Russian Spring (56 page)

“So what? It’s all the same anyway. At least we gave them something to think about.”

Nathan Wolfowitz got up from his armchair and turned off the videowall. He stood there for a moment, letting everyone wait to hear his words of wisdom. The room fell silent. Everyone sat there feeling washed out and somber.

“Well, it’s all over but the shouting, isn’t it?” Wolfowitz finally said. He spread his arms. He threw back his head. “Aaargh!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Okay, kids,” he said, “now it’s over. Anyone for poker?”

“Jesus, Nat, is that all you’ve got to say?” someone shouted.

Wolfowitz shrugged. “We anted up, we played the cards, we lost the hand,” he said. “What else is there to say?”

“You gonna run again next time, Nat?” someone else shouted.

“For Congress?” Wolfowitz said. “Forget it. The next election is a Presidential year, right? So let me be the first to announce my candidacy for President of the United States.”

There was a good round of laughter.

“No, I’m serious,” Wolfowitz declared. “Dead serious.”

“Sure you are, Nat!”

“Think about it,” Wolfowitz said. “We just passed the hat around this time and financed the whole thing out of that and my poker winnings. And we
still
managed a few sound bites on the national news, didn’t we? Shit, I even got five minutes on the goddamn Billy Allen show before they pulled the plug! Well, there’s the possibility of
federal matching funds
in a Presidential race. Who knows, with a little trick accounting, next time I might even be able to campaign at a
profit
. Running for the Presidential nomination could be a whole new career. Beats trying to teach history to assholes, anyway, don’t it?”

“Yeah,
which
nomination, Nat?”

Wolfowitz shrugged. “Does it matter?” He fished a Ronald Reagan ten-dollar piece out of his pocket. “Tails, I’m a Democrat, heads I’m a Republican,” he said, flipping the coin high in the air and catching it with a slap of his palms.

“Well, fuck a duck,” he said when he looked at it, “I guess I’ve just become a Republican! Now come on,
this
campaign has just about cleaned me out, so let’s play some poker, suckers!”

Bobby didn’t join the poker game. Instead, he went out into the backyard with Sara. They stood there holding hands amid the garbage cans and cardboard boxes full of old computer printouts and assorted campaign detritus.

“Well, it’s over,” Bobby said.

“The campaign, you mean?”

“Yeah. It was something, wasn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.”

By now Bobby knew her well enough to know that he was going to have to say it. “But it
is
over,” he muttered. “I guess you’ll be moving back to the dorms now. . . .”

Sara turned to face him. By now her eyes were quite readable, and what Bobby saw there sent his spirit soaring. “Is that what you want?” she said.

“You know it isn’t.”

“So?” she said, looking down at her feet and kicking one sneaker with the other.

“So . . .”

“Say it, Bobby. . . .”

Bobby found himself staring at his own feet. “So I love you, Sara Conner,” he said, “and I’ve never said that to anyone before. Stay here with me.”

Sara reached out, took his chin in her hand, lifted his head, and kissed him. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said dryly.

Bobby laughed. “No you didn’t,” he said.

Sara laughed back at him. Her eyes seemed to sparkle. “I guess ya got me,” she said.

“I guess I do. . . .”

“So?”

“So . . . ,” Bobby said, and hugged her to him.

HOW DEAD IS MARS?

While no living organism has yet been found on Mars, the fact is that cosmonauts have only explored the smallest fraction of its surface. The absolute negative is a most difficult case to prove. And if the visionary plans to someday terraform the planet with water ice from the moons of Jupiter should ever come to fruition, the question might prove to be of more than academic interest.

Aside from the ecological morality of destroying the remnants of any Martian life by altering the environment, there is the unsettling question of what might emerge from beneath the permafrost if such life existed and proved capable of adapting to a warmer and wetter environment. Might we unwittingly loose terrible plagues upon our Martian colonists in the very act of preparing the planet for shirtsleeve habitation?

—
Argumenty i Fakty

XIX

Six months into Franja’s tour on Cosmograd Sagdeev, they began the assembly of the
Nikita Khrushchev
, the ship that would carry the next expedition to Mars, and she found herself, like most of the other space monkeys, spending most of her work shifts outside the Cosmograd in a spacesuit working on its construction.

The
Khrushchev
was being cobbled together out of Cosmograd modules. First a framework had to be assembled. Then one of the big spheres was secured to the leading end to serve as the command center. Four dormitory modules were then slung behind it to luxuriously house the crew of eight for the long two-and-a-half-year mission—only two to a module!—and connected to the command module and each other by standard passageway modules. Another sphere behind the dormitory cluster became the crew lounge and gymnasium. Behind that came two more dormitory modules which
would be outfitted as scientific workstations. Behind the science modules, a cluster of four of the big spheres to hold oxygen, water, food, supplies, and the life-support machinery.

Fourteen more spheres were slung behind
that
. Four of them would be filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the conventional thrusters and maneuvering rockets. The other ten would hold the reaction mass for the ion drive. A hundred and fifty meters down the central spar a nuclear reactor was secured, and finally, behind that, the rockets and the ion drive.

Connecting up all these modules and spars and main components was straightforward if tedious and strenuous labor, but once the basic ship was assembled, the nightmare for the space monkeys really began.

There were kilometers and kilometers of wiring, fuel lines, oxidizer lines, and air lines that had to be strung, connected, tested, and retested, around this maze of modules, passageways, and spars in order to turn the assemblage into a working Mars ship; all of it had to work perfectly, and most of the work had to be done in spacesuits, with the supervisors constantly yammering in one’s earphones.

Important work it might be, but fun it was not, and Franja, like the rest of her long-suffering fellow monkeys, soon came to loathe the
Khrushchev
, and refer to it as The Bastard, which, in terms of
their
humble part in the grand adventure, it most certainly was.

Franja still spent hours and hours staring longingly out the observation deck bubble canopy at the Earth, but now the view was occluded by the ungainly sight of The Bastard, tethered to Sagdeev in a matching orbit a quarter of a kilometer “below,” as were her thoughts.

On the one hand, she was even more fed up with the confinement and tedium and boredom of the Cosmograd and counting the days till the end of her tour and escape. But on the other hand, there it was, The Bastard, blocking her clear view of the promise of the living planet below, and at the same time, tantalizing her with the vision of what might have been.

Unlikely as it might seem, that ungainly mess was going to
Mars
, and if things had turned out differently, she might be one of the lucky few to make the voyage on it, to stand on the soil of another planet beneath alien skies, to see the towering immensity of Mons Olympus, to look down into the huge dry canyons where once water had flowed, who knows, to even be the one to discover the living remnants of the extinct Martian biosphere which some scientists still believed might yet be found in some isolated pocket ecosphere.

For
that
, she might still be willing to endure a year on the way to Mars in an environment even more cramped than Sagdeev, and another year on the way back, and six months in yet another series of
tin cans on the Martian surface. Instead, she was condemned to another six months in this miserable Cosmograd, suffering much the same boredom and working her ass off besides, with no grand adventure to show for it at the other end.

She found herself wishing that The Bastard would just go away, disappear, leave for Mars and be done with it already, and stop tormenting her with a dream that had already died.

But of course it didn’t. The Mars Excursion Vehicle was boosted up in pieces by heavy lifters, and the monkeys had to assemble the damn thing in orbit, then horse it into place and secure it below the main assemblage of The Bastard.

The cabin had to be mounted to the internal framework, and then the engines and control systems and freight module. Then the balloon with its hydrogen tank and the main fuel and oxidizer tanks. Finally, and worst of all, the metal skin had to be glued to the framework, panel by tedious panel.

The
MEV
would enter the Martian atmosphere as a hypersonic glider, using atmospheric braking to slow it down enough for the huge balloon wing to be deployed that would soft land it by the station on the surface. Six months later, the balloon would lift it into the upper atmosphere just as smoothly, the engines would fire, and the
MEV
would rendezvous with the
Khrushchev
.

Oh yes, the
MEV
was an elegant triumph of Soviet technology, and Franja could not help feeling a surge of pride as she floated in the observation deck watching a team of monkeys mounting the finished product below The Bastard. The endless hours of her own tedious labor that had gone into it were, however, another matter. All that tedium, all that sweat, all that fatigue, and for what? So eight other people with better connections could get to ride it.

Is this what it really feels like to be a Hero of Socialist Labor? she thought sourly.

Five days after the
MEV
was mated to The Bastard, a real celebrity came up to Sagdeev on a Concordski—Colonel Cosmonaut Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov. Smirnov had already been to Mars. Smirnov was a Hero of the Soviet Union. Smirnov was the future commander of the
Nikita Khrushchev
, and he was going to stay on Sagdeev for the next month, overseeing the final outfitting of The Bastard before his crew came aboard and the Mars ship departed.

Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov was also, well, a stunning figure of a man. Sagdeev was, after all, the smallest of small towns, and Franja, like every other woman aboard, had plenty of occasion in the next few days to look him over. Tall, slim, elegantly muscular, angularly featured, with piercing blue eyes, Nikolai Mikhailovich looked every inch the cossack Prince, an impression he did nothing to dispel with
his tightly tailored uniforms, his lustrous black shoulder-length hair, and his outrageously dramatic handlebar mustache.

“Comrade Cosmonaut Movie Star,” the female space monkeys called him. “The Count” was the least disparaging thing the envious male space monkeys called him, the rest being obscene speculations on his manhood or the lack thereof, and indeed Franja herself began to wonder, for even after a week, not one woman aboard had yet bragged about getting between the nets with him, and, monkey-cage sex being what it was, one could be sure that where there was no smoke there had certainly been no fire.

Franja herself, not being made out of stone, certainly would not have turned down the opportunity if it offered itself, but she was not about to engage in the demeaning simian antics of her fellow monkeys to tempt “Comrade Cosmonaut Movie Star” to prove his questionable manhood, which obvious tactics had, at any rate, proven entirely futile. As a visiting cosmonaut, Nikolai Mikhailovich had a whole dormitory module entirely to himself, and when he wasn’t eating, or suited up and hovering around the final work on The Bastard, or working out in the gym before a slavering audience, he selfishly kept it all to himself.

It was quite a surprise, therefore, when the Object of All Desire started a conversation with
her
.

When the magic moment happened, she was holding onto a ring and floating in the observation deck, as she so often did, staring out at the Earth past the untidy bulk of the Mars ship, watching the white swirl of the cloud deck, the lights of the cities in the darkness behind the terminator, just letting her thoughts drift aimlessly as the Sagdeev orbited round and round the planet, lost in the procession of brilliant blue seas, sere dun desert, verdant rain forest, defiantly artificial night lights, the whole living world enormous and complex rolling tantalizingly beneath her in the cold hard blackness while—

“Yes, it is quite beautiful,” a deep mellow male voice said behind her.

Franja started, turned awkwardly, still holding onto the ring, her body flipped sidewise at an oblique angle by the quick motion of her head and shoulders, and there he was, above her and looking down, floating freely behind her, standing in midair with his arms folded across his chest and those piercing blue eyes looking right at her and a strangely wistful smile creasing his wide full lips.

“How long have you been there watching me?” she demanded, quite flustered.

“Oh, quite a while,” said Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov.

“Do you usually spy on people like that? Is that what you do for amusement?”

He frowned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just saw you there, contemplating as it were, and it didn’t seem right to disturb you, and then . . .”

He shrugged, and the motion sent him drifting up toward the top of the bubble. He turned a midair somersault, kicked his legs, swam downward, grabbed a ring, and righted himself beside her, a display of space-monkey aerobatics quite dazzling in its lithe and casual ease.

“And then I realized that, after all, I
had
been watching you, and it seemed rather nikulturni not to make my presence known, so I felt I had to say something,” he said. “But it
is
beautiful, and believe me, I
do
understand how precious a little solitude can be up here, so if you wish, I will now make my apologies and leave you to it. . . .”