Prisoners of Tomorrow (44 page)

“That much I can buy,” McCain agreed. “But how did you get in on it?”

“They lost an electronic chip that was vital to the process, and needed somebody who could program a new one. Olga and I had gotten to know each other by then. It was in my field. She took a chance.”

McCain looked derisive.
“She
took a chance? How much do you know about this Oshkadov woman?”

“Look, she’s a scientist. We understand a lot of things in common. I’d still be down in that pit if it wasn’t for her. She got me out.”

“She needed someone to program the chip.”

“Sure. So it’s a selfish world. But it was still her neck.”

“Okay, okay.” McCain raised a hand. “So you’re in the picture regarding this private line they’ve got. Now, how did you persuade this guy down in Siberia . . . What’s his name?”

“Ivan.”

“How did you persuade Ivan to send a message off to our side for you? Give me one good reason why a Soviet official in a high position—I don’t care if he’s a dissident or not—should agree to risk getting himself shot by sending—”

“I didn’t get him to send anything,” Paula said. “I thought of it, but Tycoon beat me to it. He sent a message through Ivan to me first.”

McCain sat back on the box and stared at Paula incredulously. He closed his eyes momentarily, shook his head, and rubbed his brow with a knuckle. “You mean Tycoon just happens to be in touch with this Ivan, and Ivan, for no particular reason, tells him all about his secret line up to
Tereshkova
. Come on, what have they been putting in your coffee? . . . Code names get broken pretty easily—you know that. And yet somebody in a place like this shows you a message that says it’s from Tycoon, and you swallow the whole—”

“It carried a correct validation-code initializer,” Paula said. “I included one from my list in my response, and since then a reply has come back with the right completion. What more do you want? If we’re not going to trust the code system, what’s the point of setting it up in the first place?”

McCain looked nonplussed. “That’s impossible,” he declared. “Or else they’ve got your completion list. How much to do you remember from when you were interrogated?”

“You don’t have to look for something like that to explain it,” Paula insisted. “Ivan has approached our side with an offer to defect. Think about it. He and Olga were both mixed up in illegal goings-on together. She was discovered somehow, the KGB grabbed her, and she wound up here. Obviously Ivan could be next. He can see that as much as anybody, so the idea of him suddenly getting a divine revelation to make himself scarce would make sense. Now put yourself in Tycoon’s place. To make the deal sound attractive, Ivan would have told who he is and how valuable he’d be if he came over. He’s hardly in a position to refuse favors right? So if you were Tycoon, what’s the first thing you might think of trying? What would there be to lose if it was Ivan’s neck on the line? Wouldn’t you give it a shot? Well, that’s what Tycoon did.”

McCain exhaled a long breath and rubbed his chin. He couldn’t fault her reasoning, but he still didn’t like the situation. There were coincidences involved, and he was always suspicious of coincidences. In the end he seemed to dismiss the subject for the time being, and got up from the box. “Razz will have to tell you what he wants with the laser,” he said, turning toward where the others were working. “But apart from that, come and see some of the other things we’ve got going down here.”

Rashazzi and Sargent had made a dummy head from plaster and used it as a template for various patterns of rubber headpieces, which they made by cutting and regluing sections of used inner tubes. The tubes were used on the general-purpose groundcars found all over
Tereshkova;
Sargent and Mungabo had obtained them from a recycling plant they’d discovered in the course of exploring beneath Landausk. Over the open face-section they had attached a mask assembled from stolen pieces of firefighters’ breathing apparatus and experimented with ways of sealing it to contain four pounds per square inch overpressure, filling it from an improvised air pump. They had settled on a method that seemed to work acceptably, and now Sargent was donning the equipment to try it out as the first live subject.

“What about the rest of the body?” Paula asked after McCain had explained the idea of going outside using homemade spacesuits. “You’ll need some kind of restraint to maintain pressure.”

Rashazzi pointed at an oil drum standing by the rear wall, partly covered by a sheet of tin but emitting fumes of a not-entirely-pleasant odor. “We’ve found that elastic surgical bandages plasticized in the concoction that’s brewing in there give the properties we need. Wrapping the body mummy-fashion would probably work, but we’re going to try welding sheets of the stuff into parts of stretch-suits. Getting dressed would be a lot quicker.”

Paula looked dubiously at the pump that Rashazzi was connecting to the mask over Sargent’s face. “You’ll need something a lot more powerful than that for a full-size vacuum chamber.” A large chamber would be necessary to test the complete suits. Nobody in their right mind would try out something like that for the first time by leaping out into space and trusting to luck.

“We can rig up a natural one,” Rashazzi said. Already Paula was developing the impression from listening to him that with his enthusiasm and energy, anything might be possible. “We find an outer compartment against the hull wall, drill a hole through to the outside, and fit a valve in it. Then we shut off the room and decompress it gradually by means of the valve to provide a test chamber. When we’re happy the suits work, we make a hatch through with the chamber evacuated, and it becomes our airlock for getting in and out.”

“How far away from the outer surface is the cosmic-ray shield?” Paula asked. An important point. The shield was a detached structure outside the hull, and since it didn’t rotate with the colony, it would be moving with a relative speed of something like a hundred fifty miles per hour. That was something that McCain realized he’d forgotten in his discussions with the scientists.

“It is only a matter of feet,” Rashazzi agreed. “But it’s something we can only know for sure by cutting the hatch and looking out.” So somebody would have to work his way across the outside skin of the structure without being thrown off, in darkness, with the inner surface of the shield flashing by probably within inches of him all the time. Paula shuddered at the thought of it. She’d done her share of heroics, she decided.

At the table near the bench, Scanlon was updating the maps which the group was producing from information gathered in their reconnaissance expeditions carried out via the freight-transit system that the escape committee had discovered. “And ’tis fortunate lads we are, indeed,” Scanlon said, looking up at her. “The traffic down there is busy these days so we’ve no problem getting rides to anywhere we want.”

“Why’s that?” Paula asked him. McCain had drifted away and was staring out into the darkness again, obviously deep in thought.

“All the good earth from Mother Russia that’s coming down the spokes from the hub and having to be distributed around,” Scanlon said.

“So it is true, then—they are really sending soil all the way here?”

“As true as we’re here, talking.” Scanlon gestured casually at a bin standing beside the plasticizing drum. “There’s a pile of it in there, if you’re interested. We’re sick of coming back covered in the stuff.”

“What did you bring it back here for?” Paula asked, walking over to the bin.

“Ah, that was Razz. It was there and it was unguarded—too much for the poor man to resist.”

She stood looking down at the dark soil, then on impulse stooped and let some trickle through her fingers. It felt dry, probably partly dehydrated for shipment, but could doubtless be reconstituted on-site. “Do you need it, or can I take some?” she asked absently.

“And what would anyone be needing the likes of that for?”

“I have some friends up on the surface who might like some—real Russian soil to grow flowers in, maybe.”

“Did you want it for anything in particular?” Scanlon called to Razz.

“Not really. We can get plenty more, anyway,” Rashazzi answered.

Scanlon shrugged. “Help yourself. You’ll find some empty cans on the shelf behind the rack there.”

Paula found a can with a lid and scooped some of the soil into it. McCain came over to her as she screwed on the lid. He seemed to have arrived at some decision in his mind and drew her aside again. “There’s one way I can check out this channel of yours,” he said. “Can you send off a response from me to Tycoon’s last message, with an initializer that
I’ll
select from
my
list? If we get an answer with the right completion, I’ll accept it as genuine.”

It was what Paula had been expecting him to say, but as usual Earnshaw had had to check through all the alternatives and possible objections first. She nodded. “Write out what you want to send, and I’ll take it back up with me.”

“Exactly what do you do with it then?”

“The chip is programmed, but the transmission text has to be loaded into it. I do that on an offline system—there are several that I can get access to up there.”

“Inside Zamork?”

“I’m working in a place at Turgenev in the day. Olga fixed it. That was how I got out of the kitchens.”

“What kind of work?”

“Eco-modeling.”

“Go on.”

“Then Olga takes the chip back and passes it to an associate she’s got, who substitutes it for a chip in the outgoing coding processors.”

“How do you get the replies back?”

“They’re encoded in statistical updates beamed up into the library. Olga transcribes them and brings me the copy.”

“So Russians have access to the plaintext going both ways.”

“How else could it be? Two separate systems are involved: here down to Siberia, and from there into our commnet. There has to be a conversion from one to the other.”

McCain nodded reluctantly. “Okay. Let’s sit down again. I won’t be a second.” He went over to the table where Scanlon was working, and returned with a notepad and a pencil. They sat down on the boxes again, and he handed her the pencil and pad. “What was Tycoon’s last initializer?” he asked.

“Hot,” she told him.

“My completion is ‘Gospel,’” McCain said. Only he had known that. Paula’s completion code for the same word would have been “Rod.”

“Initializer?” Paula asked.

McCain thought for a second. “Trans.” Paula might have chosen the same word too, for it was also on her list.
In her case only,
a valid reply from Foleda would carry the completion “Locate”; for a valid reply to McCain, however, she had no idea what the completion should be.

Paula wrote: sexton/gospel to tycoon/trans. She waited. McCain whistled tunelessly through his teeth for a few seconds and then dictated a straightforward, innocuous statement to the effect that he was being detained on
Tereshkova,
and that he was in good shape and being treated fairly, apart from denial of communications rights.

Paula looked up questioningly. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You’re not going to say anything else?”

“What else do you want me to say?”

“Well, you could answer some of the questions that Tycoon asked in his message. We could give the names of some of the VIPs upstairs that he sounded interested in. Or mention that the place is taking in new batches of civilians with lots of children. Or that tons of soil from Earth are arriving here. Wouldn’t that be considered useful intelligence material?”

McCain shook his head. “Not until I’ve a better idea who I’m talking to.”

Paula sighed with exasperation. In her own mind she had no doubt that the link was genuine. “You’re talking to Tycoon,” she said. “Believe me, I
know.”

“Let’s wait and see, shall we?”

“God, why are all you intelligence people so suspicious of everything?”

“We’re not. But the ones who aren’t don’t last too long. So your impressions end up being formed only by the rest. Scientists call it statistical bias. We call it survival. But isn’t that what eco-modeling is supposed to be all about?”

On her next day at Turgenev, Paula composed the message as Earnshaw had directed. She had thought of sending a separate communication along with it under her own code to supply the additional information she had suggested, but on further reflection decided against it. It would be tantamount to a direct violation of orders, for one thing—Earnshaw was still the senior member of the mission—and for another, it would only be a matter of days at the most before Tycoon replied. Then, with Earnshaw finally reassured, all would proceed much more smoothly.

Sure enough, a couple of days later Olga brought Paula a transcript of a message from Tycoon to “Sexton/Vaal.” This time Paula was spared another ordeal in the elevator shaft, for Earnshaw came up to meet her in the machinery gallery at the bottom of the shaft beneath Eban Istamel’s hut. Earnshaw confirmed that “Vaal” was the correct completion for “Trans” from his own personal list. Therefore there could no longer be any doubt that the channel did connect all the way through to Foleda in Washington. To Paula’s chagrin, however, he still declined to supply the information she had suggested. But he did give her a reply in which he hinted that he was in a position to enjoy virtually unlimited freedom of movement around the colony’s outer ring.

The tone of the response that came back from Foleda gave the impression that he was in trouble and having credibility problems back home. Uncharacteristically throwing caution to the winds, he specified the precise locations around
Tereshkova
where weapons installations were suspected to exist, described their nature, and requested Sexton to check the sites and report as quickly as possible. The message ended, repeat, objective subordinates other considerations. possibility of compromise acceptable. expedite by all available means.

Which meant, “Risk your ass if you have to. We need this.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The two principal factors that made
Valentina Tereshkova
potentially so formidable were its distance from Earth and its sheer size. Whether driven by high-power pulsed reactors located in the hub or rim, or in the form of ejectable bomb-type devices, its weaponry would be based on transforming nuclear energy into beams of concentrated firepower traveling at the speed of light and impacting on their targets at a rate equivalent to tens or even hundreds of tons of high explosive per second. Since nuclear processes produce energy at an intensity millions of times greater than anything attainable from conventional sources, which involve only the outer electron shells of atoms, the resulting hardware would be extremely compact, and thus easily hidden in lots of unlikely places.