The Escape Orbit

by James White

  “This is understandable,” Warren broke in, “when you consider the fact that these men are responsible for the most crucial part of the operation. And I’m afraid that the closer E-Day approaches the more superior they will feel. I’ll do what I can, of course, but it would be better if you stressed the importance of support duties as much as you can in order to make the other party feel more important, too. Frankly, I’m disappointed in the behavior of some of them myself, but I still think that the men who are going to take the guardship can be forgiven a few misdemeanors.

  “At the same time,” he went on seriously, “I don’t want the opposition getting the idea that Committeemen are a pack of hoodlums and bullies, and the Sloan incident could easily give them that impression. That is why I’d like to push through an idea I’ve had for some time…”

  The idea had had to wait on Hutton’s ruling on the feasibility of a glider taking off from water under rocket assist. The ordinary two-man gliders with their considerable payload could be redesigned to rise from the water and stay up when their rockets were jettisoned, but to withstand the stress of such a takeoff the wing structure would have to be strengthened, which would increase the overall weight, the gliding angle and seriously restrict their range. Hutton, however, had come up with a workable compromise.

  With a modified hull which would unstuck more quickly from the water, a conventional, two-man glider with its entire payload consisting of rocket units could land at its destination and take off again provided the passenger was left behind. The passenger, after his work was done, would have to hike to the nearest launching post to await transport home.

  “… The other continent is a glider-pilot’s paradise,” Warren continued. “Mountains, lakes, thermals and up-draughts all over the place. The population is very widely scattered, and since that rush of weddings we had last year there is another problem. Being able to send a doctor by glider to the spot where he’s most needed, within a matter of hours, will help to alleviate it.”

  “We’ll have to build a lot more gliders,” he concluded, “but they’re useful to have, anyway. And providing fast medical aid when we are so busy with other aspects of the Escape should look good to the non-Committee people, and it should counter the unpleasantness caused by the Sloan incident, don’t you think?”

  In a strangely neutral voice, Fielding replied, “It will certainly look good to the expectant mothers, sir.”

  Warren stared hard at her for a moment, then he said quietly, “Believe it or not, I had been considering them, as well.”

  She relaxed suddenly and smiled. Warren returned it and went on to give her instructions for picking up some material on Bug psychology he needed and taking it by glider to Hutton’s Mountain. He expected to be at the mountain himself by that time and they could work on the material together. When she left he sent for Sloan.

  But there wasn’t much he could say to the Major apart from commending him for his behavior during the exercise and deploring his conduct after it. While he talked Warren kept seeing the rain and mud, the wagons bogged down and a bull Battler pulling him onto its horn. He fancied he could even see the old, dried bloodstains on it as he fought desperately to push it away, and somehow the commendation took much longer than the reprimand which followed it. When Sloan left, Warren shook his head helplessly and tried to clear his mind for important work.

  Andersonstown had grown tremendously over the past two years. The increased boat- and glider-building, the necessity for procuring and storing food and setting up repair facilities, all had added to the size as well as the population of the town. The Escape work went on practically around the clock, which was why Warren had ordered a steady increase in street lighting at night—at least, that was the reason he had given up to now. But the town, although growing in size was dwindling in population now as more and more people moved to the other continent. There were scores of storehouses, homes and adjacent farms lying empty, and it was high time they were reoccupied.

  Warren spent the rest of the day drafting the orders which would bring mining specialists from Hutton’s Mountain to fill the waiting accommodation, the remainder to be filled by a less specialized labor force which would be placed under the direction of the miners. He announced that it was time they did some practice tunneling in soft groan, and he suggested a spot for it—a thinly wooded area half a mile inland from the town and a few hundred yards from the road which led northwards to the glass factory. The dirt from the tunnels could be hidden under the trees until dark when it could be carted away and dumped, or rather spread over the marshy ground to the south.

  The Sloan business still troubled him and he decided that in the circumstance it would be better for him to apologize in person, and make restitution in the form of two domesticated Battlers from the corral in Andersonstown to replace those which had been killed. The replacements would have to be commandeered again whenever necessary, but he would not stress that point.

  An examination of the wall-map showed him that there was a hilltop Post with glider-launching facilities less than ten miles from the farm he intended to visit, and it was almost in line with his final destination at the mountain. A nice long hike would probably do him a world of good, Warren decided, especially since he seemed to be developing a symbiotic relationship with his desk these days....

  The day of the all-important Staff meeting arrived. Decisions taken today would be irreversible, Warren knew, and subject only to the most minor of modifications. He felt an almost boyish excitement growing in him as he watched his Staff file in and take their seats. Their expressions were tense, puzzled and anticipatory. At the outer entrance they had had to pass two guards with cross-bows at the ready and a brace of grenades stuck in their belts who had requested them to halt and identify themselves—and since the fraternization order had gone into effect two years ago anyone, Committee or otherwise, had been allowed to go anywhere in the mountain. The walls of the room itself were covered with Bug physiology charts, ambush tunnel layouts, and detailed sketches of the dummy and of the guardship interior. Significantly, one of the maps was a chart of the heavens as seen from the prison planet covering the section of space which was thought to contain Sol.

  One saw mud … thought Warren.

  Aloud, he said, “Up to the present, security measures and the classification of information have been unnecessary. Everything leaked, and we like it that way and even made use of the fact. Henceforth, however, everything which goes on in the room is classified unless I direct otherwise. You will not discuss anything which goes on in this room, even amongst yourselves, outside it. From now on this room will be locked, sealed and guarded day and night, and nobody except Staff officers will be allowed entrance. The reasons for these measures will shortly become plain, but meanwhile, and before we get down to fixing the Escape site, there is one hard, harsh fact that we all must face.”

  He paused, seeing all their eyes on him, then went on, “It is this. Anything, literally anything, which will increase the probability of a successful Escape must be and will be done! I have admitted publicly the possibility of failure, and urged decentralization against possible reprisals, but privately I admit no such thing! We can, we must, escape on this attempt! Is this understood?”

  They all nodded, some, he noted, more enthusiastically than others.

  “Very well,” he continued, “we’ll begin by considering the plan originally put forward by Anderson, the modifications it has already undergone at our hands, and the further changes which I intend to introduce now ….”

  Several basic assumptions were called for in the plan, but from what they knew of Bug psychology and military organization these assumptions were justified. The first one was that the location of the prison planet would be unknown to the vast majority of enemy officers on active service. Given that, a hypothetical Bug warship—a small vessel, so badly damaged in battle that its hyperdrive generators kept dropping it into normal space at short and erratic intervals as it limped
home—could be brought on the scene. The plight of this hypothetical ship could be such that when it materialized near the prison planet it would be forced to land quickly on the night side, its condition so grave that it was unable or unwilling to go into orbit. It would not be aware, naturally, of the other Bug ship already in orbit around the planet, and it could be assumed that after the damage it had sustained in a recent engagement, its crew or even its communications equipment was in no fit state to maintain a round-the-clock radio watch.

  But instead of the unarmed scoutship only containing a pilot, which had been envisaged by Anderson, this one would be the Bug equivalent of a corvette with a crew of four—the assumption, again strongly justified, being that the Bugs looked after their own just like humans and that they would feel more constrained to risk rescuing four of their people than they would one. And it would be a risk from their point of view, because a rigorous examination of data gathered from De-briefing had established the fact that there were only about thirty Bugs on the guardship, that a study of the behavior of these beings during the transfer of prisoners showed them to be an unusually timid and overcautious lot, and that it seemed fairly certain that if they weren’t actually Bug civilians they were a pretty low order of military.

  That was not surprising, because the job of guarding a planet called for a phlegmatic disposition and a capacity to resist boredom rather than sharpness of intellect. But while the dullness of mind might play into the hands of the escapers, the proven timidity of the guards represented a real danger. There was always the possibility that the guards, on seeing one of their ships damaged by enemy action and crash-landed, might be panicked into bombing it if, as the original plan called for, there was no sign of life about the wreckage. They might consider it more important to keep the wreck from falling into the hands of the prisoners than take the risk of rescuing colleagues who were probably all dead anyway.

  “… That is why I’ve decided that the dummy must show some signs of life,” Warren went on briskly. “Also the placing of the dummy ship is critical in that it must not be more than seventy miles from either of the two mountains where its metal sections are presently concealed, this being the maximum distance they can be transported while the guardship is below the horizon, and the site must be well served by roads or accessible by sea. No matter how we look at it, this places the site within a ten mile radius of Andersonstown, and Major Fielding warns me that we may be stretching coincidence a little too much to have the ship apparently land where the farms and prison population are thickest when in the darkness they could have landed anywhere in two whole continents.”

  Warren rose and half-turned toward the wall-map behind him, lifting his pointer as he continued, “Bearing all this in mind I’ve decided to place the dummy half a mile south of town, just here. Major Fielding assures me that this will not arouse Bug suspicions, because what could be more natural than for a badly damaged ship to land as close to the lights of a town as possible, especially on a planet deep inside its own territory where it would have no reason to expect the natives to be unfriendly.”

  Ignoring Kelso and Hutton, who were fairly stuttering with surprise and incredulity, he went on. The advantages of this site are obvious. The non-metal framework of the dummy can be transported to the town and stored long before E-Day, more than half of the metal sections can be moved by sea, which will be less trouble than by road as well as freeing manpower for the convoy which must come overland, and the accommodation for the people working on the ambush tunnels is readymade, which is the reason I’ve already ordered Hutton’s mining specialists into town …”

  “But … but …” began Kelso, the first of them to become articulate. “I mean … that is, I understand now why you insisted on more and more street-lighting at night. It seemed stupid at the time … Uh, sorry, sir, but you know what I mean. But even so, considering the cowardice of the guards, isn’t it unlikely that they would risk landing so close to the town … ?”

  Warren sat down again and said, “When the time comes the risk will not seem great to them, Lieutenant. Let’s suppose that in coming down so close to town the ship lands practically on top of a farmhouse, setting fire to it with its tail-flare and burning the occupants. This is an unfortunate but allowable coincidence. Angered by the killing we’ll suppose that the human prisoners from town attack this hypothetical ship which, although damaged by battle and a hard landing, still has its C-7 projector operable. The attack will be repelled and in the process all the farms in the immediate vicinity will be burned. I don’t foresee there being much left of Andersonstown, either.

  “When the guardship rises, which on that day will be an hour before dawn,” Warren continued, “it will see the fires. Later, when it climbs higher, it will have a birdseye view of the nicest little scene of devastation that a Bug could wish to see. Certainly there will be ample evidence that someone is alive and kicking in the dummy ship. The risk of sending down a rescue party will seem negligible, and the Bugs in the guardship should not have their suspicions aroused at all, because the whole area around the dummy will be burning furiously and all our people who are not directly attached to assault groups will be seen to be hightailing it out of town by road and sea, all making like panic-stricken refugees for all they are worth.

  He stopped speaking to look at the faces around the table.

  All Sloan’s teeth were showing and his eyes glared their approval. Kelso’s face was split by a grin of sheer delight as he murmured, “Man! Oh, man …!” But Warren had been expecting some such reaction from Sloan and Kelso and they hadn’t let him down. It was the others who were causing him anxiety now. Fielding had been cooperative but coldly disapproving since she had learned of his plans. Hynds was staring at him over his ridiculous spectacles, his mouth grim. Hutton seemed to be still partially in shock, although it was he who spoke first.

  “Do we have to destroy the town, sir?”

  To Warren it seemed odd that an officer whose technical ability and capacity for improvisation had been the greatest single factor in the successful preparations for the Escape should cavil at a little destruction of property. The Major was going soft, and Warren did not know as yet whether to be glad or angry.

  “I’m afraid we do, Major,” he said impatiently. “As I’ve already said, anything goes which will in any way improve our chances. And surely you realize that after the Escape the condition of the town will not matter, although here I must stress again that the projected destruction of Andersonstown is information restricted to the present company. Others besides yourself, Major, may have a sentimental attachment for it and may want to make trouble.

  “And now,” he went on, “before we start work on the ambush and communications tunnel layouts, a job which will take some time, there are still some occupied farms near the escape area which will have to be evacuate. The people in them are being stubborn and I’d like to discuss methods of getting them out—short of stampeding a herd of Battlers through their stockade, that is …”

  Kelso and Sloan laughed, Warren noted, but not the others.

  Chapter 13

  From the observation platform in the highest tree in Nicholson’s post the town looked peaceful and innocent—which was exactly how it was supposed to look, since the guardship was overhead at the moment. A few fishing catamarans drifted aimlessly on the bay and in the streets the people were deliberately moving more slowly than usual, giving the impression of people who did not have much to do. Warren nodded approval and swung his telescope to bear on the Escape site half a mile to the south. It was the afternoon of E-Day minus one hundred and seventy-two.

  Beside him Hutton said, “The ambush tunnels and ready rooms are complete, sir. Half an hour’s work will break them through to the surface once the dummy is in place. We start on communications tunnels now, one to the observation and attack point in that clump of trees and another to link up with the hollow on the right. I thought of linking all attack points with secondary tunnels in case t
he shuttle lands in the wrong spot and causes a cave-in. If I can keep work parties on it around the clock we can finish them in time.

  “Do that,” said Warren.

  He was thinking that now he would have to send for Major Sloan’s commandos, that Hutton’s suit and explosives technicians would also have to be brought in and billeted in Andersonstown, and that the place was going to become devilishly crowded if he couldn’t talk the remaining non-Committee people into moving out. As well, with the influx of men and material it was going to be impossible to maintain the pretense that all the tunneling that was being done was simple practice. And when the non-committee people realized that the actual Escape site was to be within half a mile of the town, they would react. Some of the smarter ones would take a closer look at the tunnel layout, and at the type and quantity of material currently being moved into the town, and they would be able to piece together his plan in its entirety.

  But the assault groups would have to accustom themselves to moving in bulky spacesuits through narrow, dimly-lit and often muddy tunnels, and to waiting for hours on end in those conditions. They would have to learn to operate effectively after long periods without food or water and cope with the problems which must crop up. Warren had no other choice.

  “Simulating the projector damage worried me, sir,” Hutton said, bringing Warren’s mind back to the here and now.

  “To achieve the effect you want will require enough powder and fire-paste to start a non-nuclear war, and making such a quantity means hurrying the manufacturing process, which will add tremendously to the risk of accidents. Storing it in town is asking for trouble, too, considering the way some of the tunnelers act when they come off duty. One wrong move and the town would go up, prematurely. That would certainly tell the Bugs we were up to something!”