Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

Travelers… His thoughts abruptly turned practical. Travelers traveled for a reason. If these-people, he made himself think-were wandering artists, he wondered how much they would want for a portrait of him. No harm trying to find out.

Tolmasov clicked off the radio with a snarl of frustrated rage. “Not first,” he growled. “That damned uncultured old American son of a pig beat us down.” Despair lay on him, heavy as gravity.

“They may have been first, Sergei Konstantinovich, but we were better,” Valery Bryusov said, trying to console him. “They are eighty kilometers east of where they should be, and across the chasm from us. They will not have an easy time returning.”

Tolmasov only grunted.

He looked through the window. Seeing out only by way of monitors was one thing for which he emphatically did not envy Athena. Television, to him, was not quite real. It could lie so easily that even the truth became untrustworthy. Glass, now, a man could trust, streaks, smears, and all.

To the eye, the country reminded him of the Siberian tundra where Tsiolkovsky’s crew had trained. It was gently rolling land, with patches of snow here and there. From a distance, the plants looked like plants; Tolmasov was no botanist. Some were dark green, some brown, some yellow.

He did not see anything moving. He had set Tsiolkovsky down well away from the buildings he saw in the landing approach. It was not that he wanted to, or could, keep the landing secret-as well keep sunrise hidden! But if the Minervans came to him, he would have an easier time meeting them on his terms.

He got out of his seat and walked over to the closet full of warm clothes. “What’s the temperature outside, Katerina Fyodorovna?” he asked.

She checked the thermometer. “One above.”

“Brr!” Shota Rustaveli gave a theatrical shiver. The five Russians, even quiet Voroshilov, laughed at him. A degree above freezing-that was weather to be enjoyed, not endured, Tolmasov thought.

“It is early afternoon, at a season that is the equivalent of May, in a southern latitude that corresponds to Havana’s,” Dr. Zakharova pointed out, and Tolmasov felt his mirth slip. Russian summer was brief, but it was there. On Minerva, the weather did not get a whole lot warmer than this.

“Thank you for coming to my defense, Katerina, in these bleak circumstances,” Rustaveli said. The doctor murmured something. So did Tolmasov, under his breath. Where had the Georgian learned to sound like a courtier from some perfumed court and, worse, to do it so well.’?

The colonel drew calf length felt valenki over his feet and put his arms through the sleeves of his quilted telogreika. The rest of the crew, except for Lopatin and Voroshilov, crowded around to do likewise.

Next to the jackets, boots, and prosaic thermal underwear hung six full-length sable coats, for bad weather. Bryusov ran a loving hand down one of them. “Here is something the Americans cannot match,” he said.

“And here is something else,” Oleg Lopatin added. He had opened a locked cabinet not far from the protective gear. He started passing out weapons and brown plastic magazines.

Tolmasov took his gratefully. Even though it was the new model AKT4 with small caliber, high velocity ammunition and not the AK4T he had trained with, a Kalashnikov was a Kalashnikov: a good friend to have if the going got rough.

“How long shall we wait for the natives to come to us before we start looking for them?” Rustaveli asked as all of them but Lopatin and Voroshilov stood in front of the airlock. Doctrine was two people on Tsiolkovsky at all times, one of them able to fly the ship, and Lopatin was backup pilot.

They went through the lock two by two, Tolmasov and Bryusov first. The pilot stood on Tsiolkovsky’s left wing and stared out at a world not his own. The view was broader than the one from the windows, but not much different-boring, barren, superficially familiar terrain. A thrill ran through the colonel all the same. He had been in his teens when Buzz Aldrin had first set foot on the moon. Well, Aldrin was envying him today.

The lock’s outer door came open behind him. Katerina and Rustaveli emerged and looked around. The Georgian tugged his jacket tighter around him. Tolmasov smiled to himself.

Rustaveli was carrying a chainlink ladder. He fixed it to brackets on the edge of the wing and let it unroll. The other end landed on the ground with a metallic whump. The biologist cocked an eyebrow at Tolmasov. “I suppose you’d shoot me if I tried to go down ahead of you.”

“I would try not to hit anything vital,” Tolmasov said. Rustaveli laughed, bowed, and stood aside with a sweeping gesture of invitation. Tolmasov slung his rifle, stood, and started down the ladder. He was glad he had managed to keep his tone light. The way his hands had tightened on the rifle at Rustaveli’s impudent suggestion made him know he was only half joking.

The ground felt like ground under his feet. He took a few steps away from the ship and away from the shadow of the wing. He glanced up at the sun. Did it seem too small in the sky? Hard to tell, the more so as he had got used to its shrinking as Tsiolkovsky traveled outward. He was sure though, that nowhere on Earth was the sky-or what he could see of it through patchy clouds-quite this shade of greenish blue.

The ladder rattled and clanked. Katerina Zakharova lowered herself down onto the Minervan surface. She took two heavy, deliberate steps, then looked at her footprints. “Humanity’s marks on a new world,” she murmured.

“Ah, but the other question is, what marks will it leave on us?” Shota Rustaveli came next. Tolmasov would have bet on that. If Bryusov had tried preceding the Georgian, the linguist likely would have arrived on Minerva headfirst.

A moment later, Bryusov did join the other three. He looked ill at ease and soon revealed why. “I am not of much use here, until we actually meet the Minervans.”

That left him wide open to a sardonic retort from Rustaveli, but, rather to Tolmasov’s surprise, it did not come. Instead, just as Lopatin shouted in his earphone, he heard the biologist say quietly, “I do not think you will be useless long, Valery Aleksandrovich.”

Rustaveli was pointing; Tolmasov’s eyes followed his finger. A Minervan had been hiding behind a stone big enough to make Tolmasov glad Tsiolkovsky’s undercarriage missed it. Now the native came out, moving slowly toward the waiting humans.

It looked like its picture. That should not have surprised Tolmasov, but somehow it did. What he did next was as hard as anything else in his life. He stepped aside, saying, “Valery Aleksandrovich, now I am not of much use. You and Shota Mikheilovich must go forward from here.”

“The man who covers is as useful as the one who advances,” Rustaveli said. Hearing an army phrase from him caught Tolmasov off guard. So did finding out the Georgian meant it literally; Rustaveli set down his Kalashnikov before he walked away from Tsiolkovsky to meet the Minervan. After a moment’s hesitation, so did Bryusov.

The colonel automatically shuffled a few steps sideways, so his companions would not be between him and the Minervan. He turned his head to tell Katerina to do the same thing, but she already had.

She nodded at him. “You see, I was listening after all through those endless drills,” she said. He dipped his head in acknowledgment.

Their gloved hands open and empty before them, Bryusov and Rustaveli stopped a couple of meters in front of the Minervan. It kept two eyes on each of them, while its remaining pair refused to hold still on any target, even Tsiolkovsky, for more than a couple of seconds at a time. The spectacle was unsettling. Tolmasov wondered how the creature kept from tying its eyestalks in knots.