James P. Hogan (25 page)

“Oh, you don’t feel like working today? Is that it? What do you take us for, fools? You don’t get away with that kind of thing here. You and you, take her arms. We’ll take her to work if she won’t walk.”

Paula felt two of the other women hold her on either side, and then she was on her way along the corridor again. She had a fleeting impression of somebody going the other way stopping to look curiously, two prisoners in work smocks wheeling a cart into an elevator on one side, and all the time the back of the guard striding ahead… wide hips swinging beneath the plain brown military skirt; massive calves encased in thick tan stockings; heavy, flat-heeled shoes. Now they were at the doors leading into the kitchens.

Her first breath inside was like an intake of hot, fetid gas from a furnace, and sent her reeling against one of the aluminum worktables. The Toad was there suddenly, saying something, but all Paula could hear was incoherent snatches of her voice mixed with the guard’s.

“… matter with her? Doesn’t she…”

“I think it’s… on the way here… malingering?”

“Yes,
you
! I’m talking to you! What do you
babble-babble, cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck-cluck
…”

Paula was distantly aware of her knees buckling. Her arm pushed out against something as she slid down the side of the table to the floor. There was a crash and the sounds of breaking glass. The faces of the Toad and the guard were peering down at her with their mouths moving, but both the sight and the sounds were out of focus. After the effort of trying to stand, the relief of sitting was like an escape to nirvana, She let her head fall back against the metal door behind her and closed her eyes, not minding if she stayed there forever. She couldn’t get up again, didn’t want to get up. Nothing could make her. That was all there was to it.

… Then she was being stretched out along the floor. A coat or something was being tucked around her. She drifted….

“Hey, can you hear me?” Someone was slapping her cheek lightly. She was still lying on a hard floor, feeling cold and shivery now. A hand was feeling her pulse… then her eyelid was being lifted. A bright light… Collar being opened, dermal diffusion capsule taped to the side of her neck. She opened her eyes briefly and saw a woman in a white cap and a medical smock lowering a red blanket. Warmth, blessed warmth…

Voices echoed from far away. “Oh no, she’s got something all right… Couldn’t guess at this stage… will be notified in due course…”

Hands were lifting her….

She was watching Mike showering. Mike had been the oldest of the lovers she’d had. She liked his body the most. He had big shoulders and a barrel chest, and even the thickening around his midriff had excited her as a sign of maturity. He reminded her of Robert Mitchum, one of her favorites from the old-time movies, before they’d been taken over by health-faddist adolescents. She and Mike used to shower together after they made love. The best times had been late in the evening, before going out to dinner, or maybe to a party somewhere in Washington. He grinned and gestured for her to join him. But as she moved he began changing into the Toad. The closer she approached, the more he transformed. She recoiled, and it was Mike again. There was no way to get to him.

The dream dissolved, leaving her tense and agitated. She turned her head to the side and felt it resting on a pillow that felt soft and smelt clean. The remnant of the image in her mind died away, and her tension with it. Her toes were rubbing on the luxury of smooth linen. The sounds of a woman’s footsteps on a hard floor, lasting for a few seconds, stopping, then starting again, and a man’s voice talking in Russian, filtered through into her awareness.

She opened her eyes and saw a room with beds and lockers, pastel-yellow walls, and some kind of wheeled apparatus consisting of metal flasks, rubber tubes, and a panel with lights and switches standing at the far end. Raising her head, she saw she was in a small medical ward. A blond orderly was collecting dishes from the other beds and taking them to a cart standing in the center aisle, and a woman on the far side was watching something on a flatscreen mounted on a hinged arm extending across the bed. Another woman was reading, others were sleeping. Paula tried to sit up, but she was too weak and her head swam from the attempt. She followed the orderly with her eyes, licked her lips as she summoned up the effort, and finally managed to croak, “
Pozalsta
…”

The orderly looked round, put down the plate she was holding, and came over. She had blue eyes and a pretty face. “So, you are awake now,” she said in Russian. “How do you feel?”

“Could I get something to drink?”

“Water, yes? I don’t know if anything else would be good.” She half-filled a glass from a pitcher on the locker by the bed and helped Paula to lift her head. Nothing had ever tasted so good. “Better? I’ll get the nurse to come and look at you. Sleep some more, now.”

“
Spasiba, spasiba
.” Paula lay back and closed her eyes.

Simply to be talked to like a human being again… She put out of her mind any thought about how long it was likely to last.

They told her it was food poisoning. She told them she wasn’t surprised. It would soon pass, they said. One more day of rest, and then there would be no reason for her not to return to work. No, she protested, surely not so soon. She didn’t feel up to walking, let alone laboring for ten hours. One more day – they were adamant.

Paula found herself dreading the thought of going back. Several of the other women with her in the ward were also Russians, but they exhibited nothing comparable to the hostility she had been subjected to back in the cell. It seemed she’d managed to get herself confined with just about the worst mix of personalities that she could have run up against.

The woman across the aisle was called Tanya and came originally from Volgograd. It used to be Stalingrad before the Party went through one of its periodic interchangings of black and white and deglorified the great dictator’s memory. Tanya was a teacher, and had been arrested for promoting among her pupils ideas that conflicted with the official ideological doctrines. “I couldn’t care less about their stupid doctrines,” she told Paula. “And that’s one of the worst crimes for a teacher. I couldn’t make the bureaucrats understand that objective reality
is
what it is, and that it doesn’t care what any Party tries to say it should be. We can only discover. Children should be taught
how
to think, not
what
to think. That was all I cared about – children’s minds.”

“And that can be a crime?”

“A potential threat to the regime – the ultimate crime. But surely it’s the same everywhere. Isn’t religion used in America for the same purpose – to instill obedience and stifle questions?”

Paula shook her head. “No – it’s just there if people want it. In fact, you can’t mix it with education, by law.”

Tanya looked at her curiously. “Really? That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. I haven’t met many Americans. They don’t give you permission to travel to other countries very easily over there, do they?”

“You don’t need any permission. Anybody can just get on a plane and go where they want.”

“I hadn’t heard that before…. You
are
being serious, I suppose?”

In the next bed was Anastasia, from Khabarovsk on the Pacific side of Siberia, who said her brother had been convicted of passing secrets to the Chinese. “I hope it doesn’t affect my son’s career,” she told Paula, “He’s such a bright boy. At school they’re teaching him to program computers. Do American boys ever get to see a computer when they’re only fifteen?”

Paula was told she would be moving back to her cell after the evening meal, As the afternoon wore on, she grew quieter, and became inwardly nervous to the borderline of being fearful. She tried to read and rest to recover her strength as best she could, but the emotional strain was draining energy out of her faster than it was recharging. She even toyed with the thought of staging an accident – anything to put off the moment of having to return to the kitchens and the cell.

And then, when there was less than an hour to go before the evening meal was brought in, she heard a voice that she recognized remonstrating loudly in the corridor beyond the ward door, which was open. “I don’t care if you are a doctor. It isn’t doing her any good, I tell you. It isn’t a matter of medical knowledge, it’s a matter of common sense.” Paula looked up sharply. The Russian woman with fiery, shoulder-length hair had stopped just outside. She was wearing a light-green two-piece tunic and talking to a gray-bearded man in a knee-length white coat, Paula caught a glimpse of her firmly defined, high-cheeked features and determined chin as she half-turned and raised a hand to make her point. The man said something in a lower voice that Paula couldn’t catch, and then they moved on. “Then, I’ll make sure that somebody in higher authority is informed. If you won’t sign a simple…” The orange-haired woman’s voice faded away.

Suddenly Paula was seized by uncontrollable desperation. “Anna!” she called out.

The blond orderly came out of the instrument room at the far end of the ward. “You wanted something?”

“Yes, look, somebody I know just went past, out there in the corridor. She went that way, with a doctor. Please catch her and tell her I have to talk to her, would you? It’s very important. She has red hair, and she was wearing a green suit.”

Anna nodded and hurried out into the corridor. Paula lay back against her pillow and found that she was trembling. But she couldn’t let the chance pass by. Slowly she calmed down, Chance?… Chance of what? Now she didn’t even know what she was going to say.

Footsteps sounded outside, and a moment later Anna came back in. “I found the lady,” she announced, looking at Paula oddly. “She doesn’t know an American woman called Paula Shelmer. But she will come and see what you want. She’ll be here in a minute or two, she says.” Anna disappeared back into the room at the rear.

Paula looked around. Tanya was sleeping, and Anastasia was sitting at the table at the far end of the ward, writing something. Of the other three from the nearby beds, two were away undergoing therapy, and the other was at the table with Anastasia. So it would be possible to speak with some privacy at least. She lay back, trying to force herself to breathe normally and relax.

The orange-haired woman reappeared in the corridor outside, entered, saw Paula without showing a flicker of recognition, and continued looking around. Eventually her eyes wandered back. Paula nodded and mustered a smile. The Russian woman came over to the bed and stood looking down with a puzzled expression on her face. “You are the American?” she said in excellent English. “Do I know you?… But yes, your face does seem familiar.”

“Turgenev six weeks ago – the Security Headquarters. You were giving two officers a tough time. I was outside. You came out and spoke to me.”

Comprehension flowed into the Russian woman’s face. It was an amazingly expressive face. “Yes, of course! The nervous girl in the corridor. I was trying to place you somewhere here, not back there. So, we both wound up in Zamork.” She waved a hand briefly. “But why are you in here?”

“Food poisoning, they said. A bug or something…. I don’t know.”

“You are an American, so. And your name is Paula. I am called Olga. But the girl said there was something important. What is it?”

Paula looked over her shoulder and then back. “It’s not really something I’d want to make public knowledge…”

Olga moved closer and sat down on the edge of the bed. She looked at Paula questioningly. “Well?”

“You said not to be intimidated.”

“That’s right. They will try, but you mustn’t let them. Once they find a crack, they have you. Then they keep hammering in wedges. But strength, they respect. It’s all they respect. If only America had understood that sixty years ago.”

“The place they’ve put me in is dreadful. And the people there… It’s not so much intimidation as degradation.”

“Yes, that is another of their nasty tricks. I sympathize. Make a fuss until they change it. You Americans are like the

British and try to compromise to please everybody. It can’t be done. You just end up pleasing nobody. That’s not the way to deal with Russians. They all shout, and whoever shouts the loudest and longest gets his way.” Olga patted Paula’s arm affectionately and started to rise. Paula caught her by the sleeve.

“I heard you telling those officers that you are a scientist.”

Olga hesitated, then sat down again. “So, what of it?”

“And that’s how you come to speak English so well?” Olga nodded but didn’t reply. Paula went on, “What does a scientist do in a place like this? I mean, are there opportunities to use your mind, to think? Are there others you can communicate with?”

“Naturally there are. This is a space habitat. Resources are limited. They don’t ship people this far to open doors and count heads.”

Paula took a long breath. “I am a scientist, too,” she said. She’d decided before Olga came in that she could hardly do any damage by revealing no more than Protbornov and his interrogators had already established.

“Well, that’s very good, and I respect you as a fellow professional. But I still don’t see what —”

“You have influence. You can persuade people. Look, I scrape grease off dishes in a stinking kitchen and scrub floors, day after day. Can you talk to someone who might get me moved out? I can do more good somewhere else – better for me, and better for the colony.”

Olga frowned, “Are you saying you want to work for them?” Paula noticed she said “them” and not “us.”

“I’m not talking about changing sides,” Paula said. “I Just want to work as a person – on something that has no military value. There must be such things here. You just said yourself that resources are valuable here. Why waste any? There are children in the colony – I could teach science, maybe; or there might be something connected with medicine, agriculture… anything.”

Olga looked dubious. “Well, I really don’t know what I can do….” She caught the imploring look in Paula’s eyes, but that only seemed to make her more defensive. She got up and began turning away. “My own problems are one thing – I can shout at them about things like that. But interfering in policy on something like this is different. I am sorry, but I’m sure it will all straighten itself out in good —” She stopped as if a new thought had just struck her, and turned back. “What kind of scientist are you?”