Prisoners of Tomorrow

by James P. Hogan

  McCain graduated from UCLA at twenty-two with BA degrees in Political History and Modern Languages. These qualifications, along with his innate skepticism and desire to preserve his individuality, added up to a good grounding for work in the intelligence community. Hence, when, desperate to escape from the tedium of California farm-country life, he attended on-campus interviews for entry into the armed services, a recruiter from another department of the government pounced on him instead. So, he’d ended up back at school, this time with the UDIA at its training center in Maryland. Upon completion of the course he went to its headquarters to work as an administrative assistant, which he fondly assumed would be a cover title for more exciting and glamorous things. But the job turned out to be just what it said—clerk—and for two boring years he proved his loyalty by shuffling papers, filling in forms, sorting incoming material, and checking facts . . . and checking them again, and then rechecking them. The experience turned out to be vital to becoming an effective agent.

  Since then he’d spent some years in Europe with NATO intelligence, which was followed by six months back in the US for intensive training on such things as codes and communications, observation, security, concealment and evasion, weapons and self-defense, breaking and entering, lock picking, safe cracking, wiretaps, bugs, and other noble arts. After that he’d gone back to Europe to be introduced to counterintelligence directed against Soviet espionage into NATO weaponry, and then back to the States for courses in Eastern languages and advanced Russian—he’d spoken Czech and German, which Julia and Ralph had often conversed in, since he was a boy. From there he’d been sent on a series of assignments in the Far East, beginning with a position at the US embassy in Tokyo. His last job before being recalled to Washington for the Pedestal mission was developing a network of intelligence contacts and sources in Peking. And through all of it, everything he’d seen reinforced his original conviction that the Western way wasn’t such a bad way to live. Yet there were lots of people out there who for one reason for another, real or imagined, were ready to bring the West down if they got the chance.

  The key sounded in the door, and McCain sat up. It was too early for lunch. Protbornov entered, accompanied by a major called Uskayev. Behind them was a guard carrying a canvas bag. Protbornov looked around, his dark eyes moving casually beneath their heavy lids. He took a blue pack of Russian cigarettes from one of the pockets in his tunic, selected one, and almost as if it were an afterthought offered the pack to McCain. McCain shook his head. “You must be feeling almost at home here by now,” Protbornov rumbled. “Well, how would you say we have treated you? Not unfairly, I trust?”

  “It could be worse,” McCain agreed neutrally.

  Protbornov lit his cigarette and lifted one of the books from the shelf to inspect its title. “A pity that it requires so much to convince you that we really are not so uncivilized. You do have an extraordinarily suspicious nature, you know, Mr. Earnshaw—an impediment for a journalist, I would have thought. Your female companion thinks so, too. I’d imagine that many people you’ve met in life have said the same. Have you ever thought about that? Is it possible, do you think, that you could be wrong on some things, and that the consensus of others might have some merit?” He flipped casually through the pages of the book, and then, either accidentally or making the motion appear so, ran a finger down the edge of the back cover. From the corner of an eye McCain saw Uskayev watching him closely, and forced himself to suppress any flicker of reaction.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to be too influenced by other people’s opinions,” McCain said.

  “Your Air Force scientist friend would agree with you on that,” Protbornov replied, searching McCain’s face as he spoke. “A most obstinate woman. But be that as it may, she recognizes the importance of the present situation and its relevance to world security, and she has agreed to cooperate responsibly by making a public statement of the kind we have requested.” Protbornov gestured in the air with his cigarette and shrugged indifferently. “So now you don’t matter to us so much. The only issue you need concern yourself with is your own fate. If you adopted a more reasonable attitude than the one you’ve been showing, well, anything is possible. If not . . .” he shrugged again, “what happens then will be up to the Kremlin. But as I said, it is no longer of primary importance to us.”

  McCain looked at him almost contemptuously. “I expected something better than that. Don’t tell me you’re slipping.”

  Protbornov seemed to have been prepared for as much. “Policy decisions are not my concern,” he said. “My job is simply to carry them out. For whatever reason, orders have come through for you to be moved to another location. You should find it more congenial—at least you will have company . . . and the opportunity for more stimulating conversations than ours tend to be.” He indicated the bag that the guard had placed on the table. “Collect your belongings. You are to be transferred immediately.”

  McCain began gathering together the clothes and personal effects that he had been given. “With a personal sendoff by the general? Why so honored?”

  “Why not? I feel we have come to know one another a little in the course of the past three weeks, even if your attitude has been less than candid. A common courtesy from the host to a departing guest, maybe? Or simply a way to indicate that we desire no hard feelings?”

  McCain went around the partition to retrieve his toilet articles. So far the whole thing had been an exercise in testing and probing for weaknesses, to be exploited later—and probably the same with Paula, too. What for? he wondered. There was a lot more behind it all than he had unraveled so far.

  “So, where to?” he asked as he came back out, closing the bag. “Earthside?”

  “Nothing so exciting, I’m afraid,” Protbornov replied. The guard was holding the door open. “It’s expensive to ship people between here and Earth. Why should we pay the bill for returning one of the United States’ spies to them? They can come and collect you when the time comes—assuming, of course, that Moscow decides to let them have you back. Until then, you remain here on Tereshkova, at a place called Zamork.” A guard went ahead. Protbornov walked by McCain, with the major a pace behind, while the guard who had held the door brought up the rear.

  “Oh, you mean the gulag that you’ve got up here,” McCain said. Zamork was on the edge of the town known as Novyi Kazan, and was labeled vaguely on the maps as a detention facility. “I always admired how faithful a copy this is of the Mother County.”

  “Oh, don’t think of Zamork as a gulag,” Protbornov said breezily. “Times are changing. Even your Christian heaven needed somewhere to keep its dissidents.”

  “I take it that means we’re unlikely to be seeing the last of each other.”

  “I’m sure the Fates have it in store for us to meet again.”

  “What about Paula Shelmer? Will she be moving too?”

  “We have received no orders concerning her.” There was a short silence. Then Protbornov added, “However, she is in good health and spirits. I thought you might like to know.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ten minutes later, McCain, accompanied by two armed guards, boarded a magdrive car at a monorail terminal underneath the Security Headquarters. Soon afterward, they departed around Tereshkova’s peripheral ring, bound for the town of Novyi Kazan.

  CHAPTER NINE

  According to the Soviet publicity material, Novyi Kazan was a center for arts, sports, and education, intended to provide rest, relaxation, and a contrast to Turgenev’s administrative bustle and the scientific-industrial concentration at Landausk. The travel guides made little mention of its including a prison. Maybe, McCain thought as he looked out of the speeding monorail car, that was what the Russian interpretation of rest and relaxation meant.

  The car seemed to be a standard model containing three pairs of double seats facing each other on either side of a central aisle, but its only other occupants besides McCain were two armed guards.

  Evi
dently this one was not for public use. It had left the jumble of Turgenev’s high-rise core and moved out along the valley that he and Paula had viewed from the terrace high over the town’s square on the day of their arrival. On one side, the central strip was an irregular ribbon of green, wandering among grassy mounds, clumps of shrubs, and occasional trees, with a stream threading its way from pool to pool between rocky banks as it collected cataracts tumbling in from the valley sides. Farther away beyond the green strip, wheeled vehicles vanished and reappeared at intervals on a hidden roadway roughly matching the monorail’s route. There were plenty of people, alone, in pairs, and in groups, talking, walking, or just sitting and watching the water; a woman was feeding ducks, and two boys were sailing a boat. Above it all, the twin ribbon-suns curved away out of sight in their artificial sky.

  In an earlier century, the Russian empress Catherine the Great had decided to tour the countryside to observe the living conditions of the people for herself. Her chief adviser, Grigory Potemkin, sent advance parties ahead of the royal entourage to erect a whole make-believe world of fake villages with gaily painted facades to conceal the poverty and misery that the peasants had to endure. The people were forced to put on new clothes, loaned for the occasion, and dance, wave, strew flowers, and cheer to maintain the illusion. Afterward, scores of Western observers who had traveled with the royal party returned home filled with enthusiasm and admiration by the scenes they had witnessed. As McCain stared out of the window of the monorail car, he thought back to the reports he’d read by excited visitors to Valentina Tereshkova, bringing to the world their revelation of the changed face of communism. Just as others had come back with glowing accounts of Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s.

  Halfway along the agricultural zone outside Turgenev, the line passed through the clutter of processing plant, freight elevators, storage silos, and handling machinery piled around the base of the minor spoke, which was known as Agricultural Station 3 and possessed a geometry every bit as irregular and disorienting as that of the town. The roof here was clear for some distance on either side of where the spoke passed through, giving a breathtaking glimpse of the spoke’s entire length, soaring away to the hub structure a half mile overhead. Another half mile above that was the far side of the ring, and beyond, an endlessness of space and stars. The sight made the enclosing walls of Valentina Tereshkova suddenly seem very thin and fragile. For a while, McCain had almost forgotten he was in space at all.

  Beyond the spoke, the car passed through more of the agricultural zone, all pretty much as before, and finally entered the outskirts of Novyi Kazan. Houses and apartments appeared strewn down the valley sides as at Turgenev, but with more greenery and water; a sports field came and went, with figures playing soccer, and the view ahead became one of buildings merging and rising toward another chaotic downtown center. Then the track entered a tunnel. The car slowed, and McCain watched through the front window as it lurched to follow a branch tunnel off the through-route.

  One of the guards moved forward to the console under the window, which appeared to be the driver’s position when the car was being operated manually, and the car halted before a sturdy-looking metal door closing off the track ahead. A tone sounded, and an officer’s face appeared on the console screen. “Prisoner two-seven-one-zero-six for admission,” the guard said. The officer consulted something off-screen, then leaned forward to operate a control. A camera mounted inside the car pivoted slowly to survey the interior, pausing for a few seconds when it came to McCain’s face. Then the door ahead slid open. The car moved through and stopped beside a platform. The guards motioned to McCain to get out. When they emerged, the door across the track behind had already closed.

  They were in what looked like a loading and unloading bay, with the track branching into two lines that ran parallel between service platforms for a distance and then merged again before disappearing through another door at the far end, also closed. More guards were standing on the platform that McCain and his escorts had stepped out onto. With them was a group of a dozen or so men in plain gray jackets and matching pants with scarlet stripes, who began filing into the car. They were of various colors and races, and McCain guessed them to be from the place that he was on his way to. Several of them glanced curiously at him as he passed. They seemed healthy enough and alert. At least it didn’t look as if he were about to join a house of zombies, he reflected as he walked between the guards toward the door opening off the platform.

  Behind the door was a guardpost, inside which McCain saw the officer who had appeared on the screen within the car. A short corridor brought them to a stairway and elevator. They took the stairs up a level and crossed a hall containing rows of seats to enter a room with a counter running along one side, where the senior of the two escorts from Turgenev produced papers for the duty sergeant to sign. Then a captain came out of a room at the back to take charge, and the escorts departed. The captain asked the routine questions, and McCain gave his routine fictitious answers, which the sergeant duly entered into a terminal on the counter. Then McCain was conducted through to an examination room, where he waited forty minutes for the doctor to be found to perform a physical check. At last, after being fingerprinted, voiceprinted, blood-sampled, facially scanned for computerized mug-shotting, typed, tested, measured, and weighed all over again, he was given an outfit like the ones he had just seen in the monorail terminal. The captain handed back the bag he had brought with him, along with another containing a spare change of clothes. Finally he told McCain to hold out his left arm.

  “Why?”

  “You are not here to ask questions.”

  McCain raised his arm. The captain pulled back the sleeve of his jacket, and the sergeant clipped an electronic unit on a red, plastic-coated band around his wrist, and then crimped and sealed it with a special tool. The captain pressed a button, and two more guards appeared from a door at the back of the room.

  “This is your key to the areas which you are authorized to enter,” the captain told McCain, indicating the wristband. “Security is mostly electronic at Zamork. Guards are too valuable here to stand around doing nothing, and the same applies to prisoners. Therefore you will be required to work a minimum-forty-eight-hour week. Your duties will be assigned by the foreman of the billet you’re put in. Enforcement of discipline is firm, but not unfair. After an initial probationary period, a sensible attitude can earn privileges. Movement outside quarters after curfew, and attempts to cross the compound perimeter or to leave designated work areas in other parts of the colony are strictly forbidden—although escape from Valentina Tereshkova is, of course, quite impossible. Do you have any immediate questions?”

  “What about communications with my government and messages home?”

  “That does not fall within my area of authority.”

  “Whose area of authority does it fall in?”

  “Such matters are questions of policy, decided in Moscow.”

  “So who’s in charge of this whole place?”

  “The governor is Lieutenant General Fedorov.”

  “So, how do I talk to him?”

  “When he decides he wishes to talk to you. You will be interviewed by your block commandant later. Bring the matter up with him. In the meantime, you report to the foreman in billet B-three. The guards will take you there.”

  The guards took McCain back through the door that they had come from, and along a corridor to some stairs which led down to another door. A red light above the door came on as McCain approached, and a moment later went out again, accompanied by a beep. On the far side was a wide thoroughfare running crossways, with lime-green walls that were featureless except for welding seams and bundles of piping. There were large doorways opening off at intervals. It suggested, if anything, an enclosed street. Figures in gray tunics, singly and in pairs and groups, were walking on both sides, while in the center an electric tractor was hauling a trailer loaded with boxes. Just two guards were visible, pacing slowly togethe
r some distance away and looking more like street cops. McCain and his two escorts followed the road right to a corner, where it went left and continued, looking much the same as before. They passed an opening flanked on either side by sections of fixed bars, with a center section consisting of a sliding barred gate, which was open. A sign above read block a. Farther on they came to a similar gate, this time labeled block b. A red light came on as McCain followed the first guard through, then went out with a beep. McCain had the feeling that he could get really tired of red lights and beeps before very much longer.

  They were at one end of a more-or-less square hall, with two rows of doors facing each other across a broad center space. On a higher level above, two more rows of identical doors looked down from behind railed walkways reached by metal stairs. Footbridges at both ends of the hall connected the walkways to complete a gallery overlooking the central floor area from all four sides. At the near end of the hall were several long tables with benches, at which men were loosely scattered, some in groups, others sitting alone. As with the group that McCain had seen boarding the monorail car, they were a mix of races and types. Some were reading, one writing, others playing cards, while many just sat. In the open area beyond the tables, more were standing talking, and others were gathered in a circle around some kind of game that involved tossing coins.

  As he and his escorts moved on across the hall, McCain caught babbles of different languages. The voices dropped for a moment as he passed by the tables, and curious eyes followed him. They came to one of the doors on the right, which carried a large “3” painted in yellow. One of the guards gestured toward it. McCain stepped forward; the red light lit and the beeper beeped. He tried the door, and it opened. Without a word the two guards turned and left. McCain pushed the door wide and stepped through. The light was dimmer than in the area outside, and he paused for his eyes to adjust. Then he moved on inside, letting the door close behind him.