“If this is not a Dyson sphere,” a spokesperson for the Soviet Academy of Sciences said, “it must be something even stranger. Unfortunately, there is no way of obtaining any kind of visual image at this range.”
Sending a radio message would not be a practical means of resolving the mystery either, since a round-trip communication would take a minimum of ten thousand years.
—Science News
Franja’s affair with Colonel Cosmonaut Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov was the talk of Cosmograd Sagdeev and something of a scandal as well. Needless to say, she was the envy of every woman in the monkey cages, but, space-monkey etiquette being what it was, that would have resulted in nothing worse than obscene good-natured banter if she had played it by the unstated rules.
But she didn’t. While she didn’t move her clothing or personal effects into Nikolai’s module, since moving out of one’s assigned quarters was a clear violation of the official regulations, she did spend all her sleep periods alone between the nets with him, and that was a violation of the unwritten space-monkey code.
Not that sex between monkeys and supervisors or even command personnel was frowned upon; those privileged to bunk two to a module or to have a module all their own were human too, and hence fair game. However, using such liaisons to enjoy entire sleep periods in such luxurious quarters smacked of using sex as a commodity of exchange; class treason, whoredom, and that was considered nikulturni indeed.
Worse still, far worse, Franja and Nikolai were conducting a private and monogamous affair. Neither of them would fuck anyone else. They wouldn’t even fuck each other before an audience. In short, they had established a relationship, and that was the worst transgression of space-monkey etiquette conceivable. Relationships meant passion, jealousy, envy, and who knew what other powerful emotions that could cause only trouble in such close confined quarters.
Indeed, it skirted perilously close to violating actual regulations, and only Nikolai’s lofty status as a Colonel Cosmonaut, Mars expedition commander, and Hero of the Soviet Union kept official displeasure at bay.
Franja could not help knowing all this on a certain level, but frankly, Comrades, as the old American saying had it, she didn’t give a damn. She had enough trouble keeping herself from falling in love.
She had never met a man like Nikolai. She had never met anyone who had come even close. That he was a gorgeous physical specimen and that his prowess at zero-gravity aerobatics made him a fantastic lover was the least of it, which was not to say it wasn’t plenty.
That he had been to Mars, that he was a Colonel Cosmonaut, might be part of it, not because of his exalted status, and probably not even because he really was what she had once dreamed of becoming, but because of what his experiences had made him.
In a curious way, Nikolai reminded her of her father, of a younger, stronger, somehow more innocent Jerry Reed, who had had all the right connections, who had gotten all the right breaks, who had gotten to live his dream in the real world, and who therefore had never lost the sweetness and purity of the boy he had once been, building his own telescope, devouring science fiction, gazing up at the stars, and voyaging across the blackness in his mind’s eye.
Nikolai was a boyish idealist whose innocence had never been crushed. Nikolai was a mature man with a mystical vision. Nikolai was a man of courage and dedication, willingly undergoing incredible privation and sexual frustration in the service of what he believed, which made fucking him as often and as long and as well as possible an honor as well as a pleasure.
“Hero of the Soviet Union” was an honorific that most people sneered at these days, and Franja herself had always pictured such a personage as a stiff figure in a uniform bedecked with silly medals. But Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov gave “Hero of the Soviet Union” new meaning for her.
Nikolai was the real thing.
That actually might have been intolerable if Nikolai hadn’t also been, well, Nikolai. His sweet manners were real. He was a considerate lover. He was not without humor. When they weren’t working or making love or working out in the gym—Nikolai was a stickler for that—they spent hours and hours gazing out at the stars together, talking of Mars and the chances of finding living remnants of the vanished Martian ecosphere, of what might lie beneath the clouds of Titan, the atmosphere of Jupiter, the Uranian ocean, of the mysterious Barnards, of the destiny of consciousness in the universe, of where it all might have come from, and what it was evolving toward.
Nikolai rekindled in her dreams which had been deadened by the boring months aboard Sagdeev. Nikolai gave her the spiritual courage to long once more after things she might never have. Nikolai showed her the secrets of her soul.
How difficult it was not to fall hopelessly in love with this man!
But what a disaster it would be if she allowed it!
Within a month, Nikolai would be on his way to Mars, and he would not return for two and a half years. Any thought of a life together beyond his departure was quite hopeless. Unless . . .
Unless . . .
It was foolish, it was foredoomed and she knew it, but somehow she knew she had to try anyway, and ten days before the Nikita Khrushchev’s departure date, as they snuggled together in the nets, she did.
“Nikolai,” she said, “I want to go to Mars with you.”
Nikolai laughed. “And I want you to come to Mars with me too,” he said lightly. “I would also like to live to be two hundred and command the first expedition to Barnard’s star. . . .”
“I’m serious!”
“So am I!”
“Nikolai!”
“Franja, please!”
“You’re well connected,” Franja purred. “You’re the expedition commander. And didn’t you tell me your sister was married to Marshal Donets?”
“Ah, I see, it’s all quite simple,” Nikolai said dryly. “All I have to do is tell my brother-in-law the Marshal that I wish to bump a crew member who has been preparing for the expedition for years in favor of taking my girl friend along on an otherwise all-male expedition to Mars. And of course, he will make a phone call to the President, and our story will quite melt his romantic Slavic heart. . . .”
“Well, when you put it that way . . .”
“That’s the way it is, Franja, and we both know it,” Nikolai told her gently.
Franja sighed. “Well, you can’t blame a girl for trying,” she said, and strangely enough she felt rather relieved, knowing that at least she had, and it was over.
Nikolai kissed her softly on the lips. “I really do wish I could leave you with something to remember me by,” he said. “And I am a Colonel Cosmonaut and a Hero of the Soviet Union, and I do have connections, and Marshal Donets is my brother-in-law. . . . Make another wish, Franja, something a bit more realistic, and I promise I’ll do what I can to grant it.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“What do you want out of life, Franja?”
Franja thought about it long and hard, and with Nikolai, she had learned to do her thinking out loud. “I grew up wanting to be a cosmonaut like you, and I worked so hard to get into Gagarin, and when I was there, I worked so hard to get into Cosmonaut school, and when I didn’t get in, I allowed myself to be talked into becoming a space monkey in the hope that someday . . .”
“Someday what?”
“Someday, somehow, having experience outside the gravity well, however lowly, would get me into the Cosmonaut Corps when the Grand Tour Navettes became operational and the Corps needed to expand rapidly. . . .” she told him. “But after a few weeks in Sagdeev, I knew I didn’t want to spend my life in a succession of submarines in space, and all I wanted was to go home, and what I was going to do back on Earth after this tour I didn’t even think about, and . . . and . . .”
She kissed him on the cheek. “And then I met you, Nikolai,” she said, “and now I find myself, much to my surprise, dreaming of Mars, and Titan, and places beyond, but there doesn’t seem to be any real hope of that, and .
. . and I’m really quite confused. . . .”
“Hmmm . . . ,” Nikolai muttered. “Well, I can tell you one thing, and that’s that the Grand Tour Navettes are eventually going to mean a big need for more personnel,” he said. “There’ll be more Cosmograds, a city or two on the Moon, a Mars colony, many expeditions farther out. . . . But what they’re going to come looking for is not so much space monkeys as pilots.”
“Pilots?”
“To be specific, Concordski pilots. After all, the Concordski is a sort of spaceship already. It goes ballistic even at the apogee of terrestrial milk runs. It goes into orbit and rendezvous with Cosmograds. It goes all the way out to Spaceville in GEO. Anyone who has Concordski wings could easily enough learn to pilot a GTN in a few weeks. If you’re really serious, you should get yourself Concordski wings. With a Concordski rating and a year’s zero-gravity experience as well, you’d be right up there at the head of the line when the time comes.”
“How could I manage to do that?” Franja said.
Nikolai laughed. “That much, at least, Marshal Donets would be willing to arrange for his brother-in-law, the Hero of the Soviet Union,” he said.
FIRST HAT IN THE RING
Nathan Wolfowitz, UC Berkeley professor and former independent candidate for Congress, became the first announced candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination at a press conference held in a Las Vegas casino.
“Sure it’s a little early, but I’ve got a name-recognition problem,” Wolfowitz told reporters. “And it’s never too early to start raising money, not for someone like me who can’t count on the usual fat cats, and wouldn’t if he could.”
When asked why he had chosen such an unusual venue for his announcement, the candidate replied that he intended to raise money via a series of high-stakes fund-raising poker games, and invited bemused reporters to participate in the first such event immediately following the press conference.
According to highly unofficial sources, the candidate emerged ten hours later as the big winner.
—People
When Bobby started applying for journalist jobs two months before graduation, he found himself running up against an unexpected stone wall. His marks were good, he had hundreds of pages of good prose to show in the form of all the translations he had done, three years as a history major counted in his favor, as did his knowledge of French and Russian, and even his European background, at least in certain circles.
But the answer was always the same. “We’d like to hire you, Mr. Reed, but we simply can’t. You’re not an American citizen.”
Under federal law, no company that paid federal taxes could hire a noncitizen who did not have a federal work permit. And the unemployment situation being what it was, Green Cards were simply not being issued, except in rare cases where a national security need could be established, which certainly did not apply to reporters.
On a certain level, Bobby had known this all along, but he had avoided confronting the reality as long as possible.
The only way he could work in the United States was by surrendering his Common European passport to take American citizenship.
But as an American citizen, he wouldn’t be able to leave the country without an exit visa. And what with his father’s questionable status, his own European birth, his background as a Berkeley Red, and the way they were arbitrarily enforcing the National Security Act these days, they might never grant him one.
“It’s a big commitment,” he told Sara over dinner. “If I take American citizenship, there’s a good chance I’ll never be able to see my parents again.”
“If you don’t,” she pointed out, “you’ll never get a job, and that’s not just a good chance, it’s a dead certainty. You really don’t expect me to support you for the rest of your life . . . ?”
“No . . . ,” Bobby muttered miserably. “But . . .”
“Look at it this way,” Sara said. “It’s only a problem because of things like the damned National Security Act, and that’s the kind of thing we’re committing ourselves to work to change, isn’t it?”
“So . . . ?”
“So your mother’s a Marxist, isn’t she? Wouldn’t she approve? Wouldn’t she consider it a perfect example of enlightened class self-interest?”
“You don’t know Mom . . . ,” Bobby said. “And Dad—”
“Jesus Christ, Bobby, your father defected so he could work for what he believed in, didn’t he? You’re telling me he’s a total hypocrite?”
“No, but . . .”
“And what about me?” Sara snapped. “I’ve made a commitment to you, haven’t I? We simply can’t live a life together unless you become an American citizen, that’s the bottom line, and we both know it.”
Bobby sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah!” he declared much more firmly. “Okay, Sara, I’ll do it. But only if you’ll make the same commitment to me. Let’s . . . let’s get married!”
Sara dropped her fork into her plate. She stared at Bobby. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said.
“Did you?”
Sara laughed. “No,” she said, “but I did think it might be slightly more romantic.”
“What could be more romantic than this?” Bobby declared forcefully, realizing, to his surprise, that he meant it. “Here I am, maybe trapping myself inside this fucked-up country forever to commit myself to changing it and to stay with the woman I love! Way I see it, that’s a hell of a lot more romantic than violins and flowers!”
Sara broke into a radiant smile. “When you put it that way, how can a girl say no?” she said, and she leaned across the table and kissed him.
And so a week later, Bobby filled out his citizenship application, and a month later the papers came through. A week after that, they were married before a municipal judge. After the ceremony, Bobby kissed his new bride, and then took the Oath of Allegiance.
COSMONAUTS TO BARNARD’S STAR?
Dr. Vassily Igorovich Yermakov, of the Space Studies center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, has suggested that it might be possible to someday send a manned mission to Barnard’s star using no more than an advanced version of the Grand Tour Navettes now under development.
Such a starship might take centuries to arrive at its destination, but the ship could be piloted by an Artificial Intelligence, and the cosmonauts would travel in an electronically induced state of suspended animation or, better yet, in cryogenic suspension.
“Both the Americans and ourselves are working on the early stages of developing such techniques,” Yermakov pointed out. “What a pity that we cannot be pooling our efforts.”
—Izvestia
The observation deck was crammed with onlookers as the Nikita Khrushchev warped slowly away from Cosmograd Sagdeev, but once more, for the last time, Nikolai Smirnov had pulled strings for Franja, and she was allowed to watch the departure in blessed solitude, alone, suited up, clinging to the framework of the Cosmograd, out in the starry vastness that was about to swallow up the only man she had ever loved.
Tears clouded her vision, and there was no way to wipe them away inside her helmet, nor, really, did she want to, for they glazed the sight of the departing Mars ship with a gauzy and merciful curtain of glittering crystal highlights, softening the stars, romanticizing the sorrow.
There had been a lot of back and forth between Nikolai and Marshal Donets this past week, but Nikolai had fulfilled his promise. His brother-in-law the Marshal was going to get her into the Concordski pilots’ school in Central Asia, and there was nothing left but the paperwork and the formalities.
There had been a lot of frenzied love-making and a few tears, but no sad dramas, for after all, he was a Hero of the Soviet Union, and she was a jaded space monkey, was she not, and they had both known that this moment was inevitable from the beginning. They were star-crossed lovers in every conceivable meaning of the term.
Franja turned away for a moment to gaze down at the Earth, to which she would soon be returning, and the new life that a
waited her there now was also a departing gift from Nikolai, a purpose, a career, a dream restored. He had done the best that he could to leave her better off than he had found her, and even now, with tears in her eyes, Franja still was able to marvel at how well he had succeeded.
The Nikita Khrushchev was five kilometers from the Cosmograd now, and suddenly, silently, a tongue of blue flame erupted from the main thrusters, steadied, became a solid beam of blue light, and the Mars ship began to accelerate, pulling away from her, setting out across the sea of space toward its far-distant destination.
Franja stayed out there in the vacuum watching it dwindle into the teary black mists until its exhaust was just another star, a pinpoint of blue light dwarfed by the immensity, but arcing slowly and bravely across it. Only then, for the first and last time, did she say it.
“I love you, Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov,” she finally said, when there was no one else to hear it, when it no longer mattered.
Or perhaps when it mattered most of all.
* * *
RECORD WHEAT CROP IN UKRAINE
The Ministry of Agriculture has announced that this year’s Ukrainian wheat crop is the largest in history. The new genetically engineered seed and improved farming techniques were given part of the credit, but Ministry agronomists admit that the global warming trend, which has brought longer and warmer growing seasons and more rain, was largely responsible.
“We do not believe this is an isolated event,” a Ministry spokesperson said. “We are finally experiencing the beginning of the climatic shift that has been predicted for decades.”
—Novosti
Russian Spring Page 46
