Too late. The boat was already sliding downstream. The warriors who had let it get away stared at it with a couple of eyestalks and apprehensively back at Fralk with the rest. He screamed abuse at them. Lopatin chuckled. He did not understand even half of what Fralk was yelling, but anyone who had ever soldiered recognized the tone.
One of the males past whom Lopatin was marching wiggled his eyestalks at the human. Even in an alien species, Lopatin could tell this was a veteran: his spears and shields were old and battered, not shiny new ones like those most of the warriors carried, and pale scars seamed his hide.
“Taught that little budling everything he knows about fighting, I did: me, Juksal,” the male said. “Even sounds like a warrior now, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, and a leader of warriors,” Lopatin agreed.
“Taught him everything he knows about fighting,” Juksal repeated. The Minervan boasted like a veteran, too, the KGB man thought. Lopatin had listened to more stories about the Great Patriotic War than he ever wanted to remember. Almost all of them, a security man’s automatic cynicism told him, were lies.
He was drawing near the boats at the makeshift landing when he happened to recall a piece of a war story he had thought long forgotten. The fellow who told it was a Stalingrad survivor and had the campaign ribbon to prove it. “The worst of the worst times,” he had said, “was when the Germans had us pinned back against the Volga and the drift ice on the river made it damn near impossible to get supplies across to us.”
Lopatin looked at the chunks of ice floating by, looked at the coracle to which he was about to entrust his precious, irreplaceable neck. He wished-oh, how he wished he had never remembered that story.
Emmet Bragg frowned as he examined the latest photo from one of the weather and mapping satellites Athena had left in orbit around Minerva. Emmet had a whole spectrum of frowns, Irv thought-this one went with real live serious problems. “What’s hit the fan?” Irv asked.
“I’m not quite sure,” Emmett answered; the frown changed shape, to reflect his uncertainty. “Here, see what you make of this.” He leaned over to show Irv the picture, pointing with a ballpoint pen at the part that was troubling him. “This dark line here?” Irv asked.
Emmet nodded. “That’s the one. Nothing like it on any earlier pictures o’ that area. That’s the country just west of Jotun Canyon from here, you know.”
“I recognized it.” Irv peered at the picture. Now he was frowning, too. “What do you suppose this is?”
“A lousy picture, for one thing, through scattered clouds and without enough resolution. I wish we had a Defense Department special instead of these miserable terrain-mappers-that’d tell us what was what.”
“Back when we set out, who’d have thought we’d need to be able to kibitz at card games from space?” Irv asked reasonably.
“Nobody, worse luck,” Emmett answered. “But I wish somebody had, because one of the things that line could be is the Skarmer army headed out to do its thing.”
Irv felt his frown deepen till it matched the one Emmet was wearing. “Yeah, it could, couldn’t it? They could be doing something else just as easily, too, though, or it might not be Minervans at all.”
“I know, I know, I know.” Bragg looked unhappy. “A spy bird would tell us, one way or the other. As is, all I can do is guess, and I hate that.” The mission commander sat brooding for a minute or so, then snatched at the radio set. “Who are you calling?” Irv asked.
“Frank,” Emmett said. He spoke into the microphone:
“Frank? You there? Answer, please.”
A moment later, Frank Marquard did. “Your humble canyon-crawler is here, humbly crawling his canyon. Found another fossil about twenty minutes ago, too. What’s up, Emmett?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I think maybe the Skarmer are coming. If they are, they’ll be heading up our side of Jotun Canyon. I don’t think you want to be there when they do.”
“Are you certain they’re coming?” Frank asked. “I’m further north than I’ve been before, and I’ve found some interesting strata here, things that don’t poke through down by Athena. I don’t want to leave if I don’t have to.”
“I’m not sure,” Bragg said, looking as though the admission pained him. He always looked that way when certainty eluded him, Irv thought.
“Then I’m not leaving,” Frank said.
Bragg made a fist, pounded it against his knee. He glanced over toward Irv. Order him back, the anthropologist thought. But before he could speak, Bragg turned back to the microphone. “You be alert out there, you hear me!” he said.
“Sure I will,” Frank said. “We need more lerts.”
“Not a good time for jokes,” Bragg said with a snort. “I mean it. Athena out.” He was shaking his head as he put down the mike. “Lerts.”
“If it’s not fight there in front of him, Frank doesn’t worry about it,” Irv said. He thought of Pat’s bitter words the night after Sarah had flown across Jotun Canyon. He had done his best to avoid thinking of that night ever since or thinking of Pat in anything but a purely professional way. Most of the time, that worked pretty well. For a moment, though, even his skin remembered how she had felt in his arms.
“Yeah, I know,” Emmett said, bringing Irv back to the here-and-now. “But I can’t make him come in just on account of my vapors. He’s got his job to do, down there in the canyon.”
“I suppose so,” Irv said. He sounded halfhearted, even to himself.
Bragg looked at him. “You, too, huh?”
“Yeah. Logically, though, you’re fight. Don’t misunderstand me, Emmett.” Walking in front of a train was surer trouble than getting on Emmett Bragg’s bad side. Offhand, Irv could not think of much else.
“Yeah, logically.” Bragg grunted. “Then why don’t I like it?”
The KGB studied Disneyland because visiting Soviet dignitaries liked to go there. One of the attractions, Lopatin had learned from a friend, was something called “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.” Never having read The Wind in the Willows, Lopatin did not know much about this Mr. Toad, but he was sure the fide he was taking was wild enough to horrify any amphibian ever hatched.
The coracle tossed in the surge like a toy boat in a bathtub with a rambunctious three-year-old. All the Minervans in it were blue with fright. Could Lopatin have changed color, he would have been blue, too. He wondered if Tolmasov had let him go along in the hope he would drown, and thought of ways he could get revenge even on a Hero of the Soviet Union when he got back to Earth.
If he got back to Earth. At the moment, he would not have given a counterfeit kopeck for his chances of making it to the far side of Jotun Canyon, let alone home again. Two boulders of ice had already missed the boat by a lot less than he cared to think about; he had fended off another one, fortunately smaller, with a pole.
And his coracle was luckier than many. One of the chunks of iceberg that just missed it smashed a boat a little further downstream. Minervans splashed into the water as the coracle instantly turned to kindling. A couple of warriors managed to hang on to floating debris; the rest simply disappeared.
Even if he managed to grab something, Lopatin knew, he would quickly perish; this temporary river was frigid as the waters around Vladivostok in December. There, at least, the Minervans had the advantage on him. To them, any liquid water was warm. They might drown, but they would not freeze. A dubious distinction, he thought.
The spray blowing in his face had already left his nose numb. And when he bent down to scoop water from the bottom of the coracle, the cold bit into his fingers through the heavy gloves he was wearing. His feet had also started to freeze.
Lopatin was bending to bail again when Fralk screamed, “Paddle! Paddle hard for your lives!” The KGB man jerked erect. A veritable ice mountain was bearing down on the boat.
“Mother of God!” Lopatin shouted. He had called on the devil’s relatives often enough in his career, but could not remember the last time he had named any
of the Deity’s. Luckily the Minervans, unlike his comrades, would not notice.
He grabbed a paddle from one of the males, jammed it into the water again and again. He did not know whether he was a better paddler than the warrior but could not bear to depend only on the efforts of others for his survival. Slowly, so slowly, the coracle moved ahead. The blue-white slab of ice, sailing along as majestically as a dowager queen, took no notice of the artificial insect in its path.
The Minervan whose paddle Lopatin had taken let out a shrill scream of terror and leapt overboard. The rest of the locals, along with the KGB man, dug in even harder. Lopatin refused to look up; he would risk nothing that might distract him from his desperate rhythm.
Were they gaining? He almost tried not to believe it, for fear of slacking. But surely that mass of ice was not headed straight at the coracle anymore. Surely… The wave the ice mountain pushed ahead of itself lifted up the boat’s stern; Lopatin tried to tell himself he was imagining the wind of its passage.
Then it was past and some other boat’s problem. Heart pounding, Lopatin rested for a moment. A few more like that, he thought shakily, and the whole fleet would be someone else’s problem-probably the Virgin’s, in whose existence he did not believe. After angrily telling himself that, he wondered whether Minervans had souls.
“Is water like this all the time?” Fralk asked. If he did have a soul, he had been nearly frightened out of it; the blue of his skin was the next thing to purple.
“I hope not,” Lopatin answered, no sailor himself. In the aftermath of shared fright, he felt closer to the Minervan than he ever had, even during weapons training. Which reminded him: the only way Fralk would ever get his hands on the Kalashnikov was from Lopatin’s dead body.
That didn’t necessarily mean he would not get off a few shots of his own, though, when the time came.
The eastern wall of Jotun Canyon filled more and more of the sky ahead. Fralk saw it, too, and began to drift back toward his usual green. “We are doing it, Oleg Borisovich,” he said. Lopatin did not think he was reading surprise into the Minervan’s voice.
Nevertheless, he answered, “Da, Fralk, we are doing it.” That was no small feat, either, not when the Skarmer were inventing watergoing technology from scratch. He peered upstream, downstream. The water was still full of boats, in spite of the dreadful swath that enormous hunk of ice had cut through them. “So are most of the rest.”
Able to look in both directions at the same time, Fralk had already decided the same thing. “Enough of us will get across to fight well,” he said, “if we can assemble quickly once we’re there.”
Lopatin nodded. After a while, the coracle was close enough to the eastern shore for him to look for landing sites. “There!” he said, pointing. “Steer that way. Looks like good, sheltered anchorage.” He spoke the Skarmer tongue so the paddlers could understand him, but the key word, as happened so often, came out in Russian.
“Like a good what, Oleg Borisovich?” Fralk asked. “Tell me what that means.”
“A good place to put up a boat,” Lopatin answered. He pointed again. “That piece of rock that juts out into the water shields the part behind it from the worst flow of the stream.”
“Oh.” Fralk did a token job of widening himself. “A good thought. It never would have occurred to me that something like that could make a difference. I’m glad you’ve come along.”
That, Lopatin decided, made one of them. A problem with new technology, human or Minervan, was that it didn’t have all the answers, not least because the people putting it together hadn’t asked all the fight questions. Fralk would have been perfectly happy to land any old place on the eastern shore; he hadn’t refined his goals enough to see one place as better than another. That would be fine-until he needed his boat to get back to the other side and discovered it wasn’t where he’d left it anymore.
The KGB man’s mental grumbling did not keep him from helping to guide the coracle into the anchorage he had spotted. Fralk climbed out of the boat and tied it to a boulder. “I am back, Omalo, as I said I would be,” he declared. The rest of the males in the coracle waved their arms and hooted.
Lopatin did not join the celebration, though he was as relieved as any of the Minervans to have made it to the other side. He was also a thoroughly practical man. Instead of wasting time cheering, he scrambled after Fralk out onto dry land.
A few hundred meters away, Juksal was already heading upslope. Like Lopatin, he saw no point in staying in his boat an instant longer than he had to. He felt the same way about Ervis Gorge as a whole. The Omalo could do all sorts of hideous things to the Skarmer if they kept them trapped down here. Getting the warriors up to the flatlands was what needed doing, the veteran thought.
Warriors! Juksal’s hands tightened around the spears he was carrying till his fingerclaws bit into the shafts. Calling a bunch of peasants and clerks warriors didn’t make them such, nor did giving them spears. Just getting them to stay in their groups and do as they were told would be a fair-sized miracle.
Juksal wished he knew more about the Omalo. If they all got their eyestalks pointing the fight way fast enough, the Skarmer might be in for a very unpleasant time. But who would believe anyone could cross a Great Gorge in the middle of the summer flood? A year ago, Juksal would not have believed it himself. With luck, the Omalo would not believe it, either, not until too late.
A spatter of snow blew past the warrior. He hoped for more. It would help hide the boats-and the Skarmer males as they climbed the side of Ervis Gorge. Unless the Omalo were complete idiots, they would have watchers out. No one ever lived to be old by assuming his enemies were idiots. Juksal was no idiot.
As if thinking of watchers had made them spring into being, something moved far above him. Swearing to himself, he dove behind a rock. He stuck a cautious eyestalk around it to make sure of what he had just glimpsed. With luck, it would be an animal, not a male.
Now the snow hindered him. He could not tell what the thing up ahead was. He swore again, then paused to take stock of things.
“If I have trouble seeing it, it’ll have trouble seeing me, too,” he whispered. And he carried two spears long and sharp enough to make even a krong think twice.
Keeping himself widened as if before Hogram, Juksal dashed for the cover of another boulder. Again he poked an eyestalk around it and again found himself able to see little. If that was a male up there, though, he had not raised the alarm. More likely a beast, Juksal decided.
Then, through the muttering of the wind, he heard a sound that came from no beast: the pound-pound-pound of a hammer on stone. That was a male, then, and by the racket he was making, he had no idea Juksal was anywhere close.
The warrior scuttled forward, quiet as a zosid sneaking up on a runnerpest.
Shota Rustaveli looked nervously back over his shoulder as he stepped into Tsiolkovsky’s control room. He could have had a dozen legitimate reasons for coming forward, and in any case Yuri Voroshilov was, as usual, preoccupied in his lab at the other end of the spacecraft. Rustaveli was nervous anyhow.
“And I’m not even a soldier,” he murmured to himself, surprised at the way his heart was pounding. The murmur was in Georgian, so that even if someone had been standing right beside him, it would have been only a meaningless noise. Can’t be too careful, he thought-soldier or no, the idea of disobeying orders was seriously scary.
He glanced around again. Still no sign of Yuri. Of course not, he told himself angrily. He walked over to the radio, turned it on, found the frequency he needed.
“Hello, Athena. Tsiolkovsky calling.” He held the mike close to his lips, spoke very softly. “Hello, Athena-”
“Athena here: Louise Bragg.” The reply was likewise a whisper, for Rustaveli had turned the volume control down as far as he could and still hear. The tape would still be there to damn him later, but that was later. Now… now curiosity rode Louise’s voice: “Your call is unscheduled, Tsiolkovsky. What’s going on?”
>
“The Skarmer fleet is crossing Jotun Canyon, that’s what, and Oleg Lopatin with them. He has his friend Kalashnikov along, as I suggest you remember when you go to tell him hello. That’s all. Tsiolkovsky out.”
He reached out to switch off the set. His hand stopped, just above the switch. The dials had already gone dark by themselves. His jaw clenched until his teeth ground against one another. Of all the times for a malfunction-
Then he heard footsteps coming up the passageway. Voroshilov paused at the entrance to the control room. He was shaking his head. “That was stupid, Shota Mikheilovich,” he said. “Stupid.”
“What was?” If Rustaveli could brazen it out, he would. “This damned radio seems to have gone out on us. I was just checking it.”
“By calling the Americans.” Voroshilov was not asking a question.
Rustaveli sagged. “I should have known the timing of the breakdown was too good.”
“Yes, you should have,” Voroshilov agreed. “I hope I managed to kill the circuit before you blabbed too much, but I’m not certain. You did surprise me, Shota.”
“I’m so glad,” Rustaveli muttered. Then, one by one, the implications of what had happened began to sink in. “You were monitoring me,” he said slowly. With a dignity curious for one admitting such a thing, Voroshilov nodded. “Which means”-
Rustaveli went on; he had not really needed the nod-“ you ‘re KGB.”
Voroshilov nodded again. “But you will not mention that to anyone else, Shota Mikheilovich. Not to anyone. It is not relevant. I would do this no matter what I was, if I came by and found you at the radio.”
“Why? You hate Lopatin,” Rustaveli blurted. He wondered how that was possible if they were both KGB. He also wondered if it was even true or just a cover the two snoops used.
“Lopatin is a pig,” Voroshilov said flatly. That answered that, Rustaveli thought, or at least proved Yuri an actor as well as a chemist and a spy. After a moment, picking his words carefully, Voroshilov went on. “But he is also following the orders he received both from Colonel Tolmasov and from the Rodina, the motherland. You have no business meddling with his mission.”
A World of Difference Page 26