James White: The Escape Orbit

“You’re being unfair, sir!” Kelso protested. “The rule is that the officer who first finds—”

“ Silence!” the other man shouted; then in a tone only slightly more quiet he went on, “Rule or no rule, Kelso, I won’t allow you to walk off with nearly thirty new arrivals! To make them into troublemakers and unsettle them so that it’ll take months or years before we can make them think straight again…”

He broke off suddenly to gape at the five men who seemed to have grown out of the grass at their feet. Warren had not seen or heard the men approach and obviously neither had anyone else. They wore the same kilt and harness as did the Lieutenant and they carried weapons resembling cross-bows which they held at the ready. After the first startled look around, Warren’s attention was practically dragged back to one of them, a short, heavily-muscled man who at some time had been terribly burned about the head, shoulders and left arm. The injuries must have had deep psychological effects because the eyes which glared out of that terribly disfigured face were more frightening than the face itself. This man held his cross-bow much readier than any of the others.

The five new arrivals did not speak. Apparently they had heard enough of the argument to understand the situation.

Until the arrival of the Civilians Warren had thought that he too understood what was going on. One side was Civilian, comprising officers who accepted their position as hopeless and who were determined to make the best of it. The other side was Committee, obviously taking its name from the escape committee which every prison camp contained, whose members had not given up hope of escape. It was natural to assume that there would be a certain amount of bad feeling between them. The Committee would feel jealous and angry about their happily vegetating colleagues and the so-called Civilians would also be angry because their collective conscience was being continuously pricked by the presence and activities of the Committee.

But this was more than simply bad feeling. Kelso and the gray-haired Civilian were glaring at each other, plainly on the point of going to war on each other with their bare hands. The eight Civilians armed with spears were spread out facing the five Committeemen, whose weapons were now cocked and aimed. The situation had deteriorated suddenly to the point where a shooting was likely to break out at any second. And Warren, all too conscious of his position in the undefended center of things, could not think of a single thing to do or say which might stop it.

“I think it’s nice to have grown men fighting over one,” Ruth Fielding said suddenly. “It boosts a girl’s morale no end.”

It was a completely stupid, fatuous and selfish remark, the sort of remark which might be expected of a certain type of beautiful but dumb female. As well, her expression and tone while making it only strengthened the impression that she was the pretty, dumb and selfish type. But the Committeemen and Civilians had no way of knowing what her rank and position had been aboard Victorious , although if they had been thinking straight they would have known that the selfish and stupid personalities were never chosen for space service, no matter how nicely they were wrapped. But these people were not thinking straight, and Fielding had successfully injected a note of ridicule into an extremely grave situation.

Both Kelso and the gray-bearded Civilian turned to gape at her, and the Committeeman with the devastated face pulled back the two stiff masses of scar tissue which were his lips into a smile, although the look in his eyes still made Warren uneasy.

All at once Warren felt angry at himself. He had been mentally asleep on his feet and Fielding had created the diversion which might allow the argument to be resumed with words instead of physical violence, and his self-confidence—or was it his pride?—had taken a beating. The rest was now up to him. He still felt angry and ashamed, but only the anger showed in his voice.

“I seriously doubt, Major Fielding, that they were fighting over you alone,” Warren said harshly. “And it is not nice to have officers fighting among themselves, for any reason whatsoever.”

“What I would like to know, gentlemen,” he continued bitingly, with a definite stress on the last word, “is why we are worth fighting for? Do we ourselves have a choice in this matter? Are we property of some kind, a potential slave-labor force perhaps?”

“Oh, no, sir…!” began Kelso.

“Certainly not!” the Civilian protested, practically shouting him down. “The very idea is ridiculous! You won’t be asked to work until you ask us to give you a job, believe me. Even then the work will be easier, and much more useful, than the senseless jobs the Committee would give you…”

He paused briefly to snap, “Be quiet, Lieutenant!” at Kelso, who was trying vainly to break in, then went on, “for example, a few hours after you arrive in the post up there you will begin what is known as de-briefing. You will understand that everyone here, Committeemen and so-called Civilians alike, are curious regarding the progress of the war or the latest news from home, you would expect them to suck you dry of all the news and gossip from our various home planets. But the de-briefing involves much more than this.”

“For days on end and for anything up to six hours a day you will be questioned,” he continued grimly, “with the emphasis on the last few days before your arrival. The interrogation will be conducted under light hypnosis, if you’re lucky enough to be a hypnotic subject, and in any event will consist of the same line of questioning repeated over and over. Because the Committee wants to know everything it possibly can about the guardship, and that means everything you saw during transshipment and while on the shuttle coming down, together with everything you saw or heard or otherwise noted without knowing that you did so. Without the proper drugs, digging for these trace memories and peripheral images is a long and exhausting business, and what makes it even worse is that it is a complete waste of time…!”

“Sir!” Kelso broke in sharply before the other could go on. “I must insist that you say nothing further to these officers. I found them first and —”

“You found them, yes,” the Civilian snapped back at him, “but you couldn’t have protected them and so your claim to be escorting them is sheer—”

“I can protect them now, sir,” said Kelso in a dangerously quiet voice.

Warren saw the spears and cross-bows being raised again. Two powerful and mutually opposed ideologies were struggling for his allegiance, it seemed and he still did not know enough to mediate. All he could do was to attack one of them before they could attach each other.

“Why do you call him ‘sir,’ Lieutenant?” Warren asked sharply. “You’ve told me that he is a Civilian—someone who, if not actually a deserter, is at very least a person to whom you would not show respect. Yet you call him ‘sir’ and he appears to be giving you orders.”

“Because he is Fleet Commander Peters,” Kelso replied, without taking his eyes off the other man. He sounded bitter as well as angry as he went on, “Because he is the senior officer on the camp. To prisoners like myself who are trying not to forget we are officers, his rank and position must be respected even though he himself may no longer consider them important.”

So this large bearded man dressed in animal skins was a Fleet Commander! In the service an officer of that rank, holding as he did authority over the personnel and facilities necessary for the supply and maintenance of a fleet of anything up to one hundred interstellar ships, was a very potent individual indeed. In the ordinary way a Lieutenant regarded such august beings with much more than mere respect, and Kelso’s open contempt towards an officer so vastly his senior angered Warren suddenly. He had to remind himself that the particular Fleet Commander had “gone civilian” while the Lieutenant had not, and that going civilian in Kelso’s book was a very shameful thing to do.