The Escape Orbit

Chapter 21

The first thing Warren did after transferring the Bug prisoners to their quarters in Hutton’s Mountain was to move Peters and Hubbard to the guardship. He had a long talk with the political officer, during which Hubbard came to see his way, then released him safe in the knowledge that the other would not talk out of turn. With Peters it was different. Warren saw to it that the Fleet Commander had every possible comfort except that of conversation, but he had no intention of talking to Peters until he was good and ready. He could not risk having Peters throw a spanner in the works at this late stage. And with the Commander rendered harmless he was able to devote all of his attention to the ship and to the officers who would run her.

He made it quite clear from the first that the ship would be manned.

Warren himself did not leave the ship, although he kept in touch with Fielding and Hynds by the Bug radio equipment taken from the battleship. He needed Hynds to track down information on obsolete Earth and Bug weapons and control-systems and Fielding, perhaps unknown to herself, was supplying the psychological know-how which was helping him to separate the sheep from the wolves. Hutton visited the ship many times.

The Major expressed deep concern over the age, appointments and general condition of the vessel, at the same time giving forth with a constant stream of suggestions as to how the hopelessly obsolete equipment might be thrown away, modified or completely rebuilt to the best advantage. It was his considered opinion that the great, fat sow of a ship would disintegrate the moment thrust was applied and that its weapons were a deadlier menace to the ordnance officers than to any target, but at the same time the hints he let drop to Warren about wanting to go along were many and quite unsubtle. Knowing that Hutton was merely reacting to the magnitude of the technical challenge of making the ship operational again, and that the Major had become too much of a pacifist to fit into the ship’s crew, Warren’s treatment of these hints was equally unsubtle. He said, “No.”

And so the days passed into weeks, with the shuttle plying between the ship and the surface as often as twice a day. Going down it carried Bug provisions for their prisoners, all the Bug literature, records, charts, electronic and optical equipment together with all the machine tools and mechanical oddments which could be spared. Coming back up it brought food, the chosen Committeemen and hundreds of trays of the weed which Hutton had developed to supply the ship with air. Gradually the chlorine was bled into space, and deck by deck it was replaced by oxygen-rich air until the entire circulation system carried a human rather than a Bug atmosphere. The work of modifying and provisioning the ship accelerated rapidly after that.

Interior lighting was toned down to a comfortable intensity. Where necessary the Bug controls were reshaped to suit human hands and, so far as was possible considering their present close proximity to the planet, their weapons were tested. The men were fast getting used to ceilings which gave only a few inches of head-room, to sitting cross-legged in Bug chairs and to sleeping in the big oval beds which were like over-padded hammocks. Warren had given permission for anyone who needed them to have necessary items of furniture brought up in the shuttle, but he discovered that there was a widespread feeling among the men that anyone who couldn’t sit in a Bug chair or sleep in a Bug bed was something of a sissy.

Morale among the entire crew was very high and it was clear that no good purpose would be served by remaining in orbit around the ex-prison planet any longer, so on E-Day plus eighty-four Warren went down in the shuttle to give his final instructions and to say goodbye.

He took Peters and Kelso with him, and when they landed he told the Lieutenant that he would be back in an hour and to wait for him in the ship. He had a lot to tell the Fleet Commander and none of what he had to say was for the ears of Kelso or any of the other hidebound Committeemen on the guardship, so Warren talked a lot during the walk from the shuttle to the ruins of Andersonstown. But the Commander did very little talking back. Perhaps the reason lay in the devastation around them and the acrid, burnt smell which still hung in the air, or maybe it was simply that the Commander was too shocked at what the Marshal was confessing to for him to discuss it just yet.

They entered the building chosen for this final meeting, a storehouse near the harbor which was one of the first to be rebuilt. Inside, the benches were filled with the more active anti-Committee officers, the high level technicians from the mountain and the other members of Warren’s staff. He knew that his face looked grim as he took up his position with the Fleet Commander behind the table before them, and set the fishbowl he had been carrying down on the table. The prospect of a confession is never a pleasant one, and Warren alone knew how much he had to confess.

Harshly, he began, “We will leave as soon as I return to the ship. Before saying goodbye I have certain … explanations and instructions for you. The first is that any officers among you who are planning how best to avoid the rescue force and a return to active service can relax. I will not be back for you. Nobody will be back for you, ever.”

The expressions of wary hostility had changed suddenly to bewilderment, and Warren wondered if the gulf which had opened between these people and himself over the past months could be closed by a few minutes’ conversation. It would be nice if it could, but standing in his trim battledress uniform among all the kilts and shapeless leather pants he felt so alien and different that he might have been a Bug facing them.

“The reason for this is a situation which was apparent even before I was taken prisoner,” Warren continued, “although it surprised me that the total collapse of our military organization could come about in the three years that I’ve been here. However, it did happen. The service broke up through political mismanagement and wholesale desertions and the simple shortage of proper officers and maintenance technicians. The Fleet Commander will confirm that we have up-to-date and accurate intelligence in this matter. Even in my time this process was so well advanced that the possibility of the prisoners here being rescued was an extremely remote one, despite all that I said, or led you to believe, to the contrary.

“Knowing this, my decision to back the Escape Committee requires some explanation…”

Very briefly, Warren outline again the situation on the prison planet as he had seen it on arrival: the two mutually hostile groups whose dislike was on the point of flaring into violence, the breakdown of discipline and respect for authority, and the apparent ascendency of the Civilian over the Committee side which was simply driving the Committeemen into a tighter and more fanatical group. The considerable authority and ability of the Fleet Commander, aided by environmental factors and the purely biological forces at work—and here it should be said that the prisoners were held to the planet much more tightly by their growing number of children than by the Bug guardship—was unable to control these fanatics who placed loyalty to the service and their responsibilities as officers before comfort and security and female companionship. They placed Honor above all else, and Warren had decided that the only way to control such narrowminded yet admirable men was to join them and lead them in the general direction in which they wanted to go.

Not to have done so would have resulted in an Escape Committee, so shrunken in size that it would be plain even to themselves that escape was impossible, which had tight communications and organization, turning on the Civilians who had betrayed them. The Civilians were in the majority but were not organized at all. After many years, perhaps many generations, of strife the situation would have found its own level, but in the process all the valuable skills and knowledge of the prisoners would have been lost. In very short time the planet would have been populated by little more than savages.

By siding with the Committee he had caused the second continent to be opened up, which in turn force into being the network of communications and commerce by ship, glider and helio relay. None of this would have been possible without Committee drive and organization. He had also, by lying outrageously regarding his reasons for wanting it, caused a vast amount of technology to be recorded and distributed in written form, and he had set up the machinery of self-training and teaching. The result was that there was now little likelihood of their knowledge, particularly the space and related technologies, dying with them. In any event the Bug gadgetry he was leaving behind would ensure its being kept alive.

There had been times when Warren had wanted to do it the Fleet Commander’s way, especially during those long periods when the Civilians and Committeemen seemed to be getting along well together. But then one of his men would say something, or there would be a beating-up or some thoughtless destruction of Civilian property, and Warren would realize that there was no easy way out. Undermining the Committee from within was simply carrying on the job which the Fleet Commander had started, and the result would have been equally unsatisfactory. His men were potential troublemakers whether they called themselves Civilians or Committeemen. They were the type of men who made history, usually the wrong sort. They were the wolves among the sheep. The only thing to do with wolves was to get rid of them, one way or another…

“There was always a strong possibility that the Bugs would realize at the last moment that the site was an ambush,” Warren continued, “and dump a missile on us. That was my reserve plan if the first one failed. It would have been a dramatically simple way of disposing of the wolves, because it was the most loyal Committeemen who stayed on the site during the final hours. But these were fine men—good, able officers who were not to blame for what they were and the trouble they might ultimately cause. The fact that they sometimes went off the rails a bit with Civilians and some of the female officers didn’t make me feel any better about sentencing them to death, because I knew, and so did they, what a bloody massacre even a successful escape would be. I liked those men and wanted to kill as few of them as possible.”

“What I mean is that they weren’t very gentle or thoughtful people,” Warren went on awkwardly, “but they had enthusiasm and they would never admit that anything was impossible. They still won’t and I still like them. What they tried to do … what we did do … was…”

“Glorious,” said Peters softly.

Warren looked quickly at the Fleet Commander, suspecting sarcasm, but he was mistaken. For several seconds he stared down at this helmet, unable to speak.

“What will you do now, sir?” said Hutton quietly.

Clearing his throat, Warren said, “Our interstellar culture, along with that of the Bugs, is in the process of falling apart. I have a large ship in reasonably good condition. I have upwards of one thousand men aboard who, both crew and assault commandos, are personally loyal to me, and I have an officer capable of advising me on the political aspects of any situation. It should be possible for us to cut ourselves a chunk of this disintegrating culture, hold it and impose on it some sort of order which would halt or possibly reverse the tendency to regress toward savagery which occurs with isolated colonies previously dependent on the mother world. That is what I will try to do. Meanwhile, you have a much harder job.”

“If you don’t believe that,” he went on grimly, “just think for a minute exactly what it is that you are.”

Warren stared hard into the faces before him, because the bloody, nightmarish pictures which were always on the fringe of his mental vision were trying to take form again in the air between them, and this was the only way he had of fighting it. He was telling them the reason why one hundred and forty-two assault men had died—the real reason, not just the one that the men themselves had thought they had.

He said, “You are a planet of scientifically trained, psychologically stable and highly intelligent human beings who have, so far as was possible, had all the unstable and unsane influences removed from among you. You are in a unique position, therefore, and I expect a lot from you and your descendants. Some of you may have thought that you were ducking your responsibilities by going Civilian, but this isn’t so. You have oblications immeasurably stronger and deeper than any simple oath of service—the responsibility of the civilized person toward the savage, of the haves for the have-nots.

“I cannot tell you in detail what you should do,” Warren continued. “My advice is that you remain underground, so far as technology is concerned, for another ten years so that you’ll be on the safe side if a Bug ship should turn up—but my guess is that if one doesn’t arrive within the next three years it won’t come at all. Meanwhile you will be keeping alive the science of an interstellar culture and seeing to it that the kids who are beginning to clutter up the place learn a lot more than woodcarving—a whole lot more! At the same time you will try to love and cherish and treat as your very own those Bug prisoners at the mountain. You will see to it that they are healthy and comfortable and as happy as possible so that they will not be averse to breeding in captivity like ourselves. You will then see to it that your own darling children get plenty of chances to see theirs—you could arrange it like a visit to the zoo, at first, but later you will teach them to respect these chlorine-breathers and to communicate with them. There will be difficulties, of course, but it isn’t entirely impossible for a youngster to make friends with his bogey-man. You have some very good psychologists here…”

The picture forming before him now was from a bright and, he hoped, not too distant future rather than from the immediate and bloody past. Firmly, he went on, “Eventually—in six or seven generations from now, perhaps—you will be ready to go out. All around you will be the fragments of two promising interstellar cultures which met before either was ready for a meeting. Your job will be to pick up the pieces, all of the pieces, and put them together again.

“With luck,” he added hopefully, “one of the biggest and most civilized pieces might have been mine…”

They were all staring at him, Fielding, Hutton, Hynds and the others, as if he were something new and frightening, something accepted as a known quantity which had turned suddenly and bitten them. Warren saw now that his confession of lying and treachery and wholesale double-dealing was of secondary importance, that he had given them something much more important to think about. The fact that they did consider it more important, and the expressions on their faces as they stared through him and into space and future time, told Warren what he wanted to know. The job would be done. He was content.

“Well,” he said finally, lifting his helmet and turning to go, “I guess that’s it, then…”

Kelso burst into the room a few seconds later, in a near panic because the Marshal had been gone longer than the stipulated hour and the Lieutenant had begun to think that harm had come to him at the hands of the Civilians. The Lieutenant was in time to see a sight so mind-staggering that he felt guilty of a most unmilitary gape. It was the sight of a roomful of Civilians standing rigidly at attention while the Fleet Commander, old man Peters himself, tore off a salute to the Marshal which was the tightest, smartest and plainly the most respectful salute that Kelso had ever seen.