A World of Difference by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

twisted in his seat as if it were a cage and his shoulder harness bars.
    Seconds crawled by on hands and knees. They had been going by slowly enough already, but watching Bragg writhe made Irv wonder if time itself was holding its breath. The last time he had felt that way, he had been walking up the aisle toward Sarah and the rabbi.
    “One minute … thirty seconds …” Somehow, Louise Bragg’s words kept coming out at normal speed, no matter how much everything else was slowed down. Irv wondered how she managed that. Then she was going, “Two … one … ignition.”
    “Ignition!” her husband said savagely. He stabbed at the button. The engines came to life, kicking
Athena
out of orbit and down tail-first toward the world waiting below.
    “Kicking” was the word, Irv thought. He gasped for breath, fighting against the gorilla that seemed to have landed on his chest. After so long without weight, having it back was anything but welcome.
    “Have the Russians started their burn?” Bragg asked. He sounded the same as always, Irv noticed a little resentfully.
    “Yes.” His wife had to work to get the word out.
    “Just have to really fly this baby, then,” Bragg muttered. He worked the attitude controls.
    “You put the tail up too high for optimum reentry,” Louise said. “We’ll build up extra heat.”
    “We’ll get down faster, though. I’ll watch the skin temp, don’t worry.”
    “So will I, don’t worry,” his wife answered. The effort she needed to talk made her sound even grimmer than she would have otherwise.
    Sarah glanced over at Irv. “Hell of a time for Emmett to play like he’s Richard Petty,” she said. Irv admired her for trying to joke, but saw the worry in her eyes. He was surprised to find how relaxed he was, in spite of his discomfort. Bragg had flown against MiG-17s and glide-landed a shuttle twice. Compared to flying like that, getting
Athena
down should be a piece of cake.
    Unless something goes wrong, a small voice said inside his head. Shut up, he told it. To his relief, it did.
    “Temperature is up a little,” Louise said. “We’re starting to get into the atmosphere.”
    Her husband glanced at the gauge, then at the radar altimeter. “Still well inside specs. The carbon-fiber matrix can take more than shuttle tiles, and having a machine with a skin all in one piece means we don’t need to worry about spending our Minerva time gluing those little suckers back into place.”
    Now there, Irv thought, was a really alarming notion.
    A thin whistle began to fill the cabin and rose toward a shriek. “I thought by now I knew every noise
Athena
could make,” Pat Marquard said nervously.
    “It isn’t
Athena,”
Frank answered. “It’s Minerva—the wind of our passage.” His voice held awe. Irv understood why. No one but they—and half a dozen Russians, some unknown number of miles away—had heard the wind of another world.
    His wife thought of something else. “I wonder what the Minervans will make of our noise coming down.”
    “When the shuttles landed at Edwards, we’d hear the boom in L.A.,” Pat said. “And that’s without the noise from the ramjet and turbojet sections of our motor.”
    Emmett Bragg chuckled. “They’ll be hiding under their beds, if they have beds. And speaking of ramjets—” He checked the altimeter again and
Athena
’s velocity. “We’re low enough and slow enough to fire it up and save our liquid oxygen for the trip back up. I’m shutting down the lox pump, Louise.”
    “Acknowledged,” she said. A moment later, she added, “First time I ever heard Mach six called slow.”
    “Next to what we’ve been doing, honey, it’s just a mosey in the park.”
    Irv sided with Louise. Mach six was no mosey, so far as he was concerned. Despite aggressive soundproofing, the noise was up, too. The pump was no longer thumping and clacking away, but the shriek of Minervan air coming in through the ramjet inlet more than made up for