Prisoners of Tomorrow Read online

  Table of Contents

  ENDGAME ENIGMA PREFACE TO BAEN BOOKS EDITION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  VOYAGE FROM YESTERYEAR PROLOGUE

  PART ONE CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART TWO CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  PART THREE CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  EPILOGUE

  TWO EPIC SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS BY A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLING AUTHOR TOGETHER IN ONE VOLUME: New York Times bestseller Endgame Enigma and Promethius Award winner Voyage from Yesteryear.

  Endgame Enigma:

  New York Times bestseller. In the near future, Russia has built Valentina Tereshkova, a space station a mile in diameter, a shining city in space. Its builders claim that the orbiting space city is a peaceful Utopian experiment, but American intelligence reports raise the ominous possibility that the space colony is actually a weapon built by the last heirs of the Soviet dictators.When scientist Paula Bryce and trained agent Lew McCain travel to the station to investigate, they become prisoners in the station's high-tech prison facilities. Escape seems impossible but if they can't escape, Armageddon is inevitable. . . .

  Voyage from Yesteryear:

  Prometheus Award-winning novel. Late in our century, as nuclear war loomed, Americans sent a colonization spaceship manned by robots to an Earthline planet in the Alpha Centauri system. On arrival, the robot crew used recorded DNA information to bring forth a generation of infants, whom they educated in accordance with the principles enunciated by the founders of the American government. Generations later, Earth has rebuilt after the war, unfortunately with authoritarian governments which now can send manned starships with more colonists to the new world. But their distant relatives are serious about all that life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the inalienable rights of the individual stuff, principles to which the reconstructed America no longer gives even lip service. Those uppity colonials have such an attitude. . . .

  Books by James P. Hogan

  THE GIANTS SERIES

  The Two Moons

  The Two Worlds

  Mission to Minerva

  Code of the Lifemaker

  The Immortality Option

  The Cradle of Saturn

  The Anguished Dawn

  Bug Park

  Echoes of an Alien Sky

  Endgame Enigma

  The Genesis Machine

  Inherit the Stars

  The Legend That Was Earth

  Migration

  Moon Flower

  The Multiplex Man

  Paths to Otherwhere

  The Proteus Operation

  Realtime Interrupt

  Thrice Upon a Time

  The Two Faces of Tomorrow

  Voyage from Yesteryear

  Worlds in Chaos (omnibus)

  Cyber Rogues (omnibus)

  COLLECTIONS

  Catastrophes, Chaos and Convulsions

  Kicking the Sacred Cow

  Martian Knightlife

  Minds, Machines and Evolution

  Rockets, Redheads & Revolution

  PRISONERS OF TOMORROW

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1987 by James P. Hogan Endgame Enigma

  Copyright © 1982 by James P. Hogan Voyage From Yesteryear

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-8065-8

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First Baen paperback printing, July 2015

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hogan, James P.

  Prisoners of tomorrow / by James P. Hogan.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-4767-8065-8 (omni trade pb)

  I. Title.

  PR6058.O348P69 2015

  823'.914--dc23

  2015013073

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ENDGAME

  ENIGMA

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to express my gratitude to the following people for their help and advice in writing this book:

  Brent Warner of NASA’
s Goddard Space Center, Maryland, who spent many hours thinking about pendulums, gyroscopes, vortexes, and rotating geometries, and gallantly placed his sanity at risk by sharing for a while the weird kind of world that science-fiction writers inhabit. Jim Waligora of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston, for information on the physiology of low pressures and spacesuit design. Steve Fairchild of Moaning Cavern, Murphys, California, for thoughts on just about everything and his invaluable penchant for devil’s advocacy. Lynx Crowe of Berkeley, California, for suggestions on security methods. David Robb of Applied Perception Technologies, Minneapolis, for lots of data on space colonies. Cheryl Robinson, who helped hatch Lewis and his companions from a pile of barren notes. Owen Lock of Ballantine Books, for sharing some of his immense knowledge of the world of military intelligence. Kathy Sobansky, for her assistance with Russian language translations. And Takumi Shibano, for his guidance in penetrating Oriental inscrutability.

  And then there was Jackie, who doubled as electrician, plumber, handyman, auto mechanic, gardener, chauffeur, and carpenter, as well as being a mother to three small, rowdy boys—and never once complained about the hours a writer works. She made the book possible; they made it necessary.

  Dedication

  To EDWARD JOSEPH, my third son in a row, who,

  after three daughters in a row, restored my faith in mathematics

  by proving that the law of averages does work in the end,

  provided one gives it long enough.

  PREFACE

  TO BAEN BOOKS EDITION

  The original Bantam “Spectra” hardcover edition of Endgame Enigma was published in August 1987. When I conceived and wrote the book, which would have been in 1985 through 1986, neither I nor very many others—if any—guessed that the Soviet empire, which had withstood through the best part of a century so many predictions of imminent demise, was indeed tottering into its final few years, and by 1991 would be in the process of becoming history.

  The speed with which these events overtook the astonished world may be gauged from my own experience as a guest of the annual European science-fiction convention, which was held that year, 1991, in Volgograd (the former Stalingrad), in the USSR. A few days before I was due to leave on an Aeroflot flight from Dublin, an agitated travel agent called me to ask if I still wanted to make the trip.

  “Well, of course I do,” I replied, surprised. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because of everything that’s going on there?”

  “How do you mean? What’s going on?” I should explain that I haven’t owned a TV for longer than I can remember, and seldom open a newspaper—and then usually just to do the “Crossaire” cryptic crossword in the Irish Times. I regularly have to call the phone operator to check what day it is, and I’ve gone a week past the summertime clock adjustment without being aware of it.

  “There’s a civil war going on,” she told me, astounded. “Tanks in the streets, people getting shot.”

  “And the planes are still flying?”

  “Well, yes. . . . I suppose so.”

  I was thrilled. It was happening—ordinary people actually standing up to one of the most brutal regimes of modern times. “Well, if they can face tanks, the least I can do is be there,” I said. “Sure, I still want to go.”

  But so swift were the events that by the time I got there it was all over. When I checked in for the flight, the board behind the desk said DUBLIN-LENINGRAD-MOSCOW. By the time I returned, the flight announcement read MOSCOW-ST. PETERSBURG-DUBLIN. There were already pictures of the former Czar in windows and adorning souvenirs and gifts. There’s something reassuring in looking at the march of history and noting how consistently it seems that the oppressors end up being buried by their intended victims. Nero’s Rome has crumbled, but Christianity flourishes worldwide. The Nazis are gone, but the Jewish people prosper. And now Stalinism and the horrors of the gulag are no more, and Russia is again becoming a part of European culture.

  So what’s the point of reissuing a book set in circumstances that will never, now, come to pass? Well, for one thing, obviously, the story is still the same, and as the whole realm of science-fiction, fantasy, myth, and legend attests, the setting doesn’t have to be factual or even plausible for a story to do its job and be enjoyable. But beyond that, this is a story involving political realities that remain constant beneath the superficial ebbs and flows of the particular power rivalries that happen to constitute the present, and which it pays to remain mindful of precisely because they are no longer reiterated in every other morning’s headlines.

  The prime reason for forming government has always been to protect individuals from the violence they inflict on each other when each is left to face the prospect of survival as a law unto himself. Today’s democratic nation state—which appears, from the struggles witnessed in the twentieth century to be the most successful form of social organization to have emerged so far—seeks to achieve this through the establishment of one system of law before which all are judged equally, to which each individual forfeits the right to make and execute his own law privately. However, no such arbitration applies to affairs between governments, and the state of war that was once the lot of tribal groups everywhere reemerges periodically as collisions between nations. The authority of God is no longer compelling as a restraining influence—and was never all that notably effective, anyway—and those of us raised in the tradition of individualism and freedom are suspicious of moves toward an international order with all its socialist underpinnings and ramifications.

  What, then, will contain passions and excesses on the global scale? I have no glib formula to offer. Some place their faith in reason (is there not a certain attendant irony in such a phrase?), others in the spread of better understanding as modern communications dissolve barriers of prejudice and misunderstanding, while some have hope in the ability of technology and industry to eradicate the differences in wealth that they believe are the causes of strife. But the question needs to be asked, especially in these comparatively tranquil times, for it can never be repeated too often that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

  As half a century of ferocity has shown, ideologies in conflict will stop at nothing. In Endgame Enigma, it is Lew McCain’s grasp of human nature and the constancies of political reality that enable him to see through deceptions that others would have followed them to disaster. What deceptions? Well . . . that would be giving away too much. But as a gentle hint let’s just say for now that in keeping with any spy thriller that involves political intrigue and some out-at-the-edge technological ingenuity, nothing is quite what it seems.

  James P. Hogan

  Bray, County Wicklow

  Ireland

  April 1997

  PROLOGUE

  The Mig-55E fighter-bomber, code-named “Grouse” in Western military parlance, was rugged, easy to maintain, and equipped for a variety of ground-attack roles, making it popular for counterinsurgency operations among rulers of the Third World’s teetering Marxist regimes. Western military intelligence was interested in it, too, because it carried the first production version of the Soviet OC-27/K target-designating and -tracking computer, which the countermeasures experts were anxious to learn more about.

  Like most Soviet aircraft, ships, and ground units, the MIG carried a black box that could compute its position accurate to a few feet anywhere on the Earth’s surface with respect to an electronic navigation grid laid down by Soviet satellites. What Pilot Officer Abel Mungabo didn’t know when he took off on a training flight from Ziganda, one of the two Madagascar states into which the former Malagasy Republic had fragmented, was that aboard the Australian destroyer cruising fifty miles offshore was a group of professional mischiefmakers with some highly classified equipment, which in conjunction with transmissions from the USAF high-altitude bomber that just happened to be passing over at the time, was causing Mungabo’s black box to come up with wrong numbers. He turned back after becoming hopelessly lost over the oc
ean, but missed the tip of Madagascar completely and ended up off the coast of the South African mainland. There he ran out of fuel and bailed out.

  What happened after that was never cleared up officially. Mungabo swore upon his return that he saw the plane go down in the sea. The South Africans said he must have been mistaken: the plane crashed on the shore and exploded. They even produced pieces of twisted wreckage to prove it. But the Soviet engineers who arrived in Ziganda to examine the remains were suspicious. The damage, they said, was more consistent with demolition by explosives than with a crash. And it seemed strange that not one piece of the more sensitive electronics devices aboard the aircraft had been recovered. The South Africans shrugged and said that was the way it was, and the ensuing diplomatic accusations and denials continued for a while longer.

  But by that time, specialists in several Western military laboratories were already acquiring some interesting new toys to occupy them. The OC-27/K target-designating and -tracking computer found its way to the US Air Force Systems Command’s Cambridge Research Labs at Hanscom Field, near Bedford, Massachusetts.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dr. Paula Bryce brushed a curl of blond hair from her forehead and studied the waveforms on one of the display screens surrounding her desk. She tapped a code into a touchpad, noted the changes in one of the pulse patterns and the numbers that appeared alongside it, and commanded a reconfiguration of the circuit diagram showing on another screen. “That’s better,” she said. “D-three has to be the synch. E-six is coupled capacitively to the second-stage gate.”