Prisoners of Tomorrow (38 page)

Foleda took a moment to choose his words. “Go right back to the beginning and work through everything that’s happened since. Now ask yourself, What would the implications be if Magician had been a double agent all along?” he replied.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The escape committee’s route led out through the ceiling of B-12 billet, which had the advantage of an unusually cooperative foreman, and from there climbed to the surface through an intermediate level of pipework and plumbing. It emerged in the basements of the Services Block, a building at the east end of the surface level that contained the canteen and other amenities that privs enjoyed, and the back of which screened a drop down to the general compound used by the prisoners on the lower levels. From the Services Block it connected across the surface to Hut 8, which Eban Istamel occupied with three others. The hut was situated roughly in the center of the surface residential area, which put it above the Core zone of the lower levels. Istamel and the others had tunneled down through the floor of Hut 8 and penetrated the upper subsurface machinery galleries, and from there gained access to one of the elevator shafts running down through the Core and continuing on down past the lowest billet level. A maintenance cover in the side of the shaft opened through to the machinery deck where the Crypt was located.

The ways of escape that the committee had been looking into all involved gaining access to the hub—as was inevitable, since that was where the Soviet transporter ships, the only means for leaving the colony, docked. The possibilities that Sargent outlined included stowing away in the consignments of materials and equipment shipped up the spoke elevators to the hub, impersonating Russian personnel going there on official duties, getting there concealed illicitly among the work details assigned to the hub, and making the half-mile climb through the systems of ducting, conduits, and structural supports outside the elevator shafts.

The big problem with all of these proposals was the stringent security measures that the Soviets enforced to protect every conceivable way to entry to the spokes. Every car destined for the hub was combed inside and out three times before departure. The ID checks of Soviet personal were impregnable. The structure surrounding the elevator ports was a jungle of alarms and detectors. As the inmates who knew the tricks for vanishing from work details had found out, the security that applied to movement among the various places around
Tereshkova
’s outer ring could be surprisingly lax. But getting into the spokes, as most of the escape committee’s guinea pigs had discovered to their cost, was a different matter. But since the spokes represented the only way out of the colony, and at this distance from Earth guards came at a premium, it probably made sense that things should be so.

After thinking the matter over, however, McCain wasn’t so sure that the only way to the hub was indeed through the spokes. “Why,” he asked Rashazzi and Haber when they were alone in the Crypt one day, “can’t we go
outside
them?”

“Sure, why not?” Rashazzi shrugged. The proposition was too absurd to argue about.

“No, think about it,” McCain urged. “It would exploit the very weakness that the Soviets have built into their own system. Apart from in Zamork, security around the ring isn’t very tight—in fact, in most places it’s nonexistent. They only bother seriously guarding the access routes into the spokes. Why? Obviously because there isn’t anyplace else to go. It never occurred to them that anybody might ever want to break through to the outside!”

Rashazzi was staring at Haber with an expression that said his initial reaction was already giving way to second thoughts. Haber blinked back at him. Clearly there were problems to be solved, but the idea was starting to make a crazy kind of sense. McCain waited. “Do you think it’s feasible, Razz?” Haber asked.

“I’m not sure. . . . Maybe.”

“Obviously such a scheme would require protection and life support,” Haber said. “The Russians must keep regular EVA suits at maintenance and emergency posts around the ring. . . . What do you think?”

“Mmm . . .” Rashazzi looked dubious. “They’d be difficult places to get into. And I can’t think of anywhere they’re likely to be here, in Zamork.”

“Do you need them?” McCain asked. “What about improvising something? Is that such a crazy idea?”

“Homemade spacesuits?” Haber evidently thought it was.

This time Rashazzi wasn’t so sure. “No . . . perhaps we don’t need regular suits,” he said slowly. “You know, Lew might be onto something. There are places we can get into that contain firefighting and rescue equipment that includes various kinds of breathing gear. That would take care of the hardest part.” He paused, thinking rapidly. “The other part would be maintaining a pressured environment for the body. Actually that’s not as much of a problem as most people think—not for what we need, anyway. In fact, you can stand up to about ten seconds in a hard vacuum without any protection at all.”

“Very well, now tell us how we climb a kilometer up to the hub in ten seconds,” Haber said.

“Obviously we’d need longer,” Rashazzi agreed.

“But maybe only enough to get past the high-security zone at the base of the spoke,” McCain pointed out. “An hour or even less, say. Then you get back inside again.”

Rashazzi nodded. “Breathing pure oxygen would require a pressure of about two psi,” he said to Haber. “That’s not such a big difference over the outside. It should be possible to seal a mask over the face and eyes so that it doesn’t blow off. It might leak a bit. But as long as the supply’s enough to hold out, so what?”

“Would your eyes and ears be okay?” McCain said. “How about the rest of your body?”

“Not too big a problem,” Rashazzi answered. “People in space vehicles and simulators work in low pressures all the time. The biggest thing to watch is gases in the body expanding or coming out of solution in fluids to form bubbles. So, you don’t eat the wrong food before you go out, and you breathe pure oxygen for an hour to denitrogenate the blood. There isn’t any gas in the eye structure to expand, and because of the way ears are made, they get uncomfortable from ambient overpressure, not underpressure.”

Haber’s attitude seemed to warm as he listened. He began nodding. “It would be necessary to prevent fluids from migrating, and evaporation from the skin. Some kind of elastic wrapping garment to maintain a pressure around the body would probably be sufficient, but not so tight as to restrict breathing and movement. A material that expanded up to a point and then went rigid would be ideal.”

“Stretchy stuff with some kind of slack fiber woven into it, maybe,” Rashazzi agreed. “What can we get hold of that’s like that?”

“Getting an outside view of the place would answer a lot of questions,” Haber mused thoughtfully.

McCain thrust his hands in his pockets and paced a few yards to the bench. He stared down at the laser for a moment, then turned back to face them. “Okay, supposing it works and we get to the hub. The next thing we need to know more about is Sargent’s ideas for getting into one of the transporters . . .” He realized suddenly that Haber’s remark had had nothing to do with escape bids, but had gone off on a different tangent that meant something to the two scientists but not to him. “What’s wrong?” McCain asked. “Have I missed something?”

“We were going to mention it anyway,” Haber said to Rashazzi.

“You’re talking in riddles,” McCain said to both of them. “Mention what?”

“We’ve found something else that’s odd,” Rashazzi said. “Come and look at this.” They led McCain to the rear of the work area. Suspended from a support quite high up in the girders overhead was a line with a metal ball at the end. A pointer attached to the ball extended downward, almost scraping a large sheet of card marked with a circular scale graduated in degrees, which was lying flat on the floor. Rashazzi reached out and set the line swinging.

“From the length and period of a pendulum, a simple formula gives the local acceleration due to gravity,” he said. “That in turn determines the force with which an object presses down on the floor—in other words, what you weigh.” He looked up at McCain. “Do you remember feeling a little heavy when you first came here? But after a couple of days it had gone away? Most of us did. You thought it was due to fatigue, maybe? Well, it wasn’t so. The rotationally induced ‘gravity’ in
Valentina Tereshkova
is approximately ten percent greater than Earth-normal.”

“Seems strange,” McCain commented.

“It’s very strange,” Rashazzi agreed. “If anything, you’d expect a space colony to be designed for a level somewhat
lower
than Earth’s—to reduce the stresses upon the structure, and hence permit lighter and cheaper construction. But why would any designer go the other way?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“No. But that’s not all.” Rashazzi motioned toward the pendulum as it passed over the centerpoint of the circle, slowed to a halt a couple of inches outside the scale, and began its swing back again. “This is what’s called a Foucault pendulum. That means it’s free to swing in any direction.”

“Unlike the kind in a grandfather clock, which is constrained to move in a plane parallel to the back wall of the cabinet,” Haber interjected.

McCain nodded. Rashazzi went on, “Like a gyroscope, a pendulum tries to conserve momentum by continuing to swing in the same direction in space. Imagine one set up at the north pole on Earth. Pick an arbitrary direction—that of the constellation Aries, for example. Pull the pendulum back in that direction, and release it. Now imagine it continuing to swing in the same plane, away from Aries and then back toward it again for a whole day. The Earth will have turned a full three hundred sixty degrees beneath it. Or, if you were standing on the ground next to the pendulum, you would have observed the Earth as staying still and the plane of the pendulum’s swing rotating through a circle—in fact, as Aries moves in its circle around the pole”—Rashazzi pointed at the card on the floor—“you could measure its rotation rate on a scale.”

McCain remembered seeing this in science museums when he was younger. “Okay,” he agreed. “Now what?”

“Now let’s repeat the procedure at the equator,” Rashazzi said. “Aries no longer moves in a circle around the center of the sky overhead, but rises and sets. We start the pendulum moving just as Aries peeps over the eastern horizon, and it continues to swing east-west. But six hours later, Aries will be overhead. Now, is the pendulum still moving toward and away from Aries as it was before? Hardly. It would have to be yo-yoing up and down, which would be a miracle. No, instead it’s still moving east-west with respect to Earth. In other words, an observer there would see no rotation of the plane it swings in. Between the pole and the equator both effects combine, and the plane will rotate not through a full circle, but through a certain angle and back again, which depends on latitude.”

McCain had been on
Tereshkova
long enough to know of the rim’s equivalence to Earth’s equator. “So a pendulum here should keep going in the same direction,” he concluded.

Rashazzi nodded. “Quite. But it doesn’t. The plane of the swing rotates. We’ve measured and timed. Its oscillation period is eighty-eight seconds.”

“As the colony spins,” McCain said.

“Except that with the official dimensions as given by the Russians, and allowing for ten percent above Earth-normal weight, it ought to be about a minute,” Haber said.

Rashazzi looked at McCain quizzically for a second, as if challenging him for an explanation. “One answer that would give a slower rotation rate would be if the diameter of
Tereshkova
were considerably larger than it’s supposed to be.” He showed his palms briefly. “But that’s impossible, of course. Ever since the Russians started building it,
Valentina Tereshkova
has been studied by enough groundbased and spacebased telescopes and other instruments for us to be under no doubt that it is the size they say it is.”

McCain could only look at them in bafflement. “So what do you make of it?” he asked them. “Anything?”

Haber shook his head.

“There’s something very strange about the geometry of this whole place,” Rashazzi said. “Never mind Eban’s escape projects. Even without them, we need to get out and conduct more tests all over
Tereshkova.
One look at it from the outside would tell us a lot. That’s one attraction of the idea you had. But right now, I can’t tell you what this business means.”

“Should we tell the escape committee about this?” Haber asked.

McCain shook his head. “Not until we know what’s behind it. Right now they don’t have any inkling of this. So it’s not something that could reach the wrong ears if any of them were careless. Let’s keep things that way for the time being.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The amenities for privileged-category inmates at Zamork included a library that was larger and more diverse than the one available in the subsurface Core. In particular it possessed a more comprehensive reference section. Now, reference books tend to weigh a lot, and payloads hauled up out of Earth’s gravity well at considerable expense could be better devoted to other things. So the bulk of the reference material in the Zamork library resided in electronic form, and was updated by periodic transmissions from Earth. In fact, it was a subset of the main public library maintained in Turgenev.

Since Communists are supposed to exhibit a passionate zeal for setting constantly new records of production, this material included vast tables of industrial-output statistics, construction figures, agricultural yields, and five-year forecasts of everything from zip fasteners on Aeroflot flight attendants’ uniforms to millions of barrels of oil from the drilling platforms in the Caspian Sea. In reality, few people were even remotely interested, and none of those who were believed the official numbers anyway. Hence, for all of the technological ingenuity and organizational skills that beaming these tables from Earth to
Valentina Tereshkova
and having them instantly accessible on library screens represented, they were hardly ever read by anyone, let alone checked. Hence, anyone who wanted to, and who had access to the necessary facilities down on Earth, could encode messages into those data with little risk of being discovered. Of course, the intended recipient would have to know what numbers to watch and how to interpret them. This was the method that “Ivan” had used to communicate from Earth into
Tereshkova
—the other half of the Blueprint dialogue, which had persistently eluded the NSA.