Prisoners of Tomorrow (67 page)

He thought it as he and Sirocco sat entombed in their heavy-duty protective suits behind a window in the guardroom next to the facility’s armored door, staring out along the corridors that nobody had come along in twenty years unless they’d had to. Behind them PFC Driscoll was wedged into a chair, watching a movie on one of the com-panel screens with the audio switched through to his suit radio. Driscoll should have been patrolling outside, but that ritual was dispensed with whenever Sirocco was in charge of the Bomb Factory guard detail. A year or so previously, somebody in D Company had taken advantage of the fact that everyone looked the same in heavy-duty suits by feeding a video recording of some dutiful, long-forgotten sentry into the closed-circuit TV system that senior officers were in the habit of spying through from time to time, and nobody from the unit had done any patrolling since. The cameras were used instead to afford early warning of unannounced spot checks.

“You never know. The chances might be better after we reach Chiron,” Sirocco said. Colman’s transfer application had been turned down by Engineering. “With the population exploding like crazy, there might be all kinds of prospects. That’s what you get.”

“What’s what I get?”

“For being a good soldier and a lousy citizen.”

“Not liking killing people makes a good soldier?”

“Sure.” Sirocco tossed up a gauntleted hand as if the answer were obvious. “Guys who don’t like it but have to do it get mad. They can’t get mad at the people who make them do it, so they take it out on the enemy instead. That’s what makes them good. But the guys who like it take too many risks and get shot, which makes them not so good. It’s logical.”

“Army logic,” Colman murmured.

“I never said it had to make sense.” Sirocco brought his elbows up level with his shoulders, stretched for a few seconds, and sighed. After a short silence he cocked a curious eye in Colman’s direction. “So . . . what’s the latest with that cutie from Brigade?”

“Forget it.”

“Not interested?”

“Dumb.”

“Too bad. How come?”

“Astrology and cosmic forces. She wanted to know what sign I was born under. I told her maternity ward.” Colman made a sour face. “Hell, why should I have to humor people all the time?”

Sirocco wrinkled his lip, showing a glimpse of his moustache. “You can’t fool me, Steve. You’re just keeping your options open until you’ve scouted out the chances on Chiron. Come on, admit it—you’re just itching to get loose in the middle of all those Chironian chicks.” The first, machine-generated Chironians were the ten thousand individuals created through the ten years following the
Kuan-yin
’s
arrival, the oldest of whom would be in their late forties. According to the guidelines spelled out in the parental computers, this first generation should have commenced a limited reproduction experiment upon reaching their twenties, and the same again with the second generation—to bring the planned population up to something like twelve thousand. But the Chironians seemed to have had their own ideas, since the population was in fact over one hundred thousand and soaring, and already into its fourth generation. The possible implications were intriguing.

“I’m not that hung up about it,” Colman insisted, not for the first time. “Maybe it is like some of the guys think, and maybe it’s not. Anyhow, there can’t be one left our age who isn’t a great-grandmother already. Look at the statistics.”

“Who said anything about them? Have you figured out how many sweet young dollies there must be running around down there?” Sirocco chuckled lasciviously over the intercom. “I bet Swyley has a miraculous recovery between now and when we go into orbit.” Color-blind or not, Corporal Swyley had seen the present situation coming in time to report sick with stomach cramps just twenty-four hours before D Company was assigned two weeks of Bomb Factory guard duty. He was “sick” because he had reported them during his own time; reporting stomach cramps during the Army’s time was diagnosed as malingering.

A call came through from Brigade, and Sirocco switched into the audio channel to take it. Colman sat back and looked around. The indicators and alarms on the console in front of him had nothing to report. Nobody was creeping about under the floor, worming their way between the structure’s inner and outer skins, tampering with any doors or hatches, cutting a hole through from the booster compartments, crawling down from the accelerator level above, or climbing furtively across the outside. Nobody, it seemed, wanted any thermonuclear warheads today. He rose and moved round behind the chair. “Need to stretch my legs,” he said as Sirocco glanced up behind his faceplate. “It’s time to do a round anyhow.” Sirocco nodded and carried on talking inside his helmet. Colman shouldered his M32 and left the guardroom.

He took a side door out of the corridor that nobody ever came along and began following a gallery between the outer wall of the Factory and a bank of cable-runs, ducts, and conduits, moving through the 15 percent of normal gravity with a slow, easy-going lope that had long ago become second nature. Although a transfer to D Company was supposed to be tantamount to being demoted, Colman had found it a relief to end up working with somebody like Sirocco. Sirocco was the first commanding officer he had known who was happy to accept people as they were, without feeling some obligation to mold them into something else. He wasn’t meddling and interfering all the time. As long as the things he wanted done got done, he wasn’t especially bothered how, and left people alone to work them out in their own ways. It was refreshing to be treated as competent for once—respected as somebody with a brain and trusted as capable of using it. Most of the other men in the unit felt the same way. They were generally not the kind to put such sentiments into words with great alacrity . . . but it showed.

Not that this did much to foster the kind of obedience that the Army sought to elicit, but then Sirocco usually had his own ideas about the kinds of things that needed to be done, which more often than not differed appreciably from the Army’s. Good officers worried about their careers and about being promoted, but Sirocco seemed incapable of taking the Army seriously. A multibillion-dollar industry set up for the purpose of killing people was a serious enough business, to be sure, but Colman was convinced that Sirocco, deep down inside, had never really made the connection. It was a game that he enjoyed playing. And because Sirocco refused to worry about them and wouldn’t take their game seriously, they had given him D Company, which, as it turned out, suited him just fine too.

Colman had reached the place where a raised catwalk joined the gallery from a door leading through a bulkhead into one of the booster-pump compartments, where tritium bred in the stern bypass reactors was concentrated to enrich the ramdrive fusion plasma before it was hurled away into space. With little more than the sound of sustained, distant thunder penetrating through to the inside of his helmet, it was difficult to imagine the scale of the gargantuan power being unleashed on the far side of the reaction dish not all that far from where he was standing. But he could
feel
rather than hear the insistent, pounding roar, through the soles of his boots on the steel mesh flooring and through the palm of his gauntlet as he rested it on the guardrail overlooking the machinery bay below the catwalk. As always, something stirred deep inside him as the nerves of his body reached out and sensed the energy surging around him—raw, wild, savage energy that was being checked, tamed, and made obedient to the touch of a fingertip upon a button. He gazed along the lines of superconducting busbars with core maintained within mere tens of degrees from absolute zero just feet from hundred-million-degree plasmas, at the accelerator casing above his head, where pieces of atoms flashed at almost the speed of light along paths controlled to within millionths of an inch, at the bundles of data cables marching away to carry details of everything that happened from microsecond to microsecond to the ever-alert control computers, and had to remind himself that it had all been constructed by men. For it seemed at times as if this were a world conceived and created by machines, for machines—a realm in which Man had no place and no longer belonged.

But Colman felt that he did belong here—among the machines. He understood them and talked their language, and they talked his. They were talking to him now in the vibrations coming through his suit. The language of the machines was plain and direct. It had no inverted logic or double meanings. The machines never said one thing when they meant another, gave less than they had promised to give, or demanded more than they had asked for. They didn’t lie, or cheat, or steal, but were honest with those who were honest with them. Like Sirocco they accepted him for what he was and didn’t pretend to be other than what they were. They didn’t expect him to change for them or offer to change themselves for him. Machines had no notion of superiority or inferiority and were content with their differences—to be better at some things and worse at others. They could understand that and accept it. Why, Colman wondered, couldn’t people?

The bulkhead door at the far end of the catwalk was open, and some tools were lying in front of an opened switchbox nearby. Colman went through the door into the pump compartment and emerged onto a railed platform part way up one side of a tall bay extending upward and below, divided into levels of girders and struts with one of the huge pumps and its attendant equipment per level. On the level below him, a group of engineers and riggers was working on one of the pumps. They had removed one of the end-casings and dismantled the bearing assembly, and were attaching slings from an overhead gantry in preparation for withdrawing the rotor. Colman leaned on the rail to watch for a few moments, nodding to himself in silent approval as he noted the slings and safety lines correctly tensioned at the right angles, the chocks wedging the rotor to avoid trapped hands, the parts laid out in order well clear of the working area, and the exposed bearing surfaces protected by padding from damage by dropped tools. He liked watching professionals.

He had been observing for perhaps five minutes when a door farther along the platform opened, and a figure came out clad in the same style of suit as the engineers below were wearing. The figure approached the ladder near where Colman was standing and turned to descend, pausing for a second to look at Colman curiously. The nametag on the breast pocket read B. FALLOWS. Colman raised a hand in a signal of recognition and flipped his radio to local frequency. “Hey, Bernard, it’s me—Steve Colman. I don’t know if you’re heard yet, but that transfer didn’t go through. Thanks for trying anyway.”

The features behind the other’s visor remained unsmiling.
“Mister
Fallows to you, Sergeant.” The voice was icy. “I’m sorry, but I have work to do. I presume you have as well. Might I suggest that we both get on with it.” With that he clasped the handrails of the ladder, stepped backward off the platform to slide gently down to the level below, and turned away to rejoin the others.

Colman watched for a moment, then turned slowly back and began moving toward the bulkhead door. He didn’t feel resentful, nor particularly surprised. He’d seen it all too many times before. Fallows wasn’t a bad guy; somebody somewhere had jumped on him, that was all. “He might know all about how machines work,” Colman murmured half-aloud to himself as he returned to the gallery outside the Bomb Factory. “But he doesn’t understand how they think.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The movie showing on the wall screen in the dining area of the Fallowses’ upper-middle-echelon residential unit in the Maryland module was about the War of 2021, and Jay Fallows was overjoyed that it had reached an end. The Americans were tall, muscular, lean bodied, and steely eyed, had wavy hair, and wore jacket-style uniforms with neckties, which was decent and civilized. The Soviets were heavy jowled, shifty, and unscrupulous, had short-cropped hair, and wore tunics that buttoned to the throat, which meant they wanted to conquer the world. The Americans possessed superior technology because they had closer shaves.

“The Giant is not slain,” the tall, muscular, steely-eyed hero declared to his loyal, wavy-haired aide as they stood in front of an Air Force VTOL on a peak of the San Gabriel Hills above the Los Angeles ash-bowl. “It must sleep a while to mend its wounds now its task is done. But it will rise again, hardened and tempered from the furnace. This will not have been for naught.” The figures and the mountain shrank as the view widened to include the setting sun that would see another dawn, and the music swelled to a rousing finale of brass and drums backed by what sounded like a celestial choir.

Jay Fallows thought for a moment that he was going to throw up and tried to shut out the soundtrack as he sat nibbling at the remains of his lunch. An astronomy book lay propped open on the table in front of him. Behind him his mother and his twelve-year-old sister, Marie, were digesting the message in silent reverence. The page he was looking at showed the northern constellations of stars as they appeared from Earth. They looked much as they did from the
Mayflower II
, except in the book Cassiopeia was missing a star—the Sun. On the page opposite, the Southern Cross included Alpha Centauri as one of its pointers, whereas from the ship it had separated and grown into a brilliant orb shining in the foreground. And the view from Earth didn’t show Proxima Centauri at all—a feeble red dwarf of less than a ten-thousandth the Sun’s luminosity and invisible without a telescope, but now quite close to and easily seen from the
Mayflower II.
Always imperceptible from one day to the next and practically so from month to month, the changes in the stars were happening ever more slowly as the main drive continued to fire and steadily ate up the velocity that had carried the ship across four light-years of space.

Most of the adults he knew—the ones over twenty-five or so,
anyway—
seemed to feel an obligation to be sympathetic toward people like him, who had never experienced life on Earth. From what he had seen he wasn’t sure that he’d missed all that much. Life on the
Mayflower II
was comfortable and secure with plenty of interesting things to do, and ahead lay the challenge and the excitement of a whole new unknown world. Certainly that was something no one back on Earth could look forward to.