James P. Hogan (59 page)

The atmosphere was abuzz with excited murmurings as guards shepherded the prisoners out of the billets and down from the upper level to be formed into ranks for general assembly on the mess-area floor. Work assignments had been canceled, and more prisoners were coming in from the compound, Gorky Street, and the Core. There were rumors of mass amnesties about to be announced, that the Moscow government had fallen, and that war had broken out back on Earth. One squad of guards was particularly busy in billet B-3, which had been cleared out. Outside its door the block commandant, Major Bachayvin, and several officers were talking with the block supervisor, Supeyev, and the billet foreman, Luchenko.

Zamork had served its purpose. The things that mattered now were happening outside its boundaries, and whichever way the outcome of it all went, the charade inside was over. It was time to reestablish proper discipline and security, and to commence sorting out from the individuals who had been brought here as inmates those who showed the most promise and willingness to be useful in the new era of the regime. Fedorov wondered what kind of place the new era would have for him.

A communicator beeped on the belt of one of the aides standing near him. The aide answered it, listened for a moment, and passed the unit to Colonel Menikin. “From Colonel Gadzhovsky, sir.”

“Very good,” Menikin acknowledged. Gadzhovsky was in command of the guard detail that had been sent to open up the supposedly secret workshop that the prisoners had set up in the machinery deck below. Menikin talked to Gadzhovsky, then reported to Fedorov. “Three prisoners were apprehended down there, all members of McCain’s billet: the Zigandan Mungabo, the Pole Borowski, and the Buryat. They’re being brought up now.”

Fedorov nodded. “Good. You’d better go and inform Major Bachayvin.” He watched as Menikin walked over and said something to the group outside the door of billet B-3. Then his brow furrowed. Bachayvin, Supeyev, and Luchenko were gesticulating vigorously as they answered, and seemed agitated. A few moments later, a foreman from one of the upper-level billets came hurrying across the floor, went over to join them, and started saying something to Supeyev. Fedorov cast a general eye around the rest of the mess area, and when he looked back again, Menikin, Bachayvin, and Supeyev were coming toward him. The expressions on their faces gave him his first inkling that something was wrong.

“There are still three prisoners from B-three unaccounted for,” Menikin said. He looked inquiringly at Supeyev.

“The two scientists, Rashazzi and Haber, and the Asiatic, Nakajima-Lin,” Supeyev said. “Also the Englishman, Sargent, is not present with the contingent from B-twelve.”

Fedorov frowned uncertainly. “They can’t be out in the colony somewhere. We’ve been covering their access to the freight line at all times. They must be loose somewhere down in that machinery deck.” He turned to Menikin. “Have Gadzhovsky seal all exits down there, and send Major Kavolev down with his men to help with a search. The whole place is to be combed – every inch of it.”

“Yes, sir.” Menikin took his own communicator, contacted Gadzhovsky again, and began speaking.

“I never did like this policy of relying on informers to tell us what was going on down there,” Fedorov growled to Bachayvin. “The whole place should have been wired so tight that a bug couldn’t have moved without: our knowing.”

“But if the prisoners had discovered it, sir?…”

“Bah! It could have been done invisibly. Everyone must take risks sometimes.”

Menikin looked up from the communicator to interrupt. He looked concerned. “There’s more from Major Gadzhovsky.”

“Well?”

“We know now why Istamel failed to report in on time. He’s just been found unconscious in the elevator shaft. They’re taking him to the infirmary now. There was a piece of broken rope near him. The three prisoners who were detained down there say that he fell, and that they were on their way up to report it.”

“Any sign yet of the four others who are missing?”

“Negative, sir.”

Fedorov didn’t like it. He turned away and stared morosely out at the lines of prisoners and guard details now coming to order. If he waited a few more minutes and the four were found, nothing more would come of it. But if he delayed and they weren’t found, the consequences for him would be worse. Such was the justice of life that withholders of bad news could lose their heads just as easily as its bearers. Americans called it “Catch-22” for some reason he’d never understood.

He turned back toward Colonel Menikin. “Call General Protbornov’s office in Turgenev,” he ordered.

The human body is a continuous liquid system. Blood must flow to and from every part of it to bring oxygen to its cells and remove the waste products of metabolism from them, and the intercellular volume supporting this flow is connected throughout. Hence, if pressure differences exist between parts of the body, blood, like any other fluid, will migrate from high-pressure regions to lower-pressure ones, and the delicate skin capillaries will rupture if the pressure across them exceeds their strength.

When, after resting for some time in the machinery compartment, the four escapees cut and peeled away the survival skins they had used to make the crossing through the vacuum, they found their bodies covered with long, painfully swollen, black and purple weals. The worst were around their waists and major limb joints. Inevitably, the stretching and exertion of climbing the first wall had opened cracks in their suiting despite the improvised seals, into which the flesh had literally been sucked in elongated blood blisters that only the inner clothing had contained. The middle of Rashazzi’s back looked as if it had been beaten with a rubber hose, Scanlon’s left wrist was swollen into a balloon that practically immobilized the hand, and Koh had the same trouble with an elbow and a knee. Between them, a pretty sorry team, all in all, McCain thought. In addition to a collection of blemishes pretty much the same as the others’, he had two hideous black eyes.

“I feel like I’ve been breathing powdered glass,” he said as they sat cleaning the worst of the goo from themselves and putting on the clothes they had brought to change into. “What happened back there?”

“Your face seal had been knocked crooked on one side and had started leaking,” Rashazzi told him. “I had to lift part of it away briefly to fix it.”

“You mean my whole face was open?”

“Yes…”

“Holy shit!”

“For about five seconds, maybe. The reason you feel all dried up is that gas and moisture poured out of your lungs and mucous tissues into the vacuum. It’s possible that the evaporative cooling caused ice to form on your tongue.”

“It feels like I’ve been eating ashes.”

“Be thankful it’s us and not you who have to look at that face of yours,” Scanlon said. “You look like me uncle Mick, the morning after a night out enjoying himself.”

“Be thankful there aren’t any gas pockets behind the eyes,” Rashazzi said matter-of-factly. “Otherwise they’d have blown out like champagne corks.”

Scanlon had stayed by the door to peep out from time to time, but had seen no signs of excitement or searching. They concluded, therefore, that if the opening of the airlock had triggered an indicator, either it hadn’t been noticed, or it hadn’t been deemed serious enough to investigate yet, or it had been put down to a wiring fault as they’d intended. Whichever, it seemed they were in no immediate danger. But they had far from unlimited time.

McCain winced as he stretched an arm up into the sleeve of the baggy gray sweater that he’d unrolled. “So what are the possibilities now?” he said to the company in general. “Where do we go from here?” He pulled the sweater down over himself and pushed his head through. “Which one said that – the bishop to the barmaid?”

“Do we all feel up to surprising a guardpost full of KGB and overpowering them, stealing their uniforms, and bluffing our way through in disguise?” Scanlon asked. The looks from the others answered the question and said they weren’t in a mood for Irish humor just then.

“How far above us is Sokhotsk?” McCain asked.

“We’re under a range of hills to the northwest,” Scanlon answered. “Elevator systems from here go up five hundred feet to Potemkin’s transportation and control center. From there, Sokhotsk is about three miles away, connected by a road and rail tunnel. The tunnel comes out in a staging area below the main Sokhotsk administrative complex.”

“Which is presumably in a high-security area,” Rashazzi said.

“The whole place is a high-security area,” Scanlon replied.

“Against outside penetration, anyhow?” Rashazzi suggested. “But in a way, we’re already on the inside.”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” Scanlon said. For once he sounded pessimistic. “The security is as strict every way. Let’s face it, getting into Sokhotsk isn’t going to be a piece of cake by anybody’s definition.”

There was a glum silence. Then McCain said, “What about the rest? You said something about mining and some kind of industrial center.”

“Scientists, VIPs, and the like – small numbers of people – they come and go through Sokhotsk,” Scanlon said. ‘But building and operating Potemkin meant moving materials and people on a scale that would never be seen going in and out of a research establishment. So some industry was sited nearby as a cover. There’s a bauxite-mining operation on the other side of the hills from Sokhotsk, and an aluminum-smelting plant and rolling mill at a new town called Nizhni Zaliski, about five miles away from it – places where trains and trucks don’t attract attention.”

That sounded closer to what McCain had in mind. “So Potemkin, the place we’re at, connects to the mining operation, and to Sokhotsk,” he concluded.

“That’s right,” Scanlon said. “But the mining side doesn’t connect direct to Sokhotsk. The only way into Sokhotsk is from where we are, and getting in will be the devil of a job that I’m already after telling you.”

“Hmm…” McCain sat back, rubbing his chin.

“What about other ways in?” Rashazzi asked Scanlon. “Pipes, ducts, drains… How tight is the protection on things like that?”

“As tight as the arse on a fish, and that’s watertight,” Scanlon said.

McCain finished dressing. He tried stooping to pull on the canvas shoes that he’d brought, but the soreness around his waist prevented him from bending. Rashazzi put them on and laced them for him. “Well, that’s just great, Kev,” McCain couldn’t stop himself from saying. “Why couldn’t you have thought of all that before we bothered coming this far?”

“There wasn’t a hell of a lot of time for speculating, for one thing, if you remember,” Scanlon said. “And for another, I assumed your interests would lie in getting away from the Russians – it never occurred to me that anyone would want to get closer to them. And for another, if you want me to be honest, I never thought we’d make it this far.”

Koh had been sitting quietly and staring into space while he listened. When silence fell again, he remarked, “You know, the deviousness of the Western mind will never cease to mystify me. Why do you always look for the most difficult way of doing everything? Does it have something to do with inscrutable Puritans and their unfathomable work ethic?”

“What are you talking about?” McCain asked.

“Why do you imagine that you must get into Sokhotsk?”

McCain looked nonplussed for a moment, then shrugged as if dismissing the obvious. “There might be a war about to start out there. We know something that nobody else on our side knows, which might be vital. We have to try to communicate that information back if there’s any possibility at all for doing so, no matter how slim the chances.”

Koh looked back unblinkingly in a way which said that whatever was obvious to McCain wasn’t obvious at all to him. “Well?”

McCain shrugged again, started to speak, then looked at Rashazzi, “It is a communications establishment,” Rashazzi said. “We’re in the middle of Siberia, and we need to communicate with the West.” He spread his hands briefly, in the manner of a person not wishing to offend someone who was being obtuse. “We’ll need access to the kind of equipment that’s inside Sokhotsk.”

Koh looked unimpressed. “And what will you do with it?” he asked. “Could any of you operate sophisticated Russian equipment that you haven’t been trained to use, even if you knew the right access codes? I certainly couldn’t. So what else do you think we’ll do – sneak in somehow, just happen to find somebody who knows how everything works, hold a gun to his head, and make him do as we say?”

“Maybe,” McCain mumbled, taken aback slightly by the realization that he hadn’t thought it through. “Who knows?”

Koh snorted. “Very derring-do. And the type of people you’ll find in there will probably tell you to go ahead and shoot. So what good would it do?”

Koh was right, but McCain couldn’t let himself concede defeat now. “We won’t know until we get in there.” He sat back wearily against the wall. “Like I said, however slim the chances…”

“Zero is a pretty slim number,” Koh agreed. “Taking on those chances would be the same as throwing your vital information away.”

“What else can we do?” Rashazzi asked. “We can’t just sit here without trying anything.”

“Why do you insist that you have to use sophisticated equipment in a top-security Soviet research establishment at all?” Koh asked. “What’s wrong with simply picking up a phone?” The others all started to speak, then stopped again at the same instant. They looked at each other, each waiting for one of the other two to tell Koh why it was crazy. “Scientists!” Koh sighed, shook his head, and continued looking distant while he waited for them to get there in their own time.

“What phone?” Scanlon asked at last.

“You’re all asking how to get
in
to Sokhotsk,” Koh said “I’m saying let’s think about going the other way. You said this place connects out through the bauxite-mining complex to Nizhni Zaliski, an industrial town. Well, a town ought to have phones in it. And very possibly the freight going out that way isn’t checked as thoroughly as anything going into a place like Sokhotsk. If anything’s worth a try, surely this is.”