The Escape Orbit

Chapter 14

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!”

“Anything which makes them want home,” Warren had told him sharply, “is all to the good.”

Warren had wondered briefly how it was possible to both like and dislike what he was doing, and the people who were helping him do it, intensely at one and the same time.

In Hutton’s Mountain, strangely deserted now that the metal-work was complete and most of the technicians were in Andersonstown making explosives, he came on men adding the finishing touches to the dummy sections—lavishing the patience and care of a Michelangelo on the job of making their sections of plating show the pitting indicative of a too-fast entry into atmosphere, the buckling and discoloration of a near-miss by a beam weapon and the deep, bright scratches caused by it running through the exploding fragments of sister or enemy ships. But the real artists he saw were in Mallon’s Peak where a smaller and more specialized group were preparing the airlock section of the dummy.

During a brief trip to the outer continent with Hynds he saw a glider medic misjudge a landing. It had been dusk on a still evening with the surface of the lake as smooth as glass, and it had looked as if he had calculated his touchdown about twenty feet below the actual level of the water. They had reached the floating wreckage in time to extricate him before he drowned, but the whip action of the crash had broken his neck and he had died shortly afterwards. In the carefully neutral voice which he always used these days when Warren was around, Hynds had remarked that the planetary population figure would show no change, as the confinement which the medic had been called to had proceeded normally and a girl baby had replaced the man who had checked out.

During his restless and often unescorted wanderings he came on groups of men lying sprawled out in the long, hot grass, on their sides or propped up on their elbows as they watched their instructor developing some aspect of the attack with the aid of diagrams tacked to a tree-trunk, and occasionally asking highly pertinent questions in deceptively casual tones. Or men suspended from high branches by a single rope around their belts, swinging and twisting and sweating inside wickerwork shields while they shot their cross-bows at ridiculously small targets. In weightless conditions, spin would be set up by the reaction of any projectile-firing weapon and this drill was to accustom the men to hitting targets which whirled and twisted around them. Their instructor would yell advice about shooting from waist-level to minimize spin, and often the men would miss their targets completely because they were incapacitated by laughter as much as dizziness.

Some of the men, the assault groups in particular, seemed to get a kick out of Warren’s informal, unexpected visits, especially when he joined in their drills. With others his activities simply made them uncomfortable. But for many weeks he had felt an increasing need to reassure himself that his plan was going well, that he was doing the right thing and that the Committeemen would still follow him. Like some latter-day Haroun El Raschid he wandered his kingdom in an attempt to discover what his people were really thinking. When he found that often they did not think the way he wanted them to, Warren lost his temper to such an extent that his show of democratic good-fellowship must at times have seemed like sheerest hypocrisy.

But everyone laughed or lost their temper or lashed out too easily these days. E-Day was rushing down on them now, and tension had become a major constituent of the air they breathed. By E minus twenty-three the domesticated Battlers had been dispersed to the neighborhood of the two mountain workshops, where singly or in small groups they would practice with dummy loads along the routes they would use on E-Day. The gradual buildup of shipping in the bay, now unconcealed in order to suggest to the guardship that the prisoners were settling down to a program of exploration and expansion, was sufficient to evacuate essential records and personnel. The long-range communications system had been tested and the weather forecasters were guardedly optimistic.

Warren’s own feelings closely resembled those of the meteorologists, until on E minus twenty-one a glider coming in to land on the bay discovered the second major act of sabotage.