“Now who sounds like me?” Pat said, and poked him in the ribs. “That’s what I said a minute ago. You should spend more time with Sarah; then you and she would be echoing each other.”

“She’s asleep back there. Doing the last set of bloods and getting the data back to Houston took longer than she thought it would-that glitch showed up in the software again.” Sarah Levitt was an M.D. who specialized in biochemistry but was out of med school recently enough not to have forgotten what people were all about, either: a natural for Athena. For that matter, Irv knew that being married to her had not hurt his own chances.

“By now, everyone on this ship sounds like everybody else,” Frank said.

“In a pig’s ear we do.” Emmett Bragg glided through the cabin like a shark sliding through a tropical lagoon. If ever a man was made for freefall, Irv thought for the hundredth time, Emmett Bragg was the one. The pilot was close to fifty, a decade older than anyone else aboard Athena, and the only real astronaut on the crew. Before NASA, he had flown Phantoms in Vietnam. Once he had stayed loose on the ground for three days until a chopper got him out after his plane went down south of Haiphong.

Frank laughed. “Nobody wants to imitate that mouthful of grits you talk through, Emmett. What do the Russians think of it, anyway?”

Still without a wasted motion, Bragg strapped himself into the commander’s seat. “Matter of fact, the accent interests ‘em. One of ‘em said to me once I sounded like I was from Georgia.

I told him, naw, Alabama.”

Frank snorted, and Pat giggled.

“He meant Stalin country, Emmett, not where the Braves play,” Irv said.

“I know,” Bragg said calmly. “But it doesn’t hurt any to have the boys on the other side take you for a natural born fool.” He checked the radar screen. A blip was showing: the Tsiolkovsky, coming up over the Minervan horizon. “Right on time,” Levitt said.

Bragg nodded. “They haven’t been playing with their orbit again, anyhow.” He had worn a crew cut when it was stylish, kept it through the years when it wasn’t, and still had it now that it was in again. The only difference was that gray streaked it now. He picked up the radio mike. “Zdrast’ye, Tsiolkovsky,” he said, and went on in Russian that was accented but fluent. “All well aboard?”

“Very well, thank you, Brigadier Bragg.” Colonel Sergei Tolmasov sounded like an Oxford don. Just as the Americans used Russian to talk to the Soviet ship, the crew of the Tsiolkovsky always replied in English. Tolmasov’s dry wit went well with the slightly fussy precision he brought to the language. “Good to find you in your expected place, old fellow.”

“We were thinking the same thing about you,” Bragg said. The Tsiolkovsky had changed orbits several times in the week since it and Athena had reached Minerva. Had each burn not taken place on the far side of the planet from Athena, Levitt would have been happier about believing the Russians when they said the maneuvers were just to enhance their observations. As things were, he had not been sorry when Bragg also started jinking. “Let them worry, too,” the pilot had said.

Now Tolmasov remarked, “I will be glad when we are all on the ground, and this foolish maneuvering can cease.”

“Agreed,” Bragg said at once. “We’ll be too busy cheating the natives to worry so much about each other.”

“Ah-quite,” Tolmasov replied after a moment’s pause. “There are times, Brigadier, when I must confess myself uncertain as to how facetious you are being. Tsiolkovsky out.”

Bragg chuckled. “Sometimes I wonder myself, Sergei Konstantinovich. Athena out.” When the mike was dead, he fell back into English. “The other thing I wonder about is whether all this back-and-forth with the Russians will end up making a fulltime liar out of me.”

“’Too busy cheating the natives,’ “Tolmasov echoed. “I like that. I only wish I could believe it.”

“We should send a recording of that remark back to Baikonur,” said Oleg Lopatin, the only other Russian in the control room when Tolmasov spoke to Athena. “It shows how the Americans are already planning to exploit the people of Minerva.”

“He was just joking, Oleg Borisovich,” Tolmasov said. His Russian did not share the arid perfection of his English.

Lopatin’s heavy eyebrows came down in a frown. “You did not seem so certain of that when you were talking with him.”

“Never show all you know,” Tolmasov said. He did not bother pointing out that that also applied to his dealings with Lopatin, who was KGB. Tolmasov sighed. Things being as they were, that was inevitable. At least Lopatin was also a perfectly able electronics engineer and, by Russian standards, computer man. That gave him some real use aboard Tsiolkovsky, aside from his value to Moscow.

Tolmasov looked around the control room and sighed again. He knew that, with its round analog dials instead of slick digital readouts, it would have seemed old-fashioned to Bragg. The panels full of glowing green numbers he had seen in pictures and tapes of Athena and other American spacecraft seemed- what was the American slang? glitzy to him. All what you’re used to, he thought.

But he did envy his opposite number the computer power under those panels. Every one of Tsiolkovsky’s orbit-changing burns had been calculated back on Earth. Athena, he was sure, had figured its own. Partly that was a difference in approach. Ever since the earliest days, the Soviet space program had relied more heavily on ground control than the Americans.

The technology gap did exist, though. The big Russian boosters let Tsiolkovsky carry a lot more weight to Minerva than Athena could. The engineering on the life-support system was solid, or he wouldn’t be here worrying. But Bragg had a lot more data processing capacity than he did, and down on Minerva there would be nothing but data to process. He worried some more.

While he was at it, Tolmasov spent a little while worrying about Bragg. Envy mixed in with the worry there, too. The colonel was out of Frontal Aviation; his flight experience before being tapped for cosmonaut training was all in MiG2Ts and other attack aircraft. Without false modesty, he knew he was good. But he had never seen combat; he had left his squadron a few months before they flew against the Sixth Fleet’s Tomcats during the Third Beirut Crisis. He wondered how much difference that made.

Not much, he tried to tell himself. He had done everything but. Still, Russian and English both had a word for somebody who had done everything but sleep with a girl. The word was virgin.

That turned Tolmasov’s mind in another direction. He smoothed his short, light brown hair. It was not as neatly trimmed, of course, as it had been when Tsiolkovsky set out from Earth orbit. Eight months of amateur barbering had left everyone on the ship a little ragged. Tolmasov knew, though, that ragged or not he still kept his good looks: like so many Russians, he had a face that would somehow contrive to seem boyish and open until he was well into his fifties. And those evil days, fortunately, were a good many years away yet.

He gave his attention back to Lopatin. “I’m going aft for some rest, Oleg Borisovich. Call me at once if anything unusual happens, or if there is any unscheduled communication from Earth.”

“Of course,” Lopatin said. “Rest well.”

His voice held no irony. Even with curtains, even with a bigger ship than Athena, privacy hardly existed aboard Tsiolkovsky. Tolmasov missed it less than most Americans would have. He had grown up with a brother and three sisters in a two bedroom apartment in Smolensk, and his father was not badly off. It was, he realized wryly as he pulled himself from handhold to handhold down the corridor to the laboratory, good practice for the life of a cosmonaut.

He heard a centrifuge whir and looked into one of the chambers. “Well, Doctor,” he said, smiling, as he glided in. “Are we healthy?” The question was a way to start a conversation, but also seriously meant: if anything was wrong, Tolmasov needed to know about it right away.