James P. Hogan (18 page)

Foleda was looking more interested already. “So what’s this?” he said, “The CIA handing out freebies?”

Litherland returned a faint grin. “I guess we’ve decided that maybe we’re on the same side after all,” he said.

Foleda looked at Barbara. She inclined her head in a way that said she couldn’t find any snags. “Okay,” he announced resignedly. “Let’s suppose I’m sold. But it’s obvious that Cabman can only serve our purpose for as long as he stays at Sokhotsk. Therefore we should react encouragingly, but keep stalling him.”

“That’s what we were hoping you’d say.” Kehrn came back to his chair and sat down. Litherland nodded. “Fine.”

“Callous, calculated exploitation of another human being,” Barbara remarked.

“It’s that kind of business, Barb,” Foleda agreed with a sigh.

Back in the days when she was an engineering student, Paula Bryce had had a poster among the pictures, astronomical charts, and assorted samples of encapsulated philosophy cluttering the wall of her apartment, which read:

He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. Avoid him.

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is ignorant. Teach him.

He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep. Waken him.

But he who knows, and knows that he knows, is a wise man. Follow him.

At the bottom, in a fit of exasperation one day, she had scrawled,
He who knows not whether he knows or knows not anything at all is a politician. Get rid of him
! Paula had never been exactly enamored with politics.

After growing up in a Navy family with an independent-minded mother whom she admired, she had found most of the girls she met in her teenage years silly and boring, and the boys either crude and immature or despairingly wimpish, rarely somewhere in between. So she tended to spend her time in solitary occupations, usually at a computer keyboard or behind a book. She read Ayn Rand, Kant, and Nietzsche when she was in a serious mood, hard science-fiction to relax, and books that debunked UFO’s, psychic powers, quack medical fads, ancient astronauts, and the like, for amusement. She experimented with drugs, which she didn’t like, alcohol, which was okay, and sex, which was great. In her studies she found the challenge and rigor of the sciences stimulating, but kept liberal arts and the humanities to a minimum; they struck her as wishy-washy, too subjective in their conventional wisdoms, and they invariably attracted in droves precisely the kinds of people she couldn’t stand.

On one occasion during the campus period of her life, she found herself representing the opposition to a group of sociology students who claimed to have obtained positive results in a series of ESP card-guessing tests, which they challenged the science fraternity to debate. Paula showed how a comparable score could be derived by matching the results to a selected portion of a random-number string, thus proving once again to the world that sometimes people have lucky streaks, sometimes unlucky, and most of the time they muddle along somewhere in between. The revelation would not have surprised any experienced gambler, but her efforts made little impression on the judges and the editors of the college magazine, who awarded the verdict to the paranormalists on the grounds that “the influence of ESP has not been disproved.” And neither had the existence of Santa Claus ever been disproved, Paula pointed out in disgust, but to no avail.

Deciding on a career in science or engineering but unable to face the prospect of more years in academia, she followed the family tradition by opting for the services, and joined the Air Force in 2000 at age eighteen. After basic training she entered the USAF electronics school at Keesler AFB, Missouri, qualified there for a grant scholarship, transferred to Communications Command, and went on to complete her doctorate under Air Force sponsorship at the University of Chicago. After that she moved to the Pentagon to work on the performance evaluation of special-purpose military hardware, which involved spells at NASA, Goddard, and the USAF research center at Langley. Life settled down to a fairly humdrum routine in these years, and she relieved the boredom through a protracted affair that she rather enjoyed with a married officer twenty years her senior, called Mike. He was the kind of nonconformist who attracted her, and had earned his promotions through competence rather than the kind of social image-building that was typical in any nation’s peacetime officer corps. But after two years Mike was posted to the Mediterranean, and for a change of scene Paula applied for a posting to Systems Command. She was accepted, and eventually became a specialist in analyzing purloined Russian and East European hardware.

In all this time her disdain for politics and economics persisted. In her view, for anybody with the brains to see it, breeder reactors and fusion, spaceflight, computers, and genetic engineering had laid Thomas Malthus firmly to rest. There was no longer any necessary reason for people anywhere to starve, or anything logical for them to continue fighting each other over. In fact, wars squandered the resources that could have solved the problems that the wars were supposed to be about. Scientists had been saying for over fifty years that there was plenty of energy and everything else, that the planet wasn’t overcrowded and would never come close, and that modern-day lifestyles were incomparably healthier, safer, more prosperous, and more varied in opportunities than “natural” living had ever been. But nobody told the public. It wasn’t news, and what the media didn’t talk about didn’t exist. Politicians couldn’t see it, or perhaps they pretended not to because it wasn’t the kind of talk that generated fears and attracted funding, and in the course of it all they had created the cultural pessimism that was handing the twenty-first century to Asia. That labeled them in Paula’s book as just about the worst class of people to be running the world.

And ineptitude seemed to be just as much a mark of whoever was responsible for running the place she was in now, she thought wearily as she sat with her back to the wall on the thinly padded cot and surveyed the austere cell that she’d been cooped up in for she didn’t know how long. The single unshaded bulb in the ceiling was turned down sometimes but was never out, the intervals varying erratically so that she had lost all track of time. They had moved her here from a double cell, where the series of cellmates who had come and gone had been so transparently planted that on one occasion, for once since her capture, she had actually laughed out loud. If that was an example of the Russian fiendishness that had kept the West paralyzed for a century, then the West deserved to be eclipsed by Asia, she concluded.

First there had been Hilda, the East German, with her smile, blond fringe, and baby-doll blue eyes. “I am your friend. It is a mistake that I am here in this place. I know some important people outside, and I can help you after I am released. But first I must know more about you. What is your name? Where are you from?…”

Then there had been Luba, supposedly arrested for spreading subversive propaganda among students in Rostov. Her line had been scare tactics: “They tell the world that they’ve changed their ways, but they haven’t. Nothing has changed. They’re still as bad. They will keep you from sleeping for a week or more, leave you for days in a cell below freezing, and starve you until you can’t stand up. By the time you meet your own people again there will be no marks. But you’ll tell them what they want to know eventually. I like you. I don’t like to think of you doing something like that to yourself. Why not make it easy?”

But the effect had been the opposite of that intended. Paula’s initial fear had given way to a resolve that stemmed from a growing feeling of contempt. As the interminable interrogations went on without change of tune, the facade had peeled away from Protbornov and his troupe to reveal them as played-out actors in roles that had become mechanical and stylized. The monotony Was not, after all, a deliberate ploy to wear her down, as she’d first thought. In fact it wasn’t anything clever at all. She had vague, incoherent recollections of her interrogators rambling on about religion, social sciences, things that had nothing to do with the present situation – anything to take up time, it seemed. The simple fact was that they had nothing else to say, nowhere left to go, and they were waiting for somebody else to figure out what to do.

She leaned forward on the cot to pull the blanket up around her shoulders and tuck the edges under her knees. That was another thing: the room was always either too chilly or too hot, but never comfortable. She snorted beneath her breath. Was this really a measure of the opposition she was up against? If so, it wasn’t just mediocre, but infantile. People could do themselves a disservice by overestimating their opponents, she reflected. Maybe the West had been doing just that for a hundred years.

During the days, weeks, months – however long she’d been shut up – she had occupied herself by going through old debates again in her head. She remembered reading tales of calculating prodigies, and tried devising methods for performing calculations rapidly in her head. There had been a woman in India once who could mentally multiply two thirteen-digit numbers in the astounding time of twenty-eight seconds. Paula found the best way was to work from left to right, adding the part sums progressively, rather than from right to left as taught in schools. She wondered if schools taught it that way because it used less paper. She had passed the time playing word games in her head (how many palindromes could she think of?), compiling lists of useless facts (how many place-names start with G?), playing with scientific speculations (what would the world look like if Planck’s constant were a million times larger?), and reminiscing over events in her life.

From the time she had spent in Massachusetts, she remembered warm summer Saturday evenings in the waterfront marketplace of downtown Boston, where she went with her occasional dates to walk among the crowds and the sidewalk restaurants, maybe visiting a bar or two before deciding where to have dinner. The hearty locker-room types who made opening gambits by cracking off-color jokes had never lasted long. The ones with something worthwhile to say, and an interest in what she thought, did better, Earnshaw had refused to oblige by fitting into any of her categories. She often wondered what had happened to him since the first of May. Perhaps he was no longer even on
Tereshkova
.

The sound of the door being unlocked interrupted her thoughts. It swung inward, and a blank-faced guard with oriental features stepped through while a second waited outside. “You come now.” Paula sighed, pulled the blanket aside, and stood up. She did her best to smooth her crumpled shirt and slacks, and instinctively brushed the ever-recalcitrant curl of hair from her forehead. The guard moved a step nearer and reached out as if to jostle her elbow to hurry her. She moved her arm out of the way and glared. The guard hesitated, then stood aside. Paula walked by him, out into the familiar corridor of gray walls and numbered doors.

They went up a flight of stairs, around a corner, and along another corridor to a narrow hallway with benches by the walls on either side. The doorway into the room that General Protbornov used was open, and Paula could see him already seated behind the desk inside, smoking a cigarette. The guard who had been leading motioned her forward, but before she had moved more than a step a telephone rang inside the room, and another officer appeared in the doorway with his hand raised for her to wait. He closed the door, and Paula drew back. The two guards had reverted to zombie mode and were standing a few yards away, one in each direction along the hall, apparently without much idea of what was supposed to happen next. She sat down on one of the benches to see what they would do. They didn’t do anything.

Then she became aware of a commotion of raised voices coming from behind one of the other doors. She looked up curiously, and as she did so the door opened partly and a Russian lieutenant started to come out. A woman’s voice called from behind him, unmistakably sarcastic in tone, but Paula could catch only a few of the phrases since her Russian was not fluent. “That’s right, run and call a guard… afraid I’ll bite?… And
we
expect
you
to protect us!”

“Please sit down,” another man’s voice pleaded from in-side. The lieutenant turned to talk back into the room. “Look, you said you wanted to talk to somebody with the appropriate qualifications. Well, I’m going to fetch somebody now, all right? As you say, we do not have the qualifications.”

“You don’t have the sense, you mean,” the woman’s voice retorted. “What do you take me for, a common criminal or something – a pickpocket or a whore? Look, I am a senior scientist from Novosibirsk.” Paula raised her eyebrows. Novosibirsk was one of the major Soviet scientific centers, especially for advanced physics. “Does that mean anything to either of you? I have been brought here because of political protest, which I claim is my right, and I object to the way this is being dealt with. I demand to speak to whoever is in charge of this entire establishment. Don’t you realize this could get you shipped back to Earth and ten years in a camp?”

“Be patient, if you are capable. I will seek instructions.” The lieutenant turned back from the doorway into the hall. The two guards straightened themselves up. “It’s all right, at ease,” the lieutenant muttered. “See that the bitch in there doesn’t leave.” He saw Paula sitting on the bench. “Oh God, another one.” She watched him walk away along the corridor, shaking his head.

The lieutenant had left the door open, and through it Paula could hear the voice of the other man who had spoken earlier. “Yes, this is Colonel Tulenshev. I want to know if Sergei Gennadevitch is there. Have you seen him recently?… We have a small problem here. See if you can find him and put him on the line, would you?,,. No, it’s not serious, but I would like…”

Then Paula realized that the woman who had been doing the shouting was standing in the doorway. She looked at Paula for a moment, and then, tossing an indifferent glance at the two guards, came out and sat down next to her on the bench. The guards had been told not to let her leave. She wasn’t leaving. So they remained where they were and didn’t intervene.