Russian Spring (3 page)

What was going on was that Rob Post, like the Air Force itself, was pursuing his own hidden agenda. He was using the Air Force funding to design a Low Orbit to Geosynchronous Orbit ferry with the capability to take crews to a
GEO
space station that didn’t exist in the guise of giving them their Advanced Maneuverable Bus.

The thrusters were far bigger than anything a warhead and interceptor bus needed. The so-called refueling collar was being designed to take a large fuel tank neatly balanced along the long axis to handle a 1-g thrust. The bus platform itself was being designed to accommodate forty interceptors so that a pressure cabin would have room atop it. And so forth.

Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that Rob was smoking grass again, or perhaps vice versa. Though he had stopped when the piss tests came in, he had started again sometime during the early stages of the
AMB
project, coming home to Granada Hills, toking up, sitting down at the computer, and designing, on his own time, the pressure cabin, and the expanded fuel-tank module that would turn the
AMB
into a space ferry that could take ten people from
LEO
to
GEO
.

Eventually, of course, the inevitable happened.

The Air Force gave the design a thorough going-over before the
AMB
went to prototype, and some bright boy realized what was happening. Early one bleary Monday morning, the piss patrol showed up in force and had everyone working on the project urinate into test tubes in plain view.

Such snap mass random testing was not quite unheard-of, but when they took blood samples to nail down the evidence of any infraction
of the purity regs, everyone knew that the plug was about to be pulled.

Somehow Rob Post’s piss tested out pure, but they caught him with borderline traces of cannabinol in the blood sample, which might or might not have washed him out of the Program for life if he had chosen to fight a dismissal in court. So instead of trying to nail him directly, they got cute about it.

They canceled the
AMB
project prior to prototype, which cost Rockwell big bucks, and they made it quite clear that Rockwell’s chances of landing the replacement program would be slim and none if Rob Post was still on their payroll. What was more, he must not be permitted to resign, he had to be forthrightly fired for mismanagement of Air Force funding.

This the Rockwell management was far from reluctant to do, when they toted up how much the cancellation of the
AMB
had cost them. Rob Post was rather loudly fired, and Rockwell got the sat-sled contract.

Rob, as they say, never worked in the Program again, or at least not directly, eking out a precariously unpredictable if not exactly penurious living as a technical consultant on various non-Program projects via his many connections in the California high-tech and space communities. Meanwhile, he threw these parties every month or so to maintain his sad and forlorn connection to people like Jerry who were still in the Program.

Such as it was.

Jerry looked away from the tired party scene behind the glass balcony doors, away from André Deutcher’s knowing eyes, and up into the Southern California night sky. But the stars were hidden by the bank of offshore fog and were nowhere to be seen.

Jerry finally looked back at André, who lounged against the deck railing, staring him down and puffing out a long, languid plume of rich Havana smoke that melted into the fog.

“It is a sad time here for people like you and Rob, oui, a sad time for all of you,” André said, nodding toward the scene in the living room beyond the glass, which Rob was crossing in their direction. “Do not think I do not understand, Jerry,” he said with an air of worldly commiseration. “You are an American, but you believe in something that your country no longer does. . . .”

“Yeah, well at least I’m still in the Space business,” Jerry drawled in a phony Groucho Marx voice, waving his cigar and blowing out about five dollars’ worth of contraband Havana in what even he realized was a futilely foolish attempt to ape André’s panache.

For that matter, he didn’t really like the taste of tobacco smoke; for him smoking this cigar was what passed for a small act of defiance of the national purity regs under which most of the people at this
party, himself included, were constrained to exist if they wished to remain employable. Tobacco still wasn’t on the piss list, but
Cuban
tobacco still had the tiny thrill of safe danger that pot must have had in the old days when a trace of it in your urine didn’t mean you were out of the Program for life, like poor old Rob.

Oh yeah, he was still in the Space business, all right. He still had a job at Rockwell, ironically enough with the team developing the propulsion and maneuvering systems for the sat sleds, which had replaced the canceled
AMB
. And to turn the screw a little further on Rob Post, it was Rob’s unauthorized upscaling of the
AMB
design that had put the sat-sled bug in the Air Force’s ear, though of course no one would ever admit it.

Why
not
go right to something capable of taking payloads from
LEO
to
GEO
that could also do the
AMB
’s job in the bargain? Rob’s design for the refueling collar and the big mother fuel tank proved quite usable. Just add big throttleable stop-and-start thrusters, a maneuvering and control system, a platform just big enough to hold the whole thing together, and a clamp-on system for payload modules.

Voilà, the sat sled, which could not only deploy warheads and interceptors in Low Earth Orbit, but which could maneuver killer satellites at high speed and ferry spy satellites to
GEO
, and at a price not much greater than that of procuring the single-purpose
AMB
.

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.