Prisoners of Tomorrow (66 page)

“Five-sub-three primary’s starting to play up again, you’ll be happy to hear. Low-level profile, but it’s positive. We had a one-fifteen second burn on vernier two at seventeen hundred hours, which went okay. The main burn is behaving itself fine and correcting for trim as programmed. . . .” He shrugged. “That’s about it.”

Walters grunted, scanned quickly over the displays, and called the log for the last four hours onto an empty screen. “Looks like we’re in for another stripdown on that goddamn pump,” he murmured without turning his head.

“Looks like it,” Fallows agreed with a sigh.

“Not worth screwing around with,” Walters declared. “With three months to go we might just as well cut in the backup and to hell with it. Fix the thing after we get there, when the main drive’s not running. Why lose pounds sweating in trog-suits?”

“Tell it to Merrick,” Fallows said, making an effort not to show the disapproval that he felt. Talking that way betrayed a sloppy attitude toward engineering. Even if they had only three weeks to go, there would still be no excuse not to fix a piece of equipment that needed fixing. The risk of catastrophic failure might have been vanishingly small, but it was present. Good practice lay with reducing possibilities like that to zero. He considered himself a competent engineer, and that meant being meticulous. Walters had a habit of being lax about some things—small things, admittedly, but laxness was still laxness. To be ranked equally irked Fallows. “Log change of watch duty, Horace,” he said to the grille on the console. “Officer Fallows standing down. Officer Walters taking over.”

“Acknowledged,” Horace replied.

Fallows stood up and stepped aside, and Walters eased himself into the subcenter supervisor’s chair. “You’re off on a forty-eight, that right?” Walters asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Any plans?”

“Not really. Jay’s playing on one of the teams in the Bowl tomorrow. I’ll probably go and watch that. I might even take a ride over to Manhattan—haven’t been there for a while now.”

“Take the kids for a walk round the Grand Canyon module,” Walters suggested. “It’s being resculpted again—lots of trees and rocks, with plenty of water. Should be pretty.”

Fallows appeared surprised. “I thought it was closed off for another two days. Isn’t the Army having an exercise in there or something?”

“They wound it up early. Anyhow, Bud told me it’ll be open again tomorrow. Check it out and give it a try.”

“I might just do that,” Fallows said, nodding slowly. “Yeah . . . I could use being out and about for a few hours. Thanks for the tip.”

“Anytime. Take care.”

Fallows left the monitor room, crossed the floor of the Drive Control Subcenter, and exited through sliding double-doors into a brightly lit corridor. An elevator took him up two levels to another corridor, and minutes later he was being shown into an office that opened onto one side of the Engineering Command Deck. Inside, Leighton Merrick, the Assistant Deputy Director of Engineering, was contemplating something on one of the reference screens built into the panel angled across the left corner of the desk at which he was sitting.

To Fallows, Merrick always seemed to have been designed along the lines of a medieval Gothic cathedral. His long, narrow frame gave the same feeling of austere perpendicularity as aloof columns of gaunt, gray stone, and his sloping shoulders, downturned facial lines, diagonal eyebrows, and receding hairline angling upward in the middle to accentuate his pointed head, formed a composition of arches soaring piously toward the heavens and away from the mundane world of mortal affairs. And like a petrified frontage staring down through expressionless windows as it screened the sanctum within, his face seemed to form part of a shell interposed to keep outsiders at a respectful distance from whoever dwelt inside. Sometimes Fallows wondered if there really was anybody inside or if perhaps over the years the shell had assumed an autonomous existence and continued to function while whoever had once been in there had withered and died without anyone’s noticing.

Despite having worked under him for several years, Fallows had never been able to master the art of feeling at ease in Merrick’s presence. Displays of undue familiarity were hardly to be expected between echelon-six and echelon-four personnel, naturally, but even allowing for that, Fallows always found himself in acute discomfort within seconds of entering a room with Merrick in it, especially when nobody else was present. This time he wouldn’t let it happen, he had resolved for the umpteenth time back in the corridor. This time he would be rational about how irrational the whole thing was and refuse to be intimidated by his own imagination. Merrick had not singled him out as any special object of his disdain. He behaved that way with everybody. It didn’t mean anything.

Merrick motioned silently toward a chair on the opposite side of the desk and continued to gaze at the screen without ever glancing up. Fallows sat. After some ten seconds he began feeling uncomfortable. What had he done wrong in the last few days? Had there been something he’d forgotten? . . . or failed to report, maybe? . . . or left with loose ends dangling? He racked his brains but couldn’t think of anything. Finally, unnerved, Fallow managed to stammer, “Er . . . you wanted to see me, sir.”

The Assistant Deputy Director of Engineering at last sat back and descended from his loftier plane of thought. “Ah, yes, Fallows.” He gestured toward the screen he had been studying. “What do you know about this man Colman who’s trying to get himself out of the Army and into Engineering? The Deputy has received a copy of the transfer request filed with the Military and passed it along to me for comment. It seems that this Colman has given your name as a reference. What do you know about him?” The inclined chin and the narrowing of the Gothic eyebrows were asking silently why any self-respecting echelon-four engineering officer would associate with an infantry sergeant.

It took Fallows a moment or two to realize what had happened. Then he groaned inwardly as the circumstances came back to him.

“I, er . . . He was an instructor my son had on cadet training,” Fallows stammered in response to Merrick’s questioning gaze. “I met him at the end-of-course parade . . . talked to him a bit. He seemed to have a strong ambition to try for engineering school, and I probably said, ‘Why not give it a try?,’ or something like that. I guess maybe he remembered my name.”

“Mmmm. So you don’t really know anything about his experience or aptitude. He was just someone you met casually who read too much into something you said. Right?”

Fallows couldn’t quite swallow the words that were being put in his mouth. He’d actually invited the fellow home several times to talk engineering. Colman had some fascinating ideas. He frowned and shook his head before he could stop himself. “Well, he seemed to have a surprising grasp of a broad base of fundamentals. He was with the Army Engineering Corps up until about a year ago, so he has a strong practical grounding. And he’s studied extensively since we left Earth. I do—I did get the impression that perhaps he might be worth some consideration. But of course that’s just an opinion.”

“Worth considering for what? You’re not saying he’d make an engineering officer, surely.”

“Of course not! But one of the Tech grades maybe . . . Two or Three perhaps. Or maybe the graduate entry stream.”

“Hmph.” Merrick waved a hand at the screen. “Doesn’t have the academics. He’d need to do at least a year with kids half his age. We’re not a social rehabilitation unit, you know.”

“He has successfully self-taught Eng Dip One through Five,” Fallows pointed out. Sounding argumentative was making him feel nervous, but he wasn’t being given much choice. “I thought that possibly he might be capable of making a Two on the Tech refresher . . .”

Merrick glared across the desk suspiciously. Evidently he wasn’t getting the answers he wanted. “His Army record isn’t exactly the best one could wish for, you know. Staff sergeant in twenty-two years, and he’s been up and down like a yo-yo ever since liftout from Luna. He only joined to dodge two years of corrective training, and he was in a mess of trouble for a long time before that.”

“Well, I—I can’t pretend to know anything about that side of things, sir.”

“You do now.” Merrick arched his fingers in front of his face. “Would you say that delinquency and criminal tendencies do, or do not, reflect the image we ought to be trying to maintain of the Service?”

Faced with a question slanted like that, Fallows could only reply, “Well. . . no, I suppose not.”

“Aha!” Merrick seemed more satisfied. “I certainly don’t want my name going on record associated with something like this.” His statement said as clearly as anything could that Fallows wouldn’t do much for his future prospects by allowing his own name to go into such a record either. Merrick screwed his face up as if he were experiencing a sour taste. “Low-echelon rabble trying to rise above themselves. We’ve got to keep them in their places, you know, Fallows. That was what went wrong with the Old Order. It let them climb too high, and they took over. And what happened? They dragged it down
—
civilization. Do you want to see that happen again?”

“No, of course not,” Fallows said, not very happily.

“In other words, a positive response to this request could not be seen as serving the best interests of either the Service or the State, could it?” Merrick concluded.

Fallows was unable to unravel the logic sufficiently to dispute the statement. Instead, he shook his head. “It doesn’t sound like it, I suppose.”

Merrick nodded gravely. “An officer who abets an act contrary to the best interests of the Service is being disloyal, and a citizen who acts against the interests of the State could be considered subversive, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Well, that’s true, but—”

“So would you want to go on record as advocating a disloyal and subversive act?” Merrick challenged.

“Definitely not. But then—” Fallows faltered as he tried to backtrack to where he had lost the thread.

“Thank you,” Merrick said, pouncing on the opportunity to conclude. “I agree with and endorse your assessment. Very good, Fallows. Enjoy your leave.” Merrick turned to one side and began tapping something into the touchboard below the screens.

Fallows stood awkwardly and began moving toward the door. When he was halfway there he stopped, hesitated, then turned round again. “Sir, there’s just one thing I’d like—”

“That’s all, Fallows,” Merrick murmured without looking up. “You are dismissed.”

Fallows was still brooding fifteen minutes later in the transit capsule as it sped him homeward around the
Mayflower II
’s
six-mile-diameter Ring. Merrick was right, he had decided. He had been a fool. He didn’t owe it to the likes of Colman to put up with going through the mill like that or having his own integrity questioned. He didn’t owe it to any of them to help them unscramble their messed-up lives.

Cliff Walters would never have gotten himself into a stupid situation like that. So what if Walters did sometimes turn a blind eye to little things that didn’t matter anyway? Walters was a lot smarter when it came to the things that did matter. So much for Fallows, the smartass kid shuttling up from Arizona to save the universe, who still hadn’t learned how to keep his nose clean. Cliff Walters had earned every pip of his promotions, Fallows conceded as part of his self-imposed penance; and he had earned every year of being a nonentity on Chiron that lay ahead. Someday, maybe, he’d learn to listen to Jean.

CHAPTER THREE

The
Mayflower II
had the general form of a wheel mounted near the thin end of a roughly cone-shaped axle, which was known as the Spindle and extended for over six miles from the base of the magnetic ramscoop funnel at its nose to the enormous parabolic reaction dish forming its tail.

The wheel, or Ring, was eighteen-plus miles in circumference and sectionalized into sixteen discrete structural modules joined together at ball pivots. Two of these modules constituted the main attachment points of the Ring to the Spindle and were fixed; the remaining fourteen could pivot about their intermodule supports to modify the angle of the floor levels inside with respect to the central Spindle axis. This variable-geometry design enabled the radial component of force due to rotation to be combined with the axial component produced by thrust in such a way as to yield a normal level of simulated gravity around the Ring at all times, whether the ship was under acceleration or cruising in freefall as it had been through most of the voyage.

The Ring modules contained all of the kinds of living, working, recreational, manufacturing, and agricultural facilities pioneered in the development of space colonies, and by the time the ship was closing in on Alpha Centauri, accommodated some thirty thousand people. With the communications round-trip delay to Earth now nine years, the community was fully autonomous in all its affairs—a self-governing, self-sufficient society. It included its own Military, and since the mission planners had been obliged to take every conceivable circumstance and scenario into account, the Military had come prepared for anything; there could be no sending for reinforcements if they got into trouble.

The part of the
Mayflower II
dedicated to weaponry was the mile-long Battle Module, attached to the nose of the Spindle but capable of detaching to operate independently as a warship if the need arose, and equipped with enough firepower to have annihilated easily either side of World War II. It could launch long-range homing missiles capable of sniffing out a target at fifty thousand miles; deploy orbiters for surface bombardment with independently targeted bombs or beam weapons; send high-flying probes and submarine sensors, ground-attack aircraft, and terrain-hugging cruise missiles down into planetary atmospheres; and land its own ground forces. Among other things, it carried a lot of nuclear explosives.

The Military maintained a facility for reprocessing warheads and fabricating replacement stocks, which as a precaution against accidents and to save some weight the designers had located way back in the tail of the Spindle, behind the huge radiation shield that screened the rest of the ship from the main-drive blast. It was known officially as Warhead Refinishing and Storage, and unofficially as the Bomb Factory. Nobody worked there. Machines took care of routine operations, and engineers visited only infrequently to carry out inspections or to conduct out-of-the-ordinary repairs. Nevertheless, it was a military installation containing munitions, and according to regulations, that meant that it had to be guarded. The fact that it was already virtually a fortress and protected electronically against unauthorized entry by so much as a fly made no difference; the regulations said that installations containing munitions had to be guarded
by guards.
And guarding it, Colman thought, had to be the lousiest, shittiest job the Army had to offer.