As a voice babbled in technical French which Nicole was at a loss to translate, the Daedalus taxied past the terminal, turned onto the runway, lit its turbofans, and somewhat ponderously took to the air.
The scene abruptly changed. Now Jerry was riding in some impossible magic helicopter way up above a fluffy white cloud bank as the Daedalus rose through it toward him, its wings swinging back halfway into the fuselage as the main Rolls-Royce engine took over with a shattering roar and a long gout of thin blue flame, burning liquid hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen compressed by the speed of passage into the main intake like a conventional ramjet.
Up, up, and away like Superplane, the Daedalus rose, far faster than any so-called speeding bullet, with the magic helicopter tracking with it from above, as the sky deepened to violet, to black, and the Earth below showed a curve, and the wings retracted completely into the fuselage, and it was burning its fuel with internal liquid oxygen, like a rocket.
Then the rocket cut out, and the spaceplane was matching orbits with a rather Russian-looking space station, ungainly globular Cosmograd modules cobbled together awkwardly and painted a dim dingy green. Four space-suited figures maneuvered the most ungodly version of a scaled-up sat sled into position below the Daedalus and fixed it there with rather ridiculous magnetic clamps—a silly ungainly mess with rocket nozzles out of a cheap old science-fiction movie that would have torn the Daedalus to pieces if actually fired up in that position.
But in the HD Dynamax video version, the klutzy thing worked, of course, and the spaceplane blasted off toward Geosynchronous Orbit on a tail of unrealistic orange flame.
The view changed again. Jerry was standing in another weirdly prosaic airport arrival gate, with crowds of people, jetway doors, newsstands, souvenir shops, and a men’s room door behind him.
Weirdly prosaic because the airport crowd was swimming around in the middle of the air, and the jetway doors, and newsstands, and souvenir shops were all plastered at impossible angles to the walls of a circular waiting room with no up or down, an ordinary waiting room in a spaceport in zero gravity somewhere up out of the gravity well.
Without the feel of his buttocks nailed to his seat by gravity, the illusion would have been quite complete, as he seemed to swim toward a modest-sized circular viewport and watched the Daedalus rise toward him from the globe of the Earth on a trail of pale orange flame.
Perspective shifted again, and Jerry was space-walking himself—they even dubbed in the chuffing sounds of EVA thrusters—looking down on a truly bizarre Geosynchronous space station. Domes and passageways and clunky Cosmograd modules stuck together every which way like a model of a complex organic molecule put together from the contents of a junkpile. A big slab of a metal deck jutted out under a kind of marquee like the formal entrance to the Century Plaza Hotel and indeed emblazoned on it in blue neon the words “Méridien d’Espace.”
And with that, the show was over, and a few minutes later, Jerry was outside in the golden sunlight of late afternoon with Nicole, blinking his way back into Parisian reality.
“You are all right, Jerry?” Nicole said, peering at him with some concern. “You look as if you are still out there in outer space. . . .”
“Yeah, I’m okay, just got to adjust my eyes to the sunlight again,” he told her.
But the truth of it was that something had indeed changed. All through the long cab ride back to the center of Paris, Jerry was indeed in outer space, trying to remember all he had read about the Daedalus project. The Rolls-Royce engine had been on the drawing boards for decades, and rumor had it that they had actually built one before the Thatcher government canceled the project. ESA was building a prototype Daedalus now, but it was supposed to be a combination of a replacement for the Hermes space shuttle and suborbital hypersonic airliner, as far as he had heard. Commercial flights to a hotel in GEO? It seemed like one of Rob Post’s visionary pipe dreams.
On the other hand, if you did have the spaceplane, you could get it to GEO with some kind of sat sled, though hardly the silly thing he had seen in the exhibition hall. You’d have to have it firing directly along the plane’s long axis somehow, and you’d have to have the exhaust well clear of the fuselage, maybe a beam arrangement aft, or . . .
It was more of the same during dinner, a wonderful meal in the Jules Verne restaurant high atop the Eiffel Tower. Jerry ate his food, drank his wine, took in the fabulous view, managed to make small talk with Nicole with a corner of his mind, and even maintained a hard-on as she groped him under the table, but his mind was centered elsewhere.
The whole idea was crazy, decades away if feasible at all—commercial airliners to orbit, spacetugs to take them to GEO, a hotel when they got there, a series of improbabilities that reminded him of some hoary old science-fiction film—but if the notion was mad, it was, alas, just the sort of divine madness that had gone entirely out of the American space program.
And technically speaking, at least, it all was doable. The Daedalus was under construction, you could cobble together some kind of half-assed hotel out of Russian Cosmograd modules, and you could get it all to GEO with modified versions of the military sat sleds he himself was working on back in Downey.
And once you had a logistical system in place capable of supporting a hotel in GEO, a real lunar colony would be a snap, and even Mars could become a tourist run within his own lifetime. . . .
When they got back to the Ritz, there was a message waiting at the desk from André Deutcher. He would pick Jerry up at 11:00 the next morning to take him to a meeting at ESA’s Paris headquarters. Jerry showed Nicole the note in the elevator up to his floor.
“This will be our last night together then, Jerry,” she told him.
“Why do you say that, Nicole?”
She averted her gaze. The elevator stopped. They got out and walked down the hall to his room.
“That was the arrangement all along?” Jerry said as he opened the door.
Nicole nodded. “Your friend André Deutcher is a wise man,” she said. “It is better that such things end before parting becomes too much of a sadness. You must never fall in love with a prostitute, Jerry.”
“Yeah, I know, remember, I’m a man of the world.”
She laughed. She gave him a warm smile that nearly broke his heart. “I am not so sure,” she said gaily. “Sometimes I think you are a man of other worlds, yes? Mars, peut-être, or better yet Venus, the planet of love, n’est-ce pas?”
Jerry had to resist the temptation to sweep her up into his arms and kiss her.
Instead, he ordered a bottle of the most expensive champagne on the room-service menu, and a double order of the best caviar. After it arrived, they sat there for a long time, eating caviar, drinking champagne, and saying very little, for what indeed was there to say?
At length, indeed at considerable length, long enough for them to have reached the bottom of the champagne bottle, Nicole stood up.
“Perhaps it is better that I go now, yes?” she said.
Jerry sat there in his chair looking up at her and not knowing quite what to say. Then, he took both of her hands in his, stood up, and looked deep into those bright green eyes, and realized that she was right, that there was really nothing left to say or do, that in a sense it had all really ended somehow back there in the Parc de la Villette, in the Géode, ended, as he was now sure, in the way that Nicole in her professional wisdom had meant it to end, in the way that would hurt him the least.
“A man of the world should not kiss a prostitute,” Nicole said waveringly.
“But surely,” said Jerry, “a woman of the world can kiss a friend good-bye.”
And she laughed, and let him take her in his arms, and kissed him gently on the lips. And then, without another word, she was gone.
Jerry Reed stood there alone for a long time after she had left, trying to understand what he felt. Something told him that he should feel sad that Nicole Lafage had gone out of his life forever, that a long golden moment h
ad come to an end, and yes, he felt a certain wistful nostalgic glow for what had been, but he was also somewhat bemused to realize that he was happy.
Was this what it really meant to become a man of the world?
Was this the parting gift that Nicole had left him?
Jerry opened the big windows and stepped outside onto the little balcony and looked out over Paris as he had on that first golden morning a mere three days ago.
It was night now, and the cityscape was alive with the night lights, and the red and amber streamers of the bustling traffic. The Eiffel Tower glowed like a beacon in the distance, and along the darkened Seine, the brilliant white spotlight beams of a tour boat played along the quayside buildings.
And not only the time of day was different from that first vision of Paris, for the eyes that looked out upon the city had changed too; Jerry Reed knew what was down there beneath the picture-postcard view now. He had a feel for the city, he had lived in those streets and felt their rhythms, and now, in some small way, he felt a part of it, felt it speaking to him, though what it was saying he could not quite yet fathom.
He looked up into the clear night sky, quite washed out by the city’s brilliance. Only a sliver of crescent moon, a few first- and second-magnitude stars, Mars, and Jupiter were visible up there above the City of Light.
But then, as his eyes adjusted, a few fainter points of light appeared, and some of them were moving slowly and deliberately through the darkness. Soviet Cosmograds. The American space station. And beyond, invisible out there in GEO, spy satellites and communication satellites and the-Pentagon-knew-what. And still farther out, the Soviet Moon lab, a permanent base on another world.
There was a dance of lights going on up there that spoke to him too, of dreams that had been, and dreams that had been lost, and dreams that might be again.
He remembered what Rob Post had often told him too. “You were lucky enough to be born at the right time, Jerry. You’re going to live in the golden age of space exploration, kiddo. It’s up to you. You can be one of the people who makes it all happen.”
For a long time now, all that had seemed lost, destroyed by the Challenger explosion, and SDI, and Battlestar America. But Rob’s words had a new, and yes, somewhat terrifying meaning now too, for all at once they were true again in a way that Rob had probably never imagined or intended.
There was, after all, a golden age of space exploration aborning up there right now, and tomorrow he was pretty damned sure he would be given the chance, his last chance, to be one of the people who would make it all happen.
And he remembered something else Rob had once told him, on a day when Jerry was feeling down and discouraged, the words of a great Grand Prix driver named Stirling Moss.
“I do believe I could learn to walk on water,” Moss had told an interviewer. “I’d have to give up everything else to do it, but I could walk on water.”
* * *
A TRUE EUROPEAN HOUSE
The overtures from the British and the French, however vague and crafted for deniability they may be, do indeed merit the serious discussion that is currently taking place in the Supreme Soviet.
The economic advantage to the Soviet Union of membership in Common Europe is readily apparent, and the ruble now seems solid enough to be merged into the ECU common basket without ruinous domestic inflation.
True, reconciliation of legal systems and modes of economic organization, as well as certain defense matters, present serious problems. True too that the Soviet Union, as the largest independent nation in the world, with the largest population on the European continent, not to mention the most powerful military forces, can hardly be expected to simply apply for membership under the present structure like a second-rate power.
But despite the tentative nature of the feelers, it is clear that Britain and France, not to mention the many other member states they seem to be representing, have as strong a self-interest in Soviet membership as we do, and may very well be willing to negotiate the changes in the Common European constitution and legal systems needed to meet our requirements for entry.
For as things stand now, neither Britain nor France, indeed not even the two of them together, can serve as a political counterbalance to German economic power. Only the entry of the Soviet Union, with a population triple that of Germany, with a GNP almost as large, with its leadership in space, with the prestige of its Red Army, can prevent Common Europe from inevitably evolving into a de facto Greater German Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Only a Common Europe that includes the Soviet Union can long remain a true fraternal house of equals.
—Pravda
GAINES TESTS DOMESTIC MARKET
After considerable success with consumer acceptance of the product in the pilot marketing study in Haiti, the Gaines Company has announced that it will begin marketing Gaines People Chow domestically. Sales of the nutritionally balanced basic foodstuff, manufactured from soy flour, linseed oil, and a proprietary secret recipe of vitamins, minerals, and artificial flavorings, will at least at first be institutional. Contracts have already been signed with prison systems in Arkansas and Rhode Island.
People Chow will provide nutritionally balanced meals at a small fraction of the cost of conventional prison catering programs, and Gaines hopes to penetrate this market rapidly.
Direct consumer sales, at least for now, will be limited to selected Latin American countries, where famine situations can be counted upon to overcome problems with taste and texture, which do not affect the nutritional content.
Meanwhile, Gaines is experimenting with new flavor formulas and packaging concepts to gain entry to the domestic consumer market, including sugar coating, and synthetic chili gravy.
—U.S. News & World Report
* * *
IV
Pierre Glautier had an apartment on Rue St.-Jacques in the heart of St.-Germain, he had family money from something to do with meat packing about which he preferred not to speak, he was darkly handsome with long black hair and patrician features, he was a good lover, as a journalist he had access to a lot of good parties, and he and Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin had an arrangement.
They had met at a party in Monaco, ended up in bed together about two hours later, shared a room in Tignes for a skiing weekend, hosted each other in Brussels and Paris, all without ever falling into anything like love or a serious relationship, and now they were friends and occasional bedmates.
Staying with Pierre was like sharing an apartment with a lover and a good girl friend at the same time, for in his way, Pierre was both to Sonya. They could escort each other to parties, leave with others if they felt like it, and compare erotic notes afterward.
Several of her circle of Red Menace girl friends, like Tanya and Lenya and Katrinka, had similar arrangements with understanding gay men in Paris or Munich or London who found it mutually convenient, but it seemed to Sonya that this was much better. For one thing, Pierre was a good lover and always willing if no one else interesting showed up, and for another, she didn’t end up being dragged to a lot of clubs and parties where all the men were only interested in each other.
Sonya took a cab to the apartment, was let in by the concierge, with whom Pierre had left a set of keys, and didn’t see him until he returned somewhat bleary-eyed but not without a cold bottle of champagne at 11:00 the next morning.
“Have a good time last night?” Sonya said after the quick kiss hello in the entranceway.
Pierre shrugged, waved his raised hands somewhat deprecatingly as he marched into the kitchen. “A pleasant enough little Hungarian,” he said airily as he peeled the tinfoil from the champagne bottle. He grinned at Sonya as he popped the cork and poured the champagne into tulip glasses. “This, however,” he said, “is Moët & Chandon Brut, ma petite.”
They clinked glasses, walked around the breakfast bar and into the rather bizarre living room. There was no real furniture as such and no floor in a conventional sense either. A conversation pit, a raised dais
full of electronic equipment, toadstool-shaped tables, bookcases, cabinets, lamps, all seemed to flow and grow out of each other in organic curves and soft carpeting. A big picture window looked out on an inner courtyard, and two walls were mirrored, giving the place a strange feeling of boundlessness. It was an ideal venue for parties, even orgies, and it had seen plenty of both, at least to hear Pierre tell it.
“So, what are your plans for the big vacation?” Pierre said, plopping himself down in the padded conversation pit.
“I am here, am I not?” Sonya said, sitting down beside him, but well outside his body-space.
“You plan to spend two weeks in Paris with me?” Pierre said dubiously, or perhaps nervously, for the truth of it was that they had never spent more than four days at a time together.
“You are not flattered?” Sonya said with wide-eyed innocence.
“Ah, well, but of course I am flattered,” Pierre stammered uneasily. “Mais, this I had not exactly expected or planned for, chérie, I mean, since you have not had two whole weeks of freedom for a year and will not again for another, I had assumed you would wish to travel about, have adventures, meet new people, not that I am not pleased, you understand, but I had thought, I mean, I am not the sort to, comprends . . .”
“Oh, Pierre, you are so transparent!” Sonya said as she burst out laughing. “Who is she? When does she arrive?”
“In five days,” Pierre said, grinning with relief.
“And what does she have that I do not?” Sonya demanded good-naturedly.
Pierre took a sip of champagne. “You are not going to believe this,” he said.
“Coming from you, I will believe anything.”
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