James P. Hogan (14 page)

“Kevin is right,” Vorghas agreed. “This place breeds mistrust. Prudence is all very well, but it can go too far.”

“And how will you ever become a priv if you don’t trust people?” Scanlon asked. Vorghas laughed.

McCain had heard the expression before. It was a saying of Luchenko’s and seemed to be a joke of some kind among the inmates. “What’s a priv?” he asked, looking at the others.

“Hasn’t anyone told you about them yet?” Vorghas asked. McCain shook his head.

“Privileged-category prisoners.” Smovak said. “You’re only regular category, see.”

“They live up on surface level.” Vorghas said.

Clearly that hadn’t conveyed much to McCain, either. Scanlon explained, “There’s an upper level to Zamork, out on the surface, above the part that we’re in down here. They live in huts with grass around them, and trees – not packed into smelly billets as is good for the likes of us. There’s less work for them to do, of course, and more frills – just like in the real world.
And
,” he added with a wink, “the women and the men are mixed together. Now, there’s a carrot for you if ever there was one. Mungabo, the poor fella, drives himself wild thinking about it.”

“They’ve even got a beach up there.” Vorghas said.

“A beach!” Smovak repeated, as if daring McCain to challenge it. McCain stared at them in astonishment.

“You see, there’s a high-level reservoir next to this place, between Zamork and the town.” Vorghas said. “It feeds the water system that drains down through the recreation area between Novyi Kazan and the ag zone. Well, the privs have got a beach on it up there.”

“What kind of people are these privs?” McCain asked, growing more curious.

“The professional class of the classless society.” Smovak told him.

Vorghas nodded. “Scientists, teachers, and such-– dissidents that the Party wants to keep out of the way for a while, but without upsetting them too much. They’re worried about the risk of bad publicity later.”

“Frightened of changes in the winds that swirl through the Kremlin’s blustery halls.” Scanlon recited lyrically.

McCain smiled faintly as he chewed his bread. It was heavy and grainy in texture, “And people from down here can get promoted?” he said.

“It happens.” Scanlon replied. “But ‘tis a rare thing when it does. Many a Luchenko lives in hope, but few are chosen.”

McCain nodded distantly. So the foremen and the block supervisors had their incentives, too. It fitted with the general scheme of things, but that still didn’t shed any light on the reasons why. “So what’s it all for?” he asked the others. “Why is this place here, and why is it the way it is?” There was a quick exchange of glances among the others, and a pause of a second or two. McCain obviously wasn’t the first to have wondered about such questions.

“Progressive psychology.” Vorghas declared. “I think it’s an experiment that the KGB psychologists dreamed up – a new approach to behavior modification.” He leaned forward and let his voice fall a fraction. “Look around. You haven’t got any of your ordinary criminals and riffraff here. These are all potentially useful people. Think of the advantages if you can find out how to rehabilitate people like these and save their skills for the state.” He gestured vaguely around and overhead with the spoon he was holding. “It’s the isolation. Everything is supposed to take on a new perspective from this oasis of humanity out in space – the vastness of the universe and the puniness of Man, and that kind of thing. We’re supposed to come to see that we’re all alike underneath and have to work together….” He shrugged and resumed eating. “That’s what I think, anyway.” McCain listened but wasn’t convinced. That might have explained the privs with their huts and beach upstairs, but what about the rest? There was a fat lot of the vastness of the universe to be seen from a bottom bunk in the lower level of B-3.

“Why make a complicated issue out of it?” Smovak asked. “The Russians are a century behind the times. They’re only just finding out about methods the rest of the world has been using for years, and they don’t want to admit it. So they’ve set their experiment up nice and quietly, away from where it would get attention, so they can fold it all up and forget it without any embarrassment if they make a mess of it. That’s Russians all over.”

“Ah, is that so, now?” Scanlon challenged. “That’s every bit as involved as what Leo said, I’m sitting here thinkin’. Why couldn’t they simply be doing the same as the rest, and shipping the troublemakers as far away as they can from where they might do damage? Didn’t the Brits have to send half o’ themselves all over the world because there wasn’t a decent one of them? I can’t agree with what either of ye is saying, now. Jet planes and telephones have moved Siberia a lot closer to Moscow than it used to be, and that’s all there is to it.”

McCain looked down and carried on eating his stew in silence. He’d listened to the answers, and he didn’t believe any of them. The curious thing was that he’d watched the people giving the answers, and he didn’t think they believed them any more than he did. But they were safe answers. The simple fact was that nobody in the place trusted anybody.

Maybe that was the whole idea.

McCain sat at one end of the center-aisle table in the front section of the billet, contemplating the diagram that he had been sketching. On the top bunk behind him, Mungabo was admiring a new addition to his collection of lascivious pinups. Mungabo’s passion for Americana – an attitude that had done little to improve his credibility with the KGB at his court-martial – it turned out, derived from his dream of the kind of life he’d seen blacks living in American porno movies, which he took to be representative of the typical New England suburban social scene.

“Hey, Lew, waddya say to this for a piece of pink-shot?” he called down dreamily. “Isn’t that the horniest thing you’ve ever seen in your life? Did you ever make it with a chick like that back in the States?”

“All the time.” McCain drawled over his shoulder. “They come as extras with the hotel rooms. Hell, I did better’n that while I was at college.” Mungabo sighed and stared agonizedly at the picture. He’d never understood why the Russians wanted to take over the West if they got the chance. Now it was all starting to make much more sense.

McCain’s sketch was of the system of mirrors by which sunlight illuminated the interior of the colony. It had begun with an idea that Scanlon had mentioned first in the machine shop. Scanlon had tried drawing it but didn’t have enough knowledge of the details, whereas McCain had the benefit of the information he’d memorized for the mission.

The first component of the system was a large, annular, primary mirror that hung detached in space a mile away along the colony’s axis, looking like an enormous version of an ophthalmoscope, which old-time eye doctors wore on their foreheads. It produced a ring-section beam of reflected sunlight – a tube, like a hollow tree-trunk – and according to the relative motions of the Earth-Moon-Sun system could be steered by thrusters to keep the beam trained down the axis, onto the hub. Here the beam encountered a ring of plane secondary mirrors around the hub, which relayed the light radially outward to the roof of the outer torus, where an arrangement of louvered reflecting slats admitted visible light and heat, but blocked cosmic rays. The secondary mirrors could be tilted independently to illuminate or darken different parts of the torus as required.

The path that a ray of light followed was thus from the Sun to the primary mirror, from there down the axis to a secondary mirror, and after a couple more reflections in the chevron-section roof slats, down to a point somewhere on the “ground” inside. Scanlon’s thought was that if a laser were aimed at the roof from the ground inside, its beam ought to trace the same optical path, but in the opposite direction. In other words, it might offer a means of communicating information out. The problem, of course, was that whoever the information was intended for would have to be looking for it, which presupposed that some other way of talking to them existed in the first place. Besides, Scanlon wasn’t even sure if the idea was feasible, and McCain didn’t know either. This would be more in Paula’s line.

He sat back, chewing his pencil while he watched Haber and Rashazzi over by the bunk on the far side, fiddling with an improvised contraption of lenses and mirrors. They seemed to have access to an inexhaustible number of sources of components and materials for the Rube Goldberg gadgets that they made to demonstrate the incomprehensible things they talked about. Those two would know if the idea was feasible, McCain thought. But how was he to broach the subject? His instincts told him that they, if any in the billet, were clean; the problem would be convincing them that he was.

He was certain now in his own mind that Rashazzi was no biologist, although the Israeli kept cages of mice in the washroom at the back of the billet, which he told Luchenko were for breeding experiments. But on one or two occasions he had used figures of speech that were straight from the specialist jargon that McCain was used to hearing around the Pentagon – such as “eggbuster.” for an X-ray battle laser tuned to vaporize the hardened shells of warhead reentry vehicles. He was pretty sure that Razz was a defense scientist of some kind.

He hadn’t formed any clear impression of what Haber was. All Haber had told him was that he’d been apprehended in Moscow and accused of receiving Soviet military secrets during an exchange visit. From his varied topics of conversation, he seemed to be one of those all-rounders from the grand old classical school of scientists.

The problem was the universal mistrust. Fostering mutual suspicion among enemies and subjects was the traditional Russian way of making organized opposition all but impossible. And it was also part of the traditional Russian character to submit, which was one reason why totalitarianism had survived there for a century. But McCain was not a Russian, and it wasn’t in his nature to conform to other people’s ideas of how he should behave. He needed some way – even if just a token – of defying the system. But how? Escape, the usual outlet for such urges in this kind of situation, was surely impossible. Blind rage and destruction was hardly his style. What else was there? Whatever he came up with, he’d have to start finding out pretty soon who his friends were.

“If Americans designed a space colony, it wouldn’t be like this one, would it, Lew?” Mungabo said from the bunk behind. “It wouldn’t be all antiseptic.”

The question caught McCain far way in his reverie. “What?… I don’t know. What do you mean, antiseptic?”

“Look around at the towns and places. Everybody lives in nice, clean, respectable boxes, and does nice, clean, respectable jobs, and they play healthy games in the parks, and the kids sit in lines in nice schools…. You see, it’s all the perfect picture of an academic professor’s or some social-work counselor’s idea of how other people oughta live. Except nobody asked the people. It’s like living in a museum…. How can anyone have fun being a respectable social statistic?”

McCain half-turned and rested an elbow on the back of the chair. “How would you change it if it were up to you?”

“Hell, I’d add a bit of nightlife to them squeaky-clean towns they’ve got out there – a few bars, maybe some strip joints, the things that make
real cities
cities. Give people a chance to be honest-to-God, flesh-and-blood people, know what I mean? That’s how Americans would have done it, right?”

“Maybe.” McCain said. “It goes to extremes both ways, I guess.”

“I remember when I was a kid growing up in Ziganda, we had this preacher came all the way from Boston to save us from hell.” Mungabo said. “He told us that America was God’s second chosen nation. And do you know how he figured that?”

“How?”

“He said it was a revelation because ‘USA’ was right there inside ‘Jer
us
alem. ’ Ain’t that something?”

McCain blinked, looked back over his shoulder, and thought for a moment. “Was that the same God that put the ass in Massachusetts?”

Mungabo threw back his head and laughed. “Can’t say I know about that. But you know, Lew, that whole business that guys like him talk about – it always struck me as the neatest con operation that anyone ever dreamed up. I mean, they’re selling eternity, and your payoff in some hereafter, right? Well, that keeps ’em all pretty safe from complaints by dissatisfied customers, don’t it? – or from being sued because they didn’t deliver? When did the last person come back and tell everyone it ain’t the way they were told it is?”

“Well, I guess it’s not my problem.” McCain said, “It’s not something I ever did buy any stock in.”

Razz, Haber, Mungabo, and Scanlon were probably okay, McCain had decided. What about Koh?… He still wasn’t sure. As proverbially impenetrable as the Chinese side of him, Koh was a philosophical observer of life – and hence of everybody and everything – with innumerable ancestors, and living relatives seemingly everywhere on Earth. Nobody knew how he had come to be in Zamork. McCain had heard some say he was an obvious plant; and others that no plant would be that obvious.

What about the rest? McCain turned in his chair and surveyed the billet. Nolan was too transparent. He had to be the decoy. So who was the real one? Luchenko, of course, was excluded from the list of potential allies. Along with Luchenko, McCain eliminated the rest of the group that seemed to form a constellation around him at the far end, which apart from Nolan and the Bulgarian Maiskevik, included Borowski, a Pole, and a morose Frenchman called Taugin.

And yet, for all that watching and listening was part of the foremen’s jobs, McCain was discovering that they could, usually for a price, be surprisingly ready to turn a blind eye to some of the things that went on. The underground distillery trade and black market with the towns, for example, couldn’t have existed without their knowing; and he’d heard of one instance where the foreman of another billet had cooperated in covering a prisoner’s absence from work. Why would a foreman put his own privileges at risk when there was nothing to gain? It wouldn’t make sense. So in reality it had to be a covert part of their job. If that were true, then the security precautions and detention-style discipline were to a large degree a superficiality carried out for effect – a charade to satisfy expectations. What did that mean?