James P. Hogan (52 page)

“The whole thing is a super-battlestation “Rashazzi whispered. “They’re probably only waiting for that UN ship to arrive.”

“About sixteen hours from now,” Haber said numbly.

It was dawning on Paula that she’d been running off the tracks since somewhere way back up the line. She sent an uncomprehending look from one to another. “I… don’t understand what you’re talking about. What’s going on?”

Earnshaw exhaled a long sigh and turned away, as if needing a moment longer to integrate the new information into his thinking. Rashazzi turned absently away toward the bench, lost in a world of his own and thinking furiously. Haber still looked thunderstruck. Paula looked around for Koh and noticed for the first time that he had disappeared. Earnshaw saw the question forming on her face and stepped forward, cutting her off before she could speak. “Maybe there are a few things that
you
ought to know before you do any more talking,” he said. Just for an instant, Paula sensed the tenseness in his voice, an urgency to divert her attention.

Without warning Earnshaw whirled round and his fist streaked out in the same movement, bunched karate-style to deliver a devastating blow to the V below Istamel’s ribs. The Turk emitted a strained gurgling sound and dropped to his knees as his legs buckled. In the same instant Koh materialized from the darkness behind and slid his right arm around Istamel’s neck to seize the jacket collar high on the opposite side below the ear, while his left arm came round from the other side to grasp the right lapel. Koh drove his knee into the Turk’s back, gaining leverage to tighten his arms scissor-fashion in a way that slid aside the muscle covering the carotid artery and exposed it to the full pressure of the bony edge of Koh’s forearm – cutting off the brain’s blood supply brings unconsciousness much faster than strangulation. Rashazzi turned from the bench with a heavy metal bar in his hand, ready to help out if needed. Istamel tried to struggle, but the blow from Earnshaw had paralyzed his breathing. His efforts became feeble, then his eyes rolled upward and he went limp. Koh sustained the pressure for a few seconds longer and shook his head regretfully. “Something like this seems to happen whenever you two meet,” he commented to Earnshaw as he released the body and let it crumple to the floor.

Earnshaw squatted down and opened Istamel’s jacket. He undid the shirt and uncovered a Soviet communicator pad secured on a waistband. A quick but thorough search added a. 45 automatic in an underarm sling, some extra clips of ammunition, and a general-clearance badge. Haber produced some cord, and Earnshaw helped him truss up the Turk out of the way in a sitting position with his back to one of the supporting pillars. Rashazzi tied a gag around his mouth.

Paula could only shake her head in helpless bewilderment as she watched. Earnshaw straightened up and turned back toward her. “You pick nice friends,” he commented.

“What is this?” Paula mumbled. “Will somebody tell me what’s going on? How did you know he was a plant?”

Rashazzi, Haber, and Koh moved back around the table. “He said he went to the hub on one of our missions,” Earnshaw said.

Paula still hadn’t fully accommodated to what had just happened. “So?”

“There isn’t any hub,” Rashazzi said.

Paula shifted her gaze uncertainly from one to another of them, finally letting it come to rest on Earnshaw. His face had an odd, challenging expression. “Suppose we told you that this place we’re in is not
Valentina Tereshkova
,” he said. “In fact, it isn’t even in space at all.”

The statement was so preposterous that for a moment it didn’t register and Paula answered mechanically. “That’s crazy. Of course it’s in space, Go to one of the ag sectors and look up through a window. Everyone knows they came here from Earth, don’t they? I know that you and I did.”

“Do you?” Rashazzi’s quietly reasonable tone broke her stupor and made her look away from Earnshaw, Only now did her face show its first sign of any willingness to try to understand. Rashazzi went on, “You may know that you were taken out to
Tereshkova
on a transporter from Earth over six months ago, but that’s not quite the same thing, A lot has happened since then.”

“Just out of curiosity…” Earnshaw said. Paula’s head jerked back to face him. “Were you taken sick soon after we were arrested?” Her expression supplied the answer. He nodded, “So was I. And when you came round, did a doctor tell you you’d been out for a couple of days? These guys had similar experiences, too. Now, isn’t that strange? What do you think might have happened during that couple of days?”

“That’s… absurd,” Paula said. This time, however, her voice had lost its earlier conviction, Instead it was asking how what they were saying could be possible.

Rashazzi stepped over to the table and picked up a pencil. Paula moved forward, while the others closed around. Taking a blank sheet of paper, Rashazzi sketched a shallow, truncated, inverted cone – a circular strip, banked all the way round, like a racetrack.

FIGURE 1

“Suppose this were a large platform, miles in circumference, with miniature cities, agricultural sectors, and landscaping on it, all contained in a big, donut-shaped tunnel deep underground somewhere,” he said. “Now support the entire platform on a system of superconducting magnetic fields and rotate it at such a speed that the force vectors of gravity and centrifugal force combine into a single resultant perpendicular to the floor. If you want some specific numbers, from the tests we’ve conducted I’d estimate a banking angle of twenty-five degrees and a rotation period of ninety seconds, which implies a radius of a little under a kilometer, or about six tenths of a mile.”

Paula shook her head in the way of somebody trying to wake up, “It can’t be… I mean, adding the vectors like that… Everything would weigh more.”

“By about ten percent, with the figures I’ve just quoted.”

Rashazzi agreed. “Which is about the most you could expect people to adjust to reasonably quickly, and why you couldn’t go to a larger banking angle. And in fact, the gravitational acceleration as measured in Zamork is ten percent greater than Earth-normal. A strange way to design a space colony, wouldn’t you think?”

“And incidentally, the scales they weigh you on in the infirmary are calibrated to read ten percent light,” Haber interjected. “That is very interesting, yes?”

“Do you remember feeling weak and heavy in the limbs when you woke up?” Earnshaw asked her. “We did, too. It wore off after a few days.”

Paula was looking at Rashazzi’s sketch with a changed expression, as if she wanted to be convinced. But now the scientist in her asserted itself, searching for the flaws. “Why rotate it at all?” she asked. “If it’s on Earth and in a gravity field to begin with, why bother?”

“Because of the curvature that can be built into the structure,” Rashazzi answered. “A static platform would have to be flat, like a washer. It could never support the illusion of being the inside of a big hamsterwheel, as it would have to do to look real. But banking it introduces a vertical component of curvature and gives you a floor that does indeed bend upward as it recedes.”

Paula stared down at Rashazzi’s sketch dubiously. She thought for a while, then took the pencil and on another sheet drew a pair of curves coming inward from the sides as if from behind an observer, and then retreating and converging to one side. It was a representation of Rashazzi’s racetrack as seen by somebody standing on it. She added a series of radial lines sloping down at intervals from its higher, outer edge to the inner, and then some crude human figures at varying distances.

FIGURE 2

She inspected the result critically, tipping her head first to one side, then to the other. The others remained silent. Finally she said, “No, I still can’t buy this. However much you try and disguise it, it’s still going to look like a banked racetrack. The people will start to lean over as they get farther away. It won’t look anything like this.” Beside it she drew another perspective view, this time with the two curves converging upward and away directly in front of the observer, and with the cross-lines appearing as horizontal rungs. It was a hamster’s view of the inside of its wheel. Again she added some human figures.

“See, they’re nothing like each other. The people should stay vertical, and foreshorten.” Paula gestured back at her first sketch. “If you blocked off all the long sight lines, then maybe you could get away with it. But this place isn’t built like that. I’ve just driven from Turgenev, and everyone here’s been outside. You can see all the way from Novyi Kazan to the edge of Ag Station Three. It’s the same everywhere. Long lines of sight aren’t obstructed around the colony, yet you don’t see a banked racetrack. So how could it be the way you’re saying?”

FIGURE 3

Rashazzi took back the pencil. “That was something that puzzled us for a long time, and why we at first rejected the racetrack explanation,” he said. “This is how you do it.” He drew an imitation of Paula’s first sketch and superimposed on it a pair of lines cutting across the curve of the track and forming a section of straight strip, as would the edges of a piece of ribbon laid flat along the sloping rim of a dinner plate. Then he added a series of verticals along the lines, connected them with horizontals to complete the illusion, and added a couple of figures as Paula had done.

FIGURE 4

Rashazzi covered the parts outside the walls with his hands to leave just the view looking along between them. The result came uncannily close to the second sketch that Paula had made. “You build walls,” he said. “The colony we are inside is a replica of the real
Tereshkova
– the one you were taken to in May. But it is a replica with a difference. Instead of being circular, it consists of a series of straight segments with sides that don’t veer off laterally, just like the real one, and, by the geometry I’ve described, with floors and roofs that curve and yet possess perpendicular gravity everywhere, just like the real one. There are six long segments, running between the bases of the spokes. In addition there are what amount to another six short segments that form the complexes around the spoke-bases themselves – three towns and the three agricultural stations.” Rashazzi rummaged through some of the papers that he and the others had been discussing when Paula and Istamel arrived, and produced a plan view to show what he meant.