Prisoners of Tomorrow

by James P. Hogan

  The room had an open area running all the way down the center, containing several tables with chairs pulled up on both sides. He moved forward and deposited the two bags he was carrying on the table nearest the door. To left and right, the space along the sides of the room was partitioned into a series of five or six bays, each of which contained two double-tier bunks, one alongside the partition on each side, separated by a narrow aisle containing kit lockers. There were pictures adorning the walls in places, some mugs and eating utensils on shelves, books, a long, carved wooden pipe resting in a bowl, and an unfinished game of chess on one of the tables. The place looked reasonably clean, but had a distinct odor of too many bodies living in too confined a space. Whoever the bodies were, they were absent for the moment.

  There was an open door at the far end of the room, and as McCain’s hearing adapted to the quiet after the hubbub outside, he discerned sounds of movement. A moment later a figure appeared framed in the far doorway, holding a broom. McCain waited. The man shuffled out and approached around the farmost table. He was of Oriental appearance, lithely built, and wearing a black skullcap in addition to the regulation gray tunic. As he came closer, McCain found that he had an abstruse face that managed to both reinforce and contradict at the same time the impression of years conveyed by his physique. It was furrowed and wizened about the eyes, yet surprisingly smooth everywhere else. His chin sprouted a short beard that was turning gray, but his stare was bright and alert like that of a curious child.

  “You must be the American,” he said. “My name is Nakajima-Lin Kohmei-Tso-Liang.” His voice and expression were neutral, carrying neither undue warmth nor hostility. McCain was instantly confused. The construction was typically Asiatic with the family name coming first, but the double name itself was a composite of Japanese and Chinese; the first of the given names following sounded Japanese, but the other two were Chinese. He watched McCain curiously, and McCain had the feeling that he was able to read if the contradiction meant anything to McCain or not. “Generally I am called Koh.”

  “Lewis Earnshaw,” McCain responded. “Most people call me Lew.”

  Koh came to where McCain was standing and indicated the lower tier of the bunk by the first partition to the left. “Your place will be there,” he said. He nodded toward the corner bunk behind McCain’s right. As McCain had noticed with some of the other bunks, its upper cot was hinged upright out of the way. It suggested that the place was not occupied to full capacity at present. “I live across there. It seems, therefore, that for a while we are to be neighbors.” Koh spoke English well, with slow and careful articulation.

  McCain picked up his bags from the table and moved across. “Well, I guess that’s fine with me. Does your name make you Japanese or Chinese?”

  “A mixture of the two, which goes back many generations. Appropriate to this century.”

  “I’ve spent some time in both countries. It sounds as if you were expecting me.”

  “The billet foreman is usually notified when a new arrival is due.”

  “What exactly is a foreman?”

  “You are not familiar with the system?”

  “How could I be?”

  “Aren’t you transferring from another part of Zamork?”

  “No, I only just arrived.”

  Koh nodded. “I see. Every billet has a foreman. It’s a trusted category of inmates who are responsible for discipline, take complaints to the right quarters, and hand out work assignments. Ours is called Luchenko, a Russian.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the far end of the room with his free hand. “His place is back there. He’ll talk to you when he gets back.”

  “So, what’s he like?”

  “Oh, some days good, some days not so good. Most times okay.”

  McCain looked down at his cot, which held just a bare mattress. “What do we do about getting blankets and stuff?”

  “You pick up a kit at OI—dishes, eating implements, and so on.”

  “What’s OI?”

  “The Official Issue store, in the Core complex across Gorky Street.”

  “Gorky Street?”

  “Outside the block mess area—where you just came along. If you wish, I will show you the way when I’m finished.”

  “Are you here all the time, Koh?”

  “One half day each week is for cleaning. This week it’s my turn. It provides a welcome opportunity to think in peace and quiet. One seldom gets time to be alone in Zamork.”

  “How long have you been here now?”

  “A year, roughly.”

  McCain nodded absently and stepped back to survey the bunk above his, trying to gauge something about the person who would be his closest neighbor. There were several raunchily explicit pinups attached to the head end of the partition, a rock magazine cover showing a pop group in action behind a star-spangled logo in the shape of the letters “USA,” and, folded on the pillow below, an Ohio State University T-shirt. “What are you in here for?” he inquired.

  “Vy govorite po-Russki?” Koh asked suddenly from behind him—Do you speak Russian?

  McCain turned and studied his face for a second, then nodded. “Da.”

  “Where are you from in America?” Koh went on, still in Russian. “Have you been on Tereshkova long? What was your offense?”

  McCain saw the point and nodded resignedly. “I don’t know you,” he agreed, switching back to English.

  “Nor I, you. As you obviously already understand, one learns not to ask such questions of strangers.”

  “Would I have admitted to speaking Russian if I’d been planted here?” McCain asked.

  “Unlikely,” Koh conceded. “But then again you might, if you were being very clever.”

  “Are they often very clever?”

  “No. But when they are, that’s when they’re at their most dangerous.”

  McCain sighed. There was nothing he could say to alleviate all suspicions instantly. It would take time and patience. He sat down on his bunk and turned his attention to transferring the contents of his bags into his locker. “Who’s the guy upstairs?” he asked, changing the subject. “Looks like another American.”

  Koh gave a short laugh. “No, not an American. An Americophile. His name is Mungabo. He’s Zigandan. The Russians have strange impressions of American life, especially with regard to racial tensions, which their propagandists exaggerate. They also have a strange sense of humor. Luchenko thought it would be funny to put the American under the black man.” He turned and began walking back toward the far end of the room. “Toilets and washing facilities are through there. I’ll take you over to OI when I’m through.”

  “So, what did this Zigandan guy do for America that caused him to wind up here . . . or is that something we don’t ask about, too?” McCain called after him.

  “Oh no, everybody knows about that. He gave them a top-secret Russian plane—a MIG-55. At least, that was what the court-martial decided. Mungabo claimed that his electronic navigation system malfunctioned, but the KGB refused to believe that the whole thing wasn’t a put-up job.”

  “What made them so sure?” McCain asked.

  “It was elementary. Equipment produced under a Marxist economy, they pointed out, cannot malfunction.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dr. Philip Kress, from the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, stared out unhappily from behind the table of panel members at the rows of delegates to the Third Conference on Communications Physics, sponsored by the Japanese Science Council and being held at the “university city” of Tsukuba.

  “There are no doubt several reasons why the underwater neutrino-detection experiments have given ambiguous results,” he said. “The biggest problem all along has been statistical. We’re talking about trying to separate out a very few real events from an enormous background noise. Whichever way you approach it, you end up subtracting one big number from another big number, neither of them guaranteed absolutely, to yield a very small number, which is the
answer you’re looking for. It’s a tricky problem, and we’re working on it. What else can I say?” He tossed up a hand to indicate that he was through and sat back in his chair to light his pipe.

  The panel moderator, Jules Dupalme, from the French telecommunications corporation CIT Alcatel, looked from side to side for further comment from the others. “Okay? Any more questions from the floor? No? Good. Well, there is one announcement before we end the session for lunch. Would all those who—”

  “One question.” A Japanese about halfway back near one of the aisles stood up. In the fifth row, Dr. Melvin Bowers, from the Plasma Physics Institute at Livermore, California, sighed and looked at his watch. He was getting hungry, and speculations about communicating via neutrinos beamed through the solid Earth weren’t his field. He shifted in his seat and tried to recall the name of the bar in the city that Sam and Max said they’d found the night before—the one with the underwearless hostesses that sat on the customers’ knees. From behind him, the voice of the Japanese continued, “I see a difficulty with the data that have been selected as candidates. There is nothing that positively excludes every one of them from being an atmospheric muon, and not a neutrino-induced muon at all. For example, if the detected muon came from below, it would have to be neutrino-induced. But that is not so in a single case. All the ones we have seen came from above. Even with a small sample, this asymmetry bothers me.”

  “Phil?” Dupalme invited.

  Kress shook the match between his fingers to extinguish it and dropped it into an ashtray. “I agree, it’s strange . . . not what you’d expect . . .” The answer wasn’t satisfactory even to himself. He sighed. “But we have pushed the detectability threshold back an order of magnitude. Maybe we need to reexamine the sensitivity of the detectors. . . . It’s difficult to say without further analysis.”

  “Thank you.” Unenlightened, the Japanese bowed and sat down again. Dupalme glanced down to read the announcement he had been about to make.

  Then, Professor Masaki Kurishoda from Osaka University, who had been curiously reticent throughout most of the proceedings, pulled a microphone across the table. Bowers in the fifth row groaned inwardly. Kurishoda had a pudgy, humorous face and shot a genial smile at the audience through his heavy-rimmed spectacles before he spoke. “Of course,” he said, “another reason why you gentlemen are not getting unambiguous evidence for the existence of neutrinos might be that they don’t exist.” Somebody near the front started to laugh, then stopped abruptly with the realization that Kurishoda was serious. The professor regarded the audience calmly, shifting his eyes until sure that he had everyone’s attention. Even Bowers had forgotten lunch for the moment. Kurishoda spread his hands expressively. “Explaining the unknown by means of the unobservable is always a perilous business. The neutrino was postulated by Pauli simply as a book-balancing device to preserve the conservation laws of momentum and spin in the beta decay of a neutron into a proton and an electron. Every subsequent interpretation since has merely extended that convention. We scientists, you see . . . we think we construct objective views as dictated by facts, but really we do not. Sometimes we seek solutions within a framework of ruling academic opinion.” He paused and sent a broad smile around the room. Nobody interrupted.

  He continued, “If we extend the conservation laws to include the negative energy states proposed by Dirac—and why should we restrict it to positive states only, except to satisfy convention?—then pair-production is explained without the need for a photon to mysteriously ‘turn into’ an electron-positron pair: the positron becomes simply the ‘hole’ left in the Dirac sea by the electron that has been promoted to a positive state as a result of absorbing the photon. The notion of a hole behaving like a particle might have been strange in Dirac’s time, but today, in our world full of semiconductor electronics, we take it for granted. Now, neutron decay becomes such a simple pair-production event, with the electron escaping and the positron being captured. We no longer need a neutrino to carry away the missing energy, since the electron was raised from a negative energy level to begin with. And since three particles are involved in the process, spin conservation is also satisfied.”

  Kress was already spluttering farther along the table. “But . . . now wait a minute, I mean, what does that do to the weak nuclear force? You’ve just pulled the rug out from saying there is a weak force at all. I mean . . .”

  Kurishoda shrugged. “I agree. And you are about to remind me of the theoretical work that has unified the weak and the electromagnetic forces since the 1980’s. But I suggest that the ‘weak’ interactions are nothing more than electromagnetic forces acting between the dipoles of elementary particles and those of electrons in negative energy states. So, if the two forces were actually only one to begin with, then the whole thing will have to be reexamined.”

  A lot of muttering and head shaking was going on in the audience. “But it’s been verified, hasn’t it?” someone objected. “I mean, neutrinos are detected routinely. They have been, ever since the fifties.”

  “Cowan and Reines,” another voice supplied. “Neutrino-induced transmutation of chlorine into argon.”

  “Presumed to be neutrino-induced,” Kurishoda threw back, beaming, as if he had been waiting for just that. “The mechanism I have just described accounts for it equally well.”

  “Experiments have been conducted which suggest they not only exist, but possess mass,” another member of the panel pointed out. “It’s been measured.”

  “How else do you account for the missing mass in the universe?” somebody else in the audience called out.

  “And other experimenters have found no indication of mass,” Kurishoda replied. “Some experimenters have reported that neutrinos oscillate among three forms, while others say they don’t. As for the missing mass, well, maybe we just have to look for another kind of galaxy-glue.” He half-turned, and motioned with his head. “Phil Kress himself has told us about the difficulty in observing anything, and then the ambiguity in deciding what it is. In short, it all relies on statistical methods that are questionable. There is nothing conclusive that proves neutrinos have mass, that the oscillate among three types, or that they exist at all. I contend that everything attributed to them can be explained more simply in terms that are already familiar. William of Occam would have approved.”

  The audience was clearly all set for a showdown on this. Dupalme raised a hand before anyone else could respond. “Ladies and gentlemen, lunch is waiting. Perhaps we could arrange a special session this evening to explore this subject further?” He looked down inquiringly to someone in the front row, who leaned forward to mutter something up at the dais. “Yes, we’ll post details later this afternoon. . . .” He searched for something with which to wrap the topic up for the moment. “Maybe our speculations on neutrino-beam communications through the planet were a little premature, then, eh?”

  Some of the panelists grinned, while others shook their heads. The atmosphere relaxed.

  “Well, there’s always tachyons to think about,” someone quipped from the audience.

  “How about that, Professor Kurishoda?” another called. “Do tachyons exist?”

  The professor beamed back over the top of his spectacles. “But of course,” he replied. “A tachyon is a quantum of bad taste.”

  Five minutes later, the attendees were spilling through into the central dining hall and dispersing among the tables, already set with a fish appetizer, fruit juices, and tea. Melvin Bowers headed for a quiet spot in a far corner of the room. Jenny Hampden, a research manager from Bell Labs, joined him. They’d met the previous day at breakfast in the hotel, and talked briefly during some of the breaks between sessions. She liked caving, classical music, and cats.

  “Well, there goes my favorite theory,” Bowers said as they sat down.

  “What theory?”

  “My neutrino-bomb theory.”

  “Neutrino bomb? That’s a new one.”

  “Think about it,” Bowers
said. “It meets all the requirements for the perfect strategic weapon. It keeps defense contractors profitable and employs people. It justifies the jobs of Pentagon generals and defense analysts. And it gives the media a new scare-word and the peaceniks something to howl about.” He smoothed his napkin across his knees and turned up his palms. “But, it has no undesirable side effects: it doesn’t damage property or kill people. The perfect bomb!”

  Jenny laughed. “Maybe we could have neutrino-power reactors, too—something to divert the oppositionists away from fusion. Then maybe it could all come on-line, and they mightn’t even notice.”

  “Hm, there might be something in that, too. I wish somebody’d thought of it back in the seventies.”

  Jenny put down her fork suddenly. “Oh, Mel, there’s something I forgot. Look, I have to see Takuji right now. I promised him some slides for the talk he’s giving this afternoon. Would you excuse me? I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  “Sure. I’ll have them hold the entree.”

  “Thanks.” Jenny got up and disappeared in the direction of the door.

  Bowers carried on eating alone. Was it called the Yellow Dragon? Red Dragon? . . . No, not Dragon, but Red something . . . He didn’t notice the tall, elegantly groomed figure approaching from among the bodies still milling about to find places in the middle of the room. “Ah, Dr. Bowers, good day to you.”

  Bowers looked up. “Igor Lukich,” he said, using the Russian familiar patronymic.

  “Do you mind if I join you?”

  “Not at all. Sit down, please. Oh, not there. That side’s taken.”

  It was Professor Dyashkin, the director of a Soviet communications-research establishment in Siberia. Dyashkin’s name was known internationally, and he and Bowers were friends from previous professional gatherings in Moscow and Bombay. They had both been involved in an informal spontaneous discussion that had taken place the night before among a group of scientists at one of the hotels in which the conference attendees were staying.