Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

Rustaveli swore and put a couple more bullets into it, carefully aimed to pierce the nerve centers Minervan creatures had under their eyestalks. The big carnivore convulsed one last time and lay still.

Bryusov took more photos. Rustaveli got down from the rover and used a gloved hand to dig through snow till he found a few pebbles. He tossed one at the beast. When it did not stir, he moved closer and threw another pebble, hard this time. Only then was he satisfied that the beast was dead.

Its claws were too big to fit into a specimen bottle. He took one anyway. If all else failed, he thought, he could have it mounted on a chain and wear it around his neck. He took other, more conventional specimens, too; Katerina would never have forgiven him for failing there. The stink of alien body fluids made him cough.

The dead Minervan beast still had one twitch left. Rustaveli gave a backward leap any Russian folk dancer would have been proud of. He came down next to his Kalashnikov and had it pointed at the carnivore in essentially the same instant. The beast was inert again. He shook his head in self-reproach. “Jumpy,” he muttered.

“In the most literal sense of the word,” Bryusov said admiringly. “Had you thought about the Olympics?” The Georgian really looked for the first time at the distance he had put between himself and the animal. He whistled softly. “Talents you had not dreamed of?” Bryusov asked.

Rustaveli was not one to stay shaken for long. Grinning, he switched to English. “I’ve always been good at the broad jump- ask Katerina.”

“Why? What does she know about your ath-“ Bryusov made a sour face as he finally caught on.

“Yes, she was once one of my chief athletic supporters,” Rustaveli went on blithely, still in English. This time Bryusov did not respond at all. Calls himself a linguist, Rustaveli thought scornfully-he’s only a dictionary that walks like a man. Sighing, the Georgian went back to hacking bits off the animal he had killed. When he was sure he had enough to keep Katerina happy, he got up. “Let’s go back, Valery Aleksandrovich. So long as we don’t exactly retrace our way, every kilometer we cover is a new one.”

“True enough.” Bryusov pulled his fur cap down a little farther on his forehead; it was starting to snow harder. “I won’t be sorry to get back to our comrades.”

“I won’t be sorry to get back to heating.” Rustaveli knew he was repeating himself and did not care. He climbed onto the rover and buckled on his shoulder belt. The machine glided away, leaving the dead beast to whatever passed for scavengers on Minerva.

The snow began falling heavily-thick, wet flakes that clung to the rover’s windscreen and made Bryusov slow down. “Springtime on Minerva,” the linguist grunted.

“Yes,” Rustaveli agreed, as sardonically. “The southern latitude equivalent to Havana, Katerina said, and at a season much like May. I wonder how our ally Comrade Castro would enjoy the weather-about as much as I do, I daresay.”

Bryusov slowed still more. “I don’t like this at all. I can’t see what I’m doing.”

“If it gets worse, we can stop and put tent fabric over the rover’s frame till it blows itself out. I hate to do that, though, when we’re on the way back, no matter how much I’d like to be warm.”

“I feel the same way. Besides, the heater uses a lot of energy, and the solar panels aren’t putting out much in this weather. Even so, though, we may have to if-“ The linguist never got his “if” out. The rover’s front wheels went into an enormous hole filled with drifted snow. The rover was not supposed to flip over, no matter what happened. It flipped over anyhow.

Bryusov and Rustaveli shouted as the world turned upside down. Both shouts cut off abruptly. The Georgian had the wind jerked from him as his shoulder harness brought him up short. The linguist was less fortunate. He had not bothered to strap himself in after standing up to photograph the Minervan carnivore. His head smacked a bar of the rover’s roll cage.

When he could breathe again, Rustaveli made several choice comments in his own language. After a moment, he noticed that Bryusov was not answering-the linguist lay unmoving in the snow. Rustaveli wished he had not wasted his curses before.

He reached out to kill power to the wheels. Then, holding on to the frame of the rover with one. hand, he unbuckled his safety belt with the other. Olga Korbut, he thought, would have spun around in midair to land gracefully. He was happy enough not to have dislocated his shoulder.

Bryusov was breathing. Rustaveli muttered silent thanks for that. The linguist remained unconscious, though, with blood on his face and the side of his head. None of the cautious things Rustaveli did to try rousing him had any effect.

The Georgian tried the radio and got only static for an answer. That sent panic shooting through him. He certainly wasn’t getting any incoming signal. If he wasn’t getting out, either, the rest of the crew would not even know that Bryusov and he were in trouble until they missed their next scheduled ca. ll-and even then, what could they do? Assuming they could find the rover at all, they were several days’ forced march from it. And Bryusoy might not have several days.

Knowing that he had to think straight for his companion’s sake helped bring Rustaveli out of his fright. He scrambled out of the rover. Turning it back over, unfortunately, proved more than a one-person job. Another design flaw, he thought, and immediately filed the idea away. No time to worry about it now. The radio was the pressing concern.

The most obvious reason for its failure was damage from the accident. Rustaveli could do nothing about that. But, he reasoned, crash damage should have silenced the radio, not left it flatulent. “The antenna!” he said out loud. It would hardly do much good, buried in a snowdrift.

He had to bend a kink in the springy wire to make it go up past the body of the rover. Even then, it was less than half as tall as it should have been. That was the best he could do, though. He crawled back under the rover’s chassis and tried the radio again. “Rustaveli calling, Rustaveli calling. Do you read? Emergency. Do you read?” The repetition was very much like prayer.

“Shota! What’s wrong?” Katerina Zakharova’s voice sounded as if she were talking from behind a waterfall, but it was the most welcome thing Rustaveli had ever heard.

“Katya!” he exclaimed, then went on more calmly. “We’ve had an accident-this damned buggy overturned. Valery’s hurt.”

“Hurt? How? How badly?” Even through the roaring static, the Georgian could hear Katerina turning into Dr. Zakharova.

“How badly I don’t know,” he told her. “He’s unconscious- hit his head. This was fifteen minutes ago, maybe more, and he hasn’t come to yet. I haven’t tried moving him-“ “Good,” she broke in. “Don’t, not unless you have to.”

“I know that. I also didn’t much fancy the idea of undressing him to check for anything else wrong, not while it’s snowing.” As it always did, his wry sense of humor reasserted itself. “So much for springtime in Havana.”

“Rustaveli.” That was Colonel Tolmasov, doing his best to mask the concern in his voice. “Give me your exact position.”

The panel connected to the gyrocompass was hard to read upside down, but Rustaveli managed. “Distance 112.T kilometers, bearing 63o.”

There was silence for a moment from the radio; Rustaveli could picture Tolmasov drawing a line on a map. “Near Jotun Canyon,” the colonel said at last.

“Da, Sergei Konstantinovich.” Somehow, Rustaveli managed a chuckle. “A good deal closer to the Americans than to you, as a matter of fact. Only one tiny obstacle in the way.” He laughed again-only a gorge that dwarfed anything Earth knew!