Prisoners of Tomorrow

by James P. Hogan

  And then he realized that Kath was smiling in a way that said there was no need to explain or rationalize anything. Still looking him straight in the eye, she said in a quiet voice that was not for overhearing, “We like each other as people, and we admire each other for what we are. There isn’t anything to feel hung up about on Chiron. People who feel like that usually make love, if that’s what they want to do.” She paused for a second. “Isn’t that what you’d like to do?”

  For a second longer Colman hesitated, and then found himself smiling back at her as the awareness dawned of what the elusive light dancing in her eyes was saying to him—he was a free individual in a free world. And suddenly the barrier crumbled away.

  “Yes, it is,” he replied. There was nothing more to say.

  “I only live at Port Norday during the week,” Kath said. “I’ve got a place in Franklin as well. It’s not far from here at all.”

  “And I am on early duty tomorrow,” Colman said.

  He grinned again, and she smiled back impishly, “So why are we still here?” they asked together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Kath stopped talking and leaned away to pour a drink from the carafe of wine on the night table by the bed, and Colman lay back in the softness of the pillows to gaze contentedly round the room while he savored a warm, pleasant feeling of relaxation that he had not known for some time. It was a cozy, cheerfully feminine room, with lots of coverlets and satiny drapes, fluffy rugs, pastel colors, and homey knickknacks arranged on the shelves and ledges. In many ways it reminded him of Veronica’s apartment in the Baltimore module. On the wall opposite was a photograph of two laughing, roguish-looking boys of about twelve, who despite their years he recognized easily as Casey and Adam, and scattered about were more pictures which he assumed were of the rest of Kath’s family. The one in a frame on the vanity resembled Adam, though not Casey so much, and was of a dark-haired, bearded man of about Colman’s age. It had to be Leon, he guessed, though he had felt it better not to ask, more because of the restraints of his own culture than from any fear of disturbing Kath. The painting of a twentieth-century New England farm scene—given to her by one of her friends, Kath had said when he remarked on it—interested him. Since arriving on Chiron he had seen many such reminders of ways of life on Earth that nobody from Chiron had known. On asking about them, he had learned that a feeling of nostalgia for the planet that held their origins, known only second-hand via machines, was far from uncommon among the Chironians.

  Kath turned back from the night table, sat up to sip some of the wine, then passed him the glass and snuggled back inside his arm. “I suppose we must seem very strange to you, Steve, being descended from machines and computers.” She chuckled softly. “I bet there are lots of people on your ship who think we’re really aliens. Do they think we walk like Lurch and talk in metallic, monotone voices?”

  Colman grinned and drank from the glass. “Not quite that bad. But some of them do have pretty funny ideas—or did have, anyway. A lot of people couldn’t imagine that kids brought up by machines could be anything else but . . . ‘inhuman,’ I guess you’d call it—cold, that kind of thing.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all,” she said. “Although, I suppose, I shouldn’t really say too much since I’ve had nothing to compare it with. But it was”—she shrugged—“warm, friendly . . . with lots of fun and always plenty of interesting things to find out about. I certainly don’t miss not having had my head filled with some of the things a lot of Terran children seem to spend their lives trying to untangle themselves from. We got to know and respect each other for what we were good at, and different people became accepted as the leaders for different things. No one person could be an expert in everything, so the notion of a permanent, absolute ‘boss,’ or whatever you’d call it, never took hold.”

  “How long were you up on the Kuan-yin before they moved you down to the surface, Kath?”

  “I was very young. I’m not sure I can remember without checking the records. Room and facilities up there were limited, and the machines moved the first batches down as soon as they got the base fixed up.”

  “The ship’s changed a lot since then though,” Colman remarked. “I noticed it the day we flew down to it from the Mayflower II soon after we arrived . . . when Shirley and Ci met Tony Driscoll. The front end must be at least twice as big as it used to be.”

  “Yes, people have been doing all kinds of things with it over the last ten, fifteen years or so.”

  “What are all the changes around the back end?” Colman asked curiously. “It looks like a whole new drive system.”

  “It is. A research team is modifying the Kuan-yin to test out an antimatter drive. In fact the project is at quite an advanced stage. They’re doing the same kind of thing back on Earth, aren’t they?”

  Colman’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “True, but—wow! I had no idea that anything here was that advanced.” Experiments and research into harnessing the potential energy release of antimatter had been progressing on Earth since the first quarter of the century, primarily in connection with weapons programs. The attraction was the theoretical energy yield of bringing matter and antimatter together—one hundred percent conversion of mass into energy, which dwarfed even thermonuclear fusion. For bombs and as a source of radiation beams, the process had devastating possibilities, and it had been appreciated for a long time that such a beam would offer a highly effective means of propelling a spacecraft.

  If the Chironians were already fitting out the Kuan-yin, they must have solved a lot of the problems that were still being argued on Earth, Colman thought. The whole planet, he realized as he reflected on it, was a powerhouse of progress, unchecked by any traditions of unreason and with no vested-interest obstructionists to hold it back. If the pattern continued until Chiron became a fully populated world, it would effectively leave Earth back in the Stone Age within a century. “Have you actually flown it anywhere yet?” he asked, turning his head toward Kath. “The Kuan-yin . . . has it been anywhere since it arrived in orbit here?”

  She nodded. “To both the moons, and we’ve sent missions to all of Alpha’s other planets. But that was quite a while ago now. With the original drive. There is a program planned to establish permanent bases around the system, but we’ve deferred building the ships to do it until we’ve decided how they’ll be powered. That’s why the Kuan-yin’s being made into a test-bed. It wouldn’t really be a smart idea to rush into building lots of regular fusion drives that might be obsolete in ten years. There’s plenty to do on Chiron in the meantime, so there’s no big hurry.” She turned her face toward him and rubbed her cheek along his shoulder. “Anyhow, why are we talking about this? You told me I had to stop you from talking shop. Okay, I just did. Quit it.”

  Colman grinned and stroked her hair. “You’re right. So what do you want to hear about?”

  She wriggled closer and slid an arm across his chest. “Tell me about Earth. I’ve told you how I grew up. What was it like with you?”

  Colman smiled ruefully. “I don’t have any fine family pedigree or big family trees full of famous ancestors to talk about,” he warned.

  “I’m not interested in anything like that. I just want to hear about someone who lived there and came from there. Where did you come from?”

  “A city called Chicago, originally. Heard of it?”

  “Sure. It’s on the lakes.”

  “That’s right—Michigan. I think I was something of a not-very-welcome accident. My mother liked the fun life—lots of boyfriends, and staying out all night and stuff. I guess I was in the way a lot of the time.”

  “Was your father like that too?”

  “I never found out who he was. For all I know, nobody else did either.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Colman sighed. “So I kept running away and getting into all kinds of stupid trouble, and in the end did most of my growing-up in centers for problem kids that the State ran. Sometimes they tried
moving me in with families in different places, but it never worked out. The last ones tried pretty hard. They adopted me legally, and that’s how I got my name. Later we moved to Pennsylvania . . . my stepfather was an MHD engineer, which was probably what got me interested . . . but there was some trouble, and I wound up in the Army.”

  “Was that where you learned about engineering?” Kath asked.

  “That came later—after I’d been on the ship for some time. At first I was with the infantry . . . saw some combat in Africa. I spent most of the voyage in the Engineer Corps though . . . up until about a year or two back.”

  “What made you sign up for the trip?”

  Colman shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess there didn’t seem much risk of making any worse a mess of things than I had already.”

  Kath laughed and rolled back to stare up at the ceiling. “You’re just like us, aren’t you,” she said. “You don’t know where you came from either.”

  “That happened with a lot of people,” Colman told her. “Things were so messed up after the war. . . . Does it matter?”

  “I suppose not,” Kath said. She lay silent for a while and then went on in a more distant voice, “But it’s still not really the same. I mean, it must be wonderful to have actually been born there . . . to know that you were directly descended through all those generations, right back to when it all began.”

  “What?”

  “Life! Earth life. You’re a part of it. Isn’t that an exciting feeling? It has to be.”

  “So are you,” Colman insisted. “Chironian genes were dealt from the same deck as all the rest. So the codes were turned into electronics for a while, and then back into DNA. So what? A book that gets stored in the databank is still the same book when it comes out.”

  “Technically you’re right,” Kath agreed. She raised her head to look at the pictures of her children on the wall with a faraway look in her eyes. “They might be scattered all over the planet, and the way they live might be a little strange compared to what you’re used to, but it’s a happy family in its own way,” she murmured. “But it’s still not really the same. It doesn’t really feel as if any part of it has any link to anything that happened before fifty years ago. Don’t you think it’s . . . oh, I don’t know, kind of a shame somehow?”

  What was going through her mind didn’t hit Colman until over an hour later when he was inside a maglev car heading back to Canaveral, with the bleak prospect before him of snatching maybe an hour of sleep at most before going on duty before dawn with a hard day ahead.

  Family?

  Earth?

  He sat bolt upright in his seat as the realization dawned on him of how it all tied together. Maybe Swyley did have it all figured out after all.

  So that was why somebody from Chiron would want to get mixed up with a Terran!

  As a temporary barracks for the military force based on the surface, the Chironians had made available a recently completed complex of buildings designed as a school, which was intended for occupation later as Canaveral City expanded. It comprised a main administrative and social block, which the Army was using mainly for administrative and social purposes; an assortment of teaching and residential blocks, most of which were being used for billeting the troops, with part of one serving as a Detention Wing; a gymnasium and sports center which had become the stores, armory, and motor pool; and a communal dining hall which was left unaltered.

  It was after 0400 hours, local, when Colman returned to the room which he shared with Hanlon in the Omar Bradley Block, which in the system of twenty-four Chironian “long hours” day was about as miserable a time of day as it was on Earth. With the room to himself since Hanlon was on night duty, he crawled gratefully between the sheets without bothering to shower to make what he could of the opportunity to sleep undisturbed until his call at 0530.

  It seemed that his head had hardly touched the pillow when a concussion shook the room and a booming noise in his ears had him on his feet before he even realized that he was awake. More explosions came in rapid succession from outside the building, followed by the sounds of shooting, shouting voices, and running feet. Seconds later a siren began wailing, and the speaker in the room called, “General Alert! General Alert! A breakout is being attempted from the Detention Wing. All officers and men report to General Alert stations.”

  What followed was a General Foul-up.

  Colman found Sirocco in the Orderly Room, acting on his own initiative after receiving conflicting orders from Colonel Wesserman’s staff. Sirocco ordered most of the D Company personnel to secure the block against intrusion and cordoned off the routes past it toward the outside. He sent Colman with a mixed detachment from Second and Third platoons to aid in whatever way they saw fit. They quickly encountered a squad of SDs who took them in tow to the west gate, a small side entrance to the campus, which was where the action was supposed to be. Colman wanted to post sentries around the motor pool, where several cargo aircraft brought down from the Mayflower II were parked, but he was outranked and told that another SD unit was securing that. Then all the lights went out.

  Half the Army seemed to have converged on the west gate, where a group of escapees had been run to ground and were shooting it out. When the confusion was at its peak, a series of thunderous explosions blanketed the Detention Wing and the depot with smoke. When the smoke cleared, one of the transporters was gone. No one had been guarding the motor pool.

  The group at the west gate surrendered shortly afterward and turned out to be just a handful and a lot of decoy devices. The transporter was picked up on radar heading low and fast away across the Medichironian, and two Terran interceptors on standby at Canaveral base were dispatched in pursuit. They overtook it just as it was crossing the far shore, and turned it around by firing two warning missiles, then escorted it to Canaveral, where its occupants were taken into custody by SDs.

  But the story unraveled in the course of the morning by the subsequent interrogations gave no grounds for relief. Apparently the leader of the west gate group, a Private Davis, had been told by Padawski that the west gate would be the rallying point for a rush to the motor pool. Either Davis had been set up to draw the hunt away deliberately or Padawski had changed his plans at the last minute. Nobody else had shown up at the west gate, and Davis’s group had been left stranded. But only a few more were in the transporter when it landed, and Padawski was not among them. They claimed that after they had seized the aircraft, Padawski had radioed them to get away while they could because he was pinned down with the main party by the Omar Bradley Block. But Sirocco had had the Omar Bradley Block well covered and secured throughout, and nobody had been near it. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Padawski and twenty-three others, all heavily armed, had melted away.

  Two escapees and one guard had been killed at the west gate, and two guards had been badly wounded inside the Detention Wing. Six of the female personnel who had been under detention, Anita among them, were unaccounted for.

  “It was one glorious fuck-up from start to finish,” Sirocco declared, tugging at his moustache as he and Colman discussed the events late that evening. “Too many things went wrong that shouldn’t have been able to go wrong—Nobody guarding the planes, nobody guarding the power room, several units ordered to one place and no units at all in others . . . And how did they get hold of the guns? I don’t like it, Steve. I don’t like it at all. There’s a very funny smell to the whole business.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Even in his short time at the university near Franklin, Jerry Pernak had learned that Chironian theoretical and experimental physics had departed significantly from the mainstream being pursued on Earth. The Chironian scientists had not so much advanced past their terrestrial counterparts; rather, as perhaps was not surprising in view of the absence on Chiron of traditional habits of thought or authorities whose venerable opinions could not be challenged until after they were dead, they had gone off in a totally unexpected direction. And s
ome of the things they had stumbled across on their way had left Pernak astounded.

  Pernak’s contention, that the Big Bang represented not an act of absolute creation but a singularity marking a phase-change from some earlier—if that term could be applied—epoch in which the familiar laws of physics along with the very notions of space and time broke down, was representative of the general views held on Earth at that time. Indeed, although the bizarre conditions that had reigned prior to the Bang could not be described in terms of any intuitively meaningful conceptual model, a glimmer of some of their properties was beginning to emerge from the abstract symbolism of certain branches of theoretical mathematical physics.

  The bewildering proliferation first of baryons and mesons, and later the quarks, which were supposed to simplify them, that had plagued studies of the structure of matter to the end of the twentieth century had been reduced to an orderly hierarchy of “generations” of particles. Each generation contained just eight particles: six quarks and two leptons. The first generation comprised the “up” and “down” quarks, each appearing in the three color-charge variants peculiar to the strong nuclear force to give six in all; the electron; and the electron-type neutrino. The second generation was made up of the “strange” and “charmed” quarks, each of them again appearing in three possible colors; the muon; and the muon-type neutrino. The third generation contained the “top” and “bottom” quarks; the tau; and the tau-type neutrino; and so it went on.