The Escape Orbit

by James White

  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 probably 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.

  Chapter 5

  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 Fitzgera
ld 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.

  By displaying signs of life from the dummy ship and perhaps going to the extent of seeming to attack it with human prisoners, it was hoped to bring the Bug shuttle down on a rescue mission….

  Listening to Kelso’s low, impassioned voice as he went on to describe the work already done on the plan, Warren felt excited himself, and suddenly he found himself wanting to re-examine his motives for doing what he had done.

  Granted that his chief reason for joining the Committee had been to try to effect an escape, that being the only sure way of avoiding dissention, civil war and an ultimate descent into near-savagery. This did not mean, however, that the Committee members were warmongers or murderers at the present time. Far from it—the people on the Committee side were a group of able, intelligent and resourceful officers who had maintained and even increased their enthusiasm despite years of constantly mounting opposition and steadily dwindling numbers, and Warren was beginning to admire them.

  Another reason, and one which he had not yet made public, was that the war was going very badly for the human side and that the Earth forces were urgently in need of the officers who were rapidly going to seed on this prison planet. At one time an elite corps which accepted only the best, the space service was scraping the bottom of the personnel barrel these days for crew. This was something Warren knew from bitter personal experience.

  And yet another reason, a purely selfish one this time, was that Warren badly wanted to have officers serving under him again who refused to believe that they were beaten, or that anything was impossible….

  All at once he became aware that he had missed a lot of what the Lieutenant had been saying, and that Kelso’s customary tone of enthusiasm had changed to one of anger and frustration—the combination of emotions which were, apparently, the nearest Committeemen came to feeling despair.

  “… But the most galling fact of all,” the Lieutenant went on bitterly, “is that the plan had already been initiated years before any of the officers here had arrived! When I came here there were half a dozen concealed observation posts in operation close to the most likely landing areas. The first smelter was working and the maximum safe quantity of metal which could be collected in one spot, both on the surface and buried at various depths underground, had been ascertained experimentally—the experiment usually consisting of increasing the quantity until the Bugs noticed and dropped a couple of tons of old-fashioned HE on it. The special commands which were to take the Bug shuttle and later the guardship were already being trained, together with the Supply and Intelligence groups to support them. By this time we should have been off the planet, or at least have made a damned good try at getting off it!”

  Kelso took a deep breath and exhaled it angrily through his nose, then went on, “Instead, the plan has been hampered and sabotaged at every turn. We in the Committee, who are trying to retain our traditions and self-respect and discipline as officers, are very often forced to obey people who have given up and who want everyone else to give up, too, so that their consciences can get together and call black white. The result is that we’ve been forced to conceal nearly everything we do from fellow officers who by rights should be giving us the fullest cooperation.

  “At the present rate of progress, sir,” Kelso ended hotly, “we’ll be lucky if we can make the attempt fifteen or twenty years from now!”

  Further along the table Hutton and Sloan, the officer whose specialty was assault training, nodded their agreement. Major Hynds, still holding onto his spectacles as he turned to face Warren, said, “A conservative estimate, sir, but based on the assumption that we do not lose any more of our officers to the Civilians…”

  He stopped speaking as one of the drums in the tree above them began rattling out the signal, three times repeated, which summoned the night guard to their stations and simultaneously announced Lights Out to everyone else. Like puppets controlled by a single string the four officers at the table pushed back their chairs and rose to their feet.

  “Sit down,” said Warren.

  He did not raise his voice, but quite a lot of Kelso’s anger and frustration seemed to have rubbed off on him and Warren made no attempt to conceal the fact. At the same time he had no intention of allowing his anger to develop into an uncontrolled outburst of fury, because he knew that a leader who was subject to fits of temper might inspire fear in his subordinates rather than confidence and Warren wanted to inspire both. These Committeemen wanted a leader, and as Warren began to speak he did everything possible short of flaying them with whips to give them the idea that they had acquired one who could drive as well as lead.

  To begin with he was merely bitingly sarcastic regarding officers who had practically conditioned themselves to jump when drums banged or whistles blew, going on to suggest that it was this too-rigid insistence on discipline which was one reason for the continuing loss of Committeemen to Peters’ Civilians, and that if the present trend continued the Escape Committee would become a hard core of performing monkeys who did things when somebody made a noise and remained at attention at all other times.

  Without altering his scathing tone of voice in the slightest his remarks veered gradually from derogatory to the constructive.

  He was deeply concerned over the dwindling numbers of the Escape Committee, he told them. Not only must this steady erosion cease, but they must win back a large proportion of these so-called deserters, and every possible method of influencing them must be explored ranging from subtle psychology to outright blackmail if necessary. The shortage of manpower was the basic reason why the plan had never gotten off the ground, in both senses of the word, and this was a problem which must be and would be solved.

  And talking all the foregoing as read, he now required a breakdown into previous specialties and present aptitudes of all prisoners, also the minimum numbers and training needed by these officers to allow the four subcommittees represented here to bring the Anderson Plan to complete readiness in a reasonable time.

  Fifteen years was not a reasonable time. Warren insisted. He suggest an absolute top limit of three years.

  “…According to Lieutenant Kelso, most of the data we
need is available on this Post,” Warren concluded, his tone becoming slightly more friendly, “and I intend going into it fully with you now. So I’m afraid, gentlemen, that the lights will not go out in this building, now will any of you see your bunks, until together we have set a date for the Escape…”

  The faces along the table looked chastened in varying degrees by the tongue-lashing which had gone before and startled by his bombshell regarding the setting of the escape date. But these emotions gave way quickly to a steadily mounting excitement which was reflected in shining eyes and lips which were trying hard not to smile. There was no incredulity, no objections, no verbal response of any kind, and Warren knew suddenly that these officers did not have to be driven to do their duty and he should have realized that. Watching them he felt the warm, tingling contagion of their excitement again and all at once he wanted to praise and compliment them for what they were and for the glorious and nearly impossible thing they were trying to do. But a Sector Marshal did not pay such compliments to junior officers, even when they were deserved. It was very bad for discipline.

  Instead he allowed his manner to thaw some more and said, “I’m a reasonable man, however. At this time I won’t insist on setting the hour ….”

  Chapter 6

  It was E-Day minus one thousand and thirty-three and the officers on the Post were beginning not to smile self-consciously when they referred to it that way, and they did not smile at all if they were discussing it with the Sector Marshal.

  Warren had taken over the main administration building as his headquarters, partitioning off one corner of the big room into an office and sleeping quarters. The office portion, which had a hole in the roof to accommodate the ladder going to the communications platform, was so placed that all maps, records, dossiers, Post personnel, messages via drum or heliograph and an appreciable quantity of rain reached him with the minimum amount of delay. The office gave an illusion of privacy, although the high walls were so thin that every word carried clearly to the men and women he had staffing the outer room.