A World of Difference (33 page)

For another, he was doing, actually doing, something every Soviet officer dreamed of and planned for. He was marching to war against the Americans, in a place where they had no nuclear weapons to make life difficult.

So, he whistled.

Fralk turned an eyestalk toward him. “How do you make that peculiar noise, Oleg Borisovich?” the Minervan asked in good Russian.

“You just pucker your lips and—” Lopatin began in the same
language. Then he remembered who—and what—he was talking to. “Never mind,” he said lamely, switching to the Skarmer tongue. “Your mouth, mine not same.”

Fralk sighed. “No, I suppose not.” Even so, a minute or so later he sent air hissing up and out through his mouth. It did not sound like whistling; it sounded like a steam valve with a leak, Lopatin thought. The sight of Fralk’s breath smoking out would have completed the illusion, but Fralk’s breath did not smoke. It was too cold.

The KGB man found another reason to be glad he was marching—he stayed warmer this way.

He passed Minervans practicing their paddling on boats set down by the side of the road. They were none too efficient at best; when they turned three or four eyestalks—and their concentration—on the human instead of their job, they grew positively ragged. Unlike Lopatin, they would not freeze in moments if their coracles flipped them into the icy water now rushing through Jötun Canyon. Also unlike him, though, none of them could swim a stroke.

He expected a good many to drown on the way across. That was too bad, but it could not be helped. Fralk and Hogram, he knew, felt the same way, or they never would have tried crossing the canyon in the first place. And Fralk was also forethoughtful enough to have got the best paddlers in the whole force for his boat.

Had Fralk not come up with that idea for himself, Lopatin would have suggested it. He was going into that coracle, too. But Fralk was no one’s fool. When it came to self-interest, Minervans and humans thought very much alike.

The roar of the torrent in Jötun Canyon had filled Lopatin’s ears all day. He was starting to screen it out, as he did the city noise of Moscow. Now he let himself hear it again. The irregular grind of ice on ice that was part of the racket made him frown. Even the best paddlers might not save him.

That thought came back to haunt him as he peered down from the rim of the canyon and saw through swirling snow the cakes of ice flowing by. He wondered whether Fralk was also full of second thoughts.

More likely, the Minervan was too busy to have time for them. Gangs of males had been laboring to smooth and widen the path down to the water since before the flood began. Even so, it was none too smooth and none too wide. It was also steep and icy. Getting warriors down to where they could cross the stream was
no easy job. Getting the boats down there was worse. Lopatin was glad all that was Fralk’s problem, not his.

To give him his due, Fralk was as ready as anyone trying something for the first time could be. The changeovers of the rope crews had been planned with almost balletic precision. Moving the boats along was not the problem it had been on the trek from Hogram’s town. Keeping them from taking off on their own and sliding into the water without any warriors in them, however, presented problems of its own.

Though his own engineering talents were electronic rather than mechanical, Lopatin admired the solution Fralk and his comrades had come up with. At the top of the canyon, most of the boat-pullers abruptly turned into boat-holders, moving behind their burdens to control them and stop them from running away.

The KGB man clicked off several pictures, fast as the auto-winder would let him. He wished he had
Tsiolkovsky
’s video camera with him, but understood why Tolmasov had said no. Both in the water and across it, he was going into real, serious danger—taking the precious camera along would have risked it as well.

But the stills he was getting could only suggest the smooth discipline of the maneuvers the warriors were carrying out. Ballet was not quite the right comparison after all, Lopatin decided after watching for a few minutes. The groups of males working together reminded him more of public Komsomol displays of mass exercises.

One of Fralk’s constantly twisting eyestalks happened to light on Lopatin. “Oleg Borisovich, you should be on your way down, not gawking up here,” the Minervan scolded.

The Russian felt his face grow hot, snow flurries or no. “You are right, eldest of eldest,” he said formally. “I apologize.” Hoping the spiked soles of his boots would hold, he started down the slope.

“Careful, there,” he heard Fralk yell behind him. “No, no, no, don’t foul the ropes, you spawn of a spavined eloc. Come around
this
way. There—better, isn’t it?” The general as traffic cop, Lopatin thought, smiling.

In spite of wearing spikes, he soon came to envy the Minervan males their six legs. They could slip the claws on their toes into the tiniest cracks in the roadway to anchor themselves. And even if they fell, they had six arms with which to reach out and grab something. Don’t fall, he told himself grimly, and tramped on.

Fralk hurried past him. Instead of shouting at males getting ready to maneuver boats down the path, now the Minervan was shouting at the males who were starting to put boats into the water. “No, you idiot! Keep the rope attached! Keep it—”

Too late. The boat was already sliding downstream. The warriors who had let it get away stared at it with a couple of eyestalks and apprehensively back at Fralk with the rest. He screamed abuse at them. Lopatin chuckled. He did not understand even half of what Fralk was yelling, but anyone who had ever soldiered recognized the tone.

One of the males past whom Lopatin was marching wiggled his eyestalks at the human. Even in an alien species, Lopatin could tell this was a veteran: his spears and shields were old and battered, not shiny new ones like those most of the warriors carried, and pale scars seamed his hide.

“Taught that little budling everything he knows about fighting, I did: me, Juksal,” the male said. “Even sounds like a warrior now, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, and a leader of warriors,” Lopatin agreed.

“Taught him everything he knows about fighting,” Juksal repeated. The Minervan boasted like a veteran, too, the KGB man thought. Lopatin had listened to more stories about the Great Patriotic War than he ever wanted to remember. Almost all of them, a security man’s automatic cynicism told him, were lies.

He was drawing near the boats at the makeshift landing when he happened to recall a piece of a war story he had thought long forgotten. The fellow who told it was a Stalingrad survivor and had the campaign ribbon to prove it. “The worst of the worst times,” he had said, “was when the Germans had us pinned back against the Volga and the drift ice on the river made it damn near impossible to get supplies across to us.”

Loptin looked at the chunks of ice floating by, looked at the coracle to which he was about to entrust his precious, irreplaceable neck. He wished—oh, how he wished!—he had never remembered that story.

Emmet Bragg frowned as he examined the latest photo from one of the weather and mapping satellites
Athena
had left in orbit around Minerva. Emmet had a whole spectrum of frowns, Irv thought—this one went with real live serious problems. “What’s hit the fan?” Irv asked.

“I’m not quite sure,” Emmett answered; the frown changed
shape, to reflect his uncertainty. “Here, see what you make of this.” He leaned over to show Irv the picture, pointing with a ballpoint pen at the part that was troubling him. “This dark line here?” Irv asked.

Emmet nodded. “That’s the one. Nothing like it on any earlier pictures o’ that area. That’s the country just west of Jötun Canyon from here, you know.”

“I recognized it.” Irv peered at the picture. Now he was frowning, too. “What do you suppose this is?”

“A lousy picture, for one thing, through scattered clouds and without enough resolution. I wish we had a Defense Department special instead of these miserable terrain-mappers—that’d tell us what was what.”

“Back when we set out, who’d have thought we’d need to be able to kibitz at card games from space?” Irv asked reasonably.

“Nobody, worse luck,” Emmett answered. “But I wish somebody had, because one of the things that line could be is the Skarmer army headed out to do its thing.”

Irv felt his frown deepen till it matched the one Emmet was wearing. “Yeah, it could, couldn’t it? They could be doing something else just as easily, too, though, or it might not be Minervans at all.”

“I know, I know, I know.” Bragg looked unhappy. “A spy bird would tell us, one way or the other. As is, all I can do is guess, and I hate that.” The mission commander sat brooding for a minute or so, then snatched at the radio set.

“Who are you calling?” Irv asked.

“Frank,” Emmett said. He spoke into the microphone: “Frank? You there? Answer, please.”

A moment later, Frank Marquard did. “Your humble canyon-crawler is here, humbly crawling his canyon. Found another fossil about twenty minutes ago, too. What’s up, Emmett?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I think maybe the Skarmer are coming. If they are, they’ll be heading up our side of Jötun Canyon. I don’t think you want to be there when they do.”

“Are you certain they’re coming?” Frank asked. “I’m further north than I’ve been before, and I’ve found some interesting strata here, things that don’t poke through down by
Athena
. I don’t want to leave if I don’t have to.”

“I’m not sure,” Bragg said, looking as though the admission pained him. He always looked that way when certainty eluded him, Irv thought.

“Then I’m not leaving,” Frank said.

Bragg made a fist, pounded it against his knee. He glanced over toward Irv. Order him back, the anthropologist thought. But before he could speak, Bragg turned back to the microphone. “You be alert out there, you hear me?” he said.

“Sure I will,” Frank said. “We need more lerts.”

“Not a good time for jokes,” Bragg said with a snort. “I mean it.
Athena
out.” He was shaking his head as he put down the mike. “Lerts.”

“If it’s not right there in front of him, Frank doesn’t worry about it,” Irv said. He thought of Pat’s bitter words the night after Sarah had flown across Jötun Canyon. He had done his best to avoid thinking of that night ever since or thinking of Pat in anything but a purely professional way. Most of the time, that worked pretty well. For a moment, though, even his skin remembered how she had felt in his arms.

“Yeah, I know,” Emmett said, bringing Irv back to the here-ahd-now. “But I can’t make him come in just on account of my vapors. He’s got his job to do, down there in the canyon.”

“I suppose so,” Irv said. He sounded halfhearted, even to himself.

Bragg looked at him. “You, too, huh?”

“Yeah. Logically, though, you’re right. Don’t misunderstand me, Emmett.” Walking in front of a train was surer trouble than getting on Emmett Bragg’s bad side. Offhand, Irv could not think of much else.

“Yeah, logically.” Bragg grunted. “Then why don’t I like it?”

The KGB studied Disneyland because visiting Soviet dignitaries liked to go there. One of the attractions, Lopatin had learned from a friend, was something called “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.” Never having read
The Wind in the Willows
, Lopatin did not know much about this Mr. Toad, but he was sure the ride he was taking was wild enough to horrify any amphibian ever hatched.

The coracle tossed in the surge like a toy boat in a bathtub with a rambunctious three-year-old. All the Minervans in it were blue with fright. Could Lopatin have changed color, he would have been blue, too. He wondered if Tolmasov had let him go along in the hope he would drown, and thought of ways he could get revenge even on a Hero of the Soviet Union when he got back to Earth.

If he
got back to Earth. At the moment, he would not have
given a counterfeit kopeck for his chances of making it to the far side of Jötun Canyon, let alone home again. Two boulders of ice had already missed the boat by a lot less than he cared to think about; he had fended off another one, fortunately smaller, with a pole.

And his coracle was luckier than many. One of the chunks of iceberg that just missed it smashed a boat a little further downstream. Minervans splashed into the water as the coracle instantly turned to kindling. A couple of warriors managed to hang on to floating debris; the rest simply disappeared.

Even if he managed to grab something, Lopatin knew, he would quickly perish; this temporary river was frigid as the waters around Vladivostok in December. There, at least, the Minervans had the advantage on him. To them, any liquid water was warm. They might drown, but they would not freeze. A dubious distinction, he thought.

The spray blowing in his face had already left his nose numb. And when he bent down to scoop water from the bottom of the coracle, the cold bit into his fingers through the heavy gloves he was wearing. His feet had also started to freeze.

Lopatin was bending to bail again when Fralk screamed, “Paddle! Paddle hard for your lives!” The KGB man jerked erect. A veritable ice mountain was bearing down on the boat.

“Mother of God!” Lopatin shouted. He had called on the devil’s relatives often enough in his career, but could not remember the last time he had named any of the Deity’s. Luckily the Minervans, unlike his comrades, would not notice.

He grabbed a paddle from one of the males, jammed it into the water again and again. He did not know whether he was a better paddler than the warrior but could not bear to depend only on the efforts of others for his survival. Slowly, so slowly, the coracle moved ahead. The blue-white slab of ice, sailing along as majestically as a dowager queen, took no notice of the artificial insect in its path.

The Minervan whose paddle Lopatin had taken let out a shrill scream of terror and leapt overboard. The rest of the locals, along with the KGB man, dug in even harder. Lopatin refused to look up; he would risk nothing that might distract him from his desperate rhythm.

Were they gaining? He almost tried not to believe it, for fear of slacking. But surely that mass of ice was not headed straight at the coracle anymore. Surely … The wave the ice mountain
pushed ahead of itself lifted up the boat’s stern; Lopatin tried to tell himself he was imagining the wind of its passage.