Harry Turtledove: A World of Difference

Irv saw a dark flush rise to Sarah’s cheeks, saw her purse her lips for an angry retort. Before she could get it out, Louise Bragg spoke. “Suppose we see what they sent us before we get ourselves all in an uproar.”

“Sensible,” her husband said. Sarah nodded a moment later, her short, curly brown hair fanning out around her face at the motion.

“Good,” Louise said. She was a large, calm, blond woman, about fifteen years younger than Emmett.

Irv remembered that she was Bragg’s second wife; they had not been married long when the selection process for Athena began. Would Emmett Bragg have dumped his ex and gone after an engineer to help himself get picked? Absolutely, Irv thought. That didn’t mean they didn’t care for each other. Had they not, the ship was too cramped to hide it.

Speed of light to Houston, time to react there, speed of light back. A quarter of an hour went by before the message came in. Bragg transcribed the code groups, one by one, and taped them so he would have a backup. “Roger, Houston, we copy,” he said when the transmission was done.

He unstrapped himself. “Excuse me, folks,” he said, and pushed himself out of the cabin and down the passageway toward his compartment. Irv saw him pull a key from a pocket on his coveralls. The cubicle he shared with Louise, unlike the other two, had a locked drawer.

Louise did not have a key for it. Once she had asked her husband what was in there. He had grinned a lopsided grin and replied, “My girlfriend.” Nobody had asked since. Now they had at least part of the answer.

“I hate having someone else in charge of my fate this way,” Sarah said.

“Now you know how patients feel,” Irv told her. She glanced sharply at him, then gave a rueful nod.

Freefall was relaxing anyhow, after the nausea went away, and Louise Bragg contrived to look almost boneless as she stretched herself in midair. “When there’s nothing to do but wait,” she said, “you might as well be comfortable.”

They waited. After a while, Irv pulled a folding chess set with magnetic pieces out of his hip pocket. He opened it up, then shook his head. Two pawns was too far to be down to Sargon; the computer program was going to clean his clock again. He knew he ought to resign and have another try. He knew he was too stubborn to do it. He tried a knight move, thought better of it, and put the piece back.

lie was still tinkering and not getting anywhere much when he heard Emmett call, “Pat, Frank, come forward for a bit, if you could.”

A moment later, Bragg came gliding into the cabin. He stopped himself on the back of his chair. Within a minute, Pat and Frank Marquard had joined everyone else in the cabin.

“What’s up, Emmett?” Frank asked. He sounded casual, but his expression belied his tone. He and Pat both could tell something was up: Bragg had the veteran officer’s knack for turning ordinary words into an unmistakable order.

The mission commander glanced down at the sheet paper in his hand. He was also holding, Irv saw, a map Minerva compiled from Mariner and Viking photos. “Interesting,” was all he said.

Louise would not let him get by with that. “Come on, Era. Out with it,” she told him. “Suspense isn’t funny.”

“All right,” he said, a little sheepishly. He held up the map.

“We’ve all known since ‘T6 where Viking landed, haven’t we? Here.” He pointed.

“Not far west of the Jotun Canyon, sure,” Irv said. Everyone else nodded.

“Not sure. They’ve just done a pile of new computer work on the Viking data, and it turns out the lander actually came down here, about fifty miles east of where they thought. We’ll have to adjust our landing site to conform to the new data. Louise, honey, it’ll mean more time on the computer for you- sorry.”

“I expect I’ll manage,” she said, which for a minute or so was the only break in the silence that followed her husband’s announcement.

“How very-convenient,” Sarah Levitt said at last. “Now we know, and the Russians don’t.” Both missions had intended to land as close to the Viking touchdown point as possible; only there could they be sure they would find intelligent life.

“There might be anything on the other side of that canyon,” Irv said. Pat Marquard nodded vigorously. He knew they were thinking along the same lines. Minerva’s big canyons were wider and deeper than anything Earth knew; each spring they carried meltwater from the south polar cap to the seas and lakes of the southern tropics-though on Minerva the word “tropics” had a strictly geographic meaning. The great gorges had to be formidable barriers to both ideas and genes.

“I reckon the Russians will tell us, same as we’ll tell them what we come across on our side,” Emmett Bragg said. His drawl had gotten thicker. That happened, Irv had noticed, when Bragg did not want to come out with everything that was on his mind.

“I think we ought to pass the word on to Tsiolkovsky,” Sarah said.

Bragg raised an eyebrow. “If Houston had wanted Tsiolkovsky to know, they wouldn’t have coded the information before they sent it.” He sounded as though that closed the subject for him and expected it to for everyone else.

It didn’t. “Houston is on Earth, umpty-ump million miles from here. The Russians are right here with us,” Sarah said. “Right now, I have more in common with them than with a pack of chairwarmers back in Texas.”

“Really,” Frank Marquard agreed. “Is there intelligent life in Houston?”

“I think they’re right, Emmett,” Irv said. “This is going to be tough enough, even sharing what we have. It’s too big for us not to.” He spoke with some hesitation. He was anything but combative and did not relish the idea of getting into a shouting match when the mission commander blew a fuse.

But Bragg surprised him. Instead of losing his temper, or even pretending to for effect, he looked over at his wife and asked, “Honey, how many coded transmissions has Tsiolkovsky received since we assumed Minerva orbit?”

“Let me see.” She fiddled with the computer. “At least twenty-nine, plus however many they got when we were on the far side of the planet and couldn’t monitor them.”

“How many of those have they shared with us?”

Louise did not have to check that. “Next one will be the first.”

“Oh, but that’s the Russians, though. That’s just the way they“ Pat Marquard stumbled to a halt as she realized where her words were taking her. “-do things,” she finished lamely.

Irv shook his head. Bragg couldn’t have had that turn out better for him if he had planned it for weeks. And now the commander took the advantage, saying, “If you all”-he carefully made it two words-“think I’m not sorry to put some distance between Tsiolkovsky and us, I won’t say you’re wrong. Minerva’s a big place. Why rub elbows with the Russians when we don’t have to?”

“What if we end up needing something they have and we don’t, or the other way round?” Sarah had not given up.

“Canyon or no canyon, we won’t be that far from them,” Bragg said. “If anybody needs anything that bad, he can holler for it.”

“What if we need a ride home?” Sarah asked softly.

Frank Marquard winced; Irv felt himself doing the same thing.

But Bragg said fatly, “Anybody who needs a ride home is dead, unless he can make it on Minerva until another expedition comes along. Athena’s life-support won’t take more than six people home, and neither will Tsiolkovsky’s. For that, folks, we are on our own. We’d all best remember it, too.”

The words hit home. Irv had lived on Athena long enough to have grown used to it, as he would have to, say, an apartment. Being reminded of how fragile a place it was hurt.