Prisoners of Tomorrow (46 page)

“I see. Well, glad to have you here. Look around if you want.” The man turned to carry on in the direction he had been heading.

“One moment,” McCain called.

“Yes?”

McCain gestured toward the far side of the warehouse, opposite where they had entered. “What lies that way, behind there?” According to the official plans, it should have been a crop-drying plant.

“A crop-drying plant,” the man said.

“Thank you.”

When the man had gone on his way, they continued on to the far side of the warehouse, which was formed by two walls meeting asymmetrically at an angle a third or so of the way along. They went through another open door, crossed an alley behind it, and came to a steel structure supporting a complex of large hoppers and interconnecting conveyors. “What place is this?” McCain asked one of the two women they found monitoring panels in a control room nearby.

“Number-Three Crop-Drying Plant,” she told him.

“What’s above?”

“Hydroponic recirculators and a crushing mill.”

“And below?”

The woman laughed. “Oh, that’s a long drop. There’s nothing until you get to Earth, Moon, or somewhere else, depending on which way we’re turned at the moment. Are you lost?”

“Er, yes, I suppose we are. New arrivals. . . . Thank you.”

“And I think it’s about time we were trying to find our way back,” Scanlon said. “There’s nothing more to interest us down here.”

“No . . .” McCain sounded bemused. “No, Kev, I guess you’re right.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

When the reports were in, every one of the specific reconnaissance objectives listed by Foleda had yielded similar results. Gonares had seen nothing at the hub resembling the launching guns for ejectable, fission-pumped, X-ray laser modules that McCain had described. Rashazzi and Sargent had penetrated into where the aluminum-smelting plant was supposed to be below Landausk and found no sign of a nuclear-driven microwave projector there; instead, they had found aluminum-smelting furnaces. And McCain himself had verified that there were no particle accelerator tubes running deep down in the ring at Novyi Kazan, and others had confirmed it at two other places. Yes, it was inevitable that in a volume as large as that of
Valentina Tereshkova,
there were still a lot of places they hadn’t seen. A complete search would take months. But the fact remained that without exception,
all
of the findings prophesied by Western intelligence had turned out dead wrong.

“So what does that tell you about all the other suspicions and delusions you people have been suffering from for years? Oh, I don’t mean just on our side—the same mentalities exist on both sides. The whole problem with the world has always been the kinds of people who end up running it. It never mattered so much in the past, because they could always go off to fight in out-of-the-way places and keep it between themselves and anyone stupid enough to follow them. But that started to change when we”—Paula was referring to the general category of scientists—“gave them knowledge that allowed them to fly, and they used it to bomb cities. Now things have gone way past that and it affects everybody. You want to play at being scientific, and test the hypothesis. Okay, it’s tested. Now we have to tell the people who matter what the results are. There isn’t any choice, morally, or whatever other way you want to think of it.” She pushed her hair from her brow and turned to face Earnshaw, who was standing impassively on the other side of the Crypt, his arms folded across his chest. For the moment they were alone. Paula was tired, and her voice had been rising with emotion and exasperation.

Earnshaw breathed in heavily and shook his head. “I still don’t like it. I say no.”

Paula stared disbelievingly. “Why, for Christ’s sake? You can’t give me one single reason . . .”

“So I’m pulling rank. That means I don’t need a reason.”

“Beliefs without evidence . . . No, not even that. In the face of evidence.”

“Call it uncertainty and caution.”

“How can there by any uncertainty? Look, you can’t argue with facts. Why do so many people act as if refusing to accept facts that don’t conform to their preconceptions can change reality? Reality doesn’t care about anyone’s preconceptions. The only way to learn anything is by allowing facts to shape beliefs. Aren’t you doing just the opposite by letting preexisting beliefs decide what you’re prepared to accept as fact? That’s called prejudice and superstition.”

“I call it gut-feel.”

“It’s the same difference.”

Earnshaw sighed and turned away for a moment. His voice grated, as if he was managing to control his patience only with an effort. “What happened to probability in this all-very-scientific analysis of yours? There are too many facts that look suspiciously to me like unlikely coincidences . . .”

“Suspiciously, suspiciously. See, there you go again. Is there anything you’re not suspicious about?”

“And I don’t like the thought of having to communicate everything openly through Russians.”

“You’re obsessed with Russians. Because this place doesn’t match your preconceptions about Russian prisons, you’re convinced it has to be a cover for something. You never stop to think it might be
you
that’s wrong—that your whole set of ideas about their prisons and everything else might be behind the times. Maybe they
are
changing, and people like you just haven’t woken up to it yet.”

“It’s a nice thought,” Earnshaw agreed. “But it could turn out to be wrong. What makes you as confident as you sound?”

“Gut-feel.” Paula smiled icily and turned away.

“Well, maybe now you’re not being so smart. Gut-feel might not be a strong point in your department. What do you know about Olga, apart from that after they’d given you a hard time and kept you on your own for a while, she showed up friendly and understanding just when you needed someone to talk to. Did you ever wonder about that?”

“That’s not the way it was.
I
approached
her
—in the infirmary. I’d only seen her for a few seconds before that, by chance.”

“By chance. And she just happened to walk through the infirmary.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, don’t you ever quit? . . .”

“Look,” Earnshaw said, finally sounding sharp. “I’ve never disputed that you’re good at what you do. Don’t start trying to tell me how to do what
I
do. That’s my job. Okay?”

Paula glared back at him. “Okay. But isn’t the main part of that job to communicate back what you find out? We’ve got information. There are lots of civilians arriving here, lots of children, lots of dirt, and no weapons. Doesn’t it occur to you that sending that information back might be a duty?”

Earnshaw held her gaze long and steadily. When he spoke, his voice had returned to normal. “And hasn’t it occurred to
you
that
that
might be exactly what somebody somewhere wants us to do?” he asked.

McCain should have been out with a labor detail assigned to soil spreading and planting, but he had used Rashazzi’s bracelet-insert-swapping trick to buy enough free time from a couple of Siberians and a Japanese in A Block, a Russian and an Arab in E Block, and a Finn in F Block to be virtually free of work commitments. He had also made it worth Luchenko’s while not to notice. For the rest of the day, he prowled around Gorky Street and the general compound alone, reflecting on all the impressions and oddities that he had registered since his coming to Zamork, and seeing if he could fit them into a different pattern from the one that had taken root in his head.

For one of the things that Paula had said was true: the way the place was run was unlike any Russian prison system that he had ever heard of, and was out of character with the mentalities of totalitarian bureaucrats. It was too free and easy, too unrestrained: prisoners from different nations and backgrounds, convicted for different reasons, mixed and moved around inside Zamork with minimal supervision; there was too much lenience toward things like alcohol, Rashazzi’s wire-stripping mice, stealing, and absconding. Then there was the Exchange system, which made bribery and corruption rampant—yet surely it could have been curbed had there existed a will to do so—and the distinctly un-Russian practice of operating by incentives rather than by fear and intimidation. Paula thought it was all just part of the Russians’ catching up with the times at last. McCain wasn’t so sure.

Naturally, others had noticed this, too. Some of the inmates argued that it simply reflected the pointlessness of having Earth-style security in a space colony; others saw it as consistent with a purpose of rehabilitation and reeducation, not punishment; while McCain for his part had come to the conclusion that the Russians had cultivated these impressions deliberately to camouflage the real purpose of Zamork, which he had described as an “information mine.” It was all designed to
encourage
people to mix freely, and therefore talk. And there were many people around who would have much to talk about that the Russians would be very interested to hear. Oh, true, the Russians did go through the motions of interrogations, searches, punishments for infractions, and the like, but with time it had all come to strike McCain more and more as not quite genuine—a charade to dull critical examination by satisfying expectations.

Very clever, McCain had conceded. Everything operated at a double level. There were the apparent reasons for things being as they were, which most people worked out for themselves and were happy with, as they were meant to. And then there was the real reason, which only a few, such as he, had fathomed. And taking advantage of that insight, he had turned the Russians’ own tactic back on them by exploiting the very freedoms that they had built into the system—for their own purposes—to set up and run his own miniature espionage operation. Even cleverer.

Now he was beginning to suspect there had been not two, but three levels to the deception all along. And far from being cleverer, he had been duped all the way down the line.

For the same facts that had led him to the information-mine explanation were also consistent with the supposition that he had been meant to believe just that, and that the actions he’d imagined himself to be carrying out freely had in reality all been part of the same plan. In other words, what he’d been doing was exactly what the Soviets had wanted him to do. And now it all made sense why prisoners inside Zamork should have found all the resources they needed to organize themselves as they had, why the security system had turned out to be ridden with loopholes, and why Paula had just happened to gain access to a supposedly secret communications channel back to Western intelligence at the same time: The weapons did exist. The information that Foleda had supplied regarding their locations, however, was false—planted over a period of several years though phony defectors and leaks. The whole thing had been staged to feed misinformation to the West from a source they would believe: their own, trusted agents on the inside. The real weapons were in the places that McCain and his people had never been able to get into.

McCain stopped suddenly, staring at the compound wall in front of him, as the full implication of that line of thought became clear. If Magician had been a double agent and part of that same stratagem, then the Tangerine file had never existed. The whole story had been fabricated to lure the US into doing exactly what it had done: send somebody after it. That explained his and Paula’s capture. They hadn’t goofed somehow. The Soviets had set the whole thing up from the beginning, specifically so that the agents the US sent would be captured. That was how they had obtained the “inside people” whom Western intelligence would trust. It wasn’t an information mine at all; it was a misinformation factory.

He sought out Rashazzi. “Razz, have you ever gotten the feeling that everything we’ve been doing has been steered?”

One thing McCain had noticed over the months was that Rashazzi was never surprised by anything. “I’m listening,” was all Rashazzi said.

McCain went on to summarize his latest thoughts. The young Israeli listened intently, nodding and agreeing occasionally, but without interrupting. “Just for two people?” he queried dubiously when McCain had finished. “They would set up a deception as elaborate as that, just for two people?”

McCain shook his head. “I never said that. My guess is that they’ve been grabbing all kinds of different candidates and shipping them up to Zamork on one pretext or another for a long time—people like Peter Sargent, for example, who I’m sure is from British intelligence. You might have been on the list, even. The Russians have been auditioning for months before they made a final choice of which ones to use.”

“And these weapons we’ve been looking for. You think they really are here, but in the places we haven’t been to.”

“The places we haven’t been
steered
to,” McCain said. “Our side was fed faked information to make us look in the wrong places.”

“So where ought we to start looking?”

“In the places we’ve been steered away
from.”

“For example?”

“Underneath Zamork, for a start.”

Rashazzi frowned, trying to follow what McCain meant. “Explain,” he invited finally.

“Think back nine weeks to when you and I found the original route, underneath B-three. One level down, in the first machinery space, the floorpanels were spot-welded—which we could have cut around with the tool you’d made. But just in case we didn’t have anything like that, there was also an easy way down through the lighting panel, and we took it. Our original intention was to keep on going down. But the floor of the pump bay below was solid and seam-welded. Yes? That was why we started exploring outward at that point. Doesn’t that say to you that perhaps we were deliberately headed off in that direction? And what do you think we might find if we went back now and carried on going straight down?”

“But . . . Are you saying we were
meant
to find that route down from under B-three? Wouldn’t that mean that the Russians knew all along that we’d set up the Crypt?”

“Or something like it, somewhere down there.” McCain nodded. “Sure. That’s what I think. It was essential to their plan. Without some of the stuff that we thought we were making secretly, we wouldn’t have been able to get out and about. And that would explain why they put scientists like you and Albrecht in with us, too. The effort had to be real to make the setup look genuine.” Rashazzi cupped a hand over his mouth as he strove to assimilate the torrent of new suggestions. He shook his head wonderingly. McCain stared at him expectantly. “Well, what do you think it would take to cut down through the floor of the pump bay? Could we do it?”