The Escape Orbit (2 page)

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…”

Above the sound of the Lieutenant’s voice and the considerable noise made by his listeners as they blundered through the undergrowth in his wake, Warren could hear the whistles and drums of the other searchers growing louder by the minute. He felt angry and afraid and very short of breath, and he wished fervently that Kelso would get to the point of at least letting him know what it was that he was afraid of. But seemingly the Lieutenant intended telling everything in his own way and in proper sequence, and any interjections would serve only to delay the process.

“… What they did was pick one of the worlds in their own sector which was suitable for human colonization,” the Lieutenant rushed on, “then they dumped fifty thousand or so prisoners onto it with enough supplies, shelters and simple agricultural machinery to enable them to continue as a self-sustaining colony. Other prisoners arrive from time to time, but for the past ten years these new arrivals haven’t been accompanied by tools or supplies—they don’t want us to have any more metal than the bare minimum already supplied by them to begin with, you see. And just in case we did succeed in throwing together a spaceship out of our surplus plough-shares they have a guardship in orbit to keep an eye on things…”

The explanation of the Bug prisoners-of-war system would, in ordinary circumstances, have caused great surprise and excited discussion, but Kelso was pushing the pace so hard that all Warren and the others had breath for were a few incredulous grunts. Even Kelso’s breathing was becoming labored now, but he still continued doggedly with his history lesson.

In words which were becoming more and more emotionally loaded, the Lieutenant described the situation as it had been shortly after the first prisoners had landed. Briefly he detailed the influences and personalities which had brought about the original disagreement among the prison population—a split which had continued to widen so that, when Kelso arrived six years ago, the differences were so strongly held and basic on each side that there was little hope of ever uniting the two again. It was generally agreed that a planet-sized prison camp was an ingenious idea and caused the minimum of distress to its prisoners. What they could not agree on—and from this disagreement all the later difficulties had stemmed—was that the prison was escape-proof.

“… Because there are no domes or guards always in sight, a lot of these people forget that they are in a prison camp!” Kelso went on hotly. “Not only have they stopped thinking of themselves as prisoners or war, they’ve forgotten that they are officers and even, judging by the way they act, that there is a war on! They’ve gone civilian. But on the Committee side, we have
not
forgotten that we are prisoners. Or that it is the sworn duty of any officer taken prisoner in time of war to do everything possible to rejoin his unit…”

It was at this point that Warren threw his hands out from his sides, palms backwards in a visual order to halt which he did not have the breath to vocalize. The party came to an untidy halt around him. Kelso, whose impetus had carried him several yards ahead, pulled up hurriedly and came trotting back to them. He looked worried and impatient as he waited for Warren to speak.

“These … these Civilians you talk about,” he said as he began to get his breath. “Are they dangerous? Will they eat us, or something? From what you’ve told me … they’re just…” He broke off to suck a lungful of air, then demanded harshly, “Why the blazes are we
running
?”

Kelso did not answer at once. They had reached the base of a long, thickly-wooded slope on whose crest Warren could vaguely make out a high stockade. This would be the Committee post which the Lieutenant had mentioned several times. The civilian searchers were all around them, with the nearest group sounding so close that if it hadn’t been for the screen of trees they would probably have been in plain sight.

“I … I can explain all this much better at the post, sir,” Kelso began.

“
Now
, Lieutenant,” said Warren.

“Well, sir,” Kelso said helplessly, “they won’t harm you physically. What they intend is analogous to brainwashing. But what makes it so horribly effective is the fact that most of them don’t consider what they’re doing to be a form of coercion—they think they are simply being hospitable…”

Somewhere on their right there was a shout followed by a long blast on a whistle. Immediately all the other whistling and shouting died away so that Warren could hear the swish and crackle of feet running towards them. Kelso swore but did not look around.

Trying desperately to hold Warren’s attention, he rushed on. “They begin by welcoming you to the camp, although they’ve stopped thinking of it as that. Then they overfeed you on their home-cooking, which is particularly effective considering how long you’ve had to exist on Bug synthesized food. And because it would be too much of a strain on any one farm to take on all of you, you will find yourselves scattered all over the place. You will lose touch with each other and have no way of knowing for sure what each other is doing or thinking. They won’t ask you to work at first, but you’ll feel obligated for all the hospitality shown you and you will insist on helping out. And they’ll keep talking at you all the time.

“As you know, sir,” Kelso went on hurriedly, his voice rising in volume as the sound of running feet approached, “most highly trained and intelligent people find pleasure in performing menial, non-cerebral jobs. But very soon these pleasant, manual tasks become a way of life. You grow mentally lax and begin to think slow, farmers’ thoughts. Soon it would be hard to remember that there is a war going on and that you are an officer with certain obligations and duties to perform…”

Three Civilians arrived at that point. They were large, bearded men clad in the same type of animal skins as those which covered the Lieutenant, except that they favored long, shapeless trousers and an open-at-the-front vest-like garment instead of a kilt. Two of them carried spear-like weapons, the shafts of which were upwards of eight feet long and terminated in a cutting blade whose condition suggested that they might be some kind of farming implement, although the men were not holding them like farming implements. In addition one of them carried a hide-covered drum slung across his back. All three of them looked surprised and angry at the sight of Kelso, and it was the one with the gray beard and the angriest expression who spoke.

“So you found them first, Lieutenant…”

“Yes, sir,” Kelso broke in quickly. He was holding the older man’s eyes and ignoring the long, dirty but very sharp blades pointed at his midriff, although the tension in the muscles of his neck and shoulders showed the effort it cost him. But his voice was steady as he went on, “Since I have found them before you did, sir, you will kindly not hinder me or attempt to talk to them while I escort them to the Post.”