James P. Hogan (36 page)

“My unit has been tampered with,” McCain said. “The insert is only held by a soluble adhesive that Razz cooked up. You see, whoever designed these devices was careless. The insert in the center contains the ID electronics, but the power cell and detector for a break in the wristband are housed in the frame. So, the two can be separated without triggering an alarm. What’s more, the chip was only secured by cement around the edges, which Albrecht found a way of breaking.” As McCain said this, Rashazzi tested the bond by prying an edge of the wafer with the blade, and finding it sufficiently softened, lifted it clear for Haber to remove with a pair of tweezers.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Sargent exclaimed.

McCain held out his arm to show the bracelet with its empty frame. “One way you could use this is to switch ID’s,” he said. “Suppose you” – he looked at Sargent —” needed to go to Turgenev or somewhere, but I had a work assignment there. We could switch the inserts. Much more flexibility.”

Haber pointed at the insert, which he had placed on a glass plate. “But even better, the inserts in the badge ID’s that outside civilians wear are identical. If we could get hold of a general-clearance badge somehow, we could substitute its insert for the one in your bracelet, and you’d be able to go anywhere you wanted.”

McCain looked at Chakattar. “Is that tangible enough?”

“Would it work, though?” Sargent asked doubtfully. “Wouldn’t the ID coding in the security computers be changed as soon as the badge was missed?”

Rashazzi shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. You only get that degree of security here, inside Zamork. Outside, individuals aren’t tracked place to place. A general-clearance insert is just like a key that will get you in anywhere. That’s all it does. They all transmit the same code.”

Istamel and his two colleagues exchanged glances. “And you think you might be able to obtain such a device?” he said.

Haber smiled, and gestured at the workshop around them. “We do appear to have something of a flair for, shall we say, larcenous inventiveness.”

“Very good. I am satisfied,” Istamel pronounced.

McCain turned from the bench to face him directly. The Turk stared him in the eye and nodded. “You have a deal, Mr, Earnshaw. We have too much in common to waste our energies on rivalry. We work cooperatively, yes?…” He bunched a fist and brought it up close to the side of McCain’s chin. McCain looked back at him unblinkingly, Istamel thumped the side of his jaw, not hard enough to hurt, but solidly enough to be more than playful. “As partners, eh?” A flicker of a grin crossed his face. McCain grinned back at him. They shook hands.

Two guards escorted Paula from the interview room in the Surface Level Administration Building to the security post at the door opening out into the general area where the huts were situated. She made her own way back to Hut 19 from there. The climate-control engineers had been experimenting again that day and had created strange conditions around Novyi Kazan, in which evaporation from the reservoir and other nearby bodies of water formed a mist below the roof that reduced the ribbon-suns to indistinct, watery blurs. A month previously they had managed to produce a miniature cyclone that wrapped itself around the town’s central tower and sucked all its windows out. Half of them still hadn’t been replaced.

She walked past the Recreation Building, where the gymnasium and hobby rooms were located, and turned right onto the path running between Huts 10 and 17. Several of the green-clad figures who were out nodded or called a greeting as she passed. The session with Protbornov and Major Uskayev had followed the course that had long ago become usual. Why couldn’t she communicate with her government? she had demanded to know yet again – they must be pressing for information. She could, the Russians replied, if she would only agree to be more cooperative. How did she like her new work? It was fine. She did realize, of course, that they could always send her back to the lower levels? That was up to them. Unnerving as she found the thought inwardly, she was keeping to the tactic that Olga had urged. And although as yet she hadn’t won her battle, the contest was beginning to feel more equal.

She shared Hut 19 with three Russian women. Elena came from Minsk and was a sociologist, a field of study traditionally frowned upon by the authorities, since from the time of the state’s inception “hard” science and engineering had been viewed as more relevant to its industrialization goals. Elena had been a little too zealous in compiling and supplying to foreign publishers statistics on health and wealth in the people’s utopia that the people’s leaders had found embarrassing, and found herself consigned to Zamork as the only place sufficiently safe and far away to keep her out of mischief. Svetlana was a deactivated agent of the KGB. After undergoing years of tutoring and training, she had been infiltrated into Austria posing as a German immigrant, and had been granted Austrian naturalization. But then she had gone on to develop a taste for Western living and an open disdain for Marxist orthodoxy that had made her superiors nervous, and Zamork became her destination after recall to Moscow. Lastly, Agniya was a former Moscow art and literature critic. She had persisted in criticizing the censors instead of the artists, and dismissed the officially promoted idols as mediocrities. After Paula’s experiences on the lower level, their company and intellectual stimulation was like a release from the grave.

Svetlana, the former KGB agent, was in when Paula got back to the hut, trying a new picture in different positions on the walls. It was a scene in a city of tall buildings. The city was inhabited by a mixture of all the monsters that had ever crashed, roared, terrorized, and demolished their way across the world’s movie screens – Godzillas, mutant spiders, giant ants, barrel-chested gorillas, creaking Franken-steins, and shapeless blobs. But these monsters were panicking, fleeing in wide-eyed terror through the streets and pulling their baby monsters after them, while others shrieked from windows. It was also, evidently, a city of monsters-in-miniature… for looming above the buildings in the background, silhouetted against the sky as it lumbered closer, was a spacesuited human figure. Paula studied it and managed a smile despite her weariness after the past few hours. “Cute,” she pronounced. “Where’d it come from?”

“You met Maurice, the Frenchman who paints,” Svetlana replied. “It’s one of his.”

“I thought he was going back, Wasn’t there an exchange deal that the Russians worked out with the French and the West Germans, or something?”

“Yes, that’s right. He went a couple of days ago. This picture is a parting gift that he left for me, but I only got it this morning…. I was thinking, maybe here, by Elena’s baskets. How does it look?”

“Perhaps a little more to the right… there, that’s good. Want me to hold it?”

Paula watched while Svetlana fixed the corners of the picture with pieces of adhesive tape. Svetlana had dark hair with a reddish tint, brushed into long waves that curled for-ward beneath her ears, and a trim figure whose curves not even the standard baggy green priv’s tunic could hide. People got along well with her, and it seemed natural that the Frenchman should have left her a farewell present. It was strange, Paula thought. She had been arrested while on a professional espionage assignment for the United States government, Svetlana was a former KGB agent, and yet here they were living together and acting naturally like affection-ate sisters. It said how people everywhere could be if only those who aspired to power would leave them alone. Or was It the people’s own fault for taking any notice in the first place of those who presumed to command them?

Svetlana finished fixing the picture and stepped back. “Yes, I think that looks fine. We’ll leave it there.” She put the tape back on a shelf. “I’ve just made some tea. Would you like some?”

“I could use something,” Paula said.

“How was it today?”

“The usual. They want me to take a guided tour around the colony and send a vigram home saying there are no nasty things hidden up here.” Since the West had never concealed its suspicions about weapons on
Valentina Tereshkova
, Paula wasn’t revealing anything that Svetlana didn’t already know about.

Svetlana poured strong tea into two cups and topped them up with hot water. She handed one to Paula, added sugar and a drop of lemon juice to her own, and sat down on one of the hut’s two double-height bunks. Paula sat down at the table and sipped her tea, savoring the taste and the feeling of the hot, refreshing liquid moistening her dried mouth.

The Russian woman lit a cigarette. “Well, why don’t you do it?” she asked Paula, “Surely it can’t do any harm. I mean, if what they say is true, it could only be for the best if the West were told about it.”

“I don’t know,” Paula said after considering the question. “I guess I don’t like the thought of being used as a political mouthpiece. It’s not my kind of business. I’m a scientist.”

“Then, what are you doing here?” Svetiana asked.

“That’s what I mean – I’ve gotten mixed up in more than enough of what I should have stayed out of, already.” Paula seemed dissatisfied with her own answer and frowned while she drank from her cup again. “Anyway, it shouldn’t be up to me. If the Russians want to convince the Americans that this place is legitimate, all they have to do is bring them here and let them walk around. Why should it need to be my problem?”

Svetiana sighed. “You know how it is with stubborn old men who worry about what history books might say about them.” She fell silent for a while, contemplating the smoke from her cigarette. “We got to be quite friendly, Maurice and I,” she said at last in a distant voice that seemed to change the subject.

Paula smiled, “I can’t say I’m surprised. You are quite attractive, after all, and he was, well… very French.”

“No, I didn’t mean that way. I meant just as friends. We used to talk a lot. He was very intellectual as well as artistic.”

“Oh, I thought —”

“That’s all right. He seemed to know a lot about science – to me he did, anyway, which doesn’t say all that much. You’d have liked him. It’s a pity he’s gone.” Svetlana hoisted her legs up onto the bunk and shifted back to prop herself against the end wall. She looked at Paula quizzically. “Were you really a spy?” she asked matter-of-factly.

“Come on. You know better than that”

Svetlana didn’t seem to have expected a straight answer. “You know, I think Maurice might well have been. He never said so, but when you’ve worked as I have, you develop an instinct for these things.”

“With the French intelligence people, you mean?”

“Yes. You know it’s funny, the different reasons why people get involved in espionage. With me it was virtually automatic. My father was a KGB colonel, and I went into the academy at Bykovo straight from university. It was just a job that the family expected me to go into, and quite an exciting one, too – almost a game, in fact. But some people do it for very deep, premeditated reasons, such as ideological beliefs. Maurice was like that. He was one of those serious-minded people, always worried about humanity and where it was heading for a thousand years from now.”

Paula thought instinctively about Earnshaw, but couldn’t place him in that category. For him it came closer to soldiering – a job that had to be done that obviously everyone couldn’t leave to everyone else. His motivation reflected short-term realities more than distant ideals.

Svetlana went on, “Maurice worried that the stubborn old men might get the world into a war. They were all just as paranoid, he thought – yours as well as ours – all equally responsible for the lunacy that things have come to. ‘Impotent dinosaurs, stuck in a swamp with nothing but umbrellas,’ he used to say. And finding out the truth about the weapons that some people say are hidden up here concerned him a lot.”

“What bothered him so much about that?” Paula asked.

“The thought that all the suspicions might be nothing more than the products of fantasies and preconceptions. If that turned out to be so, then how many more crucial judgments are being based on equally wrong perceptions?”

Paula was staring at the far wall. Suddenly she glimpsed the entire situation and her own relationship to it from a new perspective. What she saw didn’t make her feel entirely comfortable, “It would be insane,” she agreed in a faraway voice.

“Yes. And the really insane part is that we could end up blowing everything for no other reason than wrong information. Maurice’s big obsession was to make sure that the right people got the right facts. You see, intelligence work was almost a religion with him. That was why the Russians were always moving him around the colony so much. Probably that was why they let him go.”

“How do you mean?” Paula asked.

“They offered him the same kind of deal as they did you: a tour around, if he would agree to relay back what he saw. And he went along with it.”

“Did he ever say what he found?”

“Not in so many words – not to me, anyway,” Svetlana said. “But think about it. If he discovered anything that shouldn’t have been there, would he be on his way home right now? That must say something.” Paula cast an eye around at the walls and ceiling and gave Svetlana a cautioning look, querying if they ought to be talking aloud like this about somebody who was quite possibly not out of the Russians’ hands yet. Svetlana laughed. “What does it matter if they are listening to us?” she said. “He would only be confirming what they themselves have been telling the world for years,” She lifted her head and called out in a louder voice, “Can you hear me, former comrades? Am I right? Are we saying anything you don’t agree with?”

Paula fell quiet as she sipped the rest of her tea. Suddenly she saw the role that she had been slipping into as one of mere academic detachment – an irrelevancy. The thought made her feel, in a way… irresponsible. It was the first time that the job she’d come to
Tereshkova
to do had felt like something that really mattered.

The big news in the second week of September was that the Russians had yielded suddenly and unexpectedly to the international pressure that had been building up for several years. In a surprise announcement from Moscow, the Soviet foreign minister stated that
Valentina Tereshkova
would be opened to unrestricted international inspection immediately following the November 7 celebrations. This was also the colony’s official completion date. The Russians pointed out that it was not normal to permit outsiders into any site while construction was still in progress. It had always been their intention to declare an open policy, they claimed; but the persistent Western harassment would have been an affront to anyone’s dignity. As a further gesture toward reconciliation, and to mark the departure from precedent, they invited the nations of the West to send delegates to join the Soviet leaders for the centenary, to symbolize their common commitment to a harmonious and prosperous future.