Russian Spring (57 page)

“No, please don’t go,” Franja found herself saying, quite charmed by his careful and thoughtful manners, so different from the space-monkey etiquette she had become all too used to, and different too from what she would have expected from a high and mighty Colonel Cosmonaut.

“You’re sure?” he said. “You’re not just saying it to be polite?”

Good Lord, Franja thought, could that be it? Has Comrade Cosmonaut Movie Star failed to avail himself of what he’s been constantly offered simply because this beautiful creature is actually an old-fashioned
gentleman?
So it would seem, for up this close, some instinct told her in no uncertain terms that this man did not have a gay bone in his body!

Franja smiled at him. “Where
did
you learn such old-fashioned manners, Colonel Smirnov?” she said. “In Cosmonaut school?”

Nikolai laughed, sending a thrill through her. “Not quite . . . what did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t. It’s Franja Gagarin Reed, Colonel Smirnov,” Franja fairly gushed.

“Please call me Nikolai,” he said. “We don’t address each other by rank where I learned my manners. Not out there, we don’t. . . .” And for a moment he seemed to be looking past her, not at the Earth, or at his ship, but to the side, straight out into the starry blackness.

“Out there?”

“Mars,” he said, “or rather perhaps on the voyage there and back. . . .” He seemed to return from some vast distance. “A year there, six months on the surface, a year back with the same few people . . . It’s a trip that changes anyone who makes it, Franja. At the very least, we Martians learn to be very, very polite to each other. Manners, as you call it, become an absolute necessity. Sometimes it gets . . . it gets . . .” He frowned, he shrugged, he seemed quite at a loss for words.

“And
sex?
” Franja could not keep from saying. “I mean, two and a half years . . . I’ve always wondered . . .”

“Not like here,” Nikolai said quite somberly. “It simply can’t be tolerated, a few people in such close quarters. To tell you the truth, it’s something we haven’t figured out yet, if we ever will. Mixed crews of single people have not worked well. Four couples would be best, but the chances of assembling such a crew are minimal, and if some people are having sex and others aren’t, well . . . So now we’re back to trying an all-male crew, and it has nothing to do with outmoded Slavic phallocracy.”

“But what do you
do
for two and a half years?”

“We suffer, we masturbate,” Nikolai said evenly.

“For two and a half years?”

“For centuries sailors and explorers were forced to do just that. . . .”

“But sailors . . . well, you know . . .”

Nikolai grimaced. “If anyone tried
that
, we’d shove him out an air lock!” he declared.

“It all sounds quite horrible.”

“It isn’t,” he said, “or perhaps it is, but it’s the price we have to pay for something wonderful.”

“Something wonderful . . . ?”

Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov grabbed hold of a second hand-ring and seemed to chin himself up on the two of them, looking straight out into the infinite depths like a boy into a sweet-shop window. He didn’t even seem to notice as Franja swiveled around to float close beside him, close enough to smell his lilac cologne, close enough to feel the heat of his body, or so to her it seemed.

“The voyage itself is mostly privation and boredom,” he said. “And there is a slow subtle kind of terror too, when the Earth no longer shows a disc, and you’re out there in a hard cold nothingness that goes on and on and on quite literally forever. And then that passes, and you feel something impossible to describe, a hideous kind of ecstasy perhaps, what the Buddhists and the Hindus must feel when they confront the reality of the Great Void, you are all alone, tiny beyond insignificance, and yet . . . and yet . . .”

A shudder went through his body. Franja found herself inching closer.

“And yet you are somehow also a part of something vast and eternal . . . ,” Nikolai went on in a dreamy voice. “And then Mars begins to grow, and grow, and you feel an enormous sense of relief, somehow, just to see another planet, any planet, though somehow there is a sense of loss too, and then before you know it, there is the excitement of making orbit, and the crazy flight through the atmosphere, and then you are floating down toward another world. . . .”

Hesitantly, Franja put an arm around his shoulder, not daring to
actually touch him, just letting it float there behind him, unseen, unfelt, apparently unnoticed.

“Another world!” Nikolai exclaimed. “True, you can never breathe the open air, but in the Martian summer, at noon, in light atmosphere suits, there are times when you can feel the distant warmth of the sun, and the wind, and you stand out there on alien soil, looking down, perhaps, into some great dry river valley where water once flowed, where life once began, and you realize in the pit of your stomach, in your lungs, and your heart, and your balls, that you
really are
standing on another world entire. And on the long voyage home, you look out at all those stars, and you think that somewhere out there there are people, yes, call them that,
people
, looking back at you, and someday, somehow . . .”

He stopped. He turned. He gave her a foolish, boyish grin that went straight to her heart. “Well, you shouldn’t get me started like this,” he said with endearing embarrassment. “That’s a Martian for you, we can’t help getting all mystical over it; despite the realities of Dialectical Materialism, I suppose we’re all still romantic old Slavs at heart. . . .”

Franja could not help herself. She threw her arms about his neck, and, hanging there, kissed him.

“What . . . what was that for?” Nikolai Mikhailovich stammered.

Franja looked downward, rather mortified herself. “I . . . I . . . I’ve never met a real hero before,” she said.

“Oh come now, don’t be ridiculous!”

Franja looked up into his wide blue eyes. And what she saw there was a man who had gazed upon vistas that would have withered her spirit—or transformed it into she knew not what. What she saw was a man who had endured unspeakable loneliness and isolation and sexual frustration in the service of something vast and oceanic and beyond her understanding, and who would soon bravely commit himself to the same adventure again. What she also saw was a little boy who was quite touchingly embarrassed to see a woman mooning over him like this.

“No, it’s true, Nikolai Mikhailovich,” she said. “And if you don’t see it, why that makes it all the more real. You’re a real hero, in the best and finest sense.”

“What rubbish!” he said, averting his gaze.

“Not at all,” Franja insisted.

“I’m no hero. Just an ordinary man who’s been quite fortunate to have been granted an extraordinary experience. . . .”

“Is that so?” Franja said, screwing up her courage. “Well, since you so strenuously deny being a hero, perhaps the hero’s code will not prevent you from accepting my modest gift. . . .”

“Gift? What gift?”

“Something to think about all the way to Mars and all the way back,” she told him. “If you are going to spend two and a half years masturbating, let me give you a memory worth masturbating over.”

Colonel Cosmonaut Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov blushed quite scarlet.

Franja laughed. “Surely a Hero of the Soviet Union who has braved the cosmic vastness does not lack the manly courage to do what gallantry demands under the circumstances?”

“I really shouldn’t . . .”

“Oh yes you should!” Franja insisted. “The honor of the Cosmonaut Corps demands no less!”

“Well, if you insist on putting it that way . . .”

Nikolai was quite nervous as Franja dragged him through the maze of passageways toward the big air lock feeling, no doubt, that all eyes were upon them, which, no doubt, they were. He was properly scandalized when she proposed that they commandeer the Octopus for their own amorous purposes, but in the end, she had her way, for when it came down to such matters, the Colonel Cosmonaut was really quite the little boy.

As Sasha Gorokov had done so many months of tedium ago, Franja maneuvered the Octopus so that the canopy looked out upon the unsullied starry blackness.

Once this was accomplished, she found herself floating in the pod with a rather flustered-looking cosmonaut hero who did not at all seem prepared to make the first move. Well, modesty and shyness certainly hadn’t gotten her this far!

She undid the clasps of her jumpsuit, wriggled out of it, and, kicking off a hand-ring, propelled herself toward the top of the bubble canopy, where she spread-eagled herself against the heated glass, presenting what she hoped was an irresistible image of naked flesh haloed in glory by the glittering star field.

To judge by the way Nikolai floated there beneath her, gazing upward with his mouth hanging open, she had achieved the desired effect, but he made no move to either take off his uniform or join her.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Well!” he sighed uncertainly.

“Well, take off your clothes and come on up here, or
down
here, if you prefer to see it that way. . . .”

Without taking his eyes off her, Nikolai managed to peel off his clothing, rather awkwardly for someone who had demonstrated such casual skill at zero-gravity aerobatics. His nervousness, however, she was relieved to see, had not prevented him from achieving quite a firm erection.

He kicked off the edge of a console and floated up toward her. She reached out, caught his hands, and pulled him down on top of her.

Once this docking maneuver was successfully completed, he became quite another man, kissing her roughly, kneading her breasts, and thrusting himself into her almost immediately, as if all those months of sexual frustration and careful politeness in space had served to make him quite lose control at the first touch of feminine flesh.

As indeed it would seem that it had, for after no more than a dozen long hard strokes, he groaned, and spasmed, and spent himself within her.

Immediately afterward, he withdrew, and rolled away from her, and half curled himself up into a ball, and floated there, staring out into space unable to meet her gaze, with the most miserable expression on his face.

“I—”

She stopped him with a gentle finger to his lips. “Don’t say anything,” she told him. “I understand. . . . You poor man. . . .”

Though in truth, when he did turn to face her, she found herself staring into the eyes, not of a heroic Colonel Cosmonaut, but of an acutely embarrassed little boy. Nothing could have moved her heart more.

“We have plenty of time, Nikolai,” she said softly. She reached out and embraced him and gave him a long lingering kiss.

Then, remembering what Sasha had said and done, she rolled him back against the canopy, grabbed him by the knees, pried his legs open, smiled up at him, and said: “Let me show you a whole new meaning for the phrase ‘going down.’ ”

And she did. She floated beneath him, and took his limp flesh in her mouth, and perspective reversed, and there she was, floating
above
him light as air, while he lay back against the bubble, rising up out of the cosmic vastness itself like a god of space, his long black hair seeming to roll and break like the waves of the starry sea, a dark corona haloing his perfect hero’s face.

Soon enough, indeed perhaps sooner than she might have wished, his manhood rose too between her lips, and he reached down, snaked his hands in her hair, and pulled, dreamy-eyed and smiling, pulled her face up into a truly tender kiss.

Then he kicked himself clear of the canopy as he gathered her up in his arms, and entered her again, surely and gently this time, and, hugging himself tightly to her, he made love to her, truly made love to her, floating freely in the air, softly and gently, keeping them clear of the canopy, and the consoles, and the floor with deft little kicks whenever they drifted close.

It was quite an incredible experience, perhaps the most incredible
experience of Franja’s life. At this zero-gravity maneuvering, Nikolai was quite the master, and with nothing beneath either of them to react against but each other, their motions were slow, and lingering, and tender of necessity, their rhythms quickly melding into the most intimate synchrony, and staying there for a long, long time.

Franja’s pleasure built slowly and reached a plateau that seemed to go on forever in space and time, flying there weightless as a cloud in the infinite and endless stellar vastness in Nikolai’s arms, melded together, dancing in the air, in the vacuum, in the ecstasy, and when she finally crested into orgasm, it seemed quite literally shattering, stars flashing within and without, as she soared up over the top to dissolve into the universal sea.

They floated in each other’s arms silently for quite a while afterward, catching their breath, quotidian and cosmic, before Franja came back close enough to the here and now to speak.

“Where did you learn to do
that?
” she whispered.

Nikolai turned in her arms to face her, positively glowing, with the most affectingly boyish grin on his lips, his blue eyes looking down, then up into hers. If there had been a floor beneath them to do it against, no doubt he would have shuffled his feet.

“Right now,” he said. “Right here, with you.”

And he took her hand, and together they floated there naked, two tiny frail creatures of flesh and blood, looking out into the cold and glorious vastness of the infinite cosmos.

CARSON INTRODUCES BILL TIGHTENING EXIT
VISA RESTRICTIONS

Senator Harry Carson (R-Texas) has introduced legislation that would allow the Central Security Agency to refuse exit visas on the broader grounds of “national interest” rather than requiring the
CSA
to show “national security” grounds for such restrictions as the National Security Act now calls for.

“Sure, changing one word seems like bureaucratic nit-picking,” Carson admitted, “but the way the law reads now, unpatriotic polecats are getting the benefit of the doubt. We need to untie the hands of the
CSA
by giving them much broader discretionary power. Sometimes one little word can make a lot of difference.”