“Source identification?” another general, who was with Protbornov, queried.
Another of the engineers consulted readouts and tapped keys. “First report indicates they’re using the IROO observatory, sir.”
“As we expected,” the general said, sounding satisfied.
“Text?” Protbornov called.
“Text from Tycoon reads, ‘Sexton/Two from Tycoon/Ball. Signal received. Reading clear. Standing by. Over.’”
“By the czars, we’ve done it!” Protbornov breathed.
“Response intercepted from Sexton,” the first engineer sang out again. “Text reads, ‘Consider it imperative that arrival Soviet VIP cadre Mermaid be confirmed. Voluntary cooperation via Soviet TV judged inappropriate. Am occupying position affording direct visual observation Turgenev center. Personal positive identifications confirmed, list of names follows: Petrokhov, Kavansky, Sanyiroky, Vlasov—’”
Whoops and shouts of jubilation broke out all around the command room. Protbornov emitted a loud belly laugh and slapped Olga heartily on the back, causing her to gasp, while the other senior officers crowded round to pump his hand and offer congratulations. Across the room, on the far side of it all, Major Uskayev smiled as he watched on one of the screens the view being picked up through a telescopic lens by one of the KGB teams posted among the roofs surrounding the air-processing-plant building. It showed the hatless head of whoever was wearing the sandy-colored beard—with the heavy-rimmed spectacles and hair tinted to match the beard, it could have been McCain or Scanlon—peering down from behind a cowling at the edge of the roof, then turning to say something, presumably to the one who was operating the laser. Then the head withdrew from view.
“How are we doing here?” Protbornov asked, having moved across the room.
“They’re like puppets dancing on our strings,” Uskayev said. “And they tried so hard. . . . It’s almost possible to feel sorry for them.”
Behind the cover of the parapet of the air-processing-plant roof, Peter Sargent unstuck his beard for a second to scratch underneath his chin. A few feet back, sitting comfortably in the recess between a ventilator housing and a stanchion supporting some pipes, Albrecht Haber finished tapping a sequence into the keyboard connected to the laser.
“Bloody stuff makes you itch,” Sargent said. “Where did Razz get it—off a horse or something?”
“Who knows?” Haber answered. “That’s the last of the names. What do you have now?”
Sargent consulted the list of information that he’d compiled in a notebook. “Ah yes, this should take a while. Ready? Message begins: ‘Previously advised data confirmed as follows . . .’” Sargent started working through the list of weapons emplacements that Paula had described before, going into greater detail about how they had been penetrated and reiterating that the weapons didn’t exist.
“Let’s hope that Protbornov’s people leave us alone for a while,” Haber said as he worked.
“Oh, I think they will,” Sargent replied breezily. He stretched back and looked up at the sky. “As long as we find things to say, we’re doing a great job of distracting the opposition for them. That means they’ll be perfectly happy to let us stay up here all day if we choose—certainly until their zero hour, anyway. . . . Care to pass the coffee and one of those sandwiches, old chap?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Many airplane pilots have crashed to their deaths singing and laughing in their last moments before losing consciousness. What makes hypoxia, or oxygen starvation, so dangerous is its insidious onset and the delirious sense of euphoria that comes just before total collapse, which makes the victim the least qualified to judge the seriousness of the situation.
McCain felt anything but euphoric when he came round. His head felt as if it had been split with a butcher’s cleaver, everything spun nauseatingly, his throat was raw, and his lips stung. He was lying back and being supported, but he couldn’t see anything and was aware only of the pressure against his face. He tried to move his arms to push it off, but had no strength. Pressure around his middle forced him to exhale, then release. He breathed in again.
Where was this? Had he been in an accident? . . . The fragments of his mind slowly came back together and started functioning again. He was lying on his back, which meant they were off the wall. The others must have gotten him to the top. He couldn’t remember anything of what had happened. Then sudden light blinded him. He tried to turn his head away, but the pressure around his face remained. Someone was shining a lamp in through his facepiece, but the facepiece was being forced down. The urge to struggle welled up, but he didn’t have the strength. After a few seconds it subsided, and he lay with his eyes closed.
He understood now. They had turned his oxygen pressure up and were holding his facepiece down against the seal to stop it from being blown off. Everything was starting to feel quite warm and pleasant. He settled back to doze. Somebody struck him a couple of sharp blows on the side of the head. Now someone was pinching his upper arm through his sleeve—with pliers or something. Jesus—it hurt! He shook it off angrily . . . but the effort had started him moving again. He felt himself being hauled into a sitting position, and opened his eyes to see just a confusion of shapes, lights, and forms. Dizziness swept over him again, and he fought not to vomit inside his mask. The feeling gradually passed.
Now they were tapping him insistently on the shoulder. He opened his eyes again and saw they were on what looked like the same wall of metal panels contained behind reinforcing girders, except that the pattern was now sloping instead of vertical. It curved over and fell away steeply to the right, but seemed to level out above them to the left, like the ridge of a hill. Ahead, the whole ridge curved up and away. Somebody swung a lamp to illuminate a figure standing in front of him, and McCain caught a glimpse of a roof flying by not far above their heads. The figure—McCain wasn’t sure who it was—gestured urgently for him to stand up, and at the same time the two who were supporting him pulled at his arms. They carried him the first few yards with his legs trailing and feet bumping over the metal ribs. Then his legs began working again, feebly at first but improving quickly as blood brought oxygen to his starved muscles.
They continued edging upward to the left as they followed the ridge, and continued crossing its flat top when it leveled out. In the center they came to a ready-made metal walkway, and continued along it without having to step over ribs and gussets every few feet. The tunnel roof curved upward ahead of them as it receded, paralleling the top of the structure they were on—although they had no more uphill work to do, since the geometry ahead became “level” as fast as they moved onto it. Nevertheless, McCain was exhausted and had to be helped all the way. But the two who were supporting him urged him on relentlessly and permitted no rest.
They reached the end of the long section they had been following, which meant they were over Novyi Kazan. Here, unlike the situation inside the colony, the sudden leftward change in direction to the next section was unmasked, although the stretch ahead seemed to continue curving upward. The walkway brought them to the side of a rounded, turretlike structure that was just about in the position of the spoke elevator at the center of Novyi Kazan. They followed around it to the left, and the surface they were on began sloping downward noticeably again, but in the opposite direction from before; this meant that they had crossed over the center of the roof and were approaching the inner edge of the racetrack. A bridge from the turret projected out horizontally, with the colony’s inner wall falling away below on the near side. The others sat McCain down at the base of the turret’s side and shone their lamps outward.
The chasm facing them was difficult to judge because of the unfamiliar scale of everything and the feebleness of their lamps in the great void of darkness. The outward curve of the ridge-side below them prevented their seeing to the bottom. On the far side, the chasm ended at a sheer wall that moved with the tunnel roof. The wall carried a horizontal groove which the bridge from their side dis
appeared into. According to Scanlon, the far end of the bridge was supported by a wheeled cradle running on rails. The rails formed a circular track inside the racetrack’s nonrotating core—the solid hole in the middle of the empty donut.
Unlike the real Valentina Tereshkova, Potemkin—the replica beneath Siberia—didn’t possess a hub. The main reason was the impossibility of engineering a cavern over a mile in diameter with an unsupported roof—as would have been necessary, since spokes connecting a hub to the rim would have swept through that whole volume; another reason was that a hub couldn’t have contributed to the deception: it would have had to exhibit reduced gravity, which couldn’t be reproduced on Earth. The elevators that departed from the spoke-bases at Turgenev and elsewhere stopped inside turrets protruding above the roof like the one McCain was sitting outside, and then engaged a horizontal drive to travel inward through the bridges—of which there were six in all, one for each spoke. Thus, to return to terra firma, the escapees would have to get across the bridge. However, that promised to be simpler now, with the guards on the inside and them on the outside; furthermore, they could see a railed catwalk running the full length of the outside of the bridge, which they could reach from a steel ladder not far from where they were standing. . . . But making this part of the task easier had been the whole point of breaking through to the outside in the first place, after all—before anyone had known that there wasn’t a hub out there to get to.
The others came back to McCain and changed his oxygen bottle and their own for the spares they had brought. Then they climbed the ladder to the catwalk, Scanlon going first, with Rashazzi and Koh still assisting McCain behind. McCain had recovered his senses sufficiently by now to know he’d gone down with hypoxia. Probably the fall that he’d taken earlier had loosened his facepiece or breathing tube. The trouble, he recalled vaguely, was that the physical and mental disablement following acute hypoxia could persist for hours. And he couldn’t really remember, he realized, why it was so important for them to get out at all.
As they moved out onto the bridge, they could look down into the chasm and see they were high above an exposed arc of the racetrack platform once again, but an inner arc this time, not an outside one as they had looked down over from the wall. Far below, they could make out jumbles of pipework, cabling, and gigantic windings in the space enclosed by the platform, while ahead of them the curve of the wall they were approaching grew more apparent as they got closer. Behind, they could trace out with their lightbeams the full height of the wall enclosing the dummy colony, from its base far below on the supporting racetrack, up through tier after tier of diagonally-crossed square lattice, until it curved to become the flat roof that they had so recently been walking along. Except, it wasn’t flat anymore. Looking back along the bridge, they could see its lines to be curved concavely upward; and the farther along it they moved, the more the angle of the far end that they had come from increased. By the time they were almost across the chasm and nearing its inner wall, the distant end of the bridge, and with it the ridgetop that it projected from, had taken on a distinct tilt toward them. What was happening was that since they were moving inward along a radius, the centrifugal force they were experiencing was getting less. This in turn required a progressively smaller banking angle to compensate, and the architecture curved accordingly. Nevertheless, when they entered the groove which they had seen from the far side—now revealed as a deep gallery twenty feet high at least, cut into the cylinder forming the tunnel’s inner wall—the floor below and the roof above were still racing by at well over a hundred miles per hour.
Inside this gallery, the bridge ended in a large boxlike construction cluttered with cables, motor housings, and catwalks, supported by a set of wheeled bogies. Scanlon had described this assembly as a “terminal.” The bogies ran on four rails, which the escapees could see flashing by below as they reached the end of the bridge and clambered across the outside of the terminal to reach its inward-facing side. Here, a mating port, set above a system of guides and lifting gear, faced another pair of rails that ran alongside the ones the terminal rolled upon, thus tracing a smaller circle inside. The port mated with airtight vehicles called gondolas, which accelerated along the inner track until their speed matched the terminal’s—that was how transfers of people and materials in and out of Potemkin were effected. In itself, this arrangement would have permitted the use of one gondola only—obviously, since having more than one speeding up and slowing down on the same track would have been unworkable—and with six terminals to service, would have been inadequate. The problem had been solved by having a gondola, after it had matched speed with a terminal, physically lifted from the track and up onto the guides to mate with the port, which immediately freed the track for other traffic. Similarly, after a gondola had slowed down from Potemkin’s speed, it exited from the ring formed by the through-track to come to a halt in a side loop.
With the current level of traffic between the “hub” and rim, the escape party hadn’t anticipated difficulty in finding a ride to hitch. Sure enough, the port of the terminal they had arrived at had a gondola already docked. They worked their way over the port and across onto the gondola’s roof. After a wait that seemed interminable but in fact had probably been less than ten minutes, the gondola detached from the port. A pair of hydraulic rams pushed it down the guides and set it on the inner track. The rams disengaged, and the entire, uncannily silent rolling assembly of terminal box, port, lifting gear, and bogies moved away into the darkness as the gondola began shedding speed.
Shortly afterward, another, identical terminal appeared from the other direction as the spoke that had been following behind them—the one that connected to Agricultural Station 3, if McCain had been visualizing things correctly in his muddled condition—caught up and then overtook them. The strange thing now was that the whole terminal was tilting down at them. The body of the gondola pivoted about its long axis, McCain realized—like some carnival rides. As the gondola slowed down, its body was returning to Earth’s horizontal from the banking angle it had assumed while at the terminal’s speed. When the next spoke passed them, moving much faster this time, its tilt was noticeably greater, and the next raced by tipped at what must have been almost the full angle corresponding to terminal-radius speed.
The roof and inner wall of the gallery moved by very slowly in the flashlight beams now. Then the gondola exited into a side tunnel and came to rest at a port similar to the one it had docked with at the terminal, but on the opposite side. While whatever transfer it had come to make was in progress inside, the four men lowered themselves down from its roof. The first thing McCain noticed on regaining his feet, despite his condition, was how light he felt. He looked down and stamped one foot, then the other. It was elating to stand on real, solid ground once again—even Siberian. The others seemed to be having a similar reaction. But there was little time for celebrating just now. The next job was to get out of the vacuum.
This part had been taken care of for them by safety-conscious Soviet design engineers, and involved procedures that Scanlon had been familiarized with during his training after being posted to Potemkin. Maintenance workers sometimes needed to come out and work in the transfer bay where the gondolas docked. Since the bay contained a hard vacuum, that meant putting on suits and going out through airlocks. To prevent anyone’s getting trapped out there, the airlocks could be opened from the outside; Scanlon, moreover, knew where they were located and how to open them. The only problem was that opening an airlock would trigger an indicator in the maintenance control room.
Scanlon had selected an airlock situated at a remote end of the transfer bay—unlikely, therefore, to have many people in its vicinity inside. A line of small orange lights in the bay led the party to it, and a larger external light above, showing green, marked its location. Lower down, beside the outer door of the lock, was an illuminated panel with several buttons. Scanlon pressed one of the buttons and the door opened, bathing them in sudden ligh
t that dazzled them after the hours of working in blackness. They crowded through, shielding their faces with their hands, and Scanlon used an inner panel to close and pressurize the lock.
Sound!
McCain wanted to shout out with sheer joy and relief as the world of sound re-formed itself around them. There was humming and vibration that seemed like a hurricane, hissing from the air system, rustling and movement from the bodies around him . . . and yelling and laughing! Rashazzi had warned them against the risks of aching ears and sinuses from repressurizing too quickly, but nobody cared. Scanlon pulled away his facepiece, drew in a chestful of air, and whooped. Rashazzi and Koh helped each other, then both of them removed McCain’s. The rush of cool, fresh air after hours of claustrophobic confinement made all the more isolating by the silence was overwhelming. He stood and gulped, and sucked it into his lungs.
“Does it taste good?” Rashazzi asked them, grinning.
“It beats even Dublin Guinness,” Scanlon sighed, pausing for just a moment.
“Definitely one of life’s more . . . memorable moments,” Koh said, savoring.
McCain didn’t care at the moment whether the Russians appeared or not.
But Scanlon cared. He had already opened the control box of the airlock doors and was detaching a wire that would make it appear that the control-room indicator had been triggered by a fault. Then he opened the inner door. On the far side was an anteroom with rows of steel closets and some seats, and behind that a corridor, many doors, and a steel-railed stairwell visible at the far end beside an elevator.
Scanlon led the way along the corridor to the stairs, hustling the others along after him. They went down a level to an intersection of two more corridors, with a well opening down onto a maze of piping on one side, and then through one of the doors into a cluttered machinery compartment reminiscent of the ones they had known below Zamork. It was warm and smelled oily, and the noise inside sounded to McCain like Niagara. But it was deserted, and it promised rest. . . .
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