Russian Spring (71 page)

For over twenty years, she had lived with this man. They had raised a son and a daughter together. She had watched as his life had narrowed down to a single obsessional point, an obsession that now lay forever beyond his grasp. She had betrayed him. She had divorced him. She had broken his heart.

And now, rather than face a few sad short years of taking care of him, she had been willing to let him die.

Let him die?

No, Sonya, nothing so passive as that. If you don’t sign these papers, if you’re not willing to do what must be done, what no one else can do in the time left to him, you’re not letting him die, you’re
killing
him. As surely as if you pulled the plug with your own hand.

Sonya sighed. She took up the pen. “No, of course not,” she said, “we’ve got to do what little we can.”

THEY FROZE TESSA TINKER’S BRAIN!

An exclusive source close (
very
close!) to Hollywood sex queen Tessa Tinker, who died last week of injuries sustained when her Maserati-Mercedes smashed into a Beverly Hills garbage truck at 75 mph, has told us that her brain has been preserved by a process derived from hush-hush military work by a funeral home in wacky Northern California. Someday it may be revived and transplanted into a new body cloned from the dead actress’s flesh, to star in another thirty-three pant-and-groan epics.

If the revived actress’s future performances run true to previous form, brain damage won’t be much of a problem as long as her new body is faithfully reproduced by the cloning process, silicon implants and all.

Look for
Return of the Zombie Sex-Queen
to appear sometime within the next two hundred years!

—
The National Enquirer

KRONKOL GOES TOO FAR, PRESIDENT
GORCHENKO DECLARES

President Constantin Semyonovich Gorchenko has strongly repeated his declaration that the Ukraine has no such legal basis for seceding from the Soviet Union after Vadim Kronkol, candidate of the Ukrainian Liberation Front for the Presidency of the Ukrainian S.S.R, declared that he would consider his election a referendum on Ukrainian independence.

“We may have no legal basis under Soviet law for preventing American agents from foisting off Kronkol on the Ukrainian people,” the President admitted. “But neither would his election constitute a legally binding secession referendum under the constitution, and Soviet law provides ample means for keeping him from leading the Ukrainian people into an act of open rebellion, up to and including mobilizing the Ukrainian national militia and placing it under Red Army command,” he warned the Ukrainian revanchists.

—
Pravda

XXIII

A dull throbbing ache, a scratchy feeling, a pressure, emerged from the void. The ache slowly localized itself at the back of his head. The scratchy feeling was a raw dry throat. The pressure was the weight of his body in a supine position. Images began to drift across his mind’s eye—a big bowl of Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream covered with chocolate syrup, the living room of the apartment on Avenue Trudaine, a figure in a bulky old spacesuit walking in slow motion on the gray surface of the Moon, the clean white contrail of a Concordski cleaving the blue sky over the Île St.-Louis, a bank of rocket engines throttling up and down in a musical sequence, a crowded rush-hour
RER
car, his hand toggling a switch back and forth, Dieter Albrecht handing him a motor cowling, a floor coming up at him as he fell, a soft whooshing explosion, blackness—

Jerry Reed realized that he was awake. And conscious. And alive.

Not without effort, he blinked open gummy eyelids, winced as a cruel light blinded him, blinked again rapidly, squinted his eyes, slowly let them adjust to the slitted light, then opened them wide.

He was in a small white-walled room. Lying in a bed. He tried to bring his hands to his face to wipe his eyes clear of tears and found that his arms were restrained. He swiveled his head left, right, saw that his forearms were tied down to handboards, saw the IV needles in the pits of his elbows, looked down the length of his body and saw the electrodes taped to his bare chest.

Hospital room. A lot of bulky electronic equipment around his bed. He wriggled his toes. In working order. He blinked rapidly several times, and his vision slowly cleared.

There were two people sitting by the foot of the bed. In green smocks. Women. One of them seemed to be staring at something hidden by the bulk of an electronic console. Watching TV? The other was reading a newspaper.

The woman reading the newspaper was . . . was . . .

“S . . . Sonya?” he croaked weakly against some kind of peculiar resistance.

The woman started, rose, tossed aside the newspaper, rushed to the head of the bed. “Jerry!” she cried. “You’re awake!”

It was! It was Sonya! Looking ashen and drawn, but smiling down at him.

“So it would seem,” Jerry managed to say. But the words did not come easily, somehow; he seemed to be fighting the rhythm of his own breathing.

“I’ll get Dr. Cordray,” the other woman said, a nurse no doubt. “You’ll want a few minutes alone.”

“Sonya . . . I feel kind of strange. . . .”

There were tears in her eyes. “There was an accident. You were hurt.” She paused. She hesitated. Her lower lip trembled.

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “But I’m here to take care of you, and you’re going to be all right.”

“Take care of me . . . ?”

“They say you can leave the hospital in a few days, and I’ll be taking you home.”

“Home?”

“Avenue Trudaine, remember, Jerry?”

“But we . . . but you . . .”

Sonya wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “You’re going to need someone to take care of you . . . while you . . . recover,” she said. “And who else is there? You don’t want to spend weeks in the hospital by yourself, now do you?”

“But you and me . . . it’s been years. . . .”

Sonya laid a finger on his lips. “Not now, okay, Jerry?” she said softly. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk all that out later.”

And she replaced her fingers with her lips. “For now, let me just be glad you’re alive,” she said after she had kissed him. “Let’s not worry ourselves just yet about the past.”

Jerry’s mind was still fuzzy, but not so fuzzy that he didn’t realize something must be very wrong, or Sonya would not be here, crying like this, kissing him, and telling him she was going to take him home and care for him after all these years.

“What’s wrong with me, Sonya?” he demanded. “What’s happened?”

“You were hit in the head by a piece of metal from the explosion,” Sonya said. “There was . . . there was . . .” She seemed to be choking on something she couldn’t bring herself to spit out.

It could be only one thing.

“Brain damage?” Jerry whispered.

Sonya looked down and nodded.

Jerry wriggled the fingers of his right hand, then his left. He tried out his toes again. He moved his arms against the restraints. He kicked his feet under the bedclothes. There was nothing wrong with his vision or his hearing. He was thinking clearly now. He could smell the acridly chemical hospital odor, the thin tang of ozone from the electronic equipment surrounding him, Sonya’s jasmine perfume.

“I seem to be in full working order . . . ,” he said.

“You are, Jerry, you are.”

“Then—”

At that moment, the nurse returned with a gray-haired woman in medical greens.

“This is Dr. Cordray, Jerry,” Sonya told him. “She’ll explain it all to you better than I can.”

Sonya shot a hard sidelong glance at Hélène Cordray as the doctor approached the bedside, a reminder not to violate the agreement they had come to after the electrode-implant operation.

There was no reason to make things worse by telling Jerry the whole truth. It would be needlessly cruel to let him know that what awaited him was two or three years of slow physical and mental deterioration toward an inevitable death. Better to leave him with hope.

“I am not in the habit of lying to my patients,” Dr. Cordray had protested.

“I’m not asking you to lie, Dr. Cordray,” Sonya told her. “Tell him all about his injury in full detail. Tell him all about the device that’s keeping him alive—believe me, he’ll be fascinated, and he’ll probably understand the technology better than you do. Just don’t tell him all the gory details about what’s going to happen to him, and don’t tell him he’s only got two or three years left. That’s not a lie, really, since you don’t really know. In two years, anything could happen. A year ago, there wasn’t even this.”

“But if he’s so technologically knowledgeable—”

“He’s a visionary, Dr. Cordray. He reads science fiction. They’re just now building spacecraft that he designed over fifteen years ago. The present and the future are the same things to Jerry in ways that you and I can never understand. All you have to do is make a full recovery seem
possible
to him, and believe me, Jerry Reed will do the rest himself.”

Dr. Cordray had shrugged. “Very well, Madame Reed, I will try,” she had said. And then she had looked Sonya in the eyes, woman to woman. “Divorced or not, you still love this man very much, n’est-ce pas?” she had said, stepping quite outside her professional persona, and Sonya had had nothing to say to that.

“Well, Monsieur Reed, how are you feeling?” Hélène Cordray said.

“Okay, I guess,” Jerry told her. “How long have I been out?”

“Approximately seventy hours—but a good part of that was because we had to do a second operation.”

“
Second
operation?”

“A piece of metal had to be removed from your medulla, and we
decided to keep you under anesthesia until we could do the electrode implant. . . .”

“Electrode implant? What’s happened to me?” Jerry said fearfully.

Dr. Cordray gave him a cool bedside smile. “Your . . . wife tells me that you are a technologically knowledgeable person,” she said. “So if you will have a little patience, I will give you the full details.”

And, to the extent that she had agreed upon with Sonya, she proceeded to do so.

Jerry had a terrible sinking sensation in his gut when the doctor told him that the brain centers that controlled heartbeat and respiration had been permanently destroyed. And when she showed him the wheeled console next to his bed, and the cable leading from it to the induction electrode taped to the back of his skull, there had been a queasy feeling of disorientation, tinged, perhaps, with a kind of disgust.

But once she started trying to explain how the thing worked, he found himself becoming rather fascinated, amused even, for he had read a bit about what the Soviets called the “hibernautika,” enough to know that he understood it better than she did, enough to realize that what he was hooked up to was not the complete version of the device they were trying to develop. The full-bore hibernautika was supposed to be able to induce both hibernation and sleep, not merely control heartbeat and respiration rates, and to control full-spectrum brainwave function as well. In theory, at least, it would make interstellar voyages possible at sub-light speeds.

He hadn’t thought they were this far advanced on the project, and what she was describing was only a piece of the device. Still, the degree of miniaturization was impressive, and there was something somehow fitting about the fact that he was being kept alive by a piece of space-technology spin-off that hadn’t even been fully developed yet, but that in its completed form might someday allow men to go to the stars. And if it was a piece of
Soviet
technology, well, he had long since made his peace with that.

“Is this version programmable for other functions?” he asked.

The doctor cocked an eyebrow at him. “Other functions?”

Jerry studied the console by his bedside. It was a matte-finish aluminum box about the size of a small television set. There were two knobs and two liquid crystal readout panels but no keyboard, and from this angle, he couldn’t see whether it had an interface port on the back.

“What you’ve described is a partial version of something called
the ‘hibernautika,’ ” he told her. “The full device is supposed to have other functions. Alpha-wave control. Sleep induction. Selective muscular stimulation. Can I program this thing for any of that?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea, Monsieur Reed,” the doctor said, “and in any case, I would not at all advise tinkering with the circuitry!”

And she exchanged strange glances with Sonya, who then shook her head and broke into a warm but ironic little smile.

“How much mobility will I have?” Jerry asked nervously.

“Quite a bit, really. The present cable is only temporary; you can have a much longer one on a reel. And it even has a self-contained power supply for travel away from mains.”

“I can travel?”

“After a fashion,” Dr. Cordray told him. “Stairs, of course, will be a barrier, and you certainly can’t use the Métro or buses. Nor risk walking down crowded streets. But automobiles should present no problem.”

“What about the Concordski? What about zero g?”

“You are talking about
airplanes
, Monsieur Reed?” the doctor exclaimed. “You are talking about
space travel?
This is a joke, oui?”

Only then did it really hit him. He was alive, yes, but his real life was over. He would never ride his Grand Tour Navette. They wouldn’t even let him on a short-hop airplane, let alone a hypersonic Concordski pulling almost 3 g’s. He probably wouldn’t even be allowed to go back to work on the ground.

This was the end of everything he had ever lived for.

Better I had never woken up to face this living death.

He shook his head. He rolled his eyes up at the ceiling. He burst into sobs and he didn’t give a damn who saw. “I can’t take this, Sonya,” he cried. “Why don’t you just do me a favor and pull the plug?”

“It isn’t hopeless, Jerry!” Sonya said. “You won’t be tied to this thing forever! Isn’t that right, Dr. Cordray, there are new developments right around the corner, aren’t there?”