The Escape Orbit

Chapter 17

“My name is Hubbard, sir,” the new man put in in a nervous, jerky voice. “Political Officer from the late Resolution. It isn’t over, exactly—but it amounts to the same thing. Neither side has the resources, technical, material or personnel, to go on with it.”

“Political Officer?” asked Warren dully. It was a completely new rank to him, and even though he felt that the planet had just been pulled from under his feet the process of satisfying his curiosity was automatic.

The position had been created because of the growing distrust of the field commanders by High Command, Hubbard explained, the situation being aggravated by the accelerating breakdown of all military organization and communications. In part this was due to the incredibly poor quality of present officer material, it being the accepted thing these days to refuse rather than force battle with the enemy. The men just would not fight—although in honesty Hubbard said that this was due to distrust of their own ships and equipment as much as inner qualms. Despite this the officers on space service had been built up as heroes by home propaganda in an attempt to boost the war effort, and this had given some of the field commanders a very nice idea.

Not just as single ships but in flotillas and whole Sector sub-fleets they had simply opted out of the war. But they had not gone home. Instead they had taken themselves to some of the colony worlds—planets with small populations and light defenses—and as heroes place their worlds under their protection. Or held them to ransom, or tried to carve small, personal empires out of them, depending on the characteristics of the commander concerned and the number of units he possessed whose captains were personally loyal to him. It was Hubbard’s duty, and the duty of the other political officers serving with the remains of the fleet, constantly to remind the ships’ personnel where there true loyalty lay, because not only the military organization but the whole of Earths interstellar culture was rapidly falling to pieces. And it was no comfort at all to know that the Bugs were having the same trouble.

“… The Fleet Commander has told me what you’re trying to do and I think it’s tremendous!” Hubbard rushed on. “But it is a complete waste of live and effort, sir, believe me. What remains of our military organization is scarcely capable of mounting an offensive patrol much less a rescue operation of the rest of the prisoners! You’ve got a nice, tight organization here, sir. You’d be better advised to stay put and—”

“Peters,” said Warren suddenly, “how many people know about this?”

The Fleet Commander smiled. He said, “Give me credit for a little intelligence, sir. Nobody but ourselves. Releasing it to your people in the present frame of mind would not be smart. I thought you had better handle it, break it to them gently after a long series of Holds…”

“Sloan!”

The Major charged into the room, his cross-bow unslung and ready, eyes glaring. Harshly, Warren said, “Put these men under close arrest. They are not to be allowed to speak. They are to be confined separately so that they cannot attempt subversion by talking to each other and allowing their seditious talk to be overheard. They are not to say ‘Good Morning’ or ‘Thank you’ when meals are served. If they utter one word they are to be killed.”

“Yes sir!” said Sloan.

“You … you can’t,” began Peters incredulously. “You’re mad, power mad…!”

The words were choked off as in response to Warren’s nod Sloan brought up his weapon, aimed at the center of the Commander’s forehead and pulled the trigger. The bolt thudded into a log two feet above the Commander’s head because at the penultimate instant Warren had used the heel of his hand to jar the Major’s elbow.

“You are not to speak at all,” he said quietly. “Is that understood?”

Second thoughts and last-minute changes of plan were dangerous, Warren told himself firmly, and a decision taken calmly and unhurriedly should not be altered because of them—especially if they arose because of cowardice, selfishness or the possibility of taking an easy way out. But he gave the final Go signal within minutes of Peters and Hubbard being marched out because he did not want to give himself time to think anyway…

The last few yards of the main tunnel were opened to the surface while the wooden framework of the dummy was going up around it. These massive, hoop-like timber sections—prefabricated, numbered for ease of assembly and stored in town many months previously—were rushed out to the Escape site by gangs of as many as twenty men in each section. Their route was a straight line from town to the site, but no attempt was made to conceal their tracks in the soft earth because it would later be burned over to look like the scar of a C-7 blast. And while the framework was being assembled, at a pace which could only be described as furious despite the frequent measurement checks, smaller parties were carefully setting alight the farmhouse which was supposed to be burned by the force-landed ship and to the trees and undergrowth sheltering the two forward attack points.

These positions had to appear to be razed to the ground, but at the same time the scorched tree-trunks, bushes, and log walls had to give concealment to a large number of men. While this carefully supervised destruction was going on, survey teams with mirrors, flags and extremely loud voices were checking the alignment of trees in the section due for burning. Some were marked down for fire-paste and others, those nearest the site, to be blown down with explosives while literally thousands of small trees and bushes had sheets of paper impaled and tied onto a conspicuous branch in such a way that they would burn off but not flow off in a wind, and these were ignited by torch. Simultaneously the grass and brush and the more inflammable species of trees along the edges of the fire lanes were being wetted down with water carried from the bay, the marsh or the nearby stream. Some of it had to be carried, in great hide gourds slung on poles, for more than three miles.

On no account could the conflagration so soon to take place be allowed to get out of control, to look like an ordinary, naturally occurring forest fire…

And through the smoke haze from the burning farm the helio on Nicholson’s post blinked out a constant stream of progress reports. The dummy’s lock section had left its mountain and was halfway to the coast. The stabilizers were twenty minutes behind it. The last of the hull sections had left Hutton’s Mountain. Weather forecast was for no change in wind velocity or direction, but there was a possibility of cloud around dawn. Hutton was having trouble with a temperamental Battler at the head of his convoy and was twenty-five minutes behind schedule. Hutton had turned the Battler loose and was having its load pulled by the extra men he had brought along for just this contingency. The lock sections had been loaded on their cart and it was at sea, winds favorable. Hutton had pickup up ten minutes by Johnson’s Bridge, and it was observed that he was helping to pull the lead wagon. A small cat fleet had rendezvoused at Chang’s Inlet and the smaller metal sections dispersed among the cliff caves there were being ferried out to them. One of the boats capsized in the shallows. Its load had been dragged ashore and transferred to another boat—estimated delay forty-five minutes. The first cat was hull up on the horizon. The head of Hutton’s convoy was not five hours away… The helio stopped blinking because the sun was suddenly down among the trees. There was perhaps an hour of useable dusk left, then the remainder of the work would have to be done by torchlight. The signals resumed, using a focused oil-lamp and shutter. With a red-orange light which gave overtones of anger to everything it said, Nicholson’s post gave the news that the guardship would rise in eight hours and seventeen minutes.

By the light of the bonfires and strategically placed torches the lock and stabilizer sections were fitted, the tanks of Bug air were brought up and positioned inside the framework and the periscopes were set up and aligned. The vanguard of Hutton’s convoy came rumbling and creaking onto the Escape site, off-loaded hurriedly because the fires were making the Battlers restive, and returned to town. While their load of metal plating was being lifted, manhandled into position and hung onto its proper place on the framework, the empty wagons were reloaded with furniture, personal possessions and litters for the injured and driven to the other side of town where they were parked by the roadside. There they waited just as the cats in the bay were waiting—although in their case the furniture and sundry oddments were carried mainly to break up or hide the outlines of the deck cargo of dismantled gliders and similar items too valuable to destroy with the town.

It was like a scene from some surrealist’s Hell, with red-eyed, smoke-blackened demons aswarm over an alien and uncompleteable jigsaw puzzle in three dimensions. But they were completing it—all the pieces had reached the site and smooth metal flesh was growing across the bare bones of the dummy. And so far everything had gone without a hitch.

Something should go wrong, Warren felt, something serious. But nothing did.

Men fell or burned themselves with torches or had heatstroke or had hands or legs crushed during the process of assembly or while unloading wagons. They were taken to the hospital in town and then to the litter wagons. But these were only minor hitches, the ones which had been planned for. Just as was the fact that they were still a little behind schedule.

“The discharge of a C-7 is detachable at line of sight,” Warren said worriedly, and unnecessarily, to Hutton. “We have to light the fires at least an hour before the guardship clears the horizon or they’ll know it isn’t the real thing.”

“Just three more sections to go, sir!” said Hutton, the smoke, excitement and the strain of too much shouting all contributing to the hoarseness of his voice. “They’re at ground level and won’t give much trouble, and we’ll have them in position before the head and smoke get too bad. So you can give the signal now, sir…!”

Hutton’s face and body were so thickly caked with soot, sweat and grime that he had the aspect of a piece of smoke-blackened sculpture, but the excited, shining eyes and the even brighter gleam of teeth were not the expression of a thing of stone. Grinning in return, Warren slipped the lanyard of his whistle over his head and handed it to the Major.

“You give the signal,” he said.

There was a moment of absolute quiet after the high, clear note of the whistle sounded, then the silence was broken by more whistles, shouted orders and sporadic cheering punctuated by the thud of explosions and the angry hiss of fire-paste. At a few widely separate points around the site a red glow showed through the trees and a few sparks drifted into the air, but as yet there was not much to see.

“I want to get a better view of all this,” Warren said briskly, turning to enter the dummy. He paused, patted the smooth metal plating beside him and added, “You’ve done a good job, Major, a very good job. When assembly is complete, leave—there’s nothing more for you to do here. Go help Fielding with the road evacuation; she might want you to pull a wagon or something. And uh, look after her, Major. Give us time to reach the guardship, then … well, what you do after that depends on circumstances, but whatever happens you are going to have an awful lot to do.”

“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.