The Escape Orbit (13 page)

It would have been so much different if they had all been like Hutton, the type of personality from which a simple suggestion, a hint of a challenge, was enough to call forth maximum effort. And it would have been nice if the whole Escape operation, now that it was going so well, had been free of internal bickering and dissension. Such things introduced a sour note and what should have been, what
was
, a bold, imaginative and truly great endeavor. But he had to work with the material at his disposal, Warren told himself, and while Fielding, Hutton and Hynds were easily controlled and directed, Kelso had to be driven with a very light rein, Sloan could not be driven at all. Like a missile with a faulty guidance system, he kept going in the direction he was originally pointed, regardless.

“… And to summarize,” said Fielding, winding up her report, “there are enough non-Committee personnel behind you at the present time to give all the help necessary to the Escape. There is a small but growing opposition to the Escape, but I don’t see it hampering us seriously provided we don’t furnish it with material”—she didn’t mention names or even look at Sloan; she didn’t have to—“to turn people against us. At the same time the enthusiasm for the Escape which had already been built up can go stale if we don’t bring it to a tighter focus. So it would help a great deal in maintaining the interest and support if I knew where as well as when the Escape will take place.”

A broken jaw, Warren thought as she sat down angrily, could cause a great deal of pain over a lengthy period of time, especially in a man pushing sixty, whose age would tend to make healing a slow process. Knowing Ruth he decided that it was the doctor in her rather than the psychologist which was angry, and he felt the sympathetic anger rising again in himself.

Curtly, he said, “It seems you all need that piece of information and you can’t go much further without it. Very well, I’ll give it to you—ten days from now at Hutton’s Mountain. There are some jobs I want done first, records and dossiers to be collected—you’ll get the details in due course. Meanwhile you can go. All except Major Fielding and Sloan—I want to see you two.

“Separately,” he added.

Quite apart from her concern over the Sloan incident, Fielding was troubled by the attitude of the original Committee toward those who had joined after Warren’s arrival, the men of the assault groups being the worst offenders. Every officer on full-time Escape work wore Committee uniform, but while the uniforms were supposed to be just that, those worn by the first group had certain markings and methods of fastening which set them apart from group two. They were all in this together, she said, but it was as if some officers had graduated from a top military academy while the others had merely come up through the ranks…

“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 ground, 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.”