He broke off, shaking his head. Pleadingly, he said, “I’m making a mess of this again. I’m sorry. What I want to say is that there is still time to make the bluff the actuality and the Escape the ruse. You can do it. I have never in my life met anyone else capable of doing it, but you could. Please.”
Warren was silent for perhaps a minute, staring into the other’s desperate, pleading, embittered features, and feeling impatient and sympathetic and not a little embarrassed by compliments of such blatant crudity. Then suddenly he shook his head.
“I won’t cancel the Escape just because you ask me to,” he said, “even if you gave good reasons, which you haven’t up to now, I wouldn’t do it. You are aware of the situation as it was when I arrived here. If I hadn’t got tough there would have been a civil war on the first day! And I give you credit for intelligence somewhat above the average, Commander, so that you must realize where that situation must lead. The outbreak of fighting between Escape Committee and Civilians, stabilizing itself with the farmers and other Civilians submitting to the authority of the local Committee posts which would furnish protection against Battlers and the raids of neighboring Committeemen would shortly have become indistinguishable from slavery, and then more violence as the Posts recruited and trained their slaves to fight for them and expand their respective territories. You must realize that a descent into savagery would be swift and all too sure, and that succeeding generations would grow up in a feudal culture which would get a hell of a lot worse before it got any better. I’m thinking in terms of hundreds of years!”
Warren broke off, realizing that he was almost shouting, then went on more quietly, “One reason for the Escape is that I can’t allow such a criminal waste of high intelligence and ability to occur. Another is that the training and ability of these officers could very well win the war for us if they were returned to active service. Yet another, and perhaps the least important of the reasons, is that it is the duty of any officer when taken prisoner in time of war, no matter what the circumstances, to make every effort to escape and rejoin his unit.” Warren’s tone, still quiet, took on a cutting edge, “… Do you still believe in a sense of duty, Commander?”
Peters shook his head violently, but it was probably in anger rather than in simple negation. He said harshly, “Those are good reasons but they are not good enough to excuse what you’re going to do. Surely you see that yourself—unless initiating and pushing through large-scale operations regardless of mental or physical suffering is an occupational disease with Sector Marshals, and I don’t want to think that of you! As for duty, traditions of the service, patriotism—they’re all a matter of inner conviction, while men of lesser intelligence, such as the type of officer the service is producing now, have to have it conditioned into them!”
“Surely you can see that it is the older and more highly-trained officers who tend to go civilian,” Peters rushed on, “and that the later arrivals make the most fanatical Committeemen. You can’t avoid the implications of that. It’s my guess that even now, within the Committee and possibly even among your own Staff, things have begun to go sour for you—people having second thoughts, wondering if they are in fact doing the right thing. Because it is the sensitive, intelligent people who are the stuff of traitors. And you could help subvert them. Even now you could turn enough of them against the Escape to—”
“That’s enough!” Warren thundered. His anger at this man who had awakened all the self-doubt and mental turmoil which had made sleep nearly impossible for him in the early months of captivity, and which he had thought were settled at last, was so overwhelming that for several seconds he could not speak. But finally he said, “We must escape, commander. I’ve given this a lot of thought, believe me. Escape is the only real solution and I can conceive of no possible argument which will change my decision—”
“You mean you want to go on playing with your soldiers!” Peters broke in, his face and even his balding scalp blotchy with anger. “Earth, the war and the glorious traditions of the service are just excuses to let you go on feeling important! To let you make a last heroic, stupid gesture which nobody but your fellow prisoners will ever know about!”
“Get out, Commander!” said Warren thickly.
“Very well!” said Peters, jumping to his feet. “I’m wasting my time here anyway, trying to talk sense to a stupid, narrowminded martinet with delusions of grandeur! But I’m warning you, Marshal, I’ll do everything possible to stop this escape short of killing you!”
“I’m sorry, Mister Peters,” Warren said coldly, as he also stood up. “Sorry that you had to add that qualifier. It puts me under no obligation to stop short—not too far short, perhaps—of killing you if you try to hamper me.”
It was some time before Warren’s anger subsided to the point where he could feel regret at his mishandling of the interview. He should not have been angered by the other’s initial lack of courtesy, not lost his head when Peters had got home with the jab about his best officers being potential traitors. He should have kept his temper and remembered that the Fleet Commander was an old, embittered man whose mental processes had hardened too much for him to see that there could be no easy way out of Warren’s dilemma…
Abruptly, Warren strode out of the room and the Post, his intention being to inspect the new tunnels, chat with the officers working on them and generally to occupy his mind with any constructive activity which presented itself. For the thought had come to him that it might not be only the Fleet Commander’s mental processes which were hardening, and with that thought came rushing back all his other doubts.
Chapter 14
At first Warren thought that one of the domesticated Battlers had broken loose and was wandering the streets, grunting and scuffling at the ground with itching stub tentacles. But when he turned the corner he was that it was a fight.
The light from the nearest street-lamp was too dim to show subtle variations of uniform, but it was obvious from the silent ferocity of the battle that the men themselves were in no doubt as to who was who. There were seven of them, four against three, and they were tearing into each other with hands, feet, heads and in once case teeth. Individually, they were equally matched in size and weight, but the three appeared a little faster, more vicious and fractionally less drunk than the four. Warren started forward to intervene, but before he had taken two paces it was all over. The victorious three moved away, one of them limping slightly, towards the noisy, brightly-lit storehouse which had been converted in an assault group club. The defeated four were on the ground, one on his hands and knees with what, in the bad light, looked like fresh paint covering his face, another was clutching his stomach and being sick and the other two weren’t moving.
A watchman came trotting up, stopped and began blowing the call for stretcher-bearers, a signal which had become all too familiar of late. He kept on blowing, the whistle clenched so tightly in his teeth that Warren thought he would bite through the wood, until there was a distant acknowledgement. He knelt beside one of the motionless figures until the stretcher-party arrived, then rose, cursed horribly and trotted back to his post.
As he joined the group around the injured men, Warren made a mental note to speak to Hutton about some of those watchmen. Their job was to guard the explosive stores against the wandering of unauthorized or irresponsible—or more simply, drunk—personnel and there their job ended. But recently they had been taking on some of the more general duties of policemen. They didn’t seem to realize that horning in on what was essentially a private fight was a sure way of getting hurt, as well as arousing the dislike of both parties.