A World of Difference (15 page)

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 Jötun 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.

“You want what?” the chemist asked when he was on the ground. The Minervans pulled back again at the sound of his deep voice.

Then one of them, visibly gathering his courage, stepped toward Voroshilov again. He repeated the sad chant all three males had been making: “Give! Please give!”

“Here.” Voroshilov pulled out a pocket knife and briefly took off one glove so he could use his thumbnail to pull out a blade and show the male what the artifact was. The Minervan shrieked again, this time, if Lopatin was any judge, in delight.

Seeing their comrade rewarded, the other two males also came
up to Voroshilov. He gave one of them another pocket knife, the other a chisel with a transparent gold plastic handle.

“Hot, yellow ice!” the Minervan exclaimed as he held the chisel up to one eyestalk so he could peer through it.

All three males made themselves short and fat to thank Voroshilov and were so happy they did not take fright when he bowed in return; Lopatin had seen other locals start running at what was to them a startling gesture.

As he always did, Voroshilov asked, “What you do with tools I give you?” And Oleg Lopatin, not for the first time, thought the chemist was much more animated dealing with the Minervans than he ever had been with his fellow humans. Voroshilov’s pale, rather thin features lit up; real expression came into his voice.

The answer he got was the one he and Lopatin heard most of the time: “Take them to Hogram’s town to get what we can for them.”

“And after that?” Voroshilov persisted.

Again the reply was familiar. “We hope we will have enough then to pay Hogram the back rent on our plots, so we will not have to give them up and come to the town for good to try to make a living there.”

“Good luck to you,” Voroshilov said. Inside
Tsiolkovsky
, Lopatin sardonically echoed, “Good luck.” The Minervan peasants would not earn as much as they thought for the trinkets Voroshilov had given them. Too many such goods from Earth were available around Hogram’s castle; almost every day, the Russians there reported another drop in price.

Well, the bumpkins would find that out soon enough. He watched them trudge off toward the town. Each of them kept a couple of eyes trained on Voroshilov as he climbed up into
Tsiolkovsky
. The locals would have a story for the rest of their lives, Lopatin thought.

“What do you suppose they’ll end up doing a few weeks from now?” he asked when his companion was back inside.

“Building boats,” Voroshilov said promptly.

“I expect you’re right,” Lopatin agreed. “Building boats, earning whatever wages Fralk and Hogram choose to grant them, living wherever they can, with only their labor to sell.”

“Proletarians,” Voroshilov said.

“Exactly so. The revolution will come here one day, just as it has on Earth.”

“Not now,” Voroshilov said with what sounded like alarm.

Lopatin made a mental note of that tone, but only a small one, because Voroshilov was right. The Minervans here were just entering a capitalist economy, not coming to its conclusion. And from what Lopatin had gathered from the Americans’ reports, the natives on the far side of Jötun Canyon were still frankly feudal.

Barring the genius of a Lenin, then, the time for the revolt of the proletariat was still far away. Lopatin had a very good opinion of himself, but he knew he was no Lenin.

“Back to work,” Voroshilov said, and headed off for his lab.

A strange one, Lopatin thought as the chemist walked down the passageway. He had had the thought many times and still did not care for it. He wanted—he needed—people to be orderly and predictable. Anything he did not understand, he mistrusted.

Voroshilov, for instance, had gone far longer than any of the other men on
Tsiolkovsky
before even trying to approach Katerina. He had gone so long, in fact, that Lopatin began to wonder if he was a homosexual who had somehow escaped all the screening for that kind of criminal behavior. Lopatin would not have much minded if he was; it would have given him a hold on the quiet chemist. But it was not so. As far as the KGB man could tell, Voroshilov was just painfully shy.

He waited until clanks and clatters told him that Voroshilov was busy again, then called up a computer index to which no one else on
Tsiolkovsky
had access. In it were his files on the other five crewfolk. He recalled Voroshilov’s. One of the documents was called “Poetry”—it was a transcription of the set of jottings Lopatin had found on one of his periodic searches through the ship. The scribbles themselves were back in their hiding place.

“Love songs,” the KGB man muttered under his breath as he read them again. They were amazingly good, amazingly sensuous, and every one had Katerina’s name in it. Just glancing at them made Lopatin wish she were there. She had not warmed much in his embrace during the brief time she let him share her cubicle, but he still savored the relief her body had brought.

Men were not like women, he thought thankfully, remembering the old joke about the fellow who came into a tavern complaining that the lovemaking he had just had was the worst he had ever known. When the man behind the bar asked him how he would describe it, he grinned and said, “Magnificent!”

Regretfully, Lopatin sent the poems back into the computer’s memory. He also sent a sharp glance back toward where Voroshilov
was still working. Nobody with that unprepossessing an exterior had any business having all those fine words running around loose in his head. Lopatin doubted everyone on principle but felt real suspicion of anyone who concealed himself the way the chemist did.

Tried to conceal himself, the KGB man amended. If he ever needed one, he had a handle on Voroshilov, all right. He smiled. Katerina was a very nicely shaped handle, now that he thought of it.

The ball, a hide cover over soft
teag
-fiber, flew past Lamra. She let out a frustrated squawk as she went after it. She had thought she had an arm in the right place to catch it, but somehow it got by her. It usually did.

She widened herself so she could pick up the ball. “Reatur always catches it,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

“Throw it back to me,” Peri said. When Lamra did not throw it back right away, the other mate’s voice got louder. “Throw it back to me! Throw it back to me!” Lamra still did not throw it. Peri came over and took it away from her. “Mine!”

Lamra snatched it back. She used a couple of free hands to hit Peri. She was older and bigger than the other mate, but that did not stop Peri from hitting her, too, and poking her with a fingerclaw. She yelled and threw the ball at Peri as hard as she could. She missed. The ball bounced away.

Neither mate cared about it anymore anyhow. They were too busy fighting with each other. Other mates came running to watch and to add their shouts to Lamra’s and Peri’s.

Lamra had taken control of the fight and was just about to tie three of Peri’s arms into a knot when the door to the outside world came open and Reatur walked in.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. “What’s this racket all about?”