Pascale's Wager: Homelands of Heaven

by Anthony Bartlett

  “I am your god,” he said. “Your existence depends entirely on me. If you displease me you will die. You will die anyway, but it is in my power to delay the onset of that final moment considerably.” He lingered over the syllables of the last word as he gazed at the creatures in his power.

  “You will continue to lie here on the floor until I tell you to get up. In the meantime you can tell me about yourselves so we get acquainted.” He looked down at Miller. “You first. Tell me your name and the crime for which you were sentenced to my camp.”

  The prisoners proceeded to blurt out their names and the pathetic details of their offenses. Miller had trashed his TEP in a fit of unexplained anger. Finn had chronically missed transports and training. When he came to Poll the charge of blasphemy made the man stop and regard the prisoner with greater interest.

  “Well, now you’ve met your god in all truth, and there’s nothing more to say, is there?” His lips curled, but without humor. “Tell me, what led you to your...unorthodox views?”

  Poll lay on the bone-numbing concrete, looking into the expressionless eyes. He felt a spasm of fear for this man quite unlike anything he had experienced before. He knew he must be on his guard, but he also knew that here was someone of evident power. If he were to survive, let alone escape, he would have to serve this person in some way. For perhaps the first time in his life Poll altered his tone and allowed his fear to show.

  “I...I, I like math. I was asking about equations, about the storm system. I like to figure things out, which upset my professors, and the Worship Leader.”

  “You like to figure things out, eh? Well, now you know. What it all comes down to.”

  Poll nodded dumbly. The man was contemptuous but continued to observe him, as if weighing something in his own mind. Finally he asked.

  “Can you do computers? Make them work?”

  “Yes, I think so. I am good at logic.”

  The man’s eyes seemed to be boring through Poll. “There is no logic,” he said, slowly. Then, more carelessly, “Try not to be too clever and you may have a chance.”

  He turned away from the trio of bodies.

  “Stand up, all of you. Gord here will supply you coats, gloves and boots. You are assigned to building 9. The squad leader there will give you your duties. That is all.”

  He swiveled neatly and disappeared into the interior of the hut. As they struggled to their feet and took in their surroundings they saw a cavernous space lined by ceiling-high cupboards up against the walls and across the middle. The single electric bulbs dangling from the roof showed two cramped corridors between the cupboards. It was some kind of equipment store. Gord, the giant, ambled over to one side and flung open a selection of clothes racks.

  “Here, get a kit. The bigger, the better.”

  This bit of free advice at once struck Poll as a hint for survival. While he had rolled on the floor meeting his new god he had been unable to hold out and finally pissed himself. The sense of helplessness and humiliation this brought made him powerfully sensitive to the other note, a code passed on by people flung together in terrible circumstances, and he took it on faith. He chose the biggest hooded overcoat he could find, patched together from thermal material, and he picked out a pair of huge gauntlets extending well up on his forearms.

  He saw Miller and Finn watching him and said, “Do what he said. Get the biggest size you can wear.”

  They fumbled around inside the cupboards until they too were dressed as shapeless trolls. Gord who was now watching them with something approaching professional zeal, went over to the other side and pulled open some more cupboards.

  “Boots. Get them big too. We wear extra socks.”

  They spent some more time stumbling around in their clumsy capes, trying on thermal-lined boots until they thought they had the right ones. When finally they stood ready Gord pointed them back to the door.

  “O.K. You’re out of here. Turn right. It’s the fifth cabin down on the left. Don’t hang about.”

  He unhooked the two levers clamping the hatch and opened it enough to push the newly inducted prisoners out into the elemental cold. The moment they were through he slammed the door shut behind. The wind struck instantaneously, a laser knife, able to slice through any surface, cutting to nil whatever inner warmth their bodies had. They struggled up the road looking for numbers on the buildings. They found a number seven and then eleven. The huts were not in order and the gaps between them were much longer than they imagined. They were terrified they’d missed their way as their huge coats flapped around them and all their extremities turn to lifeless stumps. Suddenly, there ahead was number nine, about fifty yards away. They stumbled on, up to the door, and hammered against it. Again it opened quickly, but this time a hand helped them step over the low wall so they did not fall when they entered.

  ***

  The routine of camp life was not hard to learn. Each hut had duties which it carried out implacably, day after day. There were huts assigned to food production and others to cooking, and still others to maintenance of the huts themselves, of things like water and sanitation. But the main proportion was given over to the crucial task of upkeep of the Homeland refrigeration system, which was in itself a miracle of engineering. Hut 9 had shared responsibility for a turbine and related compressors along with miles and miles of tunnels, with blowers, vents, lines and freezer coils. Almost the moment Poll and the others stepped over the threshold the essential character of camp life was brought home to them. The place was deserted, because most inmates were out on the day’s duties, but the way the space was full and bare all at once spoke precisely of survival and work. They first entered a kind of buffer room between the outside and the living area. It was surrounded by scarred metal shelves with pairs of boots neatly positioned. The hand that had helped them in belonged to the doorkeeper for the day. There was little about him of the menace which had greeted them before. He simply did his job of unlatching and slamming the big door. He nodded and spoke. He’d been waiting for them and had the information they needed.

  “Just arrived, huh? Take your boots and gloves off and put them on the bottom shelves. That’s for new prisoners. Then go through that door. Spare socks and underwear are in boxes by the showers at the end. Beds 25, 34 & 35 are open. They have towels. Sort yourselves out.”

  He said this matter-of-factly, but Poll heard again the group sense of survival passed on almost automatically. From that moment he knew he had a chance. He sensed there was something in people that was not just following a track laid out for them: they could work together because they needed to. At this point it was only a feeling but it would grow in the weeks and months that he spent at the camp, until he knew it as a creed. Right now it put just a small lift in his spirits as he and the others strained to pry off their boots in the boot room before they entered the second door. Once through they were able to see all the way to the end, the single light bulbs following each other down in bleak procession. Right in front of them were two big parallel tables at right angles to the hut, and beyond that opposite rows of beds. As they picked their way down past the tables to the beds it was Finn who took the lead. He scouted ahead and found the two in sequence.

  “Over here, over here” he shouted to Poll. “Take one of these. I can have the one next.”

  “OK,” Poll nodded. He took bed 34.

  ***

  Ten days later and he was completely exhausted. The work was never-ending. Every tenth day or so half the squad had a day off, but the break had not yet come round for him. The squad leader, a man named Cato, enforced the schedule with neutral zeal. Anyone failing to report for muster in the boot room was called in immediately to the camp enforcers and within ten minutes he was taken away. If someone were evidently ill he might be brought to the camp hospital, but otherwise the culprit disappeared for “re-training.” Perhaps he ended up some time later in another billet and there were rumors that such people had been seen, but, again, no one knew for sure. Cato was n
ot an enforcer himself. He had come to his role simply as a technique of survival: ensuring that the whole cabin stuck rigidly to its duties was a way to blot out the horror.

  The crew rose together at five thirty and were out in the merciless wind by six. At night if a prisoner awoke he heard its bloodless whine around the cabin and knew soon enough he would feel its teeth. Nothing could ever stop it. Nothing, that is, apart from the tunnels, and these were places which added torment of their own. The work of the cabin crew was to keep a constant eye on their allocated area of the system. The goal was to maintain the Homeland’s icefield at a steady sixty degrees below freezing, and it was achieved by a refrigeration equivalent of the ancient Wall of China. A vast ring of underground compressors and condensers girdled the territory. It produced the refrigerant that was then cycled along a web of tunnels until it reached the inner ring of evaporators. Huge branched coils in the inner ring released the pressured liquid causing a sustained drop in surface temperature on top. The effect was to create a vast sheet of ice spreading inwards and outwards. The crew of number nine headed out each day to an endless inspection of the various components: the compressors, condensers and fans, the lines that carried the refrigerant, and the enormous freezer coils which sucked all the heat from the ground above.

  Poll lay on his bed unable to move his body, every limb paralyzed with strain and weakness. They had just had finished supper, a watery mix of vegetables with artificial protein, and dry oatcakes on the side. It was the same evening meal he had eaten every day since his arrival, and he was fighting to stop himself from retching. But his thoughts were tormenting him more than his stomach. He had witnessed now at first hand the refrigeration process, and he continued to experience amazement at the immense boldness of the project. Back in the TEPs it had all seemed natural, as if it had fallen from the sky. Now he saw the planning, the materials, the possibilities of breakdown and the painstaking fail-safe measures which had been put in place. He understood why the job of maintenance had been given to prisoners. It needed constant attention in the worst of conditions. Going back and forth from the lethal wind to the constant warm air stream of the condenser tunnel—or from there to the inhuman cold of the inner zone, the “Icebox” as the prisoners called it— was acutely painful and dangerous. At first the heated current was a delight, like a warm bath, but quickly it became too hot, and the prisoners had to abandon their huge coats and unzip their therm-suits in order to continue. The warmth of the tunnel created a constant seeping of ground water which formed pools underfoot. Splashing through puddles the prisoners had to be very careful not to let the water into their boots. Emerging from the tunnel it would freeze immediately and cause crippling frostbite. Meanwhile the puddles themselves evaporated, causing the atmosphere to become humid and provoke asthma attacks. The whole thing was almost unbearable. The prisoners knew scores of men who had been unable to withstand the strains and fallen ill and died. In fact Miller, the older man of the recent arrivals, had been overtaken by uncontrollable shaking and been removed to the hospital.

  Finn, on the other hand, was thriving. He even seemed to enjoy it, and the men had taken to him because of his upbeat attitude. He had attached himself to Poll, occupying the bed next to him and sticking close to him through the day. In Poll's company he became free and talkative, asking questions and making comments about everything he saw. This way Poll picked up a lot of information without having to ask too much himself. He found out that the camps did not do all the maintenance of the massive electrical turbines that worked the refrigeration process but the Homeland Sectors sent out additional inspection teams. He supposed he would have been chosen for something like this if he had gotten on better in Training. As for the nuclear reactors they seemed maintenance free. Their fuel cycles were hermetically sealed and perpetual. The energy flows were monitored from the Sectors and that was about it. As he continued to get a picture of all the layers which kept the system working he could see how it all appeared to function as if by divine pleasure, but really it was by intense human ingenuity. He reflected again that the people who had done all this were really quite extraordinary; even as he was bitterly angry about them he also felt a grudging respect. His conviction hardened there had to be a bigger meaning to what they had done, something more than he could see. It was all too smart and calculating, and involving such enormous thermal by-products. All the careful planning and the huge amounts of energy meant that something much more far-reaching was at stake. And, along with that, once again he felt certain that these people would not just abandon the frozen wonder they had created. If it was so important to them they would keep actively involved. There would have to be a way for them to come here and fix things if they went wrong.

  The memory of Wes and Esh was nagging at his mind. He remembered them shouting as he was leaving the Worship Center. Something to do with Danny and Liz. Ah, yes, the famous swimming couple had disappeared. What did that mean? He saw the two of them in his mind’s eye. Happy, smiling, just like the people in the photograph. And their bodies looked like those of the laughing men. Their clothes too were different, not the therm-suits of the Sector, but freer somehow, open. Now they were running, chasing through green and colors, like in the holograms. So free, so free! His heart felt an enormous pang of jealously and loss.

  “Get up, get up,” Finn was shaking him. “Reveille was ten minutes ago. The crews are already eating. If you don’t get up you’ll miss food.”

  Poll blinked, confused and feeling empty and sick. He’d been dreaming. He’d fallen asleep exhausted on the top of his bed. It was now already morning and he was stiff and cold and trying to wake up. He struggled to his feet and pulled on the overcoat which he’d instinctively drawn over himself in the middle of the night. He stumbled down to the tables and grabbed the last of the boiled oats before it was taken for seconds. He knew it very ill advised to face a day in the tunnels without something in his stomach, and he was kicking himself for not hearing the wake-up. He didn’t feel steady on his feet and wasn’t sure he had time to get to the bathroom before the tractor arrived. If he stayed behind he’d immediately be reported. He was still wolfing down the bowl of thick oatmeal when the bang came on the door signaling arrival of the transport. He had no choice but to go with the rest. He lurched out the door to cram on his boots, grab his gauntlets and head out through the hatch into the bitter wind. Following the line of men he fell up the steps into the cabin of the tractor and into a seat that Finn was holding for him.

  By the time the vehicle had trundled the half mile to the turbine plant and the housing of the shaft-head, his body was shaking and he was fighting to keep his breakfast down. He tried to get a grip on himself, to stop the trembling by sheer force of will. He told Finn to go ahead of him on the metal ladder fixed in the concrete shaft, and asked him to hold his legs to steady him from falling. His friend carefully guided his feet on the rungs above him to the next step below. He was feeling desperately weak and when he got to the bottom he could not help it but staggered and went down on all fours. Finn helped him up.

  “Come on, get up. You gotta keep going.”

  At the bottom of the shaft was a buffer room with sealed doors to stop the warm air of the condenser tunnel from leaking into the icefield. All the men were filing through the entrance. Leaning a hand on Finn Poll followed them. The first door was sealed and the second unlocked. At once a rush of warmth swirled round the crew and the men began to unhook their coats as they passed through the inner door. The change in atmosphere made him feel nauseous all over again, but the shaking lessened and he was able to walk ahead. He pushed back his hood and fumbled at the clasps on his coat and therm-suit.

  On either side a tunnel extended, lit by dim storm lamps. This was the outer condenser ring which surrounded the Homeland, the great artery through which the whole refrigeration process pulsed. At intervals on the surface, above its circular journey, were the turbines, and below ground compressor and condenser halls were hollowed in
its outer wall. Every so often, splaying from the same outer edge, there was an exhaust shaft, each with its own fan, propelling the warm air out beyond the icefield. On the inner side of the tunnel, at equal spaces between these shafts, a branch at right angles led the big lines of refrigerant inward to the evaporating coils of the freezer zone.

  To the side of the buffer room at about thirty yards was a compressor and condenser hall, its heated air forced out into the tunnel through a huge exhaust fan. There was a constant background throb of the fans in the tunnel and the steady fifteen-miles-per-hour current they produced carried a vibration like the moan of a pipe organ. The men made their way along the tunnel toward it, but Poll had hung back. He unzipped his fly and relieved himself against a wall, leaning his body against the rock to rest, if only for a minute. He was hoping desperately he would not be sent on an inspection detail of the freezer area. He would perhaps be able to recover if he was left in the warm air stream. As he forced himself to rejoin the group Cato was dividing the crew up, giving them their duties. Sure enough, one team was doing inspections of the icebox area, another was to carry wire caging and concrete to shore up a crumbling section of tunnel.

  Cato pointed to him. “And you, Mr. Sidak, today you’re in luck. Or perhaps not. The Icemen want you for special duties.”

  3. CONSPIRACIES

  Cal had spent the first days of her forced inactivity fluctuating between states of mental nothingness and sudden bursts of intense awareness. She had watched the display lights on the wall and mindlessly counted the intervals between the Bubbles passing her house in the morning rush. She replayed WIA videos, including old sequences she hadn’t seen since she was a child: sun-dappled mountains, dolphin pods racing in the bluest seas, children picking from blackberry bushes among tall yellow grass with a dog chasing back and forth. She remembered with a jolt that as a little girl she had firmly believed she and Danny were part of that happy band, and the dog had been theirs. She played this sequence endlessly, trying to get to the part that might have made her think she and her brother were among those virtual children. Eventually she gave up and simply tried to recreate the wonderful memory; but that too had become impossible. She remembered instead that Danny was now in the other world, together with Liz, and that very possibly they were walking together in a scene just like one of the holograms, but this time for real.