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came, I recall. We weren't exactly wild about being invaded by all the
foreigners, but the money they paid was good."
They came out of the workshops and began walking along a wide corridor of
grimy, battle-scarred, lime-green walls. Meals were brought to each block and
eaten in the common mess area. "How did the Americans fit in?" McCain asked.
"They were always chasing around after the girls, which didn't please the
local lads at all. There were fights sometimes. The Germans preferred their
beer, but they liked ordering people around too much. Me, I had more time for
the Japanese than any of them. Very polite people -- always bow and smile sort
of apologetically before they knock anyone's teeth in."
"I thought it was the Irish who were supposed to be famous for all those
things."
"Is that a fact, now?"
"Great lovers, drinkers, and always good for a fight, isn't that what they
say?"
"You don't strike me as the sort of man who pays much attention to what people
say. How about yourself? Are you blessed with any Irish in the family?"
"I'm not sure," McCain replied, with deliberate vagueness.
"Surprising. I thought all Americans were obsessed with genealogy."
"I guess what I'm trying to say is that Earnshaw sounds more English to me, if
anything."
"Hmm, yes, now. Kind o' what I was thinkin' meself.... But you're not so bad a
fella for that."
They came out of the Core and turned south onto Gorky Street.
Compass directions in Tereshkova were the same as on Earth. The spin axis
through the hub defined north-south, with the direction that the hub docking
ports faced being arbitrarily taken as north. Following the convention of a
normal, spherical, inside-in and outside-out planet, the equatorial plane was
perpendicular to the axis and midway between its poles, dividing the entire
wheel of Tereshkova into a north zone and a south zone -- like a tire cut in
two along a line running around the middle of the tread. The equator itself
was the circle where this plane intersected "ground" level in the ring -- i.
e., the midline of the central valley floor. It followed that a person walking
along the equator -- or parallel to it at any level from the rim to the hub --
would be moving east or west. Once more the familiar convention applied: when
facing north, east was to the right and west was to the left. Which way the
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colony happened to be rotating had nothing to do with it.
Zamork lay off-center against the colony's south wall, on the eastern side of
Novyi Kazan. The front, which consisted of administrative offices and guard
quarters, faced the roadway and monorail tracks, with the road running above
the monorail at that part of the ring and entering Zamork on a higher level.
The rear of the administrative section opened onto the main thoroughfare known
as Gorky Street, which closed on itself to form a square dividing the inner
Core complex from the surrounding blocks that formed the rest of the facility.
The Core, which was also on two levels, contained the kitchens, laundry,
stores, a library, and workshops for such activities as machining, tailoring,
and shoemaking. Outside the Core were six prisoner blocks, two on each of
Gorky Street's remaining three sides. A walled exercise compound open to the
"sky" lay on the east side, behind A and B Blocks. Blocks
C and D were segregated for women prisoners, who wore light blue tunics
instead of gray and had their own, fenced-off portion of the east compound.
Segregation was not total, and the male and female inmates sometimes found
themselves working alongside each other in the Core and on some of the outside
labor details. This made communication between them routine, and for a
moderate outlay in ingenuity afforded ample opportunities for amorous
diversions. None of the women whom McCain got a chance to exchange a few words
with knew of an American fitting Paula's description, however.
As Luchenko had said on McCain's first day, a high emphasis was placed on
incentives. Prisoners could earn "points" for above-quota job performance, and
there was a store at which points could be converted into additional comforts
such as tobacco, candy, games, and materials for hobbies. Accrued points could
also be traded for bonus time off work. So, when a prisoner spent his savings
on the basics for a new pastime, he then found that he needed to behave
himself for the extra time that he now needed to enjoy it. Prisoners could
even debit and credit points among themselves by voucher, using individual
accounts maintained in the administrative computer system and known
collectively as "the Exchange." This could be useful for things like buying
illicitly distilled vodka -- for which a thriving underground market existed,
acquiring goods to barter on the colony's black market when on outside work
details, and settling gambling debts. None of it fitted with what McCain knew
of the way the Russians ran their prisons. Why, in fact, would the Russians
bring prisoners this far at all? He found it difficult to believe that it was
just to provide cheap labor for the mundane work. There had to be more to it.
As McCain and Scanlon entered B Block from Gorky Street, Oskar Smovak and
Leo Vorghas, who were also from B-3 billet, caught up with them. "Two points,
I'll lay you two points!" Oskar Smovak exclaimed to Vorghas as they joined the
line inside the mess area and began shuffling forward with their metal
messtins. At the table in front, a kitchen orderly in a smock that looked
greasier than the machine-shop coveralls was ladling stew out of a hatch in a
rubber-tired, stainless-steel trolley, covered in flaps and lids, that looked
like a scaled-down armored car. "No trotter ever timed a mile in under a
minute fifty. Three points!" Smovak was Czechoslovakian, a stocky, solidly
built cannonball of a man, with black hair, a ruddy face, and dark eyes
looking out over a Fidel Castro beard. He had a voice that was loud and
cutting, but most of the time it was because he was being jovial rather than
pugnacious, McCain had learned. He claimed to have been arrested because of a
relative of his who was caught photographing missiles being loaded into a
Russian submarine at Murmansk.
Leo Vorghas was a Lithuanian, in his early forties, perhaps, with an open,
high-browed face, thin, sandy hair, light-colored rounded eyes, and a pinkish
complexion. The breast pocket of his jacket always bulged with spectacle case,
ruler, and an assortment of more pens than anyone could ever know what to do
with. His claim to notoriety was that as a government statistician he had made
extra money on the side by selling details of Soviet economic disasters to
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Western journalists: they'd paid better money than
Western intelligence agencies had offered. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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