Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

“I suppose so.” Irv looked north and east. Damselfly, cruising at not much more than a man’s height off the ground, was almost right down on the horizon. Irv thumbed the radio switch. “How’s it going, darling?”

“Important discovery-it is possible to sweat on Minerva. Who would have thunk it?” Irv could hear the effort in her words, and the way she spaced them so they would not interfere with her breathing.

“How’s Damselfly going to do as a picture platform?” he asked.

Suddenly fatigue was not the only thing putting pauses between her words-exasperation was there, too. “I’m busier than hell in here, just trying to keep this beast flying-I haven’t had a lot of time for pictures.”

She had a point. By airliner standards, her controls were crude to the point of starkness: a stick, a radio switch, a prop control switch, a prop pitch gauge, an airspeed indicator, a battery charge gauge, and the camera button. But no airline pilot had to make his plane go by himself.

Still, Irv said, “On the return leg, why not see how much altitude you can gain without wearing yourself out too badly, and squeeze off a few shots. They’re pictures we can’t get any other way, you know-the main reason we brought Damselfly along.”

“You mean it’s not just a special exercise bike for me? Thanks for the news.” Irv felt his ears grow hot under the flaps of his cap. But despite her sarcasm, Sarah pedaled harder, until she got the ultra-ultralight a good thirty yards off the ground. “Even with the battery and the denser air, this is plenty,” she panted.

“All right,” Irv said mildly.

Sarah was not quite appeased. “It had better be. Most crashes with this beast I could walk away from, but I’m up high enough now to break my neck.” She clicked off. A few seconds later she came back on, sounding worn and sheepish at the same time. “The view from up here is spectacular. I can see all the way over to Jotun Canyon.”

“Just looking ought to be plenty as far as that’s concerned,” Louise said sharply. “I wouldn’t want to fly over it, not with the funny wind conditions it’s bound to have. Damselfly’s not exactly built to handle gusts, you know.”

“Seeing it and flying over it aren’t the same thing. I’m going to let my altitude go now. I’ve shot a whole roll-that ought to keep you happy, Irv.”

“So it should,” he agreed, unembarrassed. Aerial photography had taught anthropologists and archaeologists a lot of things they had never noticed when they were stuck on the ground. Irv would have killed to get a Piper Cub onto Athena. That being in the dream category, he would cheerfully settle for whatever Damselfly could show him.

The ultra-ultralight slowly approached. The prop fell silent as Sarah stopped pedaling. Damselfly touched down as lightly as one of its namesakes.

Sarah reached up and popped the catch on the canopy, then opened it so vigorously that Damselfly shook, Irv trotted up with the special stepladder. He climbed to the top to help his wife emerge. The sight of her flushed sweaty skin-and of so much of it-forcibly reminded him how little he had seen of her lately, both in the figurative and literal senses of the word. He thought unkind thoughts about Minerva’s climate.

Sarah had the weather on her mind, too, but in a different way. “For God’s sake, get me some clothes,” she said after much too brief an embrace. “If I let myself stiffen up, I’ll be hobbling around for days.” As if to underscore that, she started to shiver.

She jumped down from the ladder. Louise handed her the warm outerwear. She scrambled into it, while Irv wished the engineer had been a little less efficient. He could have done with another hug.

“And now, as medical officer, I wish I could prescribe a good hot shower for myself. Unfortunately, the closest I can come is to wipe myself down and bake under the heat lamp for a while. Have to do, I suppose.” She started for Athena.

Irv and Louise knocked down Damselfly by themselves-

Sarah, after all, had done plenty in flying it. They stored the pieces aboard Athena; neither of them even thought about leaving the fragile ultra-ultralight out were the elements could touch it. A hailstorm or even a windstorm would turn it to junk in a hurry.

As they were carrying the tail spar, to which Damselfly’s rudder and elevators were attached, Louise looked at her watch. “I think I’ll stay aboard when we’re done here. We ought to be getting today’s transmission from Houston in about another twenty minutes.”

“I guess I’ll stay, too.” Irv patted the pocket where he had the roll of film he had extracted from Damselfly’s camera. “I’ll wait for this to run through the developer so I can see just what we’ve got.”

Louise did not say anything, but before she turned away Irv saw her raise an eyebrow. He silently swore at the developer for being so slow that it made obvious his real reason for hanging around Athena: He had every intention of warming up Sarah a different way after she turned off the heat lamp.

That hopeful notion came to naught, anyhow. Some of the males in the fields must have told Reatur about Damselfly, for the chieftain walked up just as Irv was carrying the last piece of the plane, the propeller, to Athena.

Reatur was full of questions and had trouble following Irv’s answers because he had not actually seen Damselfly up in the air. The only thing he had to compare to its flight was Athena’s thunderous arrival, and Irv had already thought once about how unlike were those two things covered under the umbrella of one word.

And so, fascinated and confused at the same time, Reatur kept trying to understand. He finally invited Irv to the castle to explain further. He was so polite about it that the anthropologist could not find any good way to say no. No doubt, Irv thought sourly as they walked along a path through the fields, Reatur thought he was doing him a favor.

By the time he got back to Athena, Sarah was asleep. Grumbling, he went back and fed the roll of film into the developer. Even as he did, though, he knew his mind was not on what the prints would show.

The three males stood at the base of Tsiolkovsky’s boarding ladder. Even to the inexperienced eyes of the two Russians aboard, they looked ill-kempt. “More seedy beggars,” Oleg Lopatin said, curling his lip in distaste.

“Yes,” Yuri Voroshilov said; from the chemist, it almost counted as a major speech. Lopatin would have wondered had much more come from him. If anyone could have stayed sane alone through a nearly three-year Minerva mission, Lopatin would have bet on Voroshilov. Assuming, the KGB man thought, that he was sane now, on which Lopatin reserved judgment. That Yuri was competent counted for more.

Beggars the Minervans were in the most literal sense of the word. They held out several arms apiece toward Tsiolkovsky. Lopatin clicked on the outside mike. He had not learned a lot of the local language, but he had heard that phrase too often to mistake it: “Give! Please give!”

Lopatin had no use for beggars. Had it been up to him, he would have sent them packing, and in a hurry, too. But the orders from Moscow were clear: do nothing to antagonize the natives. Lopatin obeyed orders.

All the same, he did not care for them. As he often did, he said, “Will you do the honors, Yuri Ivanovich?”

“Yes,” Voroshilov said again. He got some trade goods out of a box by the inner airlock door, closed it after him, opened and closed the outer one, and started down the ladder. Lopatin trained a machine gun on the Minervans below. There had been no trouble with the locals, but he stayed ready for a first time.

The Minervans recoiled when they first saw Voroshilov; these newcomers might have heard about humans, an amused Lopatin thought, but they had never set eyes on one before. One male let out a contralto shriek that would have made any movie heroine proud.