And now, with the Congressional purse strings pried wide open again, they were already talking about a scaled-up second generation of sat sleds, capable of clamping onto a shuttle and taking it to Geosynchronous Orbit, or, more to the Air Force’s Battlestar America point, of boosting huge mirrors, monster lasers, high-speed interceptors, and particle-beam accelerators out there to GEO where they would be all but invulnerable to attack, making America the military overlord of Geosynchronous Space itself, master of the ultimate global high-ground.
Poor Rob had had some starry-eyed pipe dream of turning the AMB sword into a space-going plowshare, but he hadn’t bargained with the Pentagon’s superior ability to do precisely the reverse.
And now here Jerry was, out on Rob Post’s deck on the outside looking in at the party, though from another perspective he was on the inside looking out, and here came Rob out onto the deck, looking more than a little stoned, on the outside looking in, as he had been for too many years.
“That tobacco in those ropes, or are you guys holding?” he said by way of greeting.
Ever since Rockwell had canned him, Rob had made a bigger and bigger thing out of his dope-smoking despite the real risk of serious jail time, grown his hair even longer than it had been in the late ’60s, taken to blue jeans and workshirts, hidden his bitterness behind a false façade of ancient burned-out hippie. “Why not?” he would say when Jerry called him on it. “What’ve I got to lose that I haven’t lost already?”
“The best Havana,” André said, whipping out his cedar cigar case, pulling one out, and offering it to Rob.
Rob glanced around in mock paranoia. “Alma’ll kill me,” he said, but he snatched it up anyway and let André light it with his fancy silver Dunhill, and the three of them stood there leaning against the railing of the redwood deck in the foggy fragrant chill, sucking in expensive carcinogens in awkward silence.
It was Rob who had introduced Jerry to André, and it was Rob whom ESA should be trying to recruit if there was any justice in the world, at least the way Jerry saw it. But as André had said, Rob was finished, at least as far as ESA was concerned.
What Jerry really wanted to do was ask Rob’s advice about André’s offer. Would he be risking his career by merely accepting a freebie to Paris?
But he was prevented from doing this twice over; first because he didn’t know how André would take his blowing his cover to Rob, second because he feared it might break Rob’s heart to know that it was Jerry and not him who had a chance to work in the ESA program.
Unexpectedly enough, Rob Post was there for Jerry one more time when he needed it. “So, kiddo,” he said, brandishing his Upmann, “you think you could at least smuggle a box of these back for me when you go to Paris? Some primo Afghani, I know, would be out of the question.”
“You know?” Jerry blurted, looking back and forth from Rob to André. “You told him?”
“But of course,” André said, “or rather it was Rob who recommended you as a possibility.”
“But then why not—”
“Go myself?” Rob said. “They’re hardly interested in over-the-hill project managers who haven’t worked in the Program for years. They want innocent young blood, it’s only natural. . . .”
He sighed, he turned to stare out over the ravine that led down the slope of the Santa Monica mountains toward the fog-obscured floor of the San Fernando Valley, a million little lights glowing faintly through the glistening mist, took a quick puff on his cigar, and slowly sighed out the smoke.
“Besides,” he said, “I’m pushing sixty, and even in the ESA program, I’m just too old already to ever get my chance to go into the old up and out; that dream’s finished for me, kiddo, and I know it. And somehow along the way, I fell in love with this country, not the old US of A or the pinhead government in Washington, but California, the Sierras, the redwoods, these hills. . . . I’ve lived here all of my life, and I’m a part of this land by now, and it’s a part of me, and even if I were offered the choice . . .”
He shrugged, he turned back to Jerry, laughed a little laugh. “The bad news is that no one’s offering me the choice,” he said. “The good news is that I don’t have to make it.”
“You’re telling me I should go?” Jerry said.
Rob Post looked back at him with bloodshot, deeply shadowed eyes. His long gray hair was thinning now. There were deep lines around his mouth and the corners of his eyes and finer ones all over the tanned skin of his face, upon which a few liverish spots had begun to appear. Jerry noticed all this for the first time, really noticed it.
And for the first time he realized that the hero and patron of his childhood and young manhood was growing old.
That Rob Post was going to age and grow frail and finally die without ever getting to set foot on Mars or the Moon, or even to float free of gravity up there in the starry dark for one bright, shining moment at his life’s end.
Jerry’s hands balled up into fists, tears began to well up in his eyes, and he had to take a long drag on his cigar and cough out smoke to cover the wiping of them.
“Hey, kiddo, I’m not telling you anything,” Rob said. “What the hell do I know, I’ve never even been to Europe. I don’t even know what they may end up offering, if they end up offering anything. But if you want my opinion . . .”
“I always want your opinion, Rob. You know that.”
Rob smiled, and in that smile the ghost of a younger face seemed to fade back in over the aging mask of defeat. “Well, if you want my opinion, Jerry,” he said, “my opinion is . . . what the fuck?”
“What the fuck? What the fuck what?”
“What the fuck, all it is is a free three-week vacation in Europe,” Rob said, pacing back and forth in front of Jerry in a little elliptical orbit.
“You’re saying I should do it?”
Rob laughed. “What the fuck, why the fuck not? What kind of red-blooded American boy would refuse a free trip to Paris? What kind of red-blooded space cadet would refuse a peek inside the ESA program?”
“One who doesn’t want to lose the clearance to work in ours,” Jerry said.
“There is that,” Rob said much more somberly.
André Deutcher, who had been leaning back quietly against the deck railing smoking his cigar during all this, finally spoke. “The matter can be handled in what we would call a fail-safe manner,” he said. “You apply for a passport. They either give it to you or not, n’est-ce pas? If they do not, then the matter is quietly forgotten without any argument from you. It will hardly endanger his clearance to simply ask for a passport, will it, Rob?”
“I don’t see how. . . .”
“He then applies for a thirty-day Common Europe tourist visa through an ordinary travel agency and simply gets on a first-class Air France flight to Paris with me when—”
“Uh-uh,” Rob said. “That dumb, they’re not. He better fly alone, and on an American carrier, not a Common Europe airline, and no first class, or they’ll suspect he’s flying on someone else’s plastic, and just may not let him on the plane.”
André shrugged. “I’m afraid he’s right,” he told Jerry. “Best you fly with the peasantry in coach.” He smiled, he winked. “But not to worry, Jerry, we will begin to atone for this unfortunate piece of necessary tackiness and then some the moment you are safely in Paris, I can promise you that, and first class on Air France on the flight back.”
He paused, blew out another plume of smoke. “If there is a flight back,” he said.
“Well, I’m glad you two guys have gotten it all decided for me,” Jerry snapped. But there was little vehemence in it. For after all, Rob was right.
What the fuck, they weren’t about to lift his clearance for applying for a passport. What the fuck, he could always play innocent if they didn’t let him on the plane, couldn’t he? All he would be doing would be taking a vacation in Paris, as far as they were concerned.
And as if a sign had been granted, there was suddenly a distant roar, and a bright point
of light became barely visible, burning its way skyward through the mist at unreal speed, accelerating as it rose like a glorious ascending angel.
“Alors!” André Deutcher exclaimed. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
Jerry’s eyes met Rob Post’s. They both laughed wanly, and somehow, in that moment, the decision was made.
“Nothing to get excited about, André,” Rob said.
“Yeah, it’s just another ground-based reentry phase interceptor test from Vandenberg.”
And a strangely similar roar, but louder, and closer, blasted Jerry out of his time-zoned reverie, and he found himself all but pressing his nose against the cabin window in a futile attempt to see.
“My goodness, what was that?” the old lady in the seat beside him exclaimed.
“An Antonov 300 boosting off the runway,” Jerry muttered, for he knew that no other civilian aircraft made such a godawful noise on takeoff.
Until the ignition of the Antonov’s rocket-trolley had abruptly jolted him out of it, Jerry had been dozing along in airline space, where the interior of one plane was the interior of every other, and one great amoeboid airport seemed to connect the spaces between, and any connection to actually being in a country other than America had been quite unreal.
But now the ancient Pan World 747 was taxiing up to the main terminal at Charles de Gaulle, and Jerry could see two more Antonovs sitting there on the tarmac connected to the terminal building by jetways and surrounded by trains of baggage carts as if they were ordinary Boeings sitting on the ground at LAX—one painted in the red, white, and blue of British Air and the other actually bearing the winged hammer and sickle of Aeroflot—and he knew he was no longer in technological Kansas.
The Antonov 300 was the plane that had finally given the Russians a real piece of the world market. They had taken their old shuttle transporter, itself a monster upgraded from an older military transport by adding on two more engines, and turned the world’s biggest airplane into the world’s biggest airliner.
With a full load of fuel in its gigantic belly tanks, it could carry one thousand coach passengers and their luggage 10,000 kilometers at about 800 kph in somewhat dubious comfort, and as much as a hundred more in spacious first-class luxury in the add-on upper deck that replaced the shuttle pylons, making it the most profitable airplane in the world to run in terms of fares versus cost per passenger mile.
It was also a ponderous mother that required a runway longer than most commercial airports had to groan its way up to takeoff speed and then leave the ground-effect envelope.
In their typical straightforward, brute-force manner, the Russians had solved the problem by mounting a fall-away trolley aft of the main landing gear and equipping it with a battery of solid-fuel throw-away rocket engines apparently adapted from old short-range missiles.
The Antonov was a joke at Rockwell, where they built hypersonic bombers that could give you “The Ride of the Valkyries” in multiphonic sound on their state-of-the-art automatic disc decks on your way to ground zero.
But up close, there was something somehow loveable about this piece of time-warped technological Victoriana. It was something that Jules Verne and Rube Goldberg surely would have admired.
It had the elephantine grandeur of the Spruce Goose that Dad had taken him to see in Long Beach—the sheer splendor of being the largest of its kind, indeed of being larger than its kind’s natural envelope.
The old 747, itself once the world’s largest airliner, was sidling up to the gate now, right beside the Aeroflot Antonov, which dwarfed it as the Boeing had dwarfed the short-hop wide-bodies on the ground at LAX fourteen hours and a world away.
It’s like some cartoon version of Russian technology, Jerry thought as the Pan World 747 docked with the jetway. Huge, and brutal, and powerful, and cobbled together from a dustbin of obsolescence with chewing gum and baling wire.
Yeah, but it’s cheap, and it works, he reminded himself. You could laugh at the way the Russians did it, but they were laughing all the way to the bank.
If America could build hypersonic penetration bombers, then why couldn’t Rockwell or somebody build a scaled-up airliner version and recapture the long-haul market with speed and elegance?
Why was he working on sat sleds instead of manned propulsion systems? Why were the Russians mounting a Mars expedition while the U.S. was still studying a Moonbase? Why was it ESA who was building the prototype spaceplane and not Rockwell or Boeing?
Of course, to ask those questions was to answer them in the two words that were the bane of Jerry’s existence.
Battlestar America.
That was where the lion’s share of America’s high-tech R&D budget had been going for the better part of two decades under one guise or another, and one story that Rob Post had told him years ago, when Jerry was a sophomore in high school and the Program was still called the “Strategic Defense Initiative,” told it all.
“I was sitting around half-crocked at a party with a bunch of aerospace engineers, and they were all bullshitting about the contracts their companies were landing for SDI studies. X-ray lasers powered by fusion devices, orbital mirrors, rail-guns, the whole ball of wax. Hey, I said, thinking I was being funny, what about a tachyon-beam weapon? Sits up there in orbit and waits for the Russkies to launch, and then sends tachyon beams back in time and zaps their birds on the pads twenty minutes earlier. Some of the guys laughed, but a couple of them working for Lockheed get this weird look on their faces. Yeah, one of them says, I think we could get about 20 mil for a preliminary study. And about a year later, I find out that they actually did. The Pentagon put about 100 million dollars into it before they realized they were being had.”
America was becoming the world’s best-defended Third World country, and the best and the brightest were collaborating in the process and pissing into bottles for the privilege while the Russians went to Mars and sold their Antonovs and Common Europe dreamed of luxury hotels in Geosynchronous Orbit.
But don’t get me wrong, Jerry thought sourly as the seat-belt light winked off and the passengers all crowded toward the exit, I still love the space business.
Jerry snatched up his flight bag from beneath the seat in front of him and stood there in the crowded aisle with the rest of the sardines waiting for the exit door to open.
Finally, after the usual inevitable stifling, sweatstinking eternity, the door finally opened, and Jerry found himself slowly shuffling off the crowded plane in the endlessly clotted human stream, out through the jetway, and onto a long people mover past hologrammic advertising images babbling at him in incomprehensible French while displaying an amazing profusion of bare-breasted pulchritude, and finally into a jam-packed chaos of a reception area, where more people movers were disgorging yet more passengers from other gates into the hub of the radial terminal.
At the far end of the reception area, barely visible through the godawful mob scene, stood a line of customs booths, a customs official in a fancy military-looking uniform in each. Signs in French and English above the line of booths designated “Common European Passports” and “All Others.” There were four of the former, where people flashed their passports and sailed right through, and only two of the latter, where long lines of people were already queued up, and where the customs guards seemed to be checking every last passport through computer terminals.
Upon being greeted with this anti-American outrage and realizing it would be about an hour before he could clear passport control, after which he would have to play baggage-carousel roulette and then probably stand on an even slower and longer line with his baggage to clear customs, Jerry found the zone, and the sleeplessness, and the fatigue, and the babble of incomprehensible tongues finally catching up with him with a vengeance. His knees dissolved to rubber, his mouth, he realized, tasted like copper, his head was bonging, and to make matters worse, amazingly enough, half the people in the reception area seemed to be lighting up noxious cigarettes that filled the air with acrid, choking smo
ke.
“Welcome to Common Europe,” he muttered miserably under his breath, and numbly elbowed his way through the mob to the end of one of the long, crawling lines.
“Monsieur Jerry Reed, Monsieur Jerry Reed, presentez-vous à la caisse spéciale à la gauche de la salle. . . .” said a female voice over the P.A. system, barely audible over the tumult, and in incomprehensible French at that. “Jeez, now what am I supposed to—”
“Mr. Jerry Reed, Mr. Jerry Reed, please report to the special-handling booth at the left of the room. . . .”
Jerry broke into a cold sweat. Good Lord, did the long arm of the Pentagon extend this far, just when he thought he was home free?
Woodenly, fearfully, Jerry bulled his way through the crush toward the left side of the room, drawing angry scowls, more than one elbow in the ribs, and getting pinked on the forearm with a lit cigarette.
“Jerry! Jerry! Over here!”
It was André Deutcher’s voice calling out to him. Jerry swam through the crowd toward him, where he stood beside yet another customs booth that Jerry hadn’t noticed before. There was a man inside it who was not wearing a uniform, and a man standing with André who was, although this one was plain black with no insignia; but there was no line of waiting passengers.
“Welcome to France, my friend,” André said. He looked around the reception area with a moue of aristocratic distaste. “Would you please let me have your baggage claim and your passport so we can remove ourselves from this melée?”
Numbly, Jerry handed them over. André handed the baggage claim to the uniformed man, who disappeared with it through the customs booth. “Marcel will see to your baggage,” André said. He handed Jerry’s passport to the plainclothes customs official, who stamped it immediately, handed it to Jerry, said, “Bienvenue à Paris, Monsieur Reed,” and actually gave him a little salute.
André whisked him along a corridor and into a little elevator which speedily deposited them in a hallway that led directly through a private exit to a curb outside the terminal, where a vaguely elliptical black Citröen limousine sat gleaming in the eye-killing bright morning sunshine, all low-slung sweeping, stylized Deco pseudo-streamlining and smoked glass, looking like a Frank R. Paul version of a Martian Mafia don’s flying saucer.
Russian Spring Page 3