heard the Lord speak in the strange tongue.
Again, Bart felt he almost understood it. It was something about
not needing Bart any further.

The man before Bart nodded and looked at Bart almost
commiseratingly.

"The Librarian says you are now to leave this office of his and
return to the Steeds' dormitory from where you came," he said in
stiff, accented English. He toed the saddle and the thick cloth
used to bind Bart's arms in front of him. "I send one of the stack
workers back with these and another one to show you how to get to
the dormitory."

	"Merci," said Bart
		for the accent had been

		unthinkingly,

eastern Canadian. Behind him, the Lord spoke again; and once
more Bart felt something stir in him at the words. But this time,
soggy with weariness that seemed to be building up in him rapidly
now that the load was off his back, he did not gather even a sense
of the message behind the words.

"English only is spoken, in the work place, by those who are
not Lords or Ladies," said the man in the brown suit, still in

English. "In the home, is always French."

	"Thank you," said Bart again, numbly.

"Good. Come with me," said the man, and led Bart out of the
room into the main body of the Library again.

Beyond the ranks of bookcases, there was an open space with
tables and chairs of both ordinary size and smaller. The ordinary
chairs consisted of upright wooden pieces of furniture, some
unpadded, but most, though much the same sort of chairs, padded
and with angled backs to be more comfortable. There were also a
few chairs, the smaller ones, that were luxuriously padded, and
closer to the floor. Some of these were in use by Lords who were
sitting in them reading.

Similarly, the padded regular chairs were some of them
occupied by men or women in "city" clothes, and two of the

completely unpadded chairs held women in gray short tunics. All
were reading. In the center of all these chairs was an area enclosed
by a circular counter, within which were several desks, at each of
which tunic-clad people were working; and one other such was
presently standing at the inside edge of the counter, answering in
English an inquiry from a man in a dark blue suit on the outside.

"I am the Assistant Librarian," said the man with Bart, who,
perhaps because of his movements, was beginning a little to come
out of his fog of weariness. "My name is Charles Mordaunt. I'm
in charge of the Library heremunder the Lord Guettrig's supervision,
of course."

He pointed.

"The stacks are numbered," the Assistant Librarian said,
"beginning with number One at that end. If you go down between
stacks numbers One and Two, at the end you'll find a red door.
You may have been told about these rooms with red doors before;
but in any case, that's the one for the Library. It's a withdrawing
room for slaves, with all necessary appurtenances for bodily

comfort and relief. You understand7"

"The latrine," said Bart.

"Not just that!" Mordaunt seemed very nearly offended.
"There are beds and chairs in there as well . . . you'll see. In
fact, you may find yourself spending much time there, if you're
going to be bringing the Librarian to work here often--and

waiting to take him home."

"I see," said Bart.

"Never enter a room with a gray door--that is for Hybrids, like
myself. And absolutely never even pay attention to a black door,

which would be for the Lords and Ladies alone."

Bart nodded.

They had reached the circular counter now. Mordaunt leaned

across it and spoke to a tunic-clad man at one of the desks.
"Find me two stack-workers," he said.
"Yes, sir."

The man got up from his desk, went out through an opening in
the counter and disappeared down the aisle between stacks One
and Two.

A few minutes later, Bart was being guided back to the
dormitory he had left nearly four hours earlier. The stack-worker,
a slave named Jon Swenson, took a different route back to the
dormitories than the one by which Bart had come to the Library.
It was also, Bart was interested to note from the growing map in

	THE EARTH LORDS
	87

his mind, only about a fifth of the distance Bart had carried the
Librarian, and it took only about fifteen minutes to cover ito

From Swenson, a black-haired, white-skinned young man of
about twenty, who held what was apparently a common attitude
among the tunic-clad workers--that the Steeds lived lives of
luxury compared to themselves--Bart was able to learn a good
deal.

The Librarian's full name was Pier Guettrig, although no Steed
or ordinary slave would dare address him or refer to him other
than as "Lord." Guettrig's wife's first name was Marta.
Mordaunt, or a Hybrid who was related, might on rare occasions
be permitted to call Guettrig by his name alone, rather than his

title; but only by special permission and in private.

"And what's a Hybrid?" Bart asked.

"'You a Steed and not know that?" Swenson looked at him in
astonishment.

"'I'm a very new Steed." said Bart drily.

"Oh." Swenson nodded. "Just new from the dead, is that it?
You do have a lot to learn, then. But you ought to be able to guess
what a Hybrid is. It's a man or woman who's a child of one of the
Lords and a slave concubine. If a Hybrid passes the inspection
when he or she's eleven years old, and another test at seventeen,
they get to be officers and supervisors over the rest of us.
Sometimes a Lord even invites one of them into his home for a
visit. Usually, in that case, of course, the Lord's either the father
or mother of the Hybrid."

"Do Steeds," asked Bart, "ever get invited to a Lord's
home?' '

Jon looked at him with wide eyes.

"Of course not!" said the stack-worker. "You're slaves, just
like the rest of us, after all!"

"Out of luck, then," said Bart. "I see."

"Oh, no--we're very lucky, all of us; not only to have been
raised again from death in the first place, but because the Lords
will be destroying our own accursed race almost any time now;
and only those of us who were brought back to life to be their
slaves down here will be left alive to serve them."

Bart stared at the slight young man; but obviously he was
completely serious.

"Don't talk like a crazy," said Bart. "No one, no bunch of
people can destroy the human race. It's impossible. For one
thing, you'd have to destroy the world to do it."

"But that's just what the Lords are going to do!" said Jon
triumphantly. "Destroy the worldmthe surface world, that is--
just like that!"

He snapped his fingers.

"And how do they think they're going to do that.'?" Bart asked.
Jon, it seemed, was not quite sure. He talked a lot about
mountains falling and seas drying up, and seemed to have the
impression that when the moment came all the Lords would gather
in a circle around a great, magical device they had called the
Tectonal and, holding hands, order that the world he destroyed.
Once they had done this, Jon was confident the Inner World where
he, Bart and all the rest were now, would cease to be Hell. Hell
would become the surface of the world; and everything alive on it
would he destroyed.

Bart made a mental note to find out what kind of basis there was
for Jon's wild belief. It was ridiculous, of co,rrse, but there just
might be something real behind it--on a much lesser scale, of
course. After all, the Scottites had advocated an armed takeover
of the Canadian government, and since their mine somehow
connected with this place--perhaps these people were involved
with those plans, too. There might be some kind of a plan to
attack a number of governments, or some such thing.

But for the moment, he put it out of his mind; and it turned out
just as well he did. Because the moment he stepped back into the
dormitory, he found a new challenge waiting for him.

The dormitory was full of Steeds. More were present than Bart
had seen there at any time before. Not only that, but just by the
way their faces all turned to watch him as he came in, he could
guess that it was his return that was the cause of their presence.

No, he corrected himself--it was not him alone they watched.
A shortmas Steeds went, which made him still at least five feet
eightbut very broad man, with straight black hair cut short on a
round skull, turned as the others looked to the doorway. Seeing
Bart, he came striding down the center aisle between the beds to
stop an arm's length away.

Of necessity, Bart stopped also. He looked into a square, hard,
face with a scythe of a nose, and a chin and jaw the olive-colored
skin of which was darkened even further by the roots of a
close-shaved, but very black, beard. For the first time it struck
Bart that he had seen no one but Lords wearing any facial hair
here in this place they called the "Inner World."

"I'm Paolo Collini," said the broad man in a flat bass voice,

"and I run this dormitory. That means I run you, too. Ill tell you
to do something, you jump! You understand? Or do you need
instruction?"

Inside himself, Bart sighed. He was still less than his usual
strength and weight from the mines, on top of that exhausted from
his first day's chair-carrying; and this Paolo Collini, who seemed
to be the head man of the dormitory, seemed determined to settle
his authority here and now.
"Suppose I just agree to that," said Bart. "Can we let it go like
that, then?"

Paolo frowned.

"What's the matter? You don't look like the sort of man'd run
from a fight. No!" he said. "If you don't fight me you fight
Michael Bolt, who runs things here, after me."

He took a half step closer to Bart and peered up into his face,
suddenly frowning.

"What's happened to youT" he demanded. "They take you out
for your first day of carrying one of the Lords, today--and you're

just back from that?"

Bart nodded.

Paolo made a disgusted noise, as if he was about to spit.
"It's not on for now, then," said Paolo. "It wouldn't prove a
thing to lick you in the shape you're in now. In fact..." He
surveyed Bart from head to foot. "I think you've probably got less
than the usual meat on your bones, anyway. We can settle it later.
Where were you before they brought you back to life?"

"I was a slave in a mine that connects with this place,"
answered Bart.

"That settles it, then!" Paolo swung around to speak to the
others watching in the dormitory. "I know that mine. Some of the
rest of you do, too. Hear this, all of you! This man has no rank.
You hear that? When he's well enough he can try me out, if he's
got the guts. Until then, the res of you leave him alone! You'd
probably be wise to, anyway. You hear me? Everyone leave him
be!"

His voice had raised on the last two sentences. There was a
general reluctant growled mutter of acknowledgment.

Bart found himself strangely touched. He was numb with
physical exhaustion; but through that numbness something about
Paolo's words reached to the core of him, where the loneliness
was. That loneliness which only Emma, for some strange reason,
had been able to banish from him. What Paolo had just said had

Cordoa I?.. Dick.son

not altered that feeling in him, as Emma's mere presence could,
but it had held an echo of his own solitary sorrow--why, Bart
could not say.

But even as he felt this, Paolo was turning back to face him.

"Right," the head Steed was saying to him, "now you--you
come with me."

He led Bart away from the dormitory and to, not the usual
eating and drinking area of the Steeds, but the general slave social
center, where they wedged themselves into a corner box consisting
of a table and high-backed benches.

"Talk more privately here," grunted Paoio, once they were
seated. "I know, you'd rather be catching some sleep on your bed
right now; but I think we better have a talk without any more
wasted time."

A male slave waiter came and took their orders. Paolo's was for
some of the light-alcohol slave beer and a side glass of the raw,
almost pure alcohol that was also available here in the social
center. Bart, since he guessed the other would be offended if he
did not, took the same thing.

He waited for the other to begin the conversation. Here, he
hoped, was his chance to begin getting some idea of the place he
and Emma now had to escape from. He continued to wait,
however, for Paolo to give some indication of how the talk would
go.

Paolo, however, said nothing. They sat in silence until the
waiter had brought the drinks and left them once more alone.
Then the dormitory leader took the small glass of alcohol in one
swallow, drank a large portion of the beer in another, and stared
hard at Bart. Their faces were so close together across the small
table of the corner booth that Bart could see one long black hair
curling out from Paolo's left nostril. Bart stared at it in fascination.
It had a curve like the tusk of a boar; and, rather than making
the other man look unsightly, gave him a boarlike appearance of
innate fierceness.

"Look you, Bart--it's Bart that's you name, isn't it? That's

what they said back in the dormitory--"

"Bart Dybig," said Bart.

"All right, Bart. You want to be in another dormitory? One
where the Leader'll be easy for you to whip; but a good, solid
dormitory, with no real crazy men or v,od-heads in it? I can fix
it."

Bart stared at the other, startled, suddenly, so that he found

	'H' ,.AH LORDS
	9!


himself ming ou{ o a og of in a{ he hadn't u[[y
i. He k he h o. indeX, regain he stng{h {he
mne h en fm him. Bu{ olo a heaven-n opuni.

"Why'd
I n{ o in another doio?"

olo held up one finger, signaling their iter, who
snding acro t m, tching. e iter nt off and
olo dnk deeply from his tall gl of r, almost finishing it.

"I'll tell u the truth," he id, banging the ne-empty glass
down on the tabletop and wiping his mouth on the back of a thick
hd. "Ino, it."

T iter was turning with t new oers of er and
cohol. htily empti his own t gls, the Ie and
the small, d suddenly sor he had not done earlier. He
h no fe of ing outdrunk by Paolo, who emed in a friendly
m, anyy; and t alcohol now inside Bart uld act as an
mthetic for the aches and pains from the day's unusual cffo.

olo ited umil the waiter again acss the m,
tching them and ady to sere, but out of eahot.

"I'll tall u the troth," id Paolo again, "I can whip you.
Picully the y u a now; and even when u get stcd
d flesh up again. I kn I c whip you."

He stop and drank his sond alcohol and some r.
"But I'm not like tho -heads back in the dormito."
He tap the right side of his fohead with one thick finger. "I
can smell things. My mother was a stregaa witch; and I can
smell mething on u. Something 1 smell says not to fight u. A
smell like thatit's never wrong."

He stopd sing and st at Ba as if waiting for an
anat. B only Iked back. Even he now, and
m down m his time in the mine had left him, he thought he had a
g chce of defeating olo. Of ming him unconscious or
en killing him, if n.

But he could wrong, and he uld much rather have the
doito ader a friend than a defeated rival. "Same time,"
olo ske up agn suddenly, after another drink of r,
"the's mething aut u I like. But if u stay in our
do, iron, I'm going to have to whip u. And I n't te no
chcm, a of what I smell in u. That mes it'll bad for
u. You got to undetand. It mes a lot to me, ing ader. It's
the biest job I er had. Even if the rds end up somay having
me kill, I' still n der. You undetand?"

92 Oordon R. Dickson

"Yes," said Bart.

And he did. He heard the words that the other said--and
something more as well. Under the harsh voice of Paolo there was a
note of appeal.

"You want me to move to someplace else, so we don't have to
fight," Bart said, half to himself.

"That's right," said Paolo. "I can fix it. Some things I can fix.

It'll take time."

Ban nodded.

"You'll still have to fight whoever's Leader there for first place,"
Paolo said, "but he won't try to kill you if he sees he can't win any
other way. I will--and believe me, Ban, after being in the
dormitories twelve years, I know how to do it before you can guess
what's coming."

Ban sat, thinking. But not from fear of Paolo killing him. He
hesitated because he wanted to think about the possible advantages
of this attitude of Paolo's. There might be some way it could help
him get Emma out of here. Equally, there might be disadvantages.
The problem was that he did not know enough yet about this place
in which they were trapped to make a decision.

He decided a decision was best put off for the moment.

"I don't know--," he began. But Paolo had already evidently
guessed his reaction.

"Think it over, if you want to," said the Leader. "Or, hell! Ask
me anything you want, to help you make up your mind. We've got
until you've got your proper weight back anyway. That's two, three
months, maybe more. And as I say, not counting the fact I'm not
going to let you take my Leadership from me, I like you. Drink up;

and let's talk a bit."

Ban nodded.

"I'll take you up on that," he said. "I'll think about it."
"Tell me as soon as you know," said Paolo. "Remember getting
you transferred to another dormitory'll take arranging; and that'll
take time."

"I will," said Bart. "Meanwhile, as you say, let's talk. I need to
know about this place. Has it got a name?"

"It's got lots of names," Paoio smiled, and his smile was as
savage as the hair curling from his left nostril, "depending on who
you talk to and what's happened to him--or her. But its real name
is the Inner World. That's the name the Lords gave it."

The expression on his face changed to one of curiosity.
"How's it you don't know that?" he said. "Whenever anyone's

reborn from the dead here, they come back knowing all about the

Inner World, the Lords and the Hybrids."

"I don't," said Bart.

Now it was Paolo who shook his head.

"Doesn't make sense, man," he said. "Let's take it from the

beginning. You remember dying, don't you?"

"No," said Bart

Paolo sat for a long second, simply staring at him.

"Here!" he said. "You lying to me?"

"No," said Bart. "I remember being in the mine. I renumber
getting loose from the work crew I was chained to, when we were
put away to sleep, one night. I'd counted my steps in the tunnels
and so I managed to find my way to where I'd seen some of those
on the mine staff, and some other people, going. I came to a hidden
door, I found my way through it--and I fell. Into some sort of
underground river, Where I fell in there was room above the water
to breathe; but the river carried me on to where the rock overhead
came right down to the water and I had to swim holding my breath,

hoping to make it to where there was air above me."

He paused.

"That's all 1 remember until I woke up--" Caution made him
hold back the memory of the three Heads standing over him and
talking in their strange, but in that moment oddly comprehensible,
language, "--woke up in the dormitory."

"All right," said Paolo. "There's nothing crazy in that. You
must have drowned in the river. The Lords brought you back to life.
You try--you'll remember what it was like dying." He shuddered.
"No one forgets that!"

"There's nothing I remember about either dying or being
brought back to life," said Bart. "Maybe I was next to drowning,
enough so I was unconscious--but that's all."

"You couldn't have been just unconscious," said Paolo emphatically.
"The Lords'd never let anyone into the Inner World--let any

human in, that iswwho's alive."

"Why not?"

"Why, because of what people--us humans--did to them--"
Paolo's intensely black, busy eyebrows drew together over his eyes.
"You really saying you don't remember that? Everyone here's
reborn knowing that--why the Lords wouldn't never let a human

being come alive, here in their own, personal world."
"Everybody but me," said Bart patiently.

"All right. I'll tell you--but if you're joking me .... " said

	94
	Gordon R. Dicon


Paolo, then checked himself. "But you're not. I can tell. All right,
then, you ought to know that the Lords, they aren't like us. I mean,

they're not real people. They came here from another world."
"A what?" said Bart.

"Another rld--a world, just like this here world of ours; but

another one, someplace else."

"Someplace else? Where?"

"'So far away..." Paolo's voice failed at trying to make the
description. "Look, you know you stand at the foot of a mountain
and look up at the moon; then you climb that mountain and look at
the moon again--I mean, same time of night, same time of
year--right away?"

"Yes," said Bart.

"Right. Now, the moon--does it look any closer from the top of

the mountain--any bigger--than it looked from the bottom?"
"'No," said Bart. "Of course not."

"All right," said Paolo. "Well, that world the Lords come
from, it's beyond the moon, they say. So of course you can't see it,
it's so far off."

"How'd they get here, then?"

Paolo lo,red his voice.

"That's their secret--one of their secrets; and they've got lots of
them. But they got here; and then what happened?"

"You're the one who's telling me what happened."

"You know what I mean," said Paolo impatiently. "I was just
saying it that way to get you ready for what you're going to hear.
When the Lords landed here, the first humans that saw them took
them for some kind of little freaks, all of them. That was thousands
of years ago, when they had kings and courts. The kings dressed the
Lords up in clown suits and made them do tricks for the court, and
used them that way. Hell, you must have seen the carvings on doors

and paintings on walls, and such!"

Bart stared at him.

"You see?" Paolo said. "Now you see why they'd never let any
one of us in here, alive? Man, they hate us--I mean they hate the
humans we were before we died. Since they raised us from the
dead, they don't hate us as much."

"If that's so," said Bart slowly, "how'd they get from those
courts to this Inner World?"

"They snuck away from the courts--thousands of years ago, like
I said," Paolo answered. "And they began raising dead humans to
work for them and they built this placemthousands of years ago."

•
	TH 41TH LI

Bart nodded. There were holes in this story you could drive a
freight wagon through. Even granted that it must have taken a very
great amount of human labor to build this place...

A new idea interrupted his train of thought. Come to think of it,
the labor would have been a lot less if most of this underground area
had been a series of natural caves that merely needed to be
connected, cleaned out and finished inside ....

But that was beside the point. Tim one thing that had to be
patently false was that the Inner World had been built thousands of
years ago. Thousands of years ago the kings and courts of the world
knew nothing about North America--let alone about this particular
part of it. Even if they had... Bart had seen enough already to
know that this place was heavily dependent on supplies from the
outside world. Supplies which could only come in here by way of
the railroads and ocean-going vessels of a modern or near-modern
rld.

It was not merely their clothes and furniture, the carpets, the
lighting, and a thousand other items that were obviously not
manufactured here, below ground. It was the edibles; the foods and
drinks that had to come from outside, There were no farms, no
domestic food animals, and no distilleries under the earth. Such
items as food and drink, along with many other things, would have
to be shipped in through some nearby port and brought by wagon to
the mine for delivery here below ground.

That port could only be the town of Hew Westminster, which
was the capital of the Canadian coastal colony of British Columbia;
and which was probably not more than a couple of weeks of
wagon-travel tinfe away from the mine.

A thought kindled in his mind. It was that when he finally
managed to get Emma and himself free from this place, the portof
New Westminster and a ship to somewhere else might well he the
destination they should seek.

"Tell me about the Hybrids," he said to Paolo. "The slave from
the Library who guided me back to the dormitory just now said
they were the result these little peoplew"

"Lords!" hissed Paolo, leaning toward him. "Call them Lords,.
here: We're out where people can see us and maybe read your
lips!"

"All right, 'Lords' then," said Bart. "Tell me about the
Hybrids. What's their, part in the scheme of things around here?
There was one at the Library who said he was the Assistant
Librarian and I saw people earing fancy castcoast clothes who

96 Gordon R. Dickson

were supposed to be other Hybrids. What's their rank and what
jobs do they do? I get the idea they're something like foremen over
the slaves. Or do they just sit around like the Lords and enjoy life?"

"You got a lot to learn," said Paolo heavily, leaning back in his
seat of the booth and signaling the waiter for refills. "'You really got
a lot to learn."

The dormitory Leader waited until the waiter had brought freshly
filled glasses and gone again before leaning once more toward Bart.

"Sure, you could say they're like foremen," Paolo said. "They
do some of the in-between jobs, where someone has to give orders
to a whole bunch of slaves every day. But most of them do work

even the Lords aren't able to do, in the laboratories--"
"Laboratories?"

"You don't know about those, either?"

"I carded one of the Lords through some of them, today," said
Bart. "But I don't know what they're working on, or anything else
about them."

"Stick to the Hybrids for now. The point is, they work at all
kinds of things. And get something else clear--" Paolo paused for
a moment as if gathering himself. "Here in the Inner World
everybody works, including the Lords. Any of them who isn't a
a'ker isn't let grow up."

Bart frowned. He sat with two full glasses of alcohol and one and
a half of beer before him, almost untouched. Paolo seemed to ha
ceased to pay attention to the fact that Bart was not drinking as
heavily as he was himself.

"Isn't let grow up?" echoed Bart.

"Right! The only children let live down here are Lord or Hybrid
young ones; and they get checked when they're eleven and again
When they're seventeen years old, to see if they're fit to grow up. If

they're not, the young Lords, they're killed."

"The Lords kill their own children?"

"You believe it!" said Paolo. "It's true. And it's not just
because they might not want to ark hard. They've got to be just so
smart and just so healthy and so strong, and all that; or else, down


"Strong?"

Paolo laughed. For the first time the effect of the liquor he had
poured down showed on him.

"You think the Lords ride us because they're too weak to walk?"
Paolo spluttered again into his drink. "They may be little--and I
don't say one of them's a patch on you or me, or any Steed for that

	TIIE R'ft LORDS
	97

matter--or even any good-sized, healthy man in the slave dormitories.
But they practice all the time--"

He leaned forward farther, suddenly and urgently.

"Now, don't go talking about that," he said in a whisper. "The
regular slaves, most of them, don't know it. Just a few special ones,
including us because we get to be part of some of their ceremonies.
But ,x're not supposed to let the ordinary slaves know. Anyway,
you'd be surprised how strong some of those little--" He paused,
blinked, and then went on. "--are----even the Lady Lords. By the
way, you remember that, too. That's what you call their womenfolk
--not the Hybrids, but the full-blooded ones. 'Ladies.' "

Bart nodded, hiding the grin that the name "Lady Lords" had
triggered off inside him.

"I'll remember. Ladies," he said.

"That's right; and you take my advice," continued Paolo,
leaning back and belching almost inaudibly. "You get in the habit
of calling them 'Lords" all the time. Bad enough when one of the
ordinary slaves is caught calling them anything else, let alone one of
us. Why're you so interested in Hybrids, anyway.'?"

He leaned forward again, peering at Bart curiously.

"You know," he said, "you could be one of them. You've got
that sort of look about you. The way your forehead sticks out over
your eyes, almost the way a Head's does."

chapter
nine


PAOLO'$ FACE HAD become hard and his voice was suddenly clear
of any trace of drunkenness. For a moment he merely stared at
Bart; but then the tension went out of him and his voice returned
to having the slightly alcoholic blur it had held a moment before.

"No," he said, "of course you aren't. I know every Hybrid in
the Inner Word who's anywhere near your age and they don't let
even their own people out into the surface world until they're a
good ten years older than you are. Besides, why would they go to
all the trouble of setting up a Hybrid spy among the Steeds just to
trap someone like me? Even for the Lords, that doesn't make

sense. I'm not that important."

After a moment he added

"Besides, I kind of like you. You ain't the type."

He took a deep drink from his latest glass of beer and sat back
in the booth.

"Go on," he said, "tell me. I asked you why you were so
interested in the Hybrids, anyway?"

"It's just that I don't see their place in the beme of things,
here," answered Bart. But his mind was already offand galloping
down a new line of thought. If he could pass for a Hybrid, that
fact might open up a whole new world of possibilities. "What do
you mean, the Lords don't even let their own people out until

they're older than I am now7 Out, for what?"

Paolo frowned.

"How would I know what for? Some Lord business that means
one of them has to go above ground to do it. All [ know is, there's
some Lords who suddenly just aren't here anymore, and later on
word comes they left. Most of them come back in a few months.
But some don't come back at all--or don't corrm back for longer
than it's been since I as brought hack to |ire."

"It could be some of them never come back because some
accident kills themwor something like that," Bart said, as much
to himself as to Paolo.

THE EARTH LORDS
	99


"Not likely. I suppose it could happen, though," said Paolo.
"What do you want to know that for?"

"I just wondered why nobody above ground I met ever seemed
to have heard of anyone like a Lord. Some ordinary people must
know about them. They have to be seen sometimes by people who
don't know them."

"They don't look that different from ordinary people," said
Paolo. "Just small, that's all."

But Bart's real reason for the question had been entirely
different. He was thinking now that without even wandering too
far from the truth, he might be able to make the Lords believe that
he was the son of a Lord who had gone out into the ordinary world
and sired a child by an ordinary woman. A son who had never
known the truth about his father until he had seen other Lords
down here.

His father had been small enough to be a Lord--a somewhat
large one, but a Lord; although from what Bart had seen of the
rulers of this underground kingdom, Lionel Dybig could never
have been one of them. His father's character had been too
free-thinking and honest to let him belong to a society like this
one.

Bart felt a twinge of guilt, remembering how in spite of the
language, literature and science that his father had tutored him in,
he had been more drawn by the almost lawless life of the m6tis fur
traders in the open woods. He had hidden the attraction he felt for
that part of his life from his father; but he was not sure that the
older man had not sensed it in him, after all. His attention came
back to Paolo, who was talking.

"... but maybe some do die up there," Paoio was saying.
"What's that to do with anything? Anyway, whatever they do above
ground's no business of slaves like us, even if we are Steeds. You'll
do better to |eave the Lords to their own business. Yes, and the
Hybrids, too..."

He went on. The effect of the alcohol on him was now plain and
he was not shamming. He ran on, and Bart let him run for a while,
before bringing him back to their dormitory.

Paolo seemed, thereafter, to have decided that Bart was his
particular friend; and he sought Bart out at times for a drinking
companion--not minding that Bart generally only went through
the motions with his glasses.

Several nights later, Bart, at the end of an easy evening, brought
up the other subject that was always in his mind.

	100
	Gordon R. Dickson

"Thez's a female slave down here who's an old friend, since w¢
were children together," Bart said to the dormitory Leader. "How
would ] go about finding be?"

"Finding her?" Panio squinted at him. "cmale slave? Your
woman when you were alive?"

"No," said Bart. "Just a very old friend. I'd like to find her.
How do I go about it?"

Paolo frowned at him for a second, then turned to beckon the
waiter.

"Lorena bereT" Paolo asked.

"I don't know." The waiter's manner was apologetic.

"Go look."

The waiter went off.

"Who's Lorena?" Bart asked.

"Slave I know," grunted Paolo.

It was only a few minutes before the waiter came back with a tall,
thin young woman who looked as if a little more flesh and a good
deal more happiness might have turned her into someone more than
usually pretty. But as it was, she looked gaunt, harried and weap/.

"Did you want me, PaoloT" she asked, coming up to the booth,
The waiter faded away behind her to his position across the room.

"Sit down," said Paolo. She slid onto the seat of the booth
beside him. "Lorena, this is one of my dormitory--his name's
Bart Dybig."

Lorena smiled at Bart. It was a mechanical, almost pathetic
smile that expected anything but heal no hope that whatever it might

be would be anything she would welcome.

"Hello, Lorena," said Bart.

His own voice was automatically gentle, as R might have been to
some small, wild animal trapped by accident. Lorena's smile
changed and became, while still wary, genuine.

"Bart wants to find one of the female slaves," Paolo said.
"She'll be new reborn, like he is. Tell Lorena what this woman of
yours looks like, Bart."

"Her name's Emma Robeson," said Bart. "She's Scot by
breeding, just a few inches over five feet tall, with straight blond
hair, white skin and blue eyes. She's got a...'" He searched for
the proper word. "... a very peaceful face. Once you see her,
you'll always recognize her again; because that face of hers looks as

if nothing could ever touch her."
Paolo grunted.
"Death did," he said.

THE EARTH LORDS


"Death--" Bart checked the angry ans,er that sprang up in
him. This was no time to argue with Paoio, or with anyone rise,
that he did not in the least believe they had ever died and been
brought back to life by the Lords.

"If you can find her," he went on to Lorena, "tell her Bart
Dybig's down here, too; and I want to see her. Here, would be a
good place for her to meet me, wouldn't it?"

He turned to put the last sentence as a question to Paolo.

"Sure. Here's the place to meet anyone," said Paolo. "Any
slave, that is."

He laughed shortly, and not happily.

"Hybrids and Lords--those you don't need to meet anyway,"
he said. "They've got their own places and they call you to them.
They don't meet with slaves."

It occurred to Bart that, considering the fact that Arthur Robeson
had been working with the Scottites, his activities might have given
not only him but his sister some form of preference here in the
Inner World--depending on exactly what the Scottites had to do
with all this--so that they might be classed with the Hybrids,
rather than as slaves--

For a moment a wild new thought crossed his mind. But then he
shook his head, mentally dismissing it. Neither Emma nor Arthur
could possibly be born Hybrids. There was nothing about them in
the way of physical characteristics that would identify them as
progeny of this race that called itself Lords. Besides, what he and
his father had known of their parents' history above ground--no, it
was impossible that they were Hybrids.. But maybe it was possible
to be given something like a courtesy ranking as a Hybrid.

He hesitated, on the brink of asking Paolo if such courtesy
rankings existed. Then he decided not to ask. The caution built up
in him by his childhood, the years of the Rebellion, and everything
that had happened to him since, checked him. It ¢as always wise to
give away as little information about yourself and your interests as
possible, no matter with whom you were dealing.

"How are you going to go about finding her?" he asked Lorena.
"I!1 just start asking around," said Lorena. "Sooner or later
ord'll get back to me of someone who's seen somebody like
that."

"Dont mention my name," said Paolo suddenly. "Or his. I
don't want anything personal like this connected with the dormitory.
You never know how the Lords and the Hybrids'll act, if they
hear one of us is looking for some particular one 9f their slaves.

They may want to know why; and maybe even figure something
they don't like is going on."

He looked at Bart almost suspiciously.

"There's nothing special about this Emma Robeson?" be asked.
Bart met his eyes squardy.

"She's just a childhood friend. Just what I told you," he said. "I

like her and want to be sure she's all right. That's all."
"How'd she end up down here?"

"I don't know," said Bart. It was only a half-lie. "All [ know
is, [ saw her being taken down the tunnel of the mine toward the
entrance to the Inner World. She didn't see me. No one with her
did. They had light, but I was a good ways off from them and in the
dark."

"How'd you get around in that mine in the dark?" Paolo asked.
"I counted steps and turnings while I was being taken to and
from work with the gang I was chained in," answered Bart. "Bit by
bit, l got to know most of the mine."

Paolo stared at him, more than a little drunkenly.

"You must be pretty good with your sense of direction," he said.
"I was in that mine too, for a few weeks, like I said; but [ never
could've found my way about it without a light."

"I grew up finding my way through the woods on dark nights,"
said Bart. Their eyes locked again for a moment before Paolo
looked away.

"Well .... " he said. He turned to Lorena, reached out and
patted her clumsily on the head.

"You're a good woman," he muttered.

Lorena flashed a smile at him; and this time, Bart saw, it was a
smile of pure affection. Then she got up from the booth.

I'll go start asking," Lorena said. "Don't worry. I'll just sneak
it into the talk; and I'll say it's me that wants her, that she owes me
something from the time we were both alive together; and now that
I've got her down here, I just want to make sure she pays up."

"How could someone pay a debt down here?" Bart asked as he
watched her retreating back. "There's no money, is there?"

"No, all that ends when you die, right?" The other laughed a bit
grimly. "No, down here you pay off with favors, taking duties if
that's alloed--like that." He was watching Lorena leave, too.

She went out of the room, and through the space she had vacated
Bart now saw, near the doorway, the unmistakable figure of
Chandt, standing gracefully balanced on the balls of his feet, his

	THE EARTH LORDS
	103

hands on his hips, looking over those in the booths and at the tables
of this particular cranny of the slaves' recreational area. Like all the
Steeds, including Bart and Paolo, he was now wearing a shirt; but
his manner made it clear who he was.

"Wonder how long he's been there7" Paolo muttered. At the
same time he was waving his arm over his head to attract Chandt's
attention. Chandt's head turned. His eyes looked at them and he
started in their direction, moving fluidly.

"That's one you'd better never try to whip, Bart," said Paolo
under his breath, as the Leader of All the Steeds made his winding
way among the tables intervening, toward them. "He's got
devil-tricks 1 think the Lords must have taught him, so that no one
could ever push him aside as the Master of us all. No one stands a
chance against Chandt."

Chandt had reached them. He sat down on Paolo's side of the
booth without waiting to be asked. His black eyes focused on Bart.

"You're ordered to the home of the Lord Librarian," he said.
"Now. immediately."

"Now? But 1 just got back a little bit ago--'"

"That's the way it is, boy," Paolo interrupted him. "Twenty
four
hours a day we're on call, all of us, by our riders."
The dormitory head looked at Chandt, however.
"Did they send someone to guide him over there7"

"There's a slave from the Lord Librarian's household waiting
out at the front entrance," Chandt said. "He told me he guided you
back to the dormitory a few days ago, Bart Dybig, and you'd
recognize him. I left him there, because our Steeds have a
reputation to live up to. If you'd been drunk, I'd have had to sober
you up before I let you go to him."

"You'll never need to sober me up," said Bart--and felt Paolo's
knee press suddenly, warningly against his under the table.
Ignoring the pressure, Bart kept his eyes fixed directly on Chandt's.

"So much the better," said Chandt. His expression had not
changed. "Leave your shirt here. Go, now."

Bart stood up, took off his shirt, and left, leaving the other two
behind him. At the entrance to the slave's recreation area, he found
Jon Swenson, now wearing a different sort of short toga, belted at
the waist, of gold and silver cloth.

"Oh, there you are!" said Jon on catching sight of Bart. "Are
3u all right?"

"Right? Of course I'm all right," said Bart.

Jon came close and stuck his face up toward Bart's.

"You do smell of alcohol," he said, "but not too much. You say
you're not drunk?"

"I'm not drunk," said Bart. "Or anywhere near it.'"

"Do you drink heavily on occasion?" asked Ion. "You might as
well tell me now, if you do. That's the sort of question the Lord and
the Lord Lady are going to be asking you when we get there."

Bart set aside in his mind a few occasions at gatherings of the fur
traders and holidays. These had been during times of his youth. He

would not be doing that again.

"Never," he said.

"I hope you're telling the truth--for your sake," said .Ion.
"Let's go."

They moved off together down one of the long underground
corridors.

"And why do you hope for my sake I'm telling the truth?" asked
Bart, looking down at the younger man, who seemed to have put on
an aura of importance with his gold and silver toga.

"Well, because the standards for a house slave's so much higher
than the standards for a work place one," said Jon. "I'm both, you


It seemed to Bart that the younger man strutted a little.
"Yes," said Bart.

"The Lord and his Lady want you to be able to run errands
between the Library and their home, sometimes when the Lord's in
his office at the Library," said .Ion. "So, of course they want to
look you over and decide if you'll do for the house end of things."

"I see," said Bart. It had not occurred to him before that a
higher standard might be set on those slaves that had duties in the
homes of the Heads. But it made sense. Theoretically, their little
overlords could be more vulnerable to those who had the freedom
of their living quarters than to those who simply had the freedom of
the area in which the upper class worked.

He filed the information in his memory. His father had been fond
of saying that any piece of information would be useful sooner or
later; and Bart had found the statement true many times over.

He thought again about Lords leaving the Inner World for times
of various lengths; and the chance that he might be able to get away
with passing himself off as a Hybrid.

As he had been thinking since his talk with Paolo a few days ago,
Lionel Dybig had been small enough, certainly intelligent enough,
and different enough from ordinary men that he ought to be

picturable as a Lord. Bart v,uld simply have to claim that he had
barely met his father before the older man's death, so that his
memory of him was limited and hazy.

All the rest of Bart's life story, including his Cre mother and his
growing under th conditions of the Riel rebellion, could be
acceptable as the story of a young Hybrid who had grovn up
thinking himself an ordinary human.

But it would still be wise to go carefully with the story. The
Lords must have records, let alone memories of those of their own
kind who had gone out into the upper world and never returned.
Bart could claim ignorance of his father's true identity; but he
would be wise if he could, to discover the identity of some actual
Lord who had gone out and never come back; and whose character,
appearance and time of going could be fitted in with Bart's sketchy
"memory" of his father.

Where to get such information?

The Lords themsdves were not likely simply to answer questions
from him. One or more of the Hybrids might know; but as a slave
he was no more in a position to chat with Hybrids than he was with
Lords.

And the slaves would not know. The Lords would have made
sure that the slaves did not know; if necessary changing those on
duty near the exit point into the mine, or even--from what he had
seen of this place, and the mine before it--killing them off to make
sure they would never suspect what they should not know, or tell
what they had seen.

So, there was no person who could tell him the name of some
Lord who had gone away into the upper world and never returned,
and was almost undoubtedly dead by this time. A Lord who not
only fulfilled those requirements, but had gone out at a time that
would precede the time of Ban's own birth, and possibly match the
place of it.

There remained the Library. He would be taking Pier Guettrig
there daily. The Lords must keep records--where more likely for
those records to be kept than in the Library?

But it would probably not be easy to find the records he wanted.
The Lords would hardly advertise their location by making their
keeping place easily visible and identifiable. Probably the best way
for Ban to discover where they were kept would be to wait until one
of the Lords came in who wanted to consult them; and by following
him or her, to find out where that was. There was no way to tell how
often such might come about.

	106
	Gordon R. Dickson


Moreover, it would hardly be possible, let alone practical, for
him to follow every Lord who came into the Library. What he
needed was some way of recognizing a Lord who was there for the
purpose of dealing with the records Bart wanted to find. Offhand,

he could not think of one.

He felt frustrated.

If he could only really understand that private language of theirs,
it would be a simple matter of listening when the Lords came in and
spoke to the slaves on duty at the desk. The kind of records Bart
was looking for would probably require at least the permission of
Charles Mordaunt, the Hybrid who was Assistant Librarian, to be
looked at. They might require even the permission of Pier Guettrig,
himself, and if Bart could only overhear and understand the
conversation between the visiting Lord or Lady and Guettrig, he
would find out where to look, or at least learn enough to follow the
visitor to the place where the records were kept.

It would undoubtedly be a safe place, possibly a hidden
one ....

Meanwhile, Jon had brought him to the Guettrig home and a
staircase-dominated room he recognized. The man who was always
here and in charge when Bart was brought to his Master was not
present this time, and Jon led the way up the stairs with as much
aplomb as if he, himself, was a Lord.

The top of the stairs gave on to a balcony under the high ceiling
of the same room, and a number of corridors led back off through
the wall behind the balcony. Jon took the second corridor to his
right and led Bart down a carpeted and panelled corridor, past a
number of closed doors made of some heavy, dark wood, to one
which sat squarely in the wall that closed the far end of the corridor.

At this door he stopped and scratched on its surface lightly with
his fingernail.

They waited.

Bart had just about reached the point of suggesting to Jon that he
scratch again, when the door opened itself before them. They went
through it, and the door closed again behind them--once more,
apparently by itself.

They stood in a large, square room with very thick and soft
carpet underfoot, and tapestries on the walls. Overhead in the
ceiling, the mechanical lights that were all about the Inner World
glowed in their warm, sunlight color. Along the base of the walls,
panels also glowed--but redly, since they seemed to be composed
of bars of heated metal which raised the temperature of the room

	THE F.RI'H LORD
	107


close to the point where Bar would have found it actively
uncomfortable. A scent like that of spring flowers mingled with the
faint smells of carpet and hot metal, not hiding the two latter odors,
but in a sense excsing them.

The room was furnished with chairs and couches, all heavily
padded and overstuffed and all built to the size of the small people
who ruled this underground country.

In two of these chairs--brown upholstered, high-backed pieces
of furniture--facing each other across a small table that held
something like a chess board, sat Pier Guettrig and the tiny,
young-appearing woman who had been on the stairs with the
Librarian the first time Bart had seen him.

The two were now ignoring the game that had evidently been in
progress between them; their eyes were fastened on Bart.

"Lord and Lady," said Jon in French, "here is the slave you
ordered me to bring you."

"Yes. Wait outside, Jon," answered the rusty voice of Pier in the
same tongue. "You'll be needed to take him back to his dormitory,
after we've talked to him."

Jon backed toward the door, which opened to let him out and

then closed again after he had passed through it.

"'Come here," said Pier to Bart.

Bart walked forward until he stood a step from their chairs,
towering over them as they sat looking up at him.

"He'd better sit," said the woman. Her voice was as young as
her superficial appearance, and had a touch of humor in it. "I'm
going to get a stiff neck looking up at him."

"Sit down, Bart," said Pier. His own voice was not unkindly.
"You can sit cross-legged on the rug, there."

Bart lowered himself into the sitting position suggested. From
that position he looked upward at the two and they looked down at
him almost benignly, like elderly relatives.

"Bart," said Pier, "this is my Lady. You will address her as
such, but in case some other Lord should need to ask you or speak
to you about her, her name is the Lady Maria Guettrig. I am the

Lord Pier Guettrig, in case no one has already told you."
"I understand, Lord," said Bart.
Pier nodded almost enthusiastically.

"Exactly!" he said. "Of course--you're quick to learn, Bart.
But now we have to learn about you."

"Where were you born, Bart?" asked Marta.

	108
	Gordon R. Dickson


Bart had not expected to have to give any of the story about his
personal background until he had had a chance to reconcile it with
what was known about Lords who had gone out into the upper
world and never returned. Now, he was faced with the danger of
saying something that might later trip him up. Also, he had
expected Pier to do the questioning; and Marta had caught him off
guard--so that in spite of himself, he hesitated for just a moment
before answering.

"I don't know exactly," he said. "At a Cree camp, somewhere

near the Red River, not far from Assiniboia."
"In m6tis country," said Pier.
"I am a mtis," said Bart.

"And your father was a man named Lionel Dybig?"

"How did you know that?" Bart turned his gaze on the old man.
"You won't remember it, but you were questioned at the time
you were revived," said Pier. "That's done with all who've brought
in here..."

"What was your mother's name?" Marta asked, leaning forward.

"It was--in French it would translate into 'Listens to Trees,'"
answered Bart. "Both she and her mother were said to understand

the language the trees speak when the wind blows."
"Marta--," began Pier.

"Allow me, Pier," she interrupted him. "I want to hear these
things from Bart himself. Bart--what was she like?"

"She died of a coughing sickness the winter I was five years
old," said Bart. "I hardly remember her."

It was true, he hardly remembered what she had looked like, how
she had walked and talked. But he remembered vividly a presence
that had been hers, a presence, warm and large, that had surrounded
his whole life up until the time she died.

"After she was dead, I was .sent to my father," Bart went on,
remembering as he spoke. "I knew who he was, because he'd
visited our camp from time to time. I liked him; but if it had been
up to me, then, I'd have stayed with the camp rather than have gone
to him."

"Tell us about him," said Pier.

"He wasn't much bigger than you, Lord," said Bart. "His arms
were long for his size and he was much stronger than he looked. He
lived with the m6tis--in fact, he was close to Louis Rid, and Rid
sometimes acted on his advice. He was a small, dark man, very
intense. People who didn't know him sometimes began by taking

THE gARTH LORDS
	109


him too lightly, at first--"

"Ah!" said Marta unexpectedly.
Bart looked at her.
"Go on," she said.

"As I say, they'd begin by taking him lightly but once they go to
know him, they found out quickly he was somebody they had to
respect, either as friend or enemy. He was so much smarter than
those around him, that he was almost like a man living with a pack
of animals, lie taught me how to speak French with several
different accents. Also, other languages, and a lot about the world
that the mtis and the Indians didn't know."

As with his mother, talking about his father had brought back to
lart the feeling of his father's presence.

Only, in the case of his father, Bart had sharp visual memories to
go with that feeling. The one that came most often to him was the
image of Lionel seated across the cabin from him, writing at a table
under the bright white light of a parafin lamp in the evening as Bart
sat at his own studies with another lamp at another table.

His father's face in that image was carved into Bart's memories.
It had been a lean, narrow face under long, straight black hair. A
face with brilliant eyes, quick to xpression; so unlike Bart's own
square, nearly expressionless features, that Bart had hated his own
image when he saw it in the cabin mirror, thinking of himself as
incredibly ugly--just as his father, to him, was the handsome, st of


"Tell us," Marta was saying to him, "what life was like for you
as a boy, growing up among the m6tis?"

It was an odd question, Bart thought, under the present circumstances;
but Pier's wife--if "wife" had the same meaning here in
the Inner World, among the Lords--seemed to he indulging some
private interest; and it seemed her husband was sitting back and
letting her do so.

Bart tried, therefore, to tell them. But it was hard to pick what
they might want to hear and what might not bind him too tightly to
a history that could stand in the way of his claiming Hybrid birth
later on.

As a result, he told them--told Maria, actually--about little
things. Like the schoolhouse, which he had attended because his
father said that he must not seem too different; although the teacher
dealt only with simple things Bart had learned early in his time with
his father. In any case the other students there sensed a difference in
Bart, anyway, and most of them kept their distance from him--all

I!0
	Gordon R. Dickson


of them, that was, except Emma. The others did not dare pick on
him because, like his father, he was strong for his size and the
Indian camp had taught him early not to be afraid of a fight. But
they made no effort to be close to him.

It was the learning sessions he had had with his father that were
most important in his memory. His father told him fascinating
stories of a world far beyond these north woods; told him of people,
places and things, taught him different languages and customs and a
different historical background to the time they were now in than
even Louis Riel seemed to know.

Listening to Lionel's words, Bart had eagerly absorbed fascinating
details about Europe and North Africa, Persia and China; and
also about something called the Ottoman Empire. The overall
picture his father's words built for him was of a human race made
up of many different kinds of men and women, struggling, always
struggling, upward toward some better form of life that they could
hardly define themselves but which led them over the centuries to
build and invent tools to give them dominance over the earth and
even to change the face of it.

None of these latter memories were in the account he gave Marta
and Pier--and, still, he had an uneasy feeling that the two of them
were reading some of his private thoughts through the bare account
he gave them of his father's life and death; and his own life after
that, when he had left Riel down in the United States and made his
own way here.

Bart was first puzzled, then wary, about the wealth of detail they
wanted to hear, both about himself and his life with his father. Pier,
it seemed, was interested mostly in what Bart and Lionel had done
and talked of, and where they had gone. Marta's interest fastened
on other elements: on how they had felt toward each other and the
people around them. She seemed more interested in their joys and
SO1TOWS.

It occurred to Bart, suddenly, that just possibly he had tapped a
vein of intense curiosity in this race of strange little people who
owned and spent their lives in this Inner World. A curiosity about
the world of open air and sunlight above them, and curiosity about
the ordinary humans who lived there. Nothing else, thought Bart,
could explain the exhaustiveness of the interest Pier and Marta were
showing in every detail of Bart's former life.

When it came to the point of his mentioning Emma and her
brother, Bart touched on them only lightly. He did not want to
reveal either the importance of Emma to him, or his knowledge of

	T//' ./'///
	I I I

her presence here, until he knew more about whether it was safe to
do so. He wondered uneasily whether they already knew that about
him, too; but he had no choice but to put the best face he could on it
all.

Fortunately, their questions all stopped with Bart's capture at
Sbunthead; and eventually--Bart was beginning to feel harried and
wary--there came a slight pause. Once more Pier and Marta
looked at each other.

"Whatever you wish, my Lord," said Marta out loud, in the
French they had been speaking, with a demureness completely
unlike the way she had been speaking so far to her husband. Bart
gazed at her with curiosity and more of his earlier suspicion.

"And now, Bart," said Pier, also still in French, "stay as you
are and wait. I'll talk to the Lady privately for a moment."

He turned to Marta and began to speak in that oddly familiarsounding,
but barely unintelligible, private language that the Lordly
class and Hybrids, sometimes, seemed to use among themselves.

Bart
sat motionless, cross-legged, with his face impassive as
always; but with resentment warming inside him. He had never
found it pleasant to be in a group where all the other members were
speaking and understanding a language he did not understand. The
suspicion that they were talking about him--aloud and in front of
him but in such a way that he could not catch them at it, was
emotionally inescapable. It was doubled when--as now--he
actually knew himself to he the subject of the indecipherable
conversation.

• . . And yet the language they were speaking was so tantalizingly
close to something he knew. Not French, not German, not
Italian...

Then, without warning, he suddenly found himself understanding.
All at once, he could follow more than enough of the words
Pier and Marta were saying--for by now the two were in animated
discussion--to recognize it as a twisted version of something he
had once learned. Only, these people spoke it with a totally
different pronunciation, some difference of form, and a number of
unknown words.

Pier and Marta were speaking Latin.

But it was not the classical Latin his father had painstakingly
taught him. It was a Latin in which the words were mispronounced
and sometimes used to mean something largely different from the
meaning his father had taught him.

	112
	Gordon . Dickson

Recognizing the language at last, Bart abruptly remembered
something buried so deeply that it had been forgotten over the
years. His father had put a great deal of emphasis on the fact that
the correct speaking of a language, or the correct accent for a
regional version of a language, was all-important. Latin, he had
told his son, being a dead language, should never be mispronounced
or misused--and if ever Bart ornamented his conversation
by so much as a Latin phrase he must be sure to pronounce the
words of it as they had in classical times.

He had even, Bart remembered now, made the boy promise that
he would never commit the vulgarity of speaking Latin, of all
languages, incorrectly.

"... but we must go very slowly and carefully," Pier was
saying to Marta at this moment. "Very slowly and carefully. The
evidence must be beyond all argument before we even accept it

ourselves, let alone think of showing it to others."

"But I hate to think of him--," said Marta.

"We have no choice, my love. No choice," Pier answered.
"Even as Librarian, I'm not free to do anything that might be
construed as violating the Compact .... "

These words he was listening to and now understanding, Bart
thought, should have been obvious to him from the start as a dialect
of the Latin his father had taught him.

But there was no time for remembering now. At the moment all
of his attention ras needed, trying to follow the unfamiliar forms
and v,xds of the conversation about himself going on between Pier
and Marta.

"Well, I'm not that concerned about the Compact!" said Marta.
"And I'm not afraid to say what I think. He's not the usual type of
slave at all! You can't deny that after hearing what he's been telling

us''

What caused Bart to gamble at this point, he was never afterrard
able to decide. Perhaps the impulse was the result of a kindliness he
seemed to feel in Pier and Marta; or perhaps it was simply that his
own instincts cued him when logic would not. His original
intention as far as the language spoken by the Lords was concerned
had been to master it sooner or later; but he had never even
speculated on the possibility of trying to speak it until he should be
certain that he could use it with a fluency equal to the little people's
own, such as would astound them with his knowledge.

He knew that in speaking now, he would be risking his plan to
pass for a Hybrid. But it was as if a spark from Marta's emotion

	iE EART"H LORDS
	I13

kindled the decision in him. In his mind, he built the phrase he
wished to say in classical Latin--with difficulty, for his knowledge
of it had been rather a reading than a speaking knowledge--then
made such changes in the pronunciation as he thought he had heard
when Pier and Marta spoke it just now. He knew that it would take
more than a few changes to make him sound fluent, or even
completely understandable. The grammar was much simpler and
words were so often used with a somewhat different meaning than
they had held in the classical form. But, hopefully, Pier and Marta

would follow what he was trying to say.

Stumblingly, he spoke.

"Give me pardon, Lordly Ones," he said, choosing the closest
terms he could think of to those he had heard, "is it pleasing or not
to you to know that knowledge some of language yours I have?"

He was careful to speak slowly and clearly and make the changes
in pronunciation. Having done so, he waited for their response.

It was not until after the words were out of his mouth, and Pier
and Marta had abandoned their own conversation to turn and stare
wordlessly at him, that he realized the true proportions of his
gamble--that by speaking out in this manner, if he failed to make
the proper impression on the two before him, then he might very
well have signed his death warrant, as a slave who knew something
he should not.

chapter
ten


THE SlLrCE STREtCHeD out. Pier and Marta continued to stare at
him, and it cued to Bart suddenl that haps his attempt to
s their dialect might have en bad that they h not
undt him.

at he had nstmcted in his own mind h been, in clsical
tin, the simpit fo of what he wished to ; since the
dialect he had n listening to emed simpler and mo dict in
i gm than classical Latin as he had n taught it his
father. Written, the s uld h n "Veniam date,
domitores. PMceame vobis cognoscere qte congnitionem
aliqm linge stm eo?"

e cha in pwnunciation he had pick up d d from
the s' dit had primely n t pmnunciation of "w"
sounds "v" and the "c" sound fore on vols a soft
"c"--in oth s, like "s" ther than like "k."

Accordingly, the p, which he uld oinily have p
nounced as "Weni dtay, domnatoys. Plakeeatnay his
kognoscoy kad kogneetowncm ahleuam lingueyc s
hb . . ."

... he had sken instead as "vaynec dtay domecnmors.
Pltnay his kognoomy kad kogneeenem
ahleu lnguay vestry hahbaT'

Something we much like a panic stied in him n. He
h his mind hastily for lines that they must cognizc, even if
the pronunciation was not what they to; and his mcmo
me up with the oning lines of the AeneM, by Virgil: "Ar
veruue cano Troiae . . "

"Owdtay," he id htily. "Aa vrumqu kano


"You run' I think," intept Pier in tin, almost coldly,
"Owmy: a uay o Tm."

It not ctly the civic pronunciation of that fit line of
tin B h led it m his ¢r, but it so


	Gordon R. Dickson

She turned back to Bart.

"Pier and I promise you, Bart," she said, "whatever you have to
say to us, we'll keep to oursdves. We won't tell anyone of anything
you say; and of course, we trust you to do the same with what we
tell you. Isn't that right, Pier?"

She looked at her husband again. Pier sighed.

"Yes. Yes .... " he said. "Ban, honor is a great thing to those
of us who are Lords. I give you my word of honor that whatever u
may tell me about yourself will not be told by me to anyone else. I'll
also promise that I'll not act upon what I hear from you, in my
official capacity as one of the Three and under my responsibilities


Ban's thoughts were tumbling over each other in his mind. He
felt at once a great elation and a great wariness. What he was
hearing was far more than he had ever expected to hear and almost
more than he could trust. He had found himself coming to like Pier
and Marta. But there was no guarantee in that which meant he
could trust them. And while their attitude seemed to bode well for
his ideas, he still had no idea just what they were themselves
seeking.

Not yet, said his inner, cautious soul. Not completely, yet.
Perhaps eventually.

"Are you satisfied, Ban?" Marta asked.

"Yes," he said, knowing that his naturally expressionless face
would not give away the lie.

"Then, I'll ask you again. How much about yourself have you
guessed from what's been said here?"

"I've guessed," said Ban, "that the Lord and the Lady are more
interested in me than they might be if they were only concerned
with me as a possible house servant."

"Vincent, all over again," murmurred Maria. "Ban, you've got
to do better than that. I want you to tell me the most you've
guessed, not the least."

She had him cornered.

"My greatest guess," he said slowly, "is that for some reason
you seem to be interested more in me, as me, than as one of your
slaves, in any possible slave capacity."

"Of course," said Marta. "Tell him, Pier."
"Tell him what, my dear?"
"Tell him everything."

"No," said Pier slowly, and his voice deepened. His dark eyes
were steady on Ban under the gray, straggly eyebrows. "'I'm sorry,

my love, but not everything, yet. He still has to prove himself to the
vodd we live in. He's only one person, and healthy. We're two,
and no longer young. He might live anywhere. Here is the only
place we can survive; and we have a right to defend the safety of our

position here. You'll have to wait--wait a little, Marta."

"At least tell him--"

I'll decide what to tell him," said Pier. "I'm one of the Three;
and I know things I've not even told you, who are closest to my
heart--things I've not told any living soul. There are things that
have to wait for the proper moment for their telling; and a lot that

u'd like to have me tell Bart hasn't yet come to its moment."
He stopped, still looking at Bart, then went on.

"I think Bart understands. I think, too, he's got his own matters
about which he waits for the proper moment for telling us. Am I
right, Bart?"

"Yes," said Bart. He felt an admiration for the small, old man
before him. "I have. I trust you, Lord and Lady, but there are
things I can't say because they involve others besides me."

"But--," began Marta, then checked herself. Once more she
looked at Pier.

"Bart's hesitation to be completely open with us, and ours to be
completely open with him, needn't stop us from going ahead with
what you and I planned for this moment," Pier said to her. "After
all, this is only our first talk. He doesn't know us yet; as we don't
fully know him. But we do know enough to tell him some things
and do what we had decided to do for him first."

Bart's inner ears pricked up at the "for him." He was tempted to
bring up the subject of Emma, but reason told him not to push his
luck until he knew more of what these two extraordinary people had
in mind.

"Then it's all right," said Marta, "to let him go on just the way
he has so far? If he goes on without knowing any more than he does
now it'll be cruel to him and shameful for us.:'

"Sometimes cruelty and shame can't be avoided," said Pier.

".But you're right. Bart, listen to me."

"Yes, Lord."

"Many things I'm not going to explain to you now. For now, it's
enough for you to know that Marta and I once took an interest in the
young man who later became your father. Because of that interest
we--while we were still careful not to break any of the laws of our
Inner World, here--were able to help him considerably. Because
you're your father's son, and if you continue to show you deserve it,