Prisoners of Tomorrow (14 page)

Kevin Scanlon was the Irishman who occupied the single bunk opposite McCain and Mungabo in B-3, enjoying a measure of extra space that afforded one of the minor but worthwhile comforts of life. He had become mixed up with espionage and the GRU—the Soviet military-intelligence organization, which in many ways paralleled the KGB—in the course of his former IRA activities and connections through them to the Cubans and Palestinians, until one day he found himself on the wrong side of one of Moscow’s eternal comradely vendettas. He had sparse hair, with a lean build and gaunt, hollowed face that made his eyes seem protrusive, especially when he was in one of his intense moods, which usually produced either passionate discourses on Irish history or invective harangues about the “Brits.” McCain had worked with the British when he was with NATO in Europe, and he’d found them likable enough despite their occasional stuffiness. But he kept his opinions to himself, and on the whole he and Scanlon got along, which was as well since Luchenko had assigned them as regular working partners.

“What I’d give to be able to walk out and down the street for a pint o’ the porter now,” Scanlon called across from the drilling table, lifting a gloved hand and wiping his brow with his sleeve.

“Something else to think about for when you get back, I guess.”

“Or the Guinness. Pure Liffey water the Guinness is made from in Dublin. Nowhere else in the world does it have the same taste.”

“If anyone ever gets back.”

“Cream. The head on it is as smooth as tasting pure cream.”

A horn somewhere overhead gave two raucous blasts to indicate the midday break for lunch. McCain thumbed a red button, and the saw freewheeled to a stop. The din in the rest of the workshop subsided as other machines were turned off and the figures attending them stripped off their greasy coveralls before joining the general movement toward the main door. Scanlon came round the bench, wiping his hands with a piece of rag. “Now, isn’t it nice to think of all the Ivans and Vladimirs who’ll sleep comfortable in their beds for the charitable work we’re doing here today? And wouldn’t Father O’Halloran from Ballingarry be proud of me for that?”

McCain hung his coverall on the end of a storage rack. “Is that where you’re from?”

“Ah, many years ago now, it was. That was when I met my first Americans. There was a development estate set up not three miles from the village—light industry, they said, electronics and the like. An American company came first and built a computer factory there. Then the Germans and the Japanese came, I recall. We weren’t exactly wild about being invaded by all the foreigners, but the money they paid was good.”

They came out of the workshops and began walking along a wide corridor of grimy, battle-scarred, lime-green walls. Meals were brought to each block and eaten in the common mess area. “How did the Americans fit in?” McCain asked.

“They were always chasing around after the girls, which didn’t please the local lads at all. There were fights sometimes. The Germans preferred their beer, but they liked ordering people around too much. Me, I had more time for the Japanese than any of them. Very polite people—always bow and smile sort of apologetically before they knock anyone’s teeth in.”

“I thought it was the Irish who were supposed to be famous for all those things.”

“Is that a fact, now?”

“Great lovers, drinkers, and always good for a fight, isn’t that what they say?”

“You don’t strike me as the sort of man who pays much attention to what people say. How about yourself? Are you blessed with any Irish in the family?”

“I’m not sure,” McCain replied, with deliberate vagueness.

“Surprising. I thought all Americans were obsessed with genealogy.”

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that Earnshaw sounds more English to me, if anything.”

“Hmm, yes, now. Kind o’ what I was thinkin’ meself. . . . But you’re not so bad a fella for that.”

They came out of the Core and turned south onto Gorky Street.

Compass directions in
Tereshkova
were the same as on Earth. The spin axis through the hub defined north-south, with the direction that the hub docking ports faced being arbitrarily taken as north. Following the convention of a normal, spherical, inside-in and outside-out planet, the equatorial plane was perpendicular to the axis and midway between its poles, dividing the entire wheel of
Tereshkova
into a north zone and a south zone—like a tire cut in two along a line running around the middle of the tread. The equator itself was the circle where this plane intersected “ground” level in the ring—i.e., the midline of the central valley floor. It followed that a person walking along the equator—or parallel to it at any level from the rim to the hub—would be moving east or west. Once more the familiar convention applied: when facing north, east was to the right and west was to the left. Which way the colony happened to be rotating had nothing to do with it.

Zamork lay off-center against the colony’s south wall, on the eastern side of Novyi Kazan. The front, which consisted of administrative offices and guard quarters, faced the roadway and monorail tracks, with the road running above the monorail at that part of the ring and entering Zamork on a higher level. The rear of the administrative section opened onto the main thoroughfare known as Gorky Street, which closed on itself to form a square dividing the inner Core complex from the surrounding blocks that formed the rest of the facility. The Core, which was also on two levels, contained the kitchens, laundry, stores, a library, and workshops for such activities as machining, tailoring, and shoemaking. Outside the Core were six prisoner blocks, two on each of Gorky Street’s remaining three sides. A walled exercise compound open to the “sky” lay on the east side, behind A and B Blocks. Blocks C and D were segregated for women prisoners, who wore light blue tunics instead of gray and had their own, fenced-off portion of the east compound. Segregation was not total, and the male and female inmates sometimes found themselves working alongside each other in the Core and on some of the outside labor details. This made communication between them routine, and for a moderate outlay in ingenuity afforded ample opportunities for amorous diversions. None of the women whom McCain got a chance to exchange a few words with knew of an American fitting Paula’s description, however.

As Luchenko had said on McCain’s first day, a high emphasis was placed on incentives. Prisoners could earn “points” for above-quota job performance, and there was a store at which points could be converted into additional comforts such as tobacco, candy, games, and materials for hobbies. Accrued points could also be traded for bonus time off work. So, when a prisoner spent his savings on the basics for a new pastime, he then found that he needed to behave himself for the extra time that he now needed to enjoy it. Prisoners could even debit and credit points among themselves by voucher, using individual accounts maintained in the administrative computer system and known collectively as “the Exchange.” This could be useful for things like buying illicitly distilled vodka—for which a thriving underground market existed, acquiring goods to barter on the colony’s black market when on outside work details, and settling gambling debts. None of it fitted with what McCain knew of the way the Russians ran their prisons. Why, in fact, would the Russians bring prisoners this far at all? He found it difficult to believe that it was just to provide cheap labor for the mundane work. There had to be more to it.

As McCain and Scanlon entered B Block from Gorky Street, Oskar Smovak and Leo Vorghas, who were also from B-3 billet, caught up with them. “Two points, I’ll lay you two points!” Oskar Smovak exclaimed to Vorghas as they joined the line inside the mess area and began shuffling forward with their metal messtins. At the table in front, a kitchen orderly in a smock that looked greasier than the machine-shop coveralls was ladling stew out of a hatch in a rubber-tired, stainless-steel trolley, covered in flaps and lids, that looked like a scaled-down armored car. “No trotter ever timed a mile in under a minute fifty. Three points!” Smovak was Czechoslovakian, a stocky, solidly built cannonball of a man, with black hair, a ruddy face, and dark eyes looking out over a Fidel Castro beard. He had a voice that was loud and cutting, but most of the time it was because he was being jovial rather than pugnacious, McCain had learned. He claimed to have been arrested because of a relative of his who was caught photographing missiles being loaded into a Russian submarine at Murmansk.

Leo Vorghas was a Lithuanian, in his early forties, perhaps, with an open, high-browed face, thin, sandy hair, light-colored rounded eyes, and a pinkish complexion. The breast pocket of his jacket always bulged with spectacle case, ruler, and an assortment of more pens than anyone could ever know what to do with. His claim to notoriety was that as a government statistician he had made extra money on the side by selling details of the Soviet economic disasters to Western journalists: they’d paid better money than Western intelligence agencies had offered.

“One forty-eight point something.” Vorghas insisted. “I remember reading it. No, wait a minute, the Ukrainian over in F-ten—he showed it to me in a book. You ask him. He’ll tell you.”

“Ah!” Smovak roared. “That was a
pacer
, not a trotter. No trotter has ever beaten one fifty. Check it out, Leo. You lose.”

“Bah. Well, it’s the same thing.”

“It most certainly is
not
. Trotters move the diagonally opposite legs together. Pacers move the ones on the same side.”

“But the carriages are the same, aren’t they? I say that makes it the same thing. Nobody wins.”

“Oh, nonsense.”

They each collected two ladles of a tolerable concoction containing potatoes, cabbage, and a few scraps of mutton, a plate with two pieces of dark bread smeared with margarine, a slice of sausage, an apple, and a mug of black tea, and carried them over to one of the tables.

“What do you say, Mr. American?” Smovak asked, giving McCain an unusually keen look. “Know anything about racing?”

“Not really. . . . It’s not my scene,” McCain answered.

“That’s surprising,” Smovak said. “I thought it was popular there. Russia and America have had a common interest in trotting since long before the Revolution.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yes. They’re both large countries, you see—with bad roads that couldn’t take heavy stagecoaches, before there were any trains. So they both bred horses for pulling light carriages over long distances. You mean you didn’t know?” McCain shrugged and carried on eating. “Does the name Sam Caton mean anything?” Smovak asked him.

“Never heard of it,” McCain said.

“Oh, why don’t you come straight out with it, Oskar? Tell him you’re wondering if he’s really an American at all,” Vorghas said irritably.

“Well, I’ve never heard of the fella either,” Scanlon threw in. “Oskar, will ye lay off giving Lew a hard time. The man’s only after hanging up his hat, for heaven’s sake. What kind of Czechoslovakian welcome do you call that?”

“Kevin is right,” Vorghas agreed. “This place breeds mistrust. Prudence is all very well, but it can go too far.”

“And how will you ever become a priv if you don’t trust people?” Scanlon asked. Vorghas laughed.

McCain had heard the expression before. It was a saying of Luchenko’s and seemed to be a joke of some kind among the inmates. “What’s a priv?” he asked, looking at the others.

“Hasn’t anyone told you about them yet?” Vorghas asked. McCain shook his head.

“Privileged-category prisoners,” Smovak said. “You’re only regular category, see.”

“They live up on surface level,” Vorghas said.

Clearly that hadn’t conveyed much to McCain, either. Scanlon explained, “There’s an upper level to Zamork, out on the surface, above the part that we’re in down here. They live in huts with grass around them, and trees—not packed into smelly billets as is good for the likes of us. There’s less work for them to do, of course, and more frills—just like in the real world.
And,”
he added with a wink, “the women and the men are mixed together. Now, there’s a carrot for you if ever there was one. Mungabo, the poor fella, drives himself wild thinking about it.”

“They’ve even got a beach up there,” Vorghas said.

“A beach!” Smovak repeated, as if daring McCain to challenge it. McCain stared at them in astonishment.

“You see, there’s a high-level reservoir next to this place, between Zamork and the town,” Vorghas said. “It feeds the water system that drains down through the recreation area between Novyi Kazan and the ag zone. Well, the privs have got a beach on it up there.”

“What kind of people are these privs?” McCain asked, growing more curious.

“The professional class of the classless society,” Smovak told him.

Vorghas nodded. “Scientists, teachers, and such—dissidents that the Party wants to keep out of the way for a while, but without upsetting them too much. They’re worried about the risk of bad publicity later.”

“Frightened of changes in the winds that swirl through the Kremlin’s blustery halls,” Scanlon recited lyrically.

McCain smiled faintly as he chewed his bread. It was heavy and grainy in texture. “And people from down here can get promoted?” he said.

“It happens,” Scanlon replied. “But ’tis a rare thing when it does. Many a Luchenko lives in hope, but few are chosen.”

McCain nodded distantly. So the foremen and the block supervisors had their incentives, too. It fitted with the general scheme of things, but that still didn’t shed any light on the reasons why. “So what’s it all for?” he asked the others. “Why is this place here, and why is it the way it is?” There was a quick exchange of glances among the others, and a pause of a second or two. McCain obviously wasn’t the first to have wondered about such questions.

“Progressive psychology,” Vorghas declared. “I think it’s an experiment that the KGB psychologists dreamed up—a new approach to behavior modification.” He leaned forward and let his voice fall a fraction. “Look around. You haven’t got any of your ordinary criminals and riffraff here. These are all potentially useful people. Think of the advantages if you can find out how to rehabilitate people like these and save their skills for the state.” He gestured vaguely around and overhead with the spoon he was holding. “It’s the isolation. Everything is supposed to take on a new perspective from this oasis of humanity out in space—the vastness of the universe and the puniness of Man, and that kind of thing. We’re supposed to come to see that we’re all alike underneath and have to work together. . . .” He shrugged and resumed eating. “That’s what I think, anyway.” McCain listened but wasn’t convinced. That might have explained the privs with their huts and beach upstairs, but what about the rest? That was a fat lot of vastness of the universe to be seen from a bottom bunk in the lower level of B-3.