Prisoners of Tomorrow

by James P. Hogan

  Comprehension flowed into the Russian woman’s face. It was an amazingly expressive face. “Yes, of course! The nervous girl in the corridor. I was trying to place you somewhere here, not back there. So, we both wound up in Zamork.” She waved a hand briefly. “But why are you in here?”

  “Food poisoning, they said. A bug or something. . . . I don’t know.”

  “You are an American, so. And your name is Paula. I am called Olga. But the girl said there was something important. What is it?”

  Paula looked over her shoulder and then back. “It’s not really something I’d want to make public knowledge . . .”

  Olga moved closer and sat down on the edge of the bed. She looked at Paula questioningly. “Well?”

  “You said not to be intimidated.”

  “That’s right. They will try, but you mustn’t let them. Once they find a crack, they have you. Then they keep hammering in wedges. But strength, they respect. It’s all they respect. If only America had understood that sixty years ago.”

  “The place they’ve put me in is dreadful. And the people there . . . It’s not so much intimidation as degradation.”

  “Yes, that is another of their nasty tricks. I sympathize. Make a fuss until they change it. You Americans are like the British and try to compromise to please everybody. It can’t be done. You just end up pleasing nobody. That’s not the way to deal with Russians. They all shout, and whoever shouts the loudest and longest gets his way.” Olga patted Paula’s arm affectionately and started to rise. Paula caught her by the sleeve.

  “I heard you telling those officers that you are a scientist.”

  Olga hesitated, then sat down again. “So, what of it?”

  “And that’s how you come to speak English so well?” Olga nodded but didn’t reply. Paula went on, “What does a scientist do in a place like this? I mean, are there opportunities to use your mind, to think? Are there others you can communicate with?”

  “Naturally there are. This is a space habitat. Resources are limited. They don’t ship people this far to open doors and count heads.”

  Paula took a long breath. “I am a scientist, too,” she said. She’d decided before Olga came in that she could hardly do any damage by revealing no more than Protbornov and his interrogators had already established.

  “Well, that’s very good, and I respect you as a fellow professional. But I still don’t see what—”

  “You have influence. You can persuade people. Look, I scrape grease off dishes in a stinking kitchen and scrub floors, day after day. Can you talk to someone who might get me moved out? I can do more good somewhere else—better for me, and better for the colony.”

  Olga frowned. “Are you saying you want to work for them?” Paula noticed she said “them” and not “us.”

  “I’m not talking about changing sides,” Paula said. “I just want to work as a person—on something that has no military value. There must be such things here. You just said yourself that resources are valuable here. Why waste any? There are children in the colony—I could teach science, maybe; or there might be something connected with medicine, agriculture . . . anything.”

  Olga looked dubious. “Well, I really don’t know what I can do. . . .” She caught the imploring look in Paula’s eyes, but that only seemed to make her more defensive. She got up and began turning. “My own problems are one thing—I can shout at them about things like that. But interfering in policy on something like is different. I am sorry, but I’m sure it will all straighten itself out in good—” she stopped as if a new thought had just struck her, and turned back. “What kind of scientist are you?”

  “Communications electronics. Computers . . .”

  “Where did you learn that?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Hmm . . .” Olga regarded her with what seemed like a new interest. “You know something about communications-system protocols and operating software? Encryption routines and hardware microcode?”

  “Some,” Paula replied cautiously.

  “What about Russian systems?”

  “I’ve dealt with them.”

  “I see.” Olga brought a hand up to her chin and stared at Paula for what seemed a long time. Then, abruptly, she seemed to make up her mind. “I can’t make promises, and I don’t do miracles,” she said. “So don’t hope for too much. But we’ll see.” With that she turned away again and left the room.

  The women who were attending therapy returned a short while later, and Paula did her best to match their chatter through the evening meal. When it was over, the same two guards who had escorted the work detail arrived to collect her. Anastasia and Tanya gave her a bag of candies to take back, which they had put together between them. “To show how Russians and Americans ought to be,” Anastasia told her. Tanya smiled and patted Paula’s arm. Paula kissed both of them and found that her eyes were watery.

  “They would be, if only they were left alone,” she said. Then, with a sickening feeling of dread rising in her stomach, she went back to her bed and picked up the bag into which she had already put her things, while the guards waited stone-faced just inside the door.

  At that moment hurried footsteps sounded in the corridor outside, and Dr. Rubakov, the senior physician, came in, waving some papers. “Ah, good, she’s still here.” Rubakov turned to the two guards. “The order has been rescinded. The American woman is to remain here for a further three days’ rest and recuperation. Here is the countermanding order and papers, all signed and approved. You may go.” He showed the papers to the senior of the two guards. The guard took them, scrutinized the top sheet carefully, turned it over, and nodded finally to her companion with a shrug. They left, closing the door behind them.

  The reprieve had been so sudden and so overwhelming that for a moment Paula thought she was going to collapse again. She sat down shakily on the end of her bed. Rubakov looked pleased. “I’m glad they changed their minds,” he said. “You need more time to get over it.” He moved closer and studied Paula for a few seconds, at the same time stroking his mustache with the knuckle of his forefinger. “So perhaps we can do a deal, eh?” he murmured in a lower voice. “I can get good cosmetics—French brands, no less. Make you feel and look a new person. Interested, maybe?”

  Paula closed her eyes and sighed. “What kind of deal?”

  Rubakov looked suddenly alarmed and embarrassed. “Oh no! You misunderstand.” He shook his head and spread his hands. “I just want lessons to improve my English!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It was like a reprieve from a death sentence. Paula couldn’t be sure that the last-minute change of plan had anything to do with Olga’s intervening somewhere, but for the moment she was content to make the best of the opportunity to regain her strength, and leave the question to answer itself in due course. But secretly the hope was there, though she tried not to admit it to herself consciously because of the risk of a greater disappointment later. She became brighter and more cheerful toward everyone around her.

  Dr. Rubakov appeared the next day with the ultimate luxury in the form of a box of milk bath salts, with some lotion and even nail polish for her hands, and a lipstick to add some color for her face—tawny pink, just right for her complexion. After a breakfast of poached eggs and ham with a spiced potato-onion hash, buttered toast, and real coffee, she kept her side of the bargain by giving an impromptu one-hour English lesson before he went on duty. He came back for another hour during his midday break, and again in the evening.

  “I never realize is so, so . . . uzasno?”

  “Terrible.”

  “Da, terrible!” Rubakov threw up his hands and shook his head despairingly at the pieces of paper that he and Paula had accumulated between them on the table. “Here words are spelt the same but sound different; those ones have same sounds, all written different. Where is sense? How can anyone know ever what to write? But children, they learn this?”

  “I didn’t invent it. I’m just telling you
how it is,” Paula said. “Maybe that’s why your guys and our guys have had such a hard time getting along.” They both laughed.

  “It’s all a result of ancient vernaculars, you know,” Tanya, who had been listening, said in Russian from her bed behind them.

  “What do you mean?” Rubakov asked, turning.

  “Ever since long ago, back to the time of the Greeks and Romans, people had the problem of trying to talk to the slaves that were brought back from conquered nations,” Tanya explained. “So ‘vernaculars’ emerged between household members and servants—simplified mixtures of languages which combined all the oddities from the originals. Over the centuries that followed, waves of successive migrants from religious and political persecutions, and so on, came to Britain, all bringing their own languages with them. They landed at different places, and by the time they all met in the middle, all the conventions were firmly established and nobody was going to change. So, you see, English came out of it as the vernacular of all the vernaculars of Europe.”

  “And now America has continued the process by mixing in Yiddish, Negro, Hispanic, Amerind, and heaven knows what else,” Paula said. “It’s a superset of English.”

  “Russians have never had the problem,” Anastasia commented from the far side. “Nobody is clamoring to get in. They all want to get out.”

  The next morning, Rubakov told Paula that General Protbornov would be arriving later to talk to her. The announcement jolted her back to reality, and for the next couple of hours she became subdued, viewing her prospects with a mixture of excitement, which she didn’t dare let herself dwell upon, and trepidation. Protbornov appeared shortly before lunch, accompanied by Major Uskayev. They collected Paula and went into the duty nurse’s office, just inside the ward door. Protbornov took the chair behind the desk and motioned Paula to sit opposite. Uskayev sat by the wall to one side.

  Protbornov emitted a heavy sigh that made Paula think of a lumbering bear. He rested an elbow on the arm of his chair and stroked the sides of his craggy face with thumb and fingers for a few seconds. “I gather you have met Comrade Oshkadov,” he said at last.

  “Oshkadov? Is that Olga, the scientist from Novosibirsk?”

  “A spirited woman, even if misguided in some ways. A kindred spirit of yours, I would imagine. In fact, you told her that you are also a scientist.”

  Paula shrugged. “It’s not as if it were something you didn’t already know.”

  “You value science highly, don’t you, Lieutenant Bryce,” Protbornov said. The fact that he knew her identity was no reason for her to make it public knowledge. If Earnshaw, wherever he was, found a way to contact her, he would seek her by her cover name. “You show a total dedication to its ideals.”

  “I value worthwhile knowledge and methods for acquiring it that have been shown to work,” Paula agreed. “Things that matter.”

  “But ideas, laws, how societies should be structured and governed—such things do not matter?”

  “Politics, you mean?”

  “Politics, religion, ideology—call it what you will.”

  Paula wrestled with the question. Obviously the proposition couldn’t be denied outright. “Of course things like that make a difference to the lives of people—a big difference,” she said finally. “But the things that interest me are the ones that were true long before there were any people, and which will remain true if people disappear.”

  “You just want to get to the stars. It doesn’t matter who with, under what flag?”

  “I didn’t say that. The stars can wait a bit longer. They’re good at it.”

  Protbornov’s mouth twitched in what could almost have been a smile to acknowledge the rebuffed gambit. “You say these things. Yet you are with the United States Air Force, engaged in espionage. A strange career to pick, for a woman of such a political disposition, wouldn’t you think?”

  Paula sighed and brushed a curl of hair away from her brow. “It was personal. I joined the service for the independence . . . to be away from home, and for the education. Understanding science was important to me. This other business . . . it was something I got talked into. It’s not what I do.”

  “What do you do?”

  “We’ve been through all that. I won’t answer.”

  “So you say you were talked into espionage work. You were forced to spy for the American military? Would you be willing to make a statement to that effect?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “You know, for someone asking favors, you could be more cooperative.”

  “I didn’t ask for favors. I offered a trade.”

  Protbornov glanced at Major Uskayev, at the same time raising his eyebrows and straightening his fingers momentarily from his chin. The gesture seemed to say, well, it had been worth a try. He paused, giving the subject a moment to fade into the background, then came to the main point. “I understand that you indicated to Comrade Oshkadov that you are willing to be more useful to us.”

  “Within limits.”

  “Why should you wish to benefit us?”

  “I don’t. I wish to benefit myself.”

  “Frankness is something I respect. So, what are the limits?”

  “I have no desire to defect. I wouldn’t work on anything of military significance, or act against the interests of my country. But outside that, I’d be willing to explore possibilities for mutual accommodation.”

  “Why should we be interested in coming to any accommodation?” Protbornov asked.

  “Because your resources are limited up here,” Paula replied. “You can’t afford people who are dead weight.” Protbornov grunted and shifted his eyes inquiring to Uskayev.

  “We are told that you have expertise in the field of communications,” the major said, leaning forward.

  “Some.”

  “Would you be prepared to do work involving communications?”

  “Such as what?” Paula asked guardedly.

  Uskayev pouted his lips. “Oh, development and improvement of facilities for communicating to Earth and other space stations, perhaps.”

  “No. I said I won’t get involved in anything military.”

  “But Valentina Tereshkova is not a military facility. It is purely an experiment in sociology.”

  “Oh, come on. You know that anything developed here would have potential everywhere else.”

  “How about high-speed data-compression and -protection techniques?”

  “No. Look, why don’t we forget about my specializations altogether. They’re not for sale. But apart from that, I’m familiar with basic scientific principles that apply to any field—teaching, maybe, or medicine. There has to be room for some kind of deal that we can come away from and both be better off than we would have been without any deal at all. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Uskayev studied his hands, paring one thumbnail against the other. Finally he looked up and shook his head dubiously. “I don’t think she can be of very much use to us,” he said to Protbornov.

  Protbornov, however, didn’t seem satisfied. He started to reply, then changed his mind and looked at Paula. “I’d like to speak to Major Uskayev privately for a few minutes. Please wait outside.”

  Paula sat at the table in the ward aisle, turning the pages of a magazine but not seeing them. Wrong, wrong, wrong, she told herself. She’d blown it. She had been too stubborn. As Protbornov had said, a person in her position could hardly expect to get away without making a few concessions. She could see the two officers arguing and gesticulating through the observation window of the nurse’s office. She should have indicated a tentative compliance for the time being—to get herself transferred out of those dreadful kitchens—and worried about the specifics later, when it would have been more trouble for them to move her back. Why did she always try doing things all at once, instead of taking them a step at a time? Olga had told her how the Russians achieved their ends slowly, by working wedges into cracks. Here had been her chance to delicately insert a wedge of
her own. Instead she’d swung a sledgehammer.

  At last they called her back in. “We have agreed on a compromise offer,” Protbornov said. “We will assign you to work with Comrade Oshkadov for a probationary period. She will be able to give you a better idea of the possibilities available. During that time you must consider what you would be prepared to contribute that might justify a more permanent arrangement. The situation will be reviewed in one month. In the meantime, we accept your claim of being a scientist and not a professional spy. Your status will be adjusted accordingly if you accept. Well?”

  “I’ll take it,” Paula said at once. By this time, she had no stomach left for being obstinate.

  They gave her a light-green tunic like the one Olga had been wearing in the infirmary, and moved her upstairs to an above-surface part of Zamork that she hadn’t known existed. The terrain sloped upward to the containing wall in keeping with the general layout of the central valley, and westward toward Novyi Kazan a high-level reservoir bounded the detention facility and separated it from the urban center.

  Within this area, the privileged category of prisoners, which Paula learned she had now joined, lived in four-person huts beneath Tereshkova’s ribbon-suns and peculiar, curving sky. Although the surroundings of coarse grass, leathery scrub plants, and some uncertain-looking trees holding their own in the cindery soil formed a setting that would have fitted a refugee camp more than a Florida country club, after the cells and the kitchens below it was idyllic. Some of the huts boasted patches of flowers. There was even a beach fringing the reservoir, with a bathing area enclosed by a wire fence twenty yards or so out—admittedly not in use currently because of oil leaks from somewhere and a problem with algal blooms—but the feeling of wind blowing across open water after seeing nothing but bare cell interiors and drab, riveted walls for more weeks than she had been able to keep track of was exhilarating.

  And on her first evening there, when she walked down through the rows of huts to the reservoir, along by the water, and back following the outer hull wall via the hill at the rear, it rained.