Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  “I seem to be in full working order . . . ,” he said.

  “You are, Jerry, you are.”

  “Then—”

  At that moment, the nurse returned with a gray-haired woman in medical greens.

  “This is Dr. Cordray, Jerry,” Sonya told him. “She’ll explain it all to you better than I can.”

  Sonya shot a hard sidelong glance at Hélène Cordray as the doctor approached the bedside, a reminder not to violate the agreement they had come to after the electrode-implant operation.

  There was no reason to make things worse by telling Jerry the whole truth. It would be needlessly cruel to let him know that what awaited him was two or three years of slow physical and mental deterioration toward an inevitable death. Better to leave him with hope.

  “I am not in the habit of lying to my patients,” Dr. Cordray had protested.

  “I’m not asking you to lie, Dr. Cordray,” Sonya told her. “Tell him all about his injury in full detail. Tell him all about the device that’s keeping him alive—believe me, he’ll be fascinated, and he’ll probably understand the technology better than you do. Just don’t tell him all the gory details about what’s going to happen to him, and don’t tell him he’s only got two or three years left. That’s not a lie, really, since you don’t really know. In two years, anything could happen. A year ago, there wasn’t even this.”

  “But if he’s so technologically knowledgeable—”

  “He’s a visionary, Dr. Cordray. He reads science fiction. They’re just now building spacecraft that he designed over fifteen years ago. The present and the future are the same things to Jerry in ways that you and I can never understand. All you have to do is make a full recovery seem possible to him, and believe me, Jerry Reed will do the rest himself.”

  Dr. Cordray had shrugged. “Very well, Madame Reed, I will try,” she had said. And then she had looked Sonya in the eyes, woman to woman. “Divorced or not, you still love this man very much, n’est-ce pas?” she had said, stepping quite outside her professional persona, and Sonya had had nothing to say to that.

  “Well, Monsieur Reed, how are you feeling?” Hélène Cordray said.

  “Okay, I guess,” Jerry told her. “How long have I been out?”

  “Approximately seventy hours—but a good part of that was because we had to do a second operation.”

  “Second operation?”

  “A piece of metal had to be removed from your medulla, and we decided to keep you under anesthesia until we could do the electrode implant. . . .”

  “Electrode implant? What’s happened to me?” Jerry said fearfully.

  Dr. Cordray gave him a cool bedside smile. “Your . . . wife tells me that you are a technologically knowledgeable person,” she said. “So if you will have a little patience, I will give you the full details.”

  And, to the extent that she had agreed upon with Sonya, she proceeded to do so.

  Jerry had a terrible sinking sensation in his gut when the doctor told him that the brain centers that controlled heartbeat and respiration had been permanently destroyed. And when she showed him the wheeled console next to his bed, and the cable leading from it to the induction electrode taped to the back of his skull, there had been a queasy feeling of disorientation, tinged, perhaps, with a kind of disgust.

  But once she started trying to explain how the thing worked, he found himself becoming rather fascinated, amused even, for he had read a bit about what the Soviets called the “hibernautika,” enough to know that he understood it better than she did, enough to realize that what he was hooked up to was not the complete version of the device they were trying to develop. The full-bore hibernautika was supposed to be able to induce both hibernation and sleep, not merely control heartbeat and respiration rates, and to control full-spectrum brainwave function as well. In theory, at least, it would make interstellar voyages possible at sub-light speeds.

  He hadn’t thought they were this far advanced on the project, and what she was describing was only a piece of the device. Still, the degree of miniaturization was impressive, and there was something somehow fitting about the fact that he was being kept alive by a piece of space-technology spin-off that hadn’t even been fully developed yet, but that in its completed form might someday allow men to go to the stars. And if it was a piece of Soviet technology, well, he had long since made his peace with that.

  “Is this version programmable for other functions?” he asked.

  The doctor cocked an eyebrow at him. “Other functions?”

  Jerry studied the console by his bedside. It was a matte-finish aluminum box about the size of a small television set. There were two knobs and two liquid crystal readout panels but no keyboard, and from this angle, he couldn’t see whether it had an interface port on the back.

  “What you’ve described is a partial version of something called the ‘hibernautika,’ ” he told her. “The full device is supposed to have other functions. Alpha-wave control. Sleep induction. Selective muscular stimulation. Can I program this thing for any of that?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, Monsieur Reed,” the doctor said, “and in any case, I would not at all advise tinkering with the circuitry!”

  And she exchanged strange glances with Sonya, who then shook her head and broke into a warm but ironic little smile.

  “How much mobility will I have?” Jerry asked nervously.

  “Quite a bit, really. The present cable is only temporary; you can have a much longer one on a reel. And it even has a self-contained power supply for travel away from mains.”

  “I can travel?”

  “After a fashion,” Dr. Cordray told him. “Stairs, of course, will be a barrier, and you certainly can’t use the Métro or buses. Nor risk walking down crowded streets. But automobiles should present no problem.”

  “What about the Concordski? What about zero g?”

  “You are talking about airplanes, Monsieur Reed?” the doctor exclaimed. “You are talking about space travel? This is a joke, oui?”

  Only then did it really hit him. He was alive, yes, but his real life was over. He would never ride his Grand Tour Navette. They wouldn’t even let him on a short-hop airplane, let alone a hypersonic Concordski pulling almost 3 g’s. He probably wouldn’t even be allowed to go back to work on the ground.

  This was the end of everything he had ever lived for.

  Better I had never woken up to face this living death.

  He shook his head. He rolled his eyes up at the ceiling. He burst into sobs and he didn’t give a damn who saw. “I can’t take this, Sonya,” he cried. “Why don’t you just do me a favor and pull the plug?”

  “It isn’t hopeless, Jerry!” Sonya said. “You won’t be tied to this thing forever! Isn’t that right, Dr. Cordray, there are new developments right around the corner, aren’t there?”

  He had been so brave while the doctor told him of his condition that it had made her want to cry. And when he had started babbling on enthusiastically about the machinery that was keeping him alive, she had wanted to hug him to her—that was the crazy, innocent, eager, overgrown little boy with whom she had fallen in love, long, long ago.

  And she was not about to let that Jerry roll over and die.

  She fetched Dr. Cordray a swift kick in the ankle. Hélène Cordray, to her credit, and Sonya’s everlasting gratitude, did not allow her face to show Jerry a response.

  “Well, yes, this is perhaps only a temporary expedient,” she said. “You know better than I do, Monsieur Reed, that what weighs eleven kilos now could weigh a few grams later. With sufficient miniaturization, we could implant the whole device. . . . .”

  Jerry turned his head on the pillow to look at her. Sonya could see him composing himself by act of will. “Atomic level switching . . . ,” he muttered. “That could certainly get the circuitry down by two levels of magnitude. . . .”

  “An implantable isotopic power core such as we use in pacemakers would then make you entirely mobile,” Dr
. Cordray said, bless her heart.

  “Be better off with a replaceable external module,” Jerry mused. “Easy enough to use induction to power the implant from outside . . .”

  “If you say so, Monsieur Reed.”

  “What about an organic solution? A brain implant?”

  “Not beyond the realm of possibility, though it would be rather difficult to make the neuronic connections. . . .”

  “Maybe not, if it was cloned from my own genome. . . .”

  “There is that . . . I have heard that the Americans have succeeded in cloning the entire brain of a rat. . . .”

  “To use as a missile guidance system, but the software problems don’t seem to have been licked yet. . . .”

  Sonya’s intellect was quite lost as they proceeded to drift off into realms of technobabble far beyond her ken. But her heart was filled to bursting as she watched Jerry talk himself up from the blackest of pits, as he became more and more animated, as he dragged himself back into the world of the living by his own bootstraps.

  “Well, Monsieur Reed, this has certainly been a stimulating conversation,” Dr. Cordray finally said. “But it is really time you got some rest.”

  And she took Sonya by the arm, nodding toward the door.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” Sonya said, blowing Jerry a kiss.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be here, won’t I?” he said, and he smiled, and he winked, and Sonya’s spirit soared.

  “Not for long, Jerry,” she said. “Soon we’ll be going home.”

  “Mon Dieu, what a man!” Hélène Cordray exclaimed out in the corridor. “What a mind! What courage! You will pardon an old woman for saying this, but I could easily enough have fallen in love with him myself! How lucky you are! How ever could you have let a man like that slip from your grasp?”

  “I divorced him,” Sonya told her.

  “Incroyable! Why on earth did you do that?”

  Sonya sighed. “Je ne comprends pas,” she admitted.

  “But you love him still, do you not?”

  Sonya nodded. “C’est vrai,” she said softly. “I do believe I do.”

  HEROIC UKRAINIAN DEFIES MOSCOW

  Ukrainian Presidential candidate Vadim Kronkol scoffed today at Russian President Constantin Gorchenko’s threat to absorb the Ukrainian national militia into the Red Army and use it to crush the independent Ukrainian Republic that he plans to declare unilaterally after he is elected.

  “I’d just like to see Gorchenko try to put patriotic Ukrainian soldiers under Russian command,” the defiant Kronkol told reporters at a press conference in Kiev. “Does he really think he can use our own boys against us? The latest Gallup and Roper polls both show that the Ukrainian national militia supports Ukrainian independence by a margin of four to one!”

  —New York Post

  After the usual unconscionable forty-minute crawl in the taxiway stack, they were finally at the top of the runway with takeoff clearance from the clods in Narita tower. Franja ran up the turbofans, got the high sign from her flight engineer, nodded to her co-pilot, released the brakes, and the Concordski accelerated down the runway. When her ground speed showed 289 kph, she pulled back on the yoke, and the Aeroflot flight from Tokyo to Paris was at last airborne, fifty-one minutes late, quite exasperating, considering that the flight itself would last only ninety minutes.

  In fact . . .

  She thumbed on the cabin intercom. “This is Captain Gagarin speaking. Aeroflot wishes to apologize for the delay in takeoff, which was due entirely to airport congestion. Since we will be flying a ballistic trajectory at maximum suborbital velocity, I’m afraid it will be impossible to make up the lost time. Our flight time will be ninety minutes, about half the time we have spent on the ground waiting for a takeoff slot. We hope you enjoy the flight.”

  Constantin Bulanin, the co-pilot, laughed. “Not exactly according to regulations,” he said.

  “Next time I may just pipe it through the tower frequency too,” Franja said dryly. “It’s as close as we can get to really giving those numbskulls a piece of our mind!”

  When the airspeed reached 620 kph, Franja ignited the main engine, killed the turbofans, and felt the soul-satisfying kick of the 2.7-g acceleration pressing her back against the padded seat as the hydrogen-burning scramjet quickly took the Concordski up to hypersonic speed on atmospheric oxygen.

  And that, alas, was the end of manual flying until the approach to De Gaulle. She keyed in the preprogrammed flight sequence for Paris, and the computer took over the con. The climb-angle steepened to 63 degrees, the sky outside the small windshield quickly deepened from azure to purple to black, and then, at 130,000 meters, when the stars were beginning to show and the atmospheric oxygen had become too thin to sustain combustion, there was a slight judder, and then a little surge of added acceleration as the engine went over to internal oxidizer.

  The burn continued for another five minutes, until the Concordski’s speed was just 1,000 kph under orbital velocity at an altitude of about 30 kilometers, and then the engine shut down, and the plane went into its silent, weightless glide up to the apogee of its ballistic parabola, and that was it.

  Franja loosened her harness and let herself float a few centimeters clear of the seat. From here on in, till the end of the reentry sequence about half an hour away, there was really nothing to do but monitor the instruments and watch the small slice of starscape visible through the narrow windshield.

  The life of a Concordski pilot was not exactly thrilling when it came to the flying itself. You fidgeted endlessly on the ground as you advanced slot by slot toward the top of the runway, you took off, you went hypersonic, you turned the plane over to the computer, you waited, you took over again after reentry, flew circles in the holding stack, and landed.

  So much for the romance of the air! Even her work aboard Cosmograd Sagdeev had been more exciting than this, with its spacewalks and the bizarre feeling of power that came from manually moving large masses around in zero g.

  But though she still chafed at the thought that it would take two more years of seniority before they would start giving her orbital flights to Cosmograds, and two more before any hope of the choice assignment to Spaceville runs, and though Mars, or even the Moon, was still a vague distant dream, Franja seldom found herself regretting the decision to trade life as a space monkey for a career of flying milk runs for Aeroflot.

  For while flying Concordskis from city to city was nothing to write home about, once you landed, why there you were! Four days of flying, then three days off. What with the ninety-minute hops, you ended up flying two or three legs a day, and what with the ability to swap flights with fellow pilots via the international Aeroflot bulletin board, with a little horse-trading, you could take your three days a week off just about anywhere. Paris! Rome! Tokyo! Sydney! London! Leningrad! Kiev! Munich! Amsterdam! Vienna!

  You might not see any more of space than a slice of star field through a small windshield, but you certainly saw the world!

  While Franja still just might have traded the life of a Concordski pilot for an expedition to Mars or Titan, she certainly would not have traded it for anything else on Earth. Concordski pilots were citizens of the world. Time zones had no meaning for them, nor did the days of the week. Via the bulletin board, you could always find an open apartment to stay in in a choice location in any city where Aeroflot flew. Or a ready-made playmate for the long weekend if that was what you chose, and your three days off were always the weekend in the Concordski Club.

  And then there was Ivan. Theirs was a relationship that only a Concordski pilot could really understand.

  Franja had been determined to live in the Arbat from the moment she learned she was going to be based in Moscow, for while the district’s wild nightlife had been tamed somewhat into a more refined version of itself in the service of enhanced real estate values, it still stood for everything she felt she had missed as a dedicated student during her years in Yuri Gagarin.

  U
nfortunately, she was not exactly the only Muscovite with the same desire, which was why the Arbat was becoming so gentrified, and why no single person could afford the outrageous rent on even an Aeroflot pilot’s salary while tripping the lavish life fantastic around the world.

  When Franja sought out a prospective roommate on the Concordski Club bulletin board, she certainly hadn’t expected a man to apply, but Ivan Fedorovich Yortsin was handsome and charming, there was instant sexual chemistry between them, and when he pointed out that a one-bedroom was the most two Aeroflot pilots could hope to afford in the Arbat, that both of them would have a better time sharing a bedroom with each other than with some platonic roommate, and proved it to her complete satisfaction, that was the clincher.

  Especially when he pointed out that each of them would have the apartment to themselves as often as not, given the realities of Concordski pilots’ schedules, and explained the working rules of the Concordski Club, of which he was a veteran member.

  So they rented a one-bedroom one block off Arbat Street, and they scrupulously followed the code of the Club. For a former space monkey, it was hardly the depths of degeneracy that the Mother Russia bluenoses delighted in calling it.

  When both were elsewhere, the Arbat apartment went on the bulletin board. When either of them was alone in Moscow, the apartment was exclusively that person’s. When they were both in the city together, they always partied together and were never so gauche as to go home with someone else. But what they did when they were in separate cities, by mutual agreement, happened to two different people on another planet.