Warren was not surprised to see that the members of the stretcher-party were all girls. With the spacesuit-building program nearing completion and the book-making and –copying projects moved to the other continent there was little else they could do except staff the hospital which had been set up to treat injuries among the tunnelers. They were temperamentally suited to the job, of course, and while Warren had been irritated when they had refused to be evacuated with the rest of Nicholson’s girls, he was now glad that they had stayed. The doctor in charge of the party was a man, however.
He gave his lamp to Warren and told him exactly where to hold it while he examined the injured men. Considering the fact that their heads were often less than six inches apart there was ample light to see each other’s faces, but the doctor pretended not to recognize Warren—acting on the assumption, probably, that he could say things to a chance helper which he most definitely could not say to the Marshal.
“… Three ribs gone and maybe a ruptured spleen,” he said as his fingers explored the injured man’s chest and abdomen. His voice was singularly lacking in the quality known as professional calm. “Those injuries he got while lying here on the ground, after he was out! I suppose it’s one way to get a non-Committeeman to leave the area… And look at his face, and at that ear! Damn near bitten through! Animals fight like this … animals!”
Warren listened silently while the other relieved his feelings at some length. When he finally got the chance to speak his voice was grim and at the same time pleasing. It was a tone he had had to use so often of late that it had begun to sound insincere even to himself.
“I don’t like it any better than you do, Doctor,” he said. “It grieves me to see officers who are supposed to be fighting the common enemy fighting among themselves instead. But with just five weeks to go everybody is getting tensed up. It’s natural—the situation rather than the people is to blame. That, and the riotous night-life we go in for”—he laughed briefly—“which nobody expected or prepared for. But the first prisoners learned how to make beer, and stronger stuff, from the local vegetation, and officers who have been digging all day or night in hot, badly-ventilated tunnels or training in practice suits without food or water for twelve hours have a right to a little relaxation. Our trouble is that we can’t standardize the strength of the brew, and when people get drunk they’re more inclined to fight.”
“Since the tunnel sabotage it has been much worse, of course…”
On E-Day minus fifty, in an attempt to control the growing disaffection between the assault groups and the labor and supply force, Warren had ordered a special inspection. The inspection was doubly special in that it was to be the first time in more than two years that all work on the Escape ceased in Andersonstown and the surrounding district, and that while it was taking place all men and women wore their green shipboard uniforms instead of the permutations of kilt, harness or shapeless leather garments normally worn. He had ordered this in order to point up the fact that there was no basic difference between them, that they were all brother officers…
The sour note became apparent as soon as Warren mounted the review stand to address them. It was simply that the uniforms were not uniform. Stupidly he had forgotten that the Committeemen treated their ship’s battledress as their most treasured possession while the others had worn theirs until it was in tatters before being forced to change to the home-made clothing. So that even when they were all dressed the same it was glaringly obvious who had been Committee and who had not. Despite this Warren had not done too badly.
He had begun in much the same fashion as he had opened previous speeches and arguments by contrasting living conditions here with those of civilization, and he had moved on gradually to reminding them of the obligations to themselves and to the human race. He told them that if they were passively to accept their imprisonment it would be the first step in a regression towards eventual savagery and such a shameful, such a calamitous waste of intellect and training did not bear thinking about. To escape was their simple duty, therefore, and not something which could be argued about.
But the Escape would demand great sacrifice from all of them, and in many cases the suffering would be psychological as well as physical. They would have to blunt their finer sensibilities, forget that they had even been nice people, and remember only that they were going to bust out of this planetwide prison no matter what.
Warren did not know at what stage he had stopped consciously using verbal bush-buttons, at what point the fierce pride he felt in these splendid officers drawn up before him and the truly glorious undertaking on which they were engaged began to overcome him. Some of their duties appeared more important than others, he had told them, but they should remember that the work of the Battler drover, the assault commando and the lonely officer at a relay post a thousand miles way was equally necessary to success. After the Escape, history would accord them equal honor and homage as the heroic officers who had never given up, who had achieved the impossible and who would be chiefly responsible for restoring peace to the Galaxy. He wasn’t sure at what point it was that he knocked over the speaking trumpet Hutton had rigged for him, but by that time he was shouting too loudly for it to matter. He had lost much of his control, and the pride he felt in them and in what they were doing communicated itself to the officers ranked before him. Suddenly they had begun to cheer, the officers in tattered uniforms as loudly as the others, and Warren had dismissed them shortly afterwards because there had been a distinct danger that he would have grown maudlin about them if he had gone on.
It had been during these proceedings that the pumps used to clear the main ambush tunnel of seepage had been dogged open, and the ford across a nearby stream converted into a low dam with stones and mud. The water level had risen only a few feet, but this had been enough to send water pouring back along the wooden pipe which normally emptied into the stream to flood the tunnel.
A full week was needed to repair the damage, which necessitated evacuating the whole tunnel system while the water was pumped out and the tunnel roof and walls, so softened by the action of the water that they were in imminent danger of caving in, were baked hard with charges of fire-paste. Assault men had to place and fire these charges, and while they were burning, the atmosphere inside the tunnels was unbreathable. It was a severe test for the spacesuits and for the tempers of the men wearing them. The suits tested out fine, but the tempers, judging by the conditions of the four men at present on the way to the hospital, had not.
It had angered Warren that the assault men no longer trusted the labor and supply force, even though the majority of the latter were undoubtedly loyal to the Committee. Sloan’s commandos had begun to mount an unofficial guard at certain vital points, which angered the hard-working tunnelers and explosives technicians even more. The constant bickering and snarling and, at times, outright bloody violence which had followed his “We’re all brother officers” speech had not improved Warren’s own disposition. He seemed to be constantly angry these days, but the anger, he had found, was a good cure for his self-doubts.
Not all the fights were as vicious as the one he had just witnessed, however. Perhaps, he thought cynically, the fighters had not been entirely able to forget that they were nice people. And frequently he came on officers singing as they marched off shift or on the way to training areas, usually to a bloodcurdling accompaniment of signal drums and wooden whistles. Tunes like “Waltzing Matilda” and “John Brown’s Body” and “Colonel Bogey”. Not all the songs were martial, however, a fact that bothered Kelso and Sloan so much that they had brought it up at the Staff meeting on E minus thirty-six.