There was a tense silence during which nobody looked at anybody else and even the noises from the outer office seemed to stop. Warren, keeping his face expressionless, regarded the big wall map and tried to decide whether to squelch this Major Sloan now or later, or at all. He knew that normally Sloan did not have much to say for himself. He was responsible for non-technical field training, road and bridge construction, procurement of food and skins by hunting parties or through trading with the farms, and a host of subsidiary jobs. In these duties the Major was quietly and almost fanatically efficient, and this was one of the two reasons which made Warren inclined to make allowances for a certain lack of charm in the man.
The other reason was that on the day of his arrival the Major had not run quickly enough when the Bug shuttle had begun to take off. The burns he had received were of such severity that by rights he should have died from shock. But Major Sloan had been and was an unusually strong man and he had survived despite the absence of proper medical facilities—the Bugs did not supply prisoners with drugs or instruments, so that homegrown and relatively ineffective substitutes had been used in an attempt to relieve his pain. But for nearly two days the Major had screamed, Warren had been told by a Committeeman who still looked sick at the memory of it, and for three weeks after that he had been unable to talk coherently because of the pain. Eventually, however, his body had healed itself although it was plain to anyone who spoke to the Major that the process had stopped short at his mind.
Warren sighed inwardly and was about to speak when Hynds forestalled him.
“I agree with the Major, sir. And if I had as much trouble with this particular problem as he has had, my language might be even stronger.”
Obviously Hynds had been expecting Warren to blow up over Sloan’s outburst, and he was trying desperately to head the Marshal off, not by apologizing for the Major but by agreeing with him. As quickly and quietly as he could, Hynds went on, “… The desertion of female officers to the Civilians is a statistical certainty, and we have been simply hastening the process in various subtle ways. Their uniform, for instance, and paper-making. You know that we get paper—sheets of thin, fine-textured wood, actually—fairly easily. One of the trees here, with the sections of the trunk are boiled to remove the resin, come apart at the growth rings. The Committee couldn’t exist without this paper, but getting it is a horribly messy job and one definitely not suited to women—the gum stains their hands and if it gets in their hair…”
“It’s necessary and valuable work,” Lieutenant Kelso said, ditching the conversational ball neatly, “and when they’ve had enough of it we don’t just kick them out. They go to Andersonstown, on the coast. That’s a large Civilian farming community which grew up around the post responsible for fishing the bay and nearby river…”
It had been at a time when relations between the Committee and Civilians had been more cordial that the post had been set up, Kelso went on to explain, and the idea had been to trade fish as well as meat and protection against marauding battlers for grain, fruit and similar necessities. But the scheme had backfired badly as far as the Committee was concerned.
In those days the Civilians had been allowed to build farms very close to the Committee Posts, and they had done so. And because in those days there were a lot more females than there were male Civilians, and these female officers naturally refused to share a husband with another woman, the only hope they had of getting a husband was to subvert a Committeeman. This they had done to such good effect that the post had had an almost complete turnover of personnel every year. Flotilla-Leader Anderson, the Anderson whose plan had been adopted for the escape and who had been the commanding officer of the post in question, had given the settlement its name when he had gone Civilian. Gradually, the surplus females from all over the continent had moved to Andersonstown and the Post had lost more and more of its male officers until eventually the Committee had withdrawn all males from the Post.
“… Now it is manned, if you can call it that, entirely by female officers,” Kelso concluded, grinning. “Girls who can’t find Civilian husbands or who don’t want to leave the Committee for some other reason. They do some very useful work as well as being a very disturbing influence on the Civilian farmers in the area.”
As the Lieutenant stopped talking Warren found himself thinking about these highly-trained and intelligent girls who, although they might be as eager to get off the planet as anyone on the Committee, were denied that chance to contribute towards the escape. It was not anger at Sloan’s insubordination or at the attempts of the other two to cover for the Major which hardened Warren’s voice when he spoke.
“Your comments on this matter are appreciated, gentlemen,” he said, “although they in no way alter the decision which I have already made regarding this problem.”
“A point which you don’t seem to grasp,” he went on grimly, “is that the survivors of Victorious, because it was a tactical command ship, are very special people compared with the usual run of serving officers today. I don’t want to see any single one of them, male or female, going Civilian! And a second point is that fifteen or twenty years ago, at the time when most of the people here were taken prisoner, these same officers would not have been considered special at all. Which shows you how drastically the standards of the service have been lowered and how vitally important it is for the officers on this planet to be returned to active service—such an event would almost certainly bring about the end of the war in our favor! It should also explain why I want every prisoner, regardless of sex, to be serving on or to be in some was associated with the Escape Committee.
“With this in mind,” he continued almost gently, “I have appointed Major Fielding, the psychologist and medical officer from Victorious, to the Staff.”
Warren paused, regarding the suddenly stricken faces staring down at him, then he smiled.
“Please don’t look as if your best friends had just died,” he said chidingly. “Our half of the human race has managed to coexist with the females of the species, peacefully on the whole if not with complete understanding, for many millennia. I am simply asking the members of the Escape Committee to do the same for three short years.”
Chapter 7
Next day Warren dispatched Kelso, Hynds and two other responsible officers from the post on a good-will mission to the surrounding farms and settlements, at the same time signaling the other posts to send out as many officers as could be spared with similar instructions. These orders were designed to show the so-called Civilians that a major change of policy had taken place within the Committee, and while explaining the ramifications of this change the visiting Committeemen were to bend every effort to be frank, friendly, and helpful to the farmers—especially in the matter of doing odd jobs of construction and maintenance and in putting down marauding battlers. They were also ordered to show all due respect toward these fellow officers, being particularly careful to avoid dumb insolence or sarcasm, and on no account were they to refer to these non-Committee officers as Civilians—they were to refrain from even thinking of them as such. These non-Committeemen and women were to be regarded simply as imprisoned officers who on a certain day already fixed in the not too distant future would be breaking out of their prison, and that any assistance they felt like giving, whether it was a full-time service with the Committee or an hour or so a day on preparatory work, would be very much appreciated.