Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  He shrugged. He smiled. “At the very least, you will have a free first-class vacation in Paris, which, I may assure you, is hardly a fate worse than death, n’est-ce pas?”

  It had always seemed that André really was hiding something behind his series of phony secret identities, but now, looking into his eyes out here in the chilly damp, with the lights of the San Fernando Valley far below just barely glowing beneath the bank of fog, it seemed to Jerry that André Deutcher was at last speaking from the heart. André might still be trying to sell him something, but Jerry could not deny that everything André had said was the bitter truth.

  If he stayed with what was left of the Program, sooner or later, one way or another, what had happened to Rob Post was going to happen to him. If it hadn’t happened already.

  Inside, the party was starting to run down, guests sitting listlessly around the guttering fireplace, leaning up against walls with half-filled paper cups hanging in their hands.

  Running down. Like Rob Post himself, blearily surveying the detritus from the kitchen doorway, like the Program itself, facing the endless morning after.

  Rob Post had been a friend of his father’s since before Jerry was born, and Jerry’s most potent early memory was of being rousted from bed by Daddy in the middle of the night, handed a huge bowl of chocolate ice cream swimming in dark gooey Hershey’s by Rob, and then sitting between them on a dusty old couch in a darkened living room, watching the TV with the ice cream bowl in his lap, gobbling it up with a big serving spoon and smearing it all over his pajamas—a bleary four-year-old suddenly wakened into an unreal hog heaven.

  “Sandy’s gonna really read me out over this, Jerry, and you’re not gonna understand till you’re grown up,” Daddy said. “Do you have any idea why I’m letting you eat all the chocolate ice cream with syrup you can handle tonight?”

  “Because you love me, Daddy?” Jerry said, blissfully digging into it.

  Daddy hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. “So you’ll remember this moment all of your life,” Daddy said in a silly solemn voice. “You’re too young to understand what you’re going to see tonight, but you’re not too young to understand a whole pint of Häagen-Dazs.”

  “It’s an experiment, Jerry,” Uncle Rob told him. “The greatest moment in human history is about to happen and you’re alive to see it, but you’re too young to remember it with understanding. So what your Dad and I are trying to do is implant a sensory engram in your long-term memory so that when you grow up you can call it up and be here now with your adult consciousness.”

  Uncle Rob giggled. “And if you eat so much you puke, so much the better for your future recall,” he said.

  Jerry didn’t puke, but he did remember. The bittersweet cold softness and double-good hit of chocolate syrup over chocolate ice cream still never failed to time-warp him back to that couch in the living room, watching the Moon Landing with Daddy and Rob.

  He had been hooked on chocolate ice cream ever since, to the detriment of his endless battle against the scale, but he could sit there in the body of a blissful four-year-old and watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon in real time with his adult consciousness, transforming the memory of somatic joy into the deeper joy of true understanding.

  The strange pearlescent television-gray lunar landscape coming up under the lander camera to the laconic crackle of far-off voices from Houston . . . The hollow descending hiss of the retrorockets through the metal bulkhead . . . “The Eagle has landed.” And then the bulky figure descending that ladder in slow motion . . . And Armstrong’s hesitant voice blowing the scripted line as his foot came down on the gray pumice and changed the destiny of the species forever. “That’s, uh, one small step for man, uh, one giant leap for mankind.”

  Oh yes, as a boy Jerry had only to taste chocolate ice cream to be transported back to the moment whose memory would shape his whole life, and later, he had only to imagine the taste of chocolate ice cream covered with Hershey’s bittersweet chocolate syrup to replay the Moon Landing through an adult perception that could thank Dad and Rob from the bottom of his heart for the best present any four-year-old could ever have, for giving his adult self this clear and joyous memory, for the dream they had knowingly and lovingly implanted within him.

  That was how much the space program meant to Dad and Rob, and while Dad never did much more than join the L-5 Society and the Planetary Society and every space lobby in between, Rob Post had followed the dream and given it his all.

  He had joined the Program fresh out of Cal Tech and landed a job as a glorified draftsman on the Mariner project. He was at best a mediocre engineer, but as he worked his way up the ladder, it became apparent that he had a certain talent for project direction, for getting better engineers than he could ever be to work together toward a common goal. He believed in mankind’s destiny as a space-going species with an ion-blue purity, he could translate that passion into belief in the project at hand, and when he was on, he could infect a team with that same passionate innocence.

  He got to work on Voyager and on the shuttles, and he gave up smoking dope when the piss tests came in and he had to, and he took long backpack hikes in the Sierras and worked out every day, for he was still under fifty and he had accumulated clout, and if Mars was out of the question, he certainly had a good shot at a Moonbase tour if they got one built before he turned sixty and if he kept his nose clean and his body in shape. Or anyway that was the fantasy upon which his whole life was focused before the Challenger explosion.

  With a father who had turned him loose in his vast, untidy collection of musty science-fiction magazines, paperback books, and model spacecraft before he was old enough to read, and Rob Post for a favorite “uncle,” Jerry knew what he was going to be when he grew up before he was old enough to know what growing up meant.

  He was going to be an astronaut. He was going to float out there, weightless in the vasty deep. He was going to walk the pale gray pockmarked lunar surface, and search for remains of life on Mars. He was going to the asteroids and Titan, and who knows, it was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility, he was young, the Program was moving fast, life extension loomed on the horizon, he just might live long enough to be among the first to set foot on a planet circling another sun.

  “The Moon maybe, Mars, if I’m incredibly lucky, but that’s as far as an old fart like me is going to get, kiddo,” Rob would tell Jerry in the days when he was beavering his way through high school. “But you, hey, you were lucky enough to be born at the right time, Jerry. You crack those books, and by the time you’re out of college, we’ll have a lunar base. Mars before you’re thirty. Titan before you’re fifty. You could live to see the first starship launched. You could even be on it. You’re going to live in the golden age of space exploration, kiddo. It’s up to you. You can be one of the people who makes it all happen.”

  So Jerry ground his way through high school, and, with his good marks and an effusive letter of recommendation from old grad Rob Post, got into Cal Tech, where he majored in aerospace engineering.

  Jerry busted his balls his first three years at Cal Tech. Almost literally. The work was hard, but he was a practiced student by now and a totally committed one, and he aced his way to the top 5 percent with little difficulty.

  But he knew that he had to do more than make the top of his class to get into astronaut training. He had to get himself into physical condition, and for a nerdish grind with no interest in sports, a naturally endomorphic body, and an addiction to chocolate ice cream, that wasn’t easy.

  Rob Post was there for him then too, and a good thing, for Dad was the quintessential couch potato. Rob introduced him to long backpacking hikes in the Sierras. He bought him a set of weights for his birthday. By the middle of Jerry’s sophomore year, he had shed his blubber, built himself a set of muscles, and was doing better with girls than he ever had in his life, learning to get his endorphins charged via sex and sweat instead of chocolate.

  And then, during
his junior year, the Challenger exploded, and took the civilian space program with it, or rather the long hiatus between the Challenger disaster and the next shuttle launch exposed and finalized what in retrospect could be seen to have already happened.

  The bright future in space that had seemed inevitable when Jerry was a four-year-old never happened. No space station by 1975. No lunar base by 1980. No Mars by 1985. Oh yes, the 1970s and early ’80s were a golden age of unmanned space exploration, with the incredible pictures from Mars, and the Jovian moons, and the rings of Saturn, but the real space program—the manned space program, the actual raison d’être, the evolution of humanity into a space-going species—essentially sat there spinning its wheels for the decade between the last Apollo and the long-delayed advent of the space shuttle.

  And by that time, Ronald Reagan was President, and military budgets were soaring, and Star Wars started gobbling up space funding, and the Air Force already had its hooks deep into the shuttle, into NASA, and about 40 percent of the payloads were already military even before the Challenger exploded.

  Those in the know, like Rob Post, knew damn well that the Challenger had been destroyed by political pressure to launch outside the shuttle’s safe-flight envelope, or as Rob had put it at the time, “Give me a thermometer reading fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and I’ll gladly get on one tomorrow.”

  But it took a two-year hiatus of bureaucratic ass-covering for NASA to finally work up its courage to launch Discovery, and by that time the Agency’s spirit was broken, and its administrative structure had been thoroughly militarized, and there was a huge backlog of military payloads, and the civilian space budget had been cut to the bone and then some, and the doom of any visionary American civilian manned space program had been quite thoroughly sealed.

  When the dust cleared, endless Star Wars pilot-study funding had been so cunningly hardwired into the budgetary process that it had a life of its own. Even the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a credible bogeyman made no difference, especially after Saddam Hussein conveniently allowed the Pentagon to nominate the entire Third World as a replacement. The idea of a career as a civilian astronaut had become pathetically ludicrous by the time Jerry graduated.

  Rob Post was there to offer Jerry advice and aid again, but now it was of a sadly different sort. By this time, Rob had advanced into the upper middle-management levels at Rockwell, a spacecraft project manager with a good track record at a time when contracts for civilian projects were becoming virtually nonexistent.

  During Jerry’s senior year at Cal Tech, Rob had held his nose, sighed, and taken the job of manager on the Advanced Maneuverable Bus project. “It’s that or join the army of the unemployed,” Rob insisted wanly. “Besides, it’s not as if the damn thing doesn’t have potential civilian applications. . . .”

  The AMB was typical of the myriad low-profile cheap projects that kept Star Wars alive during the scaled-back “Bright Pebbles” hiatus before European outrage at the Latin American interventions finally gave the defense industry what it needed to push its deployment through Congress as Battlestar America. The AMB was basically an upscaling and redesign of the MX fourth-stage warhead bus, supposedly to be used to deploy scores of cheap little orbital interceptors, at least as far as Congress was concerned.

  But what the Air Force had really commissioned behind that smoke screen was a platform that could be launched into Low Earth Orbit with a variable mixed payload of at least twenty reentry vehicles and/or boost-phase interceptors. It had to be able to station-keep for a year without refueling, change orbits up to a point, juke and jerk to avoid satellite killers, and launch its payloads with a high degree of accuracy.

  “Shitcan the warheads and interceptors, give it a big fuel tank and corresponding thrusters, mount a pressure cabin on it, and you’ve got yourself a space jeep to take you from LEO to GEO,” Rob would muse dreamily.

  When Jerry graduated, Rob was able to hire him on as an entry-level wage slave on the AMB project. But even a naïf like Jerry could see what Rob was doing once he got to Rockwell. Everyone on the project knew it. Everyone was collaborating in the deception, knowing, of course, that it was Rob Post who would take the flak if and when the Air Force copped to what was going on.

  What was going on was that Rob Post, like the Air Force itself, was pursuing his own hidden agenda. He was using the Air Force funding to design a Low Orbit to Geosynchronous Orbit ferry with the capability to take crews to a GEO space station that didn’t exist in the guise of giving them their Advanced Maneuverable Bus.

  The thrusters were far bigger than anything a warhead and interceptor bus needed. The so-called refueling collar was being designed to take a large fuel tank neatly balanced along the long axis to handle a 1-g thrust. The bus platform itself was being designed to accommodate forty interceptors so that a pressure cabin would have room atop it. And so forth.

  Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that Rob was smoking grass again, or perhaps vice versa. Though he had stopped when the piss tests came in, he had started again sometime during the early stages of the AMB project, coming home to Granada Hills, toking up, sitting down at the computer, and designing, on his own time, the pressure cabin, and the expanded fuel-tank module that would turn the AMB into a space ferry that could take ten people from LEO to GEO.

  Eventually, of course, the inevitable happened.

  The Air Force gave the design a thorough going-over before the AMB went to prototype, and some bright boy realized what was happening. Early one bleary Monday morning, the piss patrol showed up in force and had everyone working on the project urinate into test tubes in plain view.

  Such snap mass random testing was not quite unheard-of, but when they took blood samples to nail down the evidence of any infraction of the purity regs, everyone knew that the plug was about to be pulled.

  Somehow Rob Post’s piss tested out pure, but they caught him with borderline traces of cannabinol in the blood sample, which might or might not have washed him out of the Program for life if he had chosen to fight a dismissal in court. So instead of trying to nail him directly, they got cute about it.

  They canceled the AMB project prior to prototype, which cost Rockwell big bucks, and they made it quite clear that Rockwell’s chances of landing the replacement program would be slim and none if Rob Post was still on their payroll. What was more, he must not be permitted to resign, he had to be forthrightly fired for mismanagement of Air Force funding.

  This the Rockwell management was far from reluctant to do, when they toted up how much the cancellation of the AMB had cost them. Rob Post was rather loudly fired, and Rockwell got the sat-sled contract.

  Rob, as they say, never worked in the Program again, or at least not directly, eking out a precariously unpredictable if not exactly penurious living as a technical consultant on various non-Program projects via his many connections in the California high-tech and space communities. Meanwhile, he threw these parties every month or so to maintain his sad and forlorn connection to people like Jerry who were still in the Program.

  Such as it was.

  Jerry looked away from the tired party scene behind the glass balcony doors, away from André Deutcher’s knowing eyes, and up into the Southern California night sky. But the stars were hidden by the bank of offshore fog and were nowhere to be seen.

  Jerry finally looked back at André, who lounged against the deck railing, staring him down and puffing out a long, languid plume of rich Havana smoke that melted into the fog.

  “It is a sad time here for people like you and Rob, oui, a sad time for all of you,” André said, nodding toward the scene in the living room beyond the glass, which Rob was crossing in their direction. “Do not think I do not understand, Jerry,” he said with an air of worldly commiseration. “You are an American, but you believe in something that your country no longer does. . . .”

  “Yeah, well at least I’m still in the Space business,” Jerry drawled in a phony Groucho Marx voice, waving h
is cigar and blowing out about five dollars’ worth of contraband Havana in what even he realized was a futilely foolish attempt to ape André’s panache.

  For that matter, he didn’t really like the taste of tobacco smoke; for him smoking this cigar was what passed for a small act of defiance of the national purity regs under which most of the people at this party, himself included, were constrained to exist if they wished to remain employable. Tobacco still wasn’t on the piss list, but Cuban tobacco still had the tiny thrill of safe danger that pot must have had in the old days when a trace of it in your urine didn’t mean you were out of the Program for life, like poor old Rob.

  Oh yeah, he was still in the Space business, all right. He still had a job at Rockwell, ironically enough with the team developing the propulsion and maneuvering systems for the sat sleds, which had replaced the canceled AMB. And to turn the screw a little further on Rob Post, it was Rob’s unauthorized upscaling of the AMB design that had put the sat-sled bug in the Air Force’s ear, though of course no one would ever admit it.

  Why not go right to something capable of taking payloads from LEO to GEO that could also do the AMB’s job in the bargain? Rob’s design for the refueling collar and the big mother fuel tank proved quite usable. Just add big throttleable stop-and-start thrusters, a maneuvering and control system, a platform just big enough to hold the whole thing together, and a clamp-on system for payload modules.

  Voilà, the sat sled, which could not only deploy warheads and interceptors in Low Earth Orbit, but which could maneuver killer satellites at high speed and ferry spy satellites to GEO, and at a price not much greater than that of procuring the single-purpose AMB.