Russian Spring (92 page)

Tass then demanded exclusive coverage of the flight to orbit, and StarNet hit the ceiling. This was as much their doing as Tass’s, they had a right to equal coverage. Tass then countered by offering shared coverage of the flight to orbit in return for an exclusive on the Grand Tour Navette. Agence France-Presse and Reuters screamed at that one—the
GTN
was a
European
ship, wasn’t it?

Finally, StarNet agreed to pay Tass a handsome sum for the right to cover the flight to orbit for the American market, with Tass getting its exclusive in the rest of the world. The
GTN
trip would be covered by a press pool of all the major news agencies, one correspondent each, and a common cameraman, and each of them would have the right to sell their version on the open market.

Once the contracts had been signed, though, Tass took over and cut through red tape like a knife through butter. Jerry Reed’s daughter was an Aeroflot pilot with a Concordski rating? Perfect! We’ll have her fly her own father into orbit! Why not have her accompany him around the Moon? Good way to get our own spin on it for the folks back home!

At the last moment, they had even decided that Father should sit
beside Franja in the co-pilot’s seat. Aeroflot officials had protested that that violated any number of safety regulations, but the Tass people had made a quick call to Moscow, and now here Father was, sitting beside her as she ran up the turbofans, the hibernautika console lashed to the co-pilot’s seat behind him, and an automatic camera taped over the instrument panel to catch the shot.

“I’ll try to make this as easy on you as I can, Father,” Franja told him.

“Don’t worry about me, Franja,” Father said, grinning from ear to ear like the smallest of boys. “I’m not about to die on you now!”

“Of course you’re not, Father,” Franja said uneasily, and she gunned the engines, released the brakes, and the Concordski roared down the runway.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

The Americans, the Europeans, and the Soviets are presently in a quandary over the choice of a name for their new grouping, but from our perspective, the perspective of the majority of the world’s struggling population on the outside looking in, the choice is obvious.

Why not call it the Caucasian Union and be done with it? For is it not a union of and for the developed white nations of the Northern Hemisphere, a consolidation of the economic and military power of the First and Second Worlds without regard for the welfare of Third World peoples?

If the rumored Japanese application for admission is ever accepted and that name becomes too racially offensive, “The Union of the Haves” would be an even better name, for that is just what it is.

—
Times of India

Sonya stood alone with Robert on the tarmac, far away from the press and the official mob, and her heart skipped a beat as the Concordski lifted off the runway, tucked its landing gear into its belly, and seemed to leap into the sky.

“Bon voyage, Jerry,” she muttered softly, and then she began to cry.

Bobby put his arm around her. “Come on, Mom,” he said, “that’s our crazy space cadet up there, and he’s going where he’s always belonged.”

“He’s killing himself, Robert,” Sonya said. “You know that as well as I.”

Bobby didn’t say anything for a long while, as the Concordski
dwindled away to a silvery glimmer still climbing up into the bright blue sky.

“Robert?”

“Let it be, Mom, let it be.”

“I’m trying, Bobby, really I am!”

“I know, Mom, you’ve been very brave.”

“Not as brave as he is!” Sonya wailed.

“Not many people are.”

“Oh, Bobby, Bobby, I don’t want to lose him now that I’ve really found him! Is that so selfish? Is that so wrong?”

“Of course it isn’t,” her son told her. “But don’t think about losing him now. Think of him up there at last, where he’s always wanted to be. Don’t think of what we’re losing. Think of what he’s finally found.”

Sonya tried, she really did. She stood there with Bobby’s arm around her shoulders until she had entirely lost sight of the Concordski rising toward the stars, and she tried with all her heart to feel what Jerry must be feeling now, going home at last to his dream in the sky.

And she almost made it, her heart was almost glad, as she saw a tiny point of fire way up there as the main engine ignited, as Jerry rode it up and out to a place where she couldn’t follow. She tried to be happy for him, even as a sad lorn part of her knew she was saying good-bye.

AN END TO AN ECONOMY OF LIMITS

Third World nations may have a moral and political right to their protests against the emerging new Northern Hemispheric order, for in the short run, and perhaps in the medium run as well, what has indeed emerged is a world in which a union of the rich northern developed nations will even more fully dominate the impoverished and fragmented peoples of the Third World.

But in the long run, the vast amounts of capital released by the consolidation of the military programs of most of the world’s major powers, and the technological synergy among the American, Soviet, and European space programs, will result in the transformation of our present global economy of scarcity into a solar system–wide economy of abundance, with open-ended resources of raw materials, energy, and perhaps even land.

In such an environment, exploitation of Third World nations for cheap raw materials and labor will no longer make pragmatic economic sense, and while it would be too much to expect the developed nations to donate the lion’s share of the benefits to lifting the rest of the world
out of poverty, the era of economic imperialism will at least be over, and capital resources released for mutually advantageous development.

The slices may not be more equitably divided, but the pie will get bigger and bigger every year. In the long run, this rising tide will indeed lift all boats.

—
Financial Times

Jerry’s breath was quite literally taken away when the main engine fired and the g’s pressed him back into his seat. It was like a sock in the stomach that went on and on and on, a mountain crushing his chest, as the hibernautika tried to stabilize his straining heart. His field of vision was filled with sparkles, and it kept threatening to go black. He seemed to feel capillaries bursting, his head rang like a hollow gong, and he could feel the rush of blood behind his eardrums.

“Are you all right, Father?” Franja’s voice said thickly beside him.

“Yeah, yeah,” he managed to wheeze, “I’m doing okay.”

But of course he wasn’t, and he knew it. He was blacking in and out, he was struggling to keep his head above water in an inky sea, and every so often, a wave broke over it, and he was no longer there, he was drifting down, down, down, into the darkness, where it would be so easy to just let himself float forever . . .

. . . floating upward like a cloud riding a thermal, upward like a dolphin rising for air, and bursting suddenly into the bright blue sunshine . . .

The boost was over. Brilliant white sunlight flooded the cabin through the windshield, and he was awake, and aware, and alive.

He could still feel his heart beating febrilely in his chest, and he still didn’t seem to be getting quite enough oxygen, but his breathing had stabilized, and his vision had cleared, and his body was as light as air.

“Father? Father? You were unconscious there for a while, are you all right?”

Jerry loosened his harness, pushed with his feet, lifted his butt off the seat cushion, and floated there three inches above it, just as he had always imagined, laughing in delight.

“I feel wonderful, Franja!” he declared. “I’ve never felt better in my life!”

He was dizzy, he was weak, he could feel his heart beating abnormally, and he had a raging headache, but it was nothing but the perfect truth.

“The best is yet to come, Father,” Franja said in a much-relieved tone of voice. “The best is yet to come.”

She fired a series of attitude-control thrusters, and the Concordski rolled gently out of the sunshine like a basking whale.

And, oh God, there it was! Immense and glorious, glowing like a living jewel against the black velvet of the void.

He had seen this sight reproduced on film and video at least ten thousand times. He had dreamed of it, he had imagined it, all of his life. There had never been a moment when it was far from his mind’s eye. But nothing had really prepared him for the authentic experience.

The seas glowed with a blue intensity that seemed to go all the way down into the core of the planet. The continents paraded by like great shaggy beasts. The cloud decks painted slowly moving shadows across the surface, swirling and whirling with the visible breath of the atmosphere. The whole Earth was restlessly, palpably, majestically alive.

And he was floating weightlessly above it like a dolphin at the apogee of its leap. He was looking back at where he had struggled up from like the first lungfish to climb gasping up the beach to gaze back in wonder at the mirrored surface of the sea.

The Concordski’s orbit carried it past the terminator, or rather the Earth below seemed to turn beneath him to proudly display the lights of its cities, spangled sparsely across the great continents, gathered along the coastlines into nebulae, into stellar clusters, and it seemed as if the galaxy itself were mirrored down there, the promise of the true golden age of space to come, when the cities of man would spread themselves out among the stars.

And if he would never live to see that age, if he had been born far too soon to walk the streets of unknown cities on planets circling far-distant suns, well, he had lived long enough to have
this
moment. To sit here with his daughter and see
this
planet entire, to look back on the Earth, on the cradle of that far-distant galactic future, at the moment of its birth.

The Concordski continued along its ballistic orbit, and the sun rose again, baleful and beautiful, a fast, hard, orbital sunrise, sharp and sudden as a halogen lamp turned on in a darkened room.

“There it is, Father, there it is!” Franja cried, pointing at a mote of light shimmering in the actinic glare.

Yes, there it was, defining itself as they approached it, the silvery oval of the fuel balloon, the long needle of the central spine, the spidery framework, the passenger module slung beneath it.

The Grand Tour Navette shining there in the darkness, brilliantly lit by the orbital sunrise.

Franja began firing thrusters, and soon enough had matched orbits, and there he was, floating weightlessly, looking out at the true wonder of what he had wrought.

Sunlight gleamed on the silvery surface of the great fuel balloon, so like an outsized blimp from this perspective, like a whale of the stellar seas. Below it, the windows of the passenger module glowed with internal life, like the cabin lights of a great ocean liner seen from a dinghy at night.

It was indeed a true
spaceship
, the first of its kind. Not a “module” or a “vehicle” or a “space capsule,” but a true ship of space, right off the cover of one of his father’s old science-fiction magazines.

Flash Gordon would feel right at home. Buck Rogers would not be disappointed. Captain Kirk would be proud to take command.

He had done it. He had built himself a real spaceship, and he was going to ride it before he died.

And as Franja warped the Concordski closer to the Grand Tour Navette, as a spaceway reached out from the passenger cabin to mate with the plane’s air lock, as thrillingly ordinary as a jetway rolling up beside an airliner outside the terminal, Jerry thought of Rob.

Rob Post’s words echoed in his heart. “You’re going to live in the golden age of space travel, it’s up to you, kiddo, you can be one of the people who makes it happen.”

And it was true. He was.

And it tasted just like a huge bowl of Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream swimming in deep, dark Hershey’s chocolate syrup.

And you were another, Uncle Rob. Thank you for the ice cream.

Franja was too busy with final maneuvers to see him cry.

But the camera above the instrument panel caught it all and broke the world’s heart.

CONGRESS OF PEOPLES TO REASSESS POSITION

The Congress of Peoples opened its meeting in Vienna today amid considerable division and confusion.

Did the arrangements worked out at the Strasbourg summit by the existing nation-states move far enough in the direction of a “Europe of Peoples” for the Congress to support it? Or should the nationless peoples unite in Parliament to either oppose it or modify it? And if the latter, modify it to what? Should the Congress of Peoples re-form itself as a transnational political party? Or should it consider its work done and disband in triumph?

“This promises to be a long and complex session,” Ian MacTavish said. “The Congress of Peoples has long been oriented toward a long hard struggle. Now we find ourself unexpectedly coping with a sudden partial victory.”

Perhaps Slovak delegate Gustav Svoboda put it best: “The real question
is whether there will be enough government left on a nation-state level to be worth fighting. Or whether we should just sit back, hold our peace, and let this obsolescent layer of largely ceremonial function just wither away.”

—
Die Welt

Father had suffered more damage during the boost to orbit than he had ever allowed to show. Franja should have realized that when he blacked out during the burn, but he had been so happy, and she had been busy maneuvering the Concordski, and she didn’t see how bad it had really been until they were in the spaceway.

Three crew members came brachiating up the rings to greet them, just like space monkeys, and Franja had reflexively grabbed a ring herself. But Father just floated there at the end of the spaceway, waving his arms weakly in a futile attempt to stabilize his position, staring down the tube uncertainly, his face pale, his chest heaving, his eyes narrowed against the pain.

“I . . . I don’t think I can manage that,” he admitted grudgingly, as the crewpeople whipped up the spaceway toward them, then hung one-handed from the rings.