Free The Human Front by Ken MacLeod Page A

dialectical materialism, I gather. But I must say, this place does strike me as frightfully Cretaceous, the anomaly of hot-blooded dinosaurs aside. My personal theory is that we’re on a planet around another star, which resembles Earth in the Cretaceous period.”
    He cracked a smile. “That, however, implies a vastly more advanced civilization which either isn’t communist or
is
communist and fights on the side of the imperialists. Neither of which are acceptable speculations to the, ah, leading comrades here, who thus stick with the line that the self-styled Venusians and Martians are the spawn of Nazi medical experiments, or some such.”
    “Bollocks,” I said.
    Purdie shrugged. “You may well say that, but I wouldn’t. I myself am troubled by the thought that my own theory at least strongly suggests—even if it doesn’t, strictly speaking, require—faster-than-light travel, which is ruled out by Einstein—an authority who to me carries more weight on matters of physics than Engels or Lenin, I’m afraid.”
    ”Relativity doesn’t rule out time travel,” I said. “Even if dialectical materialism does.”
    “And no science whatever rules out lost-world relict dinosaur populations,” said Purdie. He shrugged. “Occam’s razor and all that, keeps up morale, so lost-world is the official line.”
    “First I’ve heard of it,” I said. “Nobody’s even suggested we’re not on Venus in the two weeks I’ve been here.”
    “Bit of a test, comrade,” he said dryly. He stubbed out his cigarette, hopped off the table and stuck out his right hand for me to shake. “Congratulations on passing it. Now, how would you like to join the
real
escape committee?”

    The official escape committee had long since worked through and discarded the laughable expedients—tunnels, gliders and so on—which I and my mates, perhaps overinfluenced by such tales of derring-do as
The Colditz Story
and
The Wooden Horse,
had earnestly evaluated. The only possibility was for a mass break-out, exploiting the only factor of vulnerability we could see in the camp’s defences, and one which itself was implicitly part of them: the dinosaur herds. It would also exploit the fact that, as far as we knew, the guards were reluctant to use lethal force on prisoners. So far, at least, they’d only ever turned on us the kind of electrical shock which had knocked out me and my team, and indeed most people here at the time of their capture or subsequent resistance.
    The tedious details of how a prison-camp escape attempt is prepared have been often enough recounted inthe genre of POW memoirs referred to above, and need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that about fifty days after my arrival, the preparations were complete. From then on, all those involved in the scheme waited hourly for the approach of a suitably large herd, and on the second day of our readiness, conveniently soon after breakfast, one arrived.
    About a score of the great beasts: bulls, cows, and calves, their tree-trunk-thick legs striding across the plain, their tree-top-high heads swaying to sniff and stooping to browse, were marching straight towards the eastern fence of the camp, which lay athwart their route to the river. The guards were just bestirring themselves to rack up the setting on their plasma rifles when the riot started.
    At the western end of the camp a couple of Chinese women started screaming, and on this cue scores of other prisoners rushed to surround them and pile in to a highly realistic and noisy fight. Guards from the perimeter patrol raced towards them, and were immediately turned on and overwhelmed by a further crowd that just kept on coming, leaping or stepping over those who’d fallen to the low-level electric blasts. At that the guards from the watchtowers on that side began to descend, some of them firing.
    My team was set for the actual escape, not the diversion. I was crouched behind the door of our hut with Murdo, Andy, Neil, Donald