CHAPTER SIX
There was a subdued humming sound, and buried within it a periodic resonance that came and went. Lewis McCain lay listening to it with his eyes closed, allowing the preoccupation to keep other thoughts from entering his mind for a few moments longer. He was aware that he had just woken up. The hum, with its rising and falling undertone, was not something familiar. He was not in a place that he was accustomed to waking up in.
He opened his eyes and saw a white ceiling with an air-conditioner vent off to one side of his field of vision. He moved his head to look at it. His head felt muzzy; the image was blurred, and swam. An ache shot between his temples and down the back of his neck as he strained to rise. He abandoned the effort, letting his head fall back on the pillow, and lay for a while until he could breathe more easily. Then he rolled over onto his side and opened his eyes again.
The cot was in a small, windowless, sparsely furnished room containing a plain table and a single upright chair with his clothes draped over them. Above the table was a shelf with some books and a few other oddments. The walls were dark blue up to a black strip running at half height, and cream from there to the ceiling. Slowly his head cleared, and the surroundings registered as the cell he’d been occupying for—how long had it been? three days? four days?—inside the KGB Internal Security Headquarters at Turgenev. The door was solid, with a small grille and sliding panel on the outside, and led out to the corridor. In the opposite corner was a partition screening a tiny washbasin and toilet.
Moving slowly and cautiously, he raised himself onto an elbow. Pain stabbed through his head once more. He held the position this time, and after a few seconds the pain eased. He sat up, pushed the single blanket aside, and lowered his legs over the side of the cot. A wave of dizziness swept over him, then nausea. He braced himself for the effort of having to make a sudden dash to the toilet, but the feeling passed. He pulled on the baggy, beltless pants and canvas shoes he’d been given in place of his own clothes, stood up gingerly, and moved to the table. One of the books on the shelf above was a travelogue about nineteenth-century life among the Yakut hunters. McCain took it down and opened the back cover to reveal three small notches cut into the edge, about an eighth of an inch apart near the top. He pressed a fourth notch with his thumbnail, replaced the book, and went behind the partition to the washbasin to rinse his face. He felt unusually lead-limbed and sluggish when he walked.
He had seen nothing of Paula since their arrest. The interrogations had been constant and relentless, but so far he hadn’t been treated improperly. That wasn’t necessarily grounds for comfort, however. No doubt the Soviets intended to exploit the propaganda opportunities of the situation to their fullest, and had no intention of compromising their advantage by laying themselves open to counteraccusations. But how long that political condition might persist was another matter, he reflected as he wiped cold water from his eyes and peered at his reflection in the polished-metal mirror cemented to the wall. Certainly the Russians would be in no hurry to ease the pressure on the US, which probably had something to do with his not being permitted to communicate with his own authorities back on Earth. In fact, he had been told nothing to indicate even if the incident was public knowledge yet.
He had just emerged from the washroom and was about to put on his shirt, when the panel behind the grille on the door slid aside and voices sounded outside. A pair of eyes scrutinized him for a moment, and then came the sound of the door being unlocked. It opened, and a tall, lean man with gray hair and a pointed beard entered, followed by a younger, darker-skinned companion. Both were wearing white, hip-length physician’s smocks and gray-white check pants. There were also two uniformed guards, who remained outside in the corridor when the bearded man swung the door shut. McCain tensed, but the manner of the two was not threatening.
“Well, how do you feel this morning?” the bearded man inquired. His tone was intermediate between genial and matter-of-fact, as if he presumed that McCain knew what he was talking about. McCain looked at him and said nothing. “Fatigued? Not quite coordinated? A little hazy in the head, eh?” He sat back against the edge of the table and folded his arms to look McCain up and down. The younger man put down a black medical bag that he had been holding. “Well, come on,” the bearded man said after a short pause. “The patient can hardly help us look after his interests if he won’t say anything, can he?”
“What interests?” McCain asked. “What are you talking about?”
The bearded man regarded him curiously. “You don’t know who I am, do you?” he said.
A pause. “No.”
“Oh, dear.” The bearded man glanced aside at his colleague. “I think we may have a complete block here.” Then, back at McCain, “My name is Dr. Kazhakin. We have met before, I assure you—several times, in fact. You’ve been a little sick, you understand.” He gestured nonchalantly. “It’s not uncommon among people unaccustomed to an offplanet environment. Space-acclimatization sickness. The weightlessness during the trip up plays a part, and so does the excess of cosmic rays, but primarily it’s an upset of the balance mechanism caused by adapting to a rotating structure. The effects can be quite disruptive until the nervous system learns to compensate.”
“Really?” McCain sounded unconvinced. “And that causes amnesia?”
“We put you under a rather strong sedative,” Kazhakin explained. “You’ve been out for a couple of days. What you’re feeling is the aftereffect. Sometimes the memory can be impaired slightly—rather like a bump on the head.”
Although McCain’s expression didn’t change, inwardly he felt alarmed. Kazhakin was trying to justify memory loss and symptoms of the aftereffects of drugs. As McCain knew well, some extremely potent substances were available to psychological researchers and therapists, and to military and police interrogators. Although there was no truly reliable “truth drug” of the kind beloved in fiction, combined chemical assaults of different stimulants and depressants affected different individuals in different ways, and in general anything was possible. Suddenly he had the worried feeling that perhaps his interrogation mightn’t have been so gentlemanly after all.
“Let’s have a look, then,” Kazhakin said. He motioned for McCain to sit on the edge of the cot, then inspected both his eyes, his tongue and mouth, and dabbed around on his chest and back with a stethoscope while the assistant prepared a blood-pressure gauge. “And we’ll want sample bottles for some blood and urine,” Kazhakin told him.
Tattered remnants of recollections were beginning to float back. He saw the image of a man in a Russian major general’s uniform, with black, crinkly hair showing gray streaks, bright, penetrating eyes beneath puffy lids, and a craggy, heavy-jowled face. “Of course it’s obvious you’re not a journalist . . . Did you know what the file contained? . . . Which organization sent you? . . .” There was another Russian there, too, inseparable from the general as part of the image swimming in McCain’s memory, but the details remained obscure.
Kazhakin was watching McCain’s face as he inflated the bulb of the sphygmomanometer. “Brain starting to function again now, is it? Some things coming back?”
“What day is this?” McCain asked.
“May fourth. You abused your guest privileges on the first, you fell sick the day after, and you’ve been out for two days, as I said.”
If that were so, there ought to have been one notch in the book, not three, McCain thought. It was strange that he had woken up remembering to update his tally of days—or at least awakenings—and yet had no recollection of having done it before. It pointed to his having been out of control of his faculties for longer than Kazhakin was claiming. That would have been consistent with potent drugs, which was not exactly a reassuring thought.
“You probably feel a bit heavy and weak, but in fact you’ve lost a little weight,” Kazhakin said. “I’ll give you some pills to pick you up—no tricks, I promise—and we’ll put you on an enrichment diet to build up your strength. I’m sure that General Protbornov wouldn’t want you thinking of us as inconsiderate hosts.” He saw an involuntary flicker in McCain’s eyes. “Ah, so you remember the name, eh? That’s good.” Kazhakin unwound the bandage from McCain’s arm and smirked at him with undisguised sarcasm. “Yes, we’ll soon have you back to normal, Mr. Earnshaw of Pacific News Services, California. I do hope your readers won’t be too upset if they have to put up with your being out of circulation for a while.”
McCain watched expressionlessly as Kazhakin handed the sphygmomanometer back to the assistant and wrote some numbers onto a chart. It was obvious from the circumstances of his and Paula’s capture that the cover story had capsized immediately. He wondered how much more—that he didn’t even know about—might have started taking water since, or already have foundered completely to join it.