Prisoners of Tomorrow (40 page)

“It’s running and seems to be okay. I’ve added the defaults.”

“Excellent.” Brusikov rubbed his palms together and moved over to the screen. “Well, I’ll carry on playing with it for a while this evening. Same time tomorrow, is it? You’re not off, are you?”

“No.” At that instant a double beep sounded from the unit on Paula’s wrist. It meant that the computers monitoring the security and access system had noted the time, and she was now free to move beyond her working vicinity.

“There’s your signal,” Brusikov said. “Very well, we’ll see you tomorrow. Good night.”

“Good night.” Paula went out into the corridor and turned in the direction of the elevator. Two more figures, one of them dressed in the familiar green priv tunic of Zamork, emerged from another door and headed the same way.

The Zamork inmate’s name was Josip. He was a statistician from Yugoslavia, who was also working on ecological models. “I see they’re going ahead with this idea of sending tons of dirt up to us,” he said. “Have you ever heard of anything so crazy? All to avoid embarrassing their illustrious leaders. It’s Potemkin villages all over again.”

The civilian was called Gennadi. He was a Russian, younger than Josip, with fine, handsomely lined features, blond hair, and blue eyes that shone with devotion to the Party and the system. In an earlier period, allowing for the turnabout of ideology—which wouldn’t have made a lot of difference, since all fanatical ideologies are interchangeable, anyway—he would have qualified as the Nazis’ Nordic ideal. He detested everything Western, and anything American in particular. Whenever possible Paula avoided him.

“Well, aren’t you going to tell us how incompetent we are?” he asked her as they stopped to wait at the elevator. Paula sighed and said nothing while she continued staring at the doors.

“Oh, lay off, Gennadi,” Josip said. “We’ve all had a hard day. Your great Russian bosses blew it. There’s no getting away from the fact, so why not shut up?”

Gennadi took no notice. “You see, it’s not really the soil we need. It’s the bacteria and things that come with it. But then,
we
are only fallible mortals. We don’t have supernatural beings to help us.” His tone was sarcastic. Ridiculing religion was one of Gennadi’s favorite lines.

“What’s that got to do with it?” Josip asked.

“Didn’t you know? Why do you think their God told Noah to build the ark? You didn’t imagine it was to save all those animals, did you, Josip? Oh, my word, no! The animals were simply the vehicles to carry God’s most precious creations, you see: the flea, the hookworm, the body louse, the intestinal parasite, the polio virus, and the dysentery bacterium. Aren’t malaria, cholera, yellow fever, and bubonic plague the punishments that this infinitely wise, compassionate, and forgiving Father preserved to inflict upon His children? The victims that He hounds the most gleefully are always the poor, the hungry, the defenseless. What kind of a fiend would we brand any human father who treated his children like that?”

They stepped into the elevator, but Gennadi continued, “Does it make any sense to you, Josip? I say, if the suffering people of this world have anywhere to turn for help, it’s their fellow man: engineers, scientists, builders, doctors, farmers. But when a disease is finally eradicated after causing untold misery for thousands of years, what do they do? They thank their God! I ask you! What did He have to do with it? Why did He make it happen in the first place?” Gennadi looked at Paula. “What I can’t understand is that you’re a scientist. How can you respect a government that does nothing to stop such fairy tales? Is it right that you force children to pray to this absurd God every morning in school?”

“That went away a long time ago,” Paula said as the door opened and they got out. “How merciful has the god been that you force children to pray to in
your
schools?” But the answer didn’t satisfy her.

They came out into the ground-level concourse of the building, where the inmates due to return to Zamork were assembling from various parts of the surrounding complex. Paula moved to the far end of the group, and to her relief Gennadi didn’t stay around but left via the main entrance. She stood without speaking to anyone until the bus drew up outside the main doors to take them back. Minutes later the bus had negotiated the geometric maze out of central Turgenev and merged onto the roadway running above the monorail track in the direction of Novyi Kazan.

The galling part of it all was that the things Gennadi said mirrored her own views on religion almost perfectly. There had been many times when she had pointed out the same nonsenses to the fundamentalist fanatics she’d come across back in the States. That was why she was always so disarmed by Gennadi’s arguments: she had never before been in the position of hearing virtually her own words turned back upon her, and of being able to find no way to respond.

And even more disturbing, what did it signify that he should be ascribing the same attributes to her, now, that she had always seen in people like him? She thought of Olga, and how their common appreciation of science bonded them into a global community that stood apart from superficial divisions of people into nations and creeds—meaningless divisions based not on comprehension of reality and truth, but on prejudice, myth, wishful thinking, and unreason. On both sides of the world, reason was subordinated to systems that were equally irrational, and yet were just as certain of themselves. Such systems couldn’t be entrusted with the future. Now, she thought, she understood how Maurice had felt.

* * *

When Paula arrived back at Zamork, she went for her evening meal—yellow-pea soup and bread, a potato, stewed pulp of cabbage leaves, and a slice of gelatinous processed meat that the cook insisted was ham—in the communal canteen of the Services Block. It was a busy time with the day workshift trickling in, but she spotted Elena, one of her companions from Hut 19, alone at one of the tables, and joined her.

Elena had somehow managed to retain her chubby build despite the unspectacular diet. She had straight brown hair, which she wore short with a fringe, ruddy cheeks, a second chin, and ample hips. Paula always pictured her as a farmer’s wife, but in fact she was a sociologist, and for that reason was out of favor with the authorities who decided what the mainstream lines of learning and thinking should be. Thus, with typical topsy-turvy Communist logic, only in the society that claimed to comprehend the social struggle as a science was its study by scientific processes actively discouraged—or banned outright if the findings didn’t support what doctrine said had to be true. Elena’s counterparts in the West usually made prime-time TV.

“I never used to consider social science a ‘science’ at all,” Paula confessed after they had talked for a while. “I’m not sure if I do now.”

“Oh?” Elena continued eating and didn’t seem perturbed.

“A science means being able to predict confidently what causes will produce what effects. It works with things like physics, but the processes that physics describes are really simple—particles and forces and how they interact. Yet it took centuries to get where it is, and we got it wrong at every opportunity. But you know, Elena, even the ecological webs that I’ve been working with for two months are simple compared to a nation’s social system, never mind the whole world’s. Nobody knows what changes will produce what results, whatever else they say to get funding. It’s all still at the voodoo stage: eventually it’ll rain if you dance long enough.”

Elena smiled. Paula admitted inwardly that she sometimes took advantage of Elena’s disposition in order to dump her own emotional charge when she was agitated about something. “I suppose you’re right,” Elena said. “Certainly sociology never managed to become very strong as an experimental science. You can’t very well go around putting people in cages to study them. . . . But then, of course, that was mainly all you Americans’ fault if anybody’s.” Elena’s eyes were twinkling.

Paula realized that she wasn’t about to be let off the hook so easily. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“If your really believe all the things you say about freedom and the rights of people to govern themselves, why didn’t you allow the United States to become a huge, natural sociological laboratory?” Elena replied. “You could have let every part of the country try out whatever kind of system appealed to it—liberal or authoritarian, secular, religious, whatever—and found out from experience what worked and what didn’t. Then you’d have seen which of the experts’ predictions succeeded, and been able to evaluate the worth of the experts doing the predicting. Instead, you introduced those big federal programs that cost fortunes and which I’m not convinced did much good—straight from untested speculation to national law, without any experimental stage in between. And the irony is, it’s exactly what you’ve always accused us of.”

“Touché,” Paula acknowledged. “I asked for that.”

“But it’s going to happen, nevertheless,” Elena went on.

“You think so?”

“It’s starting already—look at China. They’ve got cities that are rigidly Marxist just twenty miles from others that are totally laissez-faire. One area is run by a traditionalist religious sect that rejects technology, another has no laws at all relating to personal morality, and in another everyone carries a gun. Everyone migrates to where they think it’ll suit them best, and if they find they were wrong they try somewhere else.”

“It sounds like chaos.”

“It is in many ways, while they’re finding out how to make it work without fragmenting in all directions. But it’s true evolution in action. That’s why they’ll lead the migration out into space when it comes. What they’re doing is a foretaste of how it will be, but on a vaster scale. We haven’t seen diversity yet. It will be an explosion, not a migration.”

“If it happens,” Paula had said before she realized it.

Elena looked at her curiously. “Naturally it will happen. Why shouldn’t it?”

“Oh . . .” Paula sat back on the bench and looked around. “The way the world is. . . . Are the leaders on both sides smart enough to handle it? Take all the fuss there’s been about this place, for example. You’d think it would be a simple enough matter to settle once and for all if it’s a battle platform, wouldn’t you? But apparently it’s not so simple. Now they’re saying—”

“Of course it isn’t a battle platform,” Elena said. Her tone of voice left no room for doubt. “I’m sorry, but that really is a figment of your Western imagination—paranoia at its worst.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Common sense tells you.” Elena inclined her head to indicate a bespectacled man with a ginger beard, who was talking animatedly to a group at the next table. “Do you know who that is? Professor Valdik Palyatskin, one of the Soviet Union’s authorities on low-temperature fusion. The woman across from him is a specialist in genetic diseases. The skinny man over there, in the center on the far side, is one of the engineers who built the largest aluminum refinery in Siberia. I know it’s insane that such people should be in here because of their political views, but what matters for now is that they constitute a valuable potential resource to the state—in fact, if you want my opinion, I think that’s the whole reason why this place was set up as it is. This is the last place anyone would concentrate them in, if it were a battle platform. It would be a prime target. They’d be much safer down underneath Siberia somewhere.”

Elena pushed her plate away and looked up; but Paula’s face had taken on a distant look, and she didn’t answer. Of course. It was so obvious. But Western intelligence didn’t know the caliber of the people who were interned up here—not to mention many of the civilian population, who had come by choice. The Russians didn’t publish directories of names for anyone who might be curious. Here was something else that the intelligence advisers to the West’s decision-makers needed to know about.

For a moment Paula thought of simply going to General Protbornov and telling him that she wanted to communicate with the West, and why. Surely it would be in everyone’s interests. And as Olga had said when they talked about using Ivan, it would only be corroborating what the Soviets themselves had been saying publicly. But as she thought more about it, her enthusiasm waned. Coming through on an official Soviet communications channel, what would the chances be that her story would be believed? True, as was standard practice with all agents, she had memorized a coding method to indicate whether a communication was being sent freely or under coercion. But agents could be genuinely turned; the best people could be fooled and misled. And besides, the thought of cooperating with the Russians and then having to face Earnshaw later was enough to put the idea out of her head without further consideration.

But there was still Ivan.

“Are you going?” Elena asked, surprised, as Paula started to rise.

“Excuse me. Yes, I have to leave.”

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“I have to find Olga urgently.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Water pumped up by subterranean backstage machinery emerged near the top of the hill abutting the outer-hull wall to feed a stream that flowed back down to enter the reservoir at the beach. Behind the beach, the stream curved around a flat, open stretch of grass and sand that the privs used as a recreation area. Paula found Olga there, with a group of spectators who were watching some gymnasts vaulting. It seemed that Olga had been searching for her, too. Two Russian guards were looking on idly from a distance.

“Very well, I’ve decided,” Paula said without preliminaries. “I want to try making contact with the West through Ivan.” Olga opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything Paula went on, “I’ve just been talking with Elena. There are more things that they ought to know about this place—more than Maurice will tell them. When do you plan to send your next message?”

“That’s what I was looking for you to tell you about,” Olga said. “We already have it!”

“Already have what? I don’t understand. . . . What are you talking about?”

“We have a channel to your people in the West, via Ivan.”