Prisoners of Tomorrow

by James P. Hogan

  “Oh, they couldn’t leave Maiskevik there, could they? Not any longer—after what happened. He’s lost face. . . . Wouldn’t be able to carry the same weight any more, in the billet. Not after what happened.”

  “And I don’t get put away for a while to cool down?”

  “No, they couldn’t do that, could they? Not if they want to pretend it was an accident.”

  “That’s my point. Why would they pretend that?”

  “Who knows why they do things?”

  McCain gestured at the compound in general. “So, is it likely to be everybody’s gossip for the evening?”

  “No, it won’t be spread around.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s best.”

  They began walking slowly toward the door into the throughway between A and B Blocks. Andreyov turned his head to peer at McCain, as if weighing something in his mind. Finally he said, “You seem to be a man of strong opinions—strong impressions of things.”

  McCain thrust his hands into his pockets. “Some things, maybe. I don’t know. . . . What did you have in mind?”

  “The things you argue with Nolan about. You have strong ideals.”

  “I never really thought of myself as an idealist.”

  “Principles, then?”

  “A few, maybe.”

  Andreyov hesitated, then said, “I admire that. Everybody who is anything worthwhile has to admire that. But, you know, it troubles me that you should think so badly of Russia.” Before McCain could reply, he went on, “It isn’t everything you think. We are proud of our country, as you are of yours. Like you, we worked hard and we suffered to make it what it is. And we have transformed our Motherland from backwardness to one of the world’s strongest nations, and extended its influence everywhere—out into space, too. There are many positive things that you should remember, things we have achieved. Creative things. Our history, our arts . . . Russia has produced men of words and ideas that have swept through the civilized world as have few others. Russians have brought glory to music and ballet, and at one time to painting and architecture. . . . And hospitality and friendship! Do you know what the educated Russian values more than anything else? Good friends and stimulating conversation. There is nothing anywhere else in the world to match the loyalty of Russians who are close friends. You have to spend an evening at home with an apartment full of them, when the talking goes on over food and vodka until long into the night. Or I am on my own and the telephone rings at three in the morning, and it’s my friend Viktor who I have known for forty years and he tells me, ‘Yevgenni, I have problems and I need somebody to talk to. I am coming over.’ Or it is Oleg, who says, ‘I have been thinking about what you said last week. We must discuss it.’ So what do I do? I put the water on to boil for some tea. Where would you find that in New York? Oh, no, there I must get up and go to work because I have to be ‘successful’ all the time, or make money, money, or please the boss whose ass I want to kick, but then he fires me from my job and I sleep in the street. Is it not so?”

  They emerged into Gorky Street and turned to follow it for a short distance to reenter the B Block area through its front entrance.

  “No, you misunderstand,” McCain said. “I don’t have any quarrel with the Russian people. I respect everything the Russian tradition stands for—all the things you said. But the present political system is something alien to all that. That’s not the real Russia.”

  “Yes, we’ve made our share of mistakes, it’s true,” Andreyov agreed. “Especially in Stalin’s time. And I admit we are still too bureaucratic and paranoid about foreigners. Russians worry a lot what people think of them, you see. They can’t stand the thought of being compared unfavorably, or of being seen in a bad light. They’re like a wife who is too fussy about her house and won’t let anyone in when she thinks it’s untidy. And we still tend to feel embarrassed by some things, so we hide ourselves from the world. But it’s changing. Someday we will show the world. Not in my lifetime, maybe . . . but it will happen.”

  “Well, when it does, then I’ll feel a lot easier,” McCain said.

  They walked on in silence for a short while. Then Andreyov said, “That movie last night, my father was there, you know—he was with Konev’s army that linked up with the Americans in Germany. Within months there was talk that now they were going to start fighting the Americans. He told me some of the soldiers wept when they heard it. They couldn’t understand why.”

  “Life can be crazy,” McCain agreed.

  “You don’t understand it either?”

  “I gave up trying to. I just believe that you pay what you owe, you collect what you’re due, you protect what you have, and you help if you can. Otherwise mind your own business and leave people alone.”

  “You don’t want to destroy the Soviet Union?”

  “Not unless it tries to destroy me.”

  “What about if you thought it was about to? Would you attack it preemptively?”

  McCain nodded as he saw the point. “Like Maiskevik, for instance?”

  “We are taught that the capitalists will start a desperate, last-ditch war to try and save themselves rather than submit to the inevitable triumph of world socialism,” Andreyov said. “Doesn’t what you’ve just said confirm it?”

  “Look at Japan, China, and the rest of Asia and tell me again about the triumph of world socialism. I’d say it’s the other way round: it’s not us that’s in the ditch. Maybe we feel the same way about you.”

  Andreyov shook his head sadly. “No trust, no trust,” he sighed. “Why does it always have to be that way? You know, I heard a story once about two men from a ship that had sunk, and they were floating on top of a chest full of food and water in a sea full of sharks. But to make enough room to open the door, one of them would have to jump in the water. Now, they had an oar also, which meant that the other one could beat away the sharks. But if he didn’t beat away the sharks and allowed the other one to be gobbled up, then he would be left with all the food. They both knew that they would maybe survive if they cooperated with each other, and that they would both die if they didn’t; but if one was left with all the food, then he would certainly survive. So neither of them would jump, because neither trusted the other. And they both starved to death, on top of a chest full of food.” Andreyov looked at McCain. “It’s the same problem, isn’t it. What’s the solution?”

  McCain thought for a while. “I guess first we have to decide who the sharks are,” he said. They stopped inside the B Block mess area. McCain took in the usual evening scene, then his eyes came back to Andreyov. He wondered how a seemingly harmless old man came to be shut up in a place like this. “What did you do to get in here?” he asked.

  “Oh, it’s a funny story. . . . I don’t really have any family left now, you see, so I volunteered for the experimental population that they were bringing up to inhabit the colony. But they didn’t like some of the things I said, so they put me in here rather than send me all the way back again. Subversive, they said I was.”

  “Not many guys your age get to go into space,” McCain commented.

  “Hah! I might as well not have bothered, for all I can remember,” Andreyov replied. “Very peculiar, it was. I don’t have any clear recollection at all of that trip. A lot of others I was with said the same thing. All like part of a dream, it was . . .” He paused and rubbed his temples. “In fact, even thinking about it makes me tired. And it’s past my time to rest, anyway. Not as young as you people. . . . If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll turn in.”

  “Sure. Thanks for the talk. ’Night.”

  Andreyov went on into the billet. McCain spotted Scanlon and Koh at one of the tables and went over to sit with them. It could have been his imagination, but despite what Andreyov had said about gossip not spreading, McCain got the distinct feeling that many eyes were following him; too many heads seemed to look away suddenly as he let his gaze wander over the mess area. He looked back at the other two.

 
“How’s Andreyov tonight?” Scanlon asked.

  “He always strikes me as a lonely kind of person. That’s why he talks a lot, and I listen. He only came up here because he doesn’t have any family down there.” McCain shrugged and gestured at the figures in the mess area. “Maybe this is his family now. I don’t think the idea of going home even crosses his mind.”

  “Ah well . . .” Scanlon looked curiously at Koh. “Don’t you ever think about going home?”

  “Not a lot.” Koh was packing his long, straight-stemmed pipe with the mixture of tobacco and herbs that he smoked.

  “There is really no point. And besides, not everyone back where I come from agrees that what I did was an honorable thing.” Koh never pinpointed exactly where he considered himself to be from. “And that’s very important, of course. It’s conceivable that I’d have a harder time back there than up here.”

  “Don’t you want to contribute something to what a lot of people are saying is Asia’s century?” McCain said.

  Koh chuckled as he lit his pipe. “Maybe I already have.” He sucked several times, and was rewarded with a cloud of aromatic smoke that he puffed into the air.

  “What did you do?” McCain asked.

  “Maybe I’ll tell you one day,” Koh answered mysteriously. He went on, “In any case, whatever is destined to evolve will do so in the long run, with or without me. With all their glorification, I don’t believe that even the Christs, Napoleons, Hitlers, and Genghis Khans really influence history that much. All they do is slightly accelerate or slightly retard what would have happened anyway.”

  “So Asia was due to take the twenty-first century anyway?” McCain said.

  “Yes, eventually,” Koh replied. “You had Malthus, and thought you were running out of resources; we had Confucius. But people are the only resource that matters, because human ingenuity creates all the rest—and we have thirty percent of the world’s supply. When you think of it that way, the outcome was inevitable sooner or later.”

  Scanlon was staring with his head cocked to one side, as if this put a lot of things in a perspective that he hadn’t seen before. “Go on, Koh,” he said. “That’s a thought, now. So it was all inevitable, you’re telling us?”

  Koh shrugged. “Eventually. But the West itself speeded up the process.”

  “How come?” McCain asked.

  “You made the Third World into colonies and held it back for centuries. But in doing that you were compressing a spring. And when the spring was released after the Second World War, nothing could contain the energy and the urgency to make up for lost time. In half a century Asia went through social changes that had taken the West a thousand years. America lost confidence in itself—the very thing we had admired most. You made the same mistake that the British had a hundred years before.”

  “Trust the Brits to be at the bottom of it,” Scanlon muttered.

  Koh went on, “The power and wealth of their ruling class was tied to industries that were becoming obsolete. Instead of adapting and moving with the times, they tried to entrench themselves around technology that was being superseded. It can’t work. Neither the lion nor the zebra can stop evolving and hope to survive. One would starve; the other would be eaten.” It was true, McCain thought to himself. While the two powers that represented the culmination of the Old World remained deadlocked in their military stalemate, the forerunners of the New were racing ahead with developing the energy-dense, nuclear-based industries that would power the twenty-first century and carry mankind across the Solar System.

  “Different dogs have their days,” Scanlon said.

  “Quite,” Koh said. “Likewise, human culture as a whole is all the time evolving, but it doesn’t evolve evenly, everywhere at once. It’s like an amoeba, where first one part moves, than another. The center of action shifts from place to place, and so civilizations rise and fall: the East and Middle East long ago, Greece, Rome, and the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean, the power struggles of Europe, and the rise of America. But there was no law of nature which said that once the focus shifted to America, it had to remain there forever. What we’re seeing is simply the next step in the process. The era of Western civilization that sprang from the European Renaissance a thousand years ago is over. . . . Actually, the term is a misnomer. What happened back at that time was not the rebirth of anything. It was the birth of a completely new culture. Oh, true, a new civilization might pick up a few stones that suit its needs from the rubble of an old one, but that’s not the same thing as rebuilding it. . . .” Koh sat back and smiled through the cloud that was beginning to engulf him. He held out an upturned hand in a gesture that could have meant anything, and an ecstatic light crept into his eyes. “They must free their souls to soar . . .” He paused, looking at the other two for a moment as if they had suddenly materialized there from nowhere. Then he carried on, his voice rising and falling in cadences of lyrical rapture: “. . . unfettered essence of distilled turpentine.”

  McCain and Scanlon glanced at each other. They knew they wouldn’t get anything more that was coherent out of Koh for the rest of the evening. And then, which was just as well, the lights blinked to signal that it was time to move into the billets. They each took one of Koh’s arms and helped him to his feet.

  “You never struck me as a student of cultural evolution, Kev,” McCain said as they steered Koh toward the B-3 door.

  “Well, aren’t the Irish students of life itself, and isn’t that everything?” Scanlon replied. He looked across at McCain for a moment. “Anyhow, it’s the evolution of what’s going on in this place that ye should be thinkin’ more about, yourself.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Whatever it is you have in mind to do, you’ve got it off to a fine beginning. But, Mr. Earnshaw, journalist, as the bishop said to the parlor maid, ‘Where do we go next from here?’”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  From its position two hundred thousand miles away from Earth and some distance above Earth’s equatorial plane, Valentina Tereshkova had permanent lines for its communications lasers to at least two of the Soviet synchronous satellites, which redistributed message traffic among surface locations and other satellites, depending on the signals’ final destinations. The West’s military establishment also maintained a system of “Auriga” surveillance satellites, which between them were able to keep a constant watch on both the Soviet satellites and Tereshkova. The Aurigas were equipped with telescopes designed for operation in the infrared range, which could pick up the stray reflections from both ends of the Soviet communications beams; thus they were able to eavesdrop on the message-flow to and from Tereshkova as it took place. From space, the intercepted stream of Soviet communications code was routed down through a complicated chain of links and relays, eventually becoming grist for the computer batteries of the National Security Agency’s code-cracking mill at Fort Meade, Maryland.

  For as long as Tereshkova had been operational, a portion of its signal traffic had used virtually impregnable top-security coding algorithms—which had done little to alleviate the West’s suspicions over what was supposed to be an innocuous social experiment in space-living. By summer of 2017, however, the hungry NSA cryptoanalysts in the section that handled “Teepee,” as the intercept traffic to and from Tereshkova was code-named, had received a windfall of a different kind.

  The standard procedure followed by both sides for sending encrypted messages over communications links was to transmit the code as a stream of five-digit number groups. That way, anyone intercepting the transmission with the intention of decoding its content would receive none of the clues that a structure reflecting the varying word-lengths would have supplied. To complicate the task further, the transmitting computers then obscured where the different messages in a stream began and ended, by filling the gaps between them with random five-digit number groups so that the channel simply transmitted continuously twenty-four hours a day. A message buried in the stream carried a special number
sequence that the computers at the receiving end were programmed to watch for.

  For some time the pattern-searching routines that the NSA computers subjected incoming material to as a first pass had been detecting irregularities in the filler groups used to pack the gaps in Teepee transmissions from Tereshkova to Earth: the random numbers weren’t as random as they should have been. Further analysis revealed a concealed coding system. It suggested that the West had unwittingly tapped into illicit traffic between personnel at two of the Soviet Union’s own establishments—an intriguing notion. The “Blueprint” code, as this traffic buried inside Earthbound Teepee was designated, turned out to be comparatively unsophisticated, and clearly not a creation of professional Soviet cryptographers; furthermore, its sender was too chatty, providing the Fort Meade veterans with sufficient material to break it fairly quickly. In late June the names “Earnshaw” and “Shelmer” appeared in the plaintext translation of one of these signals, which, from the lists that the NSA kept of who was likely to be interested in what, caused copies to be routed, via Litherland at CIA, Langley, to Bernard Foleda.

  Three weeks previously, the CIA had arranged for a message to be beamed into the Soviet communications net in accordance with the protocols that Dyashkin had passed to Dr. Bowers in Japan, indicating interest and a willingness to “talk” further. Dyashkin had acknowledged, and in the ensuing unusual dialogue—phrased very obliquely to keep the Soviet counterpart of NSA off the scent of who was talking to whom—the Americans had requested Dyashkin, implicitly as a test of good faith, to try to find out if the two visitors who had disappeared on Tereshkova at the beginning of May were still being held there. A week later, a response from Dyashkin had stated that they were.

  What was interesting about the Blueprint intercept that contained the references to Earnshaw and Shelmer was that it occurred a day before Dyashkin’s reply. In other words, a message from the mysterious correspondent up in Tereshkova was known to have contained the answer a day before Dyashkin sent it to the CIA. Here, then, was evidence that Dyashkin was the hitherto-unknown recipient at the Earth end of the Blueprint line; also, it corroborated that his information was in fact coming from where he said it was coming from.