James P. Hogan (43 page)

It had to happen. Just as she reached the midpoint, the cables on the far side kicked into motion with a jolt that almost caused her to fall off there and then, and suddenly the whole shaft seemed to be filled with motor noise. Paula closed her eyes and pressed herself against the wall, feeling it throb with vibrations. Air surged around her, and her fingers clawed instinctively at the cold metal. The vibrations intensified, and the terror that is triggered only by the self-preservation instinct compelled her to open her eyes and look down. The roof of the car was rushing upward at her, into the part of the shaft illuminated by the flashlight. It wasn’t going to stop, She could see herself being smeared like…

Everything had gone quiet, She looked down and saw the top of the car just a few feet below, stationary. Then her hand gave way suddenly as the palm slipped on its own perspiration. A hand gripped her elbow and steadied her as she tottered. Sargent had moved back out of the recess and was bridging the gap that remained between her and the final corner, one hand steadying her and the other anchored on a firm hold. He drew her firmly before she could panic, and seconds later she was perched next to him on a section of supporting frame, safely inside the recess.

“All right?” he asked.

Paula nodded, although she was breathing shakily. “I haven’t had so much fun since my draft physical.”

To get them down, Sargent produced a line that had been hidden behind a girder and uncoiled it, letting the free end drop into the darkness below. He showed her how to run it around her back and thigh to regulate her speed by friction, and then he went first again. A short while afterward, Paula felt two sharp tugs on the line to signal that the way was clear for her to fallow. After her experience at the top of the main shaft, the descent seemed uneventful.

They left the elevator shaft through a maintenance hatch which Sargent replaced behind them, and came out onto a narrow steel-floored walkway leading between rows of large tanks and piping. After a short distance Sargent held a hand up for Paula to stop. “We’ve installed our own intruder alarms,” he explained. “There’s an infrared beam right here. Step over it carefully. It saves them having heart attacks in the Crypt every time someone goes down there.”

“What is this Crypt? Eban mentioned it to Olga yesterday.”

“You’ll see.”

They turned off to the side and passed by a series of bays containing transformers and power-distribution equipment. Beyond, light showed from a space underneath an intermediate-level deck. It was so obscured by the forest of support works and engineering that Paula didn’t realize its extent until they were almost on top of it. As they stepped down inside, she saw that the space had been improvised into a workshop-laboratory, with a couple of large benches, tool racks, a table covered with drawings, and all manner of components, assemblies, and devices in various stages of construction. Three figures were waiting, presumably alerted to their approach by the flashlights. The youngest was swarthy-skinned, with black hair and alert, lively eyes. The man next to him was lean in build, with sparse hair, hollowed cheeks, and protruding eyes, giving Paula an instant impression of a human weasel. The third stepped forward and stood looking her up and down for a few seconds, a grin playing at the corners of his mouth. Then he grasped her by the shoulders with both hands and stared at her face. “Hi,” Earnshaw said.

“Hi.” She returned his gaze for a moment, then reached up and squeezed his forearms affectionately. “So, you are here. The Russians wouldn’t tell me.”

“They’re like that.” Earnshaw looked down at her green tunic. “What’s this – a priv? You’re doing okay. And I was worried that you were getting a hard time.”

“I was at first, but it changed. It’s a long story. I have news, too. A lot’s been happening.” Paula waved an arm at the surroundings. “But it looks as if you haven’t been exactly Idle either. What’s this all about?”

“Another long story. One part of it is we’re fixing a laser. But we need help with the electronics.”

“So that’s why you finally brought me down here?”

“Of course. What else did you think?”

“Lew, you never change. You’re hateful.”

“A much better relationship for business,” Earnshaw said, He motioned with his head to the other two men waiting behind. “This is Paula, my partner that I told you about. Paula, meet Razz and Kev, two more of the crew.”

McCain’s brow knotted in open disbelief. “Tycoon?” he repeated. “You’re in touch with Tycoon? How could you be?” They were sitting on a couple of boxes off to one side at the edge of the lighted work area and speaking in lowered voices out of earshot of the others, who were carrying on with their work. This was company business.

“It’s a complicated story,” Paula replied. She had anticipated problems in convincing him. “Basically it works like this. I’ve gotten to know a Russian woman up on the priv level called Olga. She’s a scientist, too – in the nuclear field – but also a human-rights dissident. That’s why she’s here.” McCain nodded and listened intently. Paula went on, “The point is that a colleague of hers – one of her dissident colleagues, that is – who’s also one of her long-standing personal friends, happens to hold a high position in the communications groundstation in Siberia that handles the main link up to here. To cut a long story short, they found a way of sending messages to each other by concealing them in the regular traffic in a way that’s transparent to the standard handling system.”

“That much I can buy,” McCain agreed. “But how did you get in on it?”

“They lost an electronic chip that was vital to the process, and needed somebody who could program a new one. Olga and I had gotten to know each other by then. It was in my field. She took a chance.”

McCain looked derisive. “
She
took a chance? How much do you know about this Oshkadov woman?”

“Look, she’s a scientist. We understand a lot of things in common. I’d still be down in that pit if it wasn’t for her. She got me out.”

“She needed someone to program the chip.”

“Sure, So it’s a selfish world. But it was still her neck.”

“Okay, okay.” McCain raised a hand. “So you’re in the picture regarding this private line they’ve got. Now, how did you persuade this guy down in Siberia… What’s his name?”

“Ivan.”

“How did you persuade Ivan to send a message off to our side for you? Give me one good reason why a Soviet official in a high position – I don’t care if he’s a dissident or not – should agree to risk getting himself shot by sending —”

“I didn’t get him to send anything,” Paula said, “I thought of it, but Tycoon beat me to it. He sent a message through Ivan to me first.”

McCain sat back on the box and stared at Paula incredulously. He closed his eyes momentarily, shook his head, and rubbed his brow with a knuckle. “You mean Tycoon just happens to be in touch with this Ivan, and Ivan, for no particular reason, tells him all about his secret line up to
Tereshkova
. Come on, what have they been putting in your coffee?… Code names get broken pretty easily – you know that. And yet somebody in a place like this shows you a message that says it’s from Tycoon, and you swallow the whole —”

“It carried a correct validation-code initializer,” Paula said. “I included one from my list in my response, and since then a reply has come back with the right completion. What more do you want? If we’re not going to trust the code system, what’s the point of setting it up in the first place?”

McCain looked nonplussed. “That’s impossible,” he declared. “Or else they’ve got your completion list. How much do you remember from when you were interrogated?”

“You don’t have to look for something like that to explain it,” Paula insisted. “Ivan has approached our side with an offer to defect. Think about it. He and Olga were both mixed up in illegal goings-on together. She was discovered somehow, the KGB grabbed her, and she wound up here. Obviously Ivan could be next. He can see that as much as anybody, so the idea of him suddenly getting a divine revelation to make himself scarce would make sense. Now put yourself in Tycoon’s place. To make the deal sound attractive, Ivan would have told who he is and how valuable he’d be if he came over. He’s hardly in a position to refuse favors, right? So if you were Tycoon, what’s the first thing you might think of trying? What would there be to lose if it was Ivan’s neck on the line? Wouldn’t you give it a shot? Well, that’s what Tycoon did.”

McCain exhaled a long breath and rubbed his chin. He couldn’t fault her reasoning, but he still didn’t like the situation. There were coincidences involved, and he was always suspicious of coincidences. In the end he seemed to dismiss the subject for the time being, and got up from the box. “Razz will have to tell you what he wants with the laser,” he said, turning toward where the others were working. “But apart from that, come and see some of the other things we’ve got going down here.”

Rashazzi and Sargent had made a dummy head from plaster and used it as a template for various patterns of rubber headpieces, which they made by cutting and regluing sections of used inner tubes. The tubes were used on the general-purpose groundcars found all over
Tereshkova
; Sargent and Mungabo had obtained them from” a recycling plant they’d discovered in the course of exploring beneath Landausk. Over the open face-section they had attached a mask assembled from stolen pieces of firefighters’ breathing apparatus and experimented with ways of sealing it to contain four pounds per square inch overpressure, filling it from an improvised air pump. They had settled on a method that seemed to work acceptably, and now Sargent was donning the equipment to try it out as the first live subject.

“What about the rest of the body?” Paula asked after McCain had explained the idea of going outside using homemade spacesuits. “You’ll need some kind of restraint to maintain pressure.”

Rashazzi pointed at an oil drum standing by the rear wall, partly covered by a sheet of tin but emitting fumes of a not-entirely-pleasant odor. “We’ve found that elastic surgical bandages plasticized in the concoction that’s brewing in there give the properties we need. Wrapping the body mummy-fashion would probably work, but we’re going to try welding sheets of the stuff into parts of stretch-suits. Getting dressed would be a lot quicker.”

Paula looked dubiously at the pump that Rashazzi was connecting to the mask over Sargent’s face. “You’ll need something a lot more powerful than that for a full-size vacuum chamber.” A large chamber would be necessary to test the complete suits. Nobody in their right mind would try out something like that for the first time by leaping out into space and trusting to luck.

“We can rig up a natural one,” Rashazzi said. Already Paula was developing the impression from listening to him that with his enthusiasm and energy, anything might be possible. “We find an outer compartment against the hull wall, drill a hole through to the outside, and fit a valve in it. Then we shut off the room and decompress it gradually by means of the valve to provide a test chamber. When we’re happy the suits work, we make a hatch through with the chamber evacuated, and it becomes our airlock for getting in and out.”

“How far away from the outer surface is the cosmic-ray shield?” Paula asked. An important point. The shield was a detached structure outside the hull, and since it didn’t rotate with the colony, it would be moving with a relative speed of something like a hundred fifty miles per hour. That was something that McCain realized he’d forgotten in his discussions with the scientists.

“It is only a matter of feet,” Rashazzi agreed. “But it’s something we can only know for sure by cutting the hatch and looking out.” So somebody would have to work his way across the outside skin of the structure without being thrown off, in darkness, with the inner surface of the shield flashing by probably within inches of him all the time. Paula shuddered at the thought of it. She’d done her share of heroics, she decided.

At the table near the bench, Scanlon was updating the maps which the group was producing from information gathered in their reconnaissance expeditions carried out via the freight-transit system that the escape committee had discovered, “And ‘tis fortunate lads we are, indeed,” Scanlon said, looking up at her. “The traffic down there is busy these days, so we’ve no problem getting rides to anywhere we want.”

“Why’s that?” Paula asked him. McCain had drifted away and was staring out into the darkness again, obviously deep in thought.

“All the good earth from Mother Russia that’s coming down the spokes from the hub and having to be distributed around,” Scanlon said.

“So it is true, then – they are really sending soil all the way here?”

“As true as we’re here, talking.” Scanlon gestured casually at a bin standing beside the plasticizing drum, “There’s a pile of it in there, if you’re interested. We’re sick of coming back covered in the stuff.”

“What did you bring it back here for?” Paula asked, walking over to the bin.

“Ah, that was Razz. It was there and it was unguarded – too much for the poor man to resist.”

She stood looking down at the dark soil, then on impulse stooped and let some trickle through her fingers. It felt dry, probably partly dehydrated for shipment, but could doubtless be reconstituted on-site. “Do you need it, or can I take some?” she asked absently.

“And what would anyone be needing the likes of that for?”

“I have some friends up on the surface who might like some – real Russian soil to grow flowers in, maybe.”

“Did you want it for anything in particular?” Scanlon called to Razz.

“Not really. We can get plenty more, anyway,” Rashazzi answered.

Scanlon shrugged. “Help yourself. You’ll find some empty cans on the shelf behind the rack there.”

Paula found a can with a lid and scooped some of the soil into it. McCain came over to her as she screwed on the lid. He seemed to have arrived at some decision in his mind and drew her aside again. “There’s one way I can check out this channel of yours,” he said. “Can you send off a response from me to tycoon’s last message, with an initializer that
I’ll
select from
my
list? If we get an answer with the right completion, I’ll accept it as genuine.”