Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

Tolmasov pulled off the headphones, both the static of the scrambled transmission and Lopatin’s furious shouts were giving his ears a workout. “Calmly, Oleg Borisovich, calmly,” he urged.

“The devil’s grandmother take calmly,” Lopatin yelled across the kilometers from Tsiolkovsky.

Tolmasov scowled. When a KGB man started calling on the devil and his relations, something really had gone wrong somewhere. The oath was a surer sign of trouble than Lopatin’s using the scrambler, as a matter of fact: give a security man a scrambled circuit and of course he will use it.

“At least stop swearing long enough to tell me what you’re swearing about,” the pilot suggested.

“The Americans, those deceiving sons of-”

“What about them?” Tolmasov broke in sharply, though Lopatin seemed ready to go on in that vein for some time yet. “What about the Americans?” the colonel repeated, letting the snap of command enter his voice.

“Sergei Konstantinovich, the Americans deceitfully concealed the true location where their Viking came down. When Athena landed east of Jotun Canyon, it was no navigational error. They knew where their spacecraft was, and went there. All the data they published over the last decade and a half were false, and deliberately false at that.”

Tolmasov rubbed his chin as he thought. “How can you be certain of this?” The whole thing struck him as a ploy more in character for the KGB than the Americans, who were usually too naive to come up with such ideas.

“We have people in NASA,” Lopatin reminded him. Tolmasov would have been surprised if the Americans did not know that, too. As if reading his mind, Lopatin went on, “No, Sergei Konstantinovich, this is not disinformation fed our folk by the CIA. Athena’s crew has sent word back to Houston that they are in contact with the very male who wrecked the Viking. Do you think any navigational error would have been likely to put them so precisely on the spot?”

“Nyet,” Tolmasov said flatly. More to himself than to the KGB man, he mused, “How best to use the information?”

“Beat them over the heads with it,” Lopatin answered at once. “The American hypocrites always embarrass us for not blabbing everything to the heavens as they do. Now we can pay them back, and let us see how they enjoy it.”

“You know, Oleg Borisovich, I like that.” Tolmasov could not keep the surprise from his voice; he was not used to liking Lopatin’s suggestions. He let out an anticipatory laugh. “I will enjoy seeing the good Brigadier Bragg embarrassed. Till this moment, I had not thought such a thing possible.”

What I really would enjoy, Tolmasov thought, is seeing Bragg’s fighter in the center of my radar screen, and hearing the tone that tells me my missile has locked on to his tailpipe. He sighed. Even in a fantasy, it was all too easy to imagine Bragg somehow evading him. The man was good.

The colonel blinked. Lopatin had said something, and he had missed it. “I’m sorry, Oleg Borisovich. I was woolgathering.”

“I said, is Katerina Fyodorovna still occupied with her researches at the town? Perhaps she should return to Tsiolkovsky for a time, to perform data analysis and transmit some concrete results to Moscow.”

“I will inquire, Oleg Borisovich,” Tolmasov said blandly.

“Out.” He knew how delighted Katerina was with Lopatin.

When the rover came back, Tolmasov decided, he would send it off to Tsiolkovsky with Katerina aboard. She would want to examine Rustaveli and Bryusov before she left.

The colonel’s mouth twitched wryly, and he sighed. Ever since the rover had left, he had had the only woman on this part of the planet all to himself-and made love with her exactly once. They were both too busy.

Sighing again, Tolmasov killed the scrambler circuit. He switched frequencies to the one the Soviets and Americans used to talk back and forth. He felt his blood heat. Dueling with Emmett Bragg brought its own excitement.

Reatur walked down the spiral ramp into the cellars. The flashlights he carried in two of his hands gave much more light than the ice globes full of glitterers set into the wall every so often. The domain master was glad to be carrying the twin bright beams. More than once, he had almost stumbled off the edge of the ramp and reached the bottom faster than he wanted to.

Come to that, the glitterers were not shedding as much light as they should have. Reatur made a mental note to get after a couple of the younger males to feed them more often. Nothing, he thought resentfully, ever got done unless he turned an eyestalk toward it himself.

The cellars might have been dim, but at least they were cool. Down half a male’s height below the surface, there was always ice in the ground-never any risk of the cellar collapsing, as there was in very hot weather with the parts of the castle aboveground. If it weren’t for the lighting problem, Reatur would have been just as happy living underground. He did not like summer.

“Never hurts to have something to complain about,” he said aloud. “Especially something I can’t help.” He listened to his voice echoing back from the gloomy corridors.

There was no help for breaking out the stone tools, either, not any more. As the weather grew warm, small pieces of worked ice like hoe blades got soft and brittle and started to melt. So, unfortunately, did swordblades. Hardly anyone made war during high summer. Swinging weapons of stone and timber was usually reckoned more trouble than it was worth.

Usually. Reatur kept remembering Fralk’s threats. Nobody could tell what the Skarmer would do. They were so sneaky, the domain master thought, they likely could not even tell themselves. He paused. Did that mean they took themselves by surprise?

He chased the thought around his arms a couple of times, then gave it up as a bad job. The miserable Skarmer would do whatever they did, and he would deal with it. That was what a domain master was for. A domain master was also for making sure the crops stayed tended no matter what the Skarmer did. A fine thing it would be if those wretches stayed on their own side of Ervis Gorge and the domain went hungry because everyone had forgotten the crops from worry over them!

Reatur got to the threshold of the chamber where the stone farm tools had been stored after good weather had returned last fall. He shone one of the flashlights into the underground room.

The furious hoot he let out rang through the cellar. Turning the other flashlight on himself, he saw he was as yellow as the sun, and no wonder! He had every right to be furious. The tools, which should have been grouped in neat rows by type, were dumped in a higgledy-piggledy pile.

The domain master stormed up the ramp. Males who spied his yellow color got out of his path as fast as they could. He let them go until he saw Ternat. Almost literally by main force, he took his eldest back down to the cellar with him.

“This was your job!” the domain master shouted. “Look at the mess you made of it! Did you let a herd of massi run through here, or what? Curse it, Lamra could have done better than this-eighteen times better! How do you propose to run this domain one day if you can’t do the simplest things properly?” He turned the second flashlight on his eldest, to see how he was taking it.

Ternat’s eyestalks drooped with shame, but he was as yellow as Reatur. “I’m going to tear an arm off Gurtz, or maybe two, that worthless matebudling of a nosver. He said he would see it was taken care of, and sounded as though he knew how to do it. After a while, none of the stone tools were left above ground, so I assumed he’d dealt with things.”

As Ternat’s fury grew, Reatur’s abated. He let air hiss out through his breathing pores. “So that’s how it was, then?”