Part One
American Autumn
Secretary Goddard: “Sooner or later, Bill, we’re going to have to face the unfortunate fact that Latin America simply isn’t capable of standing alone.”
Bill Blair: “Standing alone against what, Mr. Secretary?”
Secretary Goddard: “Standing alone on its own two feet. Successfully managing modern economies with stable currencies, feeding its own people, and maintaining some semblance of stable democratic government. They certainly aren’t doing it now, and history is no cause for optimism. A passive role is an abdication of responsibility.”
Bill Blair: “You mean we should intervene openly in the affairs of Latin American countries whose internal policies are not to our liking?”
Secretary Goddard: “I mean we should do whatever we have to do to establish stable democratic governments capable of joining with us to form a Western Hemispheric Common Market that will prevent this hemisphere from turning into another Africa! And if that’s your idea of gunboat diplomacy, well then I’ll be proud to have you call me a gunboat diplomat!”
—Newspeak, with Bill Blair
STAGGERING TOWARD DISASTER OR JUST
TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS?
The Americans seem to be staggering into yet another mini Vietnam in Latin America, and outraged but impotent European opinion seems to be stumbling once more into the wishful conclusion that it will be a disaster like all the others.
But what if the wise men have been wrong all along? Certainly this latest intervention seems like a disaster for the poor Costa Ricans, and certainly it seems likely to involve the United States in yet another endless military quagmire.
But what if the Americans have been applying different lessons all along? For them, after all, the Vietnam War was a long period of domestic economic prosperity. And the Gulf War taught them that no other nation on earth could hope to successfully oppose their high-tech might, establishing the United States as the impoverished military overlord of the planet.
“If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” goes an old and currently quite ominous American aphorism. And if you don’t have much of anything else, is nakedly flaunting your de facto military overlordship really a mistake in the amoral world of political and economic realpolitik?
What if keeping their military involved in endless little military quagmires in Latin America is precisely what the American economic establishment has intended all along?
—Libération
AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS
The condemnation of our efforts to rescue Costa Rica from far-left fanatics and outright chaos by the Common European Parliament, led by self-righteous German Green Socialists, and the threat of economic sanctions implied, should finally convince even the most Europhilic skeptics that half a century of American generosity has been cynically betrayed in the service of Common European economic hegemonism.
When we saved Europe from the Nazis, we were hailed as heroes. When we rebuilt their shattered economies with Marshall Plan aid, we were praised as benefactors. When we stood with them against Soviet imperialism, we were staunch allies. When we preserved their oil supplies in the Gulf with our arms and our treasure, we saved their economic prosperity at no little cost to ourselves.
When the reunited Germany was hardwired into a tighter confederal Common Europe, there was loud cheering on both sides of the Atlantic that the so-called German Question had at long last been solved. The Soviets pulled their troops back behind their own borders in return for untold billions of deutsche marks in grants, loans, and joint venture capital, and the United States was able to bring its troops home at last.
Now we see how we have been repaid for preserving European freedom and prosperity for half a century and more.
We find ourselves frozen out of the largest economic market the world has ever known. We find ourselves facing a Common Europe, dominated economically by the German colossus, determined to sabotage our efforts to establish a Western Hemispheric Common Market.
We have an enormous overseas debt to the very beneficiaries of our generosity and goodwill, a staggering economy, and an unholy alliance meddling in our own hemisphere, led by a swaggeringly self-righteous Germany, with the Soviet Union cheering it on from the sidelines.
America stands alone. And in sad retrospect, we can see that it has always been so. When our aid was needed, the nations of Europe were our friends. Now that they have long since gotten what they wanted from us, they will not even leave us to tend our own front yard without their interference.
We have been had. We have no other alternative. We must build and preserve an economically free and integrated America for all Americans, North and South. We must make whatever sacrifice is necessary to insure that overwhelming European economic power is counterbalanced by absolute American military impregnability.
We must stand up to Common European hegemonism, bite the necessary bullet, and deploy Battlestar America at long last, whatever the cost.
—Washington Post
Defense stocks, particularly anything aerospace related, which have been in the doldrums for a decade, have already exploded. The early bird does indeed get the fattest and freshest worm.
But there’s still plenty of upside left in secondary and particularly tertiary issues. And even at today’s sharply risen prices, there’s still more upside left in the big aerospace conglomerates in the medium run than the pessimists think. Contrary to popular opinion on the Street, we believe it’s still not too late for smart investors to cash in on the Battlestar America bonanza. We believe that the best is yet to come. Think independent subcontractors.
—Words from Wall Street
METHOD IN THE AMERICAN MADNESS?
Conventional wisdom has it that the decision of the American Congress to fund deployments of major elements of the so-called Battlestar America nuclear defense shield was an act of collective madness. But in truly ruthless realpolitik terms, from the American point of view, maybe not.
Against whom is Battlestar America supposed to defend? Against a Soviet Union which presents no military threat? Against a peaceful and prosperous Common Europe in the midst of an economic boom? Against hypothetical Third World madmen eager to commit national suicide by launching a puny nuclear assault against the planet’s only military superpower as some naive apologists sincerely contend?
This, of course, is a question without a rational answer. But it may not be the right question. For if one asks instead what the Americans have to gain by deploying Battlestar America, however flimsy the official excuses may be, the answers become all too clear.
By deploying Battlestar America, the United States props up a sagging defense sector without which its already staggering economy would fall into a deep structural depression.
By deploying Battlestar America, the American politicians validate the billions they have poured into its development over the decades.
By deploying Battlestar America, the United States serves notice on the republics of Latin America that American force reigns supreme in the Western Hemisphere, that no matter what interventionist excesses the Americans may descend to, no one will ever have the will or the power to oppose them in their own self-proclaimed sphere of influence.
Long ago, Mikhail Gorbachev promised to do a terrible thing to America. “We will deprive you of an enemy,” he proclaimed, and lived up to his words.
And now we see the American response. Having been deprived of the enemy whose existence propped up their economy and rationalized their foreign policy for half a century, the American government has simply gone out and nominated a replacement.
If Germany and Common Europe had not existed to serve this purpose, they no doubt would have been forced to invent us. And indeed, in a certain sense, they have.
—Die Welt
I
With a leaden thump, a protesting squeal of rubber on concrete, and a disconcerting groan of tired metal, the old 747 hit the runway, popping open half a dozen overhead luggage bins as the thrust-reversers roared, and the plane shuddered, and the lights flickered.
It had been a truly ghastly fourteen hours from Los Angeles in this aerial cattle car, what with a thermostat that seemed incapable of maintaining a constant temperature, and two lukewarm and pasty TV dinners, and a movie machine that didn’t work, and a seat that wouldn’t recline all the way, and bad vibrations from the left inboard engine, but somehow the plane had made it, and Jerry Reed was in Paris, or anyway officially on French soil.
For a born-and-bred Californian space cadet whose only previous experience with foreign intrigue had been limited to picking up hookers in Tijuana, it was a long way, my son, from Downey.
Eight weeks ago, Jerry had been planning to spend his three-week vacation backpacking in the Sierras. He hadn’t even had a passport. Now here he was, taxiing toward the terminal at Charles de Gaulle, and heaving a great sigh of relief that he had made it to Common Europe without having it lifted.
“No, no, but of course not, there is nothing at all illegal about it,” André Deutcher had assured him. “The worst thing that can happen is that they refuse to let you board the airplane.”
“And confiscate my passport.”
André had smiled that worldly smile of his and blown out a thin pout of smoke from one of his ten ECU Upmanns. “If they confiscate your passport for trying to leave the country, then it was a document of no value in the first place, n’est-ce pas, Jerry?” he said.
“True enough,” Jerry admitted bitterly. “But if they slice my clearance for trying it, I’ll never work in the Program again, like poor Rob.”
“Rob is finished, Jerry, it is a sad thing, but it is true,” André Deutcher said much more coldly. “And because people like Rob Post are no longer welcome, so is your American space program. . . .”
“With our heavy lifters and our shuttles and our sat sleds, our basic logistic technology isn’t that far behind. . . .” Jerry protested wanly, sounding sad and foolish even to himself.
“While the Soviets are building three more Cosmograds and going to Mars and we are building the spaceplane prototype.”
“When the politics change here, all the Battlestar America technology will give us—”
“Jerry, Jerry, take my offer or not as you like,” André said, fixing him with those ambiguous gray-green eyes of his, “that much is the representative of ESA speaking. But do not delude yourself as all the people at this party must in order to face their shaving mirrors in the morning. This is what happened to Rob, n’est-ce pas, I would not wish to see the same happen to you, and this is a new friend speaking, a friend who has dreamed the same dream, and who knows all too well how he would feel had he been unfortunate enough to be born American instead of French at this hour in its history. Battlestar America is the problem, and can never be the solution. Rob knew this in his heart, yes, and thought he could fight it from within. Do not let this happen to you.”
Jerry had only known André Deutcher for three weeks now, and indeed had met him at Rob Post’s previous party. André had been introduced, by Rob himself in fact, as an ESA engineer spending his vacation time in the United States seeing the sights and meeting like-minded American space people for his own pleasure.
Jerry, of course, had not believed this for a minute, had assumed that the Frenchman was some kind of industrial spy, and had immediately begun to kid him about it. André had countered that the American civilian space program, being all but nonexistent, had no industrial secrets worth stealing, and that he was really working for French military intelligence. The bullshit had flown back and forth, and somehow a spark of friendship seemed to have been lit.
Jerry took André to the original Disneyland, showed him Forest Lawn, and managed to take him on a circumspect tour of the open areas at the Rockwell plant in Downey, and the Frenchman had in turn wined and dined Jerry on the ESA expense account at restaurants that he hadn’t even known existed.
And then tonight André had committed the California faux pas of lighting up a big cigar in the middle of the crowded living room, handing Jerry another, and insisting he do likewise.
There was an unseasonable marine layer rolling in and a foggy chill in the air, so that when Rob’s wife, Alma, had shooed them outside to smoke their noxious Havana weeds, as André had known she would, the deck of the Posts’ rotten-rustic hilltop house in Granada Hills—all that Rob had managed to salvage of the good old days—was empty.
And once André had gotten Jerry out into the chilly privacy of the foggy Southern California night, he finally dropped his cover, or so at least it seemed, and admitted what his trip to America was really about.
André Deutcher was nothing so sinister as an agent of French military intelligence or even an industrial spy. He was simply a headhunter for the European Space Agency.
“You are someone I think ESA might be interested in, Jerry,” André had told him. “Not that this is yet anything like an offer of employment, you understand. But you have told me you have a three-week vacation coming up, and I am authorized to invite you to spend it as the guest of ESA in Paris, meet some interesting people, learn more about our program, and let us learn more about you.”
He shrugged. He smiled. “At the very least, you will have a free first-class vacation in Paris, which, I may assure you, is hardly a fate worse than death, n’est-ce pas?”
It had always seemed that André really was hiding something behind his series of phony secret identities, but now, looking into his eyes out here in the chilly damp, with the lights of the San Fernando Valley far below just barely glowing beneath the bank of fog, it seemed to Jerry that André Deutcher was at last speaking from the heart. André might still be trying to sell him something, but Jerry could not deny that everything André had said was the bitter truth.
If he stayed with what was left of the Program, sooner or later, one way or another, what had happened to Rob Post was going to happen to him. If it hadn’t happened already.
Inside, the party was starting to run down, guests sitting listlessly around the guttering fireplace, leaning up against walls with half-filled paper cups hanging in their hands.
Running down. Like Rob Post himself, blearily surveying the detritus from the kitchen doorway, like the Program itself, facing the endless morning after.
Rob Post had been a friend of his father’s since before Jerry was born, and Jerry’s most potent early memory was of being rousted from bed by Daddy in the middle of the night, handed a huge bowl of chocolate ice cream swimming in dark gooey Hershey’s by Rob, and then sitting between them on a dusty old couch in a darkened living room, watching the TV with the ice cream bowl in his lap, gobbling it up with a big serving spoon and smearing it all over his pajamas—a bleary four-year-old suddenly wakened into an unreal hog heaven.
“Sandy’s gonna really read me out over this, Jerry, and you’re not gonna understand till you’re grown up,” Daddy said. “Do you have any idea why I’m letting you eat all the chocolate ice cream with syrup you can handle tonight?”
“Because you love me, Daddy?” Jerry said, blissfully digging into it.
Daddy hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. “So you’ll remember this moment all of your life,” Daddy said in a silly solemn voice. “You’re too young to understand what you’re going to see tonight, but you’re not too young to understand a whole pint of Häagen-Dazs.”
“It’s an experiment, Jerry,” Uncle Rob told him. “The greatest moment in human history is about to happen and you’re alive to see it, but you’re too young to remember it with understanding. So what your Dad and I are trying to do is implant a sensory engram in your long-term memory so that when you grow up you can call it up and be here now with your adult consciousness.”
Uncle Rob giggled. “And if you eat so much you puke, so much the better for your future recall,” he said.
Jerry didn’t puke, but he did remember. The bittersweet cold softness and double-good hit of chocolate syrup over chocolate ice cream still never failed to time-warp him back to that couch in the living room, watching the Moon Landing with Daddy and Rob.
He had been hooked on chocolate ice cream ever since, to the detriment of his endless battle against the scale, but he could sit there in the body of a blissful four-year-old and watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon in real time with his adult consciousness, transforming the memory of somatic joy into the deeper joy of true understanding.
The strange pearlescent television-gray lunar landscape coming up under the lander camera to the laconic crackle of far-off voices from Houston . . . The hollow descending hiss of the retrorockets through the metal bulkhead . . . “The Eagle has landed.” And then the bulky figure descending that ladder in slow motion . . . And Armstrong’s hesitant voice blowing the scripted line as his foot came down on the gray pumice and changed the destiny of the species forever. “That’s, uh, one small step for man, uh, one giant leap for mankind.”
Oh yes, as a boy Jerry had only to taste chocolate ice cream to be transported back to the moment whose memory would shape his whole life, and later, he had only to imagine the taste of chocolate ice cream covered with Hershey’s bittersweet chocolate syrup to replay the Moon Landing through an adult perception that could thank Dad and Rob from the bottom of his heart for the best present any four-year-old could ever have, for giving his adult self this clear and joyous memory, for the dream they had knowingly and lovingly implanted within him.
That was how much the space program meant to Dad and Rob, and while Dad never did much more than join the L-5 Society and the Planetary Society and every space lobby in between, Rob Post had followed the dream and given it his all.
He had joined the Program fresh out of Cal Tech and landed a job as a glorified draftsman on the Mariner project. He was at best a mediocre engineer, but as he worked his way up the ladder, it became apparent that he had a certain talent for project direction, for getting better engineers than he could ever be to work together toward a common goal. He believed in mankind’s destiny as a space-going species with an ion-blue purity, he could translate that passion into belief in the project at hand, and when he was on, he could infect a team with that same passionate innocence.
He got to work on Voyager and on the shuttles, and he gave up smoking dope when the piss tests came in and he had to, and he took long backpack hikes in the Sierras and worked out every day, for he was still under fifty and he had accumulated clout, and if Mars was out of the question, he certainly had a good shot at a Moonbase tour if they got one built before he turned sixty and if he kept his nose clean and his body in shape. Or anyway that was the fantasy upon which his whole life was focused before the Challenger explosion.
With a father who had turned him loose in his vast, untidy collection of musty science-fiction magazines, paperback books, and model spacecraft before he was old enough to read, and Rob Post for a favorite “uncle,” Jerry knew what he was going to be when he grew up before he was old enough to know what growing up meant.
He was going to be an astronaut. He was going to float out there, weightless in the vasty deep. He was going to walk the pale gray pockmarked lunar surface, and search for remains of life on Mars. He was going to the asteroids and Titan, and who knows, it was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility, he was young, the Program was moving fast, life extension loomed on the horizon, he just might live long enough to be among the first to set foot on a planet circling another sun.
“The Moon maybe, Mars, if I’m incredibly lucky, but that’s as far as an old fart like me is going to get, kiddo,” Rob would tell Jerry in the days when he was beavering his way through high school. “But you, hey, you were lucky enough to be born at the right time, Jerry. You crack those books, and by the time you’re out of college, we’ll have a lunar base. Mars before you’re thirty. Titan before you’re fifty. You could live to see the first starship launched. You could even be on it. You’re going to live in the golden age of space exploration, kiddo. It’s up to you. You can be one of the people who makes it all happen.”
So Jerry ground his way through high school, and, with his good marks and an effusive letter of recommendation from old grad Rob Post, got into Cal Tech, where he majored in aerospace engineering.
Jerry busted his balls his first three years at Cal Tech. Almost literally. The work was hard, but he was a practiced student by now and a totally committed one, and he aced his way to the top 5 percent with little difficulty.
But he knew that he had to do more than make the top of his class to get into astronaut training. He had to get himself into physical condition, and for a nerdish grind with no interest in sports, a naturally endomorphic body, and an addiction to chocolate ice cream, that wasn’t easy.
Rob Post was there for him then too, and a good thing, for Dad was the quintessential couch potato. Rob introduced him to long backpacking hikes in the Sierras. He bought him a set of weights for his birthday. By the middle of Jerry’s sophomore year, he had shed his blubber, built himself a set of muscles, and was doing better with girls than he ever had in his life, learning to get his endorphins charged via sex and sweat instead of chocolate.
And then, during his junior year, the Challenger exploded, and took the civilian space program with it, or rather the long hiatus between the Challenger disaster and the next shuttle launch exposed and finalized what in retrospect could be seen to have already happened.
The bright future in space that had seemed inevitable when Jerry was a four-year-old never happened. No space station by 1975. No lunar base by 1980. No Mars by 1985. Oh yes, the 1970s and early ’80s were a golden age of unmanned space exploration, with the incredible pictures from Mars, and the Jovian moons, and the rings of Saturn, but the real space program—the manned space program, the actual raison d’être, the evolution of humanity into a space-going species—essentially sat there spinning its wheels for the decade between the last Apollo and the long-delayed advent of the space shuttle.
And by that time, Ronald Reagan was President, and military budgets were soaring, and Star Wars started gobbling up space funding, and the Air Force already had its hooks deep into the shuttle, into NASA, and about 40 percent of the payloads were already military even before the Challenger exploded.
Those in the know, like Rob Post, knew damn well that the Challenger had been destroyed by political pressure to launch outside the shuttle’s safe-flight envelope, or as Rob had put it at the time, “Give me a thermometer reading fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and I’ll gladly get on one tomorrow.”
But it took a two-year hiatus of bureaucratic ass-covering for NASA to finally work up its courage to launch Discovery, and by that time the Agency’s spirit was broken, and its administrative structure had been thoroughly militarized, and there was a huge backlog of military payloads, and the civilian space budget had been cut to the bone and then some, and the doom of any visionary American civilian manned space program had been quite thoroughly sealed.
When the dust cleared, endless Star Wars pilot-study funding had been so cunningly hardwired into the budgetary process that it had a life of its own. Even the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a credible bogeyman made no difference, especially after Saddam Hussein conveniently allowed the Pentagon to nominate the entire Third World as a replacement. The idea of a career as a civilian astronaut had become pathetically ludicrous by the time Jerry graduated.
Rob Post was there to offer Jerry advice and aid again, but now it was of a sadly different sort. By this time, Rob had advanced into the upper middle-management levels at Rockwell, a spacecraft project manager with a good track record at a time when contracts for civilian projects were becoming virtually nonexistent.
During Jerry’s senior year at Cal Tech, Rob had held his nose, sighed, and taken the job of manager on the Advanced Maneuverable Bus project. “It’s that or join the army of the unemployed,” Rob insisted wanly. “Besides, it’s not as if the damn thing doesn’t have potential civilian applications. . . .”
The AMB was typical of the myriad low-profile cheap projects that kept Star Wars alive during the scaled-back “Bright Pebbles” hiatus before European outrage at the Latin American interventions finally gave the defense industry what it needed to push its deployment through Congress as Battlestar America. The AMB was basically an upscaling and redesign of the MX fourth-stage warhead bus, supposedly to be used to deploy scores of cheap little orbital interceptors, at least as far as Congress was concerned.
But what the Air Force had really commissioned behind that smoke screen was a platform that could be launched into Low Earth Orbit with a variable mixed payload of at least twenty reentry vehicles and/or boost-phase interceptors. It had to be able to station-keep for a year without refueling, change orbits up to a point, juke and jerk to avoid satellite killers, and launch its payloads with a high degree of accuracy.
“Shitcan the warheads and interceptors, give it a big fuel tank and corresponding thrusters, mount a pressure cabin on it, and you’ve got yourself a space jeep to take you from LEO to GEO,” Rob would muse dreamily.
When Jerry graduated, Rob was able to hire him on as an entry-level wage slave on the AMB project. But even a naïf like Jerry could see what Rob was doing once he got to Rockwell. Everyone on the project knew it. Everyone was collaborating in the deception, knowing, of course, that it was Rob Post who would take the flak if and when the Air Force copped to what was going on.
What was going on was that Rob Post, like the Air Force itself, was pursuing his own hidden agenda. He was using the Air Force funding to design a Low Orbit to Geosynchronous Orbit ferry with the capability to take crews to a GEO space station that didn’t exist in the guise of giving them their Advanced Maneuverable Bus.
The thrusters were far bigger than anything a warhead and interceptor bus needed. The so-called refueling collar was being designed to take a large fuel tank neatly balanced along the long axis to handle a 1-g thrust. The bus platform itself was being designed to accommodate forty interceptors so that a pressure cabin would have room atop it. And so forth.
Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that Rob was smoking grass again, or perhaps vice versa. Though he had stopped when the piss tests came in, he had started again sometime during the early stages of the AMB project, coming home to Granada Hills, toking up, sitting down at the computer, and designing, on his own time, the pressure cabin, and the expanded fuel-tank module that would turn the AMB into a space ferry that could take ten people from LEO to GEO.
Eventually, of course, the inevitable happened.
The Air Force gave the design a thorough going-over before the AMB went to prototype, and some bright boy realized what was happening. Early one bleary Monday morning, the piss patrol showed up in force and had everyone working on the project urinate into test tubes in plain view.
Such snap mass random testing was not quite unheard-of, but when they took blood samples to nail down the evidence of any infraction of the purity regs, everyone knew that the plug was about to be pulled.
Somehow Rob Post’s piss tested out pure, but they caught him with borderline traces of cannabinol in the blood sample, which might or might not have washed him out of the Program for life if he had chosen to fight a dismissal in court. So instead of trying to nail him directly, they got cute about it.
They canceled the AMB project prior to prototype, which cost Rockwell big bucks, and they made it quite clear that Rockwell’s chances of landing the replacement program would be slim and none if Rob Post was still on their payroll. What was more, he must not be permitted to resign, he had to be forthrightly fired for mismanagement of Air Force funding.
This the Rockwell management was far from reluctant to do, when they toted up how much the cancellation of the AMB had cost them. Rob Post was rather loudly fired, and Rockwell got the sat-sled contract.
Rob, as they say, never worked in the Program again, or at least not directly, eking out a precariously unpredictable if not exactly penurious living as a technical consultant on various non-Program projects via his many connections in the California high-tech and space communities. Meanwhile, he threw these parties every month or so to maintain his sad and forlorn connection to people like Jerry who were still in the Program.
Such as it was.
Jerry looked away from the tired party scene behind the glass balcony doors, away from André Deutcher’s knowing eyes, and up into the Southern California night sky. But the stars were hidden by the bank of offshore fog and were nowhere to be seen.
Jerry finally looked back at André, who lounged against the deck railing, staring him down and puffing out a long, languid plume of rich Havana smoke that melted into the fog.
“It is a sad time here for people like you and Rob, oui, a sad time for all of you,” André said, nodding toward the scene in the living room beyond the glass, which Rob was crossing in their direction. “Do not think I do not understand, Jerry,” he said with an air of worldly commiseration. “You are an American, but you believe in something that your country no longer does. . . .”
“Yeah, well at least I’m still in the Space business,” Jerry drawled in a phony Groucho Marx voice, waving his cigar and blowing out about five dollars’ worth of contraband Havana in what even he realized was a futilely foolish attempt to ape André’s panache.
For that matter, he didn’t really like the taste of tobacco smoke; for him smoking this cigar was what passed for a small act of defiance of the national purity regs under which most of the people at this party, himself included, were constrained to exist if they wished to remain employable. Tobacco still wasn’t on the piss list, but Cuban tobacco still had the tiny thrill of safe danger that pot must have had in the old days when a trace of it in your urine didn’t mean you were out of the Program for life, like poor old Rob.
Oh yeah, he was still in the Space business, all right. He still had a job at Rockwell, ironically enough with the team developing the propulsion and maneuvering systems for the sat sleds, which had replaced the canceled AMB. And to turn the screw a little further on Rob Post, it was Rob’s unauthorized upscaling of the AMB design that had put the sat-sled bug in the Air Force’s ear, though of course no one would ever admit it.
Why not go right to something capable of taking payloads from LEO to GEO that could also do the AMB’s job in the bargain? Rob’s design for the refueling collar and the big mother fuel tank proved quite usable. Just add big throttleable stop-and-start thrusters, a maneuvering and control system, a platform just big enough to hold the whole thing together, and a clamp-on system for payload modules.
Voilà, the sat sled, which could not only deploy warheads and interceptors in Low Earth Orbit, but which could maneuver killer satellites at high speed and ferry spy satellites to GEO, and at a price not much greater than that of procuring the single-purpose AMB.
And now, with the Congressional purse strings pried wide open again, they were already talking about a scaled-up second generation of sat sleds, capable of clamping onto a shuttle and taking it to Geosynchronous Orbit, or, more to the Air Force’s Battlestar America point, of boosting huge mirrors, monster lasers, high-speed interceptors, and particle-beam accelerators out there to GEO where they would be all but invulnerable to attack, making America the military overlord of Geosynchronous Space itself, master of the ultimate global high-ground.
Poor Rob had had some starry-eyed pipe dream of turning the AMB sword into a space-going plowshare, but he hadn’t bargained with the Pentagon’s superior ability to do precisely the reverse.
And now here Jerry was, out on Rob Post’s deck on the outside looking in at the party, though from another perspective he was on the inside looking out, and here came Rob out onto the deck, looking more than a little stoned, on the outside looking in, as he had been for too many years.
“That tobacco in those ropes, or are you guys holding?” he said by way of greeting.
Ever since Rockwell had canned him, Rob had made a bigger and bigger thing out of his dope-smoking despite the real risk of serious jail time, grown his hair even longer than it had been in the late ’60s, taken to blue jeans and workshirts, hidden his bitterness behind a false façade of ancient burned-out hippie. “Why not?” he would say when Jerry called him on it. “What’ve I got to lose that I haven’t lost already?”
“The best Havana,” André said, whipping out his cedar cigar case, pulling one out, and offering it to Rob.
Rob glanced around in mock paranoia. “Alma’ll kill me,” he said, but he snatched it up anyway and let André light it with his fancy silver Dunhill, and the three of them stood there leaning against the railing of the redwood deck in the foggy fragrant chill, sucking in expensive carcinogens in awkward silence.
It was Rob who had introduced Jerry to André, and it was Rob whom ESA should be trying to recruit if there was any justice in the world, at least the way Jerry saw it. But as André had said, Rob was finished, at least as far as ESA was concerned.
What Jerry really wanted to do was ask Rob’s advice about André’s offer. Would he be risking his career by merely accepting a freebie to Paris?
But he was prevented from doing this twice over; first because he didn’t know how André would take his blowing his cover to Rob, second because he feared it might break Rob’s heart to know that it was Jerry and not him who had a chance to work in the ESA program.
Unexpectedly enough, Rob Post was there for Jerry one more time when he needed it. “So, kiddo,” he said, brandishing his Upmann, “you think you could at least smuggle a box of these back for me when you go to Paris? Some primo Afghani, I know, would be out of the question.”
“You know?” Jerry blurted, looking back and forth from Rob to André. “You told him?”
“But of course,” André said, “or rather it was Rob who recommended you as a possibility.”
“But then why not—”
“Go myself?” Rob said. “They’re hardly interested in over-the-hill project managers who haven’t worked in the Program for years. They want innocent young blood, it’s only natural. . . .”
He sighed, he turned to stare out over the ravine that led down the slope of the Santa Monica mountains toward the fog-obscured floor of the San Fernando Valley, a million little lights glowing faintly through the glistening mist, took a quick puff on his cigar, and slowly sighed out the smoke.
“Besides,” he said, “I’m pushing sixty, and even in the ESA program, I’m just too old already to ever get my chance to go into the old up and out; that dream’s finished for me, kiddo, and I know it. And somehow along the way, I fell in love with this country, not the old US of A or the pinhead government in Washington, but California, the Sierras, the redwoods, these hills. . . . I’ve lived here all of my life, and I’m a part of this land by now, and it’s a part of me, and even if I were offered the choice . . .”
He shrugged, he turned back to Jerry, laughed a little laugh. “The bad news is that no one’s offering me the choice,” he said. “The good news is that I don’t have to make it.”
“You’re telling me I should go?” Jerry said.
Rob Post looked back at him with bloodshot, deeply shadowed eyes. His long gray hair was thinning now. There were deep lines around his mouth and the corners of his eyes and finer ones all over the tanned skin of his face, upon which a few liverish spots had begun to appear. Jerry noticed all this for the first time, really noticed it.
And for the first time he realized that the hero and patron of his childhood and young manhood was growing old.
That Rob Post was going to age and grow frail and finally die without ever getting to set foot on Mars or the Moon, or even to float free of gravity up there in the starry dark for one bright, shining moment at his life’s end.
Jerry’s hands balled up into fists, tears began to well up in his eyes, and he had to take a long drag on his cigar and cough out smoke to cover the wiping of them.
“Hey, kiddo, I’m not telling you anything,” Rob said. “What the hell do I know, I’ve never even been to Europe. I don’t even know what they may end up offering, if they end up offering anything. But if you want my opinion . . .”
“I always want your opinion, Rob. You know that.”
Rob smiled, and in that smile the ghost of a younger face seemed to fade back in over the aging mask of defeat. “Well, if you want my opinion, Jerry,” he said, “my opinion is . . . what the fuck?”
“What the fuck? What the fuck what?”
“What the fuck, all it is is a free three-week vacation in Europe,” Rob said, pacing back and forth in front of Jerry in a little elliptical orbit.
“You’re saying I should do it?”
Rob laughed. “What the fuck, why the fuck not? What kind of red-blooded American boy would refuse a free trip to Paris? What kind of red-blooded space cadet would refuse a peek inside the ESA program?”
“One who doesn’t want to lose the clearance to work in ours,” Jerry said.
“There is that,” Rob said much more somberly.
André Deutcher, who had been leaning back quietly against the deck railing smoking his cigar during all this, finally spoke. “The matter can be handled in what we would call a fail-safe manner,” he said. “You apply for a passport. They either give it to you or not, n’est-ce pas? If they do not, then the matter is quietly forgotten without any argument from you. It will hardly endanger his clearance to simply ask for a passport, will it, Rob?”
“I don’t see how. . . .”
“He then applies for a thirty-day Common Europe tourist visa through an ordinary travel agency and simply gets on a first-class Air France flight to Paris with me when—”
“Uh-uh,” Rob said. “That dumb, they’re not. He better fly alone, and on an American carrier, not a Common Europe airline, and no first class, or they’ll suspect he’s flying on someone else’s plastic, and just may not let him on the plane.”
André shrugged. “I’m afraid he’s right,” he told Jerry. “Best you fly with the peasantry in coach.” He smiled, he winked. “But not to worry, Jerry, we will begin to atone for this unfortunate piece of necessary tackiness and then some the moment you are safely in Paris, I can promise you that, and first class on Air France on the flight back.”
He paused, blew out another plume of smoke. “If there is a flight back,” he said.
“Well, I’m glad you two guys have gotten it all decided for me,” Jerry snapped. But there was little vehemence in it. For after all, Rob was right.
What the fuck, they weren’t about to lift his clearance for applying for a passport. What the fuck, he could always play innocent if they didn’t let him on the plane, couldn’t he? All he would be doing would be taking a vacation in Paris, as far as they were concerned.
And as if a sign had been granted, there was suddenly a distant roar, and a bright point of light became barely visible, burning its way skyward through the mist at unreal speed, accelerating as it rose like a glorious ascending angel.
“Alors!” André Deutcher exclaimed. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
Jerry’s eyes met Rob Post’s. They both laughed wanly, and somehow, in that moment, the decision was made.
“Nothing to get excited about, André,” Rob said.
“Yeah, it’s just another ground-based reentry phase interceptor test from Vandenberg.”
And a strangely similar roar, but louder, and closer, blasted Jerry out of his time-zoned reverie, and he found himself all but pressing his nose against the cabin window in a futile attempt to see.
“My goodness, what was that?” the old lady in the seat beside him exclaimed.
“An Antonov 300 boosting off the runway,” Jerry muttered, for he knew that no other civilian aircraft made such a godawful noise on takeoff.
Until the ignition of the Antonov’s rocket-trolley had abruptly jolted him out of it, Jerry had been dozing along in airline space, where the interior of one plane was the interior of every other, and one great amoeboid airport seemed to connect the spaces between, and any connection to actually being in a country other than America had been quite unreal.
But now the ancient Pan World 747 was taxiing up to the main terminal at Charles de Gaulle, and Jerry could see two more Antonovs sitting there on the tarmac connected to the terminal building by jetways and surrounded by trains of baggage carts as if they were ordinary Boeings sitting on the ground at LAX—one painted in the red, white, and blue of British Air and the other actually bearing the winged hammer and sickle of Aeroflot—and he knew he was no longer in technological Kansas.
The Antonov 300 was the plane that had finally given the Russians a real piece of the world market. They had taken their old shuttle transporter, itself a monster upgraded from an older military transport by adding on two more engines, and turned the world’s biggest airplane into the world’s biggest airliner.
With a full load of fuel in its gigantic belly tanks, it could carry one thousand coach passengers and their luggage 10,000 kilometers at about 800 kph in somewhat dubious comfort, and as much as a hundred more in spacious first-class luxury in the add-on upper deck that replaced the shuttle pylons, making it the most profitable airplane in the world to run in terms of fares versus cost per passenger mile.
It was also a ponderous mother that required a runway longer than most commercial airports had to groan its way up to takeoff speed and then leave the ground-effect envelope.
In their typical straightforward, brute-force manner, the Russians had solved the problem by mounting a fall-away trolley aft of the main landing gear and equipping it with a battery of solid-fuel throw-away rocket engines apparently adapted from old short-range missiles.
The Antonov was a joke at Rockwell, where they built hypersonic bombers that could give you “The Ride of the Valkyries” in multiphonic sound on their state-of-the-art automatic disc decks on your way to ground zero.
But up close, there was something somehow loveable about this piece of time-warped technological Victoriana. It was something that Jules Verne and Rube Goldberg surely would have admired.
It had the elephantine grandeur of the Spruce Goose that Dad had taken him to see in Long Beach—the sheer splendor of being the largest of its kind, indeed of being larger than its kind’s natural envelope.
The old 747, itself once the world’s largest airliner, was sidling up to the gate now, right beside the Aeroflot Antonov, which dwarfed it as the Boeing had dwarfed the short-hop wide-bodies on the ground at LAX fourteen hours and a world away.
It’s like some cartoon version of Russian technology, Jerry thought as the Pan World 747 docked with the jetway. Huge, and brutal, and powerful, and cobbled together from a dustbin of obsolescence with chewing gum and baling wire.
Yeah, but it’s cheap, and it works, he reminded himself. You could laugh at the way the Russians did it, but they were laughing all the way to the bank.
If America could build hypersonic penetration bombers, then why couldn’t Rockwell or somebody build a scaled-up airliner version and recapture the long-haul market with speed and elegance?
Why was he working on sat sleds instead of manned propulsion systems? Why were the Russians mounting a Mars expedition while the U.S. was still studying a Moonbase? Why was it ESA who was building the prototype spaceplane and not Rockwell or Boeing?
Of course, to ask those questions was to answer them in the two words that were the bane of Jerry’s existence.
Battlestar America.
That was where the lion’s share of America’s high-tech R&D budget had been going for the better part of two decades under one guise or another, and one story that Rob Post had told him years ago, when Jerry was a sophomore in high school and the Program was still called the “Strategic Defense Initiative,” told it all.
“I was sitting around half-crocked at a party with a bunch of aerospace engineers, and they were all bullshitting about the contracts their companies were landing for SDI studies. X-ray lasers powered by fusion devices, orbital mirrors, rail-guns, the whole ball of wax. Hey, I said, thinking I was being funny, what about a tachyon-beam weapon? Sits up there in orbit and waits for the Russkies to launch, and then sends tachyon beams back in time and zaps their birds on the pads twenty minutes earlier. Some of the guys laughed, but a couple of them working for Lockheed get this weird look on their faces. Yeah, one of them says, I think we could get about 20 mil for a preliminary study. And about a year later, I find out that they actually did. The Pentagon put about 100 million dollars into it before they realized they were being had.”
America was becoming the world’s best-defended Third World country, and the best and the brightest were collaborating in the process and pissing into bottles for the privilege while the Russians went to Mars and sold their Antonovs and Common Europe dreamed of luxury hotels in Geosynchronous Orbit.
But don’t get me wrong, Jerry thought sourly as the seat-belt light winked off and the passengers all crowded toward the exit, I still love the space business.
Jerry snatched up his flight bag from beneath the seat in front of him and stood there in the crowded aisle with the rest of the sardines waiting for the exit door to open.
Finally, after the usual inevitable stifling, sweatstinking eternity, the door finally opened, and Jerry found himself slowly shuffling off the crowded plane in the endlessly clotted human stream, out through the jetway, and onto a long people mover past hologrammic advertising images babbling at him in incomprehensible French while displaying an amazing profusion of bare-breasted pulchritude, and finally into a jam-packed chaos of a reception area, where more people movers were disgorging yet more passengers from other gates into the hub of the radial terminal.
At the far end of the reception area, barely visible through the godawful mob scene, stood a line of customs booths, a customs official in a fancy military-looking uniform in each. Signs in French and English above the line of booths designated “Common European Passports” and “All Others.” There were four of the former, where people flashed their passports and sailed right through, and only two of the latter, where long lines of people were already queued up, and where the customs guards seemed to be checking every last passport through computer terminals.
Upon being greeted with this anti-American outrage and realizing it would be about an hour before he could clear passport control, after which he would have to play baggage-carousel roulette and then probably stand on an even slower and longer line with his baggage to clear customs, Jerry found the zone, and the sleeplessness, and the fatigue, and the babble of incomprehensible tongues finally catching up with him with a vengeance. His knees dissolved to rubber, his mouth, he realized, tasted like copper, his head was bonging, and to make matters worse, amazingly enough, half the people in the reception area seemed to be lighting up noxious cigarettes that filled the air with acrid, choking smoke.
“Welcome to Common Europe,” he muttered miserably under his breath, and numbly elbowed his way through the mob to the end of one of the long, crawling lines.
“Monsieur Jerry Reed, Monsieur Jerry Reed, presentez-vous à la caisse spéciale à la gauche de la salle. . . .” said a female voice over the P.A. system, barely audible over the tumult, and in incomprehensible French at that. “Jeez, now what am I supposed to—”
“Mr. Jerry Reed, Mr. Jerry Reed, please report to the special-handling booth at the left of the room. . . .”
Jerry broke into a cold sweat. Good Lord, did the long arm of the Pentagon extend this far, just when he thought he was home free?
Woodenly, fearfully, Jerry bulled his way through the crush toward the left side of the room, drawing angry scowls, more than one elbow in the ribs, and getting pinked on the forearm with a lit cigarette.
“Jerry! Jerry! Over here!”
It was André Deutcher’s voice calling out to him. Jerry swam through the crowd toward him, where he stood beside yet another customs booth that Jerry hadn’t noticed before. There was a man inside it who was not wearing a uniform, and a man standing with André who was, although this one was plain black with no insignia; but there was no line of waiting passengers.
“Welcome to France, my friend,” André said. He looked around the reception area with a moue of aristocratic distaste. “Would you please let me have your baggage claim and your passport so we can remove ourselves from this melée?”
Numbly, Jerry handed them over. André handed the baggage claim to the uniformed man, who disappeared with it through the customs booth. “Marcel will see to your baggage,” André said. He handed Jerry’s passport to the plainclothes customs official, who stamped it immediately, handed it to Jerry, said, “Bienvenue à Paris, Monsieur Reed,” and actually gave him a little salute.
André whisked him along a corridor and into a little elevator which speedily deposited them in a hallway that led directly through a private exit to a curb outside the terminal, where a vaguely elliptical black Citröen limousine sat gleaming in the eye-killing bright morning sunshine, all low-slung sweeping, stylized Deco pseudo-streamlining and smoked glass, looking like a Frank R. Paul version of a Martian Mafia don’s flying saucer.
“Super bagnole, eh?” André said, as a liveried chauffeur in a uniform matching Marcel’s emerged from the driver’s seat, and opened the back curbside door for them smartly. “Fuel cell version; we are 90 percent nuclear these days in France, and we have electricity to burn.”
The rear seat was a softly upholstered couch done in deep navy velour, and the carpeting was of the same material, as were the tiny cushioned ottomans upon which to rest one’s feet. Tiny adjustable overhead halogen spotlights bathed each of them in a soft pool of ersatz sunlight. The compartment walls were covered with pastel blue leather set off with chrome brightwork that might actually have been silver plate. Below the sealed window separating them from the front seat, an incongruously cheap-looking little screen and keyboard were built into the plush seatback.
There were sets of dual controls built into each passenger’s armrest. André fiddled with one set, and some kind of subdued electronic pseudo-oriental symphony began playing mellowly in the background. He did something else and laughed when Jerry did a take as a compartment in the seatback before them popped open, revealing the inside of a small refrigerator containing two glasses and a cold bottle of champagne, then snapped shut again.
“Is this thing yours, André?” Jerry exclaimed.
André Deutcher laughed. “Don’t I wish!” he said. “Actually, it’s a diplomatic limousine lent to ESA by the Foreign Ministry for the occasion. After the way you were forced to travel here, we were able to convince them that the honor of France demanded it.”
Amazingly enough, less than ten minutes later, while André was showing him how the videotel in the seatback was both videophone and computer terminal—connecting the car with the phone system, the teletel public data net, and, via access code, with the ESA mainframes too—Marcel appeared with Jerry’s luggage on a little trolley; how he was able to retrieve it with such speed was a bit of magic that somehow impressed Jerry even more than the sail through passport control or this state-of-the-art automotive palace.
“Avanti,” André shouted into thin air as Marcel climbed into the front passenger seat, and the car pulled away from the curb with hardly a lurch and no sound at all that was audible above the low background music.
Soon they were out of the airport and on a highway slicing through verdant green countryside interspersed with fields of dry brown cropped stubble, and it was then it really hit Jerry Reed that he was truly in a foreign country, and not just because the cars and trucks on the road all looked subtly alien and barreled along at incredible high speeds or because the road signs were all in French.
For there was no roadside ticky-tacky at all, no Burger Kings, no Golden Arches, no car lots, no shopping malls and parking lots, no sprawling cheap housing developments, none of the endless suburban crudscape that marked the ride from the airport to any major American city.
And when the Parisian suburbs finally started, it was all at once, as if the car had suddenly crossed a frontier; godawful, they certainly were, but godawful in a way quite different from anything Jerry could have imagined. Blocks of huge apartment houses with balconies from which actual laundry hung drying, gray grim concrete, a lot of it, but a lot of it painted in truly garish pastel colors, sometimes in two or three hideously clashing hues of green and pink and powder purple. And then this gave way to industrial buildings, gasworks, and railyards that might have been anywhere save for the French lettering on the walls, and the billboards that began to appear, flashing bare tits and asses huckstering unknown brands of ambiguous products.
And then the car took a sweeping turn across a bridge, and there it was, faintly visible in the far distance above the ticky-tacky, the unmistakable pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower.
“Et voilà!” André exclaimed, and popped open the refrigerator again, this time withdrawing the champagne bottle and peeling off the gilt foil.
“A little early for me, André,” Jerry muttered in a daze.
“Mais non!” André exclaimed gaily. “For you, it is still late at night in Los Angeles!”
But he waited until the car had turned off the highway and was careening across a huge traffic circle jammed with cars zigging and zagging every which way before he popped the cork. The champagne bubbled up out of the bottle and frothed down it and onto the carpeting. André shrugged and paid the mess no mind. “Good for the carpet as you say in America, oui?” he declared.
And Jerry found himself sitting there in the back of a limousine—careening along through streets packed with traffic, past sidewalk cafés and massively ornate nineteenth-century architecture, sidewalks thronged with people, a city alive with a life and energy he had never experienced before—exhausted, zoned, half asleep, but nevertheless having a high old time getting royally drunk on champagne at eleven o’clock in the morning.
By the time the limousine finally pulled up at the hotel, he was barely able to stand.
“The Ritz,” André told him, as they exited the car amid an absolute swarm of doormen and bellmen. “Hemingway and all that, a bit theatrical, peut-être, but we thought you might find it amusing.”
It was the understatement of Jerry Reed’s life. He was ushered into a reception area that seemed like a palace set for an old Cecil B. DeMille movie, into an elevator out of the same film, and into a room . . . into a room . . .
“Holy shit. . . .” Jerry sighed as André tipped the bellman and closed the door behind them.
The room was enormous. There was a brass bed, and a lavishly furnished sitting area separated from it by brocaded curtains. There was a table heaped with baskets of flowers and fruit and trays of petits fours and a silver tray holding a crystal bowl of caviar with all the fixings. There was a fully stocked bar with a refrigerator and a sink. The ceilings were covered with plaster floral-work painted in garish full color, and the moldings were all gilt braid, and the walls were papered in red and gold and blue velvet flocking, and hung all over with original oil paintings in heavy complicated frames. “My God, I feel like I’m sneaking into some royal bedroom. . . .” Jerry muttered.
André Deutcher laughed. “I know what you mean,” he said. “Nothing exceeds like excess. See a movie, be a movie, as someone once said.”
He went over to the floor-to-ceiling windows, drew the drapes, and opened them vertically like a pair of doors, and with a little bow, ushered Jerry out through them onto a little balcony. “However,” he said, “this is the real Paris.”
Jerry stepped shakily out onto the balcony into the warming morning sunlight. From this vantage he could see far out across the low rooftops of the city to the shining waters of the Seine beyond the treetops of some intervening garden. Traffic buzzed across ornate stone bridges. Bright sunlight through an occasional dappling of shadows from fleecy white clouds illumined the famous Left Bank like a picture postcard of itself, and way off to the right the Eiffel Tower proclaimed the fabled cityscape’s identity.
It was a view that everyone in the world had probably seen a thousand times, a cliché landscape of a cinematic city. But there was a subliminal music in the air and a subtly alien heady perfume wafting to his nostrils that told his backbrain that, no, this was no painting on black velvet, this was no picture postcard, this was no movie.
This was utterly unexpected. This was overwhelmingly beautiful and overwhelmingly real. He could smell it, and taste it, and hear its song calling to him.
“It is said,” said André Deutcher, “that every man has two hometowns. The place he was born and Paris.”
In a way that he doubted André could fully understand, Jerry Reed, American, space cadet, stood there drinking in the marvelous unexpected alien wonder of it all, and knew, somehow, that it was true, dangerously and wonderfully true.
And knew as well in that moment that this would be no mere three-week freebie vacation. Knew that there were temptations here that could change his life forever.
Knew somehow that it had been changed already.