Russian Spring (72 page)

He had been so brave while the doctor told him of his condition that it had made her want to cry. And when he had started babbling on enthusiastically about the machinery that was keeping him alive, she had wanted to hug him to her—that was the crazy, innocent, eager, overgrown little boy with whom she had fallen in love, long, long ago.

And she was not about to let that Jerry roll over and die.

She fetched Dr. Cordray a swift kick in the ankle. Hélène Cordray,
to her credit, and Sonya’s everlasting gratitude, did not allow her face to show Jerry a response.

“Well, yes, this is perhaps only a temporary expedient,” she said. “You know better than I do, Monsieur Reed, that what weighs eleven kilos now could weigh a few grams later. With sufficient miniaturization, we could implant the whole device. . . . .”

Jerry turned his head on the pillow to look at her. Sonya could see him composing himself by act of will. “Atomic level switching . . . ,” he muttered. “That could certainly get the circuitry down by two levels of magnitude. . . .”

“An implantable isotopic power core such as we use in pacemakers would then make you entirely mobile,” Dr. Cordray said, bless her heart.

“Be better off with a replaceable external module,” Jerry mused. “Easy enough to use induction to power the implant from outside . . .”

“If you say so, Monsieur Reed.”

“What about an organic solution? A brain implant?”

“Not beyond the realm of possibility, though it would be rather difficult to make the neuronic connections. . . .”

“Maybe not, if it was cloned from my own genome. . . .”

“There is that . . . I have heard that the Americans have succeeded in cloning the entire brain of a rat. . . .”

“To use as a missile guidance system, but the software problems don’t seem to have been licked yet. . . .”

Sonya’s intellect was quite lost as they proceeded to drift off into realms of technobabble far beyond her ken. But her heart was filled to bursting as she watched Jerry talk himself up from the blackest of pits, as he became more and more animated, as he dragged himself back into the world of the living by his own bootstraps.

“Well, Monsieur Reed, this has certainly been a stimulating conversation,” Dr. Cordray finally said. “But it is really time you got some rest.”

And she took Sonya by the arm, nodding toward the door.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Sonya said, blowing Jerry a kiss.

“Well, I guess I’ll be here, won’t I?” he said, and he smiled, and he winked, and Sonya’s spirit soared.

“Not for long, Jerry,” she said. “Soon we’ll be going home.”

“Mon Dieu, what a man!” Hélène Cordray exclaimed out in the corridor. “What a mind! What courage! You will pardon an old woman for saying this, but I could easily enough have fallen in love with him myself! How lucky you are! How ever could you have let a man like that slip from your grasp?”

“
I
divorced
him
,” Sonya told her.

“Incroyable! Why on earth did you do that?”

Sonya sighed. “Je ne comprends pas,” she admitted.

“But you love him still, do you not?”

Sonya nodded. “C’est vrai,” she said softly. “I do believe I do.”

HEROIC UKRAINIAN DEFIES MOSCOW

Ukrainian Presidential candidate Vadim Kronkol scoffed today at Russian President Constantin Gorchenko’s threat to absorb the Ukrainian national militia into the Red Army and use it to crush the independent Ukrainian Republic that he plans to declare unilaterally after he is elected.

“I’d just like to see Gorchenko try to put patriotic Ukrainian soldiers under Russian command,” the defiant Kronkol told reporters at a press conference in Kiev. “Does he really think he can use our own boys against us? The latest Gallup and Roper polls both show that the Ukrainian national militia supports Ukrainian independence by a margin of four to one!”

—
New York Post

After the usual unconscionable forty-minute crawl in the taxiway stack, they were finally at the top of the runway with takeoff clearance from the clods in Narita tower. Franja ran up the turbofans, got the high sign from her flight engineer, nodded to her co-pilot, released the brakes, and the Concordski accelerated down the runway. When her ground speed showed 289 kph, she pulled back on the yoke, and the Aeroflot flight from Tokyo to Paris was at last airborne, fifty-one minutes late, quite exasperating, considering that the flight itself would last only ninety minutes.

In fact . . .

She thumbed on the cabin intercom. “This is Captain Gagarin speaking. Aeroflot wishes to apologize for the delay in takeoff, which was due entirely to airport congestion. Since we will be flying a ballistic trajectory at maximum suborbital velocity, I’m afraid it will be impossible to make up the lost time. Our flight time will be ninety minutes, about half the time we have spent on the ground waiting for a takeoff slot. We hope you enjoy the flight.”

Constantin Bulanin, the co-pilot, laughed. “Not exactly according to regulations,” he said.

“Next time I may just pipe it through the tower frequency too,” Franja said dryly. “It’s as close as we can get to really giving those numbskulls a piece of our mind!”

When the airspeed reached 620 kph, Franja ignited the main engine, killed the turbofans, and felt the soul-satisfying kick of the 2.7-g
acceleration pressing her back against the padded seat as the hydrogen-burning scramjet quickly took the Concordski up to hypersonic speed on atmospheric oxygen.

And that, alas, was the end of manual flying until the approach to De Gaulle. She keyed in the preprogrammed flight sequence for Paris, and the computer took over the con. The climb-angle steepened to 63 degrees, the sky outside the small windshield quickly deepened from azure to purple to black, and then, at 130,000 meters, when the stars were beginning to show and the atmospheric oxygen had become too thin to sustain combustion, there was a slight judder, and then a little surge of added acceleration as the engine went over to internal oxidizer.

The burn continued for another five minutes, until the Concordski’s speed was just 1,000 kph under orbital velocity at an altitude of about 30 kilometers, and then the engine shut down, and the plane went into its silent, weightless glide up to the apogee of its ballistic parabola, and that was it.

Franja loosened her harness and let herself float a few centimeters clear of the seat. From here on in, till the end of the reentry sequence about half an hour away, there was really nothing to do but monitor the instruments and watch the small slice of starscape visible through the narrow windshield.

The life of a Concordski pilot was not exactly thrilling when it came to the flying itself. You fidgeted endlessly on the ground as you advanced slot by slot toward the top of the runway, you took off, you went hypersonic, you turned the plane over to the computer, you waited, you took over again after reentry, flew circles in the holding stack, and landed.

So much for the romance of the air! Even her work aboard Cosmograd Sagdeev had been more exciting than this, with its spacewalks and the bizarre feeling of power that came from manually moving large masses around in zero g.

But though she still chafed at the thought that it would take two more years of seniority before they would start giving her orbital flights to Cosmograds, and two more before any hope of the choice assignment to Spaceville runs, and though Mars, or even the Moon, was still a vague distant dream, Franja seldom found herself regretting the decision to trade life as a space monkey for a career of flying milk runs for Aeroflot.

For while flying Concordskis from city to city was nothing to write home about, once you landed, why there you were! Four days of flying, then three days off. What with the ninety-minute hops, you ended up flying two or three legs a day, and what with the ability to swap flights with fellow pilots via the international Aeroflot bulletin
board, with a little horse-trading, you could take your three days a week off just about anywhere. Paris! Rome! Tokyo! Sydney! London! Leningrad! Kiev! Munich! Amsterdam! Vienna!

You might not see any more of space than a slice of star field through a small windshield, but you certainly saw the world!

While Franja still just might have traded the life of a Concordski pilot for an expedition to Mars or Titan, she certainly would not have traded it for anything else on Earth. Concordski pilots were citizens of the world. Time zones had no meaning for them, nor did the days of the week. Via the bulletin board, you could always find an open apartment to stay in in a choice location in any city where Aeroflot flew. Or a ready-made playmate for the long weekend if that was what you chose, and your three days off were
always
the weekend in the Concordski Club.

And then there was Ivan. Theirs was a relationship that only a Concordski pilot could really understand.

Franja had been determined to live in the Arbat from the moment she learned she was going to be based in Moscow, for while the district’s wild nightlife had been tamed somewhat into a more refined version of itself in the service of enhanced real estate values, it still stood for everything she felt she had missed as a dedicated student during her years in Yuri Gagarin.

Unfortunately, she was not exactly the only Muscovite with the same desire, which was why the Arbat was becoming so gentrified, and why no single person could afford the outrageous rent on even an Aeroflot pilot’s salary while tripping the lavish life fantastic around the world.

When Franja sought out a prospective roommate on the Concordski Club bulletin board, she certainly hadn’t expected a man to apply, but Ivan Fedorovich Yortsin was handsome and charming, there was instant sexual chemistry between them, and when he pointed out that a one-bedroom was the most two Aeroflot pilots could hope to afford in the Arbat, that both of them would have a better time sharing a bedroom with each other than with some platonic roommate, and proved it to her complete satisfaction, that was the clincher.

Especially when he pointed out that each of them would have the apartment to themselves as often as not, given the realities of Concordski pilots’ schedules, and explained the working rules of the Concordski Club, of which he was a veteran member.

So they rented a one-bedroom one block off Arbat Street, and they scrupulously followed the code of the Club. For a former space monkey, it was hardly the depths of degeneracy that the Mother Russia bluenoses delighted in calling it.

When both were elsewhere, the Arbat apartment went on the bulletin board. When either of them was alone in Moscow, the apartment was exclusively that person’s. When they were both in the city together, they always partied together and were never so gauche as to go home with someone else. But what they did when they were in separate cities, by mutual agreement, happened to two different people on another planet.

The scandal sheets and the sex magazines and the yellow media could say what they liked about the notorious love lives of the Concordski Club, and they never tired of doing so, but the code of the Club worked.

Like the flight profile of the plane itself, the life of a Concordski pilot was mostly a long, weightless, high-speed glide.

But now the flight was descending from its apogee, and the computer had turned the nose down, and a slice of the planet was barely visible at the bottom of the windshield, and it was time for Franja to tighten up her harness again and prepare herself for reentry, into the atmosphere, into the Earthbound cares and travails of the real world.

Ordinarily, she welcomed the return to another turn at manual flight, looked forward with eager anticipation to coming down into the excitement of another city half a world away.

But not this time.

She had been en route from Lisbon to Melbourne when the accident happened, and by the time Mother had called there, she was already on her way to Vladivostok, and by the time word got there, she was in Peking. Mother had finally caught up with her in Singapore, but she was scheduled to fly to Tel Aviv, and it was too late to find a trade-off to Paris.

In Tel Aviv, it had taken endless complex trading to get her on this flight to Paris at the beginning of her next four-day shift. She had managed to trade her scheduled flight to Vienna for a hop to Kiev, where she connected with a flight to London that enabled her to take a hop to Barcelona, where she managed to get herself a flight to Tokyo, where she was forced to spend three days on the ground before the regulations would allow her to fly this run to Paris.

And all the while, via phone conversations with Mother, she learned what had happened in disjointed fragments. In Singapore, she had learned about the explosion, Father’s head injury, that he was on life-support machinery, that some sort of permanent machinery was being flown in from Moscow.

By the time she spoke to Mother from Tel Aviv, electrodes had been implanted in Father’s brain, he was hooked up to a permanent portable life-support device, and his life was out of danger.

And before she had left Tokyo, Mother had told her that they were about to release Father from the hospital, and he would be there at Avenue Trudaine with her when Franja arrived.

The computer fired the Concordski’s control jets with a series of chuffs and judders, flipping the plane head for tail, so that it was falling backward. The main engine fired up for three minutes, killing velocity, then the computer turned the craft again, so that it was descending belly-first with its nose in the air.

Once, twice, thrice, the Concordski skipped through the upper reaches of the atmosphere, bleeding off more velocity with atmospheric braking, and then it eased into a shallow downward hypersonic glide.

When it was deep enough into the atmospheric envelope for the scramjet to run on external air, the computer fired up the main engine again, and returned the Concordski to manual control, flying at 4,000 kph at 100,000 meters, descending directly toward Paris at a shallow glide slope of 20 degrees.

Franja pulled back on the yoke, flew a tight downward spiral with the nose in the air, throttling back the main engine, until the airspeed was down to 2,000 kph. Then she shut off the scramjet and continued to fly high-aspect spirals until the airspeed dropped to the point where the turbofans could endure the airstream.