His friends might but not him, ever.
Below Warren the battler transferred its grip to a thinner branch which sagged, splintered and tore free under the strain, sending the creature crashing full length to the ground. The impact was like a minor earthquake shaking the area, then the beast rolled ponderously to its feet and moved away.
“Some of the farmers have succeeded in domesticating them,” Briggs went on as it disappeared between the trees. “Cows, of course, and they have to catch them very young to remove the horns and tentacles without ill effects. They train them on a diet of grain and killed meat rather than letting them catch it on the hoof. You’ll see some domesticated cows in Andersonstown. Except for a tendency to kick their wagons to pieces in springtime they’re very useful draught animals.”
“We can go down now, sir,” he added.
They resumed the trek, following a wide, sweeping curve to the northwest, calling on as many farms as possible until they struck the river, then following it to the sea. There were many farming communities on the banks of the river, comprising anything up to twenty houses sheltering behind a common stockade for mutual protection. His reception in these places was generally less restrained than in single farmhouses, the concept of mutual protection apparently stretching to include big bad Sector Marshals, and he was able to meet a great many officers with very useful specialties. He met a large number of their offspring, too, and he was able to test out a number of his ideas and arguments, sometimes successfully.
“I never suspected that you were such a good politician, sir,” Fielding said after one of the visits. “You kiss babies like you’ve been doing it all your life. Or do you like the little terrors…?”
“Some of them,” Warren replied guardedly, “are less terrible than others.”
Since the meeting with the battler his men had ceased treating the whole affair as a picnic, their guide had become much more friendly with them, and he was even able to indulge in backchat with Fielding and not show any visible signs of strain at this continued verbal contact with a woman. But as they approached Andersonstown, Briggs began to get the look of a man about to face a battler single-handed.
Unlike the Post on the hill overlooking it, no attempt had been made to screen Andersonstown from space observation. It was a small town rather than a village, with well-planned streets of single- or two-story log buildings, a wooden dock and about thirty boats of various sizes tied up alongside or at anchor in the bay. A semicircular stockade protected its landward side and, because battlers could not swim, the seaward side was open.
Protocol demanded that they first call at the Post.
His intention had been to obtain the names and whereabouts of the most influential officers in the town with a view to visiting them and sounding them out before calling them all together for his major appeal. He had learned by heliograph that Fleet Commander Peters was also heading for Andersonstown and would arrive in three days, plainly with the intention of throwing a spanner in the works—respectfully, of course, by calling for public debate on the whole Escape operation. Warren was still too unsure of his position to risk that, so he had to rush through the Andersonstown business and leave before Peters arrived.
But the greater part of the first day was wasted because Fielding insisted that she could not work properly in the uniform issued at their first Post because the outfits worn by Lieutenant Nicholson’s girls were so much smarter that she felt everyone was laughing at her.
Nicholson, the Post commander, was a tall, graying but remarkably handsome woman. The uniform which she and the other officers on her all-female post wore consisted of the usual hide boots, trousers which were tighter fitting than was really necessary and a sort of bolero jacket which laced up the front with leather thongs. Some of the uniforms were laced higher than others, Warren noted, the degree of cleavage apparently controlled by the physiological contours of the officers concerned. Nicholson seemed a bit flattered at having to entertain a Sector Marshal at her Post, but not so much that she didn’t crack a smile when she assured him that her girls were all officers and gentlewomen who would respect the privacy of the visitor’s quarters, adding that the men in the party might expect to be whistled at from time to time, but they would be in no serious danger provided they did not whistle back…
It did not take Warren long to realize that there were unsuspected depths to this middle-aged, statuesque female with the nervous and almost impudently respectful manner. She was one of the large number of female officers rejected by the Committee because of the embarrassment of her sex, but that did not stop her from cherishing Committee ideals—like the other girls on the post she wanted to do everything possible to bring about the Escape.
She was in touch with a great many non-Committee sources of information in Andersonstown, she explained that evening while Fielding and Warren were having dinner with her, and she realized that for the best results the Marshal should put across his ideas and leave before the Fleet Commander arrived to rally the opposition. Lieutenant Nicholson had therefore taken the liberty of arranging a meeting between a representative group of citizens and the Marshal to take place at the Post early next day.
When he heard that Warren felt like kissing the Lieutenant and almost said so. But he checked the impulse. It would have definitely been lèse majesté, and Fielding would probably have wrung deep, dark psychological meanings out of it.
Warren was surprised to find next morning that the representative group of citizens numbered upwards of two hundred, although he was not surprised to see that the majority of them were girls. Not that he could see them very clearly, of course, because the only direct light coming into the assembly hut was from the trap above Warren’s head, so that the area around his table and chair was spotlighted while in the audience he could see only shadowy rows of faces. But he knew that Nicholson, Fielding and the others of his party were strategically placed among his listeners, the intention being to demonstrate the new and more cordial feelings towards non-Committee officers as well as to answer the sort of questions which could not be asked directly of a Sector Marshal. Warren had deliberately delayed his arrival so that those questions could be answered before he arrived.
He began quietly by outlining the war situation as he, one of the officers responsible for overall strategy, saw it, giving information which was top secret and restricted without the slightest hesitation. It was a picture of a long, costly war which had reached the stalemate of mutual exhaustion. Compared with the large-scale offensives mounted during the early decades of the war, he told them, it would require only a relatively feeble effort now by either side to end it. But neither side was capable of making this effort. The space service demanded a very special type of person, and after sixty years of war the type had become extremely rare.
In a voice which was not so quiet he went on to tell of highly confidential reports which had reached him during and after many operations, of ships which had failed to make rendezvous because key members of the crews had suicide, or mutinied, or shown in some other shameful fashion their inability to withstand the strain of a job which all too often was simply a few hectic minutes of action sandwiched between months of utter monotony. It was a recognized fact that the more highly intelligent and stable personalities could study or otherwise exercise their minds so as not to let them dwell too much on those few minutes during the months before they occurred, or during the equally long postmortem period when they were returning to base without some of the friends or husbands or wives with whom they had set out. The vast majority of present-day officers lacked these twin qualities of stability with high intelligence and could not withstand this strain, a strain which was being further aggravated by the fact that purely mechanical failures in the ships themselves were also on the increase.