Prisoners of Tomorrow by James P. Hogan Read Free Book Online Page A

longer.
    Myra was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in her hand, studying selected items from the morning’s news offerings on a flatscreen pivoted to face her from the worktop opposite. Like him in her fifties, she was a tall, normally full-bodied woman, with a face that had managed to retain its composure and humorous set despite eyes and cheeks still sunken from a five-month illness that had lasted through winter. The skin on the backs of her hands was still loose from her not having fully regained her weight yet, and her dark, neatly trimmed hair showed gray streaks which she hadn’t attempted to disguise by tinting. They had been married for almost thirty years, and unlike the mysterious, withdrawn spy chiefs of the popular movies, Foleda discussed his work with her regularly. He didn’t understand how scriptwriters could expect people like him, on top of everything else, to carry on being furtive and secretive after they got home. Maybe they did it to give themselves an excuse for introducing beautiful women into their plots—usually Chinese, for some obscure reason—who made their livings by coaxing secrets out of semicomatose government officials in between bouts of frenzied lovemaking. If so, Foleda had no objection—the image was good for recruiting.
    “The rain’s stopped,” Myra said as Bernard came in and hung his jacket over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “It looks as if it’s going to be cloudy today. Nice and cool for a change.”
    “Yes, I already looked. We could use it.” Bernard walked over to the chef, took out two plates of scrambled eggs, ham, and a hotcake, and pressed a button to start the toaster. His wife poured the coffee while he sat down. The item on the screen was about a Japanese astronaut who had scored a first by achieving escape velocity under his own power with a series of hops and a leap off the surface of Deimos, the smaller of the two moons of Mars. “So maybe the old nursery rhyme isn’t so silly after all, if we just change it slightly,” the commentator babbled cheerfully in a way that Bernard found indistinguishable from banal at that time of morning. “The cow jumped off the moon, ho-ho!”
    Foleda snorted. “What else do we have?”
    Myra touched a button on the handpad lying beside the coffeepot, and a yellow light on the wallpanel by the stove came on to indicate that the house-manager was active. “Cancel,” she said in a slightly raised voice. The picture vanished and was replaced by a selection of options. “Five-three,” Myra instructed, and a new list appeared. “Poland,” she said. A headline replaced the list: more warsaw demonstrations. Myra glanced at Bernard. He nodded. “Yes,” she said at the panel. Then, “X-out, out.” The yellow light went off.
    The item concerned Soviet responses to the latest round of protests and strikes in Poland and East Germany. As usual the media were emphasizing the military aspect, with dramatically narrated scenes of troops confronting crowds, NATO units being put on alert—Foleda recognized one shot of rolling tanks as being months old, with no connection to current events at all—and snippets of military and political spokesmen being questioned about the risk of a general European escalation. That was the kind of material that delivered audiences to advertisers, and was only to be expected. Western intelligence had been following the developments behind the present situation since long before the public became aware of them, however, and opinions were that the likelihood of any real shooting was remote.
    The Soviets had accelerated their military buildup in the final decades of the previous century. Their intention had not been so much to provoke war, for they had no more desire than anyone else to be devastated again if they could avoid it, but, taking their cue from the woeful performance of the democracies at Munich in response to Hitler’s aggressions, to gamble that, as before,