Prisoners of Tomorrow (2 page)

“Well, of course I do,” I replied, surprised. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because of everything that’s going on there?”

“How do you mean? What’s going on?” I should explain that I haven’t owned a TV for longer than I can remember, and seldom open a newspaper—and then usually just to do the “Crossaire” cryptic crossword in the
Irish Times
. I regularly have to call the phone operator to check what day it is, and I’ve gone a week past the summertime clock adjustment without being aware of it.

“There’s a civil war going on,” she told me, astounded. “Tanks in the streets, people getting shot.”

“And the planes are still flying?”

“Well, yes. . . . I suppose so.”

I was thrilled. It was happening—ordinary people actually standing up to one of the most brutal regimes of modern times. “Well, if they can face tanks, the least I can do is be there,” I said. “Sure, I still want to go.”

But so swift were the events that by the time I got there it was all over. When I checked in for the flight, the board behind the desk said DUBLIN-LENINGRAD-MOSCOW. By the time I returned, the flight announcement read MOSCOW-ST. PETERSBURG-DUBLIN. There were already pictures of the former Czar in windows and adorning souvenirs and gifts. There’s something reassuring in looking at the march of history and noting how consistently it seems that the oppressors end up being buried by their intended victims. Nero’s Rome has crumbled, but Christianity flourishes worldwide. The Nazis are gone, but the Jewish people prosper. And now Stalinism and the horrors of the gulag are no more, and Russia is again becoming a part of European culture.

So what’s the point of reissuing a book set in circumstances that will never, now, come to pass? Well, for one thing, obviously, the story is still the same, and as the whole realm of science-fiction, fantasy, myth, and legend attests, the setting doesn’t have to be factual or even plausible for a story to do its job and be enjoyable. But beyond that, this is a story involving political realities that remain constant beneath the superficial ebbs and flows of the particular power rivalries that happen to constitute the present, and which it pays to remain mindful of precisely because they are no longer reiterated in every other morning’s headlines.

The prime reason for forming government has always been to protect individuals from the violence they inflict on each other when each is left to face the prospect of survival as a law unto himself. Today’s democratic nation state—which appears, from the struggles witnessed in the twentieth century to be the most successful form of social organization to have emerged so far—seeks to achieve this through the establishment of one system of law before which all are judged equally, to which each individual forfeits the right to make and execute his own law privately. However, no such arbitration applies to affairs between governments, and the state of war that was once the lot of tribal groups everywhere reemerges periodically as collisions between nations. The authority of God is no longer compelling as a restraining influence—and was never all that notably effective, anyway—and those of us raised in the tradition of individualism and freedom are suspicious of moves toward an international order with all its socialist underpinnings and ramifications.

What, then, will contain passions and excesses on the global scale? I have no glib formula to offer. Some place their faith in reason (is there not a certain attendant irony in such a phrase?), others in the spread of better understanding as modern communications dissolve barriers of prejudice and misunderstanding, while some have hope in the ability of technology and industry to eradicate the differences in wealth that they believe are the causes of strife. But the question needs to be asked, especially in these comparatively tranquil times, for it can never be repeated too often that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

As half a century of ferocity has shown, ideologies in conflict will stop at nothing. In
Endgame Enigma
, it is Lew McCain’s grasp of human nature and the constancies of political reality that enable him to see through deceptions that others would have followed them to disaster. What deceptions? Well . . . that would be giving away too much. But as a gentle hint let’s just say for now that in keeping with any spy thriller that involves political intrigue and some out-at-the-edge technological ingenuity, nothing is quite what it seems.

James P. Hogan
Bray, County Wicklow
Ireland
April 1997

PROLOGUE

The Mig-55E fighter-bomber, code-named “Grouse” in Western military parlance, was rugged, easy to maintain, and equipped for a variety of ground-attack roles, making it popular for counterinsurgency operations among rulers of the Third World’s teetering Marxist regimes. Western military intelligence was interested in it, too, because it carried the first production version of the Soviet OC-27/K target-designating and -tracking computer, which the countermeasures experts were anxious to learn more about.

Like most Soviet aircraft, ships, and ground units, the MIG carried a black box that could compute its position accurate to a few feet anywhere on the Earth’s surface with respect to an electronic navigation grid laid down by Soviet satellites. What Pilot Officer Abel Mungabo didn’t know when he took off on a training flight from Ziganda, one of the two Madagascar states into which the former Malagasy Republic had fragmented, was that aboard the Australian destroyer cruising fifty miles offshore was a group of professional mischiefmakers with some highly classified equipment, which in conjunction with transmissions from the USAF high-altitude bomber that just happened to be passing over at the time, was causing Mungabo’s black box to come up with wrong numbers. He turned back after becoming hopelessly lost over the ocean, but missed the tip of Madagascar completely and ended up off the coast of the South African mainland. There he ran out of fuel and bailed out.

What happened after that was never cleared up officially. Mungabo swore upon his return that he saw the plane go down in the sea. The South Africans said he must have been mistaken: the plane crashed on the shore and exploded. They even produced pieces of twisted wreckage to prove it. But the Soviet engineers who arrived in Ziganda to examine the remains were suspicious. The damage, they said, was more consistent with demolition by explosives than with a crash. And it seemed strange that not one piece of the more sensitive electronics devices aboard the aircraft had been recovered. The South Africans shrugged and said that was the way it was, and the ensuing diplomatic accusations and denials continued for a while longer.

But by that time, specialists in several Western military laboratories were already acquiring some interesting new toys to occupy them. The OC-27/K target-designating and -tracking computer found its way to the US Air Force Systems Command’s Cambridge Research Labs at Hanscom Field, near Bedford, Massachusetts.

CHAPTER ONE

Dr. Paula Bryce brushed a curl of blond hair from her forehead and studied the waveforms on one of the display screens surrounding her desk. She tapped a code into a touchpad, noted the changes in one of the pulse patterns and the numbers that appeared alongside it, and commanded a reconfiguration of the circuit diagram showing on another screen. “That’s better,” she said. “D-three has to be the synch. E-six is coupled capacitively to the second-stage gate.”

On a bench a few feet away, the Russian computer had been stripped down into an assortment of frames and subassemblies that were now lying spread out amid tangles of interconnecting wires and test leads. Ed Sutton, another Air Force communications scientist, peered through a microscope at a detail of one of the boards and repositioned a miniature probe clipped to it. “That’s it again with the input on both,” he said. “Anything now?”

Paula looked at the waveforms again. “Aha!”

“Bingo?”

“It’s triggering. . . . Threshold’s about point two of a volt.”

“So it is differential?”

“Come and look.”

“But not for noise rejection?”

“Uh-uh. That wouldn’t figure.”

Sutton straightened up from the microscope and sat down on the stool behind him. He pivoted himself to look across in Paula’s direction. “It’s starting to look the way you guessed,” he said. “Initialization for a smart missile with its own inertial reference, updating from the aircraft’s grid-fix.”

Paula nodded. “Air-to-ground fire-and-forget.”

“That was a pretty good hunch you had.”

“Not really. It’s a modification of something I’ve seen before. This version would permit tighter evasive maneuvers while attacking.” Paula shifted her gaze to a screen displaying text, and began updating her notes. As she tapped deftly at the pad, glancing intermittently at the display of the reconstructed circuit and the data alongside, she was aware of Sutton staring over the cubicle between them. Almost thirty, she was slimly built—bony almost—beneath her lab coat and jersey, with fair, wavy hair, which although cut to neck-length and battened down with a clip, broke free into unruly wisps wherever it got the chance. Her features were clear, but somewhat sharp with a prominent bone structure, and her nose a shade too large and her chin too jutting to qualify her as glamorous. Nevertheless, men found her candid, light-gray eyes and the pert set of her mouth attractive in a way that derived from her poise and the self-assurance that it radiated, rather than from looks. “Challenging,” was how many of them said they found her. She didn’t find that especially complimentary. If they meant formidable as an object of conquest, it wasn’t exactly flattering, while if it referred to something ego-related in themselves that they saw her as potentially instrumental in resolving, well, that wasn’t her mission in life or reason for existing. The real challenge was to recognize that the challenge was to avoid being placed in either of those categories. It was too subtle to be articulated, for the whole purpose of the game was to divine its rules, but the few who could pass—those were the really interesting ones.

“Good reason to celebrate, maybe,” Sutton ventured after a while.

“Really?” Paula continued entering her notes. Typically, he was waiting for her to put the proposition. Just for once, why couldn’t he simply say straight out what was on his mind?

He skidded off along the tangent. “Cher’s away this week—gone to the Catskills. We’ve got relatives and a vacation lodge up there, you know. Good skiing area in winter. Ever get up that way?”

“No, I never did.” Paula sighed inwardly with exasperation. The stupid thing was that Sutton wasn’t too bad a guy. His being the man had nothing to do with her refusing to help him out, or with any hangup about who was supposed to make a first move to whom. It was simply that the matter seemed important to him, while it wasn’t especially important to her. Therefore the game required him to do something about it. That was what the challenge was all about.

“Did you ever try skiing?” he asked. Before Paula could reply, a call-tone sounded from the flatscreen terminal on the desk. She touched a key to accept, and as she swung the unit toward her, a picture appeared of a pinkish, heavy-jawed face with crinkly yellow hair combed back from its forehead. It was Colonel Raymond, who headed the section. He was framed against a background that included part of a picture hanging in a conference room two floors up from the lab.

“Paula, I’m with some people here in G-eighteen. We’ve, ah, got something we’d like you in on. Can you get up here right away?”

“Sure thing. . . . Oh, will you want the latest on Squid?” “Squid” was the code word for the OC-27/K computer.

“No, it’s nothing to do with that. But how’s it going?”

“We’re progressing.”

“That’s good.” The screen blanked out.

Paula closed the log on the other screen, got up from her chair, and tidied together the papers she had been using. “I’ve updated the log for Charley and Bob when they get back from lunch,” she called back from the door as she left. “And yes, skiing’s okay.”

Sutton shook his head and looked back at the disemboweled Soviet computer. He wasn’t sure why he persisted in making a fool of himself from time to time like this. It made him uncomfortable, and he was always secretly relieved inside when she turned him down or the subject changed. But somehow he felt better for going through the motions of having tried. God alone knew what he’d do if she ever took him up on it.

* * *

The picture showing on the large wallscreen facing one end of the conference table was a prototype habitat designed to test ideas and technologies for living in space. It housed over twelve thousand people, in an immense torus more than a mile in diameter. Six spokes—three thick, major ones alternating with three thinner ones—connected the torus to a central hub structure. Part of the image was shown in a cutaway to reveal miniature cityscapes and residential areas alternating with multilevel agricultural sectors and parks. At intervals around its exterior, the colony carried the Red Star emblem of the Soviet Union. The Soviets had named it
Valentina Tereshkova
—after the first woman to go into space, more than fifty years previously. They claimed that it symbolized the peaceful goals of their space program and would stand as a showpiece to the world of what a Marxist economic system could achieve. Completion of “Mermaid,” as the structure was code-named by the Western intelligence community, was targeted for the following year, to coincide with the centenary celebration of the Russian Revolution.

Gerald Kehrn, from the staff of the assistant secretary of defense for international security, was more concerned about the colony’s suspected hidden function, however. He was an intense, restless man with a bald head and a heavy black mustache, who radiated nervous energy and paced agitatedly below the screen as he spoke. “Then, about a year ago, an East German defector appeared in Austria, who claimed to have worked on construction of
Tereshkova
from 2013 to 2014. He was brought back to the States, and in the course of further interrogations described some of the hardware that he’d seen, and in some cases helped install.”