The Escape Orbit (7 page)

“Get them off the Post!” Major Sloan broke in suddenly. The bass rumble of his voice—like a distant volcano, Warren thought; deep, powerful and with overtones of instability—must have carried much further than the outer office. “And not politely, either! The longer they stay the more they unsettle the men. They’re soft and they make the men soft. Get rid of them!”

There was a tense silence during which nobody looked at anybody else and even the noises from the outer office seemed to stop. Warren, keeping his face expressionless, regarded the big wall map and tried to decide whether to squelch this Major Sloan now or later, or at all. He knew that normally Sloan did not have much to say for himself. He was responsible for non-technical field training, road and bridge construction, procurement of food and skins by hunting parties or through trading with the farms, and a host of subsidiary jobs. In these duties the Major was quietly and almost fanatically efficient, and this was one of the two reasons which made Warren inclined to make allowances for a certain lack of charm in the man.

The other reason was that on the day of his arrival the Major had not run quickly enough when the Bug shuttle had begun to take off. The burns he had received were of such severity that by rights he should have died from shock. But Major Sloan had been and was an unusually strong man and he had survived despite the absence of proper medical facilities—the Bugs did not supply prisoners with drugs or instruments, so that homegrown and relatively ineffective substitutes had been used in an attempt to relieve his pain. But for nearly two days the Major had screamed, Warren had been told by a Committeeman who still looked sick at the memory of it, and for three weeks after that he had been unable to talk coherently because of the pain. Eventually, however, his body had healed itself although it was plain to anyone who spoke to the Major that the process had stopped short at his mind.

Warren sighed inwardly and was about to speak when Hynds forestalled him.

“I agree with the Major, sir. And if I had as much trouble with this particular problem as he has had, my language might be even stronger.”

Obviously Hynds had been expecting Warren to blow up over Sloan’s outburst, and he was trying desperately to head the Marshal off, not by apologizing for the Major but by agreeing with him. As quickly and quietly as he could, Hynds went on, “… The desertion of female officers to the Civilians is a statistical certainty, and we have been simply hastening the process in various subtle ways. Their uniform, for instance, and paper-making. You know that we get paper—sheets of thin, fine-textured wood, actually—fairly easily. One of the trees here, with the sections of the trunk are boiled to remove the resin, come apart at the growth rings. The Committee couldn’t exist without this paper, but getting it is a horribly messy job and one definitely not suited to women—the gum stains their hands and if it gets in their hair…”

“It’s necessary and valuable work,” Lieutenant Kelso said, ditching the conversational ball neatly, “and when they’ve had enough of it we don’t just kick them out. They go to Andersonstown, on the coast. That’s a large Civilian farming community which grew up around the post responsible for fishing the bay and nearby river…”

It had been at a time when relations between the Committee and Civilians had been more cordial that the post had been set up, Kelso went on to explain, and the idea had been to trade fish as well as meat and protection against marauding battlers for grain, fruit and similar necessities. But the scheme had backfired badly as far as the Committee was concerned.

In those days the Civilians had been allowed to build farms very close to the Committee Posts, and they had done so. And because in those days there were a lot more females than there were male Civilians, and these female officers naturally refused to share a husband with another woman, the only hope they had of getting a husband was to subvert a Committeeman. This they had done to such good effect that the post had had an almost complete turnover of personnel every year. Flotilla-Leader Anderson, the Anderson whose plan had been adopted for the escape and who had been the commanding officer of the post in question, had given the settlement its name when he had gone Civilian. Gradually, the surplus females from all over the continent had moved to Andersonstown and the Post had lost more and more of its male officers until eventually the Committee had withdrawn all males from the Post.

“… Now it is manned, if you can call it that, entirely by female officers,” Kelso concluded, grinning. “Girls who can’t find Civilian husbands or who don’t want to leave the Committee for some other reason. They do some very useful work as well as being a very disturbing influence on the Civilian farmers in the area.”

As the Lieutenant stopped talking Warren found himself thinking about these highly-trained and intelligent girls who, although they might be as eager to get off the planet as anyone on the Committee, were denied that chance to contribute towards the escape. It was not anger at Sloan’s insubordination or at the attempts of the other two to cover for the Major which hardened Warren’s voice when he spoke.

“Your comments on this matter are appreciated, gentlemen,” he said, “although they in no way alter the decision which I have already made regarding this problem.”

“A point which you don’t seem to grasp,” he went on grimly, “is that the survivors of
Victorious
, because it was a tactical command ship, are very special people compared with the usual run of serving officers today. I don’t want to see any single one of them, male or female, going Civilian! And a second point is that fifteen or twenty years ago, at the time when most of the people here were taken prisoner, these same officers would not have been considered special at all. Which shows you how drastically the standards of the service have been lowered and how vitally important it is for the officers on this planet to be returned to active service—such an event would almost certainly bring about the end of the war in our favor! It should also explain why I want every prisoner, regardless of sex, to be serving on or to be in some was associated with the Escape Committee.

“With this in mind,” he continued almost gently, “I have appointed Major Fielding, the psychologist and medical officer from Victorious, to the Staff.”

Warren paused, regarding the suddenly stricken faces staring down at him, then he smiled.

“Please don’t look as if your best friends had just died,” he said chidingly. “Our half of the human race has managed to coexist with the females of the species, peacefully on the whole if not with complete understanding, for many millennia. I am simply asking the members of the Escape Committee to do the same for three short years.”

Next day Warren dispatched Kelso, Hynds and two other responsible officers from the post on a good-will mission to the surrounding farms and settlements, at the same time signaling the other posts to send out as many officers as could be spared with similar instructions. These orders were designed to show the so-called Civilians that a major change of policy had taken place within the Committee, and while explaining the ramifications of this change the visiting Committeemen were to bend every effort to be frank, friendly, and helpful to the farmers—especially in the matter of doing odd jobs of construction and maintenance and in putting down marauding battlers. They were also ordered to show all due respect toward these fellow officers, being particularly careful to avoid dumb insolence or sarcasm, and on no account were they to refer to these non-Committee officers as Civilians—they were to refrain from even thinking of them as such. These non-Committeemen and women were to be regarded simply as imprisoned officers who on a certain day already fixed in the not too distant future would be breaking out of their prison, and that any assistance they felt like giving, whether it was a full-time service with the Committee or an hour or so a day on preparatory work, would be very much appreciated.

Already drafted were a series of follow-up orders in increasingly firm language, which would not go out until the present tension between the two factions had eased considerably and the preparations for the Escape were far advanced, one of which stated, “Owing to the necessity of gathering up-to-date information on the disposition of friendly and enemy forces prior to the Escape, all officers are asked to interrogate new arrivals regarding these matters or, if they feel unable to execute this duty with the required efficiency, to escort them to the nearest Post without delay.”

To Ruth Fielding he said, “You’ve been appointed to the Staff because I need a good psychologist who can evaluate the overall situation here and help me guide it in the direction I think it must go, and who is also capable of seeing it from the woman’s angle. We don’t really need the help of every officer on the planet, but the ones we do want—the chemists, metallurgists and engineers that Sutton is screaming for—all seem to have married or gone civ… sorry, I mean they’ve left the Committee. To get these men, it seems to be, we must first interest their wives in the project.”

“This might be accomplished,” he went on, “by you mentioning at some length the absence of civilized amenities here, such as decent feminine clothing, makeup and whatever else it is that you and they miss. If you can make them feel discontented they will bring additional pressure to bear on their husbands and friends to support the Escape.”

“With this in mind, I am going to make a tour,” Warren continued, standing up and indicating a sequence of farms, villages and Posts which included both Hutton’s Mountain and Andersonstown. “One of the most important calls will be Andersonstown. It was there that some of our best Committeemen were lured, trapped or otherwise inveigled into joining the other side, and it is only fitting that we choose the same place to start winning them back again.”

Warren resumed his chair, smiled and went on, “But this whole area is literally crawling with husband-hungry women, which is another and more selfish reason for me wanting to take you along. The way I see it, arriving in company with a female officer who is well above average in looks will, as well as showing them that the Committee is no longer composed entirely of misogynists, be the only way of keeping these ravening females at bay and protecting me from a fate which is, the way Sloan tells it, worse than death… What did you say, Ruth?”

“Sorry, sir,” said Fielding. “I was muttering to myself about my lack of experience chaperoning Sector Marshals. And for the other flattering things you said, thank you, sir.”

“Not flattery, Major. Fact.”

“Well, well,” Fielding returned, grinning. “It seems that there are two good psychologists here…”

Hastily, Warren ended the interview before it developed into a mutual admiration society by telling her that he wanted to leave that afternoon and that they both had arrangements to make.

But the preparation for the tour did not go smoothly, and when the hour came when Warren had expected to set off he had what amounted to a mutiny on his hands. It began when Sloan insisted that the Marshal was too valuable a man to risk traveling without a proper escort, and in the same breath refused to order his men to a duty which would take them into hag-ridden Andersonstown—nor would he go there himself. It took every scrap of Warren’s authority, persuasiveness and invective to finally effect a compromise, which was that a single Committeeman from the post should act as guide to Warren and an escort made up of six members of Warren’s original crew who were fairly proficient with their cross-bows would accompany him.

The delay meant that they would not be able to stop the night at the farm thirty miles to the south as planned, but the idea of roughing it for the first night out did not seem to bother anyone. They marched in single file with packs on their backs, their cross-bows carried at the regulation Committee angle and with their hair plastered with the strong-smelling grease which was supposed to discourage insects and battlers—if the battlers did not happen to be feeling hungry or mean, and it was only on rare occasions when battlers were not feeling both—and eager to put into practice all the things they had learned as drill at the Post. It was only their guide, an officer named Briggs, who seemed worried. Tactfully but at frequent intervals he suggested that they might not be as proficient as they thought.

But the two-hour trek through the forest, which was often so dense and thorny that Warren longed for Civilian trousers rather than his trim, Committee kilt, did not noticeably damp their enthusiasm and when they reached the road which would eventually lead them to the farm they began to make good time.

It was Warren’s experience of what, until then, had been only a black line on the wall map. The road was little more than an unpaved trail, grass-grown and overhung by trees except where it crossed a river or ravine by way of a strong and surprisingly well-designed bridge. Warren had to remind himself that the road had not been built solely for pedestrian traffic, but was meant to take the heavy, metal sections of the dummy, and that the whole escape could fail if just one of those sections was to end up in a ravine.

Three hours before sunset Briggs called a halt, saying that due to their lack of experience it would be better to allow plenty of daylight in which to catch their supper. Then later, when the fires were going well and the men were returning in triumph with the small rabbit-like creatures which abounded in the forest, Briggs had some gently sarcastic things to say about the large number of arrows which were apparently necessary to kill these ferocious, eight-inch long herbivores. And when there was nothing left of the supper but the appetizing smell, he made further attempts to spoil the general air of well-being by talking about some of the horrible accidents which could occur through hammocks not being properly hung. Warren felt a little sorry for him because nothing he said or did could make Fielding and the men stop behaving as if they were all on a glorious picnic.