The Escape Orbit

by James White

  Present for their regular morning meeting were Major Sloan, the officer in charge of Supply and Assault Training, Major Hynds of Intelligence, and Lieutenant Kelso, whose job was Coordination—Major Hutton having returned to his subterranean smithy two weeks previously, taking with him seven officers from Victorious whose training, past hobbies and/or present enthusiasm made them useful to him.

  When the salutes had been exchanged and the men stood at ease, Warren said briskly, “It goes without saying that our work in the past has been seriously hampered by the fact that the so-called Civilians outranked the officers on the Committee. And that the same situation occurs within the Committee in that officers who possess ability often do not possess the rank which should go with it. In order to act effectively such officers must employ flattery and cajolery and similar verbal stratagems, and this you will admit is a gross waste of time and ability.

  “While my rank gives me wide powers in the matter of promoting able officers serving under me,” Warren continued, “I am forbidden to execute this power while held prisoner of war. But this does not mean that I cannot employ the principles of general staff command and relay my orders through junior officers, delegating such authority as seems necessary. This being so, the present heads of subcommittees are hereby appointed to my Staff and Lieutenant Kelso, because of his recognized ability to handle people nominally his superior, will be become my personal aide….”

  Warren paused to note their reactions. Kelso and Hynds were grinning hugely and Sloan was showing more teeth than usual. They all had an anticipatory gleam in their eyes as if mentally rehearsing what they would say the next time they met the Fleet Commander or any other high-ranking Civilian. In short, the reaction was as expected.

  Tapping the uneven wood of his desk for emphasis, Warren resumed sternly, “As officers on my staff, you will accord your seniors, whether Committee or otherwise, the respect due their rank. You will pass on my orders but you will not throw my weight around. You will be polite and respectful at all times, but you will not accept no as an answer at any time …!”

  More than any other single factor, the success of the Anderson Plan hinged on the presence in the escape area of a tremendous volume of manpower, every single unit of which would have to be trained and rehearsed in their movements beyond any possible chance or error. Hutton’s section could be counted on to prepare the dummy ship sections and train the technical support groups, while Hynds and Sloan took care of communications and the assault. But transporting the metal sections to the escape area and assembling them all within the severely limited time during which the guardship’s orbit took it below the horizon was an operation far beyond the capability of the Committee at its present strength.

  Their first concern, therefore, must be to gain recruits.

  As Warren saw it, the reasons for an officer leaving the Committee were three-fold. Serving with the Committee was a hard life, the hardship was pointless since they had come to believe the Committee’s objective impossible of fulfillment, and since they were unable to take part in the war the sensible course seemed to be to enjoy their enforced peace.

  From his study of the available data, however, Warren went on to explain, he was pretty sure that the consciences of these officers gave them considerable trouble—a significant indication being the touchy way most of them reacted to being called Civilians. So, if it could be shown that the escape plan was more than just a pipe dream, and if certain of the rules which hitherto had been necessary for Committee membership were to be relaxed somewhat, Warren was certain that many of the so-called deserters could be persuaded to rejoin.

  The first step would be for the Committee to wipe out of its collective mind the word “Civilian.” All non-Committee officers would be treated with respect, and the respect should be in no way diminished merely because the officer held different opinions from one’s own. They must be made to feel needed and important, that their cooperation was vital to the success of the plan—which was in fact the case. Even partial cooperation, part-time membership on the Committee, would be welcomed. The main thing was to instill the idea into the prisoner’s minds that the escape was possible, that it would take place.

  “… With that fact generally accepted,” Warren continued, “we will be in position to bring more direct pressure to bear … Yes, Lieutenant?”

  At the news that he was to be Warren’s aide, a position which in effect made him second-in-command and chief advisor to the Marshal, Kelso’s face had displayed a look of almost wolfish pleasure. But as Warren had elaborated on his plans the Lieutenant had become increasingly restive. Something was definitely bothering him.

  “Security, sir,” he burst out, then hesitated. “You shouldn’t discuss details with … with …” He nodded violently towards the partition. “There are women out there, sir!”

  Warren toyed for a few seconds with a selection of sarcastic retorts, then pushed them reluctantly aside. He said, “Explain yourself, please.”

  Kelso opened with some muttered remarks to the effect that he approved of women in general and of the surviving female officers from Victorious in particular, and that they had been very efficient in chasing up Committee records and progress reports for the Marshal. Nonetheless, the unpleasant fact had to be faced that women on the Escape Committee had demonstrated time and time again that they were a bad risk. Kelso went on to cite instances, and Major Hynds nodded agreement each time. For the best interest of the movement, the Lieutenant insisted, all female officers should be gotten rid of as quickly as possible, because girls were born to be civilians ….

  “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 th
e 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 I 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 plain 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 hat, 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.”

  Chapter 7

  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 asence 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 retur
ned, 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 office named Briggs, who seemed worried. Tactfully but at frequent intervals he suggested that they might not be as proficient as they thought.