A World of Difference Read online

  “Hello, Lamra, Morna, Peri, Numar,” he said, patting each one of them in turn. He did not stop until he had named and caressed them all; he made a point of remembering their names. Unlike some clanfathers, he treated mates as people, as much as he could. They could not help it that the sardonic saying “as likely as an old mate” meant something that would never happen. They had a directness of their own, a beautiful openness males outgrew too soon.

  “Look, Reatur, look what I did!” Numar proudly showed him some scribbles she had made with a soft, crumbly red stone on a piece of cured hide.

  “That’s very good,” he said gravely.

  “It looks just like Morna,” Numar said.

  “It certainly does,” he agreed with a certain amount of relief:

  now he would not have to ask what the marks were supposed to be. Numar might have told him, or she might have had a tantrum. He did not feel like coping with a tantrum at the moment. He wanted the mates to be their usual happy selves, to salve his anger and worry after the encounter with Fralk.

  The mates were exactly as he wished them to be, and even that did not help. “See how big Biyal’s buds are getting, Reatur,” Lamra exclaimed.

  Biyal stepped up to show the domain master the six bulges that ringed her body, one not far above each foot. “I wonder which is the male,” she said.

  “So do I,” Reatur said gently.

  “I want to have buds,” Lamra said.

  “I know you do, Lamra.” In spite of himself, Reatur felt worse instead of better. He knew that Biyal’s buds would break free of her when they were ripe, and that she would die when that happened. She knew it, too, and so did Lamra, but it meant nothing to them. They were too young. That was the one consolation of the life of a mate. Now, to Reatur, it did not seem enough.

  “I want to have buds,” Lamra repeated. “Reatur, I want to have buds right now.”

  “I know, Lamra.” The domain master let the air hiss out through his breathing pores. “Come here.” She squealed with glee and came. They pressed together. The other mates cheered them on. In a part of his mind, the cheering made Reatur sadder, but the exquisite sensations running through his body pushed the sadness far away.

  “Roger, Houston, we are set for coded transmission, as ordered,” Emmett Bragg said. He clicked off the transmitter and looked around the Athena’s cabin. “First codes they’ve sent us since we got here,” he remarked. He sounded casual, but even without weightlessness the words would have hung in the air.

  Irv Levitt asked the obvious question. “What are they telling us that they don’t want the Russians to hear about?”

  “Secrets.” His wife Sarah spoke the word as if it were obscene. She pointed to Minerva rolling by on the monitor. “That’s the enemy, not the people on Tsiolkovsky. Compared to whatever’s down there, the Russians are our next of kin.”

  She sounded absolutely certain. She usually did, her husband thought. A lot of MDs he knew were like that-they needed arrogant confidence to deal with their patients’ problems, and it spilled over into everything else they did.

  Bragg only shrugged. “Secret is what they ordered, Sarah. Secret is what they’ll get.” He glanced over at Sarah Levitt; in his quieter way, he was at least as stubborn as she was. His voice, though, stayed mild. “I expect that’s why they handed the mission commander’s chair to somebody like me. I’ve been a soldier a long time-I can take orders, not just give ‘em.”

  Irv saw a dark flush rise to Sarah’s cheeks, saw her purse her lips for an angry retort. Before she could get it out, Louise Bragg spoke. “Suppose we see what they sent us before we get ourselves all in an uproar.”

  “Sensible,” her husband said. Sarah nodded a moment later, her short, curly brown hair fanning out around her face at the motion.

  “Good,” Louise said. She was a large, calm, blond woman, about fifteen years younger than Emmett.

  Irv remembered that she was Bragg’s second wife; they had not been married long when the selection process for Athena began. Would Emmett Bragg have dumped his ex and gone after an engineer to help himself get picked? Absolutely, Irv thought. That didn’t mean they didn’t care for each other. Had they not, the ship was too cramped to hide it.

  Speed of light to Houston, time to react there, speed of light back. A quarter of an hour went by before the message came in. Bragg transcribed the code groups, one by one, and taped them so he would have a backup. “Roger, Houston, we copy,” he said when the transmission was done.

  He unstrapped himself. “Excuse me, folks,” he said, and pushed himself out of the cabin and down the passageway toward his compartment. Irv saw him pull a key from a pocket on his coveralls. The cubicle he shared with Louise, unlike the other two, had a locked drawer.

  Louise did not have a key for it. Once she had asked her husband what was in there. He had grinned a lopsided grin and replied, “My girlfriend.” Nobody had asked since. Now they had at least part of the answer.

  “I hate having someone else in charge of my fate this way,” Sarah said.

  “Now you know how patients feel,” Irv told her. She glanced sharply at him, then gave a rueful nod.

  Freefall was relaxing anyhow, after the nausea went away, and Louise Bragg contrived to look almost boneless as she stretched herself in midair. “When there’s nothing to do but wait,” she said, “you might as well be comfortable.”

  They waited. After a while, Irv pulled a folding chess set with magnetic pieces out of his hip pocket. He opened it up, then shook his head. Two pawns was too far to be down to Sargon; the computer program was going to clean his clock again. He knew he ought to resign and have another try. He knew he was too stubborn to do it. He tried a knight move, thought better of it, and put the piece back.

  lie was still tinkering and not getting anywhere much when he heard Emmett call, “Pat, Frank, come forward for a bit, if you could.”

  A moment later, Bragg came gliding into the cabin. He stopped himself on the back of his chair. Within a minute, Pat and Frank Marquard had joined everyone else in the cabin.

  “What’s up, Emmett?” Frank asked. He sounded casual, but his expression belied his tone. He and Pat both could tell something was up: Bragg had the veteran officer’s knack for turning ordinary words into an unmistakable order.

  The mission commander glanced down at the sheet paper in his hand. He was also holding, Irv saw, a map Minerva compiled from Mariner and Viking photos. “Interesting,” was all he said.

  Louise would not let him get by with that. “Come on, Era. Out with it,” she told him. “Suspense isn’t funny.”

  “All right,” he said, a little sheepishly. He held up the map.

  “We’ve all known since ‘T6 where Viking landed, haven’t we? Here.” He pointed.

  “Not far west of the Jotun Canyon, sure,” Irv said. Everyone else nodded.

  “Not sure. They’ve just done a pile of new computer work on the Viking data, and it turns out the lander actually came down here, about fifty miles east of where they thought. We’ll have to adjust our landing site to conform to the new data. Louise, honey, it’ll mean more time on the computer for you- sorry.”

  “I expect I’ll manage,” she said, which for a minute or so was the only break in the silence that followed her husband’s announcement.

  “How very-convenient,” Sarah Levitt said at last. “Now we know, and the Russians don’t.” Both missions had intended to land as close to the Viking touchdown point as possible; only there could they be sure they would find intelligent life.

  “There might be anything on the other side of that canyon,” Irv said. Pat Marquard nodded vigorously. He knew they were thinking along the same lines. Minerva’s big canyons were wider and deeper than anything Earth knew; each spring they carried meltwater from the south polar cap to the seas and lakes of the southern tropics-though on Minerva the word “tropics” had a strictly geographic meaning. The great gorges had to be formidable barriers to both ideas and genes.
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  “I reckon the Russians will tell us, same as we’ll tell them what we come across on our side,” Emmett Bragg said. His drawl had gotten thicker. That happened, Irv had noticed, when Bragg did not want to come out with everything that was on his mind.

  “I think we ought to pass the word on to Tsiolkovsky,” Sarah said.

  Bragg raised an eyebrow. “If Houston had wanted Tsiolkovsky to know, they wouldn’t have coded the information before they sent it.” He sounded as though that closed the subject for him and expected it to for everyone else.

  It didn’t. “Houston is on Earth, umpty-ump million miles from here. The Russians are right here with us,” Sarah said. “Right now, I have more in common with them than with a pack of chairwarmers back in Texas.”

  “Really,” Frank Marquard agreed. “Is there intelligent life in Houston?”

  “I think they’re right, Emmett,” Irv said. “This is going to be tough enough, even sharing what we have. It’s too big for us not to.” He spoke with some hesitation. He was anything but combative and did not relish the idea of getting into a shouting match when the mission commander blew a fuse.

  But Bragg surprised him. Instead of losing his temper, or even pretending to for effect, he looked over at his wife and asked, “Honey, how many coded transmissions has Tsiolkovsky received since we assumed Minerva orbit?”

  “Let me see.” She fiddled with the computer. “At least twenty-nine, plus however many they got when we were on the far side of the planet and couldn’t monitor them.”

  “How many of those have they shared with us?”

  Louise did not have to check that. “Next one will be the first.”

  “Oh, but that’s the Russians, though. That’s just the way they“ Pat Marquard stumbled to a halt as she realized where her words were taking her. “-do things,” she finished lamely.

  Irv shook his head. Bragg couldn’t have had that turn out better for him if he had planned it for weeks. And now the commander took the advantage, saying, “If you all”-he carefully made it two words-“think I’m not sorry to put some distance between Tsiolkovsky and us, I won’t say you’re wrong. Minerva’s a big place. Why rub elbows with the Russians when we don’t have to?”

  “What if we end up needing something they have and we don’t, or the other way round?” Sarah had not given up.

  “Canyon or no canyon, we won’t be that far from them,” Bragg said. “If anybody needs anything that bad, he can holler for it.”

  “What if we need a ride home?” Sarah asked softly.

  Frank Marquard winced; Irv felt himself doing the same thing.

  But Bragg said fatly, “Anybody who needs a ride home is dead, unless he can make it on Minerva until another expedition comes along. Athena’s life-support won’t take more than six people home, and neither will Tsiolkovsky’s. For that, folks, we are on our own. We’d all best remember it, too.”

  The words hit home. Irv had lived on Athena long enough to have grown used to it, as he would have to, say, an apartment. Being reminded of how fragile a place it was hurt.

  But Tsiolkovsky was just as fragile. “So the territory Viking saw was really on the east side of Jotun Canyon, then, not the west?” Irv asked. At Bragg’s nod, the anthropologist went on.

  “What is the west side like, then? Are the Russians going to try to fly Tsiolkovsky down into badlands? If they are, I say we call them, and the hell with Houston. I wouldn’t do that to anybody.”

  Bragg frowned, but then his face cleared as he thought it over. “That’s fair,” he said. “We’ll find out.” He folded the map and stuck it into a breast pocket of his coveralls. It was not nearly detailed enough to show him what he needed. He pulled the NASA Photographic Atlas of Minerva off a shelf; the Velcro that held the book in place let go with a scratchy sound of protest.

  The mission commander riffled through the pages till he found the plate he needed. He held the book open. Five heads craned toward it. “Looks to be flatland and low hills, same as we’ll be landing in. None of the miles and miles of scree and boulders you see around the edges of the polar caps, and no big erosion features. They aren’t taking any worse chances than we are.”

  Frank Marquard studied the photo with a professionally appraising glance. When he said, “He’s right,” Irv knew that any chance to overturn Bragg’s decision was gone.

  So did his wife. “All fight, Emmett,” Sarah said. “But if they don’t trust us once we’re all down on Minerva, they’ll have reason now.”

  “They don’t trust us now,” Bragg answered. “And you know what? I don’t trust them, either. That’s all right. The best way to deal with ‘em is to keep one hand on your wallet. That way you never lose track of where it is.”

  Sarah snorted. The Marquards went back to the labs in the rear section of Athena to return to whatever they had been doing. And when Tolmasov called from the Tsiolkovsky, nobody said anything about code groups.

  When she and her husband were in the almost privacy of their cubicle, though, Sarah Levitt said, “I still don’t like it, Irv. Not just that we didn’t tell the Russians, but that word about the changed coordinates came through today the way it did. It just seems too pat somehow.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “That bothers me, too. It’s almost as if Houston’s known all along that the coordinates they gave out to everybody weren’t the right ones, and just decided now to let us in on it.”

  He had meant the words as a joke, but once out they had an appalling ring of probability to them. He felt Sarah’s slim frame stiffen. “I wish you hadn’t said that,” she told him. “I don’t- want to believe it.”

  “Likely it isn’t true,” he said, though he doubted that himself.

  “Give me one good reason why not.” Sarah’s tone said she did not believe he could come up with one.

  But he did. “When was the last time the United States was able to hang on to a secret for thirteen years?”

  “A point,” she admitted at last. “Not a very consoling one, but a point. You pick the oddest ways to make me feel better.” “Did you have something else in mind?” he asked hopefully. “No,” she said after a small pause. “I’m tired, I’m grouchy, I wouldn’t enjoy it much now, and I don’t think I could make it much fun for you.”

  “You’re very annoying when you make sense, you know,” he said. That coaxed a small, almost reluctant laugh from her, but she went to sleep all the same. After a while, so did Irv.

  Oleg Lopatin’s face, Tolmasov thought unkindly, was made for frowning. Those eyebrows-the colonel still thought of them as Brezhnev brows, though the Chairman was seven years dead and thoroughly discredited-came down like clouds covering the sun.

  “You should have asked the Americans about the coded message,” Lopatin said.

  “I did not see how I could, Oleg Borisovich. They have never asked us about any we receive. And besides,” Tolmasov added, unconsciously echoing Emmett Bragg, “I did not think they would tell us. They would have sent it in clear if they did not care whether we heard it.”

  “You should have asked them, anyway,” Valery Bryusov said. “Why do you say that, Valery Aleksandrovich?” Tolmasov asked, more sharply than he had intended. The linguist did not usually speak up for Lopatin. If he did, he probably had a good reason. Tolmasov wondered if he had missed something.

  Bryusov tugged at his mustache. The gesture had become a habit of his in the months since he had let it grow. It was red-blond with a few white hairs, a startling contrast to the hair on his head, which was about the color of Tolmasov’s.

  He tugged again, then said, “We send things in code because it is our habit to send things in code. Even Oleg Borisovich will agree, I think, that it would not matter much if the Americans found out what was in a good many of them.”

  Lopatin’s frown got deeper. “I suppose that may be true in a few cases,” he admitted grudgingly. Tolmasov knew it was true. He was a trifle surprised the KGB man did, too. Lopatin went on, “Wha
t of it, though?”

  “The crew of Athena must know that, too,” Bryusov said, ticking off the point on his finger like the academician he was. “They must have studied us as we studied them. They, though, boast of how open-to say nothing of prodigal-they are with information. If they send in code, then, it must be something unusual and important, and so worth asking about.”

  “You may have something at that,” Tolmasov said. “Let me think it over; perhaps next time we talk with Athena I will put the question to Bragg. Heating what he says could be interesting, I suppose.”

  “My congratulations, Valery Aleksandrovich,” Shota Rustaveli said. “Even a theologian would be proud of reasoning that convoluted. Here it may even have reached the truth, always an unexpected bonus.”

  “Thank you so very much, Shota Mikheilovich,” Bryusov said.

  “Always a privilege to assist such a distinguished scholar,” Rustaveli replied, dark eyes twinkling. Bryusov scowled and floated off to find something to do elsewhere. Tolmasov smiled at his retreating back. If he didn’t know better by this time than to get into a duel of ironies with the Georgian biologist, it was nobody’s fault but his own.

  “You would talk with the Americans, too, then, Shota Mikheilovich, and try to find out what Houston sent them?” Lopatin asked.

  “Oh, not me. They find my English even worse than you do my Russian.” Rustaveli deliberately exaggerated his slight accent. He hung in midair, upside down relative to Lopatin and Tolmasov. It did not seem to bother him at all.

  “Will you ever be serious?” Lopatin growled.

  “I doubt it.” Whistling, Rustaveli sailed down the corridor after Bryusov.

  “Georgians,” Lopatin said softly.

  “He’s good at what he does.” Tolmasov meant it as a reproof, but was not sure it came out that way. Down deep, he thought the KGB man had a point. Rustaveli was the only non-Russian on Tsiolkovsky. Everyone else found him indolent and mercurial, very much the stereotypical man of the south. He found them stodgy and did not try to hide it.