Russian Spring (25 page)

One day, one of the brightest of the young engineers working under him, a Belgian named Emile Lourade who was rather taken with his American boss, put a bug in his ear.

“This little fantasy of ours, it is becoming talk in
ESA
outside our
équipe, Jerry,” Emile told him. “It becomes a small Agency legend, you must be careful. . . .”

“Careful of what, Emile?”

They were sitting at a small table in the crowded commissary together, speaking in English amid a multilingual cacophony that was nevertheless, like
ESA
itself, rather dominantly French. Emile leaned closer and ran his eyes around the room with exaggerated furtiveness.

Jerry laughed. “Yeah, I know that you Belgians are the Polish jokes of France,” he said, “but—”

“You Americans are a lot worse than a joke, and not just with the French, surely you know that. . . ,” Emile said.

“Yeah, well . . .”

The early talk about Soviet entry into Common Europe was already in the air, Washington was making vague threats, the dollar had been devalued again to the discomfort of European holders of American paper, Battlestar America was just about fully deployed, and “Festung Amerika” was a buzzword in the European press. Americans were about as highly thought of in Common Europe these days as Europeans were in the United States.

“Someday, this spaceliner idea of yours is going to be taken seriously by
ESA
,” Emile told him. “And if you do not take care to see to it that it does not simply seem to arise out of the
ESA
bureaucracy itself, what chance do you really think there is that they will let an
American
play a major role in the project, let alone be the chief of the design team?”

“Slim and none . . . ,” Jerry had muttered, quite touched by Emile’s concern.

But what to do about it?

Sonya was rising steadily in the Red Star bureaucracy by this time, already earning a larger salary than he did, and Jerry seldom discussed his career dissatisfactions with his wife anymore, it was just too painful, and productive of nothing but strife. But this time he did. And for once Sonya was sympathetic.

“This friend of yours is absolutely right!” she declared forcefully. “You must take steps to protect your position at once. It is the iron law of bureaucracy—cover your ass!”

“Great, just great. And how am I supposed to do that?”

“Attach your name to this idea in the press.”

“Yeah, maybe I should give an interview to your friends at Tass,” Jerry snapped sarcastically.

“Too political . . . ,” Sonya said quite seriously. “I have a much better idea.”

And she did. She set him up with an old friend of hers, a journalist named Pierre Glautier. Glautier wrote a piece called “La Grand Tour
Navette,” part popular science and part personality profile, which was published in a French popular science and science-fiction magazine called
Esprit et Espace
, and voilà, the project had a sexy name in French, and his name was epoxied to it.

The
ESA
bureaucracy was not amused—particularly since there was already grumbling in the ranks over the fact that the Spaceville Project was eating up so much of the Agency’s budget that nothing half as visionary as the Grand Tour Navette was even in the design-study stage—and, as Jerry had expected, Nicola Brandusi called him on the carpet.

But this time it was Brandusi’s turn to rant and rave impotently at a fait accompli and Jerry’s turn to smile blandly when he was done.

“Gee, Nicola,” he said ingenuously, “I thought you’d be pleased. I mean, it’s good P.R. for the Agency, isn’t it? Shows we’re still looking to the future, especially with the stuff you’re starting to hear about how
ESA
’s so bogged down with Spaceville that it’s conceding the rest of the solar system to the Russians. . . .”

Brandusi seemed to buy this display of naiveté. “Employees of
ESA
are not supposed to discuss Agency projects with the press without authorization, surely you know that, Jerry . . . ,” he said with the exaggeratedly patient tones of someone talking to a dimwit.

“Well sure I know that,” Jerry said sweetly. “But I thought the Grand Tour Navette was just my own crazy idea. Now you’re telling me it’s an official
ESA
project?”

“No, it is
not
under official consideration!” Brandusi snapped.

“Well then where’s the harm in my talking about it?” Jerry said. “I mean, if you put a lid on it now, won’t it look like an
ESA
project instead of my own little hobby?”

“No! Yes! Arrr!” Brandusi rolled his eyes skyward in exasperated frustration, but as Jerry well knew, there was really nothing he could do, for the cat was already out of the bag, and any attempt to stuff it back in would only make the noisome creature that much more conspicuous. They couldn’t shut him up now, nor could they fire him.

Of course, they could, and did, take bureaucratic vengeance.

While Jerry became a hero to the lower scientific and engineering echelons of the Agency as the “Father of the Grand Tour Navette,” the powers that be kept him on as chief testing engineer long after most of his original équipe, including Emile Lourade, were promoted up and out.

And his eventual promotion to chief engineer of the prototype fabrication section was mainly the result of internal pressure from people like Emile, who were now chafing rather loudly at the budgetary policy that was turning
ESA
into little more than an arm of the consortium building Spaceville, which these “Space Cadets,” as
they had already begun to call themselves defiantly, saw as draining the lifeblood out of the Common Europe space program.

Jerry found himself drawn deeper and deeper into the Space Cadet movement, speaking at unofficial seminars, appearing from time to time at science-fiction conventions, giving the occasional press interview, becoming the point man for the Grand Tour Navette Project, if not entirely against his will, then certainly against his hope of career advancement.

For the more the Space Cadets agitated for a commitment to the project against the will of the bureaucracy, the more that bureaucracy took out its displeasure on the most obviously available target, the adopted godfather of the Space Cadets and father of the Grand Tour Navette, the American in their midst, Jerry Reed.

Finally, when Space Cadets like Emile Lourade, Gunter Schmitz, Franco Nuri, and Patrice Corneau began percolating into upper middle management, the movement had enough clout within the Agency, if not to ram through a Grand Tour Navette design study, then at least to get their mentor into the design end again at last.

But the higher-ups put a nasty little spin on it, making him chief engineer on the
LEO
to
GEO
freighter project, where, with an irony that was lost on no one, he was constrained to spend his time and energies essentially
scaling down
the visionary Grand Tour Navette concept into mere automated freighters to ferry construction material from Low Earth Orbit to Spaceville.

Perhaps they thought this would get him to resign from the Agency in terminal disgust, perhaps this was merely their symbolic means of slapping down the Space Cadets and their pet project, but either way, Jerry had no place to go, so once more, he accepted the inevitable, hung in, hunkered down, and waited.

And now, it appeared, his endless patience was finally about to be rewarded.

The negotiations between the Russians and Strasbourg had ripened to the point where the entry of the Soviet Union into Common Europe had become inevitable, and all that was left was the thrashing out of the details.

One of which was the extent to which the Soviet and Common European space programs would be merged and who would contribute how much to what kind of budget. And the Russians were being sticky about it.

ESA
had plenty to gain from the Russians. The Soviets had four large Cosmograds in Low Earth Orbit. They had a new generation of Heavy Lift Vehicles with twice the payload of the old Energias. They had a permanent scientific base on the Moon. They fielded repeat expeditions to Mars and were talking about a permanent base.

What Common Europe could offer in return was not very much. The Soviets were already co-producers of the Concordski. The orbital tankers were modified Russian hardware, Spaceville was being cobbled together from the same, leaving the Soviets understandably reluctant to participate in a project from which they had nothing to gain in the way of new technology. About the only thing Common Europe had to offer was a merged space budget under which the Soviet end of the program would be the net financial gainer, and that went over like a ripe fart with the Common European Parliament.

Then Emile Lourade made his mysterious trip to Strasbourg.

Emile, by this time, had risen to director of the advanced planning section, the highest any of the Space Cadets had gone, but something of a hollow position, since there were no advanced projects on the drawing boards and still no hope for any in the budget for years to come.

No one knew what had really happened. Emile had apparently made the trip on his own. He had stayed in Strasbourg for a week. He had testified behind closed doors to Parliamentary committees. He had had meetings with Ministers.

When he came back to Paris, everyone had expected the Agency Director, Armand Labrenne, to fire him for insubordination. Instead, to the amazement of everyone, a week later Labrenne announced his sudden retirement for “health reasons,” and Emile Lourade was named Director of the European Space Agency.

And now his old protégé and friend Emile had summoned Jerry Reed to a meeting only two days after his appointment.

It was raining as Jerry arrived at
ESA
headquarters, but the weather couldn’t dampen his spirits, for while he could not quite conceive of what Emile Lourade had said to the politicians to make himself Director, he was quite sure he knew what
this
meeting was about.

That one of Emile’s first acts as Director was to summon the father of the Grand Tour Navette to his office could mean only one thing. Indeed, that a Space Cadet like Emile Lourade had replaced Labrenne so suddenly after whatever had happened in Strasbourg was a loud, clear declaration that
his
Space Cadets had been put in charge of the Agency to change its direction.

At long, long last, the Grand Tour Navette was going to become an official European Space Agency project.

And of course, Emile was going to make him chief project engineer, or perhaps even project director.

That his dream was about to come true was only just, but that his old friend Emile should be the man to give him the good news, ah, that was the chocolate syrup on his bowl of Häagen-Dazs.

“Dimitri Pavelovich Smerlak had harsh words today for those who would allow petty national chauvinisms to intrude themselves into the treaty negotiations.

“ ‘The national allocations of Soviet seats in the Common European Parliament cannot and will not be a subject of discussion between the Soviet government and Common Europe,’ the President declared. ‘The spectacle of Ukrainians and Kazhaks picketing their own embassy in Geneva is shameful. They are only resorting to such obstructive tactics because they have no hope of gerrymandering national quotas in the democratically elected Supreme Soviet. And we will never consider allowing internal Soviet election laws to be subject to review by the Common European Parliament.’ ”

—
Vremya

Heads nodded and faces smiled as Sonya Gagarin Reed came bustling through the data pit on the way to her office, late again after breaking up yet another breakfast shouting match between Franja and Robert.

“Good morning, Sonya.”

“Good morning, Comrade Gagarin.”

The computer slaves called her “Sonya” if they had been there long enough and “Comrade Gagarin” if they were still wet behind the ears, for Sonya had long since taken to calling herself “Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin” at work, as if that were going to solve her problems with the elusive Moscow Mandarins.

Once, you could have pointed an unambiguous finger at Party commissars or the
KGB
, and once, they would have made their wishes bluntly obvious and the penalties painfully clear. But this was the Russian Spring, and it simply would not do to remind anyone of the governmental nature of Red Star, S.A., or for the
KGB
to be caught transmitting diktats to its employees in the West.

Thus the Moscow Mandarinate, the nebulous level between official government circles and the upper management of Red Star. Officially, of course, it did not exist. Officially Red Star was an independent corporation chartered under Common European law whose majority stockholder just happened to be the government of the Soviet Union. Officially its decisions were made by its own board of directors.

But in the real world, Red Star was an organ of the Soviet State, connected to the policy level by the interconnected and interpenetrating bureaucracies of the Party and the government. You could never quite focus on who or what back in Moscow pulled which
strings, but the Moscow Mandarins had no trouble at all passing their displeasure down the line to
you
.

Sonya disappeared into what she still thought of as her
new
office, closed the door behind her, and sank into the swivel chair behind her desk. There was an electric espresso machine on the desk as well as a smart videotel, and an untidy mess of correspondence and printouts, and she thumbed the coffee maker on and waited impatiently for the ninety seconds it took to cough up the day’s first cup.

Red Star might have built its very own building here on the newly trendy Avenue Kennedy in the always-chic Trocadéro end of the 16th, but the assistant head of the economic strategy department didn’t rate a major office with a real view. Still, this little office
did
have a window peeking around the edge of the neighboring Sony building on her own tiny slice of the Seine, and at least it
was
finally hers.