The radio crackled to life. “Tolmasov here. Good luck, Athena.”
“Thank you, Sergei Konstantinovich,” Bragg said. “The same to you and Tsiolkovsky. Give our regards to Comrade Reguspatoff.”
“To whom?” Puzzlement crept into the Russian colonel’s precise voice.
“Nichevo,” Bragg replied. “It doesn’t matter.”
“As you wish,” Tolmasov said: an oral shrug. “We will see you on the ground, then. We also are about to uncouple.”
“Expected as much,” Bragg said. “We’ll both be busy for a while, so I’ll say goodbye now. Athena out.” He cut the transmission.
“Reguspatoff?” Frank Marquard asked. He made a good straight man.
“Registered-U.S. Patent Office,” Bragg explained with a grin that looked more like a wolf’s lolling-tongued laugh than any gentler mirth. “Or do you think Tsiolkovsky looks so much like Athena just by accident?”
“It’s bigger,” Frank said. “Why don’t we copy their rockets?”
“I wish we would,” Bragg said. “Well, we do what we can with what we’ve got. Not too bad, I suppose: we’ll be down ahead of them.”
His wife broke in. “Or maybe we won’t. Radar shows two images from Tsiolkovsky. I’d say that means they have uncoupled from their engine pack.”
The mission commander’s head jerked toward the screen. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. He picked up the mike, punched the TRANSMIT button, and started speaking Russian. “Athena to Tsiolkovsky.”
“Tsiolkovsky here: Lopatin.” The engineer’s English was accented but easy to follow.
“Tell your boss he’s a sandbagging bastard.”
“Sandbagging? I do not understand this word,” Lopatin said:
Bragg had left it in his own language. A moment later, Colonel Tolmasov came on. He sounded like a man fighting laughter. “I do, Emmett. That is uncultured.” “You should talk.”
“You will excuse me if I lack time for casual conversation, Brigadier. We are, as you said, rather busy at the moment. Tsiolkovsky out.”
“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 that. It reminded Irv of a dentist’s drill the size of Baltimore. His teeth cringed at the very idea.
His seat was padded and contoured, but he still felt as though he weighed tons. “Are we really sure Minerva’s gravity is only a couple of percent higher than ours?” he asked plaintively. “Or are we still decelerating?”
“Yes, we’re sure and yes, we are,” Emmett replied, but before Irv had a chance to be relieved, the mission commander went on. “But not enough to do anything about our weight.” He sounded amused.
Irv groaned. So did Frank.
Sarah felt strong enough to raise an arm and point to the monitor. “We just passed something big. A castle, a temple, a barracks-”
“Could be anything,” Irv agreed. “I wish we knew more about where the Minervans are technologically. They don’t have atomic energy and they don’t have radio, but there’s a lot of difference between where we were in 2000 8.c. and in 1890.”
“Or in 22,000 B.C.,” Emmett put in. He enjoyed sticking pins in people to make them jump.
This time it didn’t work. Irv had the facts to shoot him down. “No big buildings in 22,000 B.C.,” he said smugly. Then he shut up as another what-ever-it-was went by on the screen. Clouds blurred the view, but he still recognized the pattern on the ground surrounding the building. “Those are fields down there!”
“You’re right,” Pat said. “You see those grooved circles in the middle of nowhere when you fly over irrigated farms in desert country.”
“But the lines-plow marks, would those be, Irv?” Sarah said.
“On Earth, sure. Here, who knows?” he answered.
“The lines aren’t straight,” she observed. “What does that mean?”
“Maybe contour plowing. Maybe the Minervans don’t know what straight lines are. That’s what we’re here to find out.”
Emmett said, “Yeah!” as Athena flew over a pair of volcanoes with glaciers snaking down from their peaks. “Those are Smaug and Ancalagon,” he added. “Now I know where we are. We need to head just a touch further east.” He made the adjustment.
They flew lower and lower, slower and slower. As they dropped below 45,000 feet and Mach one, Emmett cut in the turbines. The engines went from a shriek to a full-throated roar. “This is your pilot speaking,” Bragg said. “Thank you for flying Minerva Air. The cabin attendants will be starting the movie shortly. Please keep your seat belts fastened.”
“Athena does sound just like a T4T now, doesn’t she?” Irv said; the mission commander’s deadpan, dead perfect delivery made him realize consciously what he had been feeling in his bones. Not even a first-class seat on a big jet, though, had the padding and room this one did. On the other hand, airline passengers didn’t need so much, either.
“How’s she handle, Emmett?” Frank asked. He had flownlight planes before he went into astronaut training, and T38 jet trainers since. If anything happened to Bragg, he would try to get Athena home. Neither he nor anyone else relished the prospect.
Bragg thought for a moment before he answered. “Depends on what you’re comparing it to. It’s no fighter, but it’s a long way from being a mildly aerodynamic brick like the shuttle, too.”
“More like fun, or more like work?” Marquard persisted. “In space it’s fun. Here it’s work, but not pick-and-shovel work. White collar, you might say. I’m not really dressed for it.” Grinning, he ran his hand down the front of the blue NASA coverall.
“Where’s Tsiolkovsky?” Pat asked.
Louise Bragg checked the radar. “Well west of us, and a couple of miles higher.”
Everyone in the cabin whooped-none of them wanted the Russians to beat them down. “In Baikonur our name is cursed, when they find out we landed first!” Irv sang, mangling Tom Lehrer in a good cause.
“I wonder what they think of our bearing,” Louise said.
“Why aren’t they calling to ask us about 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 Jotun 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. Jotun 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.