The Escape Orbit

by James White

  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 ignite by torch. Simultaneously the grass and brush and the more inflammable species of tree 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 war
m 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 a 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 ne 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.

  Chapter 18

  After having had the fires under observation, during darkness, when they would have been seen to the best advantage and having drawn certain conclusions from these observations, it was expected that the Bugs would send down a probe for a closer look. Instead of a quick dive in and out of the atmosphere, which was the usual procedure when investigating any suspicious occurrences it was expected that curiosity would make them soft-land the probe for a really close look. And it was known that if the vehicle landed it would not have enough fuel left to return to the guardship. Being an extremely valuable piece of equipment, the Bugs would not soft-land it in the first place unless they expected to get it back. The only way they could do that was to bring it back aboard the shuttle, and if they considered landing the shuttle they could not be feeling too suspicious.

  The probe arrived about two hours before noon. On the way down it had a perfect view of cats hurrying out of the bay, many of them were towing rafts; of the refugees on wagons and afoot, well advanced along all the roads leading from the town; of the town itself, devastated and still burning in many places; its gutted corpse hidden by a filthy shroud of smoke. It could see the acres of smoldering tree stumps and vegetation, and the highly unnatural outlines of the destruction which proved that a weapon designed for use over a range of thousands of miles of vacuum was capable of wreaking considerable havoc despite the blanketing effects of atmosphere.

  It noted the ship crash-landed and toppled onto its side, observing and relaying back the fine details of the buckled stabilizer which must have given on landing, the partly opened airlock and sprung plating which steamed faintly with escaping chlorine, and the slit in the nose where the C-7 blaster hadn’t closed properly. And there were the smoking remains of the farmhouse close by, whose occupants were no doubt the indirect cause of the surrounding devastation, which had been set on fire by its tail-flare.

  So far the data was utterly corroborative material for the telescopic observers in the guardship. But suddenly the probe opened out like a flower with super-sensitive vision, sound and analysis equipment, in effect subjecting the area to a microscopic as well as a telescopic examination.

  Such an examination could not be allowed to continue.

  A lone figure came staggering out of a patch of unburned vegetation some fifty yards from the probe. His body was terribly burned and bleeding from wounds inflicted by sharp branches, even his leather harness was charred and cracked by the heat, and from his mouth there came a steady, high pitched moaning that was a continuous low scream. He carried a club in the shape of a heavy table leg, and when he saw the landed probe he screamed harshly and came stumbling towards it.

  In actual fact Briggs was suffering no discomfort at all. His ghastly appearance was due solely to imaginative makeup, his club was a very carefully fashioned table leg weighted and balanced to inflict the maximum damage and he had landed one of the easiest jobs in the whole operation simply through his acting ability. He was supposed to disable the probe so that the Bugs would be thrown back onto the resources of the telescopes on the ship and their own unaided eyesight when they landed later—if they landed later. So dutifully, almost gleefully, Briggs set about battering the probe into scrap, hamming the part of a poor, pain-crazed prisoner for all he was worth.

  But he must have been a little too enthusiastic in his use of the club. The battering must have opened a path between the Probe’s fuel tank and the still red-hot venturis. There could only have been a few ounces of fuel remaining in the tank, but it was enough. There was a sudden flare, a concussion which made the whole dummy jerk around him, and when he reached the periscope Warren could see that there was very little left of Briggs or the probe.

  Warren settled back for another period of waiting, and thinking.

  Vitally important, but safe, was how Warren had described the assignment to Briggs. The probe should be give just enough time to report on the desolation around the site, the absence of any possibly dangerous groups of prisoners, of harmful activity, of anything except burning, smoldering vegetation and a ship which had crash-landed and was leaking chlorine. Then it would have to be disabled so that the small sounds made by the hidden assault groups would not be picked up. It was not expected that the Bugs would booby-trap the probe, since it would be much simpler to drop a bomb on the area if their suspicions were aroused. Briggs had agreed that all this was so, and his expression had reminded Warren of the time when this same Briggs had shown him how to swing a hammock where the Battlers couldn’t reach it and Warren had nearly hung himself on the safety rope—the expression of a man trying hard not to laugh ….

  The time dragged past and the sun beat down on the site and on the metal dummy. Inside the dummy the heat was unbearable and inside the suits it was even worse. Kelso, Sloan and himself were now lying prone with a suit technician attending each of them. The technicians had removed the gauntlet sections of the battledress and placed their hands in small pans of water, indicating that they should lift them in and out at intervals. He also kept wetting down the accessible portions of their fishbowls. Evaporation from their hands and helmets was supposed to cool them and avoid heatstroke, but Warren was convinced that the water treatment’s effect was chiefly psychological.

  Above them, invisible i
n the sunshine, the Bugs should have made their decision—the only decision possible to them if they had any decent feelings at all. The accidental destruction of their probe should not have aroused suspicion, considering the circumstances, and the shuttle should already be on the way down to rescue the survivors of the crash-landed ship—some of whom must be alive to judge by the devastation surrounding it! But something might have made them suspicious, or perhaps they were too cowardly to send a rescue party, and a missile was on the way down instead to ensure that one of their ships did not fall into the hands of the prisoners….

  Suddenly the suit technician waved and pointed upwards, but it was not until Warren reached the periscope that the sound of the shuttle coming down got through his helmet. He didn’t see the landing because of the smoke and ash being blown through the gap in the plating where the periscope was set up, but he could tell that it was very close and the elation he felt was due only in part to the beautiful way things were working out. A contributory factor was his knowledge that, not soon but in the foreseeable future, he would be able to get out of the pressure cooker he was using for a spacesuit …!

  The clouds of smoke from the many small fires started by the landing served to hide the movements of the ground assault men, from the eyes on the ship as well as those in space, as they took up their positions in the unburned cover around the edge of the Escape site. Some small trees fell, stirring up more smoke. In actual fact they were being pushed over and damp grass and twigs at hand for the purpose were being used to produce the smoke—the idea being to accustom the Bug rescuers to falling trees and sudden, dense clouds of smoke. They might be frightened by these effects, but the whole area was smoldering and constantly being reignited by sudden puffs of wind—so that they should not be suspicious of them. And when the smoke was allowed to clear temporarily the shuttle could be seen standing about one hundred yards from the dummy with the burned farmhouse almost directly between them.