James White - The Escape Orbit

Because the only efficient sealing compound, a tarry substance with a fairly low melting point which set as hard as rock, was nearly as brittle as the glass it sealed, the slightest strain put upon the device by the wearer caused the helmet or tank to crack where it joined the rigid air-hose. But it was just not practical to send up an assault group with instructions that, no matter what was happening around them, they were to bend only at the hips…!

In the poison filled tunnels of the guardship mock-up at Hutton’s Mountain the men had actually carried out a series of drills in such brittle death-traps, so far without any fatal accidents. The men had gone through their maneuvers grim-faced and stiff-backed and they had insisted that they could do the same under weightless conditions in the guardship—and had insisted further that no conceivable agency or circumstance, be it Bug, human or major natural catastrophe, would panic them into making the sort of sudden, unthinking movement which might kill them. Even though there could be no doubt about their bravery, Warren know some of the hotheads who made up the assault groups and he had told Hutton that he’d have to produce a better answer.

And now the answer was drifting up through the green depths of the bay toward the surface, a grotesque man-shape with a giant, misshapen head and a pouter-pidgeon chest. When it broke the surface the officer already in the water detached the weights which had held it to the sea bed and helped lift it aboard. Hutton brought his boat alongside so that Warren could see the details.

To a stiffly-inflated spacesuit had been added a glass helmet and air-tanks of conventional Hutton design, the two tanks being mounted in front so that the taps in the hoses were easily accessible to the wearer. The fishbowl, a lumpy sphere of varying thickness whose optical properties left much to be desired, was enclosed at the top, back and sides by an open latticework of this cane shoots which continued over the shoulders and down the back to the level of the hips, and curved outwards to enclose the two spherical chest tanks.

Sealing compound had been used to reinforce the wicker-work shield; a large amount of seaweed had become entangled in it overnight and several varieties of marine life wriggled and flapped in and around it. The object made Warren think of a man who had undergone a rather gruesome sea change, then he had a second look at the spherical chest tanks and decided that it couldn’t possibly make anyone think of a man.

Hutton said, “The wickerwork around the helmet and tanks protects them against accidental damage, and is open enough to allow unwanted heat to escape by radiation from the helmet. And enclosing the body to hip level in this … this form-fitting wastebasket means that the arms and legs can be moved freely, even violently, without danger of the air connections coming adrift. It is comparatively light and fairly rigid, sir, and considering the materials, facilities and time available I consider it to be the best workable design to be produced. I’d like your permission to put this one into production, sir.”

The tone of the normally cautious and reticent Major contained the nearest approach to smugness that Warren had ever heard from the research chief, and that it was plain that Hutton thought he had the answer and was expecting a pat on the back for finding it. Warren grunted and scrambled onto the projecting platform of the large boat, where he lifted the dripping, weed-covered spacesuit carefully and tilted it backwards and forwards several times. He replaced it on the platform and rubbed the green slime from his hands onto the back of his kilt.

“There’s at least a pint of water sloshing about in there,” he said withholding the pat temporarily.

“Sealing the helmet and wicker surround onto an empty suit is tricky, sir. With a man inside to direct the sealing process there would be no leakage.”

Warren nodded, smiling. “Permission granted. You’ve done very well, Major. I suppose you’ll put Lieutenant Nicholson’s girls onto it?”

“Yes sir.” said Hutton. “And the girls in town and in the nearer farms will want to help, too. I’d prefer to have female officers exclusively working on this project. They have the temperament for fine work needing lots of patience, and they’ll feel that they’re making a direct contribution to the Escape, something which they don’t feel slicing paperwood or copying textbooks all the time.”

Hutton paused while a second suit broke the surface and was hauled in, then he went on, “The wickerwork shield and connections require approximately one hundred and ten hours of work, although this will come down as the girls gain experience. We’ll standardize production into four basic sizes…”

As the Major talked on enthusiastically, Warren began to consider the implications of having a workable spacesuit and how it would affect his immediate planning.

The fact that the wickerwork spacesuit project had already leaked to practically everybody did not concern Warren as much as it did people like Kelso and Hynds, who threw up their hands and howled loudly about security. The time was very near when certain matters must be discussed and plans drawn up which would have to be kept secret from the general populace, but meanwhile officers talked too much and allowed themselves to be pumped by admiring friends and Warren allowed it and in some cases actually fostered it. Gossiping was good for morale and news or information gained with difficulty tended to have more weight given to it than that which was given away free.

Warren’s eyes were caught suddenly by a motion in the sky which was too regular to be a sea bird. A glider was coming in from the direction of the glass plant further up the coast, at an altitude which showed that it had made good use of intervening thermals. It banked steeply above the town, sideslipping off surplus height and generally showing off. The underside of one wing bore the white diamond which indicated a trainee pilot.

The glider men were not supposed to talk, but it was general knowledge anyway that they operated in conjunction with the survey catamarans, that the cats which explored the other continent and set up observation posts had, as part of their duties, the construction of camouflaged glider runways on nearby slopes. The job of mapping the other continent had been enormously accelerated by the gliders which, wind and cloud cover permitting could range anything up to a hundred miles inland from their coastal bases. And the cat men were not supposed to talk about the places they’d been—at least, not officially.

So the information leaked out that the other continent was much superior in every way to their present environment, and the fact that it was a leakage of true information aided Warren’s plan considerably. The ground over there was more fertile and at the same time less densely wooded, the mountains, rivers and lakes were higher, longer and more beautiful and the grass was, of course, greener there. But the greatest selling point of all, a stroke of sheer good fortune which Warren could still hardly believe was that for reasons which were still obscure the native life-form known as the Battler was virtually unknown on the other continent.

So the officers with young families whose farms were in constant danger from these creatures, as well as men who simply wanted a change of scenery, began pressing Warren to evacuate them. The numbers had grown to such proportions that he was building more and more ships to cope with them as well as pulling cats off survey duty. And every time Meteorology forecast suitable winds and a lengthy period of overcast which would hide the operation from the orbiting guardship, a small armada left for the other continent…

The glider swept out over the bay, banked steeply and headed shoreward again on a course which would take it near a squat log building set on the edge of the sea which was its hangar. In the boat Hutton had stopped talking and was watching it go over, his expression reflecting the odd mixture of pride, criticism and parental concern of the person who is observing the antics of one of his brain-children.