Russian Spring (67 page)

Velnikov had not only delivered as promised, he had actually managed to get Jerry a raise. It would seem that Velnikov’s friends back in Moscow had never informed him that Jerry’s move had been concocted by Sonya and Ilya Pashikov in the Paris office of Red Star. They hadn’t even prepared him for the Tass announcement. The morning after it had all broken in the press, Velnikov had showed up in Jerry’s office with a rather dazed expression on his face and a bottle gift-wrapped in gold foil.

“I don’t know what to say, Reed . . .
Jerry
, if I may,” he said. “I must admit that I feel like a bit of a fool . . . all these years . . .” He shrugged bearishly and slapped the bottle down on Jerry’s desk. “Here,” he said, “a poor gesture, perhaps, but . . .”

Jerry unwrapped a fifth of brown liquor with a fancy label lettered in elaborate Cyrillic and festooned with gold and silver medallions.

“Genuine Russian potato vodka,” Velnikov told him. “Produced for export. One hundred proof and aged in Cognac casks for seven years. I have it on reliable authority that it is the best vodka in the world.”

“Thank you, Boris,” Jerry said, quite touched despite his cynical knowledge, for it was plain that Velnikov’s emotion was innocently genuine.

“Thank
you
, Jerry,” Velnikov said. “To tell you the truth, I still find it hard to believe what you’ve done for me. We were never exactly friends.”

“And I was never exactly going to be project manager, we both know that,” Jerry told him honestly.

“But neither was I, or so I had thought until yesterday. They were using each of us to block the other.” Velnikov hesitated, studied Jerry’s face for a moment. “Would you mind telling me why you
really
stepped aside for me?”

“We had a deal, Boris, remember?”

“Of course! And you may be sure that I will live up to my end of the bargain! But still . . .”

“You wanted something, and I wanted something, Boris,” Jerry said, “and when I was forced to really look at it, I realized that I didn’t want to give up what I wanted to get what you wanted for yourself. So partly it was just a smart tactical move. But . . . well, the way the bastards had things set up, we were both going to get screwed. And whether I liked you or not, I could see that when it came to what that felt like, we were really standing in each other’s shoes. Know your enemy, right? But when you really do, well . . .”

“It’s hard to stay enemies, yes,” Velnikov said. “May I?” he said, reaching for the bottle. “Shall we?”

Jerry had nodded, and Velnikov opened the vodka, and they shared a drink of the smooth, pungent, powerful stuff out of plastic coffee cups.

“What you have done is going to put you in a certain disfavor with Agency circles answerable to Strasbourg,” Velnikov had told him afterward. “They won’t be able to do anything overt, of course, but it will be there. So I want you to know that circles answerable to Moscow will see to it that you still have a future with the Agency after the Grand Tour Navettes become operational. I’ve cost you the patronage of Corneau, but for what it’s worth, I want you to know that you’ll always have mine.”

And Velnikov had been true to his word. He had appointed Jerry chief propulsion and maneuvering system engineer and appointed a Russian manager over him named Igor Kalitski who was young, and eager, and deferential, and whose concept of his job was to keep paperwork and bureaucrats away from Jerry Reed and let him get on with the real work.

Lately Boris had intimated that Jerry could be promoted up to Kalitski’s job when he came back from the shakedown cruise; the section would still be active until the whole fleet was operational, and by that time, perhaps,
ESA
would be ready for a Russian Director, namely himself, and Jerry could finish his career as Deputy Director of the European Space Agency in the best of all possible worlds.

Jerry finished his coffee and left the apartment without bothering to put the empty mug in the sink. Was that what he wanted? To become a sub-project manager and then Deputy Director? They’d
never make him Director after what he had done, but it would certainly be a decent capstone to his career.

For some strange reason, a frisson of depression flashed through him as he descended the stairs, a shadow of gloom entirely inappropriate to this day of all days. For the first time in years and years, the future ahead of him seemed empty somehow, occluded, unfocused, and thoughts were leaking in around the edges of his mind that he fought to push back.

But the sun was actually starting to break through the overcast when Jerry reached the street. People were bustling along the narrow sidewalks of the Quai de Bourbon toward the Pont St.-Louis and the St.-Michel
RER
station. A hydrofoil bus cleaved the river with twin white contrails, heading east toward the Porte de Bercy. The morning traffic jam on the Quai de la Tournelle had already built up by the time Jerry reached the Left Bank. Horns honked, pedestrians jabbered, cabdrivers cursed, dogs shat on the sidewalk, and Jerry found himself absorbed into the energy of the dawning day.

Worries about what his life would be like after his ride to the Moon seemed meaningless and far away, an artifact, no doubt, of the gray beginning to what was turning into a sunny day.

After all, he told himself, if what everything he had been told and had read was true, the man who went up would not be the man who came down.

The
RER
, of course, was jammed, but it was only a short ride to the Gare du Nord to catch the new express line to the
ESA
complex at Le Bourget, and the train was always mostly empty out of Paris in the morning, going against the commuter tide into the city from the banlieue.

At first, Jerry endured the crush in good humor. Soon enough, he would be up out of the smell, and the noise, and the Earthbound press of bodies, and the bonds of gravity itself, up there where it was cool, and clear, and clean, and the starry brilliance went on forever.

Afterward, well . . .

It didn’t bear thinking about right now.

But standing there in the packed
RER
car with bodies pressed all around him, Jerry suddenly found himself thinking about it anyway. Maybe it was the odor of massed humanity. Maybe it was the press of the flesh. Maybe it was the young lovers kissing passionately in the middle of it all and who gave a damn. Maybe it was all he had given up to walk on water crowding suddenly in on him, now that he was about to actually do it, now that the countdown to the moment he had always dreamed of had really started, now that the fulfillment of a lifetime’s obsession was only two weeks away.

“You’re a real space cadet,” Bob had told him. “You ought to be a citizen of Mars.”

And that was what he suddenly felt like, right there in the
RER
, pressed up against the bodies of these strangers, like a Man from Mars. He suddenly felt his own weirdness. The years of friendless celibacy. The obsessiveness of his existence. The vast distance between what he had willed himself to become and the ordinary humans, with their ordinary loves, and lives, and children, pressed against him in this
RER
car.

A chill went through him. The truth of it was that he had turned himself into a creature with no personal life at all. Politics had taken his son away from him and caused him to disown his own daughter and destroyed his marriage. And he had done the rest.

Oh yes he had! Hadn’t Sonya asked to be his friend on the night she had given him back his life,
this
life, that in some deep way, he could now not keep from knowing, was rushing blindly toward its triumphant conclusion? And hadn’t he turned her down? Why had he done that? Why had he still insisted on keeping all contact between them to the barest minimum? Why hadn’t he even accepted her offer to celebrate together at a neutral restaurant when their scheme had succeeded? Why wouldn’t he see her even now, after the Golden Boy had finally been promoted back to Moscow and out of their lives?

Why was he thinking these grim thoughts now, of all times, riding the damned
RER
toward his last Earthbound task before leaving all this stuff far, far behind him?

What was he suddenly so afraid of?

He had given up everything to walk on water. He had turned himself into a Man from Mars.

What do you do
after
you’ve walked on water?

Rob Post hadn’t told him the answer to that one.

But he was going to find out.

As surely as what went up sooner or later had to come down.

Art Collins: “But when you come right down to it, Mr. Vice President, who gives a damn? Wouldn’t it be a good thing if the Ukraine secedes from the Soviet Union? Wouldn’t other captive peoples be encouraged to do the same thing? Wouldn’t every American like to see the Soviet Union fall apart and maybe take Common Europe with it?”

Vice President Wolfowitz: “I certainly wouldn’t.”

Art Collins: “Why not? Wouldn’t it mean the new access to the world’s largest export market that we so desperately need? Wouldn’t it make America the world’s number one economic power again?”

Vice President Wolfowitz: “Like the rest of the country, Art, you’ve been listening to too many speeches by our pinheaded Commander in Chief, and the only bottom line Harry Carson understands is the one he hangs his dirty laundry on. What about the trillions and trillions of dollars we’ve stiffed them for? Oh, yeah, all we have to do to convince them to welcome us with open arms is use our media muscle to destroy the economic and political structure they’ve spent decades building!”

Art Collins: “President Carson believes—”

Vice President Wolfowitz: “Harry Carson is a schmuck.”

Art Collins: “That’s pretty strong language!”

Vice President Wolfowitz: “If it talks like a schmuck, runs the country like a schmuck, and surrounds itself with other schmucks, it probably
is
a schmuck, even if it wasn’t cruising this poor screwed-up country for another international bruising like the biggest schmuck of all.”

—
Newspeak
, with Art Collins

XXII

It was going to be a busy day as usual for the Director of Red Star’s Paris office.

In the morning, there would be the usual briefing from the economic strategy department, plus the monthly cash-flow report to approve before transmittal to the Red Star Tower, and then she would have
to deal with the matter of the failure of the chromium shipment to arrive in Lyon on time. Over lunch and no doubt a healthy sample of the product, she would have to haggle with the President of the Bordeaux Wine Merchants’ Association over the ridiculous prices they were demanding for what inside information said was a mediocre year. In the afternoon, there would be the matter of the Crimean oranges, the transmission deal with Renault, the purchase of Midi Hydrofoil, and the fusion torch co-development deal with the French and the British, which was still hung up over the budgetary split. On top of that, she would have to fit in an essentially pointless meeting with the visiting producer from Sovfilm who had the ridiculous notion that it was her job to get him major French distribution for some big-budget epic about the Spanish Conquest of Mexico that they had shot in Uzbekistan on German money with a cast of Tartars and Italians.

Still, as she sat in her big corner office sipping a cup of coffee as she contemplated the day to come, Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin found herself thinking of Jerry.

She hadn’t given much thought to her ex-husband since she had maneuvered his appointment as chief propulsion and maneuvering systems engineer on the Grand Tour Navette. That had been the true divorce settlement, the discharge of her debt to him, and her final freedom from the years of pain and guilt.

The divorce had been merely a pragmatic necessity, or so she had put it to him at the time, a mere legalism; their relationship could continue, eventually they could even live together again, it would be a divorce in name only.

What
had
she been thinking?

In fact, of course, their
marriage
had been what had long since come to exist in name only. What a phantasm it had been to suppose that they could maintain a friendly relationship after the divorce, let alone remain lovers!

Had her affair with Ilya Pashikov been cause or effect of the estrangement between her and Jerry? A natural outcome of an intimate working relationship with an attractive man whom she really had more in common with than her bitter space-obsessed husband? Or a tawdry seeking after what she had stopped getting at home?

The thought that
she
had divorced
him
after what he had endured to preserve what was left of their marriage filled her with self-loathing.

Perhaps that was why she had tried to convince herself that she really was in love with Ilya. On some level, it made what she had done seem less cold-blooded. If she could convince herself that she had been in love with Ilya all along, that Ligatski’s blackmail had simply provided her heart with a convenient excuse to follow its own dictates, it would ease the guilt that tormented her.

Then too, she had found herself living alone for the first time in over twenty years, rattling around in the big empty apartment where she had raised a family. Jerry might not have been much of a companion for a long time, but at least he had been a human being to come home to.

So what had been for so long a matter of casual and occasional after-work sex became, at least on Sonya’s part, the beginning of a potential relationship. She was now a free woman, after all, and Jerry refused to have anything to do with her. And Ilya Pashikov had always been a free man. And now that Ilya had become Director of the Paris office and she had become Director of the economic strategy department, and their working relationship had become less full-time and intimate, were they not freer, somehow, to pursue their affair of the heart?

Ilya, at least at first, had been everything a friend and lover should be. He took her to dinner three or four nights a week. They spent the night together in each other’s apartments on a more or less regular basis. There were weekend trips to London and Rome and the Midi. Ilya was a better lover than Jerry had ever been. Ilya was a sophisticated man of the world. Ilya was someone she never grew tired of talking with.