James White: The Escape Orbit

Kelso himself was tall and thin, topping Warren’s five-eleven by at least three inches, but well-muscled. He looked to be in his early thirties and his face and chin were raw as if from constant shaving with a very blunt instrument. His hair, which looked as if it had been cut with a knife, was short and plastered flat against his scalp with something which smelled to high heaven.

Punctiliously, but without the bone-wrenching precision which had gone into the one he had just received, Warren returned the other’s salute and said, “That is correct, Lieutenant.”

Kelso nodded, then said quickly, “I have to escort your group to the nearest committee post as fast as possible, sir. I know that you’ll have questions to ask, hundreds of them probably, and my job is to answer them. But first we have to get moving—”

“What the blazes is this place?” somebody behind Kelso burst out harshly. “We expected a prison dome, with Bug guards and … and…”

“What about those drums…?”

“Committee! What committee…?”

Warren cleared his throat irritably and all at once there was silence—except for the drums and distant shouting. He said, “Go on, Lieutenant.”

Looking suddenly impressed by Warren where before he had been merely respectful, Kelso resumed. “I will answer all your questions, sir, but first I must get you to the nearest committee post as quickly as possible. There are others out searching for you, too, and it is imperative that we avoid them—I’ll explain about that, as well. So if you don’t mind, sir, I’d like us to walk as we talk…”

The Lieutenant was still standing rigidly at attention, but he kept swaying forward onto the balls of his feet in his urgency to get moving. Warren decided to have pity on him before he fell flat on his face.

“I have yet to meet a Lieutenant who did not know all the answers,” he said drily. “Very well, Kelso. Lead on.”

With the Lieutenant at his side and the other survivors from Victorious crowding their heels in an attempt to stay within earshot they moved off. The pace Kelso set was a fast walk, but each time a drum started on a new message or there was a fresh burst of shouting in the forest he increased it. When a few minutes had gone by without him saying anything, Major Fielding decided that she couldn’t wait.

“Why are there others searching for us, Lieutenant?” she said breathlessly. “Who are they and why must we avoid them?”

Kelso looked quickly towards her, then looked again. The regulation battledress uniform, tight-fitting and designed so that with the addition of a fish-bowl became a short-duration spacesuit, did nothing for an ageing officer like Warren with his thickening waistline and tendency towards bowlegs, while for officers like Ruth Fielding it did quite a lot. When he replied Kelso was smiling and he spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear.

“To answer that I’ll first have to fill in some background details,” he said. “As you know, during the sixty-odd years we’ve been fighting the Bugs one of the biggest problems on our side was looking after the prisoners of war…”

Almost a century earlier, at a time when the culture of Earth had spread to fifty inhabited systems and her colonization program was still expanding, mankind had made contact with another intelligent race. The name which this race had for itself was a short, clicking sound which could be reproduced only by a few of Earth’s top linguists, the difficulties of communication being extreme on both sides. But even so it quickly became evident that the only thing which the aliens had in common with the human race was intelligence.

To the ordinary being of both species their physical aspect was mutually loathsome, their thought processed mutually incomprehensible, and perhaps the correct course would have been to ignore each other’s existence. But there were also some extraordinary beings on both sides—beings possessed of high intelligence and an overpowering scientific curiosity who were excited by the possibility of exchanging ideas with another race despite all the difficulties of communication. Beings, in short, who were objective enough to see past an alien and utterly repulsive exterior to the mind within. They could not understand the more subtle workings of each other’s minds as yet, but they wanted desperately to go on trying. So instead of being broken off, contact between the two cultures began gradually to widen.

But there was a vast number of people on Earth and on its colony worlds who were not top-flight linguists, nor possessed of the driving scientific curiosity coupled with the fine objectivity of the men who wanted contact—even though these people were themselves kindly and intelligent and as civilized as the next man. It was just that when they saw something which was soft and pallid and crawled wetly on six legs they wanted to stamp on it, and sometimes did before they could stop themselves. The reaction was instinctive, something they couldn’t help, and the fact that the thing they wanted to stamp on was nearly as big as themselves only made their reaction that much more violent.

The number of violent incidents grew until, some thirty years after first contact had been made, they reached the proportions of an open war. The people on both sides who had been pleading for greater objectivity when dealing with the aliens were powerless to stop it, but they did retain some influence. Before diplomatic relations were severed completely they reached agreement on certain rules of conduct for the coming war.

It was not to be a total war. Both sides hoped that it would not go on forever, so there was to be no unnecessary slaughter of combatant who were no longer able to defend themselves, or cruelty towards such beings when they were taken prisoner.

In the first two decades of the war the number of major engagements found increased steadily to a point which would have been considered utterly impossible at the beginning of hostilities, because the sides were evenly matched technologically and neither had been capable of realizing the tremendous war potential inherent in a confederation of fifty inhabited systems. And because it was not a war of senseless heroics—the space personnel were much too stable and intelligent for their heroism to be anything other than the cool, calculated sort—there were prisoners taken. During the first five years of the war the number of Bug prisoners taken passed the million mark, and the flood of prisoners kept pace with the accelerating tempo of the war. And, plus or minus a few hundred thousands, the Bugs took as many as they lost.

One of the chief reasons for the prisoners-of-war agreement in the first place was the fact that space personnel were extremely valuable people. They represented the cream of the younger technical and scientific brains of their respective cultures and they were people which neither side wanted to lose. But the war showed no indication of ending and the few attempts at arranging an exchange of prisoners failed because of already difficult communications problems rendered insuperable by the mounting tensions of war. So the number of prisoners held by each side grew. And grew.

Millions of men and vast quantities of war material were tied up merely in providing for Bug prisoners. The facilities for taking care of them—their food and air required special processing and their housing had to be seen to be believed—became increasingly strained. It quickly reached the point where the whole war effort was being affected by this hampering burden of prisoners, and seemingly there was no solution to the problem.

“… But twenty-three years ago the Bugs found the solution,” Kelso went on quickly. “It is a nice, economical and very humane solution. Looked at objectively, its only drawback is that we didn’t think of it ourselves…”