A World of Difference (5 page)

“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, “What 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. Hearing 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.

“Let us see how well he does in Minervan weather,” Lopatin said. “Him and the Americans both.” He chuckled nastily and mimed a shiver.

Tolmasov nodded. After Smolensk, no winter held much in the way of terror for him.

But Rustaveli had come back. “About the Americans I do not know, Oleg Borisovich,” he said, exquisitely polite as always, “but I will do well enough. If I should have trouble, perhaps Katerina will keep me warm.”

It was Tolmasov’s turn to frown. Russians credited Georgians with legendary success with women. Shota did nothing to downplay the legend, and even though he and the doctor had quarreled, the way her eyes followed him made Tolmasov wish she looked at him like that. She gave herself to Tolmasov these days, and he was sure she enjoyed what they did together. Still, somehow it was not the same.

“Is your boasting all you want to tell us?” the pilot asked
stiffly. “We have more important things to do than listening to it.”

“No, no, Sergei Konstantinovich.” Rustaveli sounded wounded. “I just wanted to remind you that the odds are it will not matter in the long run whether you talk with
Athena
or not.”

“And why not?” Tolmasov fought for patience. Maybe, once Rustaveli got the jokes out of his system, he would settle down for a while.

For the moment, the Georgian did not seem to be joking. “Because, very probably, Moscow has the code broken and will send us what it says.”

“Hmm.” Tolmasov and Lopatin looked at each other. “Something to that,” the KGB man said after a brief hesitation—even here, so many kilometers from home, he wondered who might be listening.

“I am glad you think so, Oleg Borisovich,” Rustaveli said. He lifted a finger, as if suddenly reminded of something. “I almost forgot—Yuri wants to see you.”

“Me? Why?” Lopatin sounded suspicious, but only a little. Yuri Ivanovich Voroshilov spent as much time as he could in his laboratory. The chemist, Tolmasov thought, found things easier to deal with than people. It was quite in character for him to treat Rustaveli as nothing more than a biped carrier pigeon.

Smiling, the Georgian sank his barb. “He’s all out of ice, and wants to borrow your heart for a few minutes.”

“Why, you—” Lopatin grabbed for the buckle of the safety harness that held him in his seat.

Tolmasov brought his hand down on top of the KGB man’s. “No brawling,” he snapped. Lopatin kept struggling for a few seconds to open the harness, then subsided. Tolmasov turned his glare on Rustaveli. “I will log this incident. You are reprimanded. There will be no repetitions.”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel.” Rustaveli clicked his heels, a gesture only ludicrous in free-fall. “Reprimand all you like. But it means nothing.”

“You will think differently when you get back to Earth,” Tolmasov ground out. “Are you a mutineer?” He was a military man; he could not think of anything worse to call Rustaveli.

“No, merely practical,” the biologist answered, quite unruffled. “If we get back to Earth, I will be a Hero of the Soviet Union, reprimand or no. If we don’t, the reprimand certainly will not matter to me. Truly, Sergei Konstantinovich, you should think things through more carefully.”

The colonel gaped at him. The worst of it was that Rustaveli even made a twisted kind of sense.

“There, there,” the Georgian said, seeing his pop-eyed expression. “To please you, I will even accept the reprimand—provided you also log the KGB man, for mocking my people.”

Lopatin let out a scornful laugh. He knew how likely that was. So did Tolmasov. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the KGB might have been made to answer for misconduct. Too bad Gorbachev had only lasted nine months. Tolmasov still wondered if his cerebral hemorrhage had been of the 5.54mm variety.

“You’ve talked yourself out of your bloody reprimand,” the colonel told Rustaveli. “I hope you’re satisfied. Now go away.”

Grinning, the biologist sailed off.

    The male shoved Fralk toward the bridge. “Go on,” he said harshly. “Never let us see you on this side again.”

See me you shall, Fralk said, but only to himself. He stepped out onto the cables of the bridge.

“Once you are across, we will cut it,” the male told him. “If you do not hurry, we will not bother to wait.”

Fralk hurried. His toes wrapped around the lower rope; his fingerclaws gripped the upper one. He walked out over empty space. On the eastern side of the gorge, the one he was leaving, the males of Reatur’s clan grew smaller.

The western side, though, the lands of the Skarmer clans, did not seem any closer. Even down close to its bottom, the gorge was too wide to yield him sight of progress so soon. And with one wall visibly receding while the other appeared fixed in place, Fralk had the eerie feeling that the canyon was stretching itself like a live thing as he traveled, that he might never reach the far side.

The wind whistled around, above, below. Over the heart of the gorge, Fralk let an eyestalk turn downward, and another up. The other four, as usual, looked all about. Only the thin lines of the rope bridge, extending in the direction he had come and toward his destination, gave his vision a clue he was not a mote suspended in the center of infinite space.

The sensation was so daunting that he stopped, forgetting the male’s threat. If the gorge were infinitely wide, how could movement matter? He looked down and down and down, to the boulders far, far below. For a giddy moment, he thought they were calling to him. If he let go of the ropes, for how long would he fall?

That reminded him he might indeed fall, regardless of whether he let go. The Omalo males would know how long someone took to cross the bridge and surely would allow him no excess time, not when they knew he and his wanted to supplant them. Telling that to Reatur had perhaps been less than wise. But then, Fralk had reckoned there was a fair chance the domain-master would yield. How little folk on one side of a gorge understood those on the other!

Fralk hurried onward. Every tremor of the bridge in the wind set him to quivering with fright, thinking he was about to be pitched into the abyss.

At last the far side of the gorge began to appear closer, while the one from which he had come seemed frozen and distant in space: the reverse of the stretching he had nervously imagined before. The males he could see were his own solid Skarmer budmates, not scrawny easterners.

They helped pull him off the bridge and clustered around him. “What word, eldest of eldest?” called Niress, the commander of the crossing.

Fralk gave it to him: “War.” A moment later, as if to underscore it, the bridge jerked like a male who had just touched a stunbush. Then, like that same imaginary male a moment later, it went limp and hung down into the gorge. Fralk feared its stone supports would give way now that it was not attached to anything on the far side, but they held.

Niress’s eyestalks wriggled with mirth. “As if cutting the bridge will stop us,” he said. He and Fralk began the long climb up to the top of the gorge.

The red
numbers on the digital readout spun silently down to zero. “Initiate separation sequence,” Emmett Bragg said.

“Initiating.” His wife flipped a toggle.

Strapped in his seat, Irv Levitt heard distant metallic bangs and rattles different from the ones he no longer consciously noticed. After a while, Louise said, “Separation sequence complete.”

We’re on our own, Irv thought. As if to emphasize the point,
Athena
’s monitor gave him an image of the rocket motor package that had accompanied the ship to Minerva. While he watched, the motors slowly grew smaller as they drifted away. They would wait in orbit while the hypersonic transport that was
Athena
proper went down to the planet and—if everything worked exactly right—returned to rejoin them for the trip back to Earth.

He glanced over at his wife, whose seat was next to his in the cabin. Sarah’s answering smile was forced. “Just another flight to a new research lab,” he said, trying to cheer her by coming out with the most ridiculous thing he could think of.

“I hate them all,” she said. “I don’t like being in any situation where I don’t have full control of things, and I can’t do that in an airliner—or here,” she added pointedly. “Once we’re down, I’ll be all right.”

He nodded. A lot of doctors he knew felt that way, some of them much more than Sarah. That was, he supposed, why so many of them flew their own planes. He smiled. Sarah would get her chance at that.

The radio crackled to life. “Tolmasov here. Good luck,
Athena.
”

“Thank you, Sergei Konstantinovich,” Bragg said. “The same to you and
Tsiolkovsky
. Give our regards to Comrade Reguspatoff.”

“To whom?” Puzzlement crept into the Russian colonel’s precise voice.

“Nichevo,”
Bragg replied. “It doesn’t matter.”

“As you wish,” Tolmasov said: an oral shrug. “We will see you on the ground, then. We also are about to uncouple.”

“Expected as much,” Bragg said. “We’ll both be busy for a while, so I’ll say good-bye now.
Athena
out.” He cut the transmission.

“Reguspatoff?” Frank Marquard asked. He made a good straight man.

“Registered—U.S. Patent Office,” Bragg explained with a grin that looked more like a wolf’s lolling-tongued laugh than any gentler mirth. “Or do you think
Tsiolkovsky
looks so much like
Athena
just by accident?”

“It’s bigger,” Frank said. “Why don’t we copy their rockets?”

“I wish we would,” Bragg said. “Well, we do what we can with what we’ve got. Not too bad, I suppose: we’ll be down ahead of them.”

His wife broke in. “Or maybe we won’t. Radar shows two images from
Tsiolkovsky
. I’d say that means they
have
uncoupled from their engine pack.”

The mission commander’s head jerked toward the screen. “
Son
of a bitch,” he said softly. He picked up the mike, punched the
TRANSMIT
button, and started speaking Russian. “
Athena
to
Tsiolkovsky.
”

“
Tsiolkovsky
here: Lopatin.” The engineer’s English was accented but easy to follow.

“Tell your boss he’s a sandbagging bastard.”

“Sandbagging? I do not understand this word,” Lopatin said; Bragg had left it in his own language. A moment later, Colonel Tolmasov came on. He sounded like a man fighting laughter. “I do, Emmett. That is uncultured.”

“You should talk.”

“You will excuse me if I lack time for casual conversation, Brigadier. We are, as you said, rather busy at the moment.
Tsiolkovsky
out.”

Growling, Bragg killed the circuit. Before he could ask her, Louise said, “Coming up on three minutes … mark.”