by James White
The expected storm of protest came then, with Kelso as its center and Hynds, Fielding and Hutton silent only because the Lieutenant was putting forward their objections much more vehemently than they dared or were capable of doing themselves. And Kelso, Warren noted, was becoming down-right disrespectful.
“… You can’t do it and they won’t stand for it anyway!” Kelso was saying. He was beginning to run down and also to drift from the point. “There’s no need to waste men and effort exploring the other continent when there’s still enough room on this one, no reason to evacuate anyone to it, and this idea of sending everybody to night school is a sheer waste of time! In your efforts to gain support for the Committee you’re undermining it, wrecking it and everything it stands for! Look at all the women coming here, and our location is supposed to be a secret! I tell you the whole damned Committee is fast going Civilian and our security is shot to hell!”
“Our security is shot to hell … sir!” said Warren.
Fielding coughed and the two Majors began rubbing their jaws suddenly so that the lower halves of their faces were hidden. Kelso was silent for a long time, his face becoming a deeper red with every second which passed, then he mumbled, “I—I’m sorry, sir.”
“Very well,” said Warren. Still quietly, he went on, “Your two main objections are that we don’t need the other continent and that we’re all going Civilian. Well now, I personally do not care, Lieutenant, if the whole Escape Committee goes Civilian, if in so doing we are enabled to escape. With that out of the way we come to my reasons for wanting the other continent, some of which you should not have to have explained to you, Lieutenant—weather observation posts for accurate forecasting immediately prior to the Escape date, and the communications relays to bring the date to us. The Escape itself must be made as foolproof as is humanly possible, which means that ne effort or sacrifice however great will be too much if by it we can allay Bug suspicions or otherwise improve the chances of the Escape by the tiniest fraction, and I can tell you that our sacrifices will be considerable. At the same time we will not move until we are as certain of success as it is possible to be.
“Even so,” Warren continued, the rasp coming back into his voice despite himself, “it would be criminally negligent and stupidly unrealistic if I did not consider the possibility of failure, or take all possible precautions against Bug reprisals, because we must assume that if the attempt aborted they would retaliate with nuclear weapons. In such an eventuality I would like everyone not immediately concerned with the Escape to be as many hundreds of miles away as possible—where, we hope, they would live to try another day.”
The expression on the faces around him were definitely subdued, Warren thought grimly, and with E-Day just under two years it was not too early to remind them of the consequences of failure. There were still far too many Committeemen who thought of the Escape as something which was always in the future, an event which would never actually come to pass.
Returning his attention to Kelso, he said briskly, “They will stand for it, Lieutenant, and you will have the job of talking them into leaving. If your well-known charm fails, there are various types of pressure which can be brought to bear. It will be a gradual process, of course, so uch so that I doubt if force will be necessary at all.
“Here is what I had in mind …”
Chapter 10
The morning of E-Day minus three hundred and eighty was cloudless and hot, with a stiff land-breeze which rendered the heat of the sun pleasant rather than unbearable. Taking advantage of the breeze as well as of the fact that the guardship would not rise for another fifteen hours, one of the new catamarans was racing for the concealed anchorage on the nearest island, plowing a dazzling white double furrow across the waters of Anderson Bay. The ship passed close enough for Warren to see details of its deck cargo—section of a glider slipway and a dismantled two-man sail plane before the bow-wave sent his own boat rocking madly.
Beside him Hutton directed some derogatory remarks after the hurrying cat, then handed Warren a wooden bucket with a glass bottom.
“If you look down there, sir,” he said, “you’ll see the units we’ve had under two hundred feet of water since last night. I’m going to see if any have sprung a leak.”
At Hutton’s signal one of the officers in the larger boat nearby took his place on the overhanging platform which had been built onto its stern, and began carefully hauling in the line which had been attached on the surface to a colored float. Simultaneously another officer slipped over the side and trod water, his face submerged for minutes at a time as he watched the suit under test rise slowly toward him.
The problem arose because the Bugs had allowed the prisoners to retain their service battledress while divesting them of the associate equipment which converted this shipboard uniform into a short-duration spacesuit. Solving it had turned out to be one of the hardest jobs the Committee had had to tackle.
Various combinations of materials had been tried in the production of home-made substitutes—wood and glass helmets painstakingly care to fit the metal shoulder rings of the suits, air-tanks fashioned from hollowed out logs and air-hoses of finely stitched leather reinforced along the seams with the foul-smelling glues and sealing compounds which Hutton’s researchers had developed. But despite everything the air-hoses ruptured, the log tanks split from internal pressure and the wooden helmets besides leaking like sieves, retained so much of their wearer’s body heat that they were impossible to work in. The answer, so far as comfort and safety was concerned, seemed to be all-glass tanks and helmets joined by a short length of cane to which were attached the control taps. But it was not a good answer because the arrangement lacked flexibility and was highly susceptible to accidental damage.
Because the only efficient sealing compound, a tarry substance with a fairly low melting point which set as hard as rock, was nearly as brittle as the glass it sealed, the slightest strain put upon the device by the wearer caused the helmet of tank to crack where it joined the rigid air-hose. But it was just not practical to send up an assault group with instructions that, no matter what was happening around them, they were to bend only at the hips …!
In the poison filled tunnels of the guardship mock-up at Hutton’s Mountain the men had actually carried out a series of drills in such brittle death-traps, so far without any fatal accidents. The men had gone through their maneuvers grim-faced and stiff-backed and they had insisted that they could do the same under weightless conditions in the guardship—and had insisted further that no conceivable agency or circumstance, be it Bug, human or major natural catastrophe, would panic them into making the sort of sudden, unthinking movement which might kill them. Even though there could be no doubt about their bravery, Warren know some of the hotheads who made up the assault groups and he had told Hutton that he’d have to produce a better answer.
And now the answer was drifting up through the green depths of the bay toward the surface, a grotesque man-shape with a giant, misshapen head and a pouter-pidgeon chest. When it broke the surface the officer already in the water detached the weights which had held it to the sea bed and helped lift it aboard. Hutton brought his boat alongside so that Warren could see the details.
To s stiffly-inflated spacesuit had been added a glass helmet and air-tanks of conventional Hutton design, the two tanks being mounted in front so that the taps in the hoses were easily accessible to the wearer. The fishbowl, a lumpy sphere of varying thickness whose optical properties left much to be desired, was enclosed at the top, back and sides by an open latticework of this cane shoots which continued over the shoulders and down the back to the level of the hips, and curved outwards to enclose the two spherical chest tanks.
Sealing compound had been used to reinforce the wicker-work shield; a large amount of seaweed had become entangled in it overnight and several varieties of marine life wriggled and flapped in and around it. The object made Warren think of a man who had undergone a rather gruesome sea change, then h
e had a second look at the spherical check tanks and decided that it couldn’t possibly make anyone think of a man.
Hutton said, “The wickerwork around the helmet and tanks protects them against accidental damage, and is open enough to allow unwanted heat to escape by radiation from the helmet. And enclosing the body to hip level in this … this form-fitting wastebasket means that the arms and legs can be moved freely, even violently, without danger of the air connections coming adrift. It is comparatively light and fairly rigid, sir, and considering the materials, facilities and time available I consider it to be the best workable design to be produced. I’d like your permission to put this one into production, sir.”
The tone of the normally cautious and reticent Major contained the nearest approach to smugness that warren had ever heard from the research chief, and that it was plain that Hutton thought he had the answer and was expecting a pat on the back for finding it. Warren grunted and scrambled onto the projecting platform of the large boat, where he lifted the dripping, weed-covered spacesuit carefully and tilted it backwards and forwards several times. He replaced it on the platform and rubbed the green slime from his hands onto the back of his kilt.
“There’s at least a pint of water sloshing about in there,” he said withholding the pat temporarily.
“Sealing the helmet and wicker surround onto an empty suit is tricky, sir. With a man inside to direct the sealing process there would be no leakage.”
Warren nodded, smiling. “Permission granted. You’ve done very well, Major. I suppose you’ll put Lieutenant Nicholson’s girls onto it?”
“Yes sir.” said Hutton. “And the girls in town and in the nearer farms will want to help, too. I’d prefer to have female officers exclusively working on this project. They have the temperament for fine work needing lots of patience, and they’ll feel that they’re making a direct contribution to the Escape, something which they don’t feel slicing paperwood or copying textbooks all the time.”
Hutton paused while a second suit broke the surface and was hauled in, then he went on, “The wickerwork shield and connections require approximately one hundred and ten hours of work, although this will come down as the girls gain experience. We’ll standardize production into four basic sizes …”
As the Major talked on enthusiastically, Warren began to consider the implications of having a workable spacesuit and how it would affect his immediate planning.
The fact that the wickerwork spacesuit project had already leaked to practically everybody did not concern Warren as much as it did people like Kelso and Hynds, who threw up their hands and howled loudly about security. The time was very near when certain matters must be discussed and plans drawn up which would have to be kept secret from the general populace, but meanwhile officers talked too much and allowed themselves to be pumped by admiring friends and Warren allowed it and in some cases actually fostered it. Gossiping was good for morale and news or information gained with difficulty tended to have more weight given to it than that which was given away free.
Warren’s eyes were caught suddenly by a motion in the sky which was too regular to be a sea bird. A glider was coming in from the direction of the glass plant further up the coast, at an altitude which showed that it had made good use of intervening thermals. It banked steeply above the town, sideslipping off surplus height and generally showing off. The underside of one wing bore the white diamond which indicated a trainee pilot.
The glider men were not supposed to talk, but it was general knowledge anyway that they operated in conjunction with the survey catamarans, that the cats which explored the other continent and set up observation posts had, as part of their duties, the construction of camouflaged glider runways on nearby slopes. The job of mapping the other continent had been enormously accelerated by the gliders which, wind and cloud cover permitting could range anything up to a hundred miles inland from their coastal bases. And the cat men were not supposed to talk about the places they’d been—at least, not officially.
So the information leaked out that the other continent was much superior in every way to their present environment, and the fact that it was a leakage of true information aided Warren’s plan considerably. The ground over there was more fertile and at the same time less densely wooded, the mountains, rivers and lakes were higher, longer and more beautiful and the grass was, of course, greener there. But the greatest selling point of all, a stroke of sheer good fortune which Warren could still hardly believe was that for reasons which were still obscure the native life-form known as the Battler was virtually unknown on the other continent.
So the officers with young families whose farms were in constant danger from these creatures, as well as men who simply wanted a change of scenery, began pressing Warren to evacuate them. The numbers had grown to such proportions that he was building more and more ships to cope with them as well as pulling cats off survey duty. And every time Meteorology forecast suitable winds and a lengthy period of overcast which would hide the operation from the orbiting guardship, a small armada left for the other continent…
The glider swept out over the bay, banked steeply and headed shoreward again on a course which would take it near a squat log building set on the edge of the sea which was its hangar. In the boat Hutton had stopped talking and was watching it go over, his expression reflecting the odd mixture of pride, criticism and parental concern of the person who is observing the antics of one of his brain-children.
Hutton had had a lot to do with the designing of the latest gliders. It had been he who had insisted that, for ease of operation and subsequent rapid concealment, they should be built to take off sloping ramps and land on water. He had designed the stepped hull and, when the first three test models had cartwheeled all over the bay because one wingtip float had dug itself into the water while the other was in the air, he had suggested the sponsons—short, stub wings projecting from the fuselage just above the water line, which removed the landing hazard and in the air added to the lift. It had also been Hutton’s idea to use rockets for gain-height when the necessary updraughts were absent or for extending the glider’s range, and he had designed solid-fuel rockets. Hutton was something of an all-around genius, and he was one of the reasons why Warren’s plans had gone so smoothly up to now.
Starting today, however, the snags, hitches and deliberate foul-ups would come thick and fast. Peters would see to that.
Warren had not spoken to the Fleet Commander since the day of his arrival. At first he had avoided meeting the other by always keeping on the move. Then gradually it became apparent that Peters no longer sought contact with him, and Warren thought he knew why. Peters probably believed that his arguments for the Civilian viewpoint that first day had, when the Marshal had had a chance to think them over, converted Warren to Peters’ way of thinking, and during the past two years Warren had managed to proceed with the Escape plan without disabusing the other of this notion.
Fleet Commander Peters, Warren had long ago decided, was intelligent enough to realize the danger the long-term danger, of the two factions which had grown up among the prison population. He had not been able to accomplish much against the Committee himself except to pare down their numbers and make them an even tighter and more fanatical group, but he must have hoped that someone with Warren’s authority could succeed where he had failed. And one of the ways this could be done, again given the rank which was Warren’s, was ostensibly to take over leadership of the Committee and wreck it from within.
The steady increase of cordial relations between Committee and non-Committee members, the intermarrying and the free passage into hitherto secret Committee projects would appear to Peters as a definite galvanizing process. As also would the boatbuilding programme, the gliders and the opening up of Battler-free land on the other continent—not to mention the definite Civilian applications of the re-education program. True, there were good Committee reasons for doing all these things, too, but a tired and ageing Fleet Commander might think that
these reasons had been provided by Warren to keep the Committeemen happy while he dispersed them and dissipated their energies in what was obviously Civilian work. And Warren’s recent suggestion of lighting the streets of Andersonstown at night with oil lamps—a measure aimed at showing the orbiting guardship that they had nothing to hide—could also be taken as a first indication that the prisoners were beginning to accept their lot and settle down.
It had been an elaborate double-bluff aimed at lulling Peters and the opposition which he represented into a false sense of security. But when Hutton’s spacesuit went into production the Fleet Commander would not be so old and tired that he would not realize what had been going on, and Peters would react.
With the Fleet Commander alive at last to what was happening, the obvious course would be to hit him as hard and as often and from as many different directions as possible. But Warren had somehow to do these things without losing the respect he had built up among Committee and non-Committee alike. If any particular order seemed to harsh he would have to issue another which took the sting out of it, or at least forced attention elsewhere…
The glider was skimming the surface of the bay, the first step slapping rhythmically along the tops of the waves until water drag abruptly checked its forward speed and it came foaming to a halt. A long, low boat with twelve oarsmen and a towing rope was already shooting toward it to haul it into the cover of its hangar.
It had become almost a reflex these days to cover or otherwise conceal any object likely to arouse the suspicions of the watchers in space. So much so that the action was performed with the same speed and enthusiasm even, as now, when the guardship was below the horizon.
