The Escape Orbit

by James White

  But the two-hour trek through the forest, which was often so dense and thorny that Warren longed for Civilian trousers rather than his trim, Committee kilt, did not noticeably damp their enthusiasm and when they reached the road which would eventually lead them to the farm they began to make good time.

  It was Warren’s experience of what, until then, had been only a black line on the wall map. The road was little more than an unpaved trail, grass-grown and overhung by trees except where it crossed a river or ravine by way of a strong and surprisingly well-designed bridge. Warren had to remind himself that the road had not been built solely for pedestrian traffic, but was meant to take the heavy, metal sections of the dummy, and that the whole escape could fail if just one of those sections was to end up in a ravine.

  Three hours before sunset Briggs called a halt, saying that due to their lack of experience it would be better to allow plenty of daylight in which to catch their supper. Then later, when the fires were going well and the men were returning in triumph with the small rabbit-like creatures which abounded in the forest, Briggs had some gently sarcastic things to say about the large number of arrows which were apparently necessary to kill these ferocious, eight-inch long herbivores. And when there was nothing left of the supper but the appetizing smell, he made further attempts to spoil the general air of well-being by talking about some of the horrible accidents which could occur through hammocks not being properly hung. Warren felt a little sorry for him because nothing he said or did could make Fielding and the men stop behaving as if they were all on a glorious picnic.

  Some of the things which Briggs had warned them about came back to Warren, however, as he climbed the regulation thirty feet into one of the trees chosen for them to sleep in. Thirty feet was the minimum safe altitude, the height above ground level to which a fully grown battler reared onto its hind legs and with trunks at full extension could not reach. The trouble was, Warren thought as he attached his hammock to the one Briggs had pointed out to him, that branches at this height tended to be thin, and under his considerable mass this one sagged alarmingly. It required a distinct effort of will for him to climb into the hammock even when its fail-safe device—a length of thick rope looped around his waist and tied securely to the branch above—was in position. As he pulled across the flap which was designed to keep out the rain or dew, he was painfully aware of the distance between the ground and himself, and of the fact that he was not going to sleep this night….

  He awoke suddenly to the sounds of shouting, cursing and cries of pain. The sky between the leaves above him was light blue and the leaves themselves reflected pink highlights from the rising sun, and in the next tree Briggs was clambering among the branches methodically whacking the undersides of the hammocks with a stick. Warren did not think that the man would subject a Sector Marshal to such treatment, but rather than put it to the test he pulled himself astride his branch and began untying the hammock preparatory to stowing it in his pack. Half an hour later they were on their way, munching on the hard, Post-baked biscuits as they marched.

  They reached the Nelson farm just before noon, finding that it comprised a fair-sized log house and a larger but more crudely constructed building for storage purposes, both of them being enclosed by a stockade which sagged badly in two places. A large tree served as the main support and a ladder led up to a platform covered by a skin awning. The platform was above the thirty-foot level, a refuge for the Nelsons should a battler succeed in breaching the stockade.

  Warren had hoped to stay overnight at the farm, and the Nelsons had insisted on him doing so, saying that they could easily accommodate his people between the house and the barn. Despite their offer of hospitality Warren could see that they did not want him there. Mrs. Nelson seemed very ill at ease and when he talked to her husband, sounding him on the possibility of his contributing a few hours work a week to the Committee and testing his arguments generally, he found that he was not getting through to the man at all.

  The reason, or to be more accurate, the three reasons, were quite obvious. He mentioned them to Fielding as soon as they were alone together.

  “Three children,” he said in a strained voice. “Between six months and seven years. I wasn’t prepared for this.”

  Fielding was silent for a moment, then she said, “The Committee keeps records of all arriving prisoners, but they are the only new arrivals which concern them. I did expect something like this, although I would say that three is above the average. You must remember that the dangers of pregnancy are aggravated here—the lack of proper medical facilities and the battler menace to name only two…”

  “The medical facilities are pretty good, ma’am, considering,” Briggs broke in defensively at that point. Warren had not realized the guide was within earshot. Briggs went on, “There are some very good ex-medicos on the Committee. And among the Civilians, too, of course, but their doctors don’t have the same local know-how. Our people, under Hutton, have conducted systematic research into the medical properties of the local flora, and a couple of them have died carrying it out. But these people feel awkward about sending for one of our men at a confinement. They know what we think of bringing kids into a prison world, that an officer who has kids is not likely to take the risk of escaping, or dying, or maybe bringing down Bug reprisals.”

  “That,” said Warren with great feeling, “was what I was thinking.”

  “Sorry to butt in like this, sir,” Briggs went on, “but I wanted to ask permission for our men to repair this stockade….”

  According to Briggs the farm stockade was in such a state of disrepair that a baby battler could push it over, and as fixing it was a job called for the concerted efforts of upwards of six men, Nelson was probably waiting until some of his neighbors could come to help with the job. All the indications were that the Committee party would not be staying the night, so Briggs suggested that they do something before they left which would leave a good impression. Besides, if his men fixed the stockade it was the unwritten law that Mrs. Nelson would give them dinner and supplies for the journey, and while the farm bread would not remain edible as long as Committee biscuit, for the time it did remain fresh it made the biscuit taste like sawdust.

  As he gave the necessary permission Warren thought that words had failed him here and that a nice good deed might salvage something from the situation. He knew that the Nelsons would not mind feeding his hungry mob—Civilian cooking was one of the chief weapons used to convert Committeemen—and he resolved that his good deed should have no other strings attached. He would not even mention the Escape again, and for a while he would be very chary of talking about his ideas to non-Committee people.

  He was going to have to change his approach, Warren told himself grimly, and develop a whole new set of arguments.

  To Fielding he said thoughtfully, “Mrs. Nelson was Senior Warp Engineer on a battleship—she must have more degrees than she knows what to do with—and her husband, a relative moron, commanded a destroyer. It seems a great shame to me that two such brilliant people should be stuck here for the rest of their lives. It’s a criminal waste of brains!”

  “Yes, sir,” said Fielding.

  “Did you see those hand-made books lying around?” Warren went on. “Full of simple sketches and short words in block capitals. They’re accepting it, and beginning to think of teaching their children. I think they’ve given me some useful ideas…”

  “About founding a dynasty, sir?” said Fielding.

  Irritated suddenly, Warren wondered why all psychologists seemed to have one-track minds, the track becoming a deep and well-worn gully where female psychologists were concerned. They had not been that sort of ideas, and he suspected that Fielding knew it as well as he did, but perversely he refrained from telling her about them. Like his arguments, they need to be worked into better shape. Because it had become very plain to Warren that the main obstacle to the success of the Escape was not, as he had hitherto thought, the Bug guardship….

/>   “Muffled by the thick log walls, but still plainly audible, the Nelson baby began to cry.

  Chapter 8

  If it looked like anything else at all, Warren thought it was an elephant—a large low-slung elephant with six legs and two trunks which were each more than twenty feet long. Below the point where the trunk joined the massive head a wide, loose mouth gaped open to display three concentric rows of shark-like teeth, and above the trunk its tow tiny eyes were almost hidden by protective ridges of bone and muscle. Between the eyes a flat, triangular horn, razor-edged fore and aft, came to a sharp point, and anything which had been caught by the trunks and was either too large or not quite dead was impaled on the horn while the trunks tore it into pieces of a more manageable size. Because it had no natural enemies and was too big and awkward to profit from camouflage, its hide was a blotchy horror of black and green and livid yellow.

  “I … It is our policy, sir,” Briggs was saying as the beast’s heavy tentacles flailed bad-temperedly at the base of their tree, “to avoid battle with them if at all possible. Only if a party is caught in the open or if they have been retained by some farmer to kill the battler will we fight. So your people don’t have to feel ashamed at being treed by a full-grown bull like this one. Killing battlers is a very specialized job …”

  The rest of what he said was last as the battler sent its twenty-foot tentacles questing among the lower branches of their tree. It found a thick branch, its tentacles curled around it and tightened, and the tree creaked deafeningly as the battler began lifting its forepart off the ground. But Warren did not have to have the technique of battler-killing explained to him. He had cone considerable reading on the subject.

  The only quick way to kill one of them was to cause serious damage to its brain. But this tiny organ was very well protected at every point by an inches-thick skull and the tremendous bands of muscles serving the jaw and tentacles.

  The single vulnerable spot was the roof of the mouth, and a cross-bow bolt or spear driven vertically upwards for a distance of two or three inches brought instant death.

  But maneuvering a battler into a position where this thrust could be delivered was a combined operation calling for great skill, a steady aim and even steadier nerves. It had been found that a superficial wound close to but not in the eye caused the battler’s tentacles to roll back tightly and the jaw to drop open. This was a purely reflex action lasting for not more than a second, and it was during this period that the hunter had to evade the wildly kicking forelegs and inflect the wound. At the same time precautions had to be taken against accidently blinding the creature, because if that happened the battler became so maddened that it was no longer possible to kill it quickly and it could devastate the surrounding countryside for days before it finally died. The mouth was the only weak spot and the hunter had to get there the first time, because he would not get a second chance.

  His friends might but not him, ever.

  Below Warren the battler transferred its grip to a thinner branch which sagged, splintered and tore free under the strain, sending the creature crashing full length to the ground. The impact was like a minor earthquake shaking the area, then the beast rolled ponderously to its feet and moved away.

  “Some of the farmers have succeeded in domesticating them,” Briggs went on as it disappeared between the trees. “Cows, of course, and they have to catch them very young to remove the horns and tentacles without ill effects. They train them on a diet of grain and killed meat rather than letting them catch it on the hoof. You’ll see some domesticated cows in Andersonstown. Except for a tendency to kick their wagons to pieces in springtime they’re very useful draught animals.”

  “We can go down now, sir,” he added.

  They resumed the trek, following a wide, sweeping curve to the northwest, calling on as many farms as possible until they struck the river, then following it to the sea. There were many farming communities on the banks of the river, comprising anything up to twenty houses sheltering behind a common stockade for mutual protection. His reception in these places was generally less restrained than in single farmhouses, the concept of mutual protection apparently stretching to include big bad Sector Marshals, and he was able to meet a great many officers with very useful specialties. He met a large number of their offspring, too, and he was able to test out a number of his ideas and arguments, sometimes successfully.

  “I never suspected that you were such a good politician, sir,” Fielding said after one of the visits. “You kiss babies like you’ve been doing it all your life. Or do you like the little terrors …?”

  “Some of them,” Warren replied guardedly, “are less terrible than others.”

  Since the meeting with the battler his men had ceased treating the whole affair as a picnic, their guide had become much more friendly with them, and he was even able to indulge in backchat with Fielding and not show any visible signs of strain at this continued verbal contact with a woman. But as they approached Andersonstown, Briggs began to get the look of a man about to face a battler single-handed.

  Unlike the Post on the hill overlooking it, no attempt had been made to screen Andersonstown from space observation. It was a small town rather than a village, with well-planned streets of single- or two-story log buildings, a wooden dock and about thirty boats of various sizes tied up alongside or at anchor in the bay. A semicircular stockade protected its landward side and, because battlers could not swim, the seaward side was open.

  Protocol demanded that they first call at the Post.

  His intention had been to obtain the names and whereabouts of the most influential officers in the town with a view to visiting them and sounding them out before calling them all together for his major appeal. He had learned by heliograph that Fleet Commander Peters was also heading for Andersonstown and would arrive in three days, plainly with the intention of throwing a spanner in the works—respectfully, of course, by calling for public debate on the whole Escape operation. Warren was still too unsure of his position to risk that, so he had to rush through the Andersonstown business and leave before Peters arrived.

  But the greater part of the first day was wasted because Fielding insisted that she could not work properly in the uniform issued at their first Post because the outfits worn by Lieutenant Nicholson’s girls were so much smarter that she felt everyone was laughing at her.

  Nicholson, the Post commander, was a tall, graying but remarkably handsome woman. The uniform which she and the other officers on her all-female post wore consisted of the usual hide boots, trousers which were tighter fitting than was really necessary and a sort of bolero jacket which laced up the front with leather thongs. Some of the uniforms were laced higher than others, Warren noted, the degree of cleavage apparently controlled by the physiological contours of the officers concerned. Nicholson seemed a bit flattered at having to entertain a Sector Marshal at her Post, but not so much that she didn’t crack a smile when she assured him that her girls were all officers and gentlewomen who would respect the privacy of the visitor’s quarters, adding that the men in the party might expect to be whistled at from time to time, but they would be in no serious danger provided they did not whistle back ….

  It did not take Warren long to realize that there were unsuspected depths to this middle-aged, statuesque female with the nervous and almost impudently respectful manner. She was one of the large number of female officers rejected by the Committee because of the embarrassment of her sex, but that did not stop her from cherishing Committee ideals—like the other girls on the post she wanted to do everything possible to bring about the Escape.

  She was in touch with a great many non-Committee sources of information in Andersonstown, she explained that evening while Fielding and Warren were having dinner with her, and she realized that for the best results the Marshal should put across his ideas and leave before the Fleet Commander arrived to rally the opposition. Lieutenant Nicholson had therefore taken the liberty of arranging a meeting between
a representative group of citizens and the Marshal to take place at the Post early next day.

  When he heard that Warren felt like kissing the Lieutenant and almost said so. But he checked the impulse. It would have definitely been lesemajeste, and Fielding would probably have wrung deep, dark psychological meanings out of it.

  Warren was surprised to find next morning that the representative group of citizens numbered upwards of two hundred, although he was not surprised to see that the majority of them were girls. Not that he could see them very clearly, of course, because the only direct light coming into the assembly hut was from the trap above Warren’s head, so that the area around his table an chair was spotlighted while in the audience he could see only shadowy rows of faces. But he knew that Nicholson, Fielding and the others of his party were strategically placed among his listeners, the intention being to demonstrate the new and more cordial feelings towards non-Committee officers as well as to answer the sort of questions which could not be asked directly of a Sector Marshal. Warren had deliberately delayed his arrival so that those questions could be answered before he arrived.

  He began quietly by outlining the war situation as he, one of the officers responsible for overall strategy, saw it, giving information which was top secret and restricted without the slightest hesitation. It was a picture of a long, costly war which had reached the stalemate of mutual exhaustion. Compared with the large-scale offensives mounted during the early decades of the war, he told them, it would require only a relatively feeble effort now by either side to end it. But neither side was capable of making this effort. The space service demanded a very special type of person, and after sixty years of war the type had become extremely rare.

  In a voice which was not so quiet he went on to tell of highly confidential reports which had reached him during and after many operations, of ships which had failed to make rendezvous because key members of the crews had suicide, or mutinied, or shown in some other shameful fashion their inability to withstand the strain of a job which all too often was simply a few hectic minutes of action sandwiched between months of utter monotony. It was a recognized fact that the more highly intelligent and stale personalities could study or otherwise exercise their minds so as not to let them dwell too much on those few minutes during the months before they occurred, or during the equally long postmortem period when they were returning to base without some of the friends or husbands or wives with whom they had set out. The vast majority of present-day officers lacked these twin qualities of stability with high intelligence and could not withstand this strain, a strain which was being further aggravated by the fact that purely mechanical failures in the ships themselves were also on the increase.