Prisoners of Tomorrow (9 page)

Paula had been blinking her eyes, trying to follow. “I’m not sure I understand,” she said. Her voice was dry and cracked. Protbornov poured water from a pitcher in front of him into a glass and set it down across the desk. Paula stared at it. Whether it was the wrong thing to do or not, she suddenly didn’t care. She picked up the glass and gulped down the water gratefully.

“We are prepared to take you, in person, to all the places in
Tereshkova
where you were told these weapons were supposed to exist, and let you see for yourself that the accusations are simply not true.” Protbornov threw up his hands. “What could be fairer than that? We want the truth to be known.”

Paula replaced the glass on the edge of the desk, noticing as she did so that her hand was shaking. “Why not open the whole place to international inspection, if that’s what you want?” she asked. “Let everyone come and see for themselves.”

Protbornov tossed up his hands again. “I agree! And if I were First Secretary of the Party, that is precisely what I would do. But I am not Comrade Petrokhov. And for reasons which I do not make it my business to criticize, our policy is that we will not strip ourselves naked before the world on demand, just to prove our good intentions.”

“You’ve already demonstrated your good intentions,” Paula said, massaging her stomach tenderly.

“I apologize for that incident. It was an accident. The guards responsible were transferred only recently from one of our military punishment units, where procedures are different. They have been reprimanded and removed.”

Having served their purpose, Paula thought. “I’m still not sure what you’re saying. . . .” Despite her resolve, she heard herself getting talkative. . . . But, dammit, stuck out here, two hundred thousand miles away from everything, she needed somebody to talk to, even a Russian general. That sounded a little like the beginnings of self-pity, she reflected idly. It wasn’t like her at all to feel that way, but she found that the thought didn’t really bother her very much. She had reason to feel sorry for herself—oh God, had there been something in the water?

“All we want you to do, after you’ve satisfied yourself that what I’ve said is true, is simply to make a public statement confirming what you’ve seen with your own eyes. If we can show you that our country has been slandered before the world, is it unreasonable that we should ask this? It is, after all, the truth which is supposed to matter, isn’t it, even when it inconveniently fails to support preconceived notions? Isn’t that what you were trained to think as a scientist?”

“Yes,” Paula answered automatically, even as she saw the mistake.

Protbornov gave a satisfied nod. “So, we have established that you are a scientist. With whom? A private corporation, perhaps? But then, how would you come to know so much about Russian equipment? It was you who was operating the device. More likely one of the services, then, yes? . . . Yes. Very well, which one? Army, maybe? . . . Navy? . . . US Air Force, perhaps? We can run physiological tests, you know.”

It was all being recorded by concealed cameras, Paula guessed. Afterward, Protbornov and his specialists would play the recordings over and over, studying her every response. Probably other hidden devices were measuring changes in her skin temperature and reflectivity, muscular tensions, eye movements, and other giveaways, at the very moment. Suddenly she found herself weary of it all, helpless against forces that she didn’t comprehend and didn’t know how to resist. It was all pointless. In the end they were bound to win. And in spite of herself, what Protbornov was saying
did
sound only fair and reasonable.

“Maybe,” she said. She wasn’t sure what she had said it in response to. Every thought that started to take shape dissolved away again.

“You will agree to consider making a statement, if we can show you that the allegations concerning weapons are false? This would not have to be a public declaration. It need only be for the information of certain Western and Asian governments. In fact, we could arrange for the recording to be vetted by your own people before it was shown to anyone else. That would relieve you of any personal responsibility, and it would cause no unnecessary embarrassment in international circles. You see, our aims are quite honorable. A wrong has been committed, and we simply wish to put it right.” Protbornov paused and looked across the desk.

Paula rubbed her eyes. All she had to do was agree to a request that sounded reasonable, and she would be able to sleep. How could she be wrong for simply telling the truth about what she saw? God alone knew how much trouble throughout history had been caused by people refusing to. Protbornov waited a few seconds longer, then added, “It goes without saying that your cooperation in this small matter could make a big difference to eventual agreement between our governments concerning your future. We understand the regrettable necessity for the kind of work you were drawn into. Given a suitable incentive, we can find it very easy to let bygones be bygones over such things. Otherwise . . .” He shrugged.

Paula stared at the glass on the desk. A distorted, inverted image of Protbornov’s face peered back at her out of the thick curve of its base. As she stared, it took on the appearance of a grotesque parody of a spider, watching from the center of its web for its prey’s struggles to die away before it moved. She shook herself out of the stupor that had been creeping over her. Then it came to her that the Russians would have known far more than they seemed to if Earnshaw had given away anything to them at all. She wondered suddenly what he might be going through at that moment.

And gradually a feeling of self-disgust overcame her at the thought of what had almost happened. She drew in a determined breath and shivered as she fought back visions of what she might be letting herself in for. She looked up, clasped her hands together between her knees to prevent them from shaking visibly, and steadied her gaze across the desk.

“I wish to communicate with a representative of the United States government,” she said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The air conditioner hummed, and the resonating undertone came and went. Lewis McCain lay on the cot, staring up at the ceiling. Now that his head was clearer, isolated recollections from the hazy period following his arrest would appear suddenly in his mind in a seemingly patternless fashion. Lying here, staring up at the air-conditioner grille, was one of them. It had a gray-painted metal escutcheon surrounding it, with a scratch by one of the corner screws where a screwdriver had slipped. The sound hadn’t contained that distinctive resonance then. Something must have loosened itself in the ducting fairly recently, he thought idly.

McCain didn’t trust Russians. In his experience, whenever they started behaving reasonably, they were up to something. They’d been giving him too easy a time. Why? What were they after? From what he knew of Soviet interrogation practices, it was likely on two counts that Paula was having a tougher time: one, she was a woman, and therefore more easily intimidated, according to standard KGB thinking; and two, she would quickly have been identified as a technician rather than an intelligence professional, and hence more vulnerable through knowing less of what to expect.

So why were they playing a restrained game with him? Probably because they anticipated international ramifications and had no intention of compromising their own position by showing less-than-spotless hands. If they saw the affair as eventually being made public, they’d probably be putting pressure on Paula to make a signed statement. In his case, seeing there would be little chance of getting anywhere with a similar demand, they might simply have decided to work on convincing him that they weren’t such bad people after all, and see what accrued benefits they might be able to squeeze from the results later. Yes, he thought, nodding up at the air-conditioner grille, that would be consistent with the way they had been acting.

He thought about how he had come to find himself here at the age of thirty-six, a prisoner in a Soviet space habitat hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth.

When people asked what had induced him to make a career in military intelligence, he usually told them it was ideological: that he believed the Western way of life was worth defending. Despite its faults, a democracy based on free enterprise allowed him to be himself, to believe and say what he chose, and, apart from a few not-unreasonable constraints, made how he preferred to lead his life none of anyone else’s business. That suited him just fine. So, the answer was true as far as it went; it was the kind that people expected, and they accepted it. But there was another side to it, too, which involved more personal things.

McCain had been born in Iowa, but his mother, Julia, was Czechoslovakian. She had escaped during the anti-Russian uprising of 1968. He remembered her telling of the Czechs’ disgust over the sellout by the British and French to Hitler at Munich in 1938 of the nation which they themselves had created a mere twenty years previously and pledged solemnly to defend. Instead, at the very moment when Czechoslovakia was mobilizing to defend itself, they had surrendered it to six years of Nazi barbarism. The story had made a deep impression on the developing mind of young Lewis McCain. It had convinced him that tyrants and dictators could not be appeased. The lure of easy pickings merely excited them on to greater excesses. As with people, nations able to defend themselves, and prepared to do so if they had to, were left alone.

Julia retold stories that her parents had told her of listening around an illegal radio to reports of Hitler’s armies storming eastward, apparently overwhelming the Russians as effortlessly as they had overwhelmed the Poles. Czechoslovakia, left hundreds of miles behind the front, had surely been consumed in a nightmare that would lie across Europe for generations to come. But then the news began to change. The Russians counterattacked from the very gates of Moscow. They held at Leningrad. They stopped, then encircled and annihilated the Germans at Stalingrad. In the years that followed, the Germans were driven back remorselessly, until eventually the Red Army entered Czechoslovakia. On the day their T-34 tanks rumbled into Prague, Lewis’s grandfather had strode into the house and announced in a voice shaking with pride and emotion, “I am a Communist!” And for a while Czechoslovakia became perhaps the most faithful of the Soviets’ allies.

But the elation was short-lived. Ironically the Russians, like the Nazis before them, became oppressors of the people who had welcomed them as liberators. Instead of the independence they had promised, they imposed a Moscow-controlled puppet regime and brought in the familiar Bolshevik apparatus of ruthless persecution, midnight arrests, trumped-up charges, brutally extracted confessions, deportations, and executions to eliminate potential opposition. And, fanatically pursuing their socialist ideals, they seized land, property, and all small businesses, which henceforth were to be owned by the state.

The foundry and engineering shop that Lewis’s grandfather had worked strenuously to build up through the worst years of the thirties was taken from the family and handed over to be managed by a Party bureaucrat who had never seen a lathe or a grinding machine, had no comprehension of taking pride in excellence, and who was incapable of thinking in any terms other than of quotas. Within six months the business was ruined, and Lewis’s grandfather lost his income, which was replaced by a subsistence wage. Later, when years of anger at corruption, incompetence, and lies finally boiled over into open rebellion in the streets, he was shot in the fighting when the Red Army’s tanks returned to Prague. That was the last thing that Julia remembered seeing before she and her companions fled for the border. She ended up in Holland, where she met her first husband, an American marketing executive. They moved to the US, but the marriage didn’t work out, and Julia spent some years raising a son, Ralph, on her own before she remarried, this time to a widowed Iowa farmer of Scottish descent: Lewis’s father, Malcolm. That was in 1981, during the latter years of what had been a confused period for America.

After emerging as the most powerful among the war’s victors, the nation had gone on to enjoy two decades of growth and prosperity unprecedented by any society in history. Uninterested in the creeds and passions responsible for turning half the rest of the world into rubble, the generation that had grown up through the lean and threadbare years of the Depression turned to Sears, General Electric, General Motors, and the loan officer at the local bank for fulfillment. In their own eyes they were overcoming the problems of poverty, disease, hunger, and ignorance which had devastated human populations for as long as humanity had existed. They were proud of their achievement and of the society that had made it possible. They assumed their children would be grateful. They tried to export their system to other peoples and assumed they would be grateful, too.

Pendulums swing, however.

The next generation, watching the rest of the world’s problems on color TV over refrigerator-fresh steaks after driving home from school in air-conditioned automobiles, instead of feeling grateful, felt guilty. By some curious twist of logic it became America’s fault that the rest of the world still had problems at all. Through a sweeping extension of the “Eat-up-your-potatoes-because-the-children-in-China-are-starving” syndrome—as if, by some natural law of protein parity, every uneaten potato on a plate in Minnesota mysteriously induced the symmetric disappearance of rice from a bowl in Peking—America’s enterprise in putting its own house in order was to blame for the disorder that persisted everywhere else.

The result was a moral crusade against the American system and the institutions that gave it substance: capitalism and the business corporations, the technological industries that supported them, the science that made technology possible, and ultimately the faculty of reason itself, which was the foundation of science. The weapon was fear. Wreathed in clouds of acid rain, radiation, and carcinogens, buried under indestructible plastics, deluged with genetically mutated microbes, and stripped of its ozone, the planet would ferment in swamps of its own garbage—if the Bomb didn’t get it first or bring on a Nuclear Winter. And America had provoked the Soviets by refusing to disarm unilaterally and thereby ensure world peace—as the European democracies had ensured peace by disarming
them
selves unilaterally in the 1930’s.