Harry Turtledove - A World of Difference

Seeing him finished, Sarah said, “Nice and quick. Good. We just may get a live mama out of this yet.” She raised her voice a little. “How you doing, Pat?”

Again, hesitation. Then Pat answered, “I’ve got the first one just about clamped. I’ll go to the other as fast as I can.”

“Oh, hell!” Sarah exclaimed. She scrambled over to Pat’s side. “Give me that!” Irv went around the eloc mate to see if he could do anything to help. His face fell when he saw the size of the pool of blood under the vessel Sarah was finally clamping. He could not imagine how any animal, Earthly or Minervan, could lose so much and live.

And sure enough, the eloc mate was sagging, its arms and eyestalks going limp in a pattern he had seen too many times before. Sarah recognized that, too. She looked at the eloc-the dead eloc-and at the clamp in her hand. She threw the clamp down, hard, on the frozen ground. It bounced away.

“I’m sorry,” Pat said miserably. “I just can’t-”

“I know,” Sarah said. “Nothing to be done about it.” But she could not help adding, “] really had hopes for this, though. Now we may not get another chance to test it before-before the real thing. Having a success behind us would have been nice. Oh, well.”

She looked around to see where the clamp had gone, walked over to it, picked it up. Irv undid the five they had managed to place on the eloc mate. Only a few more drops of blood dribbled out as he freed each one; the mate was empty. He said, “We might as well head back to Athena.”

Head down, Pat walked a few paces apart from her two companions. Sarah said, low voiced, “Maybe I should show a Minervan what to do. A male would probably be more reliable than Pat is right now. I don’t blame her, but-”

“I know.” Irv thought about it. After a few seconds, he shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said as quietly as Sarah. “As far as I can tell, none of the males but Reatur and maybe Ternat would react well to the idea of helping mates survive. Too far outside their mental horizons. If he didn’t think Lamra was special, I doubt Reatur would let us go on, either. And right now Ternat isn’t here, and Reatur-”

“Has problems of his own,” Sarah finished for him. She sighed. “Don’t we all?”

Minervan summer days were not bad, not for someone used to Moscow weather as Oleg Lopatin was. Minervan nights were something else again, almost always ten below Celsius or worse. Every night reminded Lopatin of his military snow-survival course.

That he was in the middle of an armed camp now only brought the memory into sharper focus. Fralk’s forces, battered and scattered by the crossing of Jotun Canyon, were back together now, as much as they ever would be. The Omalo had not struck at them. Tomorrow, with luck, the Skarmer would be out of the immense canyon altogether and up onto fiat ground. Lopatin did not plan to be with them.

Helping the Skarmer win the war against their neighbors to the east, maybe squeezing off half a clip at any Americans foolish enough to try to help the feudal Omalo resist the ineluctable logic of the historical dialectic…, all that would be wonderful, so long as he did it step by step, in contact with Tsiolkovsky. Then he would be not only one of the instruments through which the dialectic unfolded but also carrying out Soviet policy, as defined before he headed east with Fralk’s army. Losing his radio changed everything.

Any Soviet officer who took matters into his own hands asked for trouble and usually got it. If he showed hostility toward Athena’s crew without being hooked into the chain of command that could authorize such behavior, he knew exactly what would happen. The Americans would scream bloody murder. They were probably screaming bloody murder already about Frank Marquard.

Moscow would say, would have to say, that Lopatin had been sent across Jotun Canyon purely as an observer. All the blame would land right on his shoulders. He could see it coming, just as he had seen that mountain of ice bearing down on his coracle.

As he had done in the coracle, he intended to get away now. He only saw one course that might let that happen, and he hated it. But if he yielded himself up to the Americans, and told them how Marquard had died, he might put out for his own benefit the line he expected from Moscow. As far as his actions went, all he needed to do was tell the truth. Unfortunately, though, as a KGB man he knew for how little the truth often counted.

The Skarmer slept all around him. In an Earthly camp, fires would have lit his way-and let sentries see him. The Minervans had no fires; they liked the weather fine. Lopatin knew they had set sentries. With luck, he could evade them in the dark.

He slid out of his sleeping bag, quietly rolled it up, and stuffed in into his pack. He slung his rifle over his shoulder. He wanted to carry it, but knew he might need both hands free. Shooting his way to freedom would surely fail anyhow; even if it didn’t, it would wreck the Soviet mission. But he missed the comfort of having the Kalashnikov ready to fire.

He slipped through the slumbering natives. Going in the right direction was easy, even in the darkness: any way uphill was right.

He wondered how he would ever get back across Jotun Canyon to return to Tsiolkovsky-after abandoning the Skarmer here, he would not be popular among them. Perhaps it would not matter. With Marquard dead, the Americans would have the supplies to let him fly home aboard Athena.

Home? No, to fly back to Earth. He doubted he could ever go home again. Times had changed since the Great Patriotic War, when so many Soviet soldiers earned time in the Gulag merely for seeing what western Europe was like. They had not changed so much, however, that a KGB man could expect to be greeted with open arms after being debriefed by the CIA, as Lopatin knew he would be.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to swear. He was a good Party man and a loyal Soviet citizen, and he knew he would have to defect. Very slowly, he kept creeping out of the Skarmer camp.

Finally, after what seemed forever, the Skarmer began to thin out. Lopatin no longer had to pay attention to his every footstep for fear of falling over a native. He could move faster now.

The wind picked up. Clouds scudded by. One of the Minervanmoons-Lopatin had no idea which one-shone through a break in the cover overhead. Far fainter than Earthly moonlight, it was better than the near-blackness he had known before. He picked up the pace again.

The moonlight also let a Skarmer sentry spot motion he might otherwise have missed. “Halt!” the male called. “Who goes?” Lopatin froze. Too late-the sentry had already picked up the alien quality of the way he moved. “The human! The human is running away!” the Minervan screamed.

That did it, Lopatin thought, hearing hubbub break out behind him as the outcry jerked warriors from sleep. “This way! This way!” the sentry shouted.

Swearing now in good earnest, the KGB man ran that way. Don’t panic, he told himself. The terrain gave him plenty of cover. He dashed from boulder to boulder, keeping low, trying not to give that cursed sentry another glimpse of him. The Minervan moon stayed visible. Where moments before he had been glad to see it, now he wished it into the hottest pits of hell.

He scuttled over to yet another rock and paused, listening.

Most of what he heard from the camp was chaos, but not all. Some males were moving purposefully after him, calling as they came. He shivered in his latest hiding place. Not even his darkest nightmares included pursuit by a pack of screaming maenads.

They were getting closer, too, terrifyingly fast. That alarmed him in a way different from their banshee cries-he had swerved away from his earlier direction of travel, away from where the sentry spied him. Yet the Minervans somehow still tracked him.