Prisoners of Tomorrow (22 page)

“So Asia was due to take the twenty-first century anyway?” McCain said.

“Yes, eventually,” Koh replied. “You had Malthus, and thought you were running out of resources; we had Confucius. But people are the only resource that matters, because human ingenuity creates all the rest—and we have thirty percent of the world’s supply. When you think of it that way, the outcome was inevitable sooner or later.”

Scanlon was staring with his head cocked to one side, as if this put a lot of things in a perspective that he hadn’t seen before. “Go on, Koh,” he said. “That’s a thought, now. So it was all inevitable, you’re telling us?”

Koh shrugged. “Eventually. But the West itself speeded up the process.”

“How come?” McCain asked.

“You made the Third World into colonies and held it back for centuries. But in doing that you were compressing a spring. And when the spring was released after the Second World War, nothing could contain the energy and the urgency to make up for lost time. In half a century Asia went through social changes that had taken the West a thousand years. America lost confidence in itself—the very thing we had admired most. You made the same mistake that the British had a hundred years before.”

“Trust the Brits to be at the bottom of it,” Scanlon muttered.

Koh went on, “The power and wealth of their ruling class was tied to industries that were becoming obsolete. Instead of adapting and moving with the times, they tried to entrench themselves around technology that was being superseded. It can’t work. Neither the lion nor the zebra can stop evolving and hope to survive. One would starve; the other would be eaten.” It was true, McCain thought to himself. While the two powers that represented the culmination of the Old World remained deadlocked in their military stalemate, the forerunners of the New were racing ahead with developing the energy-dense, nuclear-based industries that would power the twenty-first century and carry mankind across the Solar System.

“Different dogs have their days,” Scanlon said.

“Quite,” Koh said. “Likewise, human culture as a whole is all the time evolving, but it doesn’t evolve evenly, everywhere at once. It’s like an amoeba, where first one part moves, than another. The center of action shifts from place to place, and so civilizations rise and fall: the East and Middle East long ago, Greece, Rome, and the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean, the power struggles of Europe, and the rise of America. But there was no law of nature which said that once the focus shifted to America, it had to remain there forever. What we’re seeing is simply the next step in the process. The era of Western civilization that sprang from the European Renaissance a thousand years ago is over. . . . Actually, the term is a misnomer. What happened back at that time was not the
rebirth
of anything. It was the
birth
of a completely new culture. Oh, true, a new civilization might pick up a few stones that suit its needs from the rubble of an old one, but that’s not the same thing as rebuilding it. . . .” Koh sat back and smiled through the cloud that was beginning to engulf him. He held out an upturned hand in a gesture that could have meant anything, and an ecstatic light crept into his eyes. “They must free their souls to soar . . .” He paused, looking at the other two for a moment as if they had suddenly materialized there from nowhere. Then he carried on, his voice rising and falling in cadences of lyrical rapture: “. . . unfettered essence of distilled turpentine.”

McCain and Scanlon glanced at each other. They knew they wouldn’t get anything more that was coherent out of Koh for the rest of the evening. And then, which was just as well, the lights blinked to signal that it was time to move into the billets. They each took one of Koh’s arms and helped him to his feet.

“You never struck me as a student of cultural evolution, Kev,” McCain said as they steered Koh toward the B-3 door.

“Well, aren’t the Irish students of life itself, and isn’t that everything?” Scanlon replied. He looked across at McCain for a moment. “Anyhow, it’s the evolution of what’s going on in this place that ye should be thinkin’ more about, yourself.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Whatever it is you have in mind to do, you’ve got it off to a fine beginning. But, Mr. Earnshaw, journalist, as the bishop said to the parlor maid, ‘Where do we go next from here?’”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

From its position two hundred thousand miles away from Earth and some distance above Earth’s equatorial plane,
Valentina Tereshkova
had permanent lines for its communications lasers to at least two of the Soviet synchronous satellites, which redistributed message traffic among surface locations and other satellites, depending on the signals’ final destinations. The West’s military establishment also maintained a system of “Auriga” surveillance satellites, which between them were able to keep a constant watch on both the Soviet satellites and
Tereshkova
. The Aurigas were equipped with telescopes designed for operation in the infrared range, which could pick up the stray reflections from both ends of the Soviet communications beams; thus they were able to eavesdrop on the message-flow to and from
Tereshkova
as it took place. From space, the intercepted stream of Soviet communications code was routed down through a complicated chain of links and relays, eventually becoming grist for the computer batteries of the National Security Agency’s code-cracking mill at Fort Meade, Maryland.

For as long as
Tereshkova
had been operational, a portion of its signal traffic had used virtually impregnable top-security coding algorithms—which had done little to alleviate the West’s suspicions over what was supposed to be an innocuous social experiment in space-living. By summer of 2017, however, the hungry NSA cryptoanalysts in the section that handled “Teepee,” as the intercept traffic to and from
Tereshkova
was code-named, had received a windfall of a different kind.

The standard procedure followed by both sides for sending encrypted messages over communications links was to transmit the code as a stream of five-digit number groups. That way, anyone intercepting the transmission with the intention of decoding its content would receive none of the clues that a structure reflecting the varying word-lengths would have supplied. To complicate the task further, the transmitting computers then obscured where the different messages in a stream began and ended, by filling the gaps between them with random five-digit number groups so that the channel simply transmitted continuously twenty-four hours a day. A message buried in the stream carried a special number sequence that the computers at the receiving end were programmed to watch for.

For some time the pattern-searching routines that the NSA computers subjected incoming material to as a first pass had been detecting irregularities in the filler groups used to pack the gaps in Teepee transmissions from
Tereshkova
to Earth: the random numbers weren’t as random as they should have been. Further analysis revealed a concealed coding system. It suggested that the West had unwittingly tapped into illicit traffic between personnel at two of the Soviet Union’s own establishments—an intriguing notion. The “Blueprint” code, as this traffic buried inside Earthbound Teepee was designated, turned out to be comparatively unsophisticated, and clearly not a creation of professional Soviet cryptographers; furthermore, its sender was too chatty, providing the Fort Meade veterans with sufficient material to break it fairly quickly. In late June the names “Earnshaw” and “Shelmer” appeared in the plaintext translation of one of these signals, which, from the lists that the NSA kept of who was likely to be interested in what, caused copies to be routed, via Litherland at CIA, Langley, to Bernard Foleda.

Three weeks previously, the CIA had arranged for a message to be beamed into the Soviet communications net in accordance with the protocols that Dyashkin had passed to Dr. Bowers in Japan, indicating interest and a willingness to “talk” further. Dyashkin had acknowledged, and in the ensuing unusual dialogue—phrased very obliquely to keep the Soviet counterpart of NSA off the scent of who was talking to whom—the Americans had requested Dyashkin, implicitly as a test of good faith, to try to find out if the two visitors who had disappeared on
Tereshkova
at the beginning of May were still being held there. A week later, a response from Dyashkin had stated that they were.

What was interesting about the Blueprint intercept that contained the references to Earnshaw and Shelmer was that it occurred a day before Dyashkin’s reply. In other words, a message from the mysterious correspondent up in
Tereshkova
was known to have contained the answer a day before Dyashkin sent it to the CIA. Here, then, was evidence that Dyashkin was the hitherto-unknown recipient at the Earth end of the Blueprint line; also, it corroborated that his information was in fact coming from where he said it was coming from.

Bernard Foleda looked at the report that Barbara had brought in and studied the figures on the appended sheet. It was an estimate of the amount of political indoctrination included in the Soviet school curriculum for various grades. “They always go for the children,” he murmured as he read.

“Who do?” Barbara asked.

“Fanatics, extremists, every kind of nut with a cause. The way to their utopia is by getting at the minds of the children, so they try to control the schools. Instead of getting educated, the kids end up as political putty. Maybe the Chinese are right: governments should stay out of the whole business.”

“Is that what they’re saying?”

“It was something that Myra and I talked about a while back.” Foleda sat back and tossed the report down on his desk. “Did I ever tell you?—that might have had something to do with how I got into this kind of work.”

Barbara sat down on one of the chairs at the meeting table and looked at him curiously. “I don’t think so.”

Foleda stared at the window. “There was something that happened when I was a teenager—not really so sensational, but it’s always stuck in my mind, so I suppose it must have made some kind of impression. Two people came to have dinner with us one night—a Jewish couple that my parents had been friends with for a long time. They talked about the past year that they’d spent traveling around overseas. All their lives they’d been busy with their own affairs, until one day they looked at each other and realized they hadn’t seen anything of the world, and if they didn’t do something about it soon, they never would.”

“Too wrapped up with family and business, you mean?” Barbara said.

“Yes, exactly. Anyhow, I can remember Ben—that was his name—saying to my father, ‘You’ve known us for a long time, Chuck. I’ve never had any time for politics. But, do you know, after what we saw in other places, I
never
want to set foot outside this country again. I don’t want to see our grandchildren growing up the way we saw others made to. And I’ll tell you something else: I would give thousands of dollars, no,
tens
of thousands, to any political party—Republicans, Democrats, I don’t care; they’re all the same to me—just so long as they’re committed to defending this country.’”

“That was how you got into intelligence?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t exactly say that. But I think it played a part. I’d been looking for a way to express what I felt about the world, and that just about summed it up.”

Barbara was used to Foleda’s inclination to ramble off like this for no obvious reason. It usually happened when he was preoccupied with something that he hadn’t said much about. Some people claimed that they did their hardest thinking while asleep. She had come to see this as his way of distracting his consciousness while a deeper part of his mind tussled with something else. “Do you think everyone in this business needs an ideology like that?” she asked.

Foleda shook his head. “I don’t know of any rule that says they have to. Take Lew McCain for instance. Totally pragmatic. He’s not interested in keeping the world free for democracy. He just likes challenges with some risk thrown in, and believes in being free to be himself. In fact, the way he operates, an ideology would probably be more of a hindrance. Maybe that’s why he’s a good field man and I fit in better behind a desk. And yet in another way . . .” Foleda looked away from the window. “How do you feel about this whole Dyashkin business?” he asked Barbara suddenly.

She had worked with him long enough not to have to ask pointless questions. “What bothers you about it?”

Foleda stared down at the papers strewn across his desk. “It’s coming together too easily. . . . Look at it. First, two of our people get stuck up on Mermaid. A month later this professor shows up in Japan with a story that he wants to defect, and he just happens to run the primary groundstation that Mermaid talks to. And while all that’s going on, the hackers at Meade find a code that turns out to be easier to break than it ought to be, and they discover that somebody up there has their own private line down to him.” He tilted his chin questioningly.

“Even if NSA hasn’t found it yet, he has to have some way of talking back,” Barbara said.

“Right. What does that make you think?”

Barbara shrugged. “Maybe we can get the use of his line to make contact with our two people up there somehow.”

“Why would you need to do that?”

“Because the Soviets are coming up with any excuse not to let us talk to them officially . . .” Barbara’s eyes narrowed as she began to see what Foleda was driving at.

“Nine out of ten. And what else does it make you think?”

She frowned for a few seconds, then said, “Is that what somebody somewhere wants me to think?”

Foleda nodded. “Ten out of ten.” He got up and moved over to the window, where he stood staring out silently for a while. “Anything that involves Mermaid is serious. There are questions we need answers to before we can let this go farther. Who is this line to Dyashkin from? What was it set up for? Why does he want to defect? And most important, is he genuine? We can’t go walking blind into something like this.”

Barbara waited. She understood the situation, but at the same time could see no immediate pointer to a way of getting the answers that were needed. It would be another exercise in the long, uphill grind that was ninety percent of intelligence work: sifting through uninteresting-looking scraps, looking for patterns and connections, and hoping something useful might emerge. Where, then, would they begin accumulating more background information on somebody like Dyashkin?—personal things, glimpses of his character and loyalties, things that might help fill in the blanks. Barbara looked over the desk for possible clues to the way that Foleda’s mind had been working. One of the reference screens was displaying a summary of notes he had extracted from various databank records. At the top was the heading,
Dorkas, Anita Leonidovich. Codename “Cellist.”