A World of Difference (2 page)

“Now who sounds like me?” Pat said, and poked him in the ribs. “That’s what I said a minute ago. You should spend more time with Sarah; then you and she would be echoing each other.”

“She’s asleep back there. Doing the last set of bloods and getting the data back to Houston took longer than she thought it would—that glitch showed up in the software again.” Sarah Levitt was an M.D. who specialized in biochemistry but was out of med school recently enough not to have forgotten what people were all about, either: a natural for
Athena
. For that matter, Irv knew that being married to her had not hurt his own chances.

“By now, everyone on this ship sounds like everybody else,” Frank said.

“In a pig’s ear we do.” Emmett Bragg glided through the cabin like a shark sliding through a tropical lagoon. If ever a man was made for free-fall, Irv thought for the hundredth time, Emmett Bragg was the one. The pilot was close to fifty, a decade
older than anyone else aboard
Athena
, and the only real astronaut on the crew. Before NASA, he had flown Phantoms in Vietnam. Once he had stayed loose on the ground for three days until a chopper got him out after his plane went down south of Haiphong.

Frank laughed. “Nobody wants to imitate that mouthful of grits you talk through, Emmett. What do the Russians think of it, anyway?”

Still without a wasted motion, Bragg strapped himself into the commander’s seat. “Matter of fact, the accent interests ’em. One of ’em said to me once I sounded like I was from Georgia. I told him, naw, Alabama.”

Frank snorted, and Pat giggled.

“He meant Stalin country, Emmett, not where the Braves play,” Irv said.

“I know,” Bragg said calmly. “But it doesn’t hurt any to have the boys on the other side take you for a natural-born fool.” He checked the radar screen. A blip was showing: the
Tsiolkovsky
, coming up over the Minervan horizon.

“Right on time,” Levitt said.

Bragg nodded. “They haven’t been playing with their orbit again, anyhow.” He had worn a crew cut when it was stylish, kept it through the years when it wasn’t, and still had it now that it was in again. The only difference was that gray streaked it now. He picked up the radio mike.
“Zdrast’ye, Tsiolkovsky,”
he said, and went on in Russian that was accented but fluent. “All well aboard?”

“Very well, thank you, Brigadier Bragg.” Colonel Sergei Tolmasov sounded like an Oxford don. Just as the Americans used Russian to talk to the Soviet ship, the crew of the
Tsiolkovsky
always replied in English. Tolmasov’s dry wit went well with the slightly fussy precision he brought to the language. “Good to find you in your expected place, old fellow.”

“We were thinking the same thing about you,” Bragg said.

The
Tsiolkovsky
had changed orbits several times in the week since it and
Athena
had reached Minerva. Had each burn not taken place on the far side of the planet from
Athena
, Levitt would have been happier about believing the Russians when they said the maneuvers were just to enhance their observations. As things were, he had not been sorry when Bragg also started jinking. “Let them worry, too,” the pilot had said.

Now Tolmasov remarked, “I will be glad when we are all on the ground, and this foolish maneuvering can cease.”

“Agreed,” Bragg said at once. “We’ll be too busy cheating the natives to worry so much about each other.”

“Ah—quite,” Tolmasov replied after a moment’s pause. “There are times, Brigadier, when I must confess myself uncertain as to how facetious you are being.
Tsiolkovsky
out.”

Bragg chuckled. “Sometimes I wonder myself, Sergei Konstantinovich.
Athena
out.” When the mike was dead, he fell back into English. “The other thing I wonder about is whether all this back-and-forth with the Russians will end up making a full-time liar out of me.”

“ ‘Too busy cheating the natives,’ ” Tolmasov echoed. “I like that. I only wish I could believe it.”

“We should send a recording of that remark back to Baikonur,” said Oleg Lopatin, the only other Russian in the control room when Tolmasov spoke to
Athena
. “It shows how the Americans are already planning to exploit the people of Minerva.”

“He was just joking, Oleg Borisovich,” Tolmasov said. His Russian did not share the arid perfection of his English.

Lopatin’s heavy eyebrows came down in a frown. “You did not seem so certain of that when you were talking with him.”

“Never show all you know,” Tolmasov said. He did not bother pointing out that that also applied to his dealings with Lopatin, who was KGB. Tolmasov sighed. Things being as they were, that was inevitable. At least Lopatin was also a perfectly able electronics engineer and, by Russian standards, computer man. That gave him some real use aboard
Tsiolkovsky
, aside from his value to Moscow.

Tolmasov looked around the control room and sighed again. He knew that, with its round analog dials instead of slick digital readouts, it would have seemed old-fashioned to Bragg. The panels full of glowing green numbers he had seen in pictures and tapes of
Athena
and other American spacecraft seemed—what was the American slang?—glitzy to him. All what you’re used to, he thought.

But he did envy his opposite number the computer power under those panels. Every one of
Tsiolkovsky
’s orbit-changing burns had been calculated back on Earth.
Athena
, he was sure, had figured its own. Partly that was a difference in approach. Ever since the earliest days, the Soviet space program had relied more heavily on ground control than the Americans.

The technology gap did exist, though. The big Russian boosters
let
Tsiolkovsky
carry a lot more weight to Minerva than
Athena
could. The engineering on the life-support system was solid, or he wouldn’t be here worrying. But Bragg had a lot more data-processing capacity than he did, and down on Minerva there would be nothing but data to process. He worried some more.

While he was at it, Tolmasov spent a little while worrying about Bragg. Envy mixed in with the worry there, too. The colonel was out of Frontal Aviation; his flight experience before being tapped for cosmonaut training was all in MiG-27s and other attack aircraft. Without false modesty, he knew he was good. But he had never seen combat; he had left his squadron a few months before they flew against the Sixth Fleet’s Tomcats during the Third Beirut Crisis. He wondered how much difference that made.

Not much, he tried to tell himself. He had done everything but. Still, Russian and English both had a word for somebody who had done everything but sleep with a girl. The word was virgin.

That turned Tolmasov’s mind in another direction. He smoothed his short, light brown hair. It was not as neatly trimmed, of course, as it had been when
Tsiolkovsky
set out from Earth orbit. Eight months of amateur barbering had left everyone on the ship a little ragged. Tolmasov knew, though, that ragged or not he still kept his good looks: like so many Russians, he had a face that would somehow contrive to seem boyish and open until he was well into his fifties. And those evil days, fortunately, were a good many years away yet.

He gave his attention back to Lopatin. “I’m going aft for some rest, Oleg Borisovich. Call me at once if anything unusual happens, or if there is any unscheduled communication from Earth.”

“Of course,” Lopatin said. “Rest well.”

His voice held no irony. Even with curtains, even with a bigger ship than
Athena
, privacy hardly existed aboard
Tsiolkovsky
. Tolmasov missed it less than most Americans would have. He had grown up with a brother and three sisters in a two-bedroom apartment in Smolensk, and his father was not badly off. It was, he realized wryly as he pulled himself from handhold to handhold down the corridor to the laboratory, good practice for the life of a cosmonaut.

He heard a centrifuge whir and looked into one of the chambers. “Well, Doctor,” he said, smiling, as he glided in. “Are
we healthy?” The question was a way to start a conversation, but also seriously meant: if anything was wrong, Tolmasov needed to know about it right away.

Dr. Zakharova checked a reading, squinted, checked again, then nodded. “Healthy enough, after so much free-fall. The new calcium supplement seems better than the last one we tried.”

“That’s good, Katerina Fyodorovna. I’m glad to hear it.” Again, Tolmasov felt his words bearing two meanings. He was not looking forward to being under gravity again—even less so if he and his comrades suffered more than they had to from the weakened bones brought on by prolonged weightlessness. Moreover … “Have your tests reached a point where you can stop for a while?”

The doctor raised an eyebrow and smiled a little. “I think so,” she said. She was a small, dark woman with startling blue eyes. Tolmasov was no longer sure whether she really was pretty. As the only woman on
Tsiolkovsky
, by now she looked good to him—and, he was sure, to the other four men in the crew.

Afterward, in his cabin, they sat in midair, her legs still wrapped around his back. Free-fall did not have many advantages, but sex was one of them. Tolmasov kept a grip on a handhold, so he and Katerina would not drift out through the curtain into the corridor. “A pleasant way to pass the time,” he said.

“I’m glad you think so.” She raised that eyebrow again.

He’d expected her to; after so long, few surprises were left between crew members. It had to be a lot like being married, he thought.

That brought
Athena
, always in the back of his mind, up to the front. The Americans had tried to solve the problem of sexual tension by putting three married couples aboard. They hailed it as a triumph of equality. Tolmasov could not see that—he doubted any combination of couples would get the Americans’ best people to Minerva. And Minerva was too important for anything less than the best.

The Soviet selection boards had thought as he did. If that meant life aboard
Tsiolkovsky
sometimes got complicated, too bad. Fortunately, Katerina was as fine a woman—as fine a person—as she was a physician. He wondered if the boards had chosen her for that, too. Probably not, he decided. Otherwise they would never have come up with Igor Lopatin.

He grimaced. Had Katerina been as crabbed and dour as the
engineer, life aboard
Tsiolkovsky
would have been a lot worse than complicated. It would have been intolerable, and maybe dangerous. He ran a grateful hand down the smooth skin of her back, glad she favored him at the moment.

She stirred and detached herself from him. “Now,” she said, “back to work.” She retrieved her underpants and coverall from the little bag where she had stowed them. Tolmasov used a tissue to mop liquid out of the air. Katerina chuckled. “To the head first, then back to work,” she amended with a doctor’s practicality. As soon as she was dressed, she slipped out of the cubicle and away.

Tolmasov put his clothes back on more slowly. It was not animal lassitude; he was too disciplined to let that affect him. Calculation played a much bigger part in it. Someone besides Oleg Lopatin, he was sure, had KGB connections. That was the way things were. Katerina made the most obvious choice: if anyone on the ship could find out everything that was going on, she was the one.

Of course, the KGB did not have a reputation for being obvious. Tolmasov let out a snort of laughter. If Katerina was not what he suspected her to be, she doubtless had suspicions about him.

A drop of water fell from the castle ceiling onto Reatur’s head. He extended an eyestalk and stared balefully upward at the ice. Was it starting to drip already? Plainly, it was. Summer was coming.

Reatur was not happy about summer: It would be too hot; it always was. Most of the tools made of ice would melt; they always did. The domain-master would have to see to getting the stone tools out of storage, as he did toward the end of every spring.

He did not like stone tools. They were hard to make and expensive to buy. His peasants did not like them, either. They were heavier than ice and tiring to use in the fields. He wished he lived in a land with a better climate, where ice stayed ice the year around.

Even his castle’s thick walls would drip and trickle all summer long. He remembered the really scorching summer—how long ago was it? Seven years, that was it—when big chunks of the roof had melted and fallen in. Lucky his domain had been at peace then, and lucky the collapse had killed only mates.

Reatur’s eldest son Ternat came into the great hall, breaking
his chain of thought. Ternat thickened his body so the top of his head was lower than the top of Reatur’s. “You are respectful,” the domain-master said, pleased, “but I know you are taller than I.”

“Yes, clanfather.” Ternat resumed his natural height. “A male from the great clan of Skarmer waits outside. He would have speech with you.”

“Would he?” Air hissed out through the breathing-pores under Reatur’s eyestalks. “I wonder what he wants.” Visits from the males who lived on the west side of the Ervis Gorge were never casual affairs; the gorge was too hard to cross for anything but serious business to be worthwhile. “Bring him in.”

“Yes, clanfather.” Ternat hurried away. He was eldest, but he knew better than to do anything without his father’s leave. One day, if he outlived Reatur, he would be clanfather himself, and domain-master. Till then, he was as much in his father’s power as a just-budded mate.

He led the Skarmer male up to the domain-master. The westerner politely widened himself before Reatur, though like most of his people he was already the shorter and rounder of the two. That peculiar combination of plump body and long eyestalks always made the males from west of the gorge look sneaky to Reatur.

Still widened, the Skarmer male said in trade talk, “I bring my clanfather Hogram’s greetings to you, domain-master, and those of all the domains sprung from the Skarmer bud. I am named Fralk; I am eldest of eldest of Hogram.”

Reatur felt like hissing again but refused to let this Fralk see his surprise. Not only did the westerner have plenipotentiary power—Reatur was not even sure how many domains there were on the far side of the gorge—but he was also in line to become clanfather of his domain.