Prisoners of Tomorrow (27 page)

Protbornov emitted a heavy sigh that made Paula think of a lumbering bear. He rested an elbow on the arm of his chair and stroked the sides of his craggy face with thumb and fingers for a few seconds. “I gather you have met Comrade Oshkadov,” he said at last.

“Oshkadov? Is that Olga, the scientist from Novosibirsk?”

“A spirited woman, even if misguided in some ways. A kindred spirit of yours, I would imagine. In fact, you told her that you are also a scientist.”

Paula shrugged. “It’s not as if it were something you didn’t already know.”

“You value science highly, don’t you, Lieutenant Bryce,” Protbornov said. The fact that he knew her identity was no reason for her to make it public knowledge. If Earnshaw, wherever he was, found a way to contact her, he would seek her by her cover name. “You show a total dedication to its ideals.”

“I value worthwhile knowledge and methods for acquiring it that have been shown to work,” Paula agreed. “Things that matter.”

“But ideas, laws, how societies should be structured and governed—such things do not matter?”

“Politics, you mean?”

“Politics, religion, ideology—call it what you will.”

Paula wrestled with the question. Obviously the proposition couldn’t be denied outright. “Of course things like that make a difference to the lives of people—a big difference,” she said finally. “But the things that interest me are the ones that were true long before there were any people, and which will remain true if people disappear.”

“You just want to get to the stars. It doesn’t matter who with, under what flag?”

“I didn’t say that. The stars can wait a bit longer. They’re good at it.”

Protbornov’s mouth twitched in what could almost have been a smile to acknowledge the rebuffed gambit. “You say these things. Yet you are with the United States Air Force, engaged in espionage. A strange career to pick, for a woman of such a political disposition, wouldn’t you think?”

Paula sighed and brushed a curl of hair away from her brow. “It was personal. I joined the service for the independence . . . to be away from home, and for the education. Understanding science was important to me. This other business . . . it was something I got talked into. It’s not what I do.”

“What do you do?”

“We’ve been through all that. I won’t answer.”

“So you say you were talked into espionage work. You were forced to spy for the American military? Would you be willing to make a statement to that effect?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“You know, for someone asking favors, you could be more cooperative.”

“I didn’t ask for favors. I offered a trade.”

Protbornov glanced at Major Uskayev, at the same time raising his eyebrows and straightening his fingers momentarily from his chin. The gesture seemed to say, well, it had been worth a try. He paused, giving the subject a moment to fade into the background, then came to the main point. “I understand that you indicated to Comrade Oshkadov that you are willing to be more useful to us.”

“Within limits.”

“Why should you wish to benefit us?”

“I don’t. I wish to benefit myself.”

“Frankness is something I respect. So, what are the limits?”

“I have no desire to defect. I wouldn’t work on anything of military significance, or act against the interests of my country. But outside that, I’d be willing to explore possibilities for mutual accommodation.”

“Why should we be interested in coming to any accommodation?” Protbornov asked.

“Because your resources are limited up here,” Paula replied. “You can’t afford people who are dead weight.” Protbornov grunted and shifted his eyes inquiring to Uskayev.

“We are told that you have expertise in the field of communications,” the major said, leaning forward.

“Some.”

“Would you be prepared to do work involving communications?”

“Such as what?” Paula asked guardedly.

Uskayev pouted his lips. “Oh, development and improvement of facilities for communicating to Earth and other space stations, perhaps.”

“No. I said I won’t get involved in anything military.”

“But
Valentina Tereshkova
is not a military facility. It is purely an experiment in sociology.”

“Oh, come on. You know that anything developed here would have potential everywhere else.”

“How about high-speed data-compression and -protection techniques?”

“No. Look, why don’t we forget about my specializations altogether. They’re not for sale. But apart from that, I’m familiar with basic scientific principles that apply to any field—teaching, maybe, or medicine. There has to be room for some kind of deal that we can come away from and both be better off than we would have been without any deal at all. That’s all I’m saying.”

Uskayev studied his hands, paring one thumbnail against the other. Finally he looked up and shook his head dubiously. “I don’t think she can be of very much use to us,” he said to Protbornov.

Protbornov, however, didn’t seem satisfied. He started to reply, then changed his mind and looked at Paula. “I’d like to speak to Major Uskayev privately for a few minutes. Please wait outside.”

Paula sat at the table in the ward aisle, turning the pages of a magazine but not seeing them. Wrong, wrong, wrong, she told herself. She’d blown it. She had been too stubborn. As Protbornov had said, a person in her position could hardly expect to get away without making a few concessions. She could see the two officers arguing and gesticulating through the observation window of the nurse’s office. She should have indicated a tentative compliance for the time being—to get herself transferred out of those dreadful kitchens—and worried about the specifics later, when it would have been more trouble for them to move her back. Why did she always try doing things all at once, instead of taking them a step at a time? Olga had told her how the Russians achieved their ends slowly, by working wedges into cracks. Here had been her chance to delicately insert a wedge of her own. Instead she’d swung a sledgehammer.

At last they called her back in. “We have agreed on a compromise offer,” Protbornov said. “We will assign you to work with Comrade Oshkadov for a probationary period. She will be able to give you a better idea of the possibilities available. During that time you must consider what you would be prepared to contribute that might justify a more permanent arrangement. The situation will be reviewed in one month. In the meantime, we accept your claim of being a scientist and not a professional spy. Your status will be adjusted accordingly if you accept. Well?”

“I’ll take it,” Paula said at once. By this time, she had no stomach left for being obstinate.

They gave her a light-green tunic like the one Olga had been wearing in the infirmary, and moved her upstairs to an above-surface part of Zamork that she hadn’t known existed. The terrain sloped upward to the containing wall in keeping with the general layout of the central valley, and westward toward Novyi Kazan a high-level reservoir bounded the detention facility and separated it from the urban center.

Within this area, the privileged category of prisoners, which Paula learned she had now joined, lived in four-person huts beneath
Tereshkova
’s ribbon-suns and peculiar, curving sky. Although the surroundings of coarse grass, leathery scrub plants, and some uncertain-looking trees holding their own in the cindery soil formed a setting that would have fitted a refugee camp more than a Florida country club, after the cells and the kitchens below it was idyllic. Some of the huts boasted patches of flowers. There was even a beach fringing the reservoir, with a bathing area enclosed by a wire fence twenty yards or so out—admittedly not in use currently because of oil leaks from somewhere and a problem with algal blooms—but the feeling of wind blowing across open water after seeing nothing but bare cell interiors and drab, riveted walls for more weeks than she had been able to keep track of was exhilarating.

And on her first evening there, when she walked down through the rows of huts to the reservoir, along by the water, and back following the outer hull wall via the hill at the rear, it rained.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

At the end of July, the Russians privately released to a number of selected Western and Asian governments a recording of what they claimed was a voluntary confession by Magician. In it, Magician appeared at ease, composed, and in good health. In their consensus, the doctors, psychologists, and experienced interrogators who viewed the recording found no evidence of coercion.

Magician claimed that for many years he had been obsessed with concern over the international situation. He abhorred the distrust the Communist world and the West, and the prospect of its leading to a global calamity horrified him. So, when what seemed like a unique opportunity presented itself, he had attempted to make his own single-handed contribution to easing world tensions. The file of information he had compiled to substantiate the claims of advanced weapons systems being concealed on
Valentina Tereshkova
was a fake. He had invented the data and misled Western intelligence deliberately, in order to provoke public accusations and denials. He had believed at the time that this would force the Soviet government into a more open policy and lead eventually to full international inspection. Thus a major source of potential misunderstanding would have been defused. His intentions had been for the best, as he saw it. However, since then he had come to realize that he had acted naively, and in fact had aggravated the situation instead. He hoped that in setting the record straight he would undo some of the damage he had caused. He regretted his actions, asked the West to understand, and expressed thanks to the Soviet counselors and doctors who had helped him see everything more clearly.

“What do you make of it?” Philip Borden, the UDIA’s director, asked Foleda after they had viewed the recording with others in a conference room inside the Pentagon.

Foleda shrugged. “How can anyone know what to make of it? You know as well as I do, Phil, that with the things they’ve got these days, they could have turned the pope into an atheist since Magician was grabbed. I’d be closer to being convinced if they let some of our people talk to him freely, face-to-face. If he’s genuine, what would they have to lose?”

Foleda wasn’t the only person to feel that way. After consultation, the US ambassador in Moscow, on behalf of a number of interested nations, challenged the Soviet government to make Magician available for unsupervised interviews by experts freely selected by the West. To the surprise of everyone involved, the Soviets readily agreed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“. . . in the formation of a class with
radical chains,
a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no
particular right
because no
particular wrong
but
wrong generally
is perpetrated against it; which can invoke no
historical
but only its
human
title, which does not stand in any one-sided opposition to the consequences but in all-round opposition to the presuppositions of . . .” The tall, bearded Estonian standing on the box in the general compound delivered his reading from the works of Marx in an untiring, strident monotone that sounded like the long-playing version of a Moslem call to prayer from the top of a minaret. The audience before him continued murmuring among themselves with total inattention, reasonably confident that even the most diligent KGB eavesdropper who might still be glued to a directional microphone capable of distinguishing anything intelligible would long since have been put to sleep.

“We could pool some points and try getting approval to start glassblowing as a hobby, for ornaments or something,” Rashazzi suggested. “That would get us some basic equipment and materials. For the optical cavity we’d need, oh . . . say, a meter or two of Pyrex tube. Then for—”

“Sealing it would require a gas-oxygen torch,” Haber said. “Soda lime glass could be worked with a propane torch, which would be easier to get hold of.”

“Okay, soda-lime glass. Then we’d need some optical-quality glass to make Brewster windows, an abrasive powder for sawing and grinding, and components for the end-mirror cells. . . .”

Haber was still shaking his head. “It’s formidable. You still need a vacuum pump and manometer . . .”

“We use the glassblowing setup,” Rashazzi said.

“And then the electronics.”

“I know where I can get neon-sign electrodes from somebody in the town. A plain, double-sided, epoxy-glass PCB could be made into a twenty-kilovolt capacitor. We’ve already got some rectifiers.”

McCain kept quiet. There wasn’t much he could have contributed, anyway. He’d asked them if it would be feasible to home-build a suitable laser device for the method that Scanlon had first speculated about to communicate messages out of
Tereshkova.

“Gas-dynamic would be simpler to construct,” Haber said. “Although there would still be the problem of procuring suitable nozzles and fuel supplies.”

After more than two months of observing, listening, and getting to know how the system at Zamork worked, McCain had come to the conclusion that there might still be a chance of carrying out the mission he’d come here to accomplish. True, there was scant likelihood of obtaining the Tangerine file now; but that had been only a means to the end of ascertaining
Tereshkova
’s true nature. His unique situation compared to the rest of the interested section of the West’s intelligence community put him in an ideal position to do just that. It couldn’t be a one-man operation, however, and that raised the eternal Zamork problem of trying to decide who was reliable. He’d already recruited Scanlon and Mungabo, and now he was putting out feelers to Rashazzi and Haber. It was difficult to imagine anyone with their kind of knowledge earning a living as jailhouse stool pigeons.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Rashazzi said resignedly to Haber at last. “It’s complicated. Maybe the answer isn’t to try making our own laser at all. Suppose we just get enough pieces to make what looks like a broken Russian one. Then we find some way to switch it with a working one—there must be some in the labs in Landausk, for example. Or what about alignment lasers? There’s still construction going on in some areas.”