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and they invariably attracted in droves precisely the kinds of people she
couldn't stand.
On one occasion during the campus period of her life, she found herself
representing the opposition to a group of sociology students who claimed to
have obtained positive results in a series of ESP card-guessing tests, which
they challenged the science fraternity to debate. Paula showed how a
comparable score could be derived by matching the results to a selected
portion of a random-number string, thus proving once again to the world that
sometimes people have lucky streaks, sometimes unlucky, and most of the time
they muddle along somewhere in between. The revelation would not have
surprised any experienced gambler, but her efforts made little impression on
the judges and the editors of the college magazine, who awarded the verdict to
the paranormalists on the grounds that "the influence of ESP has not been
disproved." And neither had the existence of Santa Claus ever been disproved,
Paula pointed out in disgust, but to no avail.
Deciding on a career in science or engineering but unable to face the prospect
of more years in academia, she followed the family tradition by opting for the
services, and joined the Air Force in 2000 at age eighteen.
After basic training she entered the USAF electronics school at Keesler AFB,
Missouri, qualified there for a grant scholarship, transferred to
Communications Command, and went on to complete her doctorate under Air Force
sponsorship at the University of Chicago. After that she moved to the Pentagon
to work on the performance evaluation of special-purpose military hardware,
which involved spells at NASA, Goddard, and the USAF research center at
Langley. Life settled down to a fairly humdrum routine in these years, and she
relieved the boredom through a protracted affair that she rather enjoyed with
a married officer twenty years her senior, called Mike. He was the kind of
nonconformist who attracted her, and had earned his promotions through
competence rather than the kind of social image-building that was typical in
any nation's peacetime officer corps. But after two years Mike was posted to
the Mediterranean, and for a change of scene Paula applied for a posting to
Systems Command. She was accepted, and eventually became a specialist in
analyzing purloined Russian and East European hardware.
In all this time her disdain for politics and economics persisted. In her
view, for anybody with the brains to see it, breeder reactors and fusion,
spaceflight, computers, and genetic engineering had laid Thomas Malthus firmly
to rest. There was no longer any necessary reason for people anywhere to
starve, or anything logical for them to continue fighting each other over. In
fact, wars squandered the resources that could have solved the problems that
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the wars were supposed to be about. Scientists had been saying for over fifty
years that there was plenty of energy and everything else, that the planet
wasn't overcrowded and would never come close, and that modern-day lifestyles
were incomparably healthier, safer, more prosperous, and more varied in
opportunities than "natural" living had ever been. But nobody told the public.
It wasn't news, and what the media didn't talk about didn't exist. Politicians
couldn't see it, or perhaps they pretended not to because it wasn't the kind
of talk that generated fears and attracted funding, and in the course of it
all they had created the cultural pessimism that was handing the twenty-first
century to Asia. That labeled them in Paula's book as just about the worst
class of people to be running the world.
And ineptitude seemed to be just as much a mark of whoever was responsible for
running the place she was in now, she thought wearily as she sat with her back
to the wall on the thinly padded cot and surveyed the austere cell that she'd
been cooped up in for she didn't know how long. The single unshaded bulb in
the ceiling was turned down sometimes but was never out, the intervals varying
erratically so that she had lost all track of time.
They had moved her here from a double cell, where the series of cellmates who
had come and gone had been so transparently planted that on one occasion, for
once since her capture, she had actually laughed out loud. If that was an
example of the Russian fiendishness that had kept the West paralyzed for a
century, then the West deserved to be eclipsed by Asia, she concluded.
First there had been Hilda, the East German, with her smile, blond fringe, and
baby-doll blue eyes. "I am your friend. It is a mistake that I am here in this
place. I know some important people outside, and I can help you after I am
released. But first I must know more about you. What is your name?
Where are you from?..."
Then there had been Luba, supposedly arrested for spreading subversive
propaganda among students in Rostov. Her line had been scare tactics: "They
tell the world that they've changed their ways, but they haven't. Nothing has
changed. They're still as bad. They will keep you from sleeping for a week or
more, leave you for days in a cell below freezing, and starve you until you
can't stand up. By the time you meet your own people again there will be no
marks. But you'll tell them what they want to know eventually. I like you. I
don't like to think of you doing something like that to yourself. Why not make
it easy?"
But the effect had been the opposite of that intended. Paula's initial fear
had given way to a resolve that stemmed from a growing feeling of contempt. As
the interminable interrogations went on without change of tune, the facade had
peeled away from Protbornov and his troupe to reveal them as
played-out actors in roles that had become mechanical and stylized. The
monotony was not, after all, a deliberate ploy to wear her down, as she'd
first thought. In fact it wasn't anything clever at all. She had vague,
incoherent recollections of her interrogators rambling on about religion,
social sciences, things that had nothing to do with the present situation --
anything to take up time, it seemed. The simple fact was that they had nothing
else to say, nowhere left to go, and they were waiting for somebody else to
figure out what to do.
She leaned forward on the cot to pull the blanket up around her shoulders and
tuck the edges under her knees. That was another thing: the room was always
either too chilly or too hot, but never comfortable. She snorted beneath her
breath. Was this really a measure of the opposition she was up against? If so,
it wasn't just mediocre, but infantile. People could do themselves a
disservice by overestimating their opponents, she reflected.
Maybe the West had been doing just that for a hundred years.
During the days, weeks, months -- however long she'd been shut up -- she had
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