A World of Difference (6 page)

“Damnation!” Bragg seldom swore; Irv could not remember his doing so twice in the space of a couple of minutes. The pilot twisted in his seat as if it were a cage and his shoulder harness bars.

Seconds crawled by on hands and knees. They had been going by slowly enough already, but watching Bragg writhe made Irv wonder if time itself was holding its breath. The last time he had felt that way, he had been walking up the aisle toward Sarah and the rabbi.

“One minute … thirty seconds …” Somehow, Louise Bragg’s words kept coming out at normal speed, no matter how much everything else was slowed down. Irv wondered how she managed that. Then she was going, “Two … one … ignition.”

“Ignition!” her husband said savagely. He stabbed at the button. The engines came to life, kicking
Athena
out of orbit and down tail-first toward the world waiting below.

“Kicking” was the word, Irv thought. He gasped for breath, fighting against the gorilla that seemed to have landed on his chest. After so long without weight, having it back was anything but welcome.

“Have the Russians started their burn?” Bragg asked. He sounded the same as always, Irv noticed a little resentfully.

“Yes.” His wife had to work to get the word out.

“Just have to really fly this baby, then,” Bragg muttered. He worked the attitude controls.

“You put the tail up too high for optimum reentry,” Louise said. “We’ll build up extra heat.”

“We’ll get down faster, though. I’ll watch the skin temp, don’t worry.”

“So will I, don’t worry,” his wife answered. The effort she needed to talk made her sound even grimmer than she would have otherwise.

Sarah glanced over at Irv. “Hell of a time for Emmett to play like he’s Richard Petty,” she said. Irv admired her for trying to joke, but saw the worry in her eyes. He was surprised to find how relaxed he was, in spite of his discomfort. Bragg had flown against MiG-17s and glide-landed a shuttle twice. Compared to flying like that, getting
Athena
down should be a piece of cake.

Unless something goes wrong, a small voice said inside his head. Shut up, he told it. To his relief, it did.

“Temperature is up a little,” Louise said. “We’re starting to get into the atmosphere.”

Her husband glanced at the gauge, then at the radar altimeter. “Still well inside specs. The carbon-fiber matrix can take more than shuttle tiles, and having a machine with a skin all in one piece means we don’t need to worry about spending our Minerva time gluing those little suckers back into place.”

Now there, Irv thought, was a really alarming notion.

A thin whistle began to fill the cabin and rose toward a shriek. “I thought by now I knew every noise
Athena
could make,” Pat Marquard said nervously.

“It isn’t
Athena,”
Frank answered. “It’s Minerva—the wind of our passage.” His voice held awe. Irv understood why. No one but they—and half a dozen Russians, some unknown number of miles away—had heard the wind of another world.

His wife thought of something else. “I wonder what the Minervans will make of our noise coming down.”

“When the shuttles landed at Edwards, we’d hear the boom in L.A.,” Pat said. “And that’s without the noise from the ramjet and turbojet sections of our motor.”

Emmett Bragg chuckled. “They’ll be hiding under their beds, if they have beds. And speaking of ramjets—” He checked the altimeter again and
Athena
’s velocity. “We’re low enough and slow enough to fire it up and save our liquid oxygen for the trip back up. I’m shutting down the lox pump, Louise.”

“Acknowledged,” she said. A moment later, she added, “First time I ever heard Mach six called slow.”

“Next to what we’ve been doing, honey, it’s just a mosey in the park.”

Irv sided with Louise. Mach six was no mosey, so far as he was concerned. Despite aggressive soundproofing, the noise was up, too. The pump was no longer thumping and clacking away, but the shriek of Minervan air coming in through the ramjet inlet more than made up for that. It reminded Irv of a dentist’s drill the size of Baltimore. His teeth cringed at the very idea.

His seat was padded and contoured, but he still felt as though he weighed tons. “Are we really sure Minerva’s gravity is only a couple of percent higher than ours?” he asked plaintively. “Or are we still decelerating?”

“Yes, we’re sure and yes, we are,” Emmett replied, but before Irv had a chance to be relieved, the mission commander went on. “But not enough to do anything about our weight.” He sounded amused.

Irv groaned. So did Frank.

Sarah felt strong enough to raise an arm and point to the monitor. “We just passed something big. A castle, a temple, a barracks—”

“Could be anything,” Irv agreed. “I wish we knew more about where the Minervans are technologically. They don’t have atomic energy and they don’t have radio, but there’s a lot of difference between where we were in 2000
B.C
. and in 1890.”

“Or in 22,000
B.C
.,” Emmett put in. He enjoyed sticking pins in people to make them jump.

This time it didn’t work. Irv had the facts to shoot him down. “No big buildings in 22,000
B.C
.,” he said smugly. Then he shut up as another whatever-it-was went by on the screen. Clouds blurred the view, but he still recognized the pattern on the ground surrounding the building. “Those are fields down there!”

“You’re right,” Pat said. “You see those grooved circles in the middle of nowhere when you fly over irrigated farms in desert country.”

“But the lines—plow marks, would those be, Irv?” Sarah said.

“On Earth, sure. Here, who knows?” he answered.

“The lines aren’t straight,” she observed. “What does that mean?”

“Maybe contour plowing. Maybe the Minervans don’t know what straight lines are. That’s what we’re here to find out.”

Emmett said, “Yeah!” as
Athena
flew over a pair of volcanoes with glaciers snaking down from their peaks. “Those are Smaug and Ancalagon,” he added. “Now I know where we are. We need to head just a touch further east.” He made the adjustment.

They flew lower and lower, slower and slower. As they dropped below 45,000 feet and Mach one, Emmett cut in the turbines. The engines went from a shriek to a full-throated roar. “This is your pilot speaking,” Bragg said. “Thank you for flying Minerva Air. The cabin attendants will be starting the movie shortly. Please keep your seat belts fastened.”

“
Athena
does sound just like a 747 now, doesn’t she?” Irv said; the mission commander’s deadpan, dead perfect delivery made him realize consciously what he had been feeling in his bones. Not even a first-class seat on a big jet, though, had the padding and room this one did. On the other hand, airline passengers didn’t need so much, either.

“How’s she handle, Emmett?” Frank asked. He had flown
light planes before he went into astronaut training, and T-38 jet trainers since. If anything happened to Bragg, he would try to get
Athena
home. Neither he nor anyone else relished the prospect.

Bragg thought for a moment before he answered. “Depends on what you’re comparing it to. It’s no fighter, but it’s a long way from being a mildly aerodynamic brick like the shuttle, too.”

“More like fun, or more like work?” Marquard persisted.

“In space it’s fun. Here it’s work, but not pick-and-shovel work. White collar, you might say. I’m not really dressed for it.” Grinning, he ran his hand down the front of the blue NASA coverall.

“Where’s
Tsiolkovsky?
” Pat asked.

Louise Bragg checked the radar. “Well west of us, and a couple of miles higher.”

Everyone in the cabin whooped—none of them wanted the Russians to beat them down. “In Baikonur our name is cursed, when they find out we landed first!” Irv sang, mangling Tom Lehrer in a good cause.

“I wonder what they think of our bearing,” Louise said. “Why aren’t they calling to ask us about it?”

“They figure we screwed up,” her husband guessed. “Tolmasov’s just gonna let us. Sitting in his chair, I’d do the exact same thing.”

Sarah was still watching the monitor. She gasped. “Will you
look
at that?” Other gasps followed shortly.

Irv had seen plenty of pictures of Jötun Canyon taken from space. He had flown over the Grand Canyon half a dozen times. Neither did anything to prepare him for what he was seeing. Jötun Canyon was a great gouge on the face of the world. Three miles deep, a dozen miles across, even at jet speeds it took a minute and a half to cross.

“That’s my spot,” Frank declared. “Just start me at the edge, give me plenty of rope, and let me work my way down. If Jötun doesn’t cut through a billion and a half years of stratigraphy, I’ll eat my hat.”

Bragg flew
Athena
south along the eastern rim of the canyon. “We swing inland when it jogs southwest,” he said. “Then we start looking for a place to set down.” He laughed a couple of syllables’ worth of laugh. “After the shuttle, that looking-around time is a luxury.”

They were down very low now, low enough to see individual
trees—if those tall, dark green, stationary things were trees—in the forests. Snow clung to them, though summer was about to start.

The canyon changed direction. Bragg flew
Athena
away from it. In a couple of minutes, he flew over some little rolling hills. Seeing them made Irv sit up, even against gravity’s new and unpleasant grip. He was not the only one who recognized them. “That’s where
Viking
set down!” Pat exclaimed.

“Sure does look that way,” Bragg agreed. He flew on. Before long, he flew over another one of the large buildings and the fields that surrounded it. “Hate to rip a half-mile track in a fellow’s crop,” he said, “but I don’t think we’re gonna do any better. Anybody really want to try talking me out of it?”

Irv thought about it, but in the end he didn’t.
Athena
, he hoped, would be strange enough—and big enough—to win the humans the benefit of the doubt. Nobody else said anything, either.

“All right,” Bragg said. “I’m gonna do it. Let’s go around for one more pass to kill some speed and get nice and lined up, and then we land.”

Athena
was so close to the ground that on the monitor Irv saw things moving around down there. Things … He felt the hair on his arms and the back of his neck tingle as the realization hit him. Those were not
things
. Those were
Minervans
.

“Altitude 500 feet, speed 320,” Louise said as her husband swung
Athena
down. “Three hundred feet, speed 300 … 200 feet, speed 290.”

“Arming the landing gear,” Emmett said. He lifted the switch’s cover, pushed it to the
ON
position.

Louise’s reading never paused. “A hundred fifty feet, speed 260 …”

“Deploying landing gear.” Emmett uncovered and pushed the switch next to the one he had just hit.
Athena
really seemed a plane to Irv now; the noises and bumps as the wheels came down were the same as the ones he knew from Delta jets.

“Ninety feet, speed 240 …”

“Landing gear down and locked.” Bragg hesitated, then bared his teeth in what was almost a smile. “We owe the Russians this one—the undercarriage is borrowed from the Ilyushin I1-76. There’s no better big plane in the world for getting in and out of unpaved fields.”

“Fifty feet, speed 230 … 20 feet, speed 220 …”

There was a jar. “Down! Hot damn, we’re down!” Bragg
said exultantly. “Wheels locked,” he added a moment later. He reached out with his left hand and slammed the speed brake all the way forward.

“I hope you have something more historic than, ‘Hot damn, we’re down!’ planned for when we step outside,” Sarah remarked as they bounced along the ground.

“Did I say that?” Bragg sounded amazed.

So was Irv, at how gentle the landing was. He had experienced bumpier ones at Dulles. “Let’s hear it for Russian undercarriages,” he said.

They rolled to a stop. Pat was looking at an instrument cluster that had not had much to do since it was installed. “Temperature 39 degrees, humidity 48 percent, wind out of the south at … six knots. A lovely almost-summer day,” she finished.

“If you’re an ice cube,” Irv said.

Emmett Bragg was on the radio. “Houston, this is
Athena
. We contacted the surface of Minerva at 2:46:35
P.M
. Landing extremely nominal. Baby, it’s cold outside.
Athena
out.”

He got up and walked back to a panel just aft of the cabin. He might have been on parade; he conceded nothing to so many months of free-fall. Irv watched admiringly. Soon enough, he would have to start walking, too. He was in no hurry about it.

Like the meteorology package, the panel Bragg opened had not been important while
Athena
was in space. Now it was. The mission commander started taking out parkas, snow pants, boots, headgear … and pistols and ammunition pouches.

“Just in case,” he said, holding them up. “Time to go meet the natives.”

The scream in the sky faded a little—enough to let Reatur hear other screams in the castle. The mates and new-budded males were making an unholy racket. So were a good many adults. Reatur did not blame them. Were he without a domain-master’s dignity to uphold, he would have screamed himself.

The first thud had slapped against the walls like a boulder of ice. When everything jumped, Reatur’s first thought was,
quake!
He took an instinctive step toward the doorway, while his eyestalks sprang upward to see if the roof was going to come down on him.

But only that one jolt came. “Funny kind of quake,” he said out loud. He started to go on about his business, but then the roar started. Fear of a quake, at least, was a familiar kind of fear. The bellow overhead kept getting louder and shriller, until
Reatur wondered if it was the end of the world. He had not known how alarmed he was until he gauged his relief as the insane, impossible noise at last began to recede.

A male came running into the great hall. “Clanfather!” he cried. “There’s a monster moving through the air, shrieking so that we’re afraid to work.”