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.