Russian Spring (11 page)

By unstated mutual agreement, they left the European Space Agency exhibit for last, for somehow Jerry knew that it would signify the last act of their time together, and the first act of something else, the something else that had brought them together, that had brought him to Europe in the first place, and something he had not given a thought to these past two days, nor cared to.

But finally, fortified by Cognac at the museum bar, they went inside.

There was a short history of space travel told with models and holograms. There was a whole Ariane booster rocket and a mock-up of a Hermes space shuttle you could crawl around inside. There were satellites and deep-space probes and space suits and an
EVA
maneuvering system you could play with yourself. The usual stuff.

But then they went into the Géode, the 360-degree surround theater, where an
ESA
promotional film shot in full-circle high-definition Dynamax video was being shown, and that wasn’t the usual stuff at all, that took Jerry’s breath away, and, in the end, almost made him want to cry.

The full-surround HD Dynamax video process warped him immediately into the reality the moment the film started as no color hologram could, for while the image might not be truly three-dimensional, you weren’t looking at it, you were inside of it, it filled your entire field of vision no matter how much you craned your neck around like a spectator at a tennis match, and the sound had been disced from a central point in each setup, giving the sound track quite perfect 3-D reproduction of reality.

He stood at a departure gate looking out on a busy airport which Nicole told him was Charles de Gaulle. And taxiing slowly past him, decked out in conventional red, white, and blue Air France livery like an ordinary commercial airliner, was the Daedalus, the European spaceplane that was about to enter prototype production.

It had the sleek proportions of the old Concorde or the American B-l bomber, but it was twice the size, with a payload of a hundred passengers in this configuration. Like the B-l, it had swing wings, extended now for takeoff and atmospheric flight. There was a huge intake under the nose aft of the cockpit for the main engine and two
much smaller ones where the wings joined the fuselage for the auxiliary turbojets, and a weirdly recurved exhaust bell at the rear.

As a voice babbled in technical French which Nicole was at a loss to translate, the Daedalus taxied past the terminal, turned onto the runway, lit its turbofans, and somewhat ponderously took to the air.

The scene abruptly changed. Now Jerry was riding in some impossible magic helicopter way up above a fluffy white cloud bank as the Daedalus rose through it toward him, its wings swinging back halfway into the fuselage as the main Rolls-Royce engine took over with a shattering roar and a long gout of thin blue flame, burning liquid hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen compressed by the speed of passage into the main intake like a conventional ramjet.

Up, up, and away like Superplane, the Daedalus rose, far faster than any so-called speeding bullet, with the magic helicopter tracking with it from above, as the sky deepened to violet, to black, and the Earth below showed a curve, and the wings retracted completely into the fuselage, and it was burning its fuel with internal liquid oxygen, like a rocket.

Then the rocket cut out, and the spaceplane was matching orbits with a rather Russian-looking space station, ungainly globular Cosmograd modules cobbled together awkwardly and painted a dim dingy green. Four space-suited figures maneuvered the most ungodly version of a scaled-up sat sled into position below the Daedalus and fixed it there with rather ridiculous magnetic clamps—a silly ungainly mess with rocket nozzles out of a cheap old science-fiction movie that would have torn the Daedalus to pieces if actually fired up in that position.

But in the HD Dynamax video version, the klutzy thing worked, of course, and the spaceplane blasted off toward Geosynchronous Orbit on a tail of unrealistic orange flame.

The view changed again. Jerry was standing in another weirdly prosaic airport arrival gate, with crowds of people, jetway doors, newsstands, souvenir shops, and a men’s room door behind him.

Weirdly prosaic because the airport crowd was swimming around in the middle of the air, and the jetway doors, and newsstands, and souvenir shops were all plastered at impossible angles to the walls of a circular waiting room with no up or down, an ordinary waiting room in a
spaceport
in zero gravity somewhere up out of the gravity well.

Without the feel of his buttocks nailed to his seat by gravity, the illusion would have been quite complete, as he seemed to swim toward a modest-sized circular viewport and watched the Daedalus rise toward him from the globe of the Earth on a trail of pale orange flame.

Perspective shifted again, and Jerry was space-walking himself—they
even dubbed in the chuffing sounds of
EVA
thrusters—looking down on a truly bizarre Geosynchronous space station. Domes and passageways and clunky Cosmograd modules stuck together every which way like a model of a complex organic molecule put together from the contents of a junkpile. A big slab of a metal deck jutted out under a kind of marquee like the formal entrance to the Century Plaza Hotel and indeed emblazoned on it in blue neon the words “Méridien d’Espace.”

And with that, the show was over, and a few minutes later, Jerry was outside in the golden sunlight of late afternoon with Nicole, blinking his way back into Parisian reality.

“You are all right, Jerry?” Nicole said, peering at him with some concern. “You look as if you are still out there in outer space. . . .”

“Yeah, I’m okay, just got to adjust my eyes to the sunlight again,” he told her.

But the truth of it was that something had indeed changed. All through the long cab ride back to the center of Paris, Jerry was indeed in outer space, trying to remember all he had read about the Daedalus project. The Rolls-Royce engine had been on the drawing boards for decades, and rumor had it that they had actually built one before the Thatcher government canceled the project.
ESA
was building a prototype Daedalus now, but it was supposed to be a combination of a replacement for the Hermes space shuttle and suborbital hypersonic airliner, as far as he had heard. Commercial flights to a hotel in
GEO
? It seemed like one of Rob Post’s visionary pipe dreams.

On the other hand, if you
did
have the spaceplane, you
could
get it to
GEO
with some kind of sat sled, though hardly the silly thing he had seen in the exhibition hall. You’d have to have it firing directly along the plane’s long axis somehow, and you’d have to have the exhaust well clear of the fuselage, maybe a beam arrangement aft, or . . .

It was more of the same during dinner, a wonderful meal in the Jules Verne restaurant high atop the Eiffel Tower. Jerry ate his food, drank his wine, took in the fabulous view, managed to make small talk with Nicole with a corner of his mind, and even maintained a hard-on as she groped him under the table, but his mind was centered elsewhere.

The whole idea was crazy, decades away if feasible at all—commercial airliners to orbit, spacetugs to take them to
GEO
, a hotel when they got there, a series of improbabilities that reminded him of some hoary old science-fiction film—but if the notion was mad, it was, alas, just the sort of divine madness that had gone entirely out of the American space program.

And technically speaking, at least, it all
was
doable. The Daedalus
was
under construction, you
could
cobble together some kind of half-assed hotel out of Russian Cosmograd modules, and you
could
get it all to
GEO
with modified versions of the military sat sleds he himself was working on back in Downey.

And once you had a logistical system in place capable of supporting a hotel in
GEO
, a real lunar colony would be a snap, and even Mars could become a tourist run within his own lifetime. . . .

When they got back to the Ritz, there was a message waiting at the desk from André Deutcher. He would pick Jerry up at 11:00 the next morning to take him to a meeting at
ESA
’s Paris headquarters. Jerry showed Nicole the note in the elevator up to his floor.

“This will be our last night together then, Jerry,” she told him.

“Why do you say that, Nicole?”

She averted her gaze. The elevator stopped. They got out and walked down the hall to his room.

“That was the arrangement all along?” Jerry said as he opened the door.

Nicole nodded. “Your friend André Deutcher is a wise man,” she said. “It is better that such things end before parting becomes too much of a sadness. You must never fall in love with a prostitute, Jerry.”

“Yeah, I know, remember, I’m a man of the world.”

She laughed. She gave him a warm smile that nearly broke his heart. “I am not so sure,” she said gaily. “Sometimes I think you are a man of other worlds, yes? Mars, peut-être, or better yet Venus, the planet of love, n’est-ce pas?”

Jerry had to resist the temptation to sweep her up into his arms and kiss her.

Instead, he ordered a bottle of the most expensive champagne on the room-service menu, and a double order of the best caviar. After it arrived, they sat there for a long time, eating caviar, drinking champagne, and saying very little, for what indeed was there to say?

At length, indeed at considerable length, long enough for them to have reached the bottom of the champagne bottle, Nicole stood up.

“Perhaps it is better that I go now, yes?” she said.

Jerry sat there in his chair looking up at her and not knowing quite what to say. Then, he took both of her hands in his, stood up, and looked deep into those bright green eyes, and realized that she was right, that there was really nothing left to say or do, that in a sense it had all really ended somehow back there in the Parc de la Villette, in the Géode, ended, as he was now sure, in the way that Nicole in her professional wisdom had meant it to end, in the way that would hurt him the least.

“A man of the world should not kiss a prostitute,” Nicole said waveringly.

“But surely,” said Jerry, “a woman of the world can kiss a friend good-bye.”

And she laughed, and let him take her in his arms, and kissed him gently on the lips. And then, without another word, she was gone.

Jerry Reed stood there alone for a long time after she had left, trying to understand what he felt. Something told him that he should feel sad that Nicole Lafage had gone out of his life forever, that a long golden moment had come to an end, and yes, he felt a certain wistful nostalgic glow for what had been, but he was also somewhat bemused to realize that he was happy.

Was this what it
really
meant to become a man of the world?

Was this the parting gift that Nicole had left him?

Jerry opened the big windows and stepped outside onto the little balcony and looked out over Paris as he had on that first golden morning a mere three days ago.

It was night now, and the cityscape was alive with the night lights, and the red and amber streamers of the bustling traffic. The Eiffel Tower glowed like a beacon in the distance, and along the darkened Seine, the brilliant white spotlight beams of a tour boat played along the quayside buildings.

And not only the time of day was different from that first vision of Paris, for the eyes that looked out upon the city had changed too; Jerry Reed knew what was down there beneath the picture-postcard view now. He had a feel for the city, he had lived in those streets and felt their rhythms, and now, in some small way, he felt a part of it, felt it speaking to him, though what it was saying he could not quite yet fathom.

He looked up into the clear night sky, quite washed out by the city’s brilliance. Only a sliver of crescent moon, a few first- and second-magnitude stars, Mars, and Jupiter were visible up there above the City of Light.

But then, as his eyes adjusted, a few fainter points of light appeared, and some of them were moving slowly and deliberately through the darkness. Soviet Cosmograds. The American space station. And beyond, invisible out there in
GEO
, spy satellites and communication satellites and the-Pentagon-knew-what. And still farther out, the Soviet Moon lab, a permanent base on another world.

There was a dance of lights going on up there that spoke to him too, of dreams that had been, and dreams that had been lost, and dreams that might be again.

He remembered what Rob Post had often told him too. “You were lucky enough to be born at the right time, Jerry. You’re going to live
in the golden age of space exploration, kiddo. It’s up to you. You can be one of the people who makes it all happen.”

For a long time now, all that had seemed lost, destroyed by the Challenger explosion, and
SDI
, and Battlestar America. But Rob’s words had a new, and yes, somewhat terrifying meaning now too, for all at once they were true again in a way that Rob had probably never imagined or intended.

There
was
, after all, a golden age of space exploration aborning up there right now, and tomorrow he was pretty damned sure he would be given the chance, his last chance, to be one of the people who would make it all happen.

And he remembered something else Rob had once told him, on a day when Jerry was feeling down and discouraged, the words of a great Grand Prix driver named Stirling Moss.

“I do believe I could learn to walk on water,” Moss had told an interviewer. “I’d have to give up everything else to do it, but I could walk on water.”

A TRUE EUROPEAN HOUSE

The overtures from the British and the French, however vague and crafted for deniability they may be, do indeed merit the serious discussion that is currently taking place in the Supreme Soviet.

The economic advantage to the Soviet Union of membership in Common Europe is readily apparent, and the ruble now seems solid enough to be merged into the
ECU
common basket without ruinous domestic inflation.