Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  Representative Carson: “What are they gonna do, send the Red Army up Pennsylvania Avenue to collect what we owe them?”

  Billy Allen: “Well, when you put it that way, Harry . . .”

  Representative Carson: “If Brazil and Argentina could do it, why can’t we?”

  Billy Allen: “But we didn’t let them get away with it!”

  Representative Carson: “But they weren’t sitting on enough nukes to turn the Eastern Hemisphere into a parking lot, now were they? And they didn’t have Battlestar America, now did they?”

  Billy Allen: “If you got it, flaunt it, hey?”

  —Newspeak, with Billy Allen

  * * *

  IX

  It wasn’t quite raining when Jerry Reed left the family apartment on Avenue Trudaine, but as usual for one of these Greenhouse Februarys, it looked as if it might, billowy gray clouds hanging low over Paris under a thin cool mist that turned Sacré-Coeur into a ghostly white specter.

  The climate, like the city, hadn’t changed much from year to year, not so that you could notice it happening, but on a morning like this, with twenty years of his life about to pivot on this single meeting, Jerry found himself in a rare retrospective mood as he walked through the familiar neighborhood toward the Pigalle Métro station and realized, perhaps for the first time, that the winter weather of Paris had come to resemble nothing so much as his dim recollections of San Francisco.

  The borderland between the 18th and the 9th had slowly and imperceptibly evolved too. Back when he and Sonya had bought the place on Trudaine, this had been a relatively cheap and sleazy area, and they had been considered something of urban pioneers for daring to move up here with two young children.

  Then the real estate agents had taken to calling it “Montmartre Bis,” and the prices went up, and the grungy stores started to be replaced with fancy boutiques and pâtisseries and sleek brasseries, and the produce in the open-air market improved, and the Place Pigalle got a modern hotel and a refurbished Métro station and expensive restaurants, and the crummy sex shops and porn houses gave way to an ENO and an FNAC and a thematic mini-mall version of themselves, and without being able to figure out quite when it had happened, Jerry and Sonya and the kids found themselves living in a fashionable neighborhood.

  Life in Paris seemed to go like that. The climate got imperceptibly warmer, the neighborhood slowly gentrified, his French gradually improved, and voilà, here he was without quite knowing how he had gotten here, known at the pâtisserie, and the fruit market, and the dry cleaner’s, and the corner brasserie, and the father of two teenaged children, sauntering down the boulevard like a comfortable old Parisian.

  Or so at least it could seem in moments like this, out on the street in the penumbra of the Butte Montmartre, away from the endless sniping between Bob and Franja, away from Sonya and her political blathering, and for the moment, at least, not yet immersed again in the politics that had poisoned his career.

  Politics! Politique politicienne! Why couldn’t people just be left alone to “do their own thing,” as they used to say in California half a lifetime ago?

  They had let him do his own thing all during the Project Icarus design phase. Ian Bannister was a hands-on engineer who ran his équipe on a strictly pragmatic basis, he appreciated Jerry’s sat-sled experience, and Jerry had been happy as the proverbial clam.

  Politique politicienne hadn’t intruded until the design phase was completed, the prototype spacetug certified for production, and the design team disbanded.

  There had been a big party with lots of champagne out at the Le Bourget atelier to celebrate the completion of the project. The bar was set up on sawhorses in front of the prototype itself, there were many toasts to the fruit of their long labor, and everyone was pleasantly high by the time Nicola Brandusi thanked them all for a job well done and announced their new assignments. Bannister was awarded the assistant project manager’s post on the Spaceville preliminary design team. Kurt Froehmer got the job of overseeing the design of the tanker upper stage of the Energia boosters. Brizot got the tanker maneuvering systems. Constantine got the tanker docking collar.

  Jerry waited with pleasant anticipation as Brandusi went down the list, an anticipation that grew tenser, however, with every promotion that Brandusi announced. Everyone on the Icarus équipe, down to the junior engineers, seemed to be getting a choice slot on the Spaceville Project or the tankers, and indeed they all deserved it. But what was going to be left for him?

  “Alain Parmentier has been named chief engineer of the Icarus propulsion and maneuvering system ground-testing crew, and Jerry Reed will be his assistant, a promotion which comes with a five-hundred-ECU-a-month raise. . . .”

  This outrage was announced with a fatuous smile as if it were some choice plum, while Jerry stood there like a fool with his mouth hanging open as Brandusi quickly passed on to the next name on his list.

  Ground-testing! Certifying existing hardware! It wasn’t fair! It was an insult! He was a designer, not a glorified quality-control tech! Without him, the maneuvering and propulsion systems wouldn’t even exist!

  For long minutes after he had finished speaking, Brandusi tried to avoid Jerry and tried to brush him off when Jerry braced him at the bar. But Jerry was having none of it, and when Brandusi saw that the alternative was going to be an ugly public scene, he finally let Jerry drag him off into a quiet corner and vent his wrath.

  The Italian just stood there taking it with infuriating urbanity as Jerry chewed him out, looking not so much at him as through him, letting Jerry rant and rave until the nonresponse finally wore him down.

  “Come, come, Jerry,” Brandusi said when Jerry was good and finished, “for you it will be excellent and necessary experience. Parmentier is a bureaucrat, so you will really be in charge in the lab, and it will be your first chance to prove yourself as a supervisor, as well as hands-on experience with the actual hardware.”

  “Running quality-control tests on hardware I designed myself!”

  Brandusi gave him a fatuous smile. “Hardware you assisted in designing,” he corrected.

  “Without me—”

  “Without you, it would have taken a few more years, your contribution was indeed significant,” Brandusi said. “Which is why your salary was higher than that of anyone else in the project of comparable age and experience. . . . But now . . .” He shrugged. “Now that the . . . special circumstances are over, well, you are still making more money than people with quite a bit more seniority, and I have to consider the, ah, shall we say, social equity of the situation, you understand. . . .”

  “And what if I refuse to go along with this bullshit?” Jerry demanded.

  Brandusi shrugged, threw up his hands, and that was the end of the conversation. Sonya had just given birth to Franja, there was no place else for Jerry to go, Brandusi knew it, and he knew that Jerry knew that he knew it too, the bastard.

  There was only one hope. He had spotted André Deutcher at the bar, and André these days had long since emerged from his shadowy role as a headhunter and “technology transfer expert” and was involved in the Soviet-European consortium that was building and marketing the Daedalus, which the press had promptly rechristened the “Concordski.” He might not be Brandusi’s superior, but he did move in higher circles. Surely Jerry’s old buddy André could do a little leaning on his behalf.

  But when he finally cornered André Deutcher, André fidgeted, shook his head, gave him the old Gallic shrug. “I am long out of that particular circuit, Jerry. I’m not even in the ESA chain of command.”

  “Chain of command, my ass, André! You’re way up there with the big boys now! You do some leaning, and Brandusi will feel the weight!”

  André frowned. “You are forcing me to be painfully honest with you, Jerry. . . .”

  “At least a little honesty would be a novelty around here!” Jerry shot back.

  André sighed. “I’m afraid that you’re the victim of larger considerations,�
� he said. “Soviet technology is already being intimately integrated into the cutting edge of the ESA program. . . .”

  “So what?”

  André gave him a somewhat furtive and embarrassed look. “It might unduly disturb our partners to give someone like you too intimate an access to Soviet space technology. . . .”

  “What do you mean, ‘someone like me’?”

  “You know,” André said uneasily.

  “No I don’t!”

  André Deutcher sighed. “An American . . . ,” he said. “One who has already been involved in, shall we say, a bit of gray technology transfer in the opposite direction. . . . Someone who the Americans might just have willingly given up in order to plant a mole in the ESA program. . . .”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “You know it, and I know it,” André said, “but the Russians . . .” He shrugged. “C’est la politique,” he said.

  “Politique politicienne!” Jerry shot back. His French might still have been pretty primitive at the time, but he knew enough to make the uniquely French distinction between legitimate political necessity and bullshit bureaucratic backstabbing. “C’est la merde!”

  But he was in it.

  That had been a long time ago, but “politique politicienne” was still Jerry Reed’s contemptuous conversation stopper whenever anyone tried to justify the way ESA had treated him all these years in terms of the petty maneuverings in Strasbourg, or the endless negotiating of the details of the Soviet Union’s entry into Common Europe, or what the United States was presently doing in Venezuela.

  But Jerry had inevitably found himself involved in another sort of politics, at which he had become something of a grudging adept, and which, he earnestly hoped as he trotted down the stairs of the Pigalle Métro station, would finally, at long last, pay off today.

  When he sobered up that next morning, he had realized that he had no choice but to accept the inevitable, and later, accepted Parmentier’s old post too, when his superior was promoted, even though it meant the same tedious old thing at a higher salary.

  Once again, there was no real choice. Bob was already a year old, the place on the Île was just too small, and the raise was just big enough to let Sonya and him swing a three-bedroom apartment near Pigalle by mortgaging themselves up to the eyeballs.

  Two years after that, he made second assistant head of all ground testing, then first assistant, and finally section chief. From there, he became chief engineer in charge of prototype fabrication, realizing other people’s designs for Spaceville construction equipment.

  Finally, they had made him chief project engineer on the LEO to GEO freighter project, merely scaling up the spacetugs and designing big freight pallets for them to ferry to the Spaceville construction site.

  And there he had languished for the last five years. Space was farther away than ever, they hadn’t let him work on the cutting edge since Project Icarus, and maybe, just maybe, they would have finally made him a project director before he retired if they could have found something trivial enough to trust to an expatriate American.

  What had kept Jerry going through all those long dark days was the vision that had come to him at the very beginning, back when he first left Rockwell and sat sleds to work on Project Icarus for ESA.

  As it had been obvious to Rob Post that the Rockwell Advanced Maneuverable Warhead Bus could be upscaled into a LEO-to-GEO space jeep, so had it been obvious to Jerry that the Icarus spacetug technology could be developed into something like a real spaceliner, no doubt because he had seen how Rob had done his clandestine redesign of the AMB.

  The idea, after all, was quite similar.

  Scale up the propulsion system. Attach it to the end of a long boom extending through the midline of a great big mother of a balloon fuel tank. Sling a simple framework with lock-on clamps to the balloon tank and you could carry any configuration of freight and passenger modules you chose.

  It could take a hundred passengers from Low Earth Orbit to Spaceville or even the Moon fast and in comfort. With a big enough balloon tank it could go to Mars with enough payload to make permanent colonization possible. Since there was no limit on the size of the fuel balloon, you might even be able to configure it to support expeditions as far out as Jupiter. It would be a great leap forward into space, using nothing more arcane than scaled-up available technology.

  While he was still working on Project Icarus, Jerry hadn’t done anything with the notion, assuming that after the spacetug became operational he would be promoted into some position where he could persuade his superiors to get an official preliminary design study funded, with himself as the head of the team.

  When that didn’t happen, he started working on the design at home, knowing that no one would listen to a mere test engineer, that even if they did, the project would be taken away from him. The time to surface the concept would be when ESA moved him back into the design end.

  When they made him ground-test chief instead, Jerry started talking about upscaling the spacetug around the atelier. He might be merely in charge of testing hardware, but at least he was a chief engineer, meaning he had younger people working under him who would be eager to listen to their boss’s babble, or at least pretend to be.

  Soon enough, he had members of his équipe fooling around with the designs, speculating on how the hardware they were testing might be modified for use in the fantasy project, and the thing started to take on a life of its own, especially since ESA had nothing beyond Spaceville on its drawing boards to capture the visionary imagination of its younger engineers and workers.

  One day, one of the brightest of the young engineers working under him, a Belgian named Emile Lourade who was rather taken with his American boss, put a bug in his ear.

  “This little fantasy of ours, it is becoming talk in ESA outside our équipe, Jerry,” Emile told him. “It becomes a small Agency legend, you must be careful. . . .”

  “Careful of what, Emile?”

  They were sitting at a small table in the crowded commissary together, speaking in English amid a multilingual cacophony that was nevertheless, like ESA itself, rather dominantly French. Emile leaned closer and ran his eyes around the room with exaggerated furtiveness.

  Jerry laughed. “Yeah, I know that you Belgians are the Polish jokes of France,” he said, “but—”

  “You Americans are a lot worse than a joke, and not just with the French, surely you know that. . . ,” Emile said.

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  The early talk about Soviet entry into Common Europe was already in the air, Washington was making vague threats, the dollar had been devalued again to the discomfort of European holders of American paper, Battlestar America was just about fully deployed, and “Festung Amerika” was a buzzword in the European press. Americans were about as highly thought of in Common Europe these days as Europeans were in the United States.

  “Someday, this spaceliner idea of yours is going to be taken seriously by ESA,” Emile told him. “And if you do not take care to see to it that it does not simply seem to arise out of the ESA bureaucracy itself, what chance do you really think there is that they will let an American play a major role in the project, let alone be the chief of the design team?”

  “Slim and none . . . ,” Jerry had muttered, quite touched by Emile’s concern.

  But what to do about it?

  Sonya was rising steadily in the Red Star bureaucracy by this time, already earning a larger salary than he did, and Jerry seldom discussed his career dissatisfactions with his wife anymore, it was just too painful, and productive of nothing but strife. But this time he did. And for once Sonya was sympathetic.

  “This friend of yours is absolutely right!” she declared forcefully. “You must take steps to protect your position at once. It is the iron law of bureaucracy—cover your ass!”

  “Great, just great. And how am I supposed to do that?”

  “Attach your name to this idea in the press.”

 
; “Yeah, maybe I should give an interview to your friends at Tass,” Jerry snapped sarcastically.

  “Too political . . . ,” Sonya said quite seriously. “I have a much better idea.”

  And she did. She set him up with an old friend of hers, a journalist named Pierre Glautier. Glautier wrote a piece called “La Grand Tour Navette,” part popular science and part personality profile, which was published in a French popular science and science-fiction magazine called Esprit et Espace, and voilà, the project had a sexy name in French, and his name was epoxied to it.

  The ESA bureaucracy was not amused—particularly since there was already grumbling in the ranks over the fact that the Spaceville Project was eating up so much of the Agency’s budget that nothing half as visionary as the Grand Tour Navette was even in the design-study stage—and, as Jerry had expected, Nicola Brandusi called him on the carpet.

  But this time it was Brandusi’s turn to rant and rave impotently at a fait accompli and Jerry’s turn to smile blandly when he was done.

  “Gee, Nicola,” he said ingenuously, “I thought you’d be pleased. I mean, it’s good P.R. for the Agency, isn’t it? Shows we’re still looking to the future, especially with the stuff you’re starting to hear about how ESA’s so bogged down with Spaceville that it’s conceding the rest of the solar system to the Russians. . . .”

  Brandusi seemed to buy this display of naiveté. “Employees of ESA are not supposed to discuss Agency projects with the press without authorization, surely you know that, Jerry . . . ,” he said with the exaggeratedly patient tones of someone talking to a dimwit.

  “Well sure I know that,” Jerry said sweetly. “But I thought the Grand Tour Navette was just my own crazy idea. Now you’re telling me it’s an official ESA project?”

  “No, it is not under official consideration!” Brandusi snapped.

  “Well then where’s the harm in my talking about it?” Jerry said. “I mean, if you put a lid on it now, won’t it look like an ESA project instead of my own little hobby?”