James P. Hogan (49 page)

Paula turned her head and watched, puzzled, as Olga hurried across the room and opened the door. She went out into the corridor and her footsteps retreated. Then Paula heard her say, “Oh, Dr. Brusikov, are you leaving?”

Brusikov’s voice answered, sounding surprised. “I was going out to watch the arrival of the foreign minister and his party, and then have lunch. Why?”

“Oh, good. Then, you are going out into the square?”

“Yes.” The voices were right outside the door now.

“Could I ask a favor?” Olga ushered Brusikov into the room. He nodded perfunctorily to acknowledge Paula’s presence. Olga glanced quickly around the lab and took a bright-blue cylindrical cardboard container, three feet or so long, from a stack lying on a shelf – the kind commonly used for carrying things like rolled technical drawings. “I promised these to somebody urgently, but missed him. He’s outside in the square now, but I can’t go out there. I wonder if you’d be so kind…”

“Oh, I see.” Brusikov nodded. “Very well. But how will I know him?”

Olga turned to the screen showing the scene outside and pointed to a man in a yellow jacket and green hat, standing on the edge of the crowd, near the main door of the Government Building. “That’s him, He’s very distinctive. His name is Zavdat.”

Paula had stood up from her chair behind them. As Brusikov turned to leave, she said suddenly, “No, that’s the wrong one.”

He stopped and looked back questioningly. Paula-held Olga’s eyes steadily while she drew a red cylinder off the shelf. “I put them in this one.”

Olga didn’t falter. “Oh yes, that’s right… I must have got them mixed up.” She took the red cylinder and exchanged it for the blue one that Brusikov was holding. He nodded and left, closing the door.

A strained silence descended while the two women watched the screen, Paula looking remorseful now, Olga tight-lipped and flushed. After a minute or so the figure of Dr. Brusikov came out of the Government Building entrance, carrying the red cylinder. He stopped and looked about for a few seconds, then approached the man in the yellow coat and green hat. Brusikov said something and offered the cylinder. The man in the yellow coat shook his head, shrugged, and waved a hand. Brusikov remonstrated and pointed back at the Government Building. The man shook his head again. Finally Brusikov, looking disgruntled and not a little mystified, moved away to find a different spot in the crowd.

Paula turned away but avoided facing Olga directly. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Olga shook her head. She was her usual calm self once again. “No, you were quite right,” she said. “Neither of us knew for sure. It is I who should apologize.”

“For a moment I didn’t trust you.”

“At times like these, it’s a wonder anyone trusts anybody.”

On the screen the doors on the raised level above the square opened and a group of smiling figures came out to be greeted by cheers and applause. Paula sat down at the terminal again and pushed the curl from her forehead. “Then, let’s get on with the job,” she said.

Dressed in a selection from the civilian attire accumulated in the Crypt, Rashazzi took the laser outside to repeat over longer ranges some tests that he and Haber had conducted inside the structure which had yielded odd results. He emerged at the surface in a ventilator outlet above some apartments on the far side of the reservoir, and spent more than an hour surreptitiously aiming pulses at parts of the buildings of central Novyi Kazan and timing the returns on an electronic interferometer that Paula had built. He explained the results to McCain later, after returning to the Crypt. Haber was with them.

“Since we are on the inside of a cylinder, the verticals of buildings converge toward the center, like the spokes of a wheel. And since we know the size of
Valentina Tereshkova
, it’s easy to calculate how much the convergence ought to be: verticals spaced two hundred meters apart at the base ought to converge by about three meters through a fifteen-meter difference in height.”

McCain nodded. That much was straightforward enough. “Okay.”

“But they don’t,” Rashazzi said. “It works out at closer to one point three meters. So what’s happened to the difference?”

McCain could only shake his head. “It fits with this idea that keeps coming up, of the whole place being bigger than it’s supposed to, doesn’t it,” he said.

“Yes,” Haber agreed. “And not only that. To give the amount or convergence that Razz has measured, the colony would have to be just the diameter that was indicated by the experiments we did with the balance scale: almost four and a half kilometers instead of less than two kilometers”

McCain made a face. “I hate coincidences.”

“Oh, I don’t think this could properly be called a coincidence,” Haber said.

“Probably not. But we still don’t have any explanations, huh?”

Rashazzi looked at McCain with a strange, unsmiling expression for a second. Then he picked up a sheet of paper that he and Haber had been poring over when McCain arrived. “Yes,” he replied in a curious voice. “As a matter of fact, Lew, this time I believe we do have an explanation….”

Brusikov came in again on his way back from lunch to return the cylinder and ask what the hell Olga had been playing at. Paula apologized and explained that Olga had been fooled by the yellow coat and green hat – hardly the most common of outfits to be seen around
Tereshkova
, she pointed out with as much charm as she could muster – and had not paid enough attention to the face. It wasn’t the right man. Brusikov went away grumbling about being made to feel a fool, but accepted it.

Paula remained, staring at the work she had been doing on the larger screen, but no longer interested in it. How was anybody supposed to care about the flatulence of microbes when the world might be about to cremate itself?

She thought about the message she had composed for Foleda, and how inadequate it seemed compared to the scale of what was at stake. Her conviction grew that the nature of
Valentina Tereshkova
had become a major factor in. the equations being juggled in Washington and in Moscow,. Here she was, not only present at that fulcrum of events, but singled out through a strange series of twists of fate for a unique perspective that should surely be crucial to any decisions embarked on at such a moment. She remembered reading somewhere that Napoleon scoffed at the notion of luck. “Lucky” people, he maintained, were the ones who put themselves in the right place and at the right time for the right things to happen. In other words,-they rose to the occasion. Here was an occasion that surely beckoned.

She was still feeling despondent when Olga returned. The Russian woman slipped in without knocking, and closed the door behind her.

“Did the message go off all right?” Paula asked.

Olga nodded and stood leaning against the door with her eyes closed for a moment, as if allowing tension to drain away. “Top priority, so Ivan will send it straight on.” She went over to the empty chair in front of the console and sat down, noticing as she did so the red cylinder, which Paula had put back on the shelf. “Has Brusikov been back?”

“Yes. He wasn’t very amused.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That it was the wrong man. You were misled by the hat and the coat – an unlikely similarity in appearance.”

Olga nodded, and sat staring at the console for what seemed a long time. Paula watched her but had nothing to say. Eventually Olga turned her chair to face across the room. They looked at each other. At last Olga said, “It doesn’t seem enough, somehow.”

Paula nodded in a way that said. Olga didn’t have to elaborate. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. And on reflection I’m not even sure they’ll believe that much.”

“Why shouldn’t they?”

“Who am I? Just the support half of the team.” Olga gave the impression that she had expected the reply but had allowed Paula to make it all the same, just to be sure they both understood the same things. Paula got the feeling that Olga’s thoughts had been running parallel to her own. Olga hesitated visibly. “Yes?” Paula prompted.

Olga looked up. “There is another way.”

“What way?”

“Ask the Russians to connect you to America via one of their regular channels – it could be a private military link, not public TV. Show yourself here, in
Valentina Tereshkova
, alongside the Soviet leaders. Let your own people talk with you over the link, ask questions, and observe you responding and interacting. That way they will know that the Soviet leaders are here, and that they are here now.” Paula was so surprised by the proposal that for a moment she could only shake her head and stare incredulously, “Say you wish to talk with General Protbornov urgently, and tell him everything,” Olga urged. “He has access to the people who can arrange it.”

“But… everything? We’d have to reveal the channel. You’d lose your communications to Ivan. Ivan would be exposed.”

“I know. I’ve already thought of all that. What do things like that matter now? If there’s a war it will all be lost anyway.”

Paula swallowed hard. “That’s… that’s some decision you’re asking.”

“Is it? What is the alternative?”

A good point, Paula conceded. For when she thought about it, the only alternative to trying was to live the rest of her life, irrespective of the outcome, with the knowledge that she hadn’t tried, Put that way, it didn’t really leave much of a choice.

Major General Protbornov stared back across the desk in his office at the Internal Security Headquarters in Turgenev. For several seconds his rugged, heavy-jowled face was completely blank, as if it had just been solidly punched. Then he blinked and raised a hand to rub the corner of his eye. “Communications?” The heavy, rumbling voice assembled the word slowly, a syllable at a time, as if they were steps he was having to mount to overcome his disbelief, “Communications into American intelligence, from inside Zamork? How could this be possible?” Beneath their puffy lids, his eyes had taken on a bleak expression that already seemed to be looking into the face of demotion, arrest, and possibly even a firing squad.

Uskayev – the same blond, gray-eyed major whom Paula had last seen with Protbornov in the infirmary – drew a notepad closer across the top of his desk, which stood by the window to one side of the office. “Describe the mechanism of this communications method,” he said. “What form does it take?”

Olga sighed in the chair beside Paula. “We possess an electronic chip that is programmed to insert encoded text into the random-number-group fillers in the regular message stream to Earth,” she replied, speaking in a tired voice. “The chip is substituted for the standard one in the outgoing encryption processor located in the Communications Center.”

“How do you gain access to the Communications Center?”

“I don’t. I have an associate.”

“The name?”

Olga hesitated. Uskayev looked up sharply. Clearly if she’d come here asking for favors, she couldn’t expect to hold anything back. “Andrei Ogovoy, an engineer at the Communications Center,” she said. Uskayev wrote rapidly on his pad.

“Go on,” Protbornov said.

Olga described her channel down to the groundstation at Sokhotsk and the technique of disguising the encoded replies as statistical data. She said that the channel had been extended to connect into the US military and intelligence communications system, but insisted, correctly, that she didn’t know how the link from Sokhotsk to the US operated.

“You say this person at Sokhotsk was communicating with you privately before there was any contact with the Americans,” Protbornov said when she had finished.

“Yes.”

“So this person must have set up the link to the Americans, and managed the transfer of messages after it was established. Who was this person who commanded such extraordinary opportunities?”

“The name?” Uskayev said, pen poised.

Paula stared woodenly ahead and heard Olga take in a long breath beside her. “Professor Igor Dyashkin,” Olga! said. “Director of the operational facility at Sokhotsk.” Despite herself, Paula raised her eyebrows. Protbornov and Uskayev exchanged ominous glances.

Protbornov stared down at his hands in a way that said the sky might as well fall now, for all the surprises life had left to offer. He looked up. “So, you have your channel to the professor. And how did you progress from there to initiating contact with the Americans?”

“We didn’t,” Olga said. “They initiated contact with us.” Protbornov stared at her incredulously.

That had been expected. Paula explained, “I’m not a journalist with Pacific News Services. My companion and I came here on a mission for US military intelligence. It was our people. A message came over the channel from them, to us.” She looked at Uskayev and nodded resignedly before he could say it. “Bryce, Paula M., second lieutenant, United States Air Force, serial number AO 20188813, temporarily attached to the Unified Defense Intelligence Agency.”

“And your colleague?” Protbornov clearly wasn’t going to quit while he was on a roll.

“I only know him as Lewis Earnshaw. He’s with the UDIA. That’s all I know.”

Protbornov nodded, having disposed of those preliminaries, and clasped his hands. “So, you say the UDIA contacted you here, using the link through Professor Dyashkin, But how could they possibly have known about it?”

“I don’t know,” Paula replied.

“You can’t expect us to believe that,” Protbornov scoffed.

“She’s telling the truth,” Olga said. “We are both scientists. We don’t know what kinds of intrigues go on among you people. But that’s all immaterial now, compared to the reason why we’ve decided to come here and reveal everything.” She paused to let the point sink in. Protbornov waited. Olga went on, “To us, the messages we have been receiving indicate that the West believes the Soviet Union is about to launch a first strike. We think there’s a strong possibility that the West will decide to attack preemptively. Preventing such a catastrophe must take priority over other considerations – that is why we have been frank. We think there is a way it can be prevented, but we will need your help.”