Prisoners of Tomorrow (49 page)

“I’m not so sure, Joe.” General Snell was leaning back, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Maybe there is a way we can find out if those Russians are really where they say they are.”

“How?” the President asked them from the end of the table.

“We’ve got agents up there, right now. And we’ve got a means of communicating with them. We don’t have to rely on what the Soviet news service says. Can’t we ask our own people if they can see with their own eyes the same things we’re seeing on screens down here? If they say they can, that would be good enough for me.”

The heads turned back toward Foleda. Foleda blinked. He had discredited Sunflower so much in his own mind, he realized, that the possibility of using the link for this purpose hadn’t occurred to him. An unskilled agent’s failing to find weapons that might be there was one thing—negative evidence was always questionable. But confirmation of something taking place right in front of one’s eyes constituted positive evidence. That was a different matter.

“What do you say, Mr. Foleda?” the President asked. “You have expressed the greatest skepticism toward Sunflower. If we took up General Snell’s suggestion and got confirmation from our own agents there, would that satisfy you?”

Foleda’s brow creased into a frown. The truth was that he didn’t trust the Soviets an inch, and didn’t like the West in general—and the US in particular—were dancing eagerly to the Soviet tune to demonstrate their inoffensiveness. But those were prejudices pure and simple, and there was no way to defend them now. He looked up and nodded.

“Yes, Mr. President, I guess that would change the picture a whole lot,” he agreed unhappily.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

In the background, the large screen in the graphics lab at Turgenev still displayed the exchange cycle of gases between soil bacteria and the atmosphere. But Paula and Olga were more interested in the smaller deskscreen pivoted to face them on the console below, which was showing on a local channel the crowd gathering in the square outside the building. The second transporter bringing Soviet government and Party officials had arrived at the hub twenty minutes previously, and they were expected to emerge from the spoke at any time. There was considerable excitement among the privileged-category inmates back at Zamork, too. Rumors had been circulating of large-scale amnesties to be announced during the November 7 celebrations, and the compound was alive with speculations about whose names might have been chosen.

“But why?” Olga asked again. She shook her head and moved over to a worktop at the side of the room and stared down again at the transcript of the latest request to come in from Tycoon. “They can see on the public television channels that there are important people arriving here. Why should they want corroboration from you? And why does it matter so much, anyway?”

“It’s strange . . .” Paula answered in a faraway voice, leaning back and staring at the large screen but not seeing it. They had established some time ago now that since it was part of the Environmental Department, which was classed as a normal civilian work area, the graphics lab was not wired for surveillance. Therefore they could speak freely there.

Olga turned and came back to stand behind Paula’s chair. “Why should the Americans doubt it? Do they think that what they’re watching down there might be recordings or something? Maybe they still believe this is a war platform.” She tapped her lips with her fingertip for a moment. “Could they be afraid that the Russians might be planning to hijack the Western VIPs who are on their way here? You know them better than I do. Are they capable of dreaming up something like that?” Paula didn’t answer. Olga waited, then looked at her. “What are you thinking?”

Paula swiveled the chair slowly, her elbow resting on the armrest, and looked up over her loosely closed fist. “I think it’s worse than that,” she said.

Olga frowned. “Worse?”

“A lot.”

“What do you mean?”

Paula pushed herself up from the chair, paused to choose her words, and then turned to stand with her back to the console, resting herself against the edge. “We don’t know what’s been going on down on Earth between your side and mine over the past few months. But we do know they’re run by some people who can be pretty irrational.”

Olga nodded. “Yes, I would agree with that. So?”

“Well, if you were the Americans,” Paula said, “what would the fact that practically the entire Soviet leadership had gone up to
Valentina Tereshkova
for the November seventh celebrations say to you?”

“Why . . . that they were taking time off to go away and enjoy themselves for once, I suppose. And since a potential target would be the last place they’d pick, I’d be pretty happy that they weren’t planning to—” Olga broke off and turned her head toward Paula quizzically as she saw what Paula was implying.

“Yes,” Paula said. “And what would it say if they hadn’t gone there at all, but wanted you to think the things you’ve just said?”

Olga stared incredulously. “No!”

“I think so.” Paula nodded somberly. She met Olga’s eyes fully. “I think the Americans believe you’re about to launch.” Olga sat down weakly and shook her head. “And worse,” Paula said. “What if the West decides to preempt?”

“Oh, God . . .” Olga licked her lips and turned her head first one way and then the other. She seemed to be having trouble coming to terms with the enormity of it. Paula watched silently. At last Olga gestured at the transcript, then indicated the BV-15 terminal standing in a corner. “We must do something . . .” Her voice choked. She waved a hand again. “The channel. We must send them an answer.”

“Yes, I know.” Paula straightened up from the console, gathered the transcript, and sat down at the terminal. Her movements were purposeful and resolute, as if she had been giving Olga time to catch up with the conclusion she had already recognized in her own mind as inevitable. Paula took a screwdriver from a drawer and removed the BV-15’s cover. Then she reached in her pocket, took out a small plastic box containing one of the preprogrammed chips, and plugged the chip into the socket that it was coded to work in. Then she replaced the cover, sat down, and activated the screen. Olga moved her chair closer to watch.

Then a frown crossed Paula’s face. She sat back uncertainly and turned her head to glance at the small screen showing the scene outside the building. The crowd was denser now, and officials were buzzing excitedly around the doors that opened from the concourse outside the spoke elevators. Paula looked back at the terminal again with a suddenly numb expression. “I can’t do this,” she said.

“What’s the matter?” Olga asked. She sounded alarmed.

“This message. I can’t send it. I
can’t
tell them those leaders are arriving here.”

“But why not?”

“Because I don’t
know
that they are.” Paula turned her head and looked at Olga oddly. “Am I being paranoid too, now? But don’t you see? All I have to go by is a TV picture, just like the people down there in America. I can’t tell if it’s real any more than they can.”

Olga was shaking her head. “But . . . but that’s ridiculous. You’re
here.
They’re not.” She waved frantically at the deskscreen. “That’s all happening right outside the building we’re in.” They couldn’t simply walk out and look, of course, because their Zamork bracelets would trigger alarms if they tried leaving their authorized working vicinity, which would achieve nothing but get them spells in solitary.

Paula was adamant. “If I sound silly, I’m sorry, but I think it’s important. You’re always reminding me that we’re scientists. Well, this would be confirming reported data that we haven’t observed for ourselves. Scientists can’t do that.”

Olga was looking dazed. “But . . . we’re talking about possibly averting
war!”
she insisted. Her voice was pleading, her face strained. “Global war. How many times we’ve talked about this, what it would mean . . . You can’t stop because of something like this.” She got up from her chair and stood with her hands pressed flat together against her face. Her eyes darted this way and that, as if seeking answers on the walls. “I can show you. . . . Yes, look, wait there. I’ll go and get Gennadi.”

Paula turned her head and watched, puzzled, as Olga hurried across the room and opened the door. She went out into the corridor and her footsteps retreated. Then Paula heard her say, “Oh, Dr. Brusikov, are you leaving?”

Brusikov’s voice answered, sounding surprised. “I was going out to watch the arrival of the foreign minister and his party, and then have lunch. Why?”

“Oh, good. Then, you are going out into the square?”

“Yes.” The voices were right outside the door now.

“Could I ask a favor?” Olga ushered Brusikov into the room. He nodded perfunctorily to acknowledge Paula’s presence. Olga glanced quickly around the lab and took a bright-blue cylindrical cardboard container, three feet or so long, from a stack lying on a shelf—the kind commonly used for carrying things like rolled technical drawings. “I promised these to somebody urgently, but missed him. He’s outside in the square now, but I can’t go out there. I wonder if you’d be so kind . . .”

“Oh, I see.” Brusikov nodded. “Very well. But how will I know him?”

Olga turned to the screen showing the scene outside and pointed to a man in a yellow jacket and green hat, standing on the edge of the crowd, near the main door of the Government Building. “That’s him. He’s very distinctive. His name is Zavdat.”

Paula had stood up from her chair behind them. As Brusikov turned to leave, she said suddenly, “No, that’s the wrong one.”

He stopped and looked back questioningly. Paula held Olga’s eyes steadily while she drew a red cylinder off the shelf. “I put them in
this
one.”

Olga didn’t falter. “Oh yes, that’s right . . . I must have got them mixed up.” She took the red cylinder and exchanged it for the blue one that Brusikov was holding. He nodded and left, closing the door.

A strained silence descended while the two women watched the screen, Paula looked remorseful now, Olga tight-lipped and flushed. After a minute or so the figure of Dr. Brusikov came out of the Government Building entrance, carrying the red cylinder. He stopped and looked about for a few seconds, then approached the man in the yellow coat and green hat. Brusikov said something and offered the cylinder. The man in the yellow coat shook his head, shrugged, and waved a hand. Brusikov remonstrated and pointed back at the Government Building. The man shook his head again. Finally Brusikov, looking disgruntled and not a little mystified, moved away to find a different spot in the crowd.

Paula turned away but avoided facing Olga directly. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Olga shook her head. She was her usual calm self once again. “No, you were quite right,” she said. “Neither of us knew for sure. It is I who should apologize.”

“For a moment I didn’t trust you.”

“At times like these, it’s a wonder anyone trusts anybody.”

On the screen the doors on the raised level above the square opened and a group of smiling figures came out to be greeted by cheers and applause. Paula sat down at the terminal again and pushed the curl from her forehead. “Then, let’s get on with the job,” she said.

Dressed in a selection from the civilian attire accumulated in the Crypt, Rashazzi took the laser outside to repeat over longer ranges some tests that he and Haber had conducted inside the structure which had yielded odd results. He emerged at the surface in a ventilator outlet above some apartments on the far side of the reservoir, and spent more than an hour surreptitiously aiming pulses at parts of the buildings of central Novyi Kazan and timing the returns on an electronic interferometer that Paula had built. He explained the results to McCain later, after returning to the Crypt. Haber was with them.

“Since we are on the inside of a cylinder, the verticals of buildings converge toward the center, like the spokes of a wheel. And since we know the size of
Valentina Tereshkova,
it’s easy to calculate how much the convergence ought to be: verticals spaced two hundred meters apart at the base ought to converge by about three meters through a fifteen-meter difference in height.”

McCain nodded. That much was straightforward enough. “Okay.”

“But they don’t,” Rashazzi said. “It works out at closer to one point three meters. So what’s happened to the difference?”

McCain could only shake his head. “It fits with this idea that keeps coming up, of the whole place being bigger than it’s supposed to, doesn’t it,” he said.

“Yes,” Haber agreed. “And not only that. To give the amount of convergence that Razz had measured, the colony would have to be just the diameter that was indicated by the experiments we did with the balance scale: almost four and a half kilometers instead of less than two kilometers.”

McCain made a face. “I hate coincidences.”

“Oh, I don’t think this could properly be called a coincidence,” Haber said.

“Probably not. But we still don’t have any explanations, huh?”

Rashazzi looked at McCain with a strange, unsmiling expression for a second. Then he picked up a sheet of paper that he and Haber had been poring over when McCain arrived. “Yes,” he replied in a curious voice. “As a matter of fact, Lew, this time I believe we do have an explanation. . . .”

* * *

Brusikov came in again on his way back from lunch to return the cylinder and ask what the hell Olga had been playing at. Paula apologized and explained that Olga had been fooled by the yellow coat and green hat—hardly the most common of outfits to be seen around
Tereshkova,
she pointed out with as much charm as she could muster—and had not paid enough attention to the face. It wasn’t the right man. Brusikov went away grumbling about being made to feel a fool, but accepted it.

Paula remained, staring at the work she had been doing on the larger screen, but no longer interested in it. How was anybody supposed to care about the flatulence of microbes when the world might be about to cremate itself?

She thought about the message she had composed for Foleda, and how inadequate it seemed compared to the scale of what was at stake. Her conviction grew that the nature of
Valentina Tereshkova
had become a major factor in the equations being juggled in Washington and in Moscow. Here she was, not only present at that fulcrum of events, but singled out through a strange series of twists of fate for a unique perspective that should surely be crucial to any decisions embarked on at such a moment. She remembered reading somewhere that Napoleon scoffed at the notion of luck. “Lucky” people, he maintained, were the ones who put themselves in the right place and at the right time for the right things to happen.