Tolmasov took his gratefully. Even though it was the new model AKT4 with small caliber, high velocity ammunition and not the AK4T he had trained with, a Kalashnikov was a Kalashnikov: a good friend to have if the going got rough.
“How long shall we wait for the natives to come to us before we start looking for them?” Rustaveli asked as all of them but Lopatin and Voroshilov stood in front of the airlock. Doctrine was two people on Tsiolkovsky at all times, one of them able to fly the ship, and Lopatin was backup pilot.
They went through the lock two by two, Tolmasov and Bryusov first. The pilot stood on Tsiolkovsky’s left wing and stared out at a world not his own. The view was broader than the one from the windows, but not much different-boring, barren, superficially familiar terrain. A thrill ran through the colonel all the same. He had been in his teens when Buzz Aldrin had first set foot on the moon. Well, Aldrin was envying him today.
The lock’s outer door came open behind him. Katerina and Rustaveli emerged and looked around. The Georgian tugged his jacket tighter around him. Tolmasov smiled to himself.
Rustaveli was carrying a chainlink ladder. He fixed it to brackets on the edge of the wing and let it unroll. The other end landed on the ground with a metallic whump. The biologist cocked an eyebrow at Tolmasov. “I suppose you’d shoot me if I tried to go down ahead of you.”
“I would try not to hit anything vital,” Tolmasov said. Rustaveli laughed, bowed, and stood aside with a sweeping gesture of invitation. Tolmasov slung his rifle, stood, and started down the ladder. He was glad he had managed to keep his tone light. The way his hands had tightened on the rifle at Rustaveli’s impudent suggestion made him know he was only half joking.
The ground felt like ground under his feet. He took a few steps away from the ship and away from the shadow of the wing. He glanced up at the sun. Did it seem too small in the sky? Hard to tell, the more so as he had got used to its shrinking as Tsiolkovsky traveled outward. He was sure though, that nowhere on Earth was the sky-or what he could see of it through patchy clouds-quite this shade of greenish blue.
The ladder rattled and clanked. Katerina Zakharova lowered herself down onto the Minervan surface. She took two heavy, deliberate steps, then looked at her footprints. “Humanity’s marks on a new world,” she murmured.
“Ah, but the other question is, what marks will it leave on us?” Shota Rustaveli came next. Tolmasov would have bet on that. If Bryusov had tried preceding the Georgian, the linguist likely would have arrived on Minerva headfirst.
A moment later, Bryusov did join the other three. He looked ill at ease and soon revealed why. “I am not of much use here, until we actually meet the Minervans.”
That left him wide open to a sardonic retort from Rustaveli, but, rather to Tolmasov’s surprise, it did not come. Instead, just as Lopatin shouted in his earphone, he heard the biologist say quietly, “I do not think you will be useless long, Valery Aleksandrovich.”
Rustaveli was pointing; Tolmasov’s eyes followed his finger. A Minervan had been hiding behind a stone big enough to make Tolmasov glad Tsiolkovsky’s undercarriage missed it. Now the native came out, moving slowly toward the waiting humans.
It looked like its picture. That should not have surprised Tolmasov, but somehow it did. What he did next was as hard as anything else in his life. He stepped aside, saying, “Valery Aleksandrovich, now I am not of much use. You and Shota Mikheilovich must go forward from here.”
“The man who covers is as useful as the one who advances,” Rustaveli said. Hearing an army phrase from him caught Tolmasov off guard. So did finding out the Georgian meant it literally; Rustaveli set down his Kalashnikov before he walked away from Tsiolkovsky to meet the Minervan. After a moment’s hesitation, so did Bryusov.
The colonel automatically shuffled a few steps sideways, so his companions would not be between him and the Minervan. He turned his head to tell Katerina to do the same thing, but she already had.
She nodded at him. “You see, I was listening after all through those endless drills,” she said. He dipped his head in acknowledgment.
Their gloved hands open and empty before them, Bryusov and Rustaveli stopped a couple of meters in front of the Minervan. It kept two eyes on each of them, while its remaining pair refused to hold still on any target, even Tsiolkovsky, for more than a couple of seconds at a time. The spectacle was unsettling. Tolmasov wondered how the creature kept from tying its eyestalks in knots.
Bryusov pointed to himself. “Valery.” He pointed to Rustaveli. “Shota.” He pointed to the Minervan and waited. For this, Tolmasov thought, we need a linguist?
It might have been simple, but it worked. The native pointed toward itself with three arms at once and said, “Fralk.” Its voice startled Tolmasov again-it was a smooth contralto. To his way of thinking, nothing taller than he was, and unbelievably weird looking to boot, had any business sounding like a woman, a sexy woman, at that.
Get used to surprises, the colonel told himself. Expect them. After all, you were just reminding yourself this is a whole different world. He wondered how many times he would end up giving himself that order. A great many, he guessed.
Bryusov was still talking at the Minervan, trying to pick up nouns. The tape recorder in his pocket would save the replies he got for more study later. Tolmasov chuckled to himself. The recorder was just as good as the Americans’. Both expeditions used Sonys.
While the linguist worked, Rustaveli walked halfway around Fralk so he could take some pictures of it-him? her? and Bryusov. But when he pulled out his camera-also Japanese, again like the Americans’-the Minervan sprang away from him and Bryusov. Its body got short and plump, so its arms could reach the ground. A moment later it was tall again, and it was holding stones in three hands.
“Hold still!” Katerina shouted, startling Tolmasov and the Minervan both. A couple of Fralk’s eyestalks whipped toward her. The native did not put down the rocks it had seized, but it made no move to throw them, either.
At the same time Fralk was watching Katerina, it was also keeping an eye on Bryusov, another on Rustaveli, and one more on Tolmasov. A Minervan, the colonel realized, was a creature that had no behind, any direction was as accessible to it as another. He wondered how the natives chose which way to go.
Worry about that some other time, he told himself firmly. First things first. “I think the photographs will have to wait, Shota Mikheilovich,” he called. “At least until this Fralk understands that your camera is no weapon.”
The biologist’s thin, mobile features twisted in a grimace, but he lowered the camera, moving slowly and ostentatiously. The eyestalk Fralk was using to watch him followed the motion. The Georgian signed. “You appear to be right,” he said mournfully. “I will go turn over some flat stones. With luck, nothing I find under them will want to slay me for taking its picture.”
Seeing Rustaveli go off to do something that had nothing to do with it seemed to reassure Fralk. It staged giving long answers to Bryusov. It talked, in fact, at such length that the linguist threw his hands in the air. “This will be wonderful later, when I and the computers back at Moscow have a chance to analyze it,” he said plaintively, “but for now it’s only so much nonsense.”
He had picked up a couple of rocks of his own, a small white one and a larger gray one. He held the white rock above the gray one, then below it. “Spatial relationships,” he explained to Tolmasov, then turned back to Fralk, who was saying something or other.
Eventually, the colonel thought, he would have to learn Minervan. He ought to be just getting fluent in it when Tsiolkovsky lifted off. Then he likely would never use it again. Things worked that way sometimes.