Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  “I’ll do it!” Jerry said immediately.

  Corneau’s eyes widened in amazement. “Now? After all these years? Merde, Jerry, if you had only done it in the first place!”

  Boris Velnikov objected strenuously, but Emile Lourade backed up Corneau, and Patrice moved Jerry to an office adjoining his own, no bigger than his old one, but much closer to the action. Jerry really didn’t have much to do except attend endless meetings and serve as Corneau’s messenger boy.

  The project manager found it quite useful to let his assistant project manager for design integration deliver his decisions when someone’s toes were going to have to get stepped on. It allowed him to play Good Cop to Jerry’s Bad, and Jerry, the Grand Old Man of the Grand Tour Navette to this generation of senior engineers who had been the last to remember what it was like to be out-of-favor Space Cadets, was just the figure to resolve disputes with minimum ill will.

  Everyone knew that he had designed a whole alternate vehicle, working in isolation. Everyone knew he had been obsessed with the project before there was a project. Everyone also knew that he had neither a vested emotional interest in any subsystem design nor a political ax to grind. He was the ideal messenger, the one least likely to get his head chopped off for delivering bad news.

  He was also an excellent club with which to batter down Velnikov when the chief project engineer began delivering his spirit messages from Moscow. When Patrice Corneau suspected he was going to hear something he didn’t want to hear, he found ways to make himself unavailable, and Velnikov, much to his displeasure, found himself forced to communicate through Jerry.

  Velnikov knew exactly what Corneau was doing, but he was stuck with it. Jerry tried to avoid rubbing it in as much as possible, rather than further antagonizing someone who had already proven to be enough of an obstacle.

  Patrice Corneau had cunningly set things up so that they could not afford to be enemies. And if their relationship was cold to say the least, at least it became more or less civilized.

  Still, Jerry was quite amazed when Boris Velnikov actually suggested that they have a drink or two together after a late afternoon meeting. Utterly bemused, he let Velnikov pile him into a cab and take him to Les Deux Magots, the historic old café on St.-Germain across from the church itself, the legendary haunt of long-gone superstar intellectuals, preserved in amber for the delectation of intellectual tourists, at outrageous prices, for about a hundred years.

  Velnikov sat them down at an inside table, ordered Cognacs, and came right to the point. “We have never exactly approved of each other, Reed, but big changes are coming at ESA, and it occurs to me that our mutual interests might best be served by an alliance of convenience. We don’t have to like each other to serve our own class self-interests.”

  “Spare me the dialectical materialism, will you, Boris?” Jerry said. Although Velnikov always called him “Reed,” Jerry took a perverse pleasure in calling him “Boris” as if that was his natural bureaucratic privilege as Corneau’s assistant.

  Velnikov allowed himself a scowl, nothing more. He was a thickset balding man who wore artfully cut loose suits that managed to make him look powerful rather than corpulent, the archetypal boss, and when he scowled like this, it was usually the prelude to an attempted browbeating.

  But not this time. “My contacts in Moscow tell me that Emile Lourade is soon to become Common European Minister of Technological Development,” he said in a rather strangely conspiratorial tone.

  If Jerry was supposed to be impressed by this inside information, he wasn’t about to show it. “What’s that got to do with our mutual interests?” he said diffidently.

  “Corneau is almost certain to be named Director to replace him,” Velnikov said, and that did give Jerry pause. Who would replace Patrice as project manager when he moved up? How long could he expect to remain “Assistant Project Manager for Design Integration” when that fancy title was just a bureaucratic euphemism for his personal relationship with Corneau?

  Velnikov, of course, had no trouble reading the obvious in his mind. He smiled grimly. He nodded. “Yes, the whole Agency is going to be thrown into a state of flux, Reed. You have much to lose, and I have much to gain.”

  “How nice for you, Boris,” Jerry said dryly. He frowned in some confusion. “It’s all too obvious what I have to lose,” he said, “but what do you think you have to gain?”

  “I intend to replace Corneau as project manager,” Velnikov said.

  Jerry took a sip of Cognac and swallowed hard at the thought of that. If Velnikov became project manager, Jerry’s ass was already out the door. What was the bastard trying to tell him?

  “I can see that you do not find the prospect pleasing,” Velnikov told him with a hideous smile.

  “They’ll never allow a Soviet project manager, and you know it, Boris.”

  “I want the job very badly, Reed,” Velnikov declared with a force that bordered on anger.

  “I wanted it too once, Boris,” Jerry told him. “You’ll pardon me if I don’t get too upset to see you standing in my shoes for a change.”

  But Velnikov held himself under tight control. “Point taken, Reed,” he acknowledged, rather manfully, Jerry was forced to admit. “But that is the past. The question is, what do you want now?”

  “What do you care what I want?”

  “Because I’m prepared to give it to you in return for services rendered,” Velnikov said. “You’re close to Corneau. When the time comes to recommend a successor, he’ll talk it over with you. . . .”

  “And you actually expect me to put in a good word for you, Boris?” Jerry exclaimed in amazement.

  “Yes,” Velnikov said blandly.

  “Why the hell would I do that?”

  “Tell me what you really want, Reed, and I’ll tell you why I know you’ll do whatever you can to help me become project manager.”

  “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?”

  Velnikov just nodded briefly.

  “I want to go up there, Boris,” Jerry told him. “I want to get at least as far as GEO. I want to see Spaceville floating out there in the darkness. I want to see the Earth from space. I want to feel it, I want to be there, I want a ride in my own creation.”

  Velnikov cocked his head to one side and stared at Jerry narrowly. “That’s really all you want?” he said distrustfully. “You do not demand a higher executive position? You do not even require that you retain your present one?”

  “Politique politicienne,” Jerry said scornfully. “Shit for the birds. You want my help, you get me up there. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Velnikov studied him silently for a long moment. “I believe you, Reed,” he finally said. “I do not understand you, but I believe you. Very well, I make to you this promise. When I become project manager, I will quite literally give you the Moon.”

  “The Moon . . . ,” Jerry said softly. “What do you mean, the Moon?”

  Velnikov smiled a vast smug smile. “If you are serious about what you say, it will not be so difficult,” he said. “Not if you are really willing to take a demotion to get there, all the way down to chief propulsion and maneuvering system engineer.”

  “Subsystem engineer!” Jerry exclaimed. What irony! The very position that Velnikov had kept him from having all these years! The very reason that he had had to con Patrice into creating this phony job for him in the first place!

  But this time Boris Velnikov seemed to have misread him entirely. “Yes, I know, it seems unthinkable, but the position would require you to supervise the system integration on the prototype in orbit and monitor it during the shakedown cruise,” he said. “And current thinking is to create a big splash by taking the GTN as far as lunar orbit. You can’t expect to stay part of management, there won’t be anyone aboard except operational personnel.”

  “How do I know that I can trust you?” Jerry said. “We’ve been, well, enemies so long. . . .”

  “I’ve never been your enemy, Reed
.”

  “Oh come on, Boris!”

  “No, it’s true. I’ve certainly never liked you, and I’ve never trusted you, and you’ve been a thorn in my side, but I’ve never blocked you from anything out of personal pique. Everything I’ve done was done for sound policy reasons, and believe me, not always policies set on my level. I’ve taken no particular pleasure in it. You’ve been a security risk and a political embarrassment, but now the situation has changed, and we can be useful to each other. Our self-interests are no longer in conflict, it’s as simple as that.”

  “Simple to you, maybe. . . ,” Jerry muttered.

  “Oh come on, Reed, what do you have to lose, after all?”

  Nothing I haven’t lost already, Jerry was forced to realize.

  “Okay, Boris,” he said, “so if you make project manager, I’ll take the job. But beyond that, I don’t promise anything.”

  Velnikov sipped at his Cognac. “You don’t have to, Reed,” he said. “It’s merely a matter of following your own enlightened self-interest. That’s the reason we can trust each other—precisely because we don’t have to.”

  Jerry clinked glasses with the Russian. “You know, Boris,” he said, “for once I think I know just what you mean.”

  And by the time Patrice Corneau finally called Jerry into his office to tell him the inevitable, Jerry had just about decided to play Velnikov’s game. It was, after all, from his point of view, the only game in town.

  After the congratulations were over, Patrice leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Of course, as Director of ESA, I have to appoint a new project manager for the Grand Tour Navette, subject of course to the usual review process,” he said. “I’m in a bit of a quandary. The logical choice, in terms of the project, is, I’m afraid, going to be rather hard to make the politicians swallow. What do you think, Jerry, should I have a go at what might be a futile gesture, or play it safe and nominate someone like Clark or Steinholz?”

  “This may sound strange coming from me, Patrice,” Jerry told him, “but I think you should go ahead and try to appoint Velnikov.”

  “Velnikov!” Corneau exclaimed. “I’m not talking about Velnikov, I’m talking about you!”

  “Me?” Jerry stammered.

  “You’ve often enough said that you should have had the job instead of me, and I’ve agreed from the beginning, as you well know,” Corneau said. “No one knows the project better. You’ve been right in the middle of everything as my assistant. The engineering staff respects you. It could be good pub. Rationally speaking, there isn’t any other logical choice. Don’t you agree?”

  “Of course I agree!” Jerry exclaimed in an utter daze. “But . . . but . . .”

  Jerry’s brain was reeling. He found himself struggling for psychic purchase. “My God, Patrice,” he said, “after all that’s happened, what makes you think you can get away with appointing me?”

  Corneau leaned forward and stared into Jerry’s eyes with the strangest expression. “I have a chance of getting away with appointing you now, Jerry,” he said. “You’ve taken Common European citizenship, and that helps. You’ve been functioning more or less as my deputy. How much of a chance?” He shrugged. “That is certainly one of the imponderables. Perhaps only a slight chance. But the good of the project and simple justice points right at you, old friend. I may very well fail. You may be publicly embarrassed. That’s why I’m leaving it up to you, Jerry. What do you say, should I go ahead and try?”

  “But . . . but Velnikov—”

  “Wants very much to be project manager, oh yes, I know,” Corneau said, leaning forward now and frowning. “And Moscow wants very much to foist him on us. But a Russian project manager would be unacceptable to Strasbourg.”

  “And you think there’s a chance in the world that the Russians would accept me!”

  “They just might if Velnikov became Deputy Director of ESA as a quid pro quo,” Corneau said. “They’d have their man higher placed than expected, and as my deputy, the bastard would be effectively out of the operational circuit.”

  Patrice smiled at him. “Well, Jerry, one old Space Cadet to another, do I go ahead and try?” he said. “What do you say?”

  What did he say? Jerry didn’t even know what to think.

  Wasn’t Velnikov’s offer what he really wanted? Hadn’t he long since decided what he really meant by walking on water? Hadn’t he given up everything else for it already? Should he really throw away all that for what was likely to turn out to be Patrice Corneau’s futile gesture?

  Round and round it went in his head, and it did not revolve smoothly. There was a missing piece in all this, he didn’t know what it was, but he could feel it grinding painfully in his brain like a gear train with a missing tooth on a cogwheel. Something here just did not compute.

  “I don’t know what to say, Patrice,” he finally said cautiously. “This is such a shock. . . . You’ve got to give me time to think. . . .”

  “Naturellement,” Corneau said. “But unfortunately, we’re on a tight timetable. In order to prevent confusion and weeks of political infighting, it has been decided to announce all three appointments simultaneously—Emile as Minister of Technological Development, me to replace him as Director, and a project manager to replace me. So nothing happens until we have a project manager to announce. I can let you sleep on it for two days, Jerry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to give me your answer before the weekend.”

  Jerry staggered out of the project manager’s office and went straight home even though it was only four o’clock. He needed to be alone to think. But after hours of sitting on the hard black leather couch in his disheveled little living room, staring into space, he was as confused as ever.

  Or worse. He had the eerie feeling that there was something lurking beneath the surface of all this that he didn’t understand. That perhaps he was simply unequipped to understand. Something churning around like a hidden serpent deep within the bowels of the deepest dirtiest levels of what he had always scorned as politique politicienne.

  He desperately needed to talk this over with someone who understood these dirty bureaucratic games, someone who could tell him whatever it was that he sensed Corneau would not.

  Velnikov? He was certainly a bureaucratic weasel, and he certainly had deep connections in Moscow. But of course he couldn’t talk to Velnikov about any of this!

  He knew only one person in the world whom he could turn to for useful help now.

  She had spent her whole life playing bureaucratic hardball. The Golden Boy was at least as well connected as Velnikov, and Red Star had real clout in Strasbourg too.

  And she owed it to him, didn’t she? She owed him more than she could ever pay. She owed him his life back at the very least.

  But how could he call Sonya? He hadn’t seen her in over a year. He hadn’t spoken to her on the phone for something like six months. And for over three years, their occasional phone conversations had been painful, and businesslike, and coldly brief. How could he face ripping open that deep old wound by crying out for her help now?

  You’ll have to give up everything else to do it. . . .

  Everything?

  Even this?

  Even this, kiddo, Rob Post’s voice seemed to whisper insinuatingly in his ear.

  He poured himself a small Cognac, slugged it down, poured himself another, and without letting himself think any further about what he was doing, he sat down in the armchair in the videotel camera’s field of vision and punched in the number of the apartment on Avenue Trudaine.

  Sonya answered on the third ring. She was close to the camera. All he could see was her head and the collar of a plain white shirt. She looked older than he seemed to remember, it had been a year, but had she really looked as old as this? There were lines in her face where he had thought it would be smooth, and something different about the set of her mouth, and a severity to the ear-length cut of her hair. And her eyes seemed so world-weary and cynical.

  He tried not to think a
bout what his videotel camera must be showing her.

  “Hello, Jerry,” she said, allowing only her raised eyebrows to show surprise.

  “Hello, Sonya,” Jerry stammered. “Uh . . . how’ve you been doing?”

  “Surviving,” she said coolly. “And you?”

  “I need your advice, Sonya,” Jerry blurted. And, having spat it out and gotten directly to the point, “You owe me that much.”

  “Of course I do,” she said with unexpected tenderness. “It was never my idea to drift apart.”

  It was never my idea to divorce you! Jerry was about to snap back. Screwing Pashikov was never my idea either!

  But the face on the screen had softened and let a sadness show through, and his heart would not let him say what his mind told him was presently entirely beside the point.

  “It wasn’t either of our ideas, was it, Sonya?” he said instead. “Our lives just got ground up in the political machinery. There’s no point in blaming each other for it now, is there.”

  “I’m glad you’ve finally come to that sad wisdom, Jerry,” Sonya said, and the professional bureaucrat’s mask went back up. “So tell me your problem, and I’ll gladly do whatever I can to help you.”

  Perhaps that was for the best. At any rate, he found himself pouring out the story, not so much to the memory of his wife as to the mature detached professional bureaucrat on the screen, to the Director of the economic strategy department of the Paris office of Red Star, S.A.

  Sonya’s face didn’t show anything as he told her of his cynical deal with Boris Velnikov, nor did she react to the news that Emile Lourade was becoming a Minister and Patrice Corneau was moving up to ESA Director. In her position, she probably had known it was coming before he had. But when he told her that Corneau had offered to put him up for project manager, her mouth fell open, and by the time he had finished, she was shaking with rage for some unfathomable reason.

  “That’s loathsome!” she declared, her nose puckered up in an apparently sincere expression of disgust.