Prisoners of Tomorrow (36 page)

Rashazzi turned on the light again and Haber sat down weakly on a nearby box. McCain glared up as the three newcomers switched off their flashlights and clambered down into the Crypt. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he growled.

One of the two men with Sargent was swarthy-faced, with a short beard and dark eyes that were constantly darting suspiciously this way and that. He looked Indian. McCain knew his face from around the compound but had never talked to him. The other, McCain hadn’t seen before. Heavily built, with reddish curls fringing an immense brow, and a face that somehow managed to combine decisive, sharply lined features with a rounded, babyish shape, he was wearing a priv-category green tunic. He moved a pace forward into the light and took in the surroundings with a cool, dispassionate stare that could have signified ownership.

“We thought it was time to introduce ourselves personally,” Sargent said. He gestured toward the big man first. “Eban Istamel, who is Turkish. . . . And this is Jangit Chakattar, originally from Delhi.” He looked pleasantly at McCain. “We were delighted to hear that the information from the escape committee turned out to be so useful. But we also heard from Koh that you had doubts if the committee exists at all. I can assure you that it does.” He gestured toward himself and at his two companions once again. “You see, it was
our
present. We run the escape committee.”

McCain looked from one to another for what seemed a long time, in silence, but from the expression on his face his mind was working furiously. Finally he asked Sargent, “Which one is in charge?”

“Eban.” Sargent indicated the big Turk. “He is the chairman.”

“Very pleased to meet you,” McCain said. The Turk extended a perfunctory hand. . . . And McCain hit him squarely on the jaw.

The big Turk sat on a box with his back propped against one of the roof supports, dabbing a folded handkerchief at the swelling on one side of his mouth. McCain, Haber, and Sargent were also sitting in a loose circle, while Rashazzi leaned against the bench and Chakattar stood looking on from behind. “It’s all right,” Istamel had mumbled to his two astonished companions when McCain punched him. “He had the right. We used them.”

For what McCain had realized in the moments following the appearance of Sargent and his two friends was that he and his group in B-3 had been set up. The fact that they had come through without mishap was beside the point. They had been the ones at risk. Supposedly this had been necessary because the committee people occupied an upper-level billet, and penetration belowdecks required access from the lower level. But clearly the new arrivals had not come via the route that McCain’s group had been using, through the floor of B-3. That meant they had another way of getting into the belowdecks region. Moreover, Istamel’s presence showed that it connected with the privs’ level up on the surface, somehow. Very likely they’d had such an alternative all along, but had played safe by getting the B-3 group to try out the method first. McCain had guessed their appearance now represented a bid to take over the operation, and the disdainful manner that the Turk had exhibited did nothing to dispel the suspicion. But McCain’s action, in accordance with the rough-and-ready unspoken code by which such things were asserted, had symbolically redressed the imbalance of status which the advantage the escape committee had gained for itself implied. The meeting could now proceed as a discussion between equals.

“You people are really serious?” McCain sounded mildly incredulous. “This escape committee business. You think there’s a hope of getting away from a place like this?”

“Probably slim,” Sargent admitted. “But studying the possibilities does help keep the mind busy, all the same. It wouldn’t do to allow oneself to vegetate, would it?”

“What kinds of possibilities have you identified?” Rashazzi asked curiously.

“Really you can’t expect us to divulge details of such things freely,” Chakattar protested from where he was standing. “Much effort was involved—all kinds of confidential things. We don’t know anything about you three.”

“True,” Haber sighed. “Nor do we know you.”

The eternal Zamork impasse. The position was ridiculous. McCain saw from his expression that the Turk was thinking the same thing. Somebody was going to have to make a first move. “Look,” he said, addressing the company in general. “We all know the problem. But we’ve all put a lot into finding a place like this, specifically to get away from the environment upstairs. You got the information to make it possible; we did the work. Now, if we’re not going to pool what we know, what’s the point of all this?”

Istamel glanced at his handkerchief and put it back in his pocket. “The problem isn’t so much of knowing who’s trustworthy, but the risk that if someone were caught, the more he knew, the more would be compromised,” he said. “So we are reluctant to give away anything without a good reason. I’m sure the same applies to you, also.”

“How are we supposed to help each other achieve our respective goals if we don’t share information?” Rashazzi asked.

There was a short silence. “Very well,” Chakattar said at last. “You talk about goals. Ours is very simple: to find ways of escaping. What is your goal?” Rashazzi and Haber looked at McCain.

It was McCain who had proposed that somebody had to start trusting somebody, and he accepted that the onus of making the first concession was his. Besides, he could see nothing to lose from appearing to be forthright by revealing to the present company what the Russians would already have concluded for themselves, anyway. “All right, I’ll be straight,” he said. “I was sent here on a mission by a branch of Western intelligence. That mission involves establishing the nature of equipment believed to exist in locations around
Valentina Tereshkova.
I intend if I can to carry out that mission, and to find a way of communicating the findings back to Earth. In other words, my immediate goal is to conduct a reconnaissance of the entire colony and a detailed examination of certain parts of it. One piece of information that might help a lot would be knowing how you got in here.” He looked from the Turk to the Englishman to the Indian and spread his hands. “We have a common need here. You’re looking for ways to get out—a detailed knowledge of the place is essential for any specific plan. So, for the time being at least, our goals are identical. When the time comes to revise that, then hopefully we’ll all have gotten to know each other better.”

Istamel looked at Sargent and Chakattar, in a way that said it was good enough for him. Sargent gave a shrug and nodded. Chakattar, however, was still unhappy. “You want us to give you concrete information,” he pointed out. “But all you are offering in return is a promise of good intentions. That doesn’t seem like a good trade to me. What do you have that would be of tangible benefit to us right now?”

Rashazzi caught McCain’s eye for an instant, and indicated the drum at the rear with a slight questioning motion of his head. He was asking if they should mention the vortex experiment that McCain had just witnessed. McCain returned a barely perceptible shake of his head. They needed to know more about what it meant themselves, first. Instead, he looked back at Istamel. “It’s clear that your way in involves access to the surface level.”

“Maybe so.” Istamel shrugged. The expression on his babyishly round yet shrewd face remained neutral.

“But any serious plans about escaping would require freer movement around
Tereshkova.
You’d need ways of getting out of Zamork entirely. Do you have ways of accomplishing that?”

“There are the outside work details.”

“Yes, but they’re guarded,” McCain said.

“Guards can be bribed.”

“Sure,” McCain agreed. In fact, some of the things he’d been asking people like Gonares in B-3 to do involved just such arrangements. “But what I’m talking about is freedom of movement anywhere around the colony, without any hassle from guards or limits on time,” he said. “Interested?”

Istamel looked very interested. “You can provide this?” he said, sitting forward.

“If we can find a way to get out through the perimeter of Zamork itself,” McCain said. “And it sounds as if what you’ve done could already represent half the job. You see, this is the kind of way I’m saying we can work together.”

Sargent held out an arm and pulled back his jacket sleeve to display his wrist bracelet. “But even if you did get out of Zamork, you’ve still got a problem with these,” he said. “You’d trigger an alarm the first time you came within range of an interrogating sensor. And they’re all over the place.”

“Then, let us show you something we’ve discovered,” McCain said. “Razz?” He got up and walked over to the bench, while Rashazzi went to fetch a flat box from one of the racks before joining him. The others came over and gathered round. McCain took off his jacket and rested his forearm on the bench with the electronic unit of his own bracelet facing upward. As with all of them, it consisted of a square metal frame with rounded corners to which the bracelet attached and, fitted in the frame’s recess, a plain black rectangular insert that contained the electronics. Rashazzi took a scalpel and cut along one side of the joint between the edge of the insert and the frame, at the same time swabbing a solvent fluid into the crack. Then he began working along the second edge.

“My unit has been tampered with,” McCain said. “The insert is only held by a soluble adhesive that Razz cooked up. You see, whoever designed these devices was careless. The insert in the center contains the ID electronics, but the power cell and the detector for a break in the wristband are housed in the frame. So, the two can be separated without triggering an alarm. What’s more, the chip was only secured by cement around the edges, which Albrecht found a way of breaking.” As McCain said this, Rashazzi tested the bond by prying an edge of the wafer with the blade, and finding it sufficiently softened, lifted it clear for Haber to remove with a pair of tweezers.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Sargent exclaimed.

McCain held out his arm to show the bracelet with its empty frame. “One way you could use this is to switch ID’s,” he said. “Suppose you”—he looked at Sargent—“needed to go to Turgenev or somewhere, but I had a work assignment there. We could switch the inserts. Much more flexibility.”

Haber pointed at the insert, which he had placed on a glass plate. “But even better, the inserts in the badge ID’s that outside civilians wear are identical. If we could get hold of a general-clearance badge somehow, we could substitute its insert for the one in your bracelet, and you’d be able to go anywhere you wanted.”

McCain looked at Chakattar. “Is that tangible enough?”

“Would it work, though?” Sargent asked doubtfully. “Wouldn’t the ID coding in the security computers be changed as soon as the badge was missed?”

Rashazzi shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. You only get that degree of security here, inside Zamork. Outside, individuals aren’t tracked place to place. A general-clearance insert is just like a key that will get you in anywhere. That’s all it does. They all transmit the same code.”

Istamel and his two colleagues exchanged glances. “And you think you might be able to obtain such a device?” he said.

Haber smiled, and gestured at the workshop around them. “We do appear to have something of a flair for, shall we say, larcenous inventiveness.”

“Very good. I am satisfied,” Istamel pronounced.

McCain turned from the bench to face him directly. The Turk stared him in the eye and nodded. “You have a deal, Mr. Earnshaw. We have too much in common to waste our energies on rivalry. We work cooperatively, yes? . . .” He bunched a fist and brought it up close to the side of McCain’s chin. McCain looked back at him unblinkingly. Istamel thumped the side of his jaw, not hard enough to hurt, but solidly enough to be more than playful. “As partners, eh?” A flicker of a grin crossed his face. McCain grinned back at him. They shook hands.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Two guards escorted Paula from the interview room in the Surface Level Administration Building to the security post at the door opening out into the general area where the huts were situated. She made her own way back to Hut 19 from there. The climate-control engineers had been experimenting again that day and had created strange conditions around Novyi Kazan, in which evaporation from the reservoir and other nearby bodies of water formed a mist below the roof that reduced the ribbon-suns to indistinct, watery blurs. A month previously they had managed to produce a miniature cyclone that wrapped itself around the town’s central tower and sucked all its windows out. Half of them still hadn’t been replaced.

She walked past the Recreation Building, where the gymnasium and hobby rooms were located, and turned right onto the path running between Huts 10 and 17. Several of the green-clad figures who were out nodded or called a greeting as she passed. The session with Protbornov and Major Uskayev had followed the course that had long ago become usual. Why couldn’t she communicate with her government? she had demanded to know yet again—they must be pressing for information. She could, the Russians replied, if she would only agree to be more cooperative. How did she like her new work? It was fine. She did realize, of course, that they could always send her back to the lower levels? That was up to them. Unnerving as she found the thought inwardly, she was keeping to the tactic that Olga had urged. And although as yet she hadn’t won her battle, the contest was beginning to feel more equal.

She shared Hut 19 with three Russian women. Elena came from Minsk and was a sociologist, a field of study traditionally frowned upon by the authorities, since from the time of the state’s inception “hard” science and engineering had been viewed as more relevant to its industrialization goals. Elena had been a little too zealous in compiling and supplying to foreign publishers statistics on health and wealth in the people’s utopia that the people’s leaders had found embarrassing, and found herself consigned to Zamork as the only place sufficiently safe and far away to keep her out of mischief. Svetlana was a deactivated agent of the KGB. After undergoing years of tutoring and training, she had been infiltrated into Austria posing as a German immigrant, and had been granted Austrian naturalization. But then she had gone on to develop a taste for Western living and an open disdain for Marxist orthodoxy that had made her superiors nervous, and Zamork became her destination after recall to Moscow. Lastly, Agniya was a former Moscow art and literature critic. She had persisted in criticizing the censors instead of the artists, and dismissed the officially promoted idols as mediocrities. After Paula’s experiences on the lower level, their company and intellectual stimulation was like a release from the grave.