CHAPTER TWO
“Now wait a minute,” Paula had repeated in the privacy of Colonel Raymond’s office an hour after the meeting ended. “My degrees are in electronics and computer communications. I’m a scientist. If I wanted to get mixed up in this kind of business I’d have joined Foleda’s outfit or the CIA, not the Air Force.”
“But this job needs your kind of expertise,” Raymond had said. “And the way they’ve got it figured out, it wouldn’t really be that risky.”
“Tell that to the last guy who tried. He’s in Lubyanka prison.”
“This approach would be different. You wouldn’t have to get inside the computer center—or anywhere that’d be all that difficult.”
“Except a Soviet space station nearly two hundred thousand miles out.”
“Kehrn explained how that could be arranged. . . . Paula, just promise that you’ll take a few minutes to think over how important this is, would you, please? It’s not only the potential military value of getting detailed intelligence on those weapons. The political implications are monumental. The unaligned great powers that we’ve seen emerging in this century—Japan, China, Brazil, the Southeast Asian alliance—have tended to regard both us and the Russians as equally crooked in the long run, and played us off against each other. But this would prove to the world, irrefutably and finally, that all the assurances we’ve been hearing about how the Soviets have changed but nobody understands them are just as much horseshit as everything else they’ve told us over the years. It would show that we are not victims of paranoia . . . that our suspicions all along have been grounded in reality, and their aim is still to spread their system worldwide, by force or otherwise, as much as it ever was. But against the lineup of global power that this could generate, they’d be powerless—ruined politically. This ‘Pedestal’ operation that Foleda’s people are talking about could do it, Paula, the end of the line for them—kaputski. That’s what this job could mean.”
That was when she had made her first mistake, she decided: she’d agreed to think about it.
A male voice that incongruously blended an American twang with a guttural Russian accent spoke from a loudspeaker somewhere overhead and interrupted her reverie. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching Valentina Tereshkova and should be docking in approximately twenty minutes. Arrival formalities will be minimal, and there will be refreshments while we hear a short address in the hub reception lounge before commencing our tour. The Soviet Ministry of Space Sciences hopes that despite the limited space aboard the transporter craft, your journey has been comfortable. Thank you.”
On the viewscreen at the front of the cabin, Tereshkova was almost a full circle, highlighted as two brilliant crescents slashed in the black background by the Sun off to one side. Around Paula, the other passengers were stirring and becoming talkative again, and those who had been asleep were stretching, yawning, patting hair back into shape, and refastening ties and shirtcuffs. There were a hundred or so altogether—mainly political and military figures, scientists, and reporters from Western and Asian nations—invited on a special visit to the colony to commemorate the Soviets’ centennial May Day. The voyage from the low-Earth-orbiting transfer platform where they had boarded the transporter from surface shuttles had taken over fifteen hours. Although this was probably the first spaceflight for most of them, the initial excitement had lasted only so long, even with receding views of Earth coming through on the screen periodically to relieve the unchanging starfield. Now there was something new to see.
“Time to wake up,” she murmured to the man sprawled in the seat next to her, a still-open magazine resting loosely between his fingers. “We’re here. Welcome to Orbitskigrad.”
The man whom she still knew only as Lewis Earnshaw stretched against his restraining belt, held the pose for a few seconds, while emitting a long-drawn mixture of a yawn and a groan, and relaxed. Then he rubbed his eyes, sat up in his seat, and looked around. “Home, home at Lagrange?” he murmured.
He was in his late thirties, solid but athletically built, and had straight dark hair parted conventionally, brown eyes that were alert and humorous most of the time but could be reflective when the occasion demanded, and a clean-cut, square-jawed face with a tight, upturned mouth. This kind of thing was his business. He was a civilian agent from a department that Bernard Foleda ran somewhere in the murkier depths of the UDIA, known nebulously as the “Operations Section.” Like Paula, he was wearing a badge that identified him as representing Pacific News Services of California, USA.
“Quite an experience, eh, General?” someone inquired in the row behind them.
“More boring than driving across Texas,” another voice drawled loudly in reply.
“The people don’t seem exactly wild with excitement,” Earnshaw said, closing the magazine and slipping it back in the pouch in front of him. “That’s what you get when a generation raised on electronics grows up. Gotta have new stimulation all the time.”
“Reality can be a good substitute,” Paula answered dryly.
“So long as you don’t get hooked on it.”
She had met him before their first briefing together by some of Foleda’s spooks from the Pentagon underworld. After Colonel Raymond finally talked her round, transfer orders had come through with amazing rapidity, assigning her to temporary duty with the UDIA. She had moved from Massachusetts to Washington within a week, and after a crash course in regulations and procedures for offplanet duties, she found herself in orbit aboard a USSF manned platform as one of a dozen trainees undergoing practical familiarization with a space environment. Talk about personal backgrounds had been discouraged, so she had learned little about her classmates, including Earnshaw. At that time, before their cover identities had been invented, she had known him only by his class pseudonym of “George,” and had herself been known to the rest simply as “Joyce.” It only occurred to her later that the entire class had probably consisted of final candidates for the same mission. She wondered how many people that last dozen had been selected from. Foleda certainly wasn’t taking any chances this time.
Earnshaw had struck her as capable and self-assured, which she respected, and the two of them had worked well together on group tasks, despite her stubborn independent streak and his perennial skepticism and refusal or inability to trust anyone, which at times exasperated her. On the other hand, he didn’t talk when he had nothing to say, and he wasn’t especially bothered about maintaining an image and having to be popular all the time. It was a pity he was in a profession that bred such cynicism and suspicion, she remembered thinking. He might have made a good scientist.
“What attracted me into science as a career?” she had answered once to a question he’d asked her. It was something they’d talked about during time off and breaks between classes aboard the space platform. “I guess because the challenges were demanding intellectually. It doesn’t leave room for pretentiousness or self-delusion, as you get in a lot of other areas—I’ve never been able to stand phoniness. It deals in facts and truth, its conclusions are unambiguous, and it tests them against reality.”
“The rest of the world has a lot to learn, eh?” he’d said, in the way he had of talking absolutely neutrally when he wanted to—usually when they drifted into something controversial—with no discernible expression or intonation, neither approving nor disapproving, agreeing nor disagreeing, encouraging nor discouraging. Somehow it always had the effect of opening her up more. She’d wondered if it was a result of gumshoe training.
“The rest of the world runs on deception and manipulation—what else can you say?” she’d answered. “It’s what people perceive and believe that matters. Whether or not the perceptions and beliefs happen to be true has nothing to do with it. What matters is that everyone buys the product, votes the right way, and behaves themselves. I don’t know who I blame most—cynical leaders, or the gullible people who listen to them. The irony of it all is that I should end up here, working for this outfit.” Yet, here she was.
On another occasion, while they were having lunch together in one of the Pentagon’s cafeterias during the three-week preparation period after they were selected, she had said, “You see, the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.”
“Who said that?” Earnshaw had asked.
“Bertrand Russell.” She’d waited a moment while he thought it over. “A philosopher.”
“Philosopher, eh?”
“Sometime back in the last century.”
“Just like that?”
“What do you mean, ‘just like that’?”
“That’s how he said it, just like that?”
“I guess so.”
Earnshaw had eyed her skeptically, then asked, “So how come he didn’t put ‘I think’ at the end of it?”
The pressure of the seat against her back increased as the transporter came round and decelerated into its stern-first final approach. The image on the screen had enlarged noticeably. Then the view cut to a close-up of the central part of the hub structure with its array of communications antennas, and the docking port’s outer doors swinging open to admit the ship. The sight of the bay inside loomed larger, ablaze with arc lamps, provoking a twinge of nervousness inside her. Her second mistake, she decided, had been to go ahead and think about it after she’d promised to.
A quarter of an hour later, the passengers collected their coats, bags, and other belongings, and exited through the forward door, moving awkwardly and using handrails for assistance in the low-gravity conditions near Tereshkova’s axis. They emerged onto a carpeted ramp, where smiling attendants in gray uniforms were waiting to usher them through to the reception lounge.