Russian Spring Read Free

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 bulkyfigure 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