“My lungs are going to fill up with fluid, and my arteries and veins are going to decay, and there’ll be heart arrhythmias, and little strokes, and—”
“Jerry! Please!”
“It’s the truth, Sonya. You can’t do anything to save me. Nobody can.”
“You can’t give up hope like this, Jerry!”
“I haven’t given up hope, Sonya,” he told her. “I’ve got all the hope in the world for something wonderful, something you can help to—”
“Oh no, Jerry, for God’s sake, not that now!” Sonya cried. “You can’t be serious!”
But one look at his face told her how serious he really was.
“I’m . . . dead serious,” he said. “It’s now or never. I ride the next Grand Tour Navette, or I die without ever having my moment, for nothing, as the buffoon in a stupid farce. Is that what you really want for me? Is it, Sonya?”
“Jerry . . .”
“Spaceville is full of people in worse shape than I am,” he went on relentlessly. “I’ve done my homework. Hell, I designed the GTN, remember? The Grand Tour Navette will take me all the way to the Moon and back and I’ll never even pull more than half a g.” He gave her a foolish little smile. “In fact, it’ll be healthier for me up out of the gravity well than it would be down here on Earth.”
“I . . . I’ve done some homework too, Jerry,” Sonya admitted. “The reentry strain . . . the cabin pressure differential . . . and you’d be under nearly three g’s on the trip up to orbit. It’d cut months off your life, a year maybe. . . .”
“So what?” Jerry said coldly. “I’ll have been there.”
“I won’t do it!” Sonya said. “I won’t let you just give up and die! In the months you’re talking about throwing away, anything could happen!”
“My God, Sonya, what do I have to do to convince you to help me?” Jerry said angrily. “Get down on my knees and beg?”
“Tell him, Franja!” Sonya cried. “Tell him how insane this is!”
“I can’t do that, Mother,” Franja said. “You’re wrong, and he’s right.”
“What?”
“He’s going to die, Mother. And nothing we can do is going to save him.”
“I just can’t accept that!” Sonya sobbed.
“You have to, Sonya! I have!”
“How can you sit there and . . . and . . . ?”
“Because I’ve still got a dream,” Jerry said. “I don’t want to spend what’s left of my life doing nothing but sitting around and watching myself die. A few months of pain and agony for a chance to have what I’ve always wanted. Can’t you see that not making that tradeoff is what’s insane?”
“No, Jerry, I can’t, I just can’t. . . .”
“Because it’s not your dream, Mother, that’s it, isn’t it?” Franja said. “You’ve never understood it. You don’t know what it means.”
And she looked at Jerry as she spoke now, speaking to him, speaking for him, as Sonya had never heard her speak before.
“To feel the power of those engines fighting against gravity, against the bonds of the Earth, to feel the planet itself resisting your will . . . And then, suddenly, it’s over, and there’s silence, and you’re weightless, and you look out, and there’s the Earth, shining out there in the darkness, immense, and beautiful, and wonderfully alive. And the stars, more of them than you can count, and you know that there are planets out there around them, other living worlds, and on them, creatures like yourself, looking back across the light-years, across the centuries, and it all goes on forever, worlds and time without end . . .”
Franja sighed. She turned to face Sonya. “It’s like . . . it’s like nothing else there is, Mother. It’s . . . it’s everything there is, and you know your place in it. And you feel grand, and you feel tiny, and somehow . . . somehow you know what you’re for. People have died for much less, Mother. For much, much less. Let him have it. Let him go.”
There were tears in Jerry’s eyes now. He reached across Sonya’s lap and squeezed his daughter’s hand.
“Listen to me, Mother,” Franja said. “I’m my father’s daughter, and I know. I’ve been there.”
And Sonya almost saw it then, this vision that could never be hers, like what one experienced among true believers in the church of a religion whose faith you could not share.
She envied the two of them that vision. And loved them for it. And felt the bite of jealousy too. And the happiness of being part of a true family again. And the pain of standing a pace apart from its heart.
If only . . .
She raged at the injustice of it all. I am a Soviet bureaucrat, she thought. I am a good Marxist and a dialectical materialist. But just this once, I would like to believe in God. I would like to believe that you are out there listening to me, you miserable phallocratic bastard! I would like to believe that you are able to hear me telling you what a sadistic brute you are!
But no voice from the whirlwind answered back. There was only Jerry and Franja holding hands across her lap, regarding her silently with the same infinite vista in their eyes.
Sonya sighed. She reached out and took their hands. The touch of the two of them warmed her heart. She had never felt closer to them and yet never more far apart. It was the best moment of her life and the worst.
“I just don’t know,” she said. “What you’re asking is so hard. . . .”
“I know it is,” Jerry said softly. “Really I do. . . .”
“You’ve got to give me time . . .” Sonya said miserably.
“I’d like to,” Jerry said. “I’d like to give you anything you want. I’d like to give you all the time in the world.”
He shrugged. He smiled oh so bravely. “But I just don’t have that much time to give,” he said tenderly. “It’s just not in this hand of cards.”
* * *
VADIM KRONKOL TO ADDRESS UNITED NATIONS
Despite the strenuous efforts of the Soviet Union to prevent it, Vadim Kronkol, the new Ukrainian President, will be allowed to address the United Nations General Assembly next week, and is expected to use the opportunity to declare Ukrainian independence.
In 1945, when the U.N. was founded, the Soviet Union demanded 15 General Assembly seats, one for each of its constituent republics. The United States offered to accept this position providing it was given 48 General Assembly seats, one for each state. The eventual compromise gave the Soviet Union 3 seats, one each for the republics of Russia, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine.
In practice, the Byelorussian and Ukrainian delegates have always been selected by the central government of the Soviet Union, but when Yegor Shivlets resigned, the credentials committee was left no choice but to accept the credentials of the duly elected Ukrainian government over strong Soviet protest.
United Nations legal experts have pointed out, however, that, since the Ukraine has held a U.N. seat since the organization’s inception, this is not an implied recognition of Ukrainian independence.
“The Russians can’t have it both ways,” a high U.N. official who asked not to be identified pointed out. “They’ve always maintained the position that the Ukraine was a quasi-sovereign state for representation purposes, the Kronkol government was duly elected under both Soviet and Ukrainian law, and so there is no legal basis whatever for questioning its delegation’s credentials. The Soviet Union did this to itself, way back in 1945.”
—Robert Reed, StarNet
* * *
XXV
“It’s your father again, Bobby,” Sara called out from the living room.
“Jesus Christ . . . ,” Robert Reed muttered under his breath. “Tell him I’ll be there as soon as I wipe the shaving cream off my face!” he shouted.
What a morning to call! This was the day that the shit was going to come down for sure, and for once some big news was going to be made at the United Nations, Bobby was actually going to get his byline on a lead story, and his head was thoroughly involved with the impending crisis.
Vadim
Kronkol was scheduled to address the General Assembly at eleven o’clock, and it was no secret that he was going to use it as the forum for a Ukrainian declaration of independence from the Soviet Union.
What would happen after that was anyone’s guess and everyone’s. What would the Russians do? Present a rival Ukrainian delegation? Walk out? Send in the Red Army?
More to the point, what words would that pinhead Harry Carson put in the mouth of the American delegate, Reagan Smith?
That was going to be the real story. Everyone knew that Kronkol was going to declare Ukrainian independence. Everyone knew that the Soviets would not accept it.
But no one knew what President Carson would do. How could you predict the next move of a maniac?
Carson had certainly made it quite clear that he would recognize an independent Ukraine the moment it was formally declared. But how far would he really go in backing the Ukrainians against the Russians?
Would he threaten to supply arms to the Ukrainians if the Red Army moved? Was it true that there were American arms in the Ukraine already? Would Carson threaten to send in American “advisors”? An expeditionary force? And would he back up his words with deeds if the Russians called his bluff? Or was he just pounding his chest like the gorilla he was?
With Harry Carson, anything was possible. Bobby didn’t envy the Russians.
The United States had sealed the Western Hemisphere and turned it into a series of economic fiefdoms. Resistance in Latin America had been reduced to the point where it was being handled by local proxies led by a handful of American advisors. And while this made the endless endemic guerrilla warfare far more politically popular, now that local cannon fodder was doing most of the dying, it was lousy for the armaments industry which kept the arteriosclerotic American economy going.
The result was that trillions of dollars were still being poured down the bottomless rathole of Battlestar America. By now the Pentagon probably didn’t even know how much ordnance was deployed between Geosynchronous Orbit and the atmosphere. Anything and everything that the defense industry could dream up to sell to the Pentagon had been procured in overwhelming numbers and more had to be dreamed up every year to avoid a depression.
And all this was now in the hot little hands of President Harry Burton Carson.
Everything that the Russians and Europeans had in space between here and the Moon was hostage to Battlestar America. One word from Carson, and it could all be vaporized in about five minutes—satellites, Cosmograds, Spaceville, even Lunagrad, everything, trillions and trillions of ECU in capital investment, thousands of lives.
Even if Carson sent American troops into the Ukraine against the Red Army, the Russians might not dare go beyond opposing them with conventional weaponry. For if they went to tactical nukes, Carson could retaliate by destroying everything in cis-lunar space that wasn’t flying the Red, White, and Blue. And even then, it was highly unlikely that the Soviets would dare to respond with a strategic nuclear attack on the United States. Some of their missiles would no doubt get through, but Battlestar America would swat down something like 95 percent, leaving the Soviet Union at the nonexistent mercy of an enraged America still bristling with ICBMs, submarine missiles, Penetrator bombers, hypersonic cruise missiles, and the new nearly unstoppable Slam-Dunkers.
Conventional wisdom was that it was all a monstrous game of bluff, with the United States holding all the hole cards. Russia wouldn’t dare risk a nuclear confrontation with a lunatic like Carson, and Carson knew it. If the Red Army invaded the Ukraine, it might end up fighting Ukrainian troops armed by the United States, but as long as the Soviets didn’t go nuclear, there would be no direct American involvement.
But it was Sara’s paranoid theory that Harry Carson actually wanted to get American forces involved in an endless conventional war in the Ukraine.
“From his loathsome viewpoint, it’s just perfect, Bobby. A nice big capital-intensive land war that would burn up more expensive weaponry in a week than all the guerrillas in Latin America manage to take out in a year. And there’ll be more independence movements, in the Caucasus, Central Asia, God knows where, to back up with American product. Latin America all over again, only this time with a string of new governments running up the debt in place of the American taxpayer. It would keep the arms industry humming along in high gear for decades, and when it’s finally over, if it ever is, the United States will own half of what used to be the Soviet Union!”
True, Sara was a political extremist even by Bobby’s standards, and of course her theory was paranoid, cynical, and depraved.
But on the other hand, so was Harry Carson.
And today was likely to be the day that the world found out just how demented President Carson really was.
Today was the day that Bobby’s miserable U.N. assignment was finally going to give him something important to write about instead of the usual meaningless round of impotent Third World rantings.
It had taken Bobby years to land this job, years of covering stupid city politics in Santa Barbara and stupider state politics in Sacramento, years of rewriting Tass and Reuters and Agence France-Presse to fit the jingo politics of a crummy rag in San Diego, while Sara wrote her free-lance pieces for little or no money for any disreputable shit sheet that would print them, while coming down on him for selling out to the jingo press in order to make the money that kept them from starving.
He had jumped at the chance to take the U.N. job with StarNet, even though it meant living in New York, paying more than half of his salary for a so-called one-bedroom apartment in a security compound on East Ninety-third Street. It had seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime, covering the United Nations, covering world politics, for the second largest newsnet in the United States.
Worth pauperizing himself to live in a tiny apartment in Manhattan, in an island of high security surrounded by a sea of squalor that made the Third World look like his memory of Paris. Worth enduring the steam-bath summers. Worth the claustrophobia and the cockroaches. Worth paying double for every meal in a restaurant and every bag of groceries.
After all, he was the U.N. correspondent for StarNet, wasn’t he? His stories would appear in a hundred newspapers, some of which would even run his byline, would be mouthed by TV newscasters all over the country.
Even Sara, who had long since stopped being enthusiastic about anything he did, who had never had anything good to say about New York, had excitedly urged him to take it.
“God, Bobby, it’s a chance to really do something that matters!” she had said the day he got the call from StarNet. “A chance to say things that matter about something that counts!”
Of course, in practice it had turned out to be nothing quite so glorious. The United Nations had long since degenerated into a forum for Third World bitching and moaning. Most of the Latin American seats were held by revolutionary governments in exile. The Africans begged money which was not forthcoming. The Chinese condemned Caucasian economic imperialism. The Latin Americans railed against the United States. And the real players, the United States, Common Europe, and the East Asian Common Market, just yawned, went about their unilateral business, and ignored the rest of the world’s cries of agony.
In the beginning, Bobby had actually tried to cover the endless futile speechifying with insight and passion. But after the umpteenth story was killed or rewritten into total blandness, Bobby finally got the message that his fellow American U.N. correspondents, as cynical a bunch of timeservers as he had ever seen, had been trying to give him all along.
No one in the United States gave a shit what happened in the United Nations. No one cared what happened in the Third World. Someone had to cover the U.N. for the major newsnets and papers simply because it was there. But it was strictly filler material for the back pages or the tag end of newscasts, on a par with science news, flying-saucer sightings, agricultural statistics, and man-bites-dog.
Until now.
Now Vadim Kronkol was going to use the U.N. as
a forum to declare Ukrainian independence from the USSR.
It was Bobby’s golden opportunity. If he could put his own spin on it, he had a shot at putting his byline on a story that would make his reputation, that could break him out of the pack.
No doubt all his so-called colleagues were now thinking the same thing, but they had long since lost their edge. This was his chance to shine before the world.
But to do that, he had to have his wits about him today. He had to be focused. He had to be sharper than he had ever been before.
Bobby groaned as he quickly ran his razor over the rest of his face and wiped off the remains of the shaving cream without bothering to brace himself with aftershave.
What a day to have to deal with another of Dad’s phone calls on his way out the door!
He simply couldn’t leave the country. In the beginning, it had been because he feared he could never get back in, but that was before the Central Security Agency had really clamped down, and now he couldn’t even get a one-way ticket out.
Not with a sister who was a Soviet national and a mother who was a ranking officer in Red Star. And certainly not with a wife who insisted upon maintaining open involvement in every crazy radical group on the Central Security Agency’s admittedly catholic shit list.
He had known all this before Dad’s accident, it was what had kept him from working as a foreign correspondent, yet he had tried to get an exit visa after the accident, he had been willing to risk not getting back in.
Or had he?
Wasn’t that the real source of his guilt? He had tried to get out only because he was sure he would fail, in order to make himself feel less guilty about his true priorities of job and wife. And that was something to feel guilty about.
That was the real guilt that overcame him when he spoke to Dad on the phone.
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