James White - The Escape Orbit

Of one thing he was sure, however; the Fleet Commander was ultimately on the losing side no matter which choice Warren made. Even if he should side with Peters and use his considerable weight of authority against the Committee, he would succeed in further reducing their numbers but at the cost of making them a more-closely knit and fanatical group. No matter how he looked at it the situation was a potentially dangerous one which must sooner or later lead to a shooting war.

Warren sighed, bringing his mind back from a probably disastrous future to a present that was, literally, full of laughter, sunshine and excitement. Smiling, he said, “Relax, Doctor. The question was purely rhetorical.”

So far as Warren could see there was only one solution to his problem. He must join the Escape Committee.

And escape.

Shortly after the meeting began the rain started and the light which made its way through the natural camouflage and into the administration hut became so dim that Warren could barely make out the faces of the four other officers around the table. Proceedings were held up while Kelso lit the lamps and positioned their reflectors to direct all the available light onto the map which had been attached, in sections, to the largest clear area of wall.

Nearly eight feet high and twenty long, the map showed the prison planet in Mercator projection. A large, elongated diamond-shaped continent was centered on the equator and was connected to a smaller continent, triangular in shape and also lying on the equator, by a long chain of islands. The large continent, the islands and the two indistinct land masses at each pole were little more than outlines, but the smaller continent was shown in considerable detail.

Major Hynds, who was chief of the Intelligence subcommittee, spoke as Kelso resumed his seat.

“As you will already have guessed, sir,” he said, “the smaller continent is the one occupied by the prisoners. From data gathered by Committee exploration parties and from the observations of people lucky enough to be near a port on the shuttle coming down we have obtained a fairly accurate idea of this continent’s topology. Everything else on the map, however, was pieced together from the interrogation of the few officers who were able to view the planet from the guardship’s orbit. Because of the acute angle of observation, the unfortunate fact that continental outlines have a habit of being obscured by cloud, and because some people just don’t have the ability to draw what they remember seeing, this must be considered unreliable.”

Hynds was a small, lightly-build man with a tendency towards sarcasm. He wore glasses which had been repaired so many times that their nose- and ear-pieces were shapeless blobs of paper and gum. He steadied them with a finger and thumb while he talked, using the other hand as a pointer.

The positions of Committee Posts, Hynds went on to explain, were marked by red feathers, farms and farming villages by green, with the roads connecting these Civilian installations shown in black. Committeemen used these roads extensively, since they had been instrumental in building most of them, but great pains were taken to ensure that the Civilian road system was not linked, even by a forest path, to the Posts. The existence of the camouflaged Posts was not known to the enemy, as was proved by the fact that this one had been built within a few miles of a favorite landing spot.

The two black triangles were ore-bearing mountains, it having been found that the widely-dispersed ore effectively screened the small masses of refined metal underlying it from the guardship’s detectors. These were the sites of the Committee smelting plants and advanced training units, the existence of which was not known even to the Civilians.

So the movement was already underground, in both senses of the word , Warren though drily. He had been right to join them, because he certainly could not have beaten them. Not completely.

“You mentioned advanced training units,” Warren broke in suddenly. “Would you expand on that, please.”

“That is Major Hutton’s department, sir,” said Hynds, seating himself and glancing toward the officer beside him.

The table jerked and made scraping noises against the floor as Hutton got to his feet. He was an enormous man, fantastically muscled and with a mat of chest hair so thick that in places it concealed the straps of his harness. But his expression was intelligent, apologetic and eager to please, and Warren was reminded of a good-natured and well-meaning bull to whom the whole world was a china shop. When he spoke his voice was barely audible, as if it, like his tremendous body, had also to be kept constantly in check.

“As you can understand, sir,” Hutton murmured, “a large amount of preparatory work is necessary before the escape plan can be put into effect. Experiments with the extraction and processing of metallic ores must go forward, which presents certain difficulties considering the limited facilities at our disposal and the need of concealing the work. We have teams working on glass blowing, chemical explosives, air liquefication and storage problems and so on. Then there is the work on the guardship mock-up, and on the dummy itself.

“We need men to build and maintain the wood-burning steam engines used for the heavy jobs,” Hutton went on quietly, “a steam engine being the best our machine shops are capable of producing at present. Even if we could make one, the ignition of an internal combustion engine might be picked up by Bug instruments so steam is safer—although we’ve drilled successfully for oil, which is used mainly for lighting the tunnels and labs. In actual fact, however, a machine shop is little more than a medieval smithy…”

“Major Hutton is being over-modest, sir,” Kelso put in quickly. “Despite the handicaps, his Technical and Research section is farther advanced in its part of the plan than any of the others.”

“Maybe so,” Hutton returned, his voice rising almost to a conversational level and becoming less than apologetic, “but it is my job to train a certain number of officers for maintenance and support duties and I’m not getting enough of them, nor am I getting the right kind of men. The people sent me are the ones Hynds considers least likely to go Civilian, not officers whose previous specialties best suit them for the work in hand!”

“Nonsense, sir!” Hynds protested, glaring at Hutton. “I’ve send him every chemist and metallurgist I could scrape up. What does he want me to do, send him Civilians?”

Hutton was staring at the table top, looking more sullen than angry. Hynds was trying to murder him with his eyes and Kelso was looking from one to the other, obviously annoyed at the impression his two superior officers had created. The other officer at the table, Major Sloan, showed no perceptible reaction. Subtle variations of expression were impossible for his ruined face.

“Since I lack data on this subject,” Warren said sternly to the two Majors, “my comments at this time would be valueless. However, an escape plan has been mentioned several times. What exactly does it involve and when do you propose putting it into effect?”

He looked at Kelso.

“There have been a number of plans submitted to the Escape Committee from time to time,” the Lieutenant said brightly, trying to dispel the unpleasantness of a few minutes previously, “The custom being to label them with the names of their originators. There was the Fitzgerald Plan, which was very well detailed and called for an attack on the guardship with two-man, chemically powered rockets. Quite apart from the fact that the Bugs would be unlikely to stand around doing nothing while we developed the technology to build the ships, the plan was not feasible because of the length of time required in the preparatory stages.