Harry Turtledove: A World of Difference

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 T4T 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 flownlight planes before he went into astronaut training, and T38 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 Jotun 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. Jotun 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 Jotun 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 fromit. 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 IIT6. 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 freefall. 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 newbudded 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 came out of its belly. “There was something worse to be” said after all. Enoph said it. “It’s going to come down in our fields!”