No Man's World

XIV

“What I did I did partly because of you,” Caradine said. “I had the crazy and moon-struck notion that you might be in trouble. You could say I was attempting to rescue you.” It sounded infantile.

Hsien Koanga started. Allura, standing beside him, looked ill and defeated, her auburn hair heavy about her shoulders, her face masklike in indifferent hurt. Looking at her, Caradine made the mental comparisons and thought to ask after the third of these women so disastrously injected into his life.

“Those?” The man who spoke was merely one of the moguls; a man habituated to running the destinies of solar systems. “Watch. It may amuse you.”

Caradine had been gazing at a tall wall screen where stars showed against blackness. Thinly setded, then. The air of expectant waiting was strong and he knew that these moguls were toying with him as the greater drama out there in the galaxy unfolded. Now he had only to turn his head to see the indicated screen.

Greg Rawson’s face showed on the screen. He was shouting in horror. Then his head disappeared and left only a charred, blood crisped stump of neck. Caradine could not be moved by crudities like that.

The screen shifted focus and he saw Sharon Ogilvie. She was falling. Her mouth was open but no sound came from it. Her long silvery hair streamed in the wind of her fall.

“They had been clumsily trying to enter a starship yard.”

Sharon fell past rows of dark windows, past the upraised jibs of cranes like solemnly transfixed storks. Caradine was not prepared. Sharon fell on and then, abruptly, she had struck the hook of a crane which ripped into her stomach and left her dangling.

Allura gave a choked scream. Harriet turned to Caradine.

“Are you satisfied now, John Carter?”

“I was under duress,” he said mildly. The fear was turning into anger. “I did not break my word to you. I have done no spying on this accursed planet.”

“Koanga says differently.”

Caradine felt sorry for the little man from Shanstar.

“Koanga is a citizen of a small planetary grouping. He does what he must. All decent people must stand together against things like you.”

A man’s voice rapped from a speaker. “Approaching direct now. Nothing stops them. They do not return our fire.”

A mogul answered.

Harriet said, “Tour petty little groupings will come running to us when the danger strikes them. Out there—” she waved a vehement hand at the screens—“is a tremendous space fleet. We have checked with Ragnar and the Paragon League of Worlds. The fleet is not theirs.”

“So it was true then?”

“This is an alien threat to all humanity, Carter. As a transport expert, I have been recalled to my home planet. I, too, am a mogul. Please don’t forget that.”

“I’m not likely to. Do the aliens answer radio calls?”

“No. They are heading straight for Alpha-Horakah.”

“And nothing you can do can stop them!” shouted Allura.

Everyone looked at her in astonishment.

“What do you want with me, then?” Caradine asked.

“Before we kill you we have to know what you have done. Shanstar is not truly represented by Koanga and you, just as Ahansic wasn’t by Rawson. There are other factions.”

“You mean that in face of the alien threat, you’ll combine with the other interstellar groupings?”

“Yes.”

“Well, at least that’s something.”

Koanga said heavily, “I do speak for Shanstar, Mrs. Lafonde. This man, John Carter, is not of Shanstar at all—”

“Not of Shanstar?” Harriet looked at Caradine hard. “Well? Where?”

The speaker rapped again. “Acceleration has taken them through our screening forces.”

“They’re coming in!” screamed Allura.

Caradine felt sympathy for her. It was the end of life for her so the end of this planet held some consolation.

“Take these people away!” The mogul who had spoken before snapped his fingers. Guards moved.

“Just a minute.” Harriet must carry weight here. “I want to know about this man Carter’s antecedents.”

“Of what use is all this?”

“We can’t stop the aliens, can we? So we spend the remaining time before they land keeping sane.” Harriet had this mogul wrapped around her little finger.

She turned sharply on Caradine. “Well? Who are you? Where do you come from?”

Caradine was tired. He was sick of it all. It hadn’t worked out as he’d planned. He was likely to get himself killed, and Harriet had turned out to be a blasted Horakah mogul. Very well. To hell with them all.

“My name’s David Caradine,” he said. “And I come from Earth.”

“The man’s an idiot,” said the mogul. “Harriet, we must do something about the aliens.”

“Such as? They’ve struck clean through our fleets. They haven’t fired a shot. So they’re coming here. We’ll talk to them.” To Caradine she said, “Caradine may be your name, hut from Earth—”

The mogul’s scowl darkened. “What’s your interest in this man, Harriet?” His voice lost its smoothness, showed the ruthlessness beneath. “Are you in—”

Harriet laughed with a scorn that Caradine felt overdone. “With a maniac who claims to be from Earth? A man from a fairy story? A man who—”

The speaker rapped. “Latest intelligence reports show a further alien space fleet following in the wake of the first. There are now five hundred thousand starships on the way in.

Everyone was quiet. The gravity of the situation could not be exaggerated. Horakah—even Ragnar and the good ol* PLW—could between them about muster that number. Cara-dine guessed that Harriet and her mogul friends had been relying on eventual Ragnar and PLW help; the big combines would fight off aliens. But now? Now things were different.

Now half a million aliens were rampaging in.

Activity caught up the party by the screens down at the far end of the gigantic room as a last desperate effort was organized. Caradine, Koanga, and Allura were shephereded to one side. Frightened guards stood over them. Electric tensions in the air sparked bad tempers. Harriet and the moguls were arguing. Caradine heard one of them refer to her, and then turn to the man she had talked most to.

“Well, Lafonde, it seems we cannot stop them.”

So that explained that!

Caradine looked about the depths of the chamber, trying to compress into these few dwindling minutes the touch and sight and sensation of a lifetime, through the barbaric splendor and luxury of this hall to seize on a slice of life that he had lived through fully and could remember.

For he knew that he was to die very soon.

The loftiness of chamber drew a blue-tinted mist among the groinings, and the walls fell in silver and golden magnificence that caught and reflected the glittering girl-figure of Harriet Lafonde. Thick drapes of emerald and crimson and electric blue shrouding secret doorways tossed pools of contrasting color into the vast hollowness. Everyone was in uniform. Gorgeous, outrageous, suffocating, splendid in color and pomp and ceremony.

“A single alien has landed an air boat on Alpha-Horakah. Approaching Horak and floating palace.”

“We’re ready for them,” Lafonde said uglily.

His wife said, “We talk, remember?”

“You can’t do anything else!” shouted AHura savagely.

At least, considered Caradine, this place should impress whoever the aliens were. He had lost all hope for himself, now. Whichever side won, he looked to come out on the sticky end. “Earth!” they’d said, and pushed him aside like a child or a lunatic.

The deflation, the sickness, the utter weariness with it all in him blunted his perceptions, made him physcially and mentally exhausted. Yet Allura looked in worse shape. He moved slowly, so that he was standing beside her. The guards did not stop him; everyone else’s attention was fixed on the screen which showed row after row and rank after rank of glittering dots of light, each one a starship and each one a dreadnought of space. He touched Allura on the arm.”

“Seems I was wrong about you, Allura.”

“And me, you. Oh, well. These pigs will be finished along with us all. But it’s a pity. I wanted so much from life, there was so much to do and see. And, Carter, or Caradine, I wanted you, too. There was no trickery.”

“I believe you now.” He said. “Now it’s too late.”

Out of them all, then, it would have been this girl with the heavy auburn hair and the alive face and the darting mind that cared not where it stabbed. He looked at her. She was haggard, heavy-eyed, parchment of face and slack of limb. Yet she would have been the one.

The speaker rapped. “Air boat touching locks.”

“Let them in,” said Lafonde.

There was nothing left then for any of them to do hut wait.

Throughout the barbaric magnificence of that palace chamber men and women in gorgeous uniforms stood frozen before their mutual terror. What would come stalking in arrogance and might through the corridors of this floating wonderland, to challenge them and dictate the terms of an agreement? What would their fate be? A thousand solar systems’ fate hung on the events of the next moments; possibly the fates of thousands more when the aliens sat back to consider what they would do with the other solar groupings here in this portion of the galaxy. Men could await them only with pride, ready to fight to the end knowing that the fight was doomed.

Caradine felt sorry for Horakah and the prestige and barbaric pomp of this setting. Without a shot being fired the aliens had won. Now their emissary was stalking haughtily into the inmost secret place of this floating kingpin city of Horak to dictate his terms.

The volume of noise dropped until Caradine could feel and hear the incessant throb of machinery in the marble beneath his feet.

A fanfare rang out. Brilliant, coruscating notes that battered at all ears. Through that mammoth archway appeared the alien envoy.

He was a tiny black figure, there at that enormous distance away down at the other end of the room.

“Humanoid, at least,” said Harriet in a breath.

The tiny figure approached slowly, the focal point of every eye. He looked like a man. He wore black shoes and striped trousers of black and silver and gray, and a tight black coat fitted snugly, making him look like a beetle. In his left hand, cocked up, he carried a cylindrical black object with a round brim. His white shirt was fastened at the throat by a white butterfly-shaped strip of cloth. He walked very slowly because he was old and fragile and his face was brown and lined, with deep-set eyes of gray that pierced forth beneath tufty white eyebrows. His hair was immaculately silver.

A very small and very old and very dignified gentleman walked carefully all that enormous distance across the flamboyant marble floor, between the flanking rows of guardsmen, beneath the hanging crystal chandeliers.

Harriet and her husband and all the other moguls tensed up.

This was not what they had expected.

The old gentleman stopped at last before them. He bowed very slightly, looking about, the shadow of puzzlement on his face.

Lafonde, big and burly and domineering, stepped a pace forward. “Here we are, to await you,” he said. “Can you understand me?”

“Yes.” The envoy was looking about. Then he glanced at his wrist.

“We await your terms. All the might of our suns, and the power of our allies, will fight you to the bitter end if we find your terms unnacceptable. You are alive and admitted here merely because—”

“Because there are half a million battleships out there, which are the forerunners of the main fleets.”

Lafonde, all of them, accepted that. Lafonde swallowed and tried to speak again.

“Please be quiet,” said the little old man. “I did not come to see you.” He glanced up from his wrist and made a half turn. “All these fancy uniforms,” he grumbled to himself. He walked forward.

He stopped directly before Caradine.

“Hi, Dave,” he said. “I’ve come for you.”

“Hi, Dick. I might have known you couldn’t get on without me.”

“Terrible mess. You shouldn’t have done it. Ready?”

“Yes.” Caradine felt a new man. “Oh, I’m taking a couple of friends back, if they’ll go. One, at least.” He smiled at Allura. “Care to go to Earth with me, Allura?”

She put one hand in his. Something else settled, then.

The moguls were staring. They could not speak. All then-might, their pomp, their barbaric splendor—it had not even been noticed. Just that it was a long walk for a man from the door. That was all.

Harriet put a hand to her mouth. “You mean,” she whispered, “there is an Earth? An Earth that can put’ half a million battleships out as a scouting force? My God. My God!”

No one took much notice of her.

Walking back to the overpowering doorway with the rulers of Horakah ignored, Caradine said conversationally, “I suppose young Carson Napier saw through me, Dick? Figured that I was sick of this aimless wandering, and so he called you in.

“Something like that. A commonwealth of Suns may not be ran by one man; but having the right man directing overall policy is a—well, we just need you back, Dave. That’s all there is to it.”

“But why—?” said Allura holding to his arm.

“Earth went through a rough time way back. Man called Caradine—remote ancestor, they tell me—decided she needed to recover without being subjected to extraterrestrial pressures. So the word was spread that the Earth had been destroyed, and that developed into the fairy story everyone here believed implicidy. Now, the Commonwealth Suns of Terra consists of a million solar systems.”

Dick looked apologetic. “Nearer one and a half, now, Dave.”

“And that’s where we’re going. We may come back here beyond the Blight, one day, and clean up all these little groupings. I’ve seen the mess they’re in. That sort of pecking-order pseudo-civilization is not for Earth.”

They left the palace and the barbarians. The space-tender took them to the waiting armada. Ahead lay a commonwealth of over one million stars—and the legendary world of Earth.