Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  Blood and shit continued to smash against the Embassy building and pour down out of the sky into the courtyard. People were running around screaming. And, Bobby numbly realized, empty wine bottles and stones and bricks were now coming in over the wall too. . . .

  “ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTEN-SHUN!” a great amplified voice shouted out above the chaos.

  A black Marine officer had emerged from the building and stood at the Embassy entrance shouting into a bullhorn cranked up to maximum volume. “WE ARE GOING TO NEURONIC DISRUPTERS! WE ARE GOING TO NEURONIC DISRUPTERS! MARINES, INSERT YOUR PLUGS! CIVILIANS, BACK UP AGAINST THE BUILDING AND PRESS YOUR THUMBS IN YOUR EARS!”

  Bobby forgot the blood and shit that was still splattered all over his pants and the puke drying on his shoes in his haste to get as far away from the wall and the disrupters as possible. He had never experienced a neuronic disrupter, but he, and everyone else crowding back up against the Embassy building, knew full well what was about to happen.

  The neuronic disrupter cranked out a high volume of carefully chosen subsonic and ultrasonic frequencies that did extremely unpleasant things to the human nervous system. It stimulated a somatic panic response. It made it literally impossible to think. It vibrated the skull and the auditory apparatus to create one killer of an instant migraine. It loosened sphincter muscles, destroying bowel and bladder control.

  It was the crowd-control weapon of choice of the American forces in Latin America, touted as noninjurious and humane by the United States, reviled as outrage against human dignity by the European media, who loved to show images of hapless Latin Americans clutching their guts, holding their heads, and shrieking in agony like animals.

  Bobby himself had often enough shared in the conventional outrage, but now, terrified, infuriated, reeking of blood and shit and vomit, with his back up against the wall of his Embassy and his thumbs pressed tightly in his ears, it was another story.

  “ACTIVATE NEURONIC DISRUPTERS!”

  The disrupters were directional, but some backwash was inevitable, and even with his thumbs pressed tightly in his ears, Bobby felt a horrible vibration, as if a miniature jackhammer were at work on the top of his head. He found himself pressing harder and harder back against the building wall, fighting the urge to break and run. His bowels felt like shimmering jelly, and it took an enormous effort to keep from pissing in his pants.

  It couldn’t have gone on for more than five minutes, but it felt like hours. People around him fell to their knees. Some of them had wet stains about their crotches. What was going on on the other side of the wall, where the mob was getting it full blast, was difficult to imagine.

  “DEACTIVATE NEURONIC DISRUPTERS!”

  And all at once it was over.

  The headache pain was gone, as was the urge to flee to nowhere in particular. His bowels firmed up, and he no longer had the overwhelming urge to piss.

  And there was a strange hushed silence. No more mob noises. No more ordure and missiles sailing over the wall. People stood around numbly, smeared with filth, stealing sidelong glances at each other.

  A Marine guard deactivated the charge on the gate. A sergeant formed up two neat lines of troops. The gate was opened, and the two files of Marines trotted out through it to reestablish their cordon.

  “IT IS NOW SAFE TO LEAVE THE COMPOUND,” the Marine officer said through his bullhorn. “PLEASE DO SO IN AN ORDERLY FASHION. REMEMBER—YOU ARE AMERICANS.”

  And indeed, people who a few moments before had been running around and screaming in panic dutifully and politely formed themselves up into a rough triple line and filed out through the open gate quietly, without any pushing or shoving.

  Bobby stood there in the street for a moment, surveying the wreckage and trying to sort out his feelings.

  The gutter and the sidewalks were littered with debris—placards, banners, throwing sticks, overturned buckets of blood and shit, an Uncle Sam effigy that had been trampled underfoot, puddles of piss, rocks, bricks, broken bottles.

  He shuddered as he imagined what it must have been like out here only a few minutes ago, thousands of people clutching their aching heads, shitting and pissing in their pants, fleeing in animal panic, just like the Latin Americans he had seen scores of times on television.

  He crossed the street and began walking toward the Place de la Concorde Métro stop, past the line of Marine guards, who stood staring stony-faced straight ahead, at ease with their M-86s slung on their shoulders.

  He paused. He looked up and behind him at the façade of the American Embassy.

  It was encrusted with blood and shit.

  And so was he.

  But neither had been dishonored.

  For despite it all, his American passport was in his pocket, and despite the terrible provocation, not a Marine had opened fire, not a rioter had died.

  And the Stars and Stripes still waved in the breeze over the ordure-encrusted Embassy, transforming the blood and shit itself into a badge of honor.

  And in this most unlikely of all moments, making Bobby prouder than he had ever been before to be an American.

  CARSON TO RUN FOR SENATE

  Representative Harry B. Carson today announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for United States Senator and formed a Senatorial campaign committee.

  Party leaders expect no serious opposition to nomination of the popular Congressman from Dallas who has claimed much of the credit for spearheading the Renationalization Act in the House. State Democratic leaders refused public comment, but the long faces at party headquarters told the whole story. A preliminary phone poll shows Carson favored over the strongest possible Democratic candidate by a margin of 27 percent.

  —Dallas Straight Shooter

  “Are we going to wait forever?” Franja groaned.

  Sonya glanced across the dining room table at Jerry, who sat there stabbing nervously at his half-eaten pâté with his fork and staring into space. “Shall I, Jerry?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Shall I serve the salmon?”

  “Jesus, how can you two think of food at a time like this?” Jerry snapped irritably.

  Sonya shrugged. “We’ve waited over an hour already,” she said. “We can sit here staring at each other or we can sit here and eat. What else can we do?”

  When Bobby hadn’t shown up on time for dinner, she had waited ten minutes and then angrily served up the pâté de canard, leaving his plate empty. Let him miss the entrée, it would serve him right!

  Fifteen minutes later, when he still hadn’t turned up, the anger had turned to worry. Now she had passed into a perverse state of mind where paranoia and anger mingled. Her mother’s heart was filled with fearful fantasies of what might have happened to Bobby, but if nothing really had happened to justify this behavior, he was going to wish that it had when he finally got home!

  “At least now that you and Pashikov have finally finished pulling off your stock market coup, I would have thought you might finally start caring about your family again!” Jerry shot back.

  “Oh no, not that again!” Sonya moaned.

  “Oh yes, that again!” Jerry said. “Or is that too much to ask from the assistant director of the economic strategy department of Red Star, S.A.?”

  “I’m going to serve the salmon!” Sonya declared, and she stomped off into the kitchen, set the oven for two minutes of microwave re-warm, and slapped the ON button angrily.

  It had been like this for weeks now. Kaminev had sworn them to secrecy, and Ilya had made it clear that that emphatically included Sonya’s American husband. . . .

  She and Ilya had been working endless days and evenings analyzing the holdings of every European company in which Red Star held an interest, preparing scores of economic-impact papers, and doing most of it themselves so as to minimize the possibilities of leaks to the staff, some of whom just might have started trading options on their own if they knew what was going to happen. It had been exhausting but exciting, and, in its
way, a welcome escape from Jerry’s endless depressive bitching and whining.

  At least to hear him tell it, Boris Velnikov, the chief project engineer that the Soviet Union had imposed upon ESA, was strictly a bureaucrat who hadn’t done any real hands-on work for years, and a Russian chauvinist with an open contempt for Americans in the bargain.

  Jerry had been excluded from key meetings, they wouldn’t give him a staff, and his access to the main project computer files had been limited to what Velnikov considered relevant to “maneuvering system design.” Complaining to his old friend Corneau did no good, and Emile Lourade wouldn’t even return his phone calls.

  When Sonya did manage to get home in time for dinner, she was forced to endure endless tirades against Velnikov, and when she didn’t, she had to suffer through whining complaints about how she was neglecting her own family.

  It got to the point where she began catching dinner with Ilya after work even when they ended early enough for her to go home in decent time to eat with Jerry and the children.

  Sonya was forced to keep her silence and take it. She even managed to hold her tongue when Jerry started insinuating that her evenings with Ilya Pashikov might not be entirely business.

  The only thing that had kept her going was the work itself. Beneath the permanent exhaustion there was an exhilaration, the exhilaration of at last working at the full stretch of her powers on something that really mattered, that affected the destiny of her company and her country.

  The best-case scenario always came up the same—Red Star, S.A., was going to lose about 18 percent of its net worth no matter what they did. But in the long run, there was indeed a way of coming out ahead.

  Kaminev began selling stock in the companies that were likely to be bankrupted by the expropriation of their American assets—in modest-sized blocks through dozens of dummies on every stock exchange in the worldwide net. When the stocks dropped below a predetermined price, they bought big blocks of out-of-the-money calls, firming up the price of the underlying stock, enabling them to sell more shares and buy cheap out-of-the-money puts, shedding their holdings gradually as the prices ratcheted downward in a controlled manner. It was a losing proposition, but all the computer models showed that this scenario would minimize the damage.

  Red Star also held stock in many companies that would survive the expropriations, and unloaded big blocks, driving the prices prematurely downward close to what the models said would be their post-expropriation worth.

  When “Yankee Thursday” hit, and the European markets blew off 30 percent of their value in the panic, Red Star had already disposed of all its stock in the companies that were going to go belly-up, as well as a lot of the shares it had held in those the models said would survive.

  At the bottom of the market, when sellers outnumbered buyers ten to one at any price, Red Star was sitting on a mountain of cash, and it spent most of the money buying up huge blocks of shares in the companies the models had identified as survivors.

  Companies whose stock prices Red Star itself had driven down to their post-expropriation intrinsic worth before the panic drove them even lower. Which not only let them bottom-fish like bandits at artificially depressed prices, but let Moscow grandly announce afterward that it had stepped in to shore up the markets in the interests of Common European solidarity.

  When the dust cleared, Red Star had sold off its shares in the companies that were going to fold at a net loss of about 22 percent, but had greatly increased its holdings in the survivors at cut-rate panic prices that were already bouncing upward, and the Soviet Union had come out smelling like a political rose in the bargain.

  Yankee Thursday’s trading had gone on long into the night, and Sonya and Ilya had cracked open a celebratory case of vodka for the staff afterward, so Sonya hadn’t gotten home till after 3:00 A.M., riding high on euphoria, fatigue, and a certain amount of vodka, and she was surprised and delighted to find Jerry in bed but still waiting up for her. Now at last she could tell him the whole truth and clear the air between them, the perfect ending for a perfect day.

  But Jerry was in an even fouler mood than usual. “Where the fuck have you been?” he demanded by way of greeting.

  “At the office, of course,” Sonya said calmly. “What a day!”

  “Day?” Jerry snapped. “It’s nearly 4:00 A.M.! What have you and Pashikov been doing?”

  “Celebrating with the staff,” Sonya told him as she started to undress. “Haven’t you heard the news?”

  “How could I miss it?” Jerry said sourly. “I’ve been catching shit all day. And now you come reeling home in the wee hours of the morning!”

  Sonya kicked off her shoes, peeled off her blouse, stepped out of her skirt, and cuddled up to him on the bed in her bra and panty hose. “Poor Jerry,” she cooed, throwing an arm around his shoulders. “Don’t worry, things have turned out a lot better than anyone yet realizes. . . .”

  “You’re drunk!” Jerry snarled, pulling away from her.

  “I may have had a few vodkas,” Sonya admitted. “But believe me, I earned them.”

  “So you and Ilya tied one on together!”

  “Oh really, Jerry, it was just a little office party! To celebrate!”

  “The bottom falls out of the stock market, and you and your boss get shit-faced together to celebrate?”

  “We made out like bandits, Jerry!” Sonya exclaimed happily. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!”

  “Tell me what?”

  “What Ilya and I have been working so hard to accomplish all these weeks!”

  “Aside from a little hanky-panky?”

  “Will you stop it, Jerry, you know that’s absurd, I’m trying to tell you why I’ve had to spend so many extra hours at the office!”

  “So tell me,” Jerry said belligerently, folding his arms across his chest and regarding her skeptically like some KGB interrogator in a bad historical movie.

  She did. But when she was finished, his expression still hadn’t lightened. If anything, he seemed even angrier.

  “All this time, and you didn’t tell me a thing . . . ?” he said slowly in a tightly controlled voice.

  “I couldn’t, Jerry, I was under orders, and besides—”

  “You let me sit here and stew in my own juices, imagining all the things you were doing with Pashikov—”

  “—you might have blown the whole thing.”

  “Blown the whole thing! What did you imagine I would do? Tell the CIA? Mortgage the apartment to buy put options, or whatever the hell you call them? You think I give a good goddamn about any of this crap!”

  “Then why are you so angry, Jerry?” Sonya asked reasonably.

  Jerry’s rage abruptly subsided into a sad sullen smolder. “Because my own wife didn’t trust me,” he said in a much smaller voice. “Because your loyalty to Red Star was more important than your loyalty to me. . . .”

  “Oh, Jerry, Jerry,” Sonya cooed, reaching out, trying to roll over onto him.

  But Jerry pushed her away. “Not tonight, dear,” he said sarcastically, “you’re drunk, and I’ve got a headache.” And he rolled over onto his side to face away from her.

  And they hadn’t made love since.

  Jerry Reed sat at the table silently fuming. What a week this had turned into! While Sonya had made the world safe for Soviet stock market speculation, Velnikov had used the foul odor surrounding all things American to pressure Corneau into appointing a chief maneuvering system engineer directly above him.

  “One can understand how Boris feels, n’est-ce pas?” Patrice had said with a little shrug when he finally called Jerry into his office. “Here he is with the title of Chief Project Engineer, and there you are, the engineer whose basic plans form the framework for the whole project. He has power, but no professional respect, while you are so to speak the Grand Old Man, the éminence grise. It is natural for him to want you as far out of the circuit as possible. . . .”

  “What about my feelings, Patrice?
” Jerry demanded.

  “I know things are difficult for you now, Jerry,” Corneau said. “But after all, we are in the early organizational phase, where there is really very little for you to do. Once we get down to actual design, things will be much different.”

  “Will they, Patrice?”

  “Bien sûr!”

  “With a chief maneuvering system engineer above me?”

  “Ah, but you forget that this maneuvering system design consultant job description is just a fiction! Once the project is truly underway, you will be working directly with me, and on everything!”

  “Velnikov will permit this?”

  “I am in charge of this project, not Boris Velnikov!” Corneau declared, perhaps a bit hollowly. “He may be . . . connected, as they say in Moscow, but I am the project manager!” He pursed his lips. “Still . . ,” he said reflectively.

  “Still . . . ?”

  Corneau shrugged. “What with the recent American unpleasantness, the political pressures on me to accede to Velnikov’s demands in this matter are going to be pretty irresistible,” he said. He favored Jerry with a sardonic little smile. “Peut-être, the wisest course might be to preempt him, n’est-ce pas? Let you step aside for the good of the project yourself, and be quite sure that everyone knows it. . . .”

  “Just great!” Jerry had said. “You hand me the knife and ask me to slit my own throat.”

  “It is not like that, Jerry,” Corneau had said somberly. “I am truly sorry you feel this way. At least do think it over.”

  And he had left things hanging like that. And Jerry had thought it over. Over and over and over again.

  This was the sort of miserable bureaucratic politics that he hated and that Sonya was so good at. But the way things had been going between them, he hadn’t even mentioned it to her. He had a feeling that he knew what she would say—go along with the inevitable, cover your bureaucratic ass, and at least rack up some Brownie points in your goddamn kharakteristika.