The Escape Orbit (19 page)

“I understand,” said Hutton in a low voice. His eyes were not shining quite so brightly and his teeth did not show at all. He went on, “If you don’t … I mean, I can’t be sure that I could organize a second escape. The way things are at the moment, sir, I couldn’t promise—”

“And I wouldn’t want you to, Major,” said Warren meaningfully, even though he knew that at present the meaning was lost on Hutton.

“Good luck, sir,” said the Major.

Warren went through the opening in the dummy’s hull, around or under the timber braces and into the mouth of the main ambush tunnel. The compartments opening off it were full of men checking weapons or airtanks or just sitting quietly beside their spacesuits. One of the rooms, the testing compartment, was full of deep and very muddy water and another was festooned with as-yet-unclaimed spacesuits, one of which was his own. At the other end of the tunnel the road was becoming well-lit by the growing number of fires and he made good time to the town and to the harbor. The glider refused to unstuck from the water until its rockets were almost burned out and they made only five hundred feet, but by then there was no dearth of warm updraughts of air to help him.

A very fine man, Major Hutton
, Warren thought;
the type of personality and mind which should be preserved, no matter what the cost!
The thought gave him a little comfort, although it could not make him completely sure that what he was doing was right…

From two thousand feet the scene resembled a tremendous wheel of fire whose hub was the blunt torpedo shape of the dummy and whose spokes radiated in lines of burning trees and vegetation to the Post, to the many farms up the valley and to the town. Around the site the greenery gave off much smoke and burned with a loud frying sound. But most of the spokes radiated toward the town, and here the wooded buildings were dry and roared as they burned and hurled clouds of sparks half a mile into the air.

It looked both spectacular and highly artificial. Satisfied, Warren tapped his pilot’s shoulder and they dived through the smoke and sparks toward a landing in the bay.

They put Warren into his suit then. After the freedom and comfort of a kilt the battledress part alone felt hot and constricting, and when they fitted the wickerwork shield, helmet and air-tanks he felt even worse. As respectfully as possible in the circumstances, they held him head downwards in the muddy pool of water so that they could check the seal between issue battledress and home-made helmet. He was dunked three times before he was able to tell them where the water was coming through.

A wide leather strap laterally encircled his head and served to anchor a large sponge pad to his forehead. A second strap going around the top of his head and under his chin held the first one in place and gave support to yet another strap, a thin one this time, which crossed just under his nose. To this one was attached a thin, hollow cane, and when they took him out of the pool and laid him face down he worked his lips about until the cane was between his teeth and then drank the muddy water. There was about a half a pint of the stuff.

Water inside the helmet during weightless maneuvering could be deadly, and drinking it was the only way of getting rid of it. He was helped to his feet, motioned to crane his neck forward to wipe away the remaining droplets with his forehead pad, then assisted toward the dummy along the tunnel which was now lined with spacesuited figures resting against nearly vertical planks. Their eyes followed him as she passed, caught by the big numeral “1” painted on his wickerwork shield, and under the ludicrous nose-strap and drinking-straw gadgets their teeth showed in a smile. Warren stopped long enough at each one of them to tap out “Good Luck” against their face-pieces, show his own teeth and wag an admonishing finger if any of them started to come to attention.

Kelso and Sloan were already in the dummy, propped in their wooden supports near one of the periscopes, waiting. Warren joined them.

After having had the fires under observation, during darkness, when they would have been seen to the best advantage and having drawn certain conclusions from these observations, it was expected that the Bugs would send down a probe for a closer look. Instead of a quick dive in and out of the atmosphere, which was the usual procedure when investigating any suspicious occurrences it was expected that curiosity would make them soft-land the probe for a really close look. And it was known that if the vehicle landed it would not have enough fuel left to return to the guardship. Being an extremely valuable piece of equipment, the Bugs would not soft-land it in the first place unless they expected to get it back. The only way they could do that was to bring it back aboard the shuttle, and if they considered landing the shuttle they could not be feeling too suspicious.

The probe arrived about two hours before noon. On the way down it had a perfect view of cats hurrying out of the bay, many of them were towing rafts; of the refugees on wagons and afoot, well advanced along all the roads leading from the town; of the town itself, devastated and still burning in many places; its gutted corpse hidden by a filthy shroud of smoke. It could see the acres of smoldering tree stumps and vegetation, and the highly unnatural outlines of the destruction which proved that a weapon designed for use over a range of thousands of miles of vacuum was capable of wreaking considerable havoc despite the blanketing effects of atmosphere.

It noted the ship crash-landed and toppled onto its side, observing and relaying back the fine details of the buckled stabilizer which must have given on landing, the partly opened airlock and sprung plating which steamed faintly with escaping chlorine, and the slit in the nose where the C-7 blaster hadn’t closed properly. And there were the smoking remains of the farmhouse close by, whose occupants were no doubt the indirect cause of the surrounding devastation, which had been set on fire by its tail-flare.

So far the data was utterly corroborative material for the telescopic observers in the guardship. But suddenly the probe opened out like a flower with super-sensitive vision, sound and analysis equipment, in effect subjecting the area to a microscopic as well as a telescopic examination.

Such an examination could not be allowed to continue.

A lone figure came staggering out of a patch of unburned vegetation some fifty yards from the probe. His body was terribly burned and bleeding from wounds inflicted by sharp branches, even his leather harness was charred and cracked by the heat, and from his mouth there came a steady, high pitched moaning that was a continuous low scream. He carried a club in the shape of a heavy table leg, and when he saw the landed probe he screamed harshly and came stumbling towards it.

In actual fact Briggs was suffering no discomfort at all. His ghastly appearance was due solely to imaginative makeup, his club was a very carefully fashioned table leg weighted and balanced to inflict the maximum damage and he had landed one of the easiest jobs in the whole operation simply through his acting ability. He was supposed to disable the probe so that the Bugs would be thrown back onto the resources of the telescopes on the ship and their own unaided eyesight when they landed later—if they landed later. So dutifully, almost gleefully, Briggs set about battering the probe into scrap, hamming the part of a poor, pain-crazed prisoner for all he was worth.

But he must have been a little too enthusiastic in his use of the club. The battering must have opened a path between the Probe’s fuel tank and the still red-hot venturis. There could only have been a few ounces of fuel remaining in the tank, but it was enough. There was a sudden flare, a concussion which made the whole dummy jerk around him, and when he reached the periscope Warren could see that there was very little left of Briggs or the probe.

Warren settled back for another period of waiting, and thinking.

Vitally important, but safe, was how Warren had described the assignment to Briggs. The probe should be given just enough time to report on the desolation around the site, the absence of any possibly dangerous groups of prisoners, of harmful activity, of anything except burning, smoldering vegetation and a ship which had crash-landed and was leaking chlorine. Then it would have to be disabled so that the small sounds made by the hidden assault groups would not be picked up. It was not expected that the Bugs would booby-trap the probe, since it would be much simpler to drop a bomb on the area if their suspicions were aroused. Briggs had agreed that all this was so, and his expression had reminded Warren of the time when this same Briggs had shown him how to swing a hammock where the Battlers couldn’t reach it and Warren had nearly hung himself on the safety rope—the expression of a man trying hard not to laugh…

The time dragged past and the sun beat down on the site and on the metal dummy. Inside the dummy the heat was unbearable and inside the suits it was even worse. Kelso, Sloan and himself were now lying prone with a suit technician attending each of them. The technicians had removed the gauntlet sections of the battledress and placed their hands in small pans of water, indicating that they should lift them in and out at intervals. He also kept wetting down the accessible portions of their fishbowls. Evaporation from their hands and helmets was supposed to cool them and avoid heatstroke, but Warren was convinced that the water treatment’s effect was chiefly psychological.

Above them, invisible in the sunshine, the Bugs should have made their decision—the only decision possible to them if they had any decent feelings at all. The accidental destruction of their probe should not have aroused suspicion, considering the circumstances, and the shuttle should already be on the way down to rescue the survivors of the crash-landed ship—some of whom
must
be alive to judge by the devastation surrounding it! But something
might
have made them suspicious, or perhaps they were too cowardly to send a rescue party, and a missile was on the way down instead to ensure that one of their ships did not fall into the hands of the prisoners…

Suddenly the suit technician waved and pointed upwards, but it was not until Warren reached the periscope that the sound of the shuttle coming down got through his helmet. He didn’t see the landing because of the smoke and ash being blown through the gap in the plating where the periscope was set up, but he could tell that it was very close and the elation he felt was due only in part to the beautiful way things were working out. A contributory factor was his knowledge that, not soon but in the foreseeable future, he would be able to get out of the pressure cooker he was using for a spacesuit…!

The clouds of smoke from the many small fires started by the landing served to hide the movements of the ground assault men, from the eyes on the ship as well as those in space, as they took up their positions in the unburned cover around the edge of the Escape site. Some small trees fell, stirring up more smoke. In actual fact they were being pushed over and damp grass and twigs at hand for the purpose were being used to produce the smoke—the idea being to accustom the Bug rescuers to falling trees and sudden, dense clouds of smoke. They might be frightened by these effects, but the whole area was smoldering and constantly being reignited by sudden puffs of wind—so that they should not be suspicious of them. And when the smoke was allowed to clear temporarily the shuttle could be seen standing about one hundred yards from the dummy with the burned farmhouse almost directly between them.

It wasn’t an ideal position for the ambush, Warren thought, but it could have been much worse.

With gestures which were an improbable combination of salute, cheery wave and thumbs up sign, Kelso and Sloan disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel heading for Number Two Attack Point, which was very nearly to windward of the shuttle’s position and from which the main body of commandos would be able to approach the ship under cover of smoke. At Warren’s signal the suit technician stopped pouring water over him and began pounding on the interior of the metal hull with a piece of wood. It was a slow, irregular beat, not very loud but still capable of being heard all over the Escape site, and it was the sort of noise which might very well be made by someone trying to attract attention when radio or other means of communication were impossible. That would be how the Bugs in the shuttle would regard it, Warren told himself. And later, if the pounding should vary in beat or volume they should regard it as a sign of impatience or desperation on the part of the survivors and not as instructions going out to the assault group via drum-talk…

The shuttle’s lock swung suddenly open and the ladder with its oddly shaped rungs and stubby handrail came telescoping down. A billow of smoke from the fires behind Number Two rolled past the enemy ship and when it cleared there were two Bugs on the ladder. A few seconds later there were four, all descending as quickly as was possible for that particular life-form to move. Excitement as well as heat made Warren’s mouth go dry.

They intended to make a fast rescue. That much was plain from the speed of their descent and the fact that the cargo lock remained sealed—they weren’t going to break out one of their ground vehicles. And the normal crew of the shuttle was five. Counting the one they must have left on radio watch there were five beings in the rescue party, which was a further indication that they suspected nothing or they would not have taken so many at one time. But the four Bugs moving away from the base of the landing ladder were armed—they might not be suspicious but at the same time neither were they stupid. In addition they carried metal-cutting equipment and packs which probably contained medication of some kind, all hung from the lightweight type of suit which gave the maximum amount of physical mobility with, as was usual with such suits, the minimum of physical protection. All at once Warren felt sorry for them.