Russian Spring Read Online Free PDF

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 Worldcountry, 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