Prisoners of Tomorrow (51 page)

“I’ve interrogated him many times,” Protbornov said. “Yes, professional. Impossible to intimidate or persuade. You get nothing from him, nothing. If he were
my
man, I would believe him. Unquestionably, I would believe him.”

“He couldn’t have been brainwashed?” Kirilikhov inquired.

Protbornov shook his head emphatically. “Him? Never.”

“Why couldn’t he have a gun pointing at him too, then?”

“He’d tell you to pull the trigger and be damned. He wouldn’t compromise.”

The Russians began warming to the idea, but then noticed that Paula had sat back and was shaking her head. “What is wrong?” Protbornov asked her.

Paula sighed hopelessly. “I just can’t see him agreeing to it. . . . You have to understand what he’s like: stubborn, antagonistic, indoctrinated with fixed views. He won’t even consider the possibility that there might be alternatives to the way he thinks.” She raised her opened hands. “He abhors everything about the Soviet system. The general said it—he wouldn’t compromise. As a matter of principle, he’d never be seen going on television, public or private, and voluntarily cooperating with Russians. That’s the way he is. It won’t work. Forget it.”

Protbornov pulled a face. “On reflection, I have to admit that she’s probably right,” he said. “That does sound like him.”

“It was just an idea,” Sepelyan said.

“A pity,” Kirilikhov murmured.

Silence fell. Then Olga, who had been sitting and thinking to herself in silence, said, “I don’t know . . . perhaps there is a way in which we could get him to do it.” She glanced at Paula. “Or maybe you could.”

“How?” Paula asked.

“The laser that they’ve got,” Olga said. “Wasn’t that the idea of it in the first place? And you said it’s working now. Well, maybe he won’t go on a live TV transmission with Russians—but he might say the same thing privately, over his own personal link. Might he be persuaded to do that?”

Protbornov was looking bewildered. “Laser? What laser? What are you two women talking about now?”

They told him about Earnshaw’s laser and its intended use for communicating with Earth. Protbornov sat looking stunned. The two men from Moscow glanced at him from time to time like officials from the head office of a bank with a branch manager whose staff had been giving away notes on the street. If Earnshaw believed he was acting independently, possibly he could be induced to send a personal confirmation from
Tereshkova
of what his own eyes were seeing there, Olga said. All Protbornov would need to do was make sure the guards stayed out of the way.

Paula thought it was worth a try, but she pointed out a problem that still remained. Communications only work when the person on the receiving end is listening. For a signal from the laser to get through, somebody down on Earth would have to be expecting it, and know what frequency and code to look for. Furthermore, in view of the minuscule amount of energy that would actually reach Earth, they would need to be using more than just any equipment for the looking.

Olga was aware of that. “But I understand that you helped them build the electronics,” she said to Paula. “Could you provide the operating frequency and whatever else somebody would need to know to set a receiver up?”

“Sure—actually there isn’t that much,” Paula said. “What have you got in mind?”

“We use the existing channel through Sokhotsk to give that information to the Americans,” Olga replied. “We’re here now, in Turgenev. We can send it off right away. You can tell Earnshaw it was your idea—that you did it in anticipation, hoping he would agree. We will have to hope that the Americans can arrange a suitable method for reception in time. It might take, what . . . a day, maybe?”

“A lot less is they use emergency procedures,” Paula replied. “But that only applies to relaying a signal through the communications net. I don’t know how they’d pick it up in the first place.”

“We can only leave that side to them,” Olga said. “Once they’re set up, then all Earnshaw would need to do is get himself to a place where he can witness what’s happening here, and point the laser at the roof. That shouldn’t be too difficult if the guards stay away from him—but nobody tells him that, of course.”

“Will he know if he’s getting through?” Sepelyan asked. “Does this device receive also?”

“Yes,” Paula said. “A reply signal comes back along the same path in the opposite direction.”

“Along with the sunshine? Wouldn’t the signal get lost in it?”

“It shouldn’t. We picked the operating frequency to coincide with one of the dark absorption lines in the solar spectrum. And at the Earth end, they’ll be able to use a powerful transmitter, don’t forget.”

Sepelyan nodded in a way which said that was all right with him, whatever it meant. Everyone looked at everyone else. Evidently there was nothing more to be said.

“Then, we seem to be agreed to give this suggestion a try,” Protbornov announced. “We have little time. Therefore I propose that Lieutenant Bryce be taken back to Zamork at once to contact Mr. Earnshaw and explain the situation. Comrade Oshkadov goes downstairs to the Communications Center to send the message to the Americans via the Sokhotsk channel, advising the laser frequency and other details. Lieutenant Bryce can write them down before she leaves.”

“Very well,” Olga agreed.

Protbornov looked inquiringly at Kirilikhov and Sepelyan. They returned nods that said they were satisfied. “I’d better go and check on what’s happening in Moscow,” Kirilikhov said. He gave Protbornov a withering look as he rose from his chair. “After the present situation is resolved, we can discuss Zamork and the effectiveness of its security measures. Out of curiosity, have you ever been down a salt mine in Siberia, General?”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Inquisitive visitors waiting to board the spoke elevators after their arrival at
Valentina Tereshkova
had always been told that behind the bulkhead facing the boarding area at the hub were storage tanks for water and liquid chemicals, as the official plans showed. In fact there were no storage tanks there. The small amount of agriculture and industrial processing that had been staged purely for show had never required much in the way of chemicals. And neither were there any manufacturing facilities worth speaking of next to the hub nuclear reactors behind the docking ports. The dummy bulkhead with its pipes, and the rest of the facade, had been dismantled now. What the reactors actually powered were capacitor banks feeding a battery of electromagnetic coil guns capable of imparting an acceleration of hundreds of g’s into their drum-shaped projectiles to hurl them miles clear of the platform in seconds. Each projectile consisted of a fission bomb contained in an ellipsoidal cavity shaped to feed a configuration of lasing material that would transform a large proportion of the detonation energy into fifty independently aimable beams of high-density X-rays.

Field Marshal Vladislav Kyrenko, Commander in chief of “Anvil”—the designation of the entire space bombardment system that the superficialities of
Valentina Tereshkova
had disguised—steadied himself against a handrail while the general in charge of Battle Station 2 at the hub finished his report. One of the things the planners of space warfare hadn’t taken into account was the difficulty of maintaining dignity under conditions of negligible weight.

“All mechanical and hydraulic systems tested and functional. Registration computers have been tracking assigned targets for twelve hours and check positively. All projectile onboard computers have been updating continuously without errors. Power-plant and launch systems are fully operational.”

“Sounds good,” Kyrenko said. “So what odds should I bet on our zapping every American lasersat with the first salvo?”

The general smiled faintly. “Oh, pretty good, I’d say.”

“And the morale of the crew?”

“Just waiting to go for it.”

Kyrenko nodded. “Good. Carry on.” He watched as the general went back into the armored fire-control center from which the hub batteries would be directed. Inside, through the opening next to the massive door that would be closed before the action commenced, he could see technicians and operators busy at their rows of consoles. And that was merely the inner defense. The space between the inner and outer skins held a layer of pulverized moonrock several feet thick at the strongpoints.

That completed the hub part of the inspection. Kyrenko turned to Lt. General Churenev, his principal aide, who was standing with the party of officers waiting behind. “Everything looks fine here. Let’s move on down.”

They bobbed and pulled themselves across the deck and entered the elevator waiting at the top of one of the shafts from the Turgenev spoke. The doors closed, and moments later they were descending toward the ring. The outer tube of the spoke was armored, too; but since it was more exposed than the hardened battle stations at the hub and various locations around the rim, it would not be used while combat conditions prevailed. Once hostilities commenced, the garrison at the hub would be sealed in there for the duration.

At Turgenev they came out of the elevator into the main concourse of the skeleton that had once been the Government Building and crossed the dusty, derelict space to come out onto the raised terrace bordering the main square, where two staff cars were waiting. All was darkness, broken only by pools of light from the floodlamps set up at ground level by the military. The lines of reflecting slats in the roof had been closed to prevent their directing hostile laserfire into the interior. Kyrenko halted with his party, and stood for a while staring out at the black, empty shapes of the deserted ghost city. On the far side, the bones of what had been Internal Security Headquarters stood silhouetted against one of the lamps, picked clean by an army-engineer squad collecting materials for a piece of last-minute improvised construction. A row of groundcars stood silent and abandoned in the shadows beneath.

“It’s hard to imagine it the way it was,” Churenev commented. “With light, color, people, children . . .”

Kyrenko nodded distantly. “The day has come at last, Oleg. For a hundred years we have been treated like lepers. The capitalists sent Lenin back from Switzerland because they thought his Revolution would destroy Russia. When that failed, they set up Hitler and the Nazis, and sent them against us, but we destroyed them. Then they encircled us with guns and bases and missile sites, as if we were a disease that had to be contained. They spread lies, waiting . . . thinking they could wear us down by siege. But they forgot the Mongols, Napoleon, Hitler—how many times Russia has come back to bury those who thought they had destroyed her. And so it will be again. They say we are on the verge of collapse. But soon they will learn.” He turned his head. “Am I not right?”

Churenev sighed. “If that is how it must be . . .”

The party descended the steps to the square, climbed into the cars, and left Turgenev. For a little over a quarter mile they drove through a desolation of bare metal terraces and piles of rotting vegetation that had been one of the agricultural sectors. In fact, only the crops along the valley center, lining the route along which visitors had been taken, had ever been real. The wheat, sorghum, vegetables, and rice terraces higher up the sides, which foreign observers had admired so enthusiastically from afar—apart from one show-piece section that they climbed laboriously to inspect more closely for themselves—had been planted with plastic imitations.

They came to Agricultural Station 3 and parked outside the waste-recycling plant that consisted mainly of dummy tanks, pipes, and reactor vessels. Its processing capacity was only a fraction of the publicized value—for the simple reason that there had never been that much waste to process. The field marshal and his aides walked through an opening in the side of an armored enclosure and entered the space that the public plans described as “Materials Storage.” The commander of Battle Station 4, free-electron-laser emplacement, was waiting with his senior officers.

The party moved through the bays of windings and super-conducting magnets, the linac tunnel, and the control room. Accelerator potentials and field frequencies had been tuned to take out the West’s communications and instrumentation satellites, checks were positive, and there were no problems to report. Emergency generators, local backup life-support systems, and escape chute down to the armored ring-transit tunnel were all operational. The men were in good shape.

“Very good, General,” Kyrenko approved. “First-rate. So, we will meet in Washington, eh?”

“Yes, sir—to help burn down the Pentagon.” Everyone laughed.

Kyrenko turned to Churenev and the others. “Very well, gentlemen. That completes the tour. My compliments to all of you. Let us return to HQ.”

They reembarked in their vehicles and drove the remaining distance to Novyi Kazan, climbing the ramp by the emptied reservoir to the main entrance. On the way in, Kyrenko stopped in the upper-level communications room to send a signal to Moscow. It read: anvil at battle readiness, condition orange 1. all units operational. countdown status to plan is confirmed.

Then he continued on down into the hardened zone containing the command center from which he and his staff would direct and coordinate all the battle stations. It was a place that had never been included in the official tours. On the publicly released plans, however, it was described as a detention and rehabilitation facility. Its name was Zamork.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The speeches were over, but the main square in Turgenev was still alive with people when Paula came out from the main concourse of the Government Building, accompanied by Major Uskayev, the captain, and two guards. The sight of a woman in a plain green tunic under armed escort contrasted with the colorful, holidaylike atmosphere that had taken over, and heads turned to watch them curiously as they crossed the terrace outside the main doors and descended the steps to the square, where a security-police van was waiting.

As the van entered an underpass, changed direction, and emerged again to negotiate the tortuous route out of the town, Paula saw that the bridges and pedestrian ways were bustling with people. Many of them were acting like tourists, rubbernecking at the sights and posing for pictures—no doubt recent arrivals out viewing their new home, she thought. On the edge of town they passed a large, open area of grass, where teams of children in white and red outfits were putting final touches to their gymnastics routines for the celebrations. For a moment the brightly lit tunnel of the colony’s valley curved upward before them, with the green and yellow arms of the agricultural terraces spreading upward on either side, and then the van entered another tunnel to descend from town-center level to the valley floor.