Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  “Is that so?” Franja said, screwing up her courage. “Well, since you so strenuously deny being a hero, perhaps the hero’s code will not prevent you from accepting my modest gift. . . .”

  “Gift? What gift?”

  “Something to think about all the way to Mars and all the way back,” she told him. “If you are going to spend two and a half years masturbating, let me give you a memory worth masturbating over.”

  Colonel Cosmonaut Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov blushed quite scarlet.

  Franja laughed. “Surely a Hero of the Soviet Union who has braved the cosmic vastness does not lack the manly courage to do what gallantry demands under the circumstances?”

  “I really shouldn’t . . .”

  “Oh yes you should!” Franja insisted. “The honor of the Cosmonaut Corps demands no less!”

  “Well, if you insist on putting it that way . . .”

  Nikolai was quite nervous as Franja dragged him through the maze of passageways toward the big air lock feeling, no doubt, that all eyes were upon them, which, no doubt, they were. He was properly scandalized when she proposed that they commandeer the Octopus for their own amorous purposes, but in the end, she had her way, for when it came down to such matters, the Colonel Cosmonaut was really quite the little boy.

  As Sasha Gorokov had done so many months of tedium ago, Franja maneuvered the Octopus so that the canopy looked out upon the unsullied starry blackness.

  Once this was accomplished, she found herself floating in the pod with a rather flustered-looking cosmonaut hero who did not at all seem prepared to make the first move. Well, modesty and shyness certainly hadn’t gotten her this far!

  She undid the clasps of her jumpsuit, wriggled out of it, and, kicking off a hand-ring, propelled herself toward the top of the bubble canopy, where she spread-eagled herself against the heated glass, presenting what she hoped was an irresistible image of naked flesh haloed in glory by the glittering star field.

  To judge by the way Nikolai floated there beneath her, gazing upward with his mouth hanging open, she had achieved the desired effect, but he made no move to either take off his uniform or join her.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “Well!” he sighed uncertainly.

  “Well, take off your clothes and come on up here, or down here, if you prefer to see it that way. . . .”

  Without taking his eyes off her, Nikolai managed to peel off his clothing, rather awkwardly for someone who had demonstrated such casual skill at zero-gravity aerobatics. His nervousness, however, she was relieved to see, had not prevented him from achieving quite a firm erection.

  He kicked off the edge of a console and floated up toward her. She reached out, caught his hands, and pulled him down on top of her.

  Once this docking maneuver was successfully completed, he became quite another man, kissing her roughly, kneading her breasts, and thrusting himself into her almost immediately, as if all those months of sexual frustration and careful politeness in space had served to make him quite lose control at the first touch of feminine flesh.

  As indeed it would seem that it had, for after no more than a dozen long hard strokes, he groaned, and spasmed, and spent himself within her.

  Immediately afterward, he withdrew, and rolled away from her, and half curled himself up into a ball, and floated there, staring out into space unable to meet her gaze, with the most miserable expression on his face.

  “I—”

  She stopped him with a gentle finger to his lips. “Don’t say anything,” she told him. “I understand. . . . You poor man. . . .”

  Though in truth, when he did turn to face her, she found herself staring into the eyes, not of a heroic Colonel Cosmonaut, but of an acutely embarrassed little boy. Nothing could have moved her heart more.

  “We have plenty of time, Nikolai,” she said softly. She reached out and embraced him and gave him a long lingering kiss.

  Then, remembering what Sasha had said and done, she rolled him back against the canopy, grabbed him by the knees, pried his legs open, smiled up at him, and said: “Let me show you a whole new meaning for the phrase ‘going down.’ ”

  And she did. She floated beneath him, and took his limp flesh in her mouth, and perspective reversed, and there she was, floating above him light as air, while he lay back against the bubble, rising up out of the cosmic vastness itself like a god of space, his long black hair seeming to roll and break like the waves of the starry sea, a dark corona haloing his perfect hero’s face.

  Soon enough, indeed perhaps sooner than she might have wished, his manhood rose too between her lips, and he reached down, snaked his hands in her hair, and pulled, dreamy-eyed and smiling, pulled her face up into a truly tender kiss.

  Then he kicked himself clear of the canopy as he gathered her up in his arms, and entered her again, surely and gently this time, and, hugging himself tightly to her, he made love to her, truly made love to her, floating freely in the air, softly and gently, keeping them clear of the canopy, and the consoles, and the floor with deft little kicks whenever they drifted close.

  It was quite an incredible experience, perhaps the most incredible experience of Franja’s life. At this zero-gravity maneuvering, Nikolai was quite the master, and with nothing beneath either of them to react against but each other, their motions were slow, and lingering, and tender of necessity, their rhythms quickly melding into the most intimate synchrony, and staying there for a long, long time.

  Franja’s pleasure built slowly and reached a plateau that seemed to go on forever in space and time, flying there weightless as a cloud in the infinite and endless stellar vastness in Nikolai’s arms, melded together, dancing in the air, in the vacuum, in the ecstasy, and when she finally crested into orgasm, it seemed quite literally shattering, stars flashing within and without, as she soared up over the top to dissolve into the universal sea.

  They floated in each other’s arms silently for quite a while afterward, catching their breath, quotidian and cosmic, before Franja came back close enough to the here and now to speak.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” she whispered.

  Nikolai turned in her arms to face her, positively glowing, with the most affectingly boyish grin on his lips, his blue eyes looking down, then up into hers. If there had been a floor beneath them to do it against, no doubt he would have shuffled his feet.

  “Right now,” he said. “Right here, with you.”

  And he took her hand, and together they floated there naked, two tiny frail creatures of flesh and blood, looking out into the cold and glorious vastness of the infinite cosmos.

  CARSON INTRODUCES BILL TIGHTENING EXIT VISA RESTRICTIONS

  Senator Harry Carson (R-Texas) has introduced legislation that would allow the Central Security Agency to refuse exit visas on the broader grounds of “national interest” rather than requiring the CSA to show “national security” grounds for such restrictions as the National Security Act now calls for.

  “Sure, changing one word seems like bureaucratic nit-picking,” Carson admitted, “but the way the law reads now, unpatriotic polecats are getting the benefit of the doubt. We need to untie the hands of the CSA by giving them much broader discretionary power. Sometimes one little word can make a lot of difference.”

  —AP

  “Are you really serious about this relationship, Bobby?” Sara Conner said in bed one night toward the end of the spring term.

  “Of course I’m serious,” Bobby declared without thinking.

  “Well, if we’re going to stay together, we should have our own apartment,” Sara said with her familiar firmness. “I’m getting pretty fed up with living like this. Aren’t you?”

  Bobby thought about it. They had been living in his room at Little Moscow for over five months now, and he had to admit that it was pretty damned cramped, crammed as it was with books, papers, chips, discs, files, underwear, cosmetics, socks, and endless assorted junk, and there was always crap to be cleared off the bed ev
ery night and no place left to dump it but the floor.

  True, they didn’t do anything in the room but sleep, study, and make love, and true too that it was rather amazing that they didn’t get on each other’s nerves more than they did, especially with Sara being Sara, but he had to admit that the room was something of a pigpen, nor did he much like having to clear the bed of debris every time they wanted to fuck.

  But an apartment? That was really a serious step. And besides . . .

  “But how can we afford it?”

  “I’ve already found a place we can afford,” Sara told him. “It’s not much, a pretty tiny one-bedroom, but we can swing it.”

  “You have? We can?”

  That Sara, having already decided what she wanted, had gone out and found an apartment already was by now not so surprising. Bobby had long since learned that she was like that, and indeed, he suspected, she had really gone out and gotten him when she wanted him in much the same self-contained and even Machiavellian fashion.

  “We’re only going to be living in it over the summer and for another two terms till we graduate,” she told him. “With what you’re paying here, plus the living allowance my parents send me, plus what I’ve already saved up by moving out of the dorms, we can handle it with what we can both make working over the summer.”

  “You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?” Bobby said, a bit perturbed, but not without admiration.

  “Yup.”

  “I had hoped we could go to Paris this summer to meet my parents . . . ,” Bobby muttered rather disconsolately.

  “Oh, Bobby, we’ve gone over that a thousand times, don’t you even read the papers?” Sara moaned.

  Bobby sighed. That was another thing about Sara that he had learned to accept and even admire. Not only had her family been political for generations, she was a journalism major with a firm career goal in mind, to become a political reporter, on a newspaper if she could, on TV if she had to. More to the current point, for Sara the personal and the political were inseparable.

  Even when it came to his own name.

  “Bob is such a jingo name,” she told him. “It makes me think of birdbrained jocks in gym shorts, swilling beer from cans. But when I call you Bobby, it makes me think of Bobby Kennedy, the last politician this country produced that was worth a damn. Living with a man I can call Bobby makes me feel, I don’t know, like something’s still alive. And Bobby Reed, well . . .”

  She wanted to know if he was any relation of John Reed. Bobby hadn’t even known who John Reed was, much to Sara’s exasperation.

  “You and he have a lot in common,” she told him. “John Reed was an American journalist who went to Russia to cover the Revolution and stayed there out of conviction. And you chose to be an American the way he chose to become a Soviet. For God’s sake, Bobby, you should at least see Reds!”

  She dug out a tape of the old movie, and while Bobby found the sad story of political idealism betrayed depressing, the love story was something else again, something that became a secret bond between them, and after that, he found that he didn’t mind being called Bobby anymore.

  That was Sara. She could take his common old American name, run it through her political sensibilities, and hand it back to him as a special gift with whole new meanings.

  But those same political sensibilities had quite convinced her that Paris was out of the question.

  Under the current political conditions, the provisions of the National Security Act, her family background, and the dossier she was certain existed in some Central Security Agency computer in Washington, Sara was sure there was no way she could be granted an exit visa to visit Common Europe.

  And she was equally convinced that if Bobby ever left the United States, given his father’s history, his mother’s nationality and employment, his own ambiguous nationality status, and the dossier she was sure the CSA had on him, there was no way he would ever get back in.

  Which was to say there was really no way he could leave the country and count on getting back in to be with Sara.

  And that was something he was not about to risk, despite all Dad’s pleading on the phone.

  So . . .

  So Bobby went with Sara to look at the apartment she had found in a crumbling old building on a back street off of Shattuck. It was tiny, barely thirty square meters, and the toilet didn’t flush quite right, and the Pullman kitchen equipment was ancient, and he did spot a roach or two, but compared to the room at Little Moscow it was enormous, and there was a door they could shut between the small living room and the even smaller bedroom, plus two closets, and Sara had worked out the numbers, so in the end, they took it.

  Bobby managed to get a summer job through the University translating dull French history papers for academic journals, and Sara held her nose and took a job as a waitress. The money wasn’t much, but by the end of the summer, they had enough saved up to pay the rent through the end of their senior year. After that . . .

  Well, Sara had her own firm ideas about that too, and, as was her way, had waged a campaign to convince him, and by the time the fall term had arrived, had pretty much succeeded.

  “Sure, Berkeley is wonderful,” she told him, “but we can’t live like this forever. You don’t want to end up like all those people who go straight from graduation into grad school and from grad school into a teaching job at the University and end up never leaving, thinking that the rest of the world is just something out there somewhere south of Oakland that they don’t have to pay any attention to. . . .”

  “I don’t?” Bobby said. For the truth of it was that before he had met Sara Conner, that had indeed been pretty much his life plan.

  “No, you don’t,” Sara kept insisting. “Certainly I have no intention of ending up a campus wife in Berkeley! I want to be out there in the real world doing something that matters, with you or without you; I can’t live my life like an ostrich with its head in the sand!”

  It was quite a bit for Bobby to handle. The oblique reference to marriage was the least of it, somehow; their lives and their finances were currently so intertwined that in a sense he felt married to Sara now, and one more document in a life that had so long been papered with passport and visa and nationality red tape did not seem all that significant. Indeed, the thought of living without Sara seemed like divorce already.

  And that was what got to him. He loved her, and the thought of losing her was intolerable. He was convinced that she loved him too, but he was equally convinced that he would have to fit his career choice into the life she wanted to lead if he was to retain her love past college.

  And what Sara wanted was to be out there in what she called the “real world,” doing something, which, Sara being Sara, meant doing something to change the world, or at least something that could give her that illusion; being a political reporter somewhere, not languishing in the protected groves of academe with a professor of history at UC Berkeley.

  Far from resenting this, it made Bobby love her all the more. Indeed, he even found himself envying such an idealistic passion, for he knew damn well that he had nothing like it himself.

  But Sara being Sara, she also understood all this, and instead of threatening or browbeating him, launched a campaign to fire him with her own ardor, to convince him intellectually, to present a vision that they could truly share.

  “You could do so much, Bobby,” she insisted. “You have perfect French and more Russian than you’re willing to admit. You’ve got a decent background in history, and you’ve lived in Europe, and you can write better prose than I do. You’d be a terrific reporter, a foreign correspondent even, if some paper wanted you badly enough to hassle the visas. . . .”

  Bobby, in the end, wasn’t all that hard to convince. All the translating he had done over the summer had shown him that he could write facilely enough in English. There weren’t many American reporters fluent in French and possessed of passable Russian, and fewer still who had grown up on the other side of the Great Atl
antic Divide. He could make good money as a journalist, better than anything he could hope for as one of a horde of teaching assistants struggling up the academic ladder. . . .

  “You owe it to yourself and your country, Bobby!” Sara also insisted. “The media’s so hopelessly jingo, and you’ve got a really unique viewpoint to contribute. It would be just awful if you wasted all that vegetating in an academic hothouse like Berkeley, when you’ve got what it takes to do something, to be someone who really matters!”

  Bobby would have liked to believe that that was what convinced him to change his major to journalism at the beginning of his senior year. But Sara had taught him how inseparable the political and the personal could really be.

  He was choosing a higher-paying career that would take fuller advantage of his experience and skills, he was choosing a career that might indeed allow him to better the world, to be someone who mattered.

  But above all, he was also choosing to make a life together with the woman he loved, the woman who had pushed him into this more adventurous and idealistic career in the first place, and that was surely a textbook example of enlightened self-interest.

  ANOTHER EXTRATERRESTRIAL CIVILIZATION?

  Soviet astronomers say they may have discovered another extraterrestrial civilization, this one much more advanced than that of the fourth planet of Barnard’s star. Lunar-based astronomers have detected an object about five thousand light-years away toward the galactic center that could be a so-called Dyson sphere, a star entirely enclosed by an artificial shell in order to capture its total output of energy.

  Gravity-wave perturbations indicate an object of about half a solar mass, stellar occlusions suggest a solid body with a diameter approximately that of the orbit of Jupiter, and infrared studies indicate a surface temperature in the liquid water range.