James P. Hogan (3 page)

That was when she had made her first mistake, she decided: she’d agreed to think about it.

A male voice that incongruously blended an American twang with a guttural Russian accent spoke from a loudspeaker somewhere overhead and interrupted her reverie. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching
Valentina Tereshkova
and should be docking in approximately twenty minutes. Arrival formalities will be minimal, and there will be refreshments while we hear a short address in the hub reception lounge before commencing our tour. The Soviet Ministry of Space Sciences hopes that despite the limited space aboard the transporter craft, your journey has been comfortable. Thank you.”

On the viewscreen at the front of the cabin,
Tereshkova
was almost a full circle, highlighted as two brilliant crescents slashed in the black background by the Sun off to one side. Around Paula, the other passengers were stirring and becoming talkative again, and those who had been asleep were stretching, yawning, patting hair back into shape, and refastening ties and shirtcuffs. There were a hundred or so altogether – mainly political and military figures, scientists, and reporters from Western and Asian nations – invited on a special visit to the colony to commemorate the Soviets’ centennial May Day. The voyage from the low-Earth-orbiting transfer platform where they had boarded the transporter from surface shuttles had taken over fifteen hours. Although this was probably the first spaceflight for most of them, the initial excitement had lasted only so long, even with receding views of Earth coming through on the screen periodically to relieve the unchanging starfield. Now there was something new to see.

“Time to wake up,” she murmured to the man sprawled in the seat next to her, a still-open magazine resting loosely between his fingers. “We’re here. Welcome to Orbitskigrad.”

The man whom she still knew only as Lewis Earnshaw stretched against his restraining belt, held the pose for a few seconds, while emitting a long-drawn mixture of a yawn and a groan, and relaxed. Then he rubbed his eyes, sat up in his seat, and looked around. “Home, home at Lagrange?” he murmured.

He was in his late thirties, solid but athletically built, and had straight dark hair parted conventionally, brown eyes that were alert and humorous most of the time but could be reflective when the occasion demanded, and a clean-cut, square-jawed face with a tight, upturned mouth. This kind of thing was his business. He was a civilian agent from a department that Bernard Foleda ran somewhere in the murkier depths of the UDIA, known nebulously as the “Operations Section.” Like Paula, he was wearing a badge that identified him as representing Pacific News Services of California, USA.

“Quite an experience, eh, General?” someone inquired in the row behind them.

“More boring than driving across Texas,” another voice drawled loudly in reply.

“The people don’t seem exactly wild with excitement,” Earnshaw said, closing the magazine and slipping it back in the pouch in front of him. “That’s what you get when a generation raised on electronics grows up. Gotta have new stimulation all the time.”

“Reality can be a good substitute,” Paula answered dryly.

“So long as you don’t get hooked on it.”

She had met him before their first briefing together by some of Foleda’s spooks from the Pentagon underworld. After Colonel Raymond finally talked her round, transfer orders had come through with amazing rapidity, assigning her to temporary duty with the UDIA. She had moved from Massachusetts to Washington within a week, and after a crash course in regulations and procedures for offplanet duties, she found herself in orbit aboard a USSF manned platform as one of a dozen trainees undergoing practical familiarization with a space environment. Talk about personal backgrounds had been discouraged, so she had learned little about her classmates, including Earnshaw. At that time, before their cover identities had been invented, she had known him only by his class pseudonym of “George,” and had herself been known to the rest simply as “Joyce.” It only occurred to her later that the entire class had probably consisted of final candidates for the same mission. She wondered how many people that last dozen had been selected from. Foleda certainly wasn’t taking any chances this time.

Earnshaw had struck her as capable and self-assured, which she respected, and the two of them had worked well together on group tasks, despite her stubborn independent streak and his perennial skepticism and refusal or inability to trust anyone, which at times exasperated her. On the other hand, he didn’t talk when he had nothing to say, and he wasn’t especially bothered about maintaining an image and having to be popular all the time. It was a pity he was in a profession that bred such cynicism and suspicion, she remembered thinking. He might have made a good scientist.

“What attracted me into science as a career?” she had answered once to a question he’d asked her. It was something they’d talked about during time off and breaks between classes aboard the space platform. “I guess because the challenges were demanding intellectually. It doesn’t leave room for pretentiousness or self-delusion, as you get in a lot of other areas – I’ve never been able to stand phoniness. It deals in facts and truth, its conclusions are unambiguous, and it tests them against reality.”

“The rest of the world has a lot to learn, eh?” he’d said, in the way he had of talking absolutely neutrally when he wanted to – usually when they drifted into something controversial – with no discernible expression or intonation, neither approving nor disapproving, agreeing nor disagreeing, encouraging nor discouraging. Somehow it always had the effect of opening her up more. She’d wondered if it was a result of gumshoe training.

“The rest of the world runs on deception and manipulation – what else can you say?” she’d answered. “It’s what people perceive and believe that matters. Whether or not the perceptions and beliefs happen to be true has nothing to do with it. What matters is that everyone buys the product, votes the right way, and behaves themselves. I don’t know who I blame most – cynical leaders, or the gullible people who listen to them. The irony of it all is that I should end up here, working for this outfit.” Yet, here she was.

On another occasion, while they were having lunch together in one of the Pentagon’s cafeterias during the three-week preparation period after they were selected, she had said, “You see, the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”

“Who said that?” Earnshaw had asked.

“Bertrand Russell.” She’d waited a moment while he thought it over. “A philosopher.”

“Philosopher, eh?”

“Sometime back in the last century.”

“Just like that?”

“What do you mean, ‘just like that’?”

“That’s how he said it, just like that?”

“I guess so.”

Earnshaw had eyed her skeptically, then asked, “So how come he didn’t put ‘I think’ at the end of it?”

The pressure of the seat against her back increased as the transporter came round and decelerated into its stern-first final approach. The image on the screen had enlarged noticeably. Then the view cut to a close-up of the central part of the hub structure with its array of communications antennas, and the docking port’s outer doors swinging open to admit the ship. The sight of the bay inside loomed larger, ablaze with arc lamps, provoking a twinge of nervousness inside her. Her second mistake, she decided, had been to go ahead and think about it after she’d promised to.

A quarter of an hour later, the passengers collected their coats, bags, and other belongings, and exited through the forward door, moving awkwardly and using handrails for assistance in the low-gravity conditions near
Tereshkova
’s axis. They emerged onto a carpeted ramp, where smiling attendants in gray uniforms were waiting to usher them through to the reception lounge.

“Dobro pozalovat v Valentinu Tereshkovu,”
the Russian official said when they came to the front of the short line at one of the reception booths. There had been a baggage check when they transferred from the surface shuttle in Earth orbit. He peered at their badges and switched to English. “Welcome to
Valentina Tereshkova.”
Earnshaw handed him their two document holders. The Russian extracted a plastic card from Paula’s, passed it through a reader, checked the information and picture that appeared on a screen in front of him, and entered a code into a keyboard. Then he repeated the process with the other folder. “Ms. Shelmer and Mr. Earnshaw, both from Pacific News Services, Los Angeles, California.” He studied the screen again for a moment. “Yes, these are correct. What is the purpose of your visit?” His tone was one of personal curiosity rather than of officialdom.

“Special coverage for a consortium of West Coast agencies,” Paula replied. “We’ve scheduled a number of special-feature items on this for the next few weeks.”

“I see. Well, we must be sure to take good care of you. Can’t afford any bad publicity, eh? I’m sure that Americans know all about that.” The Russian passed across two preprepared ID badges in red frames. “Wear these at all times for your own convenience and safety, and remain within the designated visitor zones, which are clearly indicated. The stewards wearing red armbands are at your service if you have questions or need assistance.” He indicated the camera and other equipment that Earnshaw was holding. “Pictures are permitted anywhere within the visitor zones. Thank you, and enjoy your stay with us. Next, please.”

Still loping in bounds more than walking – because of their negligible weight near the spin axis – they followed a short ramp to a gate that led from the arrival area into the reception lounge. Groups of people were already forming around tables set, cocktail-party style, with assorted hors d’oeuvres, breads, meats, and cheeses. Earnshaw’s wrist unit, which looked like an ordinary computer-communicator, beeped almost inaudibly as they passed through the gate. He stopped a few feet into the lounge to press something on it and consult the readout.

“That Russian was quite civilized,” Paula said as she stopped along side him. “Are you sure we’re in the right place? I thought they were all supposed to be monsters.”

“Today, they’re all on their best behavior,” Earnshaw said. “Shop window to the world. Come on, let’s get a drink and eat.” They began moving toward the bar that had been set up by one wall. “Oh, incidentally” – he made it sound like an afterthought —” you’ve just been X-rayed.” Fortunately the special equipment they were carrying had been designed with that kind of possibility in mind, and would have shown nothing unusual.

For the next half hour or so, the guests munched on snacks and stretched their legs as guests of the Soviet press agency
Novosti,
while two speakers delivered a double act that alternated welcoming remarks and a preview of the coming tour with a lament for misunderstood Marxism. Then the party moved on out of the reception lounge into a large, brightly lit gallery with corridors leading off in all directions, railed catwalks above, machinery bays below, doorways everywhere, and a confusing geometry in which verticals converged overhead and the floor was visibly curved.

As they waited to board elevators for the half-mile “descent” to the rim, Paula looked around to reconcile the surroundings with the published construction plans that she and Earnshaw had spent hours memorizing. She wondered if it was significant that the tour didn’t take in any part of the hub system. The same thought seemed to have occurred also to a woman behind them, who was wearing a European Space Agency badge. “Excuse me,” the ESA woman said to the red-armbanded steward by the door as the group began shuffling forward into the elevator.

“Madam?”

“Are we going straight down to the ring now? We’re not going to see anything up here first?”

“There is really nothing of special interest to see up here.”

“Nothing? That’s surprising. What’s behind that far bulkhead, and the pipes back there, for instance – between here, where we’re standing, and the next spoke?”

“Only storage tanks – fuel for the Earth and lunar transporters, various agricultural and industrial chemicals, and water.

“You must store an enormous amount of everything. There’s nothing else?”

“Just storage tanks, madam.”

Earnshaw glanced at Paula and raised an eyebrow. That was where the launchers for some of the ejectable modules that Jonathan Watts had talked about were supposed to be located.

After the long flight up from Earth orbit, the return to normal bodyweight as the elevator moved out to the rim felt like a debilitating heaviness creeping through their bodies; but in another respect, it was reassuring to emerge walking naturally again.

Valentina Tereshkova
contained three built-up urban zones inside its main torus, which in the official bureaucratese of the predistributed literature were designated, mind-bogglingly, “high-density residential-occupational social units.” The bureaucrats didn’t have to live there, however, and the Russian guides who accompanied the visitors down from the hub referred to them simply as “towns.” Each was clustered around the base of one of the major spokes, which formed a central tower disappearing through the roof to connect to the hub. Alternating with the three major spokes were three slimmer ones, which terminated in the middle of the agricultural zones between the towns at built-up transportation and processing complexes known simply as Agricultural Stations 1, 2, and 3.

The town that the party arrived in was called Turgenev, and constituted the administrative and social center. The tour began with a stop high up on the central tower above the main square, where the guides led the visitors through from the elevators onto an outside terrace for a general view of the colony. Paula judged the roof to be fifty to a hundred feet above where they were standing. The cross-section of the rim was not circular as in a true torus, but flattened like a wide automobile tire, with the roof stretching away horizontally for a distance on either side before it curved over and down to become the sides. Illumination came from two rows of what looked like immense, golden-glowing, venetian-blind slats receding upward and out of sight with the sweep of the roof – louvered reflectors that admitted light from an external mirror system. Power for the colony’s industries came from nuclear reactors located at the hub.