Russian Spring (28 page)

“ ‘Maneuvering system design consultant’!”
Jerry snapped. “What the fuck is that?”

“A useful fiction,” Emile Lourade said. “Something the Russians could not object to. . . .”

“I’m supposed to let myself be demoted from chief project engineer on the freighter to . . .
maneuvering system design consultant
on the
GTN
?” Jerry said bitterly. “I’ve got a wife and two kids and a mortgage, Emile. . . .”

“I’ll promote you to senior engineer at the same time,” Lourade said.

“Senior engineer? I never heard of any such thing. What the hell is that?”

Emile managed a little smile. “Something I just made up so I could raise your salary to that of a project manager,” he said. “I
am
the Director, after all, and I can bend things that far for an old friend. . . .”

“What the hell is a ‘maneuvering system design consultant’ supposed to do on the project?”

Emile Lourade’s smile widened. “Whatever the project manager wants him to, of course,” he said.

“Génial, Emile!” exclaimed Patrice Corneau.

“Let me get this straight,” Jerry said slowly. “What you’re really saying is that I’ll have a project manager’s salary and more or less of a chief designer’s job while you hide me behind this phony shitass title. . . .”

“Something like that,” Emile said.

“While some damn Russian has the title and struts around taking the credit . . . ?”

Emile shrugged. “There you have it, Jerry, that’s the best I can do under the circumstances,” he said.

“That’s pretty lousy,” Jerry muttered.

“It could be worse, Jerry,” Patrice pointed out.

Emile Lourade got up from behind his desk and pointedly walked across his office so that he was standing under the framed blowup of the artist’s rendition of the Grand Tour Navette, the illustration for the magazine interview that he himself had caused Jerry to give all those years ago, when Emile was a very junior engineer, and the whole project was nothing but an impossible dream.

“Remember, Jerry?” he said. “Remember when we were all just crazy Space Cadets together and the Grand Tour Navette was just your dream? Well, now it’s going to happen, Jerry, with you or without you. It all comes down to this—what really counts, the lives of the dreamers, or the dream itself?”

Jerry Reed sat there staring at the old artist’s conception of the dream he had spent all these years pursuing. And once more he could taste chocolate syrup over chocolate ice cream, the bitter and the sweet. And hear the voice of Rob Post speaking to him across the years, “You’re going to live in the golden age of space exploration, kiddo. You can be one of the people who makes it all happen. It’s up to you.”

You can walk on water. You’ll have to give up everything else to do it, but you can walk on water.

Jerry sighed. He shrugged. “You got me, Emile,” he finally said. “And you knew it all along.”

The Director of the European Space Agency looked back at him with actual tears in his eyes, and nodded. “Yes, old friend,” he said, “I did.”

GOSPEL FOR THE BARNARDS

The Reverend Ike Ackerman announced today that he was consulting with other leading evangelical ministers for the purpose of chartering a nonprofit nondenominational corporation to raise funds to beam the Gospel to Barnard’s Star.

“If there really are intelligent beings on the fourth planet, they too must be children of God, with souls in need of saving,” he declared. “If the Russians can send them their message, so can we, and not just here we are, but here Jesus Christ has been also, hear the Good News, and rejoice in the Lord.”

—
Valley News

X

It was frayed around the cuffs from obsessive wear, the lining had been restitched around the armholes twice, and the original zipper had had to be replaced, but the blue-and-white satin Los Angeles Dodgers team jacket that his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday was still Robert Reed’s fondest possession. He wore it on hot summer days, he wore it over bulky sweaters in the dead of winter, he wore it in the rain, wore it despite Franja’s taunts and his mother’s pleas, and he still wore it to school even though it got him called “gringo.”

He loved the jacket as he loved his father for ordering it for him all the way from far California. For there on the left breast, in fancy white embroidery mirroring the style of the team logo on the back, was the name “Bob.”

Ever since he could remember, Robert Reed had wanted to be called Bob. But this was a sound that did not exactly slide trippingly off the French tongue, and it was an aggressively gringo name besides, as bad as Joe or Tex or Al, and so his teachers insisted on Frenchifying
his full name into “Robaire,” as did the kids in school whenever they wanted to bait him, for they knew that he hated it.

His mother called him “Robaire” too when she spoke to him in French, which was usually when she was pissed off at him, otherwise it was Bobby. What friends he had called him “Bob-bee,” which was the path of least linguistic resistance to the French palate. That was also what Franja called him, but she had a way of putting a whining accent on the second syllable even in English when she was needling him. He even called
himself
Bobby inside his own head when he wasn’t watching what he was thinking.

Only from Dad did he get a good old American “Bob.” Only Dad understood what it meant to him. Only Dad understood what a bum-out it was to be an American in Common Europe.

America had been an object of contempt in Europe since long before Bobby was old enough to understand why. Dad had tried to explain it to him as best he could when Bobby first began to realize there was something different about him, something that made kids he had done nothing bad to, sometimes kids he really didn’t even know, hate him, and tease him, and call him nasty names.

“Are you a gringo, Dad?”

“I’m an American, Bob. ‘Gringo’ is a bad word people call Americans when they don’t like us, like we used to call people niggers and spicks and frogs back in the States. Nice people don’t use words like that.”

“Am I an American?”

“Not exactly, Bob, but when you’re old enough to decide for yourself, you can be one if you want to.”

“Is it bad to be an American?”

“No, Bob, it isn’t bad to be an American, it isn’t bad to be a Frenchman or a Russian either, but . . .”

“Then why don’t people like Americans?”

Dad got the strangest faraway look on his face. “Because . . . because sometimes the United States of America does bad things, Bob,” he said.

“Do other countries do bad things too?”

“Oh yeah, other countries have done some really bad things, worse than anything America has done, much, much worse. . . .”

“Then why don’t people hate
them
the way they hate us?”

Dad peered at him really weirdly and didn’t answer for quite a while. “That’s a damned good question, Bob, and I wish I had a good answer for you,” he finally said. And then his eyes got all teary and it looked like he was going to cry.

“Everybody loved America once,” he said. “America saved Europe from some very bad people. America forgave its enemies and rebuilt
ruined countries with its own money. And Americans did the most wonderful thing, Bob, we were the first people to go to the Moon. They loved us, they admired us, we were the light of the world. . . .”

Dad rubbed at his eyes before he spoke again. “And then . . . and then something happened to America, and . . . America stopped doing all these wonderful things and . . . started doing bad things . . . no worse than what other countries did, maybe, but . . . I don’t know, Bob, I’m not really good about these things. It’s like . . . it’s like everyone loves Père Noël, so if one Christmas instead of giving out presents, he was to get drunk and beg money on the streets instead . . . well, that would be worse than if it was someone else doing it, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t understand, Dad. . . .”

And Dad had just shrugged his shoulders and given out a great big sigh. “Neither do I, kiddo,” he said, “neither do I.”

Dad always used to buy him models of classic American spacecraft when he was a little kid, one corner of his room was still a dusty and forgotten museum of them, the Apollo, the Saturn V, the Eagle, the space shuttle Columbia, and all the rest. Bobby had never really been into this stuff, but he loved his father, and when he was ten, he took the bulk of the money he had saved up from his allowance and bought Dad a really neat model of the Terminator hypersonic bomber for his birthday, all metal, retractable landing gear, swing wings, and even fully detailed spring-loaded missiles that fired from their pod when you pressed down on the cockpit.

Bobby had burst into tears when Dad unwrapped the gift and started cursing. “You don’t like it . . . ?” he wailed.

Dad gathered him up in his arms and dried his tears. “It’s a beautiful model, Bob,” he said, “and the damned real thing is a beautiful piece of hardware too, you’ve got to give the bastards that. And I love you very much for buying it for me. But . . . but maybe you’re old enough now to understand . . . about what I do and why I’m here and why I got so upset when I saw your present. . . .”

And Dad told him. About watching the first men landing on the Moon, about watching
Americans
landing on the Moon, as a little kid. And his Uncle Rob. And the Challenger disaster. And Battlestar America. And how it had somehow turned the wonderful country that had gone to the Moon into something bad. About how the Terminator could have been a
real
spaceplane like the Concordski instead of a weapon. About how he had moved to France to work on real spacecraft. And the great idea he had for a spaceliner that they wouldn’t let him work on because he was an American.

There was an awful lot of it that the ten-year-old Bobby didn’t understand, but his ten-year-old heart understood what counted.

Once, Americans had been the greatest people on Earth and done a wonderful thing, and Dad had tried to help America do even more wonderful things. And then something or someone called Challenger or Battlestar America had tricked America into doing bad things instead, things that hurt his Dad so bad that he had to leave America to do his work, and so he came to France to build spaceships, but they wouldn’t let him do that because they hated Dad for being an American.

It was Bobby who gave his father a great big warm hug when he was finished. “I hate America too, Dad!” he declared. “America is bad! Why don’t we become French people? Or . . . or we could become Russians, just like Mom!”

“No, Bob,” Dad told him firmly, “you shouldn’t hate America. Don’t you ever forget that it was once something special and wonderful to be an American. We were the first humans to set foot on another planet, and no one can
ever
take that away from us.
We’re
the real Americans, you and me, kiddo. When we forget that, the bastards that killed the dream win again.”

That was when Dad started giving him old American science-fiction novels and sent away for baseball cards from the United States and bought him a bat and a ball and a glove. Dad got him subscriptions to American sports magazines and brought him discs of old American movies. He got him the
Visual Encyclopedia Americana
on disc for his computer and game programs for baseball and American football. And a marvelous software atlas of the United States that windowed full-color pictures of almost any point in America at the touch of a mouse.

Bobby’s room filled up with Americana, with a wall map of the United States, and a Statue of Liberty rug, and a star-spangled bedspread, with posters and picture cards of ballplayers he had never seen, with untidy stacks of American sports magazines and old comic books, with models of classic Cadillacs and old Buicks, with bits and pieces of Harley chic, to the point where his mother began fighting with Dad about it.

He overheard them arguing about it once when he was about thirteen.

“It’s unnatural, Jerry, you’ve got him living in some kind of fantasy America out of your own adolescence, twenty years and more out of date, an America that even then never was.”

“It’s his heritage, Sonya, what about all that Russian stuff Franja is into all the time?”

“Those are books and magazines and discs that are really teaching her something, not a roomful of obsessive old Russian pop-cult kitsch!
His mind’s been filled with too much of this stuff to get rid of the obsession, perhaps, but if he’s doomed to be obsessed with America, at least let me give him some things that will give him some historical perspective on the United States, instead of this random collection of old junk, of—how would you have been saying it twenty years ago—‘golden oldies.’ ”

“Just as long as it isn’t a bunch of anti-American propaganda!”

“Oh, really, Jerry!”

So Bobby’s Russian mother began giving him things to read about the United States, and if none of it was anti-American propaganda, none of it was the rabid anti-European power fantasies spewing out of Festung Amerika these days either. There were novels by Twain and Melville and Salinger and Kerouac and Mailer and Robert Penn Warren. Biographies of Lincoln and FDR and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Eugene V. Debs. Histories by de Toqueville and Halberstam and Rattray. Treatises by Jefferson and Paine. Discs of old American films like
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
,
PT-109
,
All the President’s Men
, and
Born on the Fourth of July
.

Bobby gobbled it all up and went back for more on his own, plowing through
Naked Lunch
,
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
,
I Reach for the Stars
,
Profiles in Courage
,
Bug Jack Barron
,
Less Than Zero
, and anything else he could lay his hands on at the English used-book stores. He dug out ancient tapes of
Easy Rider
,
Candy
, and
Dr. Strangelove
,
American Graffiti
, and
Beach Blanket Bingo
. He collected moldy old copies of
Time
and
Playboy
and
Rolling Stone
.