Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  Sara turned to face him. By now her eyes were quite readable, and what Bobby saw there sent his spirit soaring. “Is that what you want?” she said.

  “You know it isn’t.”

  “So?” she said, looking down at her feet and kicking one sneaker with the other.

  “So . . .”

  “Say it, Bobby. . . .”

  Bobby found himself staring at his own feet. “So I love you, Sara Conner,” he said, “and I’ve never said that to anyone before. Stay here with me.”

  Sara reached out, took his chin in her hand, lifted his head, and kissed him. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said dryly.

  Bobby laughed. “No you didn’t,” he said.

  Sara laughed back at him. Her eyes seemed to sparkle. “I guess ya got me,” she said.

  “I guess I do. . . .”

  “So?”

  “So . . . ,” Bobby said, and hugged her to him.

  * * *

  HOW DEAD IS MARS?

  While no living organism has yet been found on Mars, the fact is that cosmonauts have only explored the smallest fraction of its surface. The absolute negative is a most difficult case to prove. And if the visionary plans to someday terraform the planet with water ice from the moons of Jupiter should ever come to fruition, the question might prove to be of more than academic interest.

  Aside from the ecological morality of destroying the remnants of any Martian life by altering the environment, there is the unsettling question of what might emerge from beneath the permafrost if such life existed and proved capable of adapting to a warmer and wetter environment. Might we unwittingly loose terrible plagues upon our Martian colonists in the very act of preparing the planet for shirtsleeve habitation?

  —Argumenty i Fakty

  * * *

  XIX

  Six months into Franja’s tour on Cosmograd Sagdeev, they began the assembly of the Nikita Khrushchev, the ship that would carry the next expedition to Mars, and she found herself, like most of the other space monkeys, spending most of her work shifts outside the Cosmograd in a spacesuit working on its construction.

  The Khrushchev was being cobbled together out of Cosmograd modules. First a framework had to be assembled. Then one of the big spheres was secured to the leading end to serve as the command center. Four dormitory modules were then slung behind it to luxuriously house the crew of eight for the long two-and-a-half-year mission—only two to a module!—and connected to the command module and each other by standard passageway modules. Another sphere behind the dormitory cluster became the crew lounge and gymnasium. Behind that came two more dormitory modules which would be outfitted as scientific workstations. Behind the science modules, a cluster of four of the big spheres to hold oxygen, water, food, supplies, and the life-support machinery.

  Fourteen more spheres were slung behind that. Four of them would be filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the conventional thrusters and maneuvering rockets. The other ten would hold the reaction mass for the ion drive. A hundred and fifty meters down the central spar a nuclear reactor was secured, and finally, behind that, the rockets and the ion drive.

  Connecting up all these modules and spars and main components was straightforward if tedious and strenuous labor, but once the basic ship was assembled, the nightmare for the space monkeys really began.

  There were kilometers and kilometers of wiring, fuel lines, oxidizer lines, and air lines that had to be strung, connected, tested, and retested, around this maze of modules, passageways, and spars in order to turn the assemblage into a working Mars ship; all of it had to work perfectly, and most of the work had to be done in spacesuits, with the supervisors constantly yammering in one’s earphones.

  Important work it might be, but fun it was not, and Franja, like the rest of her long-suffering fellow monkeys, soon came to loathe the Khrushchev, and refer to it as The Bastard, which, in terms of their humble part in the grand adventure, it most certainly was.

  Franja still spent hours and hours staring longingly out the observation deck bubble canopy at the Earth, but now the view was occluded by the ungainly sight of The Bastard, tethered to Sagdeev in a matching orbit a quarter of a kilometer “below,” as were her thoughts.

  On the one hand, she was even more fed up with the confinement and tedium and boredom of the Cosmograd and counting the days till the end of her tour and escape. But on the other hand, there it was, The Bastard, blocking her clear view of the promise of the living planet below, and at the same time, tantalizing her with the vision of what might have been.

  Unlikely as it might seem, that ungainly mess was going to Mars, and if things had turned out differently, she might be one of the lucky few to make the voyage on it, to stand on the soil of another planet beneath alien skies, to see the towering immensity of Mons Olympus, to look down into the huge dry canyons where once water had flowed, who knows, to even be the one to discover the living remnants of the extinct Martian biosphere which some scientists still believed might yet be found in some isolated pocket ecosphere.

  For that, she might still be willing to endure a year on the way to Mars in an environment even more cramped than Sagdeev, and another year on the way back, and six months in yet another series of tin cans on the Martian surface. Instead, she was condemned to another six months in this miserable Cosmograd, suffering much the same boredom and working her ass off besides, with no grand adventure to show for it at the other end.

  She found herself wishing that The Bastard would just go away, disappear, leave for Mars and be done with it already, and stop tormenting her with a dream that had already died.

  But of course it didn’t. The Mars Excursion Vehicle was boosted up in pieces by heavy lifters, and the monkeys had to assemble the damn thing in orbit, then horse it into place and secure it below the main assemblage of The Bastard.

  The cabin had to be mounted to the internal framework, and then the engines and control systems and freight module. Then the balloon with its hydrogen tank and the main fuel and oxidizer tanks. Finally, and worst of all, the metal skin had to be glued to the framework, panel by tedious panel.

  The MEV would enter the Martian atmosphere as a hypersonic glider, using atmospheric braking to slow it down enough for the huge balloon wing to be deployed that would soft land it by the station on the surface. Six months later, the balloon would lift it into the upper atmosphere just as smoothly, the engines would fire, and the MEV would rendezvous with the Khrushchev.

  Oh yes, the MEV was an elegant triumph of Soviet technology, and Franja could not help feeling a surge of pride as she floated in the observation deck watching a team of monkeys mounting the finished product below The Bastard. The endless hours of her own tedious labor that had gone into it were, however, another matter. All that tedium, all that sweat, all that fatigue, and for what? So eight other people with better connections could get to ride it.

  Is this what it really feels like to be a Hero of Socialist Labor? she thought sourly.

  Five days after the MEV was mated to The Bastard, a real celebrity came up to Sagdeev on a Concordski—Colonel Cosmonaut Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov. Smirnov had already been to Mars. Smirnov was a Hero of the Soviet Union. Smirnov was the future commander of the Nikita Khrushchev, and he was going to stay on Sagdeev for the next month, overseeing the final outfitting of The Bastard before his crew came aboard and the Mars ship departed.

  Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov was also, well, a stunning figure of a man. Sagdeev was, after all, the smallest of small towns, and Franja, like every other woman aboard, had plenty of occasion in the next few days to look him over. Tall, slim, elegantly muscular, angularly featured, with piercing blue eyes, Nikolai Mikhailovich looked every inch the cossack Prince, an impression he did nothing to dispel with his tightly tailored uniforms, his lustrous black shoulder-length hair, and his outrageously dramatic handlebar mustache.

  “Comrade Cosmonaut Movie Star,” the female space monkeys called him. “The Count” was the
least disparaging thing the envious male space monkeys called him, the rest being obscene speculations on his manhood or the lack thereof, and indeed Franja herself began to wonder, for even after a week, not one woman aboard had yet bragged about getting between the nets with him, and, monkey-cage sex being what it was, one could be sure that where there was no smoke there had certainly been no fire.

  Franja herself, not being made out of stone, certainly would not have turned down the opportunity if it offered itself, but she was not about to engage in the demeaning simian antics of her fellow monkeys to tempt “Comrade Cosmonaut Movie Star” to prove his questionable manhood, which obvious tactics had, at any rate, proven entirely futile. As a visiting cosmonaut, Nikolai Mikhailovich had a whole dormitory module entirely to himself, and when he wasn’t eating, or suited up and hovering around the final work on The Bastard, or working out in the gym before a slavering audience, he selfishly kept it all to himself.

  It was quite a surprise, therefore, when the Object of All Desire started a conversation with her.

  When the magic moment happened, she was holding onto a ring and floating in the observation deck, as she so often did, staring out at the Earth past the untidy bulk of the Mars ship, watching the white swirl of the cloud deck, the lights of the cities in the darkness behind the terminator, just letting her thoughts drift aimlessly as the Sagdeev orbited round and round the planet, lost in the procession of brilliant blue seas, sere dun desert, verdant rain forest, defiantly artificial night lights, the whole living world enormous and complex rolling tantalizingly beneath her in the cold hard blackness while—

  “Yes, it is quite beautiful,” a deep mellow male voice said behind her.

  Franja started, turned awkwardly, still holding onto the ring, her body flipped sidewise at an oblique angle by the quick motion of her head and shoulders, and there he was, above her and looking down, floating freely behind her, standing in midair with his arms folded across his chest and those piercing blue eyes looking right at her and a strangely wistful smile creasing his wide full lips.

  “How long have you been there watching me?” she demanded, quite flustered.

  “Oh, quite a while,” said Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov.

  “Do you usually spy on people like that? Is that what you do for amusement?”

  He frowned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just saw you there, contemplating as it were, and it didn’t seem right to disturb you, and then . . .”

  He shrugged, and the motion sent him drifting up toward the top of the bubble. He turned a midair somersault, kicked his legs, swam downward, grabbed a ring, and righted himself beside her, a display of space-monkey aerobatics quite dazzling in its lithe and casual ease.

  “And then I realized that, after all, I had been watching you, and it seemed rather nikulturni not to make my presence known, so I felt I had to say something,” he said. “But it is beautiful, and believe me, I do understand how precious a little solitude can be up here, so if you wish, I will now make my apologies and leave you to it. . . .”

  “No, please don’t go,” Franja found herself saying, quite charmed by his careful and thoughtful manners, so different from the space-monkey etiquette she had become all too used to, and different too from what she would have expected from a high and mighty Colonel Cosmonaut.

  “You’re sure?” he said. “You’re not just saying it to be polite?”

  Good Lord, Franja thought, could that be it? Has Comrade Cosmonaut Movie Star failed to avail himself of what he’s been constantly offered simply because this beautiful creature is actually an old-fashioned gentleman? So it would seem, for up this close, some instinct told her in no uncertain terms that this man did not have a gay bone in his body!

  Franja smiled at him. “Where did you learn such old-fashioned manners, Colonel Smirnov?” she said. “In Cosmonaut school?”

  Nikolai laughed, sending a thrill through her. “Not quite . . . what did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t. It’s Franja Gagarin Reed, Colonel Smirnov,” Franja fairly gushed.

  “Please call me Nikolai,” he said. “We don’t address each other by rank where I learned my manners. Not out there, we don’t. . . .” And for a moment he seemed to be looking past her, not at the Earth, or at his ship, but to the side, straight out into the starry blackness.

  “Out there?”

  “Mars,” he said, “or rather perhaps on the voyage there and back. . . .” He seemed to return from some vast distance. “A year there, six months on the surface, a year back with the same few people . . . It’s a trip that changes anyone who makes it, Franja. At the very least, we Martians learn to be very, very polite to each other. Manners, as you call it, become an absolute necessity. Sometimes it gets . . . it gets . . .” He frowned, he shrugged, he seemed quite at a loss for words.

  “And sex?” Franja could not keep from saying. “I mean, two and a half years . . . I’ve always wondered . . .”

  “Not like here,” Nikolai said quite somberly. “It simply can’t be tolerated, a few people in such close quarters. To tell you the truth, it’s something we haven’t figured out yet, if we ever will. Mixed crews of single people have not worked well. Four couples would be best, but the chances of assembling such a crew are minimal, and if some people are having sex and others aren’t, well . . . So now we’re back to trying an all-male crew, and it has nothing to do with outmoded Slavic phallocracy.”

  “But what do you do for two and a half years?”

  “We suffer, we masturbate,” Nikolai said evenly.

  “For two and a half years?”

  “For centuries sailors and explorers were forced to do just that. . . .”

  “But sailors . . . well, you know . . .”

  Nikolai grimaced. “If anyone tried that, we’d shove him out an air lock!” he declared.

  “It all sounds quite horrible.”

  “It isn’t,” he said, “or perhaps it is, but it’s the price we have to pay for something wonderful.”

  “Something wonderful . . . ?”

  Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov grabbed hold of a second hand-ring and seemed to chin himself up on the two of them, looking straight out into the infinite depths like a boy into a sweet-shop window. He didn’t even seem to notice as Franja swiveled around to float close beside him, close enough to smell his lilac cologne, close enough to feel the heat of his body, or so to her it seemed.

  “The voyage itself is mostly privation and boredom,” he said. “And there is a slow subtle kind of terror too, when the Earth no longer shows a disc, and you’re out there in a hard cold nothingness that goes on and on and on quite literally forever. And then that passes, and you feel something impossible to describe, a hideous kind of ecstasy perhaps, what the Buddhists and the Hindus must feel when they confront the reality of the Great Void, you are all alone, tiny beyond insignificance, and yet . . . and yet . . .”

  A shudder went through his body. Franja found herself inching closer.

  “And yet you are somehow also a part of something vast and eternal . . . ,” Nikolai went on in a dreamy voice. “And then Mars begins to grow, and grow, and you feel an enormous sense of relief, somehow, just to see another planet, any planet, though somehow there is a sense of loss too, and then before you know it, there is the excitement of making orbit, and the crazy flight through the atmosphere, and then you are floating down toward another world. . . .”

  Hesitantly, Franja put an arm around his shoulder, not daring to actually touch him, just letting it float there behind him, unseen, unfelt, apparently unnoticed.

  “Another world!” Nikolai exclaimed. “True, you can never breathe the open air, but in the Martian summer, at noon, in light atmosphere suits, there are times when you can feel the distant warmth of the sun, and the wind, and you stand out there on alien soil, looking down, perhaps, into some great dry river valley where water once flowed, where life once began, and you realize in the pit of your stomach, in your lungs, and your heart,
and your balls, that you really are standing on another world entire. And on the long voyage home, you look out at all those stars, and you think that somewhere out there there are people, yes, call them that, people, looking back at you, and someday, somehow . . .”

  He stopped. He turned. He gave her a foolish, boyish grin that went straight to her heart. “Well, you shouldn’t get me started like this,” he said with endearing embarrassment. “That’s a Martian for you, we can’t help getting all mystical over it; despite the realities of Dialectical Materialism, I suppose we’re all still romantic old Slavs at heart. . . .”

  Franja could not help herself. She threw her arms about his neck, and, hanging there, kissed him.

  “What . . . what was that for?” Nikolai Mikhailovich stammered.

  Franja looked downward, rather mortified herself. “I . . . I . . . I’ve never met a real hero before,” she said.

  “Oh come now, don’t be ridiculous!”

  Franja looked up into his wide blue eyes. And what she saw there was a man who had gazed upon vistas that would have withered her spirit—or transformed it into she knew not what. What she saw was a man who had endured unspeakable loneliness and isolation and sexual frustration in the service of something vast and oceanic and beyond her understanding, and who would soon bravely commit himself to the same adventure again. What she also saw was a little boy who was quite touchingly embarrassed to see a woman mooning over him like this.

  “No, it’s true, Nikolai Mikhailovich,” she said. “And if you don’t see it, why that makes it all the more real. You’re a real hero, in the best and finest sense.”

  “What rubbish!” he said, averting his gaze.

  “Not at all,” Franja insisted.

  “I’m no hero. Just an ordinary man who’s been quite fortunate to have been granted an extraordinary experience. . . .”