Prisoners of Tomorrow (39 page)

After the accident that lost Olga the special chip which Ivan had provided, the transmissions from
Tereshkova
had ceased. Coded messages from the Earth end had continued to appear, embedded in the statistical updates beamed into the library, but Olga had had no way of responding until she acquired the electronic chip that she had asked Paula to program for her. Three days after Paula gave her back the finished chip, Olga was waiting in the hut when Paula returned from her day at the Environmental Department. They chatted about local matters with Svetlana and Elena for a while, and then Olga suggested a walk on the hill above the reservoir.

“I was in the library today,” Olga said when they were alone. “A reply from Ivan has come in. He received our message. The link is working again!”

Paula was pleased. “So, there were no hitches. You’re in business again. I’m glad I was able to help.”

“I’m sure Ivan is feeling relieved now,” Olga said. “He must have been getting quite worried.”

They walked on for a while. Paula became thoughtful as some of the things that she had been brooding over during the past few days came back to her. “What kind of a person is he—Ivan?” she asked at last. “How well did you know him?”

A surprised look flashed across Olga’s face, but she shrugged and replied, “Well, I told you we were lovers once. He’s . . . well, quite sophisticated in many ways, I suppose you’d say, cultured—”

“No, I meant politically. You said he belonged to that dissident organization that you were part of back on Earth. Does that mean he’s opposed to the Soviet system? Is he . . . well, how loyal does that make him?”

Olga frowned. “That depends. Obviously he’s less than completely happy with the present regime and what it represents. But he’s a strong nationalist. He loves everything Russian.”

“What about the international situation—all the tensions?” Paula asked.

“It’s something that concerns him deeply,” Olga answered. She slowed her pace and studied Paula’s face searchingly. “Very deeply, in fact. His main reason for being active in the dissident movement is to promote greater understanding worldwide. Why do you ask?”

Paula struggled for the right way to put the question. “How far would he go to achieve that, do you think?”

“I’m sorry. You’ll have to explain what you mean.”

“Well, take this channel that we’ve got now, down to Siberia. He’s in a communications station, with access to all kinds of equipment. From the way he’s able to read our signals and inject his own into the upbound beam, I’d assume his position there must be a fairly senior one.”

Olga nodded slowly, still looking puzzled. “Yes.”

“Do you think he might be willing to extend the link farther if we had a good reason to ask him—beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, for example?”

Olga stopped and turned to face Paula fully. “What strange questions you’re asking all of a sudden. Extend the link farther to
where
beyond the borders of the Soviet Union?”

Paula hesitated, then drew in a long breath. “Do you think he might relay a message from us here, into the Western military-communications system?” Before Olga could reply, she plunged on to explain. “You knew Maurice, the Frenchman who was exchanged. Svetlana told me he’d seen for himself that at least some of the weapons that are supposed to be up here don’t exist. He’ll have told his people as much of course, but it’ll only be one man’s word. Would he be believed? It’s information that could be crucial to policy decisions at a time like this. Through Ivan we could be in a position to corroborate it. Or even to find out more . . . I don’t know . . .” But then, suddenly, a feeling of futility at even thinking about it overwhelmed her. She shook her head with a sigh and resumed walking. “Oh, forget it, Olga. It was a stupid idea. Why should a senior scientist want to risk his neck transmitting messages to the West? It just seemed—”

“Now wait a minute. I’m not sure it is such a stupid idea.” Olga was staring at her keenly. “Ivan is already risking his neck—I told you, he is very concerned about the present tensions. And look at it this way: if all we were asking him to do was relay confirmation to the West from a source it might trust—one of its own agents—of what the Soviets have been saying publicly anyway, they could hardly accuse him of betraying secrets or being disloyal, could they? I wouldn’t write it off so quickly as a lost cause. It might be worth a try.”

Paula frowned uncertainly. Olga continued to shoot questioning looks at her as they walked, but she kept quiet. Finally Paula asked, “Have you managed to get any news on Lew Earnshaw yet? If I could talk to him about it somehow, it would help a lot.”

“I’m still trying. As soon as I hear anything, of course I’ll let you know.”

“I see.”

“I could include a feeler to Ivan in my next message,” Olga offered.

“Don’t rush me. I need to think about it some more,” Paula said.

“As you wish.”

But inwardly Paula had already as good as conceded that in the end the decision was probably going to have to be hers. She didn’t even know if Earnshaw was anywhere within two hundred thousand miles.

Less than a hundred feet below the hill in an entirely different environment, McCain, Scanlon, Istamel, and Sargent were sitting, like a conspiratorial circle in some smugglers’ cave of old, in a pool of yellow light surrounded by darkness around a makeshift table of aluminum drums and wall paneling. McCain unwrapped the package that Rashazzi had left for them, revealing two pieces of charred, twisted plastic about the size of a credit card but thicker, which had obviously been severely burned. Istamel picked one of them up and examined it.

For the frame, Rashazzi had welded together plastic pieces cut from a razor-blade dispenser of an acceptably close shade of blue, which he had found in the general store. He had fashioned the securing clip from the clip of a ballpoint pen, using as a guide for its shape and dimensions the imprints of a genuine clip that Peter Sargent had somehow obtained in a bar of soap; and for the plastic-encapsulated electronics insert in the center, he cut a square out of a slice sawn from the base of a black chess king. Then he had incinerated his handiwork in a bowl of shredded rags soaked in alcohol. To a casual inspection, the result looked impressively like a standard Russian general-clearance badge that had been in a fire.

Istamel gave a satisfied grunt and placed the fragile object down again carefully. “It’s good,” he pronounced. He picked up the other and looked at it briefly. “I see no problem. These are fine.”

“Well, I’m pleased to hear it,” Scanlon said, sitting forward. “And now maybe ye can tell us what it is ye have in mind that we’ll be needing them for.”

The Turk drew his hands back to the edge of the table and ran his eyes quickly around the group. “I know of a situation that would suit our purpose,” he told them. “I am a doctor by profession—of physiology. In particular I specialize in the regulatory mechanisms of the circulatory system. I have privileged status here in Zamork because I agreed to work cooperatively in the Space Environment Laboratory at the hub. They develop different kinds of spacesuits, do research into conditions and effects of working outside—things like that.” He shrugged and thrust out his lower lip as if acknowledging that some kind of explanation was called for. “It enables me to pursue my own work and keep my knowledge up to date. So if helping their interests to a degree also serves my interests, why not? We’re all traders at heart, yes?”

McCain nodded curtly. “Sure, we hear what you’re saying. And?”

“The technical people there are Russian civilians—doctors and technicians from around the colony. Most of them carry general-clearance badges—which will give access to anywhere within the colony’s regular environment outside a few restricted zones, such as parts of Landausk and the Government Center, which require various grades of special-clearance badges.” McCain and Scanlon glanced at each other and looked more interested. Istamel went on, “I’ve noticed that when they change into their lab coats and working clothes, they tend to leave the badges on their regular coats, which they hang in a closet by the lab entrance. Now here’s the interesting part. Heavy-current cabling to an air compressor and some welding equipment passes through the bottom of that closet. Also, the space below the hanging rail is always piled with bags and boxes that contain who-knows-what. Now you see my point: if a fault developed that caused those cables to heat up and ignite something that happened to be in one of those boxes . . .”

“You mean you’d put a package in there of your own to make sure that a couple of the coats at least were destroyed,” Scanlon said, nodding.

“Exactly,” Sargent threw in.

“But could you guarantee that the cable would set fire to the package?” McCain queried.

“We don’t have to,” Istamel replied. “We make the package a self-igniting incendiary device—something that Razz and Haber can put together. We fake some kind of fault in the electrical system and cover the cables in the closet with something that will burn, simply to make it look like an accidental fire. So the way it works is, first we switch these”—he indicated the burned dummies lying on the table—“for two of the badges, and at the same time plant the materials to start the fire. Then, just when it’s due to go up, we put a short-circuit somewhere in the electrical system. Afterward, the Russians recover the two dummies, write them off officially as destroyed, and supply replacements to whoever they were issued to. Meanwhile, we have the real ones in working order.”

McCain thought for a while but couldn’t fault it. “Can you manage it all on your own?” he asked.

“Given the materials, then everything in the closet, yes,” Istamel replied. “But the electrics, I’m not so strong on.”

“Now, that would be my department if there was a way of getting me there,” Scanlon said. “The IRA gives a good apprenticeship in things like that.”

“But there isn’t,” McCain said.

“I’m not so sure,” Istamel murmured thoughtfully. “We do have regular-category prisoners on work assignments around the hub. They deliver materials to the lab sometimes, cart away the trash, and so on. If we could get you on something like that . . .”

“But Luchenko isn’t in the habit of handing out favors on request, and my bracelet isn’t programmed for the hub,” Scanlon said.

They debated various possibilities at some length, but got nowhere. Then Sargent returned to their first thought by asking, “What about this scheme that Razz came up with for swapping the inserts between two bracelets? Maybe we could find somebody assigned to the hub who’d appreciate an extra holiday in exchange for letting us borrow his insert for a day. Maybe we could get Kev to the hub that way—with the insert that’s programmed for the hub mounted in his bracelet.”

“Wouldn’t the guards notice his face was different?” Istamel asked.

“Possible, but unlikely,” Sargent said. “They’re not exactly the most diligent or the brightest in the place. So, fair enough—it’s a risk.”

McCain looked inquiringly at Scanlon. “What do you think, Kev?”

“Ah, and why not? I’ve done riskier things in me time. Sure, I’ll go with it.”

“We seem to have settled it, then,” McCain said. “So let’s get it moving as quickly as possible. The sooner we have the badges, the sooner we can be mobile. There’s a lot I want to find out about this place.” He turned again toward Istamel. “Changing the subject back, you said you’re a doctor of physiology?”

“Yes,” Istamel replied.

“And you’re helping develop designs for spacesuits?”

“In the Space Environment Laboratory. That’s right.”

“That’s interesting,” McCain said. “Let us tell you about something else we’re working on that maybe you can help us with. . . .”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Russians, Paula decided, simply weren’t happy unless they were suffering. From what she had read of their poets, dramatists, novelists, and historians, their compulsion expressed itself in the sense of tragedy and glorification of sacrifice that permeated their national spirit. Another manifestation, she thought, could be the innate genius they displayed for creating agricultural disasters. Peasant revolts had been a standard part of the czarist background scenery. Stalin’s forced collectivization of the farms had produced starvations on a scale that even now could only be guessed at; Lysenko had risen to become head kook in charge of biology with state backing; successive disastrous postwar harvests had been offset only by exports from the evil West; and now, three quarters of the farming experiments in the sector known as Ukraine—between Turgenev and Landausk—were turning out to be dismal failures.

The reason, as the Soviets had now admitted publicly, was clear to Paula from the dynamics of the simulation she was running to test a program modification before finishing for the day. The notion that lunar dust could be force-fed into becoming living, tillable soil by introducing a few selected bacteria strains and saturating it with bulk nutrients might have been attractive to quota-obsessed bureaucrats, but the problem was that it didn’t work. The process wasn’t amenable to brute force. The Western and Asian space programs had opted for an approach based on self-evolved biosystems, where all the ecological subtleties were allowed to develop in their own time, even though nobody could say for sure why all of them were needed. It was a far slower method, and helped explain why the non-Soviet programs had not gone for large-scale colony construction yet. But it was showing positive results. Now, goaded by we-told-you-so jeers from the rest of the world’s biological community, the Soviets had commenced a crash program to ship thousands of tons of terrestrial soil up to
Valentina Tereshkova
for enriching certain areas, then dressing those areas with huge quantities of transplanted crops and plants to provide an acceptable setting for the Soviet leaders to make speeches about progress in when they came up for the November 7 celebrations.

Dr. Brusikov, the Russian section-head whom Paula worked under, came in from the corridor. In his dealings with her he always confined himself to business, never alluding to personal or political matters. “I wanted to catch you before you went,” he said. “How does it look?”