Prisoners of Tomorrow Read Free Page B

He came back to the table and sat down at last.
    Paula looked away and gazed at the image of Valentina Tereshkova again while she thought over what had been said. So, if it was a disguised battle platform, in combination with the other weaponry that the Soviets were known to have deployed in space, it would outgun everything the West had been putting up for the past decade. But why did that call for the meeting in progress now, and in particular her presence at it? Then it came to her suddenly what the meeting was all about. She jerked her head away from the screen to look at Raymond and Foleda. “That file is still up there,” she said.
    “Right on the nail, again,” Foleda confirmed. “Magician managed to get a message through to us after he was arrested—it doesn’t matter how—saying that as a precaution, he created a backup copy of the file. Apparently the Soviets never found out about it.” Foleda gestured at the screen. “It’s up there right now, inside a section of Mermaid’s databank, stored invisibly under a special access code. We have that code. What we don’t have is somebody up there who would know how to break into a Russian computer system and use it.”
    Paula stared hard at him as the meaning of it all became clear. They had risked using a nonspecialist, and the gamble had failed. But by a small miracle, the prize was still waiting to be claimed. This time they wanted an expert.
    She swallowed and shifted her gaze from one to another of the faces staring back at her questioningly. “Now wait a minute . . .” she began.

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