James P. Hogan (39 page)

“Given the materials, then everything in the closet, yes,” Istamel replied. “But the electrics, I’m not so strong on.”

“Now, that would be my department if there was a way of getting me there,” Scanlon said. “The IRA gives a good apprenticeship in things like that.”

“But there isn’t,” McCain said.

“I’m not so sure,” Istamel murmured thoughtfully. “We do have regular-category prisoners on work assignments around the hub. They deliver materials to the lab sometimes, cart away the trash, and so on. If we could get you on something like that…”

“But Luchenko isn’t in the habit of handing out favors on request, and my bracelet isn’t programmed for the hub,” Scanlon said.

They debated various possibilities at some length, but got nowhere, Then Sargent returned to their first thought by asking, “What about this scheme that Razz came up with for swapping the inserts between two bracelets? Maybe we could find somebody assigned to the hub who’d appreciate an extra holiday in exchange for letting us borrow his insert for a day. Maybe we could get Kev to the hub that way – with the insert that’s programmed for the hub mounted in his bracelet.”

“Wouldn’t the guards notice his face was different?” Istamel asked.

“Possible, but unlikely” Sargent said. “They’re not exactly the most diligent or the brightest in the place. So, fair enough – it’s a risk.”

McCain looked inquiringly at Scanlon. “What do you think, Kev?”

“Ah, and why not? I’ve done riskier things in me time. Sure, I’ll go with it.”

“We seem to have settled it, then,” McCain said. “So let’s get it moving as quickly as possible. The sooner we have the badges, the sooner we can be mobile. There’s a lot I want to find out about this place.” He turned again toward Istamel. “Changing the subject back, you said you’re a doctor of physiology?”

“Yes,” Istamel replied.

“And you’re helping develop designs for spacesuits?”

“In the Space Environment Laboratory. That’s right.”

“That’s interesting,” McCain said. “Let us tell you about something else we’re working on that maybe you can help us with….”

Russians, Paula decided, simply weren’t happy unless they were suffering. From what she had read of their poets, dramatists, novelists, and historians, their compulsion expressed itself in the sense of tragedy and glorification of sacrifice that permeated their national spirit. Another manifestation, she thought, could be the innate genius they displayed for creating agricultural disasters. Peasant revolts had been a standard part of the czarist background scenery. Stalin’s forced collectivization of the farms had produced starvations on a scale that even now could only be guessed at; Lysenko had risen to become head kook in charge of biology with state backing; successive disastrous postwar harvests had been offset only by exports from the evil West; and now, three quarters of the farming experiments in the sector known as Ukraine – between Turgenev and Landausk – were turning out to be dismal failures.

The reason, as the Soviets had now admitted publicly, was clear to Paula from the dynamics of the simulation she was running to test a program modification before finishing for the day. The notion that lunar dust could be force-fed into becoming living, tillable soil by introducing a few selected bacteria strains and saturating it with bulk nutrients might have been attractive to quota-obsessed bureaucrats, but the problem was that it didn’t work. The process wasn’t amenable to brute force. The Western and Asian space programs had opted for an approach based on self-evolved biosystems, where all the ecological subtleties were allowed to develop in their own time, even though nobody could say for sure why all of them were needed. It was a far slower method, and helped explain why the non-Soviet programs had not gone for large-scale colony construction yet. But it was showing positive results. Now, goaded by we-told-you-so jeers from the rest of the world’s biological community, the Soviets had commenced a crash program to ship thousands of tons of terrestrial soil up to
Valentina Tereshkova
for enriching certain areas, then dressing those areas with huge quantities of transplanted crops and plants to provide an acceptable setting for the Soviet leaders to make speeches about progress in when they came up for the November 7 celebrations.

Dr. Brusikov, the Russian section-head whom Paula worked under, came in from the corridor. In his dealings with her he always confined himself to business, never alluding to personal or political matters. “I wanted to catch you before you went,” he said. “How does it look?”

“It’s running and seems to be okay. I’ve added the defaults.”

“Excellent.” Brusikov rubbed his palms together and moved over to the screen. “Well, I’ll carry on playing with it for a while this evening. Same time tomorrow, is it? You’re not off, are you?”

“No.” At that instant a double beep sounded from the unit on Paula’s wrist. It meant that the computers monitoring the security and access system had noted the time, and she was now free to move beyond her working vicinity.

“There’s your signal,” Brusikov said. “Very well, we’ll see you tomorrow. Good night.”

“Good night.” Paula went out into the corridor and turned in the direction of the elevator. Two more figures, one of them dressed in the familiar green priv tunic of Zamork, emerged from another door and headed the same way.

The Zamork inmate’s name was Josip. He was a statistician from Yugoslavia, who was also working on ecological models. “I see they’re going ahead with this idea of sending tons of dirt up to us,” he said. “Have you ever heard of anything so crazy? All to avoid embarrassing their illustrious leaders. It’s Potemkin villages all over again.”

The civilian was called Gennadi. He was a Russian, younger than Josip, with fine, handsomely lined features, blond hair, and blue eyes that shone with devotion to the Party and the system. In an earlier period, allowing for the turnabout of ideology – which wouldn’t have made a lot of difference, since all fanatical ideologies are interchangeable, anyway – he would have qualified as the Nazis’ Nordic ideal, He detested everything Western, and anything American in particular. Whenever possible Paula avoided him.

“Well, aren’t you going to tell us how incompetent we are?” he asked her as they stopped to wait at the elevator. Paula sighed and said nothing while she continued staring at the doors.

“Oh, lay off, Gennadi,” Josip said. “We’ve all had a hard day. Your great Russian bosses blew it. There’s no getting away from the fact, so why not shut up?”

Gennadi took no notice. “You see, it’s not really the soil we need. It’s the bacteria and things that come with it. But then, we are only fallible mortals. We don’t have supernatural beings to help us.” His tone was sarcastic. Ridiculing religion was one of Gennadi’s favorite lines.

“What’s that got to do with it?” Josip asked.

“Didn’t you know? Why do you think their God told Noah to build the ark? You didn’t imagine it was to save all those animals, did you, Josip? Oh, my word, no! The animals were simply the vehicles to carry God’s most precious creations, you see: the flea, the hookworm, the body louse, the intestinal parasite, the polio virus, and the dysentery bacterium. Aren’t malaria, cholera, yellow fever, and bubonic plague the punishments that this infinitely wise, compassionate, and forgiving Father preserved to inflict upon His children? The victims that He hounds the most gleefully are always the poor, the hungry, the defenseless. What kind of a fiend would we brand any human father who treated his children like that?”

They stepped into the elevator, but Gennadi continued, “Does it make any sense to you, Josip? I say, if the suffering people of this world have anywhere to turn for help, it’s their fellow man: engineers, scientists, builders, doctors, farmers. But when a disease is finally eradicated after causing untold misery for thousands of years, what do they do? They thank their God! I ask you! What did He have to do with it? Why did He make it happen in the first place?” Gennadi looked at Paula. “What I can’t understand is that you’re a scientist. How can you respect a government that does nothing to stop such fairy tales? Is it right that you force children to pray to this absurd God every morning in school?”

“That went away a long time ago,” Paula said as the doors opened and they got out. “How merciful has the god been that you force children to pray to in your schools?” But the answer didn’t satisfy her.

They came out into the ground-level concourse of the building, where the inmates due to return to Zamork were assembling from various parts of the surrounding complex. Paula moved to the far end of the group, and to her relief Gennadi didn’t stay around but left via the main entrance. She stood without speaking to anyone until the bus drew up outside the main doors to take them back. Minutes later the bus had negotiated the geometric maze out of central Turgenev and merged onto the roadway running above the monorail track in the direction of Novyi Kazan.

The galling part of it all was that the things Gennadi said mirrored her own views on religion almost perfectly. There had been many times when she had pointed out the same nonsenses to the fundamentalist fanatics she’d come across back in the States, That was why she was always so disarmed by Gennadi’s arguments: she had never before been in the position of hearing virtually her own words turned back upon her, and of being able to find no way to respond. And even more disturbing, what did it signify that he should be ascribing the same attributes to her, now, that she had always seen in people like him? She thought of Olga, and how their common appreciation of science bonded them into a global community that stood apart from superficial divisions of people into nations and creeds – meaningless divisions based not on comprehension of reality and truth, but on prejudice, myth, wishful thinking, and unreason. On both sides of the world, reason was subordinated to systems that were equally irrational, and yet were just as certain of themselves. Such systems couldn’t be entrusted with the future. Now, she thought, she understood how Maurice had felt.

When Paula arrived back at Zamork, she went for her evening meal – yellow-pea soup and bread, a potato, stewed pulp of cabbage leaves, and a slice of gelatinous processed meat that the cook insisted was ham – in the communal canteen of the Services Block. It was a busy time with the day workshift trickling in, but she spotted Elena, one of her companions from Hut 19, alone at one of the tables, and joined her.

Elena had somehow managed to retain her chubby build despite the unspectacular diet. She had straight brown hair, which she wore short with a fringe, ruddy cheeks, a second chin, and ample hips. Paula always pictured her as a farmer’s wife, but in fact she was a sociologist, and for that reason was out of favor with the authorities who decided what the mainstream lines of learning and thinking should be. Thus, with typical topsy-turvy Communist logic, only in the society that claimed to comprehend the social struggle as a science was its study by scientific processes actively discouraged – or banned outright if the findings didn’t support what doctrine said had to be true. Elena’s counterparts in the West usually made prime-time TV.

“I never used to consider social science a ‘science’ at all,” Paula confessed after they had talked for a while. “I’m not sure if I do now.”

“Oh?” Elena continued eating and didn’t seem perturbed.

“A science means being able to predict confidently what causes will produce what effects. It works with things like physics, but the processes that physics describes are really simple – particles and forces and how they interact. Yet it took centuries to get where it is, and we got it wrong at every opportunity. But you know, Elena, even the ecological webs that I’ve been working with for two months are simple compared to a nation’s social system, never mind the whole world’s. Nobody knows what changes will produce what results, whatever else they say to get funding. It’s all still at the voodoo stage: eventually it’ll rain if you dance long enough.”

Elena smiled. Paula admitted inwardly that she sometimes took advantage of Elena’s disposition in order to dump her own emotional charge when she was agitated about something. “I suppose you’re right,” Elena said. “Certainly sociology never managed to become very strong as an experi mental science. You can’t very well go around putting people in cages to study them…. But then, of course, that was mainly all you Americans’ fault if anybody’s.” Elena’s eyes were twinkling.

Paula realized that she wasn’t about to be let off the hook so easily. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“If you really believe all the things you say about freedom and the rights of people to govern themselves, why didn’t you allow the United States to become a huge, natural sociological laboratory?” Elena replied. “You could have let every part of the country try out whatever kind of system appealed to it – liberal or authoritarian, secular, religious, whatever – and found out from experience what worked and what didn’t. Then you’d have seen which of the experts’ predictions succeeded, and been able to evaluate the worth of the experts doing the predicting. Instead, you introduced those big federal programs that cost fortunes and which I’m not convinced did much good – straight from untested speculation to national law, without any experimental stage in between. And the irony is, it’s exactly what you’ve always accused us of.”

“Touché,” Paula acknowledged. “I asked for that.”

“But it’s going to happen, nevertheless,” Elena went on.

“You think so?”

“It’s starting already – look at China. They’ve got cities that are rigidly Marxist just twenty miles from others that are totally laissez-faire. One area is run by a traditionalist religious sect that rejects technology, another has no laws at all relating to personal morality, and in another everyone carries a gun. Everyone migrates to where they think it’ll suit them best, and if they find they were wrong they try somewhere else.”

“It sounds like chaos.”

“It is in many ways, while they’re finding out how to make it work without fragmenting in all directions. But it’s true evolution in action. That’s why they’ll lead the migration out into space when it comes. What they’re doing is a foretaste of how it will be, but on a vaster scale. We haven’t seen diversity yet. It will be an explosion, not a migration.”