The Escape Orbit

by James White

  Compared with some of the difficulties Hutton had overcome these were as nothing. The answer was simply to tighten up on safety precautions, but Hutton was acting as if the whole plan were in jeopardy. The Major, Warren thought angrily, was beginning to drag his feet.

  A lot of officers these days seemed to be dragging their feet or were visibly having second thoughts about a great many things, and the odd thing about it was that most of them were Committeemen of long standing, not recruits. With less than six months to go, enthusiasm for the Escape should have nearly reached its height ….

  On E-Day minus one forty-three Fleet Commander Peters arrived at the post, unescorted and requesting a meeting. Warren granted the request and Peters was shown into his office, a room not nearly so soundproof as the Staff room in Hutton’s Mountain, but then Warren had the feeling that many of the secrets he had been trying to keep were secrets no longer, otherwise the Fleet Commander would not have been there in the first place.

  He stood up when Peters entered, a courtesy he had not extended to a junior officer for more years than he could remember, but when the Commander took the chair on the other side of the table without either saluting or saying “Sir” Warren sat down again, violently.

  “I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” Peters said, obviously reading Warren’s expression and feeling that some sort of apology was called for. But the bitterness in his voice robbed it of all warmth or sincerity as he went on, “It is simply that I can’t bring myself to salute while wearing this caveman get-up—I’m improperly dressed—and I have no right to do so in any case since I passed the compulsory age of retirement four months ago. I’m afraid I really have become a civilian, Marshal.”

  Hutton and Hynds and a few others had begun to whine at him, Warren thought angrily, and now the chief member of the opposition was doing it, and the self-pitying whine of the aged from an officer of this man’s stature sounded worst of all. It took a great effort for Warren to alter his expression and say pleasantly, “We’ll have to escape now, Commander. Four months’ back pension plus retirement bonus is too much to give up.”

  “You don’t have to humor me, Marshal,” Peters said quietly. “I’m not as old as all that.”

  Warren stopped trying to be pleasant. He said, “You wanted an interview. You’ve got it, but you’ll have to make it short.”

  Peters bowed his head, muttering something about no longer being entitled to the courtesy due his rank and that he was foolish to expect it, then he looked up and said, “I seem to have started this all wrong. I’m sorry. What I came for was to ask you to cancel the escape attempt, permanently …”

  “Don’t laugh at me, dammit!” he raged suddenly, then I a voice filled with quiet desperation he went on, “You can do it if you want to, I know that. In two and a half years you’ve done things which I thought were impossible! Making Kelso run errands for you and like it, when we were all expecting the exact opposite. Making hidebound Committeemen fraternize, and very often marry, with non-Committee officers and generally turning the Committee upside down and inside out—and making them all like it! Not to mention having all the married officers with children practically eating out of your hand because you expressed concern for their safety and lack of proper education. All of this, with the buildup of non-metal technology, communications, exploration and now even an efficient medical service, was simply an elaborate ruse to disarm our suspicions and to clear the escape area of everyone but your personal bullyboys!”

  “And don’t try to deny that Andersonstown will be the escape site,” Peters went on angrily, “because too much wok has gone into the so-called practice tunnels. There are other indications, too. You probably intend to destroy the town!”

  Warren did not try to deny it.

  “When you deliberately avoided meeting me,” Peters continued, “and when you kept doing all these unorthodox things I thought you were on our side and were goring from within, or should I say leading the Committee to its own destruction. There were times in the early days when I could have hamstrung some of your projects, but I helped them instead—quietly, or course, so as not to make Kelso and the others suspicious. I know now that I was deluding myself, but I thought that a person with your ability and authority would also have the intelligence to see that …”

  He broke off, shaking his head. Pleadingly, he said, “I’m making a mess of this again. I’m sorry. What I want to say is that there is still time to make the bluff the actuality and the Escape the ruse. You can do it. I have never in my life met anyone else capable of doing it, but you could. Please.”

  Warren was silent for perhaps a minute, staring into the other’s desperate, pleading, embittered features, and feeling impatient and sympathetic and not a little embarrassed by compliments of such blatant crudity. Then suddenly he shook his head.

  “I won’t cancel the Escape just because you ask me to,” he said. “even if you gave good reasons, which you haven’t up to now, I wouldn’t do it. You are aware of the situation as it was when I arrived here. If I hadn’t got tough there would have been a civil war on the first day! And I give you credit for intelligence somewhat above the average, Commander, so that you must realize where that situation must lead. The outbreak of fighting between Escape Committee and Civilians, stabilizing itself with the farmers and other Civilians submitting to the authority of the local Committee posts which would furnish protection against Battlers and the raids of neighboring Committeemen would shortly have become indistinguishable from slavery, and then more violence as the Posts recruited and trained their slaves to fight for them and expand their respective territories. You must realize that a descent into savagery would be swift and all too sure, and that succeeding generations would grow up in a feudal culture which would get a hell of a lot worse before it got any better. I’m thinking in terms of hundreds of years!”

  Warren broke off, realizing that he was almost shouting, then went on more quietly, “One reason for the Escape is that I can’t allow such a criminal waste of high intelligence and ability to occur. Another is that the training and ability of these officers could very well win the war for us if they were returned to active service. Yet another, and perhaps the least important of the reasons, is that it is the duty of any officer when taken prisoner in time of war, no matter what the circumstances, to make every effort to escape and rejoin his unit.” Warren’s tone, still quiet, took on a cutting edge, “… Do you still believe in a sense of duty, Commander?”

  Peters shook his head violently, but it was probably in anger rather than in simple negation. He said harshly, “Those are good reasons but they are not good enough to excuse what you’re going to do. Surely you see that yourself—unless initiating and pushing through large-scale operations regardless of mental or physical suffering is an occupational disease with Sector Marshals, and I don’t want to think that of you! As for duty, traditions of the service, patriotism—they’re all a matter of inner conviction, while men of lesser intelligence, such as the type of officer the service is producing now, have to have it conditioned into them!”

  “Surely you can see that it is the older and more highly-trained officers who tend to go civilian,” Peters rushed on, “and that the later arrivals make the most fanatical Committeemen. You can’t avoid the implications of that. It’s my guess that even now, within the Committee and possibly even among your own Staff, things have begun to go sour for you—people having second thoughts, wondering if they are in fact doing the right thing. Because it is the sensitive, intelligent people who are the stuff of traitors. And you could help subvert them. Even now you could turn enough of them against the Escape to—“

  “That’s enough!” Warren thundered. His anger at this man who had awakened all the self-doubt and mental turmoil which had made sleep nearly impossible for him in the early months of captivity, and which he had thought were settled at last, was so overwhelming that for several seconds he could not speak. But finally he said, “We must escape, commander.
I’ve given this a lot of thought, believe me. Escape is the only real solution and I can conceive of no possible argument which will change my decision—“

  “You mean you want to go on playing with your soldiers!” Peters broke in, his face and even his balding scalp blotchy with anger. “Earth, the war and the glorious traditions of the service are just excuses to let you go on feeling important! To let you make a last heroic, stupid gesture which nobody but your fellow prisoners will ever know about!”

  “Get out, Commander!” said Warren thickly.

  “Very well!” said Peters, jumping to his feet. “I’m wasting my tme here anyway, trying to talk sense to a stupid, narrowminded martinet with delusions of grandeur! But I’m warning you, Marshal, I’ll do everything possible to stop this escape short of killing you!”

  “I’m sorry, Mister Peters,” Warren said coldly, as he also stood up. “Sorry that you had to add that qualifier. It puts me under no obligation to stop short—not too far short, perhaps—of killing you if you try to hamper me.”

  It was some time before Warren’s anger subsided to the point where he could feel regret at his mishandling of the interview. He should not have been angered by the other’s initial lack of courtesy, not lost his head when Peters had got home with the jab about his best officers being potential traitors. He should have kept his temper and remembered that the Fleet Commander was an old, embittered man whose mental processes had hardened too much for him to see that there could be no easy way out of Warren’s dilemma….

  Abruptly, Warren strode out of the room and the Post, his intention being to inspect the new tunnels, chat with the officers working on them and generally to occupy his mind with any constructive activity which presented itself. For the thought had come to him that it might not be only the Fleet Commander’s mental processes which were hardening, and with that thought came rushing back all his other doubts.

  Chapter 14

  At first Warren thought that one of the domesticated Battlers had broken loose and was wandering the streets, grunting and scuffling at the ground with itching stub tentacles. But when he turned the corner he was that it was a fight.

  The light from the nearest street-lamp was too dim to show subtle variations of uniform, but it was obvious from the silent ferocity of the battle that the men themselves were in no doubt s to who was who. There were seven of them, four against three, and they were tearing into each other with hands, feet, heads and in once case teeth. Individually, they were equally matched in size and weight, but the three appeared a little faster, more vicious and fractionally less drunk than the four. Warren started forward to intervene, but before he had taken two paces it was all over. The victorious three moved away, one of them limping slightly, towards the noisy, brightly-lit storehouse which had been converted in an assault group club. The defeated four were on the ground, one on his hands and knees with what, in the bad light, looked like fresh paint covering his face, another was clutching his stomach and being sick and the other two weren’t moving.

  A watchman came trotting up, stopped and began blowing the call for stretcher-bearers, a signal which had become all too familiar of late. He kept on blowing, the whistle clenched so tightly in his teeth that Warren thought he would bite through the wood, until there was a distant acknowledgement. He knelt beside one of the motionless figures until the stretcher-party arrived, then rose, cursed horribly and trotted back to his post.

  As he joined the group around the injured men, Warren made a mental note to speak to Hutton about some of those watchmen. Their job was to guard the explosive stores against the wandering of unauthorized or irresponsible—or more simply, drunk—personnel and there their job ended. But recently they had been taking on some of the more general duties of policemen. They didn’t seem to realize that horning in on what was essentially a private fight was a sure way of getting hurt, as well as arousing the dislike of both parties.

  Warren was not surprised to see that the members of the stretcher-party were all girls. With the spacesuit-building program nearing completion and the book-making and –copying projects moved to the other continent there was little else they could do except staff the hospital which had been set up to treat injuries among the tunnelers. They were temperamentally suited to the job, of course, and while Warren had been irritated when they had refused to be evacuated with the rest of Nicholson’s girls, he was now glad that they had stayed. The doctor in charge of the party was a man, however.

  He gave his lamp to Warren and told him exactly where to hold it while he examined the injured men. Considering the fact that their heads were often less than six inches apart there was ample light to see each other’s faces, but the doctor pretended not to recognize Warren—acting on the assumption, probably, that he could say things to a chance helper which he most definitely could not say to the Marshal.

  “… Three ribs gone and maybe a ruptured spleen,” he said as his fingers explored the injured man’s chest and abdomen. His voice was singularly lacking in the quality known as professional calm. “Those injuries he got while lying here on the ground, after he was out! I suppose it’s one way to get a non-Committeeman to leave the area…. And look at his face, and at that ear! Damn near bitten through! Animals fight like this … animals!’

  Warren listened silently while the other relieved his feelings at some length. When he finally got the chance to speak his voice was grim and at the same time pleasing. It was a tone he had had to use so often of late that it had begun to sound insincere even to himself.

  “I don’t like it any better than you do, Doctor,” he said. “It grieves me to see officers who are supposed to be fighting the common enemy fighting among themselves instead. But with just five weeks to go everybody is getting tensed up. It’s natural—the situation rather than the people is to blame. That, and the riotous night-life we go in for”—he laughed briefly—“which nobody expected or prepared for. But the first prisoners learned how to make beer, and stronger stuff, from the local vegetation, and officers who have been digging all day or night in hot, badly-ventilated tunnels or training in practice suits without food or water for twelve hours have a right to a little relaxation. Our trouble is that we can’t standardize the strength of the brew, and when people get drunk they’re more inclined to fight.”

  “Since the tunnel sabotage it has been much worse, of course…”

  On E-Day minus fifty, in an attempt to control the growing disaffection between the assault groups and the labor and supply force, Warren had ordered a special inspection. The inspection was doubly special in that it was to be the first time in more than two years that all work n the Escape ceased in Andersonstown and the surrounding district, and that while it was taking place all men and women wore their green shipboard uniforms instead of the permutations of kilt, harness or shapeless leather garments normally worn. He had ordered this in order to point up the fact that there was no basic difference between them, that they were all brother officers…

  The sour note became apparent as soon as Warren mounted the review stand to address them. It was simply that the uniforms were not uniform. Stupidly he had forgotten that the Committeemen treated their ship’s battledress as their most treasured possession while the others had worn theirs until it was in tatters before being forced to change to the home-made clothing. So that even when they were all dressed the same it was glaringly obvious who had been Committee and who had not. Despite this Warren had not done too badly.

  He had begun in much the same fashion as he had opened previous speeches and arguments by contrasting living conditions here with those of civilization, and he had moved on gradually to reminding them of the obligations to themselves and to the human race. He told them that if they were passively to accept their imprisonment it would be the first step in a regression towards eventual savagery and such a shameful, such a calamitous waster of intellect and training did not bear thinking about. To escape was their simple duty, therefore, and not something which could b
e argued about.

  But the Escape would demand great sacrifice from all of them, and in many cases the suffering would be psychological as well as physical. They would have to blunt their finer sensibilities, forget that they had even been nice people, and remember only that they were going to bust out of this planetwide prison no matter what.

  Warren did not know at what stage he had stopped consciously using verbal bush-buttons, at what point the fierce pride he felt in these splendid officers drawn up before him and the truly glorious undertaking on which they were engaged began to overcome him. Some of their duties appeared more important than others, he had told them, but they should remember that the work of the Battler drover, the assault commando and the lonely officer at a relay post a thousand miles way was equally necessary to success. After the Escape, history would accord them equal honor and homage as the heroic officers who had never given up, who had achieved the impossible and who would be chiefly responsible for restoring peace to the Galaxy. He wasn’t sure at what point it was that he knocked over the speaking trumpet Hutton had rigged for him, but by that time he was shouting too loudly for it to matter. He had lost much of his control, and the pride he felt in them and in what they were doing communicated itself to the officers ranked before him. Suddenly they had begun to cheer, the officers in tattered uniforms as loudly as the others, and Warren had dismissed them shortly afterwards because there had been a distinct danger that he would have grown maudlin about them if he had gone on.

  It had been during these proceedings that the pumps used to clear the main ambush tunnel of seepage had been dogged open, and the ford across a nearby stream converted into a low dam with stones and mud. The water level had risen only a few feet, but this had been enough to send water pouring back along the wooden pipe which normally emptied into the stream to flood the tunnel.