The Escape Orbit (5 page)

This was encouraged in every way possible by the Fleet Commander, and the result was a further erosion of the Committee ranks in addition to the losses caused by the usual propaganda methods. As things were, Peters would have been statistically certain of getting two thirds of the newly arrived officers if one of them had not happened to outrank him. Peters was winning, and without having to work really hard at it.

“… But the ones who stay on the Committee are tough,” Fielding went on. “They are not misogynists exactly, but their urges in that direction have been pretty thoroughly sublimated to the idea of Escape. They have found that, generally speaking, females can’t be trusted. That the few who do honestly want to stay and work for the Committee only cause trouble anyway, and that it’s better to discourage them gently from the start.

“And I do mean gently,” she added quickly. “We couldn’t possibly take offense at anything they’ve said or done. But the situation here—on the planet as a whole, not just in the Post—is psychologically unstable. Dangerous even.”

“Professionally,” she ended, “I don’t like it!”

In the silence which followed, Warren thought very hard. Fielding’s outline of what, to her, seemed a dangerous and unstable situation was fairly accurate, but the truth was that it was much more serious than she realized. Warren also had access to files, the files restricted to members of the Inner Committee, and he did not like the situation either. And he was aware, too, that Kelso was pushing him. Warren did not mind that so long as he was being pushed in the direction he wanted to go, and he had climbed up here to try to decide exactly which direction it was that he intended to take. But now, and without him having the chance to hear Peters’ side of it, the decision was being forced upon him.

A burst of laughter drifted up to him, followed by the sound of someone getting a good-natured bawling out for missing the target and losing cross-bow bolts in the long grass. It was very hard just then for him to think of these pleasant, efficient and enthusiastic young Committeemen as being a threat.

“Would you like to help found a dynasty?” he asked Fielding suddenly.

Fielding’s face went red. “Are you
serious?
” she said. Then, realizing that her tone could have given offense on several levels of meaning, she altered it subtly so that the question sounded mildly improbably instead of utterly ridiculous, and repeated, “
Are
you serious, sir?”

Warren did not reply at once. He was thinking that the Committee as it now stood was something of an elite corps, that the officers who had remained in it had survived in spite of extreme psychological pressures, and that to do so they must be little short of fanatical in their devotion to what they considered was their duty. It had also occurred to Warren that out of a prison population of half a million widely scattered and disorganized farmers they represented a well-disciplined and relatively mobile force of something like twenty thousand, and that if Peters had his own way much longer and succeeded in trimming their numbers even further so that they themselves realized that an escape was no longer possible, then the Fleet Commander and the Civilians he represented would be in very serious trouble indeed.

At present they were something less than respectful towards senior officers who did not share their ideas, and it would only be a short step to the point where a further reduced and hence even more fanatical ex-Escape Committee took over the place by force.

Such a military dictatorship might not be too bad, Warren thought, except that civil war must follow inevitably and soon. Far too many of the Committee officers were of equal rank, and there was bound to be furious disagreement as to who would be Boss. All these things, although distant in time, were not only probable but virtual certainties, and Warren had been trying for more than a week to devise a plan which would put this probability into the impossible class. Founding a dynasty—remaining in the present position, consolidating it and passing his ideas as well as his supreme authority on to his descendants—was a nice if rather fanciful idea. But even the stability of a monarchy was not always certain and judging by Fielding’s first reaction to the suggestion and bearing in mind the fact that she was a doctor as well as a psychologist, the idea might be physiologically impossible anyway.

Of one thing he was sure, however; the Fleet Commander was ultimately on the losing side no matter which choice Warren made. Even if he should side with Peters and use his considerable weight of authority against the Committee, he would succeed in further reducing their numbers but at the cost of making them a more-closely knit and fanatical group. No matter how he looked at it the situation was a potentially dangerous one which must sooner or later lead to a shooting war.

Warren sighed, bringing his mind back from a probably disastrous future to a present that was, literally, full of laughter, sunshine and excitement. Smiling, he said, “Relax, Doctor. The question was purely rhetorical.”

So far as Warren could see there was only one solution to his problem. He must join the Escape Committee.

And escape.

Shortly after the meeting began the rain started and the light which made its way through the natural camouflage and into the administration hut became so dim that Warren could barely make out the faces of the four other officers around the table. Proceedings were held up while Kelso lit the lamps and positioned their reflectors to direct all the available light onto the map which had been attached, in sections, to the largest clear area of wall.

Nearly eight feet high and twenty long, the map showed the prison planet in Mercator projection. A large, elongated diamond-shaped continent was centered on the equator and was connected to a smaller continent, triangular in shape and also lying on the equator, by a long chain of islands. The large continent, the islands and the two indistinct land masses at each pole were little more than outlines, but the smaller continent was shown in considerable detail.

Major Hynds, who was chief of the Intelligence subcommittee, spoke as Kelso resumed his seat.

“As you will already have guessed, sir,” he said, “the smaller continent is the one occupied by the prisoners. From data gathered by Committee exploration parties and from the observations of people lucky enough to be near a port on the shuttle coming down we have obtained a fairly accurate idea of this continent’s topology. Everything else on the map, however, was pieced together from the interrogation of the few officers who were able to view the planet from the guardship’s orbit. Because of the acute angle of observation, the unfortunate fact that continental outlines have a habit of being obscured by cloud, and because some people just don’t have the ability to draw what they remember seeing, this must be considered unreliable.”

Hynds
was a small, lightly-build man with a tendency towards sarcasm. He wore glasses which had been repaired so many times that their nose- and ear-pieces were shapeless blobs of paper and gum. He steadied them with a finger and thumb while he talked, using the other hand as a pointer.

The positions of Committee Posts, Hynds went on to explain, were marked by red feathers, farms and farming villages by green, with the roads connecting these Civilian installations shown in black. Committeemen used these roads extensively, since they had been instrumental in building most of them, but great pains were taken to ensure that the Civilian road system was not linked, even by a forest path, to the Posts. The existence of the camouflaged Posts was not known to the enemy, as was proved by the fact that this one had been built within a few miles of a favorite landing spot.

The two black triangles were ore-bearing mountains, it having been found that the widely-dispersed ore effectively screened the small masses of refined metal underlying it from the guardship’s detectors. These were the sites of the Committee smelting plants and advanced training units, the existence of which was not known even to the Civilians.

So the movement was already underground, in both senses of the word
, Warren though drily. He had been right to join them, because he certainly could not have beaten them. Not completely.

“You mentioned advanced training units,” Warren broke in suddenly. “Would you expand on that, please.”

“That is Major Hutton’s department, sir,” said Hynds, seating himself and glancing toward the officer beside him.

The table jerked and made scraping noises against the floor as Hutton got to his feet. He was an enormous man, fantastically muscled and with a mat of chest hair so thick that in places it concealed the straps of his harness. But his expression was intelligent, apologetic and eager to please, and Warren was reminded of a good-natured and well-meaning bull to whom the whole world was a china shop. When he spoke his voice was barely audible, as if it, like his tremendous body, had also to be kept constantly in check.

“As you can understand, sir,” Hutton murmured, “a large amount of preparatory work is necessary before the escape plan can be put into effect. Experiments with the extraction and processing of metallic ores must go forward, which presents certain difficulties considering the limited facilities at our disposal and the need of concealing the work. We have teams working on glass blowing, chemical explosives, air liquefication and storage problems and so on. Then there is the work on the guardship mock-up, and on the dummy itself.

“We need men to build and maintain the wood-burning steam engines used for the heavy jobs,” Hutton went on quietly, “a steam engine being the best our machine shops are capable of producing at present. Even if we could make one, the ignition of an internal combustion engine might be picked up by Bug instruments so steam is safer—although we’ve drilled successfully for oil, which is used mainly for lighting the tunnels and labs. In actual fact, however, a machine shop is little more than a medieval smithy…”

“Major Hutton is being over-modest, sir,” Kelso put in quickly. “Despite the handicaps, his Technical and Research section is farther advanced in its part of the plan than any of the others.”

“Maybe so,” Hutton returned, his voice rising almost to a conversational level and becoming less than apologetic, “but it is my job to train a certain number of officers for maintenance and support duties and I’m not getting enough of them, nor am I getting the right kind of men. The people sent me are the ones Hynds considers least likely to go Civilian, not officers whose previous specialties best suit them for the work in hand!”

“Nonsense, sir!” Hynds protested, glaring at Hutton. “I’ve send him every chemist and metallurgist I could scrape up. What does he want me to do, send him Civilians?”

Hutton was staring at the table top, looking more sullen than angry. Hynds was trying to murder him with his eyes and Kelso was looking from one to the other, obviously annoyed at the impression his two superior officers had created. The other officer at the table, Major Sloan, showed no perceptible reaction. Subtle variations of expression were impossible for his ruined face.

“Since I lack data on this subject,” Warren said sternly to the two Majors, “my comments at this time would be valueless. However, an escape plan has been mentioned several times. What exactly does it involve and when do you propose putting it into effect?”

He looked at Kelso.

“There have been a number of plans submitted to the Escape Committee from time to time,” the Lieutenant said brightly, trying to dispel the unpleasantness of a few minutes previously, “The custom being to label them with the names of their originators. There was the Fitzgerald Plan, which was very well detailed and called for an attack on the guardship with two-man, chemically powered rockets. Quite apart from the fact that the Bugs would be unlikely to stand around doing nothing while we developed the technology to build the ships, the plan was not feasible because of the length of time required in the preparatory stages.

“The plan which was adopted,” Kelso went on, his tone becoming more serious, “was the one put forward by Flotilla-Leader Anderson…”

Anderson had begun by accepting the fact that the only practical way of getting off the planet was to use a Bug ship, his idea being to lure the shuttle rocket to the surface at a predetermined point and in such circumstances that the prisoners would be able to capture it. With the shuttle in their hands it should be possible to effect the capture of the guardship itself, an obsolete battlewagon which was easily capable of transporting anything up to a thousand ex-prisoners to an Earth base, where the news of the existence and position of the planet could be given to the proper authorities.

It was a simple, daring plan which at practically every stage was packed with things that could go wrong. But Anderson had been able to eliminate enough of the uncertainties that it would be workable with just the average amount of good luck instead of a multiple chain of miracles.

The bait which would lure down the Bug ferryship would be a metal dummy of a crash-landed enemy reconnaissance vessel, assembled during a time when the guardship’s orbit kept it below the horizon, from parts prefabricated and hidden in undetectable caches. Then, to make sure that the guardship simply did not bomb this mock-up as they had bombed earlier collections of metal on the surface, carefully positioned fires would be started in the surrounding vegetation to make it plainly obvious to the guardship that a vessel had crash-landed, a vessel which on closer inspection would show to be one of their own scoutships.