The Escape Orbit (15 page)

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 time 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.

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 as 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 on 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 waste of intellect and training did not bear thinking about. To escape was their simple duty, therefore, and not something which could be 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.

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!”