Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  “Loathsome?” Jerry exclaimed. “What’s loathsome about trying to do the right thing?”

  “Merde, Jerry, how can you be so naive? Patrice Corneau knows damn well he has absolutely no chance of being allowed to appoint you project manager! Don’t you see what’s really behind this?”

  “No, I don’t,” Jerry said simply. “That’s why I had to call you.”

  “Corneau is using you, Jerry,” Sonya said with angry passion. “Moscow badly wants Velnikov as project manager, and we have enough clout to veto whoever they put up until they break down and capitulate to end the deadlock. Our negotiators still come equipped with a good set of iron underpants. But if Corneau nominates you and refuses to put up anyone else until we withdraw Velnikov, it will be a clear signal that they’re serious, that the deadlock can only end with the appointment of a compromise. Once that happens, you may be sure that Moscow will demand your head on a platter for serving as Corneau’s dupe, and he’ll give it to them.”

  Laid out as nakedly and angrily as all that, it had the instant ring of the disgusting bureaucratic truth. It was also, upon the briefest reflection, the only theory that accommodated all of the data.

  “It’s fuck-your-buddy time, isn’t it?” he said.

  “It’s always fuck-your-buddy time, Jerry, when are you going to face up to that? It’s the second law of bureaucracy.”

  “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Apply the first law of bureaucracy,” Sonya told him, “cover your ass.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  Sonya’s face hardened, and when she spoke, it was the middle-aged survivor of the bureaucratic wars speaking, not his angry ex-wife, or the girl he had been enthralled by, or even the woman who had walked out on him to save her Party card.

  “Give Corneau what he so richly deserves. Give Moscow what it wants.”

  “What?”

  “Let Corneau propose you for project manager. Let the process become good and deadlocked. Then you step aside in favor of Velnikov, in the interests of the project, European solidarity, world peace, and humanity’s future in space; don’t worry, Tass will write a stirring speech for the press release. They’ll have no choice, not when the Godfather of the Grand Tour Navette magnanimously steps aside and kisses Velnikov publicly on both cheeks.”

  Jerry goggled at the hard-eyed mature woman on the screen. Was the woman he had married really capable of this?

  Was he?

  “And why should Velnikov live up to his end of the bargain?” Jerry said, realizing as he said it that he had made the moral decision already.

  “Because, despite what you think, Russians are not unprincipled swine whose word of honor is worthless!” Sonya snapped at him. Then, more coldly: “Besides which, Red Star will see to it that promises are kept. When the time comes for you to withdraw in favor of Velnikov, you will approach Moscow through Red Star, through me, they’ll certainly find that credible enough. And Ilya will transmit your offer directly to the Red Star Tower. And the Director General of Red Star himself will call President Gorchenko, who will order Tass to set up the public announcement. And all along the line, everyone will know what Velnikov promised you. Your ass will be plated with bureaucratic gold, Jerry. No one is going to sour such a triumph for Red Star on that level with a cheap double-cross if we have anything to say about it, and after we, not any government or Party apparatus, deliver Velnikov as project manager, believe me, we will!”

  “And the Golden Boy will come out looking even more golden, won’t he?” Jerry muttered. And instantly regretted it. Sonya’s face seemed to grimace for just an instant, as if it was merely a glitch in the transmission, her eyes flared angrily at him for a longer moment, and then her expression became more distant, somehow, not so much cold as strangely wooden.

  “His standing will certainly not be diminished,” she said evenly.

  “And neither will yours, will it?” said Jerry. “You two are still . . . a team, aren’t you?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Sonya said tonelessly.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Let’s not get into that,” Sonya said wearily. “Can’t we just try and be friends?”

  “I don’t think I can really be your friend after all that’s happened, Sonya,” Jerry told her. But he did let it be.

  “I want to be your friend, Jerry, if you’ll let me,” Sonya said. “You came to me for help, remember . . . ? So at least let me give it to you. Don’t trust Patrice Corneau. Trust me.”

  Jerry sighed. “I guess I really have no other choice,” he admitted. “But it certainly feels strange climbing into bed with all these goddamn Russians. . . .”

  And then he nearly bit his tongue off when he saw the look on her face. Her mouth twisted into a snarl even as tears welled up in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Sonya, it just came out.”

  “I’m sorry too, Jerry, I’m sorry for a lot of things. So if we can’t really be friends, then just let me be your ally in this, okay?”

  “Okay, Sonya,” Jerry said. He stared at her image on the screen trying to think of something else to say, anything to end the conversation on anything but this oh-so-civilized level. But nothing would come.

  Sonya stared back at him apparently just as blankly. “I’ll stay in touch, Jerry,” she finally said lamely.

  “Yeah, you do that,” Jerry said, and they broke the connection.

  Afterward, Jerry had just sat there in his tiny living room for a long while, staring at the dead screen, at the piles of journals spilling off the coffee table, at the science-fiction novels overflowing the bookcases and mounding up against the walls, at the clutter of chips and printouts surrounding the computer station, at the dust and the dirty glasses, at the physical evidence of what his life alone had become.

  Somehow, something had made him clean up the entire apartment before collapsing that night, piling up the books and magazines as neatly as possible, straightening up the computer stand, changing the linen for the first time in two weeks, washing the mounds of dirty dishes, scrubbing the sink and stove, even making a pass at the bathtub and the toilet bowl.

  That had been a long, long time ago, and he had never done anything like it since, but from that day on, he had never let things devolve to the point they had reached before. The living room had pretty much reverted to its primitive state, and the bedroom still had its pile of laundry, and the bedclothes were usually stale, but now, on the morning of the final static firing tests, the kitchen was at least bearable when he turned on the coffee machine, and the bathtub was more or less clean when he showered off the sweat of his workout.

  The shaving mirror was more or less clean too, and the face in it, though the hair was now streaked with gray, and the skin a bit more than finely wrinkled, and the eyes hollowed by incipient bags, looked somehow younger today than it had before that call to Sonya, before Velnikov became project manager, before he became chief propulsion and maneuvering system engineer, before he had been able to look forward with concrete assurance to riding his Grand Tour Navette to the Moon. Older in years, in wrinkles, bags, gray hair, salt-and-pepper stubble, it was younger around the eyes and mouth, hopeful, and almost relaxed where it had been tense with frustration and bitter with ancient defeats.

  By the time he had finished shaving and dressing, the coffee was ready, and he took a big mugful into the living room along with a somewhat stale pain au chocolat, and had his quick petit déjeuner sitting on the couch and thinking about today’s test.

  The main engines were already certified and waiting on the pad atop a dumb freight rocket for tomorrow’s boost to orbit. All that was left was routine static firing of assorted maneuvering system rockets, certainly nothing exciting in and of itself.

  But then, once the rockets were certified, they would be taken down, and crated, and flown to Tyuratam, and boosted into orbit, and that would be the end of his work on the ground. Next stop—orbit, assembly, and t
hen the Moon.

  What his life would be like after his fifteen days in space was something he hadn’t really thought about until now. What do you do after you’ve finally walked on water? He was too old to seriously hope for any crew position when the fleet of Grand Tour Navettes became operational, too old to dream of exploring Mars, unqualified for anything in the bases on the Moon.

  But after he had stepped aside for Boris Velnikov, things had changed for him at ESA. Patrice Corneau might have become distant and cold and certainly no longer his patron as Director of the Agency, but much to his ironic bemusement, Jerry had become rather the pet of the Russians.

  Velnikov had not only delivered as promised, he had actually managed to get Jerry a raise. It would seem that Velnikov’s friends back in Moscow had never informed him that Jerry’s move had been concocted by Sonya and Ilya Pashikov in the Paris office of Red Star. They hadn’t even prepared him for the Tass announcement. The morning after it had all broken in the press, Velnikov had showed up in Jerry’s office with a rather dazed expression on his face and a bottle gift-wrapped in gold foil.

  “I don’t know what to say, Reed . . . Jerry, if I may,” he said. “I must admit that I feel like a bit of a fool . . . all these years . . .” He shrugged bearishly and slapped the bottle down on Jerry’s desk. “Here,” he said, “a poor gesture, perhaps, but . . .”

  Jerry unwrapped a fifth of brown liquor with a fancy label lettered in elaborate Cyrillic and festooned with gold and silver medallions.

  “Genuine Russian potato vodka,” Velnikov told him. “Produced for export. One hundred proof and aged in Cognac casks for seven years. I have it on reliable authority that it is the best vodka in the world.”

  “Thank you, Boris,” Jerry said, quite touched despite his cynical knowledge, for it was plain that Velnikov’s emotion was innocently genuine.

  “Thank you, Jerry,” Velnikov said. “To tell you the truth, I still find it hard to believe what you’ve done for me. We were never exactly friends.”

  “And I was never exactly going to be project manager, we both know that,” Jerry told him honestly.

  “But neither was I, or so I had thought until yesterday. They were using each of us to block the other.” Velnikov hesitated, studied Jerry’s face for a moment. “Would you mind telling me why you really stepped aside for me?”

  “We had a deal, Boris, remember?”

  “Of course! And you may be sure that I will live up to my end of the bargain! But still . . .”

  “You wanted something, and I wanted something, Boris,” Jerry said, “and when I was forced to really look at it, I realized that I didn’t want to give up what I wanted to get what you wanted for yourself. So partly it was just a smart tactical move. But . . . well, the way the bastards had things set up, we were both going to get screwed. And whether I liked you or not, I could see that when it came to what that felt like, we were really standing in each other’s shoes. Know your enemy, right? But when you really do, well . . .”

  “It’s hard to stay enemies, yes,” Velnikov said. “May I?” he said, reaching for the bottle. “Shall we?”

  Jerry had nodded, and Velnikov opened the vodka, and they shared a drink of the smooth, pungent, powerful stuff out of plastic coffee cups.

  “What you have done is going to put you in a certain disfavor with Agency circles answerable to Strasbourg,” Velnikov had told him afterward. “They won’t be able to do anything overt, of course, but it will be there. So I want you to know that circles answerable to Moscow will see to it that you still have a future with the Agency after the Grand Tour Navettes become operational. I’ve cost you the patronage of Corneau, but for what it’s worth, I want you to know that you’ll always have mine.”

  And Velnikov had been true to his word. He had appointed Jerry chief propulsion and maneuvering system engineer and appointed a Russian manager over him named Igor Kalitski who was young, and eager, and deferential, and whose concept of his job was to keep paperwork and bureaucrats away from Jerry Reed and let him get on with the real work.

  Lately Boris had intimated that Jerry could be promoted up to Kalitski’s job when he came back from the shakedown cruise; the section would still be active until the whole fleet was operational, and by that time, perhaps, ESA would be ready for a Russian Director, namely himself, and Jerry could finish his career as Deputy Director of the European Space Agency in the best of all possible worlds.

  Jerry finished his coffee and left the apartment without bothering to put the empty mug in the sink. Was that what he wanted? To become a sub-project manager and then Deputy Director? They’d never make him Director after what he had done, but it would certainly be a decent capstone to his career.

  For some strange reason, a frisson of depression flashed through him as he descended the stairs, a shadow of gloom entirely inappropriate to this day of all days. For the first time in years and years, the future ahead of him seemed empty somehow, occluded, unfocused, and thoughts were leaking in around the edges of his mind that he fought to push back.

  But the sun was actually starting to break through the overcast when Jerry reached the street. People were bustling along the narrow sidewalks of the Quai de Bourbon toward the Pont St.-Louis and the St.-Michel RER station. A hydrofoil bus cleaved the river with twin white contrails, heading east toward the Porte de Bercy. The morning traffic jam on the Quai de la Tournelle had already built up by the time Jerry reached the Left Bank. Horns honked, pedestrians jabbered, cabdrivers cursed, dogs shat on the sidewalk, and Jerry found himself absorbed into the energy of the dawning day.

  Worries about what his life would be like after his ride to the Moon seemed meaningless and far away, an artifact, no doubt, of the gray beginning to what was turning into a sunny day.

  After all, he told himself, if what everything he had been told and had read was true, the man who went up would not be the man who came down.

  The RER, of course, was jammed, but it was only a short ride to the Gare du Nord to catch the new express line to the ESA complex at Le Bourget, and the train was always mostly empty out of Paris in the morning, going against the commuter tide into the city from the banlieue.

  At first, Jerry endured the crush in good humor. Soon enough, he would be up out of the smell, and the noise, and the Earthbound press of bodies, and the bonds of gravity itself, up there where it was cool, and clear, and clean, and the starry brilliance went on forever.

  Afterward, well . . .

  It didn’t bear thinking about right now.

  But standing there in the packed RER car with bodies pressed all around him, Jerry suddenly found himself thinking about it anyway. Maybe it was the odor of massed humanity. Maybe it was the press of the flesh. Maybe it was the young lovers kissing passionately in the middle of it all and who gave a damn. Maybe it was all he had given up to walk on water crowding suddenly in on him, now that he was about to actually do it, now that the countdown to the moment he had always dreamed of had really started, now that the fulfillment of a lifetime’s obsession was only two weeks away.

  “You’re a real space cadet,” Bob had told him. “You ought to be a citizen of Mars.”

  And that was what he suddenly felt like, right there in the RER, pressed up against the bodies of these strangers, like a Man from Mars. He suddenly felt his own weirdness. The years of friendless celibacy. The obsessiveness of his existence. The vast distance between what he had willed himself to become and the ordinary humans, with their ordinary loves, and lives, and children, pressed against him in this RER car.

  A chill went through him. The truth of it was that he had turned himself into a creature with no personal life at all. Politics had taken his son away from him and caused him to disown his own daughter and destroyed his marriage. And he had done the rest.

  Oh yes he had! Hadn’t Sonya asked to be his friend on the night she had given him back his life, this life, that in some deep way, he could now not keep from knowing, was rushing blindly toward its
triumphant conclusion? And hadn’t he turned her down? Why had he done that? Why had he still insisted on keeping all contact between them to the barest minimum? Why hadn’t he even accepted her offer to celebrate together at a neutral restaurant when their scheme had succeeded? Why wouldn’t he see her even now, after the Golden Boy had finally been promoted back to Moscow and out of their lives?

  Why was he thinking these grim thoughts now, of all times, riding the damned RER toward his last Earthbound task before leaving all this stuff far, far behind him?

  What was he suddenly so afraid of?

  He had given up everything to walk on water. He had turned himself into a Man from Mars.

  What do you do after you’ve walked on water?

  Rob Post hadn’t told him the answer to that one.

  But he was going to find out.

  As surely as what went up sooner or later had to come down.

  * * *

  Art Collins: “But when you come right down to it, Mr. Vice President, who gives a damn? Wouldn’t it be a good thing if the Ukraine secedes from the Soviet Union? Wouldn’t other captive peoples be encouraged to do the same thing? Wouldn’t every American like to see the Soviet Union fall apart and maybe take Common Europe with it?”

  Vice President Wolfowitz: “I certainly wouldn’t.”

  Art Collins: “Why not? Wouldn’t it mean the new access to the world’s largest export market that we so desperately need? Wouldn’t it make America the world’s number one economic power again?”

  Vice President Wolfowitz: “Like the rest of the country, Art, you’ve been listening to too many speeches by our pinheaded Commander in Chief, and the only bottom line Harry Carson understands is the one he hangs his dirty laundry on. What about the trillions and trillions of dollars we’ve stiffed them for? Oh, yeah, all we have to do to convince them to welcome us with open arms is use our media muscle to destroy the economic and political structure they’ve spent decades building!”