James P. Hogan (41 page)

Mungabo and Scanlon had come in from Gorky Street and sat down to catch the tail end of what Koh had been saying, Scanlon pulled a box of playing cards from his pocket and began laying out a solitaire array. “And what do you see emerging, Koh?” he inquired. “Will this be the fella to replace Western Man?”

“Maybe,” Koh said.

“Got a name for him yet?” Mungabo asked.

“Next will come Nonlinear Man – Interplanetary Man – who will emerge among the offplanet worlds that will soon take shape,” Koh replied. “He will take Classical beauty, Western science, Chinese pragmatism, Japanese dedication, and maybe Russian realism, along with other stones from other rubble, but he will build them into a new edifice which will be his own. His children will accept as self-evident the concept of evolution as a succession of discontinuities, and take for granted the impossibilities of today becoming commonplace tomorrow. They will go out to populate a universe which by its very size and extent, stretching away beyond the range of the most powerful instruments, symbolizes a reality that imposes no limits on how far their civilization can grow, how much it may achieve, or what they may become,” Koh looked around the table. “There are no finite resources, only finite thinking.” He opened his book again, looked down, and resumed reading.

Scanlon continued moving and turning the cards. Smovak picked up a knight and thumped it back down on the board. “Check.” Vorghas put his chin between his hands to study the new position.

McCain leaned forward and moved a red five onto a black six. “Busy day at the hub?” he asked Scanlon casually.

Scanlon scooped up the cards again and dealt two gin-rummy hands. McCain picked up his hand and inspected it. “As a matter of fact, I heard they had a little bit of excitement there today,” Scanlon said. “A fire, no less – in the Space Environment Lab, it was. An electrical fault, by all accounts.”

“That’s too bad,” McCain murmured. “Anyone hurt?”

“Ah, no, it was nothing serious…. But I’m told some things in a closet up there were burned pretty badly.”

McCain sent a questioning look over the top of the fan he was holding, and Scanlon returned a faint nod. They played for a while. When they finished, Scanlon put the cards back in the box, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and rose to leave. Then, as if struck by an afterthought, he turned back, took the box from his pocket again, and handed it to McCain. “If you’re going back inside the billet, do me a favor and give these back to Chan, would you? I’ve to meet a man in the compound in a couple of minutes.”

“Sure,” McCain said, dropping the box into his own pocket. But it wasn’t the same box, and there weren’t any playing cards inside. Instead, it held a package containing two functioning general-clearance civilian badges.

A day later, Haber had undergone an amazing recovery and was returned to the billet. With him he brought the remaining components which, together with the ones he had purloined from the Pharmaceuticals lab during his previous two visits to the infirmary, enabled him and Rashazzi to construct an accurate balance scale in the Crypt workshop. They used it to measure the weights of objects at various heights in the elevator shaft that connected the Crypt deck, via the surface and Hut 8, back down to B-12 billet and gave the escape committee’s “elevator route” its name.

“Things should weigh less at higher levels as you get nearer to the spin axis,” Rashazzi explained to McCain after the results had been compared. “And in fact they do. But the decrease is far less than it ought to be. At this level in the rim, a weight should change by two point one percent if it’s moved twenty meters nearer the axis. But the amount we measured was less than half that.”

Haber took off his spectacles and began polishing the lenses with a handkerchief. “The baffling thing is that once again the results are consistent with the idea of the colony’s being larger than is officially stated.” McCain had been thinking about that since the scientists described the results of their tests with the pendulum. He wondered if weapons could be concealed in the extra volume that seemed to be indicated. But Haber demolished the notion when he continued, “But to give these figures, the diameter of the ring would have to be something like four and a half kilometers, which is well over twice the quoted figure. I really don’t know what to make of it. A discrepancy that large would have been public knowledge years ago.”

Nobody could offer any satisfactory answers, But the matter was put aside for the time being when Peter Sargent and Eban Istamel brought more news from the escape committee. In the course of exploring farther down below the elevator-route shaft, they had gained entry to a tube that appeared to be part of a robot freight-transit system that possibly ran all the way around the ring. If so, then it offered not only a way out of the limits of Zamork, but a ticket to anywhere else in the colony.

So at last it looked as if McCain and his group were about to become fully mobile. Now, perhaps, they’d begin shedding light on some of the perplexing questions that had been accumulating.

Deep in the Pentagon’s labyrinth of corridors and offices, Bernard Foleda and Gerald Kehrn came out of an elevator and turned in the direction of Foleda’s office. Foleda pounded along irascibly, setting the pace. Kehrn was looking worried.

“Dirt!” Foleda snorted. “Who ever heard of shipping thousands of tons of dirt up into orbit? Not even their cloud-cuckoo-land economics could justify it. What do they take us for? It smells to high heaven, Gerry.”

A lot of other people thought so, too. That was why the United States, representing a number of concerned Western nations, had demanded that USSF vessels be permitted to monitor the operations, going on in low-Earth orbit, of transferring cargo from Soviet surface shuttles into longer-range transporter ships. To everyone’s surprise, the Soviets had agreed.

“Well, don’t forget that their ideas on what’s efficient don’t exactly tally with ours,” Kehrn said. “To them, efficiency is directing all the resources you’ve got onto whatever objective the Party says is top priority. That was how Mermaid got to be built in the first place. It isn’t simply the sum total of a lot of individually profitable businesses. They wouldn’t be able to see how running a pet-food factory profitably can be efficient when pet food isn’t important. So maybe to them it makes sense.”

“Yes, and what caused Mermaid to be their top priority?” Foleda growled. “They’re up to something.”

Barbara got up from a chair opposite Rose in Foleda’s outer office as they appeared. Rose began leafing through a wad of papers and message slips. “It’s been all hell let loose… Borden has called three times in the last half hour. The President’s chief of staff called. The CIA director…. Whalley over in Defense…”

“Hold the trench just a little longer, Rose,” Foleda said without slackening his pace. “We’ve got something really urgent.”

“Okay, but I’m telling you, the ammunition’s running low here.” As she spoke, a call-tone sounded from the screen-panel beside her desk. The others went on through.

Barbara closed the door of the inner office. “What have we got?” Foleda asked her. She had beeped him via his pocket handpad a few minutes earlier and told him only that she had news from Mermaid concerning Pedestal.

Barbara opened the folder she was carrying and handed him a sheet of printout. He sat down at his desk, and Kehrn moved around to read it with him over his shoulder. “In from NSA eight minutes ago,” Barbara said. “They show the time of receipt as ten-thirty-nine hours today. The validation completion is correct for Pangolin.”

‘“My God, we did it!” Foleda breathed as his eyes read rapidly down the paper. “It’s from Bryce. Our signal got through. She is still up there…. No news of Lew, though, eh?”

Kehrn nodded. “She’s the communications whiz. It figures.”

“Your hunch must have been right,” Barbara said to Foleda. “It must be Oshkadov that Dyashkin has been talking to.”

“He did what we wanted,” Kehrn said. “The guy’s busting his ass over there to please. It’s starting to look as if he’s clean.” He looked down questioningly, but Foleda was leaning back in his chair and staring at the far wall without seeming to have heard.

Kehrn was about to say something more when Foleda’s desk screen began emitting its priority tone. Barbara answered it. “Yes, Rose?”

“Fix bayonets. I’m out of bullets. Borden’s on his way.”

Moments later the door burst open and Philip Borden strode in, looking strained, “What the hell, Bern? I’ve been calling you. I was told you were out.”

“Sorry, Phil, I was. We only got back this second.” Foleda showed him the transcript of the message from
Tereshkova
.

“Take a look at this. It just came in. We’ve got a line to Bryce. Sounds as if Lew might be there someplace, too.”

Borden took the sheet and scanned down it. “Holy cow, I don’t believe this… a private channel to our own people inside a Soviet space station. Honestly, Bern, when you first sprung this on me I thought you’d flipped…. What’s this bit about key inmate names?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I only saw it for the first time myself a few seconds ago.”

The diversion had calmed Borden down a little from the agitated state he’d been in when he entered. He set the folder down on Foleda’s desk and sighed wearily. “Well, let’s hope that now you’ve got it, it can do some good. They sure made us look a bunch of assholes this time.”

“Who did?”

“Moscow, of course. What else do you think the flap’s all about out there? Don’t tell me you haven’t heard yet.”

“I just this second got back,” Foleda said again. “I’ve been giving a talk to that conference of Stan’s all morning.”

Borden waved a hand vaguely overhead. “We’ve sent three USSF interceptors in to monitor those Soviet transfer operations in orbit. They used X-ray detectors, magnetometer detectors, visual observation, and Christ knows what. The reports are in. They’re all the same.”

“What did they find?” Kehrn asked.

Borden threw up his hands. “What do you think they found? Dirt. Just lots of dirt. Nothing else. The President’s mad as hell about it, we’re a laughingstock, and some of the Asian states are wondering if maybe we have been crazy all along. This isn’t my best day, Bern.”

For once Foleda looked dumbstruck. It was he who had predicted that the Russians would never permit the payloads of the Soviet shuttles to be inspected. There was no risk that they might be decoys: the transporter ships loaded from them could be tracked clearly all the way to
Tereshkova
. Nothing could be substituted with any chance of escaping detection.

“Does that mean we’ve got a decision for November?” Barbara asked.

Borden nodded. “We’re accepting. It hasn’t been announced publicly yet, but I got it from the White House an hour or so ago. We’ll be sending the Vice President and Secretary of State. The President’s view is that we don’t have any choice now if we want to avoid being written off by half the world as paranoids. He didn’t want to force this inspection issue, and he feels that we pushed him into it. This is his way of telling us, ‘screw you.’”

Foleda stared gloomily at his desk. This was what he had been fearing. In the tide of euphoria and hopes for a sudden easing of tensions that had swept the world, most of the leading European and Asian nations had already announced that they would be sending representatives. The party would travel from Earth orbit to
Valentina Tereshkova
in a neutral ship carrying a mixed United Nations crew. The President, he knew, had expressed displeasure at what he saw as the US’s failure to seize an important initiative, and he held excessive caution and unwarranted suspicion on the part of the UDIA as largely to blame. “So the rest of it didn’t make any difference, eh?” Foleda concluded.

Borden shook his head, “Not after this. They think we’re seeing shapes in tea leaves. And to be frank, I’m half inclined to think they might be right.”

“We walked right into it,” Foleda said. “I was a chump. Of course there’s nothing but dirt in those shuttles. Whatever they needed up there went up months ago. This dirt thing was a deliberate provocation for us to call them, and we did. Now our credibility’s shot.”

“You still think it’s a blind for something, then,” Borden said.

“No, I don’t think. I’m sure of it. They wanted to make sure we’d be embarrassed enough to make amends by sending our people there, along with everyone else’s.”

“What for?”

Foleda looked up. “Hostages. What else? And they don’t even have to hijack them – we’re sending them voluntarily. Mermaid is a battle platform. Those VIPs are its protection. They guarantee we won’t fire at it preemptively, and they constitute insurance against us having possible weapons up
our
sleeve. Hesitation and disagreement in our camp at a crucial moment could prove decisive.”

Borden nodded. He had heard this before. “But aren’t you overlooking one thing, Bern?” Kehrn said. “All the
Soviet

VIPs will be there too – and I mean practically
all
of them. Their tops, too: bigger than the ones everybody else will be-sending. That has to count for something.”

“And suppose they don’t,” Foleda countered. “Suppose it’s all phony, and they don’t send any of them up there – just empty ships for us to watch through telescopes. Do you think our people would insist on checking them out after this latest fiasco? No way. See – they’ve covered that base too.”

Kehrn looked uneasy. “Well… they’d have to be there,” He frowned, as if, having stated it, he wasn’t sure why. “I mean, they couldn’t not be there when all the rest arrive, could they? And the place will be declared open after that…”

Foleda looked hard at him for a few seconds, then leaned back in his chair and shook his head. “No. They don’t have to do any of that. By that time, none of it will matter. Whatever it is they’re planning will have happened by November seventh. A month. That’s all we’ve got to find out.”

He sounded more certain than ever before. This time the others remained quiet and didn’t argue.