Russian Spring (4 page)

“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 smoke.

“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.

“Super bagnole, eh?” André said, as a liveried chauffeur in a uniform matching Marcel’s emerged from the driver’s seat, and opened the back curbside door for them smartly. “Fuel cell version; we are 90 percent nuclear these days in France, and we have electricity to burn.”

The rear seat was a softly upholstered couch done in deep navy velour, and the carpeting was of the same material, as were the tiny cushioned ottomans upon which to rest one’s feet. Tiny adjustable overhead halogen spotlights bathed each of them in a soft pool of ersatz sunlight. The compartment walls were covered with pastel blue leather set off with chrome brightwork that might actually have been
silver plate. Below the sealed window separating them from the front seat, an incongruously cheap-looking little screen and keyboard were built into the plush seatback.

There were sets of dual controls built into each passenger’s armrest. André fiddled with one set, and some kind of subdued electronic pseudo-oriental symphony began playing mellowly in the background. He did something else and laughed when Jerry did a take as a compartment in the seatback before them popped open, revealing the inside of a small refrigerator containing two glasses and a cold bottle of champagne, then snapped shut again.

“Is this thing
yours
, André?” Jerry exclaimed.

André Deutcher laughed. “Don’t I wish!” he said. “Actually, it’s a diplomatic limousine lent to
ESA
by the Foreign Ministry for the occasion. After the way you were forced to travel here, we were able to convince them that the honor of France demanded it.”

Amazingly enough, less than ten minutes later, while André was showing him how the videotel in the seatback was both videophone and computer terminal—connecting the car with the phone system, the teletel public data net, and, via access code, with the
ESA
mainframes too—Marcel appeared with Jerry’s luggage on a little trolley; how he was able to retrieve it with such speed was a bit of magic that somehow impressed Jerry even more than the sail through passport control or this state-of-the-art automotive palace.

“Avanti,” André shouted into thin air as Marcel climbed into the front passenger seat, and the car pulled away from the curb with hardly a lurch and no sound at all that was audible above the low background music.

Soon they were out of the airport and on a highway slicing through verdant green countryside interspersed with fields of dry brown cropped stubble, and it was then it really hit Jerry Reed that he was truly in a foreign country, and not just because the cars and trucks on the road all looked subtly alien and barreled along at incredible high speeds or because the road signs were all in French.

For there was no roadside ticky-tacky at all, no Burger Kings, no Golden Arches, no car lots, no shopping malls and parking lots, no sprawling cheap housing developments, none of the endless suburban crudscape that marked the ride from the airport to any major American city.

And when the Parisian suburbs finally started, it was all at once, as if the car had suddenly crossed a frontier; godawful, they certainly were, but godawful in a way quite different from anything Jerry could have imagined. Blocks of huge apartment houses with balconies from which actual laundry hung drying, gray grim concrete, a lot of it, but a lot of it painted in truly garish pastel colors, sometimes in two or
three hideously clashing hues of green and pink and powder purple. And then this gave way to industrial buildings, gasworks, and railyards that might have been anywhere save for the French lettering on the walls, and the billboards that began to appear, flashing bare tits and asses huckstering unknown brands of ambiguous products.