A World of Difference

by Harry Turtledove

  A World of Difference

  Harry Turtledove

  When the Viking lander on the planet Minerva was destroyed, sending back one last photo of a strange alien being, scientists on Earth were flabbergasted. And so a joint investigation was launched by the United States and the Soviet Union, the first long-distance manned space mission, and a symbol of the new peace between the two great rivals.

  Humankind's first close encounter with extraterrestrials would be history in the making, and the two teams were schooled in diplomacy as well as in science. But nothing prepared them for alien war -- especially when the Americans and the Soviets found themselves on opposite sides...

  Harry Turtledove

  A World of Difference

  MINERVA is the fourth planet out from the sun in the solar system, the first planet past Earth orbit. At its nearest approach to Earth, Minerva is the brightest object in the sky except for the sun and moon. It then looks to the naked eye like a brilliant, gray-blue star of magnitude 5. 9. Sometimes it may even exceed that brightness for a short period. This is the result of the famous “Minervan flash,” which occurs when breaks in the cloud cover above the planet surface allow the sun to reflect directly off ice or water. Long before the cause of the phenomenon was known, it gave the planet its name: the Greeks called it Athena, after their flashing-eyed goddess of wisdom. Minerva is the Latin name for the same divinity.

  Since the invention of the telescope, Minerva has fascinated observers. It is the only worm in the solar system besides Earth where water can exist as a liquid, and the presence of oxygen in its atmosphere has long suggested that, like Earth, it is a home for life.

  Since 1965, American and Soviet space probes have greatly added to our knowledge of Minerva. Despite the planet thick, cloudy atmosphere, we now have reliable maps of almost its entire surface. Not until 1976, though, did the Viking I spacecraft actually land on the planet. The Viking analyzed Minerva lower atmosphere, and the craft’s biological experiment package and the photographs it returned to Earth confirmed that there is life on the planet.

  Viking I-last photograph, arguably the most famous ever taken, confirmed far more than that. It proved humanity is not alone in the universe, for it shows a Minervan native carrying what cannot be anything but a deliberately manufactured artifact, whether a weapon or simply a pole remains the subject of hot debate. Transmission from Viking I ceased immediately after this photograph was made…

  About The Author

  HARRY TURTLEDOVE is that rarity, a lifelong southern Californian. He is married and has three young daughters. After flunking out of Caltech, he earned a degree in Byzantine history and has taught at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State Los Angeles. Academic jobs being few and precarious, however, his primary work since leaving school has been as a technical writer. He has had fantasy and science fiction published in Isaac Asimov, Amazing, Analog, Playboy, and Fantasy Book. His hobbies include baseball, chess, and beer.

  I

  Irv Levitt pumped away on the exercise bike. Sweat clung greasily to his skin and matted his dark brown hair. He tossed his head. That was a mistake he still made after eight months in space. Little drops spread in all directions.

  The anthropologist swore and mopped them out of the air with a soft, absorbent cloth like a big diaper. Without mopping up, the sweat would float around until it hit something-or someone. Jamming six people into a ship as cramped as Athena was tough enough without troubles like that.

  Levitt worked the bike with grim intensity until finally, mercifully, the timer rang and let him off the hook. Then he toweled himself off and pushed himself out of the tiny exercise chamber and past the three sleeping cubicles.

  On his way by, he stuck his head through the privacy curtain of his own chamber for a moment. The light inside was dim and red; his wife Sarah was tethered to the foam mattress, asleep. He smiled a little and went on to the control room.

  Patricia and Frank Marquard were already there, watching the monitor as Minerva flowed by below at almost 19,000 miles an hour. Levitt saw the longing on their faces. It mirrored his own: like him, they wanted nothing more than to get down to the planet so they could start working. She was a biologist, her husband a geologist.

  At the moment, the monitor showed mostly ice. That was not surprising; each of Minerva’s polar caps reached about halfway to the equator, the northern a bit more, the southern a bit less. Sometimes the planet looked so frigid and forbidding that even a glance could make Levitt shiver.

  Not now, though. The Athena moved north past the edge of the southern polar cap. Through cloud cover, Levitt glimpsed one of the long, deep gorges that channeled meltwater from the icecaps to the seas and lakes of the southern tropics every Minervan spring.

  “I think I’d kill for a shower about now, even in water that cold,” he said.

  Pat Marquard nodded rueful agreement. “Disinfectant wipes just aren’t the same,” she said. “I’m sick of smelling like an infirmary. I’m sick of short hair, too, and even sicker of having it smell like an infirmary.” Back on Earth, her hair had been a curly blond waterfall that went halfway down her back; she was vain about it. Keeping it only a couple of inches longer than Frank’s had given her something to complain about ever since Athena left the American space station.

  “I could go for a shower, too, but I’m not looking forward to gravity again,” Frank said.

  Levitt glared at him half seriously. “You have the nasty habit of pointing out things we’d all rather not think about. Just working the bike leaves my legs sore. Having to hold myself up again, walk, run-“ He broke off, shaking his head in distaste.

  “We may have to do some running,” Pat said quietly.

  She let it drop there, but her eyes, her husband’s, and Irv’s automatically went to one of the two pictures taped above the monitor: the Viking photo. It shared pride of place with Galileo’s first sketch of Minerva through the telescope, but Galileo’s drawing got short shrift. Sometimes Irv stared at the Viking shot so hard that he ignored the planetary view under it. That picture was the reason for Athena, and the reason it had an anthropologist, it had him-aboard: the only glimpse humanity had ever had of another intelligent race.

  Ever since Viking was destroyed, people had been searching for words to describe Minervans-or at least this Minervan, Levitt reminded himself; nobody had any idea how typical he, she, or it was. “Fat hat-rack” was about the best short phrase anyone had come up with, and even the learned articles in Science and Nature had not done much better than that.

  The creature was essentially cylindrical, better than six feet tall, and about a foot and a half across through most of its height. Half a dozen short, stumpy legs were equally spaced around its base. A like number of arms ringed its torso about a foot below the top; a ring of six eyes sprouted from the bulge there.

  No mouth was visible. Some people wondered if the Minervan had one. if so, was it on the side away from the Viking’s camera, or in the center of the top part? Levitt would have bet on the latter; the Minervan looked to be radially symmetrical, not built on the bilateral pattern more common on Earth. He was willing to admit he was just guessing, though.

  Each of the Minervan’s legs ended in three claws, each arm in three fingers. Two arms held the Artifact, as the anthropologists had dubbed it. Levitt had no idea what the thing was supposed to be for: it could have been a crook, a flail, a pole vaulter’s pole, anything. He doubted it was intended as a wrecking bar, but it had done the job plenty well.

  “Junior doesn’t look as though it’d be very fast,” he said musingly.

  “Neither are we, relative to the rest of the big mammals,” Pat said. “We have things besides speed going for us. So do the Mi
nervans, I’ll guarantee you that.”

  “That ‘relative’ is a good point, Pat,” Frank Marquard put in. “Without knowing what the local competition is, we can’t tell whether Junior’s a sloth or a gazelle.”

  “You’ve been listening to your wife too much. Comes of sharing a cubicle with her, I suppose,” Irv said. He tried to remember when they had started calling the Minervan Junior and failed. Sometime very early on in the flight, anyway. “Me, I don’t care how fast Junior is by local standards. I just want to know whether I can outrun it if it decides to swing the Artifact at me.”

  “Now who sounds like me?” Pat said, and poked him in the ribs. “That’s what I said a minute ago. You should spend more time with Sarah; then you and she would be echoing each other.”

  “She’s asleep back there. Doing the last set of bloods and getting the data back to Houston took longer than she thought it would-that glitch showed up in the software again.” Sarah Levitt was an M.D. who specialized in biochemistry but was out of med school recently enough not to have forgotten what people were all about, either: a natural for Athena. For that matter, Irv knew that being married to her had not hurt his own chances.

  “By now, everyone on this ship sounds like everybody else,” Frank said.

  “In a pig’s ear we do.” Emmett Bragg glided through the cabin like a shark sliding through a tropical lagoon. If ever a man was made for freefall, Irv thought for the hundredth time, Emmett Bragg was the one. The pilot was close to fifty, a decade older than anyone else aboard Athena, and the only real astronaut on the crew. Before NASA, he had flown Phantoms in Vietnam. Once he had stayed loose on the ground for three days until a chopper got him out after his plane went down south of Haiphong.

  Frank laughed. “Nobody wants to imitate that mouthful of grits you talk through, Emmett. What do the Russians think of it, anyway?”

  Still without a wasted motion, Bragg strapped himself into the commander’s seat. “Matter of fact, the accent interests ‘em. One of ‘em said to me once I sounded like I was from Georgia.

  I told him, naw, Alabama.”

  Frank snorted, and Pat giggled.

  “He meant Stalin country, Emmett, not where the Braves play,” Irv said.

  “I know,” Bragg said calmly. “But it doesn’t hurt any to have the boys on the other side take you for a natural born fool.” He checked the radar screen. A blip was showing: the Tsiolkovsky, coming up over the Minervan horizon. “Right on time,” Levitt said.

  Bragg nodded. “They haven’t been playing with their orbit again, anyhow.” He had worn a crew cut when it was stylish, kept it through the years when it wasn’t, and still had it now that it was in again. The only difference was that gray streaked it now. He picked up the radio mike. “Zdrast’ye, Tsiolkovsky,” he said, and went on in Russian that was accented but fluent. “All well aboard?”

  “Very well, thank you, Brigadier Bragg.” Colonel Sergei Tolmasov sounded like an Oxford don. Just as the Americans used Russian to talk to the Soviet ship, the crew of the Tsiolkovsky always replied in English. Tolmasov’s dry wit went well with the slightly fussy precision he brought to the language. “Good to find you in your expected place, old fellow.”

  “We were thinking the same thing about you,” Bragg said. The Tsiolkovsky had changed orbits several times in the week since it and Athena had reached Minerva. Had each burn not taken place on the far side of the planet from Athena, Levitt would have been happier about believing the Russians when they said the maneuvers were just to enhance their observations. As things were, he had not been sorry when Bragg also started jinking. “Let them worry, too,” the pilot had said.

  Now Tolmasov remarked, “I will be glad when we are all on the ground, and this foolish maneuvering can cease.”

  “Agreed,” Bragg said at once. “We’ll be too busy cheating the natives to worry so much about each other.”

  “Ah-quite,” Tolmasov replied after a moment’s pause. “There are times, Brigadier, when I must confess myself uncertain as to how facetious you are being. Tsiolkovsky out.”

  Bragg chuckled. “Sometimes I wonder myself, Sergei Konstantinovich. Athena out.” When the mike was dead, he fell back into English. “The other thing I wonder about is whether all this back-and-forth with the Russians will end up making a fulltime liar out of me.”

  “’Too busy cheating the natives,’ “Tolmasov echoed. “I like that. I only wish I could believe it.”

  “We should send a recording of that remark back to Baikonur,” said Oleg Lopatin, the only other Russian in the control room when Tolmasov spoke to Athena. “It shows how the Americans are already planning to exploit the people of Minerva.”

  “He was just joking, Oleg Borisovich,” Tolmasov said. His Russian did not share the arid perfection of his English.

  Lopatin’s heavy eyebrows came down in a frown. “You did not seem so certain of that when you were talking with him.”

  “Never show all you know,” Tolmasov said. He did not bother pointing out that that also applied to his dealings with Lopatin, who was KGB. Tolmasov sighed. Things being as they were, that was inevitable. At least Lopatin was also a perfectly able electronics engineer and, by Russian standards, computer man. That gave him some real use aboard Tsiolkovsky, aside from his value to Moscow.

  Tolmasov looked around the control room and sighed again. He knew that, with its round analog dials instead of slick digital readouts, it would have seemed old-fashioned to Bragg. The panels full of glowing green numbers he had seen in pictures and tapes of Athena and other American spacecraft seemed- what was the American slang? glitzy to him. All what you’re used to, he thought.

  But he did envy his opposite number the computer power under those panels. Every one of Tsiolkovsky’s orbit-changing burns had been calculated back on Earth. Athena, he was sure, had figured its own. Partly that was a difference in approach. Ever since the earliest days, the Soviet space program had relied more heavily on ground control than the Americans.

  The technology gap did exist, though. The big Russian boosters let Tsiolkovsky carry a lot more weight to Minerva than Athena could. The engineering on the life-support system was solid, or he wouldn’t be here worrying. But Bragg had a lot more data processing capacity than he did, and down on Minerva there would be nothing but data to process. He worried some more.

  While he was at it, Tolmasov spent a little while worrying about Bragg. Envy mixed in with the worry there, too. The colonel was out of Frontal Aviation; his flight experience before being tapped for cosmonaut training was all in MiG2Ts and other attack aircraft. Without false modesty, he knew he was good. But he had never seen combat; he had left his squadron a few months before they flew against the Sixth Fleet’s Tomcats during the Third Beirut Crisis. He wondered how much difference that made.

  Not much, he tried to tell himself. He had done everything but. Still, Russian and English both had a word for somebody who had done everything but sleep with a girl. The word was virgin.

  That turned Tolmasov’s mind in another direction. He smoothed his short, light brown hair. It was not as neatly trimmed, of course, as it had been when Tsiolkovsky set out from Earth orbit. Eight months of amateur barbering had left everyone on the ship a little ragged. Tolmasov knew, though, that ragged or not he still kept his good looks: like so many Russians, he had a face that would somehow contrive to seem boyish and open until he was well into his fifties. And those evil days, fortunately, were a good many years away yet.

  He gave his attention back to Lopatin. “I’m going aft for some rest, Oleg Borisovich. Call me at once if anything unusual happens, or if there is any unscheduled communication from Earth.”

  “Of course,” Lopatin said. “Rest well.”

  His voice held no irony. Even with curtains, even with a bigger ship than Athena, privacy hardly existed aboard Tsiolkovsky. Tolmasov missed it less than most Americans would have. He had grown up with a brother and three sisters in a two bedroom apartment in Smolensk, and his
father was not badly off. It was, he realized wryly as he pulled himself from handhold to handhold down the corridor to the laboratory, good practice for the life of a cosmonaut.

  He heard a centrifuge whir and looked into one of the chambers. “Well, Doctor,” he said, smiling, as he glided in. “Are we healthy?” The question was a way to start a conversation, but also seriously meant: if anything was wrong, Tolmasov needed to know about it right away.

  Dr. Zakharova checked a reading, squinted, checked again, then nodded. “Healthy enough, after so much freefall. The new calcium supplement seems better than the last one we tried.”

  “That’s good, Katerina Fyodorovna. I’m glad to hear it.” Again, Tolmasov felt his words bearing two meanings. He was not looking forward to being under gravity again-even less so if he and his comrades suffered more than they had to from the weakened bones brought on by prolonged weightlessness. Moreover… “Have your tests reached a point where you can stop for a while?”

  The doctor raised an eyebrow and smiled a little. “I think so,” she said. She was a small, dark woman with startling blue eyes. Tolmasov was no longer sure whether she really was pretty. As the only woman on Tsiolkovsky, by now she looked good to him-and, he was sure, to the other four men in the crew.

  Afterward, in his cabin, they sat in midair, her legs still wrapped around his back. Freefall did not have many advantages, but sex was one of them. Tolmasov kept a grip on a handhold, so he and Katerina would not drift out through the curtain into the corridor. “A pleasant way to pass the time,” he said.

  “I’m glad you think so.” She raised that eyebrow again.

  He’d expected her to; after so long, few surprises were left between crew members. It had to be a lot like being married, he thought.

  That brought Athena, always in the back of his mind, up to the front. The Americans had tried to solve the problem of sexual tension by putting three married couples aboard. They hailed it as a triumph of equality. Tolmasov could not see that-he doubted any combination of couples would get the Americans’ best people to Minerva. And Minerva was too important for anything less than the best.