The Escape Orbit

by James White

  A full week was needed to repair the damage, which necessitated evacuating the whole tunnel system while the water was pumped out and the tunnel roof and walls, so softened by the action of the water that they were in imminent danger of caving in, were baked hard with charges of fire-paste. Assault men had to place and fire these charges, and while they were burning, the atmosphere inside the tunnels was unbreathable. It was a severe test for the spacesuits and for the tempers of the men wearing them. The suits tested out fine, but the tempers, judging by the conditions of the four men at present on the way to the hospital, had not.

  It had angered Warren that the assault men no longer trusted the labor and supply force, even though the majority of the latter were undoubtedly loyal to the Committee. Sloan’s commandos had begun to mount an unofficial guard at certain vital points, which angered the hard-working tunnelers and explosives technicians even more. The constant bickering and snarling and, at times, outright bloody violence which had followed his “We’re all brother officers” speech had not improved Warren’s own disposition. He seemed to be constantly angry these days, but the anger, he had found, was a good cure for his self-doubts.

  Not all the fights were as vicious as the one he had just witnessed, however. Perhaps, he thought cynically, the fighters had not been entirely able to forget that they were nice people. And frequently he came on officers singing as they marched off shift or on the way to training areas, usually to a bloodcurdling accompaniment of signal drums and wooden whistles. Tunes like “Waltzing Matilda” and “John Brown’s Body” and Colonel Bogey”. Not all the songs were martial, however, a fact that bothered Kelso and Sloan so much that they had brought it up at the Staff meeting on E minus thirty-six.

  “… Stupid, sentimental songs like that are bad for morale!” Kelso had said. “Hutton’s people are the worst offenders, singing about peace and Christmas and … and … Some of the words are anti-war—pacifist stuff and downright subversive! ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ indeed! Suppose the commando units get infected with this sort of tripe!”

  “Anything which makes them want home,” Warren had told him sharply, “is all to the good.”

  Warren had wondered briefly how it was possible to both like and dislike what he was doing, and the people who were helping him do it, intensely at one and the same time.

  In Hutton’s Mountain, strangely deserted now that the metal-work was complete and most of the technicians were in Andersonstown making explosives, he came on men adding the finishing touches to the dummy sections—lavishing the patience and care of a Michelangelo on the job of making their sections of plating show the pitting indicative of a too-fast entry into atmosphere, the buckling and discoloration of a near-miss by a beam weapon and the deep, bright scratches caused by it running through the exploding fragments of sister or enemy ships. But the real artists he saw were in Mallon’s Peak where a smaller and more specialized group were preparing the airlock section of the dummy.

  During a brief trip to the outer continent with Hynds he saw a glider medic misjudge a landing. It had been dusk on a still evening with the surface of the lake as smooth as glass, and it had looked as if he had calculated his touchdown about twenty feet below the actual level of the water. They had reached the floating wreckage in time to extricate him before he drowned, but the whip action of the crash had broken his neck and he had died shortly afterwards. In the carefully neutral voice which he always used these days when Warren was around, Hynds had remarked that the planetary population figure would show no change, as the confinement which the medic had been called to had proceeded normally and a girl baby had replaced the man who had checked out.

  During his restless and often unescorted wanderings he came on groups of men lying sprawled out in the long, hot grass, on their sides or propped up on their elbows as they watched their instructor developing some aspect of the attack with the aid of diagrams tacked to a tree-trunk, and occasionally asking highly pertinent questions in deceptively casual tones. Or men suspended from high branches by a single rope around their belts, swinging and twisting and sweating inside wickerwork shields while they shot their cross-bows at ridiculously small targets. In weightless conditions, spin would be set up by the reaction of any projectile-firing weapon and this drill was to accustom the men to hitting targets which whirled and twisted around them. Their instructor would yell advice about shooting from waist-level to minimize spin, and often the men would miss their targets completely because they were incapacitated by laughter as much as dizziness.

  Some of the men, the assault groups in particular, seemed to get a kick out of Warren’s informal, unexpected visits, especially when he joined in their drills. With others his activities simply made them uncomfortable. But for many weeks he had felt an increasing need to reassure himself that his plan was going well, that he was doing the right thing and that the Committeemen would still follow him. Like some latter-day Haroun El Raschid he wandered his kingdom in an attempt to discover what his people were really thinking. When he found that often they did not think the way he wanted them to, Warren lost his temper to such an extent that his show of democratic good-fellowship must at times have seemed like sheerest hypocrisy.

  But everyone laughed or lost their temper or lashed out too easily these days. E-Day was rushing down on them now, and tension had become a major constituent of the air they breathed. By E minus twenty-three the domesticated Battlers had been dispersed to the neighborhood of the two mountain workshops, where singly or in small groups they would practice with dummy loads along the routes they would use on E-Day. The gradual buildup of shipping in the bay, now unconcealed in order to suggest to the guardship that the prisoners were settling down to a program of exploration and expansion, was sufficient to evacuate essential records and personnel. The long-range communications system had been tested and the weather forecasters were guardedly optimistic.

  Warren’s own feelings closely resembled those of the meteorologists, until on E minus twenty-one a glider coming in to land on the bay discovered the second major act of sabotage.

  Chapter 15

  “It’s one of the trees giving cover to Number Two Attack Point,” said Major Hynds worriedly. Cutting it down when there is no reason to do so will look suspicious to the Bugs, and leaving it as it is won’t be any better because it will stand out like a beacon. The tree is dead, of course—the bark was stripped from around the trunk close to ground level, the damage being hidden by the underbrush until the glider pilot noticed the color change in the foliage and called our attention to it.

  “I don’t know what we can do about it, sir,” he ended grimly. “In three or four months the leaves will drop off, but before that, within two weeks from now, the leaves will have turned bright yellow.”

  “Yellow”, said Kelso viciously, “how very appropriate! I’ve always said Civilians were nothing but cowards and lousy deserters, and we should have kept a closer watch on them—”

  “We need those lousy Civilians, Lieutenant,” Hutton broke in quietly. “You can’t put a guard on every tree.”

  For an instant Kelso looked as though he wanted to hit the Major, and Sloan’s expression indicated that he might join the Lieutenant in making a combined operation of it. Fielding and Hynds looked worried, but whether over the danger to Hutton or the threat to the success of the Escape was open to doubt. Hutton himself seemed to be the most unconcerned officer in the room. Warren was beginning to have suspicions about Hutton.

  Normally a big, mild, almost shy individual, he had recently taken to baiting Kelso and Sloan during Staff meetings—although always quietly and politely. Warren could not help remembering Peters’ remarks to the effect that the higher an officer’s intelligence the more likelihood of his becoming a traitor.…”

  “All right,” said Kelso visibly controlling himself. “There are a lot of things we can’t do, like putting our heads between our knees and spitting until we reach escape velocity. But if I could make a construc
tive suggestion, sir, how about stripping the tree of its greenery then bend its branches into those of the adjoining trees, anchoring them with ropes and working the living foliage into and around the stripped branches. It would have to be done carefully, of course, and inspected from the air by glider to be sure it looked right …”

  “Impossible, I’m afraid,” said Hutton again. “It would be good enough to fool the guardship, Lieutenant, but you forget that when the dummy is in place they’d probably soft-land a probe in the Escape area. What would fool a telescope will not pass what would amount to a microscopic examination. If the Bugs see a stripped tree with branches from adjoining trees tied to it … well, they’d be as jumpy and suspicious as it is possible for Bugs to get in any case, and such a blatantly artificial camouflage is taking too big a risk. It would be better to leave the tree as it is.”

  “That is your suggestion, Major?” asked Kelso, his tone carrying more sarcasm than befitted that of a junior officer. “Leave the tree as it is?”

  “Yes,” said Hutton. He looked at the faces around him, then almost apologetically he went on, “Of course I’d also suggest getting off a signal to all Posts to have their men go out and kill trees, the same type of tree, in the way in which this one was killed. The idea would be to suggest that some kind of infection is attacking this species of tree, and with trees turning yellow all over the continent I don’t think the Bugs would notice that ours had turned yellow a little earlier than the others ….”

  It was the answer, of course. Warren’s earlier suspicion of Hutton began to fade, although he still thought it a pity that the Major could not have given his answer without sniping at Kelso.

  “Nice thinking, Hutton,” he said warmly. “I don’t mind admitting that I was badly worried there for a while. Now is there anything else needing attention before the signals go out?”

  Major Hynds shook his head, automatically catching his spectacles as they fell off. Sloan and Kelso were glaring at Hutton, who stared politely back at them. It was Ruth Fielding who spoke.

  “Two days ago,” she said, using her clinical voice, “there was a bad accident with a Battler at the Telford farm. Three men were badly injured, two of them were dead by the time the Lieutenant got them to the hospital. The third, who was Flotilla-Leader Anderson, died this morning. He talked a lot before he died, and if the Lieutenant doesn’t mind I’d like to know what exactly happened at that farm.”

  Kelso and Sloan switched their angry gaze from Hutton to Fielding, but when the Lieutenant turned to face Warren again there was anxiety as well as anger in his expression.

  “I’ve had the farm under observation for three months,” Kelso said carefully, “and during that time nothing resembling farming has gone on there. The place has been occupied by as many as seven officers at a time, all members of the opposition. Fleet Commander Peters has stayed there many times recently, and I’m morally certain that the tunnel flooding operation was mounted from there. That’s why, when I was with the Battler-hunting party in that area I thought of mounting a small, unofficial operation of my own…”

  Having flushed a Battler within half a mile of the farm, Kelso hat hit on the idea of wounding it instead of killing it outright with one of the new grenades and herding it towards the Telford stockade. This was a very chancy business, necessitating members of the party running just a few feet beyond the reach of the beast’s tentacles to make sure it followed them, but they managed it without anyone tripping and being trampled to death. When the Battler had been with fifty yards of the stockade and properly lined up they had blinded it and run clear.

  Telford had been asked to move countless times, his farm being one of those due to be burned on E-Day, but he had refused point-blank to move to the other continent or to give a reason for staying put—being a ringleader of the saboteurs was not a reason which could be mentioned aloud to Committeemen. The idea therefore had been to run a Battler into his stockade to make him realize that his farm was no longer wanted in the area. It had been meant merely as a warning, with absolutely no harm intended. But the Battler had been unusually large and Telford’s stockade had been in a serious state of disrepair. Instead of shaking the stockade and scaring the occupants of the farmhouse the Battler had gone right through it. By the time Kelso and his party got to it with grenades it had gone through the farmhouse too.

  “… We dug them out of the wreckage and got them to hospital as fast as we could, sir,” Kelso went on soberly, “but the only one we thought might make it was Flotilla-Leader Anderson. I … I’m very sorry about this, sir. I only meant to frighten them off. We were looking on the whole thing as a joke, sir. I wouldn’t … I mean, it’s Anderson’s plan we’re using, even if he did go Civilian at the end ….”

  You have to look at both sides, Warren thought desperately, striving to hold back his anger. He had to look at the picture of his Committeemen laughing as they played tag with the most deadly menace on the whole planet as well as that of the mangled body of Flotilla-Leader Anderson, the man whose plan they were using and who had been solidly behind Warren and the Escape until he discovered that it would entail the destruction of the town which had been named after him. And he could not in justice bawl out the Lieutenant because Warren himself shared much of the responsibility for the tragedy. How many times recently had he stated that they must stop at nothing to ensure the success of the Escape?

  “I’m sorry about this, too,” said Warren dully. He was silent for a moment, thinking. The Escape had to come off, to make all the unpleasant and inhuman things which were happening these days worthwhile, and to make sure that they did not happen again. Then briskly, he said, “I take it this thing is not yet general knowledge?”

  “The hunting party won’t talk, sir,” said Kelso, looking relieved.

  “And dead men and Staff officers don’t tell tales,” Hutton added cynically.

  “I’m sorry,” said Kelso, looking at everyone in turn. “Really I am.”

  Warren shook his head. “It can’t be helped. We must expect casualties on an operation of this size and complexity, casualties not directly caused by enemy action—”

  “Speaking of incidental casualties, sir,” Fielding broke in smoothly, but still looking daggers at Kelso, “Lieutenant Nicholson complains that her girls going to and from duty at the hospital are being molested by—”

  That was as far as she got before Sloan and Kelso shouted her down. Sloan’s language was unsuitable for any company, mixed or otherwise, so that it was Kelso’s relatively quiet voice which came through when the other had run out of profanity.

  “… And this isn’t a Sunday school outing we’ve planned!” the Lieutenant said furiously. “It’s a major operation, part of the war! I say these men deserve to get drunk or have sing-songs or play rough—they deserve all the fun they can get, because an awful lot of them won’t be alive three weeks from now! They’re going to take that ship with suits which are little short of death-traps. I say that with all respect for Major Hutton, who has done wonders with what little he has had to work with, but they are still death-traps. He’s given us a means of carrying out a successful assault, but with an estimate loss due to component failure—suit failure, remember, not enemy action—of sixty percent!”

  He waved down Hutton’s protest with a gesture which was definitely insubordinate and went on passionately, “The men know these odds, they know why we’ve trained and equipped four times the number of officers needed for the job! Knowing these odds they still want to take part, would consider it a personal tragedy if they were not allowed to do so.”

  “They are a very special group of officers,” he rushed on, “hand-picked for qualities of bravery, aggressiveness and toughness. Major Fielding as well as yourself, sir, went through their dossiers. Some of the officers here don’t seem to realize what a really tremendous thing we’re doing. This escape will go down in history, and nothing is too good for the officers who have the most difficult and dangerous part in it! T
o my mind, hampering the work with petty complaints and criticisms is little short of treason!”

  “Some of the girls,” growled Sloan suddenly, “were just asking for it.”

  Fielding swung furiously on him. “Really, Major?” she said. “You might like to know that one of the case histories I read mentioned severe concussion, caused by a blow from a not too blunt instrument which also necessitated major suturing of the scalp. Presumably the officer in question was playing hard to get. Or is it simply that our gallant assault officers—I hesitate to use the expression ‘officers and gentlemen’—have regressed to the point where they must use caveman methods of courtship …?”

  “Environmental influences, Major Fielding.” Hynds put in, his expression dead-pan. “It comes from too much swinging about in trees.”

  “That’s enough!” said Warren sharply, as Kelso and Sloan opened their mouths for a return blast. He went on, “We all deplore these incidents, naturally, but at the present time I can understand the feelings of Sloan and Kelso. All the officers know that they are expendable and that the greater number of them will be expended, so that the increasing strain they are under calls for our sympathy rather than disciplinary action. We must try to retain our sense of proportion about this, weighing the relatively minor sufferings against the major achievement we hope to gain.”

  “I have devoted much thought to the final choosing of these assault groups,” Warren continued, trying to inject a lighter note into the proceedings, “and it is unfortunate that a certain lack of charm is a concomitant of the other qualities I sought—but then who ever heard of a polite commando? We might all feel better if we remember that we’re fighting a war, and think of all the people we’ve been discussing as casualties …”