“… Stupid, sentimental songs like that are bad for morale!” Kelso had said. “Hutton’s people are the worst offenders, singing about peace and Christmas and … and … Some of the words are anti-war—pacifist stuff and downright subversive! ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ indeed! Suppose the commando units get infected with this sort of tripe!”
“Anything which makes them want home,” Warren had told him sharply, “is all to the good.”
Warren had wondered briefly how it was possible to both like and dislike what he was doing, and the people who were helping him do it, intensely at one and the same time.
In Hutton’s Mountain, strangely deserted now that the metal-work was complete and most of the technicians were in Andersonstown making explosives, he came on men adding the finishing touches to the dummy sections—lavishing the patience and care of a Michelangelo on the job of making their sections of plating show the pitting indicative of a too-fast entry into atmosphere, the buckling and discoloration of a near-miss by a beam weapon and the deep, bright scratches caused by it running through the exploding fragments of sister or enemy ships. But the real artists he saw were in Mallon’s Peak where a smaller and more specialized group were preparing the airlock section of the dummy.
During a brief trip to the outer continent with Hynds he saw a glider medic misjudge a landing. It had been dusk on a still evening with the surface of the lake as smooth as glass, and it had looked as if he had calculated his touchdown about twenty feet below the actual level of the water. They had reached the floating wreckage in time to extricate him before he drowned, but the whip action of the crash had broken his neck and he had died shortly afterwards. In the carefully neutral voice which he always used these days when Warren was around, Hynds had remarked that the planetary population figure would show no change, as the confinement which the medic had been called to had proceeded normally and a girl baby had replaced the man who had checked out.
During his restless and often unescorted wanderings he came on groups of men lying sprawled out in the long, hot grass, on their sides or propped up on their elbows as they watched their instructor developing some aspect of the attack with the aid of diagrams tacked to a tree-trunk, and occasionally asking highly pertinent questions in deceptively casual tones. Or men suspended from high branches by a single rope around their belts, swinging and twisting and sweating inside wickerwork shields while they shot their cross-bows at ridiculously small targets. In weightless conditions, spin would be set up by the reaction of any projectile-firing weapon and this drill was to accustom the men to hitting targets which whirled and twisted around them. Their instructor would yell advice about shooting from waist-level to minimize spin, and often the men would miss their targets completely because they were incapacitated by laughter as much as dizziness.
Some of the men, the assault groups in particular, seemed to get a kick out of Warren’s informal, unexpected visits, especially when he joined in their drills. With others his activities simply made them uncomfortable. But for many weeks he had felt an increasing need to reassure himself that his plan was going well, that he was doing the right thing and that the Committeemen would still follow him. Like some latter-day Haroun El Raschid he wandered his kingdom in an attempt to discover what his people were really thinking. When he found that often they did not think the way he wanted them to, Warren lost his temper to such an extent that his show of democratic good-fellowship must at times have seemed like sheerest hypocrisy.
But everyone laughed or lost their temper or lashed out too easily these days. E-Day was rushing down on them now, and tension had become a major constituent of the air they breathed. By E minus twenty-three the domesticated Battlers had been dispersed to the neighborhood of the two mountain workshops, where singly or in small groups they would practice with dummy loads along the routes they would use on E-Day. The gradual buildup of shipping in the bay, now unconcealed in order to suggest to the guardship that the prisoners were settling down to a program of exploration and expansion, was sufficient to evacuate essential records and personnel. The long-range communications system had been tested and the weather forecasters were guardedly optimistic.
Warren’s own feelings closely resembled those of the meteorologists, until on E minus twenty-one a glider coming in to land on the bay discovered the second major act of sabotage.
Chapter 15
“It’s one of the trees giving cover to Number Two Attack Point,” said Major Hynds worriedly. Cutting it down when there is no reason to do so will look suspicious to the Bugs, and leaving it as it is won’t be any better because it will stand out like a beacon. The tree is dead, of course—the bark was stripped from around the trunk close to ground level, the damage being hidden by the underbrush until the glider pilot noticed the color change in the foliage and called our attention to it.
“I don’t know what we can do about it, sir,” he ended grimly. “In three or four months the leaves will drop off, but before that, within two weeks from now, the leaves will have turned bright yellow.”
“Yellow”, said Kelso viciously, “how very appropriate! I’ve always said Civilians were nothing but cowards and lousy deserters, and we should have kept a closer watch on them—”
“We need those lousy Civilians, Lieutenant,” Hutton broke in quietly. “You can’t put a guard on every tree.”
For an instant Kelso looked as though he wanted to hit the Major, and Sloan’s expression indicated that he might join the Lieutenant in making a combined operation of it. Fielding and Hynds looked worried, but whether over the danger to Hutton or the threat to the success of the Escape was open to doubt. Hutton himself seemed to be the most unconcerned officer in the room. Warren was beginning to have suspicions about Hutton.
Normally a big, mild, almost shy individual, he had recently taken to baiting Kelso and Sloan during Staff meetings—although always quietly and politely. Warren could not help remembering Peters’ remarks to the effect that the higher an officer’s intelligence the more likelihood of his becoming a traitor.…”
“All right,” said Kelso visibly controlling himself. “There are a lot of things we can’t do, like putting our heads between our knees and spitting until we reach escape velocity. But if I could make a constructive suggestion, sir, how about stripping the tree of its greenery then bend its branches into those of the adjoining trees, anchoring them with ropes and working the living foliage into and around the stripped branches. It would have to be done carefully, of course, and inspected from the air by glider to be sure it looked right…”
“Impossible, I’m afraid,” said Hutton again. “It would be good enough to fool the guardship, Lieutenant, but you forget that when the dummy is in place they’d probably soft-land a probe in the Escape area. What would fool a telescope will not pass what would amount to a microscopic examination. If the Bugs see a stripped tree with branches from adjoining trees tied to it … well, they’d be as jumpy and suspicious as it is possible for Bugs to get in any case, and such a blatantly artificial camouflage is taking too big a risk. It would be better to leave the tree as it is.”
“That is your suggestion, Major?” asked Kelso, his tone carrying more sarcasm than befitted that of a junior officer. “Leave the tree as it is?”