A World of Difference by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

it?”
    “They figure we screwed up,” her husband guessed. “Tolmasov’s just gonna let us. Sitting in his chair, I’d do the exact same thing.”
    Sarah was still watching the monitor. She gasped. “Will you
look
at that?” Other gasps followed shortly.
    Irv had seen plenty of pictures of Jötun Canyon taken from space. He had flown over the Grand Canyon half a dozen times. Neither did anything to prepare him for what he was seeing. Jötun Canyon was a great gouge on the face of the world. Three miles deep, a dozen miles across, even at jet speeds it took a minute and a half to cross.
    “That’s my spot,” Frank declared. “Just start me at the edge, give me plenty of rope, and let me work my way down. If Jötun doesn’t cut through a billion and a half years of stratigraphy, I’ll eat my hat.”
    Bragg flew
Athena
south along the eastern rim of the canyon. “We swing inland when it jogs southwest,” he said. “Then we start looking for a place to set down.” He laughed a couple of syllables’ worth of laugh. “After the shuttle, that looking-around time is a luxury.”
    They were down very low now, low enough to see individualtrees—if those tall, dark green, stationary things were trees—in the forests. Snow clung to them, though summer was about to start.
    The canyon changed direction. Bragg flew
Athena
away from it. In a couple of minutes, he flew over some little rolling hills. Seeing them made Irv sit up, even against gravity’s new and unpleasant grip. He was not the only one who recognized them. “That’s where
Viking
set down!” Pat exclaimed.
    “Sure does look that way,” Bragg agreed. He flew on. Before long, he flew over another one of the large buildings and the fields that surrounded it. “Hate to rip a half-mile track in a fellow’s crop,” he said, “but I don’t think we’re gonna do any better. Anybody really want to try talking me out of it?”
    Irv thought about it, but in the end he didn’t.
Athena
, he hoped, would be strange enough—and big enough—to win the humans the benefit of the doubt. Nobody else said anything, either.
    “All right,” Bragg said. “I’m gonna do it. Let’s go around for one more pass to kill some speed and get nice and lined up, and then we land.”
    Athena
was so close to the ground that on the monitor Irv saw things moving around down there. Things … He felt the hair on his arms and the back of his neck tingle as the realization hit him. Those were not
things
. Those were
Minervans
.
    “Altitude 500 feet, speed 320,” Louise said as her husband swung
Athena
down. “Three hundred feet, speed 300 … 200 feet, speed 290.”
    “Arming the landing gear,” Emmett said. He lifted the switch’s cover, pushed it to the ON position.
    Louise’s reading never paused. “A hundred fifty feet, speed 260 …”
    “Deploying landing gear.” Emmett uncovered and pushed the switch next to the one he had just hit.
Athena
really seemed a plane to Irv now; the noises and bumps as the wheels came down were the same as the ones he knew from Delta jets.
    “Ninety feet, speed 240 …”
    “Landing gear down and locked.” Bragg hesitated, then bared his teeth in what was almost a smile. “We owe the Russians this one—the undercarriage is borrowed from the Ilyushin I1-76. There’s no better big plane in the world for getting in and out of unpaved fields.”
    “Fifty feet, speed 230 … 20 feet, speed 220 …”
    There was a jar. “Down! Hot damn, we’re down!” Braggsaid exultantly. “Wheels locked,” he added a moment later. He reached out with his left hand and slammed the speed brake all the way forward.
    “I hope you have something more historic than, ‘Hot damn, we’re down!’ planned for when we step outside,” Sarah remarked as they bounced along the ground.
    “Did I say that?” Bragg sounded amazed.
    So was Irv, at how gentle the landing was. He had experienced bumpier ones at Dulles. “Let’s hear it for Russian