“Isn’t there something we can do?”
Ilya grimaced. “About the only thing you can do is persuade Jerry to make his peace with Boris Velnikov,” he said.
“Jerry won’t even talk to me. And besides, he hates Velnikov. And the feeling would seem to be mutual.”
“Hmmm . . . ,” Ilya muttered thoughtfully. Then his eyes lit up and he smiled his best bureaucratic grin. “Perhaps Velnikov could be persuaded that it would be in his best interests to make his peace with Jerry Reed!”
“What?”
“Jerry has the ear of Corneau. What’s more, he’s a sort of transnational symbol these days, a real live Europeanized American. I could speak to Velnikov. I could tell him that you still have some influence with Jerry. And that Red Star therefore has reason to believe that Jerry could be brought over to his side. That the support of someone like Jerry Reed might be at least marginally useful. I could even intimate that I was transmitting the opinion of higher circles, as it were.”
“But Jerry would never do anything to help Boris Velnikov!”
“He might if Velnikov offered him the right quid pro quo . . . perhaps the job of chief project engineer, if and when Velnikov moves up to project manager. . . .”
“You’d go out on a limb like that for me, Ilya?” Sonya said, quite moved. “For Jerry?”
Ilya shrugged. “Who am I to deny that I am in some small way responsible for his misfortunes?” he said. Then the bureaucratic grin came back. “Besides, should Moscow believe that I had some small hand in getting Velnikov’s appointment through, it will look very pretty in my kharakteristika.”
Ilya had his talk with Boris Velnikov, and Velnikov had his tête-à-tête with Jerry, an apparently successful meeting, or so Velnikov had reported back to Ilya, and Sonya had felt more at peace than she had in years.
She had discharged a debt of honor. She had written the happiest ending possible to the long chapter of her and Jerry’s life together that she could under the circumstances, and now she could consider it closed.
Or so she had thought till the night that Jerry had telephoned her and plunged her right back into the middle of the whole mess.
He had looked perfectly dreadful; old, and tired, and distracted, and perhaps a little drunk. Nor, after all these months with no contact, did he waste much time on small talk.
She smiled inside when he told her of his deal with Velnikov, but when he told her that Corneau had offered to put him up for project manager, her heart sank, and she was quite amazed at the depths to which his so-called friend was prepared to sink.
How much can I tell him? she asked herself. Certainly not that this is about to destroy everything Ilya and I have done for him! Certainly not why Corneau’s cynical ploy is almost certain to fail! But he has to be made to understand what Corneau is really up to. . . .
“Corneau is using you, Jerry,” Sonya had told him angrily. And she told him how. But she didn’t tell him why it wouldn’t work, nor how Ilya Pashikov had put himself on the line to protect Jerry’s interests.
Instead she let him think that Moscow would have his head as Corneau’s dupe if the Velnikov appointment did not go through. But how to walk him through the bureaucratic mine field without telling him things he was simply not prepared to hear . . . ?
And then it came to her. It was perfect!
“Let Corneau propose you for project manager,” she had told him, and laid the whole thing out. It would be marvelous! Not only would it put Corneau and the Western Europeans in an impossible position when Jerry stepped aside and endorsed Velnikov, it would be a demonstration of transnational solidarity on the part of a Europeanized American, and that would give the Bears a good solid P.R. kick in the pants!
She told Jerry that she would keep in touch and there were a few necessary and awkward phone conversations between them while the wheels were turning, but after Velnikov was appointed project manager, and Jerry became chief propulsion and maneuvering system engineer, that was really the end of it as far as she was concerned, nor did Jerry seem very eager to have anything further to do with her.
She had gotten Jerry what he really wanted most in life, hadn’t she? He was going to get his spaceship ride. It was he who had destroyed the heart of their marriage with this childish obsession, wasn’t it? It was this obsession that in the end had driven her into the arms of Ilya Pashikov. She had only been forced to write a legal end to the hollow specter of their marriage, and that too had at least been partially done to preserve his adolescent dream.
Jerry was going to get what he wanted most in the world, more than he had ever wanted her, if the sad truth be told. And she had gotten it for him twice over, hadn’t she? There was no more reason for guilt. All that was dead. All that was past.
Sonya sighed and finished the last of her coffee. It was 10:30 and time for the briefing from the economic strategy department.
She had gotten what she had always wanted too, or most of it, hadn’t she? When Ilya was finally promoted to Assistant Vice President of Red Star and transferred back to Moscow, thanks in part to his role in the successful outcome of the Velnikov affair, she had gotten his job in Paris.
And if she could not quite delude herself that she didn’t miss him, well, their so-called affair had cooled down to a mere understanding long before he had left, and she had always known that Ilya would have to leave Paris for her to sit in this office.
And so here she was, Director of Red Star’s Paris office, a mature bureaucrat at the pinnacle of her career. She had her work. She had her visits from Franja. She had all the money she would ever need. She had a life in the West that need never end. She had everything that a young girl in Lenino had ever dreamed of and more.
Didn’t she?
Nevertheless, after Ilya had left, she had once more taken to following Jerry’s career from afar. A hobby, idle curiosity, no more, she told herself, something to fill some of the empty hours. . . .
It was going to be another standard busy day for the Director of the Paris office of Red Star, S.A., and it was time to get down to it.
But across the city and out in the banlieue, she knew that this was going to be a very special day for Jerry Reed, and she couldn’t help thinking about it.
This was the last day he was to spend ground testing his rockets and the first day of the countdown to the fulfillment of the dream of his lifetime. In two weeks, he would ride a Concordski into space, up there at last, where he had always belonged.
Sonya sighed. It really was time to begin her working day.
But she knew that she would never have a day in her life like the day Jerry must be having now. She would never feel what he was going to feel at the apogee of his Concordski ride, never ride a dream into the up and out.
In a superficial way, their lives had turned out quite similarly. They were two lonely people with nothing left but their work. But today she knew that Jerry had something that would never be hers.
She was a professional bureaucrat, it was an honorable calling, and here she was at the top of her career. By all objective standards, her life was a success story.
He was a spacecraft designer who had never gotten to work at the full stretch of his powers, never received the just fruits of his labor, and by all the usual objective standards, his career was a tragic failure.
But by some other, more elusive, more absolute standard, it was Jerry whose life in the end had the higher meaning. He was a man with a vision, and soon, at long last, against all odds, and via the aid of the woman who had divorced him, the man who had made him a cuckold, and a country that he loathed, he would live to experience a fulfillment of that vision, a completion of the spirit, that the successful bureaucrat could never know.
And at last Sonya admitted it to herself.
She envied Jerry his incomprehensible vision.
Perhaps she always had.
THE UKRAINIAN REAGAN
Ironically enough, it was Vice President Nathan Wolfowitz, the self-s
tyled “American Gorbachev,” who hit the nail on the head when he called Vadim Kronkol the “Ukrainian Ronald Reagan.” While Reagan might have been a mediocre actor and Kronkol one of the Soviet Union’s most successful television personalities, both were political nonentities before they were chosen to run for office by backstage political forces, and both were chosen for their proven ability as TV salesmen, Reagan for the General Electric Company, and Kronkol for Ukrainian nationalism.
And while Kronkol may have never gone so far as to co-star with a chimpanzee, his antics as the presiding ringmaster over the circus called “Tonight in the Ukraine,” with its bizarre mélange of ethnic nationalism, faith healing, traditional entertainments, and Ukrainian Catholic preachments, could have taught Mr. Reagan himself a thing or two about monkey business.
And indeed, the horde of American political mercenaries now running Kronkol’s Presidential campaign are busily working away applying some of the very same techniques that made “the American Kronkol’s” campaigns so ruthlessly effective.
—Mad Moscow
Thus far, everything had run smooth as glass, not that Jerry Reed had really expected otherwise. Clones of these components had been tested over and over again, and all the design flaws and glitches had long since been worked out, so today’s work was merely a matter of static firing all the actual motors that would be boosted up to the Grand Tour Navette being assembled in orbit.
There were quite a few rockets to be static tested, of various sizes and thrust ratings, and they had been set up on test stands all around the ESA complex.
The biggest motors were the actual vectoring thrusters, capable of altering the GTN’s trajectory even while the main engines were firing. There were four of them, to be mounted in a cross halfway down the boom between the body of the GTN and the main engines. They would be hooked up to the main fuel supply in the balloon and work in concert, and they were capable of being throttled up or down to produce anything from subtle course corrections to a swift one-eighty virtually on a dime with the main thrusters off.
This meant that they had to be static fired on the big outdoor test stand used to handle the main thrusters. It was the first test of the day, and by far the most dramatic. The vectoring thrusters were set up side by side on the outsized test stand, and Jerry and the team ran the tests from inside the remote blockhouse.
When the vectoring thrusters were installed in their cross configuration on the GTN, with the nozzles pointing outward, course changes could be made by punching numbers into the maneuvering computer, but Jerry had designed the system so that the GTN could also be flown by the seat of the pants with a computer-controlled joystick. There had been a lot of argument about that one, but every prospective pilot in the program, as well as everyone else with a pilot’s license, had endorsed it a thousand percent.
So when Jerry test-fired the vectoring thrusters, he had the silly pleasure of doing it first with the joystick. The four directions of control fired each of the line of thrusters in sequence, and the distance the stick was displaced from the center point throttled the thrust up and down.
Some comedian had brought a chip-deck into the blockhouse and dropped in the William Tell Overture, and while the recorded orchestra played the music, Jerry improvised to it on the “rocket organ.” As the music changed in pitch, he switched from one thruster to another, trying at the same time to match volume with thrust level. Little gouts of flame, full shattering blasts, medium notes, danced crazily up and down the line of thrusters to the kitschy music, while the techs laughed and cheered and beat time against the control panels.
When the overture was finished, and Jerry had taken his ironic bows, they punched in the preprogrammed test sequence and let the control computer take over. Jerry doubted that he would ever be a maestro on the rocket organ, but everything tested out perfectly to the fifth decimal place.
After that, things became more routine. The automatic station-keeping jets were quite small, designed as they were to simply keep the GTN in a stationary position with all other maneuvering rockets inactive. There were dozens of them which would be affixed all over the spacecraft, and they were set up on a series of six indoor test stands, and it took Jerry the rest of the morning to run through these sequences.
After a short lunch over which no one really wanted to linger, Jerry went over to the hangar where two dozen of the warping jets were set up side by side on a long test bed. This was the system that would maneuver the GTN in proximity to Cosmograds, space stations, Concordskis, lunar shuttles, and Martian excursion vehicles. Delicacy was what was required here, and so there were four dozen very low-powered thrusters in the system. On the actual spacecraft, they would be gimbal-mounted in a computer-controlled ring around the boom, in lateral banks along both sides of the main framework, and fore and aft of the cabin, so that the GTN could maneuver with pinpoint precision at velocities as low as a meter a minute.
With these low-power rockets, safety required no more than a steel partition with a viewing window between the test bed and the control console, and when Jerry arrived and began the test sequence, the sounds of the rockets firing were no more than fairly loud hisses, and the exhausts were barely visible. The instruments told the story, and through the first seventeen tests, everything was boringly nominal.
But when Jerry threw the eighteenth switch, the rocket failed to fire.
“Merde!” muttered Albrecht, the team head.
Jerry opened the switch and closed it again.
Still nothing.
Jerry turned around and cocked an inquisitive eyebrow. Albrecht shrugged. “Probably just a loose connection between the panel and the test bed,” he offered lamely.
Jerry was not amused. There was an untidy mess of electronic spaghetti running from the control console, across the hangar floor, and to the test bed. He nodded toward the cables. “It could take all day to find a short in all of that,” he told Albrecht unhappily.
“Could just be the switch,” Albrecht suggested hopefully.
“Assume it is and replace it,” Jerry snapped, and he fidgeted for twenty minutes while a technician removed the suspect switch and installed a new one.
When Jerry threw it, nothing happened.
“Fuck!” he exclaimed.
“I hope it’s not the motor . . . ,” Albrecht said uneasily.
“You and me both!”
“What now?”
Jerry thought about it. If they started screwing around with the wiring now, the test bed could be down for hours if they were lucky, and all day if they weren’t. If it was a bad motor . . . well, he didn’t even want to think about it.
“We’ll test the rest of the motors first and then worry about it,” he said. “Waste a lot less downtime that way.”
“Makes sense,” Albrecht agreed, and they fired the remaining six rockets. Everything went nominally.
“Now what?” Albrecht said.
“We’d better have a look at the motor,” Jerry sighed. “If that’s the problem, we’re fucked, but it’d take a lot longer to find a short in the wiring if that’s all it is, so we’d better eliminate the possibility of the worst news first.”
“I guess you’re right,” Albrecht said unhappily. “Shut down the panel, we don’t want to take any chances while we’re out there if there is a short in the wiring,” he ordered his crew. “And I don’t think I have to tell you that this is not a smoking break!”
He and Jerry stepped out from behind the safety partition and threaded their way across the wiring to the test bed. “Well?” he said as they stood over number eighteen.
“First thing to do is remove the cowling and check the fuel and oxidizer lines,” Jerry told him.
Albrecht nodded, took a wrench out of a coverall pocket, and carefully loosened the series of bolts securing the top half of the cowling to the interior framework of the small motor assembly. He lifted off the oval piece of sheet metal, handed it to Jerry, leaned over, and peered into the guts of the mechanism
.
“Well . . . ?” Jerry said, holding the cowling over his head with his right hand, and leaning forward impatiently to peer over Albrecht’s shoulder at—
“Scheissdreck!” Albrecht shouted, leaping backward, colliding with Jerry, knocking him off balance. “The hydrogen line’s loose, we’ve got to get—”
Jerry staggered back, threw up his arms in a futile attempt to regain his balance, and the cowling flew loose from his right hand as he spun around and started to fall—
—as the cowling came clattering down on the rocket motor assembly—
—there was a soft whooshing explosion—
—something slammed into the base of his skull—
THE MEDIA BLITZ ROLLS ON
Vadim Kronkol, having purchased another hour of airtime on an American broadcast satellite with money that went in one pocket as it went out the other, made yet another rabble-rousing speech that seemed to have gone through several rewrites in both Washington and Hollywood, invoking everything from the Stalinist genocide against the Ukrainian kulaks to Catherine the Great’s alleged predilection for stallions to demonstrate that Russians were nikulturni barbarians and perverts who regularly ate innocent Ukrainian babies for breakfast.
It was quite a vintage performance by the Ukrainian Rasputin, next morning’s polls showed he had improved his lead over the nearest voice of reason another five points, to 69 percent. This time, the American satellite targeted Moscow and Leningrad too, where there certainly are no votes to be won for the Ukrainian Liberation Front, as if to provoke Russians into providing riot footage.
Which unruly mobs in both cities dutifully did, led by Uncle Joe hooligans, but joined by many of their Russian nationalist elders who certainly should have known better. And of course the American media wizards have now taken the choice footage of Uncle Joes smashing restaurant windows and beating up supposed Ukrainians and cut it up into the sixty-second commercials that are now saturating the Ukraine.
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