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- The Road Not Taken
- Harry Turtledove
- Captain Togram was using the chamberpot when the Indomitable broke out of hyperdrive. As
- happened all too often, nausea surged through the Roxolan officer. He raised the pot and was
- abruptly sick into it.
- When the spasm was done, he set the thundermug down and wiped his streaming eyes with
- the soft, gray-brown fur of his forearm. "The gods curse it!" he burst out. "Why don't the
- shipmasters warn us when they do that?" Several of his troopers echoed him more pungently.
- At that moment, a runner appeared in the doorway. "We're back in normal space," the youth
- squeaked, before dashing on to the next chamber. Jeers and oaths followed him: "No shit!"
- "Thanks for the news!" "Tell the steerers -- they might not have got the word!"
- Togram sighed and scratched his muzzle in annoyance at his own irritability. As an officer, he
- was supposed to set an example for his soldiers. He was junior enough to take such
- responsibilities seriously, but had had enough service to realize he should never expect too
- much from anyone more than a couple of notches above him. High ranks went to those with
- ancient blood or fresh money.
- Sighing again, he stowed the chamberpot in its niche. The metal cover he slid over it did little
- to relieve the stench. After sixteen days in space, the Indomitable reeked of ordure, stale
- food, and staler bodies. It was no better in any other ship of the Roxolan fleet, or any other.
- Travel between the stars was simply like that. Stinks and darkness were part of the price the
- soldiers paid to make the kingdom grow.
- Togram picked up a lantern and shook it to rouse the glowmites inside. They flashed silver in
- alarm. Some races, the captain knew, lit their ships with torches or candles, but glowmites
- used less air, even if they could only shine intermittently.
- Ever the careful soldier, Togram checked his weapons while the light lasted. He always kept
- all four of his pistols loaded and ready to use; when landing operations began, one pair would
- go on his belt, the other in his boottops. He was more worried about his sword. The
- perpetually moist air aboard ship was not good for the blade. Sure enough, he found a spot of
- rust to scour away.
- As he polished the rapier, he wondered what the new system would be like. He prayed for it to
- have a habitable planet. The air in the Indomitable might be too foul to breathe by the time the
- ship could get back to the nearest Roxolan-held planet. That was one of the risks starfarers
- took. It was not a major one -- small yellow suns usually shepherded a life-bearing world or
- two -- but it was there.
- He wished he hadn't let himself think about it; like an aching fang, the worry, once there,
- would not go away. He got up from his pile of bedding to see how the steerers were doing.
- As usual with them, both Ransisc and his apprentice Olgren were complaining about the poor
- quality of the glass through which they trained their spyglasses. "You ought to stop whining,"
- Togram said, squinting in from the doorway. "At least you have light to see by." After seeing so
- long by glowmite lantern, he had to wait for his eyes to adjust to the harsh raw sunlight
- flooding the observation chamber before he could go in.
- Olgren's ears went back in annoyance. Ransisc was older and calmer. He set his hand on his
- apprentice's arm. "If you rise to all of Togram's jibes, you'll have time for nothing else -- he's
- been a troublemaker since he came out of the egg. Isn't that right, Togram?"
- "Whatever you say." Togram liked the white-muzzled senior steerer. Unlike most of his breed,
- Ransisc did not act as though he believed his important job made him something special in
- the gods' scheme of things.
- Olgren stiffened suddenly; the tip of his stumpy tail twitched. "This one's a world!" he
- exclaimed.
- "Let's see," Ransisc said. Olgren moved away from his spyglass. The two steerers had been
- examining bright stars one by one, looking for those that would show discs and prove
- themselves actually to be planets.
- "It's a world," Ransisc said at length, "but not one for us -- those yellow, banded planets
- always have poisonous air, and too much of it." Seeing Olgren's dejection, he added, "It's not
- a total loss -- if we look along a line from that planet to its sun, we should find others fairly
- soon."
- "Try that one," Togram said, pointing toward a ruddy star that looked brighter than most of the
- others he could see.
- Olgren muttered something haughty about knowing his business better than any amateur, but
- Ransisc said sharply, "The captain has seen more worlds from space than you, sirrah.
- Suppose you do as he asks." Ears drooping dejectedly, Olgren obeyed.
- Then his pique vanished. "A planet with green patches!" he shouted.
- Ransisc had been aiming his spyglass at a different part of the sky, but that brought him
- hurrying over. He shoved his apprentice aside, fiddled with the spyglass' focus, peered long at
- the magnified image. Olgren was hopping from one foot to the other, his muddy brown fur
- puffed out with impatience to hear the verdict.
- "Maybe," said the senior steerer, and Olgren's face lit, but it fell again as Ransisc continued, "I
- don't see anything that looks like open water. If we find nothing better, I say we try it, but let's
- search a while longer."
- "You've just made a luof very happy," Togram said. Ransisc chuckled. The Roxolani brought
- the little creatures along to test new planets' air. If a luof could breathe it in the airlock of a
- flyer, it would also be safe for the animal's masters.
- The steerers growled in irritation as several stars in a row stubbornly stayed mere points of
- light. Then Ransisc stiffened at his spyglass. "Here it is," he said softly. "This is what we want.
- Come here, Olgren."
- "Oh, my, yes," the apprentice said a moment later.
- "Go report it to Warmaster Slevon, and ask him if his devices have picked up any hyperdrive
- vibrations except for the fleet's." As Olgren hurried away, Ransisc beckoned Togram over.
- "See for yourself."
- The captain of foot bent over the eyepiece. Against the black of space, the world in the
- spyglass field looked achingly like Roxolan: deep ocean blue, covered with swirls of white
- cloud. A good-sized moon hung nearby. Both were in approximately half-phase, being nearer
- their star than was the Indomitable.
- "Did you spy any land?" Togram asked.
- "Look near the top of the image, below the icecap," Ransisc said. "Those browns and greens
- aren't colors water usually takes. If we want any world in this system, you're looking at it now."
- They took turns examining the distant planet and trying to sketch its features until Olgren
- came back. "Well?" Togram said, though he saw the apprenice's ears were high and cheerful.
- "Not a hyperdrive emanation but ours in the whole system!" Olgren grinned. Ransisc and
- Togram both pounded him on the back, as if he were the cause of the good news and not just
- its bearer.
- The captain's smile was even wider than Olgren's. This was going to be an easy one, which,
- as a professional soldier, he thoroughly approved of. If no one hereabouts could build a
- hyperdrive, either the system had no intelligent life at all or its inhabitants were still primitives,
- ignorant of gunpowder, fliers, and other aspects of warfare as it was practiced among the
- stars.
- He rubbed his hands. He could hardly wait for landfall.
- Buck Herzog was bored. After four months in space, with five and a half more staring him in
- the face, it was hardly surprising. Earth was a bright star behind the Ares III, with Luna a
- dimmer companion; Mars glowed ahead.
- "It's your exercise period, Buck," Art Snyder called. Of the five-person crew, he was probably
- the most officious.
- "All right, Pancho," Herzog sighed. He pushed himself over to the bicycle and began pumping
- away, at first languigly, then harder. The work helped keep calcium in his bones in spite of free
- fall. Besides, it was something to do.
- Melissa Ott was listening to the news from home. "Fernando Valenzuela died last night," she
- said.
- "Who?" Snyder was not a baseball fan.
- Herzog was, and a California to boot. "I saw him at an old-timers' game once, I remember my
- dad and my grandfather always talking about him," he said. "How old was he, Mel?"
- "Seventy-nine," she answered.
- "He always was too heavy," Herzog said sadly.
- "Jesus Christ!"
- Herzog blinked. No one on the Ares III had sounded that excited since liftoff from the
- American space station. Melissa was staring at the radar screen. "Freddie!" she yelled.
- Frederica Lindstrom, the ship's electronics expert, had just gotten out of the cramped shower
- space. She dove for the control board, still trailing a stream of water droplets. She did not
- bother with a towel; modesty aboard the Ares III had long since vanished.
- Melissa's shout even made Claude Jonnard stick his head out of the little biology lab where
- he spent most of his time. "What's wrong?" he called from the hatchway.
- "Radar's gone to hell," Melissa told him.
- "What do you mean, gone to hell?" Jonnard demanded indignantly. He was one of those
- annoying people who thought quantitatively all the time, and thought everyone else did, too.
- "There are about a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty, objects on the screen that have no right to
- be there," answered Frederica Lindstrom, who had a milder case of the same disease.
- "Range appears to be a couple of million kilometers."
- "They weren't there a minute ago, either," Melissa said. "I hollered when they showed up."
- As Frederica fiddled with the radar and the computer, Herzog stayed on the exercise bike,
- feeling singularly useless: what good is a geologist millions of kilometers away from rocks?
- He wouldn't even get his name in the history books -- no one remembers the crew of the third
- expedition to anywhere.
- Frederica finished her checks. "I can't find anything wrong," she said, sounding angry at
- herself and the equipment both.
- "Time to get on the horn to Earth, Freddie," Art Snyder said. "If I'm going to land this beast, I
- can't have the radar telling me lies."
- Melissa was already talking into the microphone. "Houston, this is Ares III. We have a
- problem--"
- Even at lightspeed, there were a good many minutes of waiting. They crawled past, one by
- one. Everyone jumped when the speaker crackled to life. "Ares III, this is Houston Control.
- Ladies and gentlemen, I don't quite know how to tell you this, but we see them too."
- The communicator kept talking, but no one was listening to her anymore. Herzog felt his scalp
- tingle as his hair, in primitive reflex, tried to stand on end. Awe filled him. He had never
- thought he would live to see humanity contact another race. "Call them, Mel," he said
- urgently.
- She hesitated. "I don't know, Buck. Maybe we should let Houston handle this."
- "Screw Houston," he said, surprised at his own vehemence. "By the time the bureaucrats
- down there figure out what to do, we'll be coming down on Mars. We're the people on the
- spot. Are you going to throw away the most important moment in the history of the species?"
- Melissa looked from one of her crewmates to the next. Whatever she saw in their faces must
- have satisfied her, for she shifted the aim to the antenna and began to speak: "This is the
- spacecraft Ares III, calling the unknown ships. Welcome from the people of Earth." She turned
- off the transmitter for a moment. "How many languages do we have?"
- The call went out in Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, even Latin.
- ("Who knows the last time they may have visited?" Frederica said when Snyder gave her an
- odd look.)
- If the wait for a reply from Earth had been long, this one was infinitely worse. The delay
- stretched far, far past the fifteen-second speed-of-light round trip. "Even if they don't speak
- any of our languages, shouldn't they say something?" Melissa demanded of the air. It did not
- answer, nor did the aliens.
- Then, one at a time, the strange ships began darting away sunward, toward Earth: "My God,
- the acceleration!" Snyder said. "Those are no rockets!" He looked suddenly sheepish. "I don't
- suppose starships would have rockets, would they?"
- The Ares III lay alone again in its part of space, pursuing its Hohmann orbit inexorably toward
- Mars. Buck Herzog wanted to cry.
- As was their practice, the ships of the Roxolan fleet gathered above the pole of the new
- planet's hemisphere with the most land. Because everyone would be coming to the same
- spot, the doctrine made visual rendezvous easy. Soon only four ships were unaccounted for.
- A scoutship hurried around to the other pole, found them, and brought them back.
- "Always some water-lovers every trip," Togram chuckled to the steerers as he brought them
- the news. He took every opportunity he could to go to their dome, not just for the sunlight but
- also because, unlike many soldiers, he was interested in planets for their own sake. With any
- head for figures, he might have tried to become a steerer himself.
- He had a decent hand with quill and paper, so Ransisc and Olgren were willing to let him spell
- them at the spyglass and add to the sketchmaps they were making of the world below.
- "Funny sort of planet," he remarked. "I've never seen one with so many forest fires or
- volcanoes or whatever they are on the dark side."
- "I still think they're cities," Olgren said, with a defiant dance at Ransisc.
- "They're too big and too bright," the senior steerer said patiently; the argument, plainly, had
- been going on for some time.
- "This is your first trip off-planet, isn't it, Olgren?" Togram asked.
- "Well, what if it is?"
- "Only that you don't have enough perspective. Egelloc on Roxolan has almost a million
- people, and from space it's next to invisible at night. It's nowhere near as bright as those
- lights, either. Remember, this is a primitive planet. I admit it looks like there's intelligent life
- down there, but how could a race that hasn't even stumbled across the hyperdrive build cities
- ten times as great as Egelloc?"
- "I don't know," Olgren said sulkily. "But from what little I can see by moonlight, those lights
- look to be in good spots for cities -- on coasts, or along rivers, or whatever."
- Ransisc sighed. "What are we going to do with him, Togram? He's so sure he knows
- everything, he won't listen to reason. Were you like that when you were young?"
- "Till my clanfathers beat it out of me, anyway. No need getting all excited, though. Soon
- enough the flyers will go down with their luofi, and then we'll know." He swallowed a snort of
- laughter, then sobered abruptly, hoping he hadn't been as gullible as Olgren when he was
- young.
- "I have one of the alien vessels on radar," the SR-81 pilot reported. "It's down to 50,000
- meters and still descending." He was at his own plane's operational ceiling, barely half as
- high as the ship entering atmosphere.
- "For God's sake, hold your fire," ground control ordered. The command had been dinned into
- him before he took off, but the brass were not about to let him forget. He did not really blame
- them. One trigger-happy idiot could ruin humanity forever.
- "I'm beginning to get a visual image," he said, glancing at the head-up display projected in
- front of him. A moment later he added, "It's one damn funny-looking ship, I can tell you that
- already. Where are the wings?"
- "We're picking up the image now too," the ground control officer said. "They must use the
- same principle for their in-atmosphere machines as they do for their spacecraft: some sort of
- antigravity that gives them both lift and drive capability."
- The alien ship kept ignoring the SR-81, just as all the aliens had ignored every terrestrial
- signal beamed at them. The craft continued its slow descent, while the SR-81 pilot circled
- below, hoping he would not have to go down to the aerial tanker to refuel.
- "One question answered," he called to the ground. "It's a warplane." No craft whose purpose
- was peaceful would have had those glaring eyes and that snarling, fang-filled mouth painted
- on its belly. Some USAF ground-attack aircraft carried similar markings.
- At last the alien reached the level at which the SR-81 was loitering. The pilot called the
- ground again. "Permission to pass in front of the aircraft?" he asked. "Maybe everybody's
- asleep in there and I can wake'em up."
- After a long silence, ground control gave grudging ascent. "No hostile gestures," the controller
- warned.
- "What do you think I'm going to do, flip him the finger?" the pilot muttered, but his radio was
- off. Acceleration pushed him back in his seat as he guided the SR-81 into a long, slow turn
- that would carry it about half a kilometer in front of the vessel from the spacefleet.
- His airplane's camera gave him a brief glimpse of the alien pilot, who was sitting behind a
- small, dirty windscreen.
- The being from the stars saw him, too. Of that there was no doubt. The alien jinked like a
- startled fawn, performing maneuvers that would have smeared the SR-81 pilot against the
- walls of his pressure cabin -- if his aircraft could have matched them in the first place.
- "I'm giving pursuit!" he shouted. Ground control screamed at him, but he was the man on the
- spot. The surge from his afterburner made the pressure he had felt before a love pat by
- comparison.
- Better streamlining made his plane faster than the craft from the starships, but that did not do
- him much good. Every time its pilot caught sight of him, the alien ship danced away with
- effortless ease. The SR-81 pilot felt like a man trying to kill a butterfly with a hatchet.
- To add to his frustration, his fuel warning light came on. In any case, his aircraft was designed
- for the thin atmosphere at the edge of space, not the increasingly denser air through which
- the alien flew. He swore, but he had to pull away.
- As his SR-81 gulped kerosene from the tanker, he could not help wondering what would have
- happened if he'd turned a missile loose. There were a couple of times he'd had a perfect shot.
- That was one thought he kept firmly to himself. What his superiors would do if they knew
- about it was too gruesome to contemplate.
- The troopers crowded round Togram as he came back from the officers' conclave. "What's the
- word, captain?" "Did the loaf live?" "What's it like down there?"
- "The loaf lived, boys!" Togram said with a broad smile.
- His company raised a cheer that echoed deafeningly in the barracks room. "We're going
- down!" they whooped. Ears stood high in excitement. Some soldiers waved plumed hats in
- the fetid air. Others, of a bent more like their captain's, went over to their pallets and began
- seeing to their weapons.
- "How tough are they going to be, sir?" a gray-furred veteran named Ilingua asked as Togram
- went by. "I hear the flier pilot saw some funny things."
- Togram's smile got wider. "By the heavens and hells, Ilingua, haven't you done this often
- enough to know better than pay heed to rumors you hear before planetfall?"
- "I hope so, sir," Ilingua said, "but these are so strange I thought there might be something to
- them." When Togram did not answer, the trooper shook his head at his own foolishness and
- shook up a lantern so he could examine his dagger's edge.
- As inconspicuously as he could, the captain let out a sigh. He did not know what to believe
- himself, and he had listened to the pilot's report. How could the locals have flying machines
- when they did not know contragravity? Togram had heard of a race that used hot-air balloons
- before it discovered the better way of doing things, but no balloon could have reached the
- altitude the locals' flier had achieved, and no balloon could have changed direction, as the
- pilot had violently insisted this craft had done.
- Assume he was wrong, as he had to be. But how was one to take his account of towns as big
- as the ones whose possibility Rarisisc had ridiculed, of a world so populous there was
- precious little open space? And lantern signals from other ships showed their scout pilots
- were reporting the same wild improbabilities.
- Well, in the long run it would not matter if this race was numerous as reffo at a picnic. There
- would simply be that many more subjects here for Roxolan.
- "This is a terrible waste," Billy Cox said to anyone who would listen as he slung his duffelbag
- over his shoulder and tramped out to the waiting truck. "We should be meeting the starpeople
- with open arms, not with a show of force."
- "You tell 'em, Professor," Sergeant Santos Amoros chuckled from behind him. "Me, I'd sooner
- stay on my butt in a nice, air-conditioned barracks than face L.A. summer smog and sun any
- old day. Damn shame you're just a Spec-1. If you was President, you could give the orders
- any way you wanted, instead o' takin' 'em."
- Cox didn't think that was very fair either. He'd been just a few units short of his M.A. in poli sci
- when the big buildup after the second Syrian crisis sucked him into the army.
- He had to fold his lanky length like a jackknife to get under the olive-drab canopy of the truck
- and down into passenger compartment. The scats were too hard and too close together.
- Jamming people into the vehicle counted for more than their comfort while they were there.
- Typical military thinking, Cox thought disparagingly.
- The truck filled. The big diesel rumbled to life. A black soldier dug out a deck of cards and bet
- anyone that he could turn twenty-five cards into five pat poker hands. A couple of greenhorns
- took him up on it. Cox had found out the expensive way that it was a sucker bet. The black
- man was grinning as he offered the deck to one of his marks to shuffle.
- Riffff! The ripple of the pasteboards was authoritative enough to make everybody in the truck
- turn his head. "Where'd you learn to handle cards like that, man?" demanded the black
- soldier, whose name was Jim but whom everyone called Junior.
- "Dealing blackjack in Vegas." Riffff!
- "Hey, Junior," Cox called, "all of a sudden I want ten bucks of your action."
- "Up yours too, pal," Junior said, glumly watching the cards move as if they had lives of their
- own.
- The truck rolled northward, part of a convoy of trucks, MICV's, and light tanks that stretched
- for miles. An entire regiment was heading into Los Angeles, to be billeted by companies in
- different parts of the sprawling city. Cox approved of that; it made it less likely that he would
- personally come face-to-face with any of the aliens.
- "Sandy," he said to Amoros, who was squeezed in next to him, "even if I'm wrong and the
- aliens aren't friendly, what the hell good will hand weapons do? It'd be like taking on an
- elephant with a safety pin."
- "Professor, like I told you already, they don't pay me to think, or you neither. Just as well, too.
- I'm gonna do what the lieutenant tells me, and you're gonna do what I tell you, and everything
- is gonna be fine, right?"
- "Sure," Cox said, because Sandy, while he wasn't a bad guy, was a sergeant. All the same,
- the Neo-Armalite between Cox's boots seemed very futile, and his helmet and body armor as
- thin and gauzy as a stripper's negligee.
- The sky outside the steerers' dome began to go from black to deep blue as the Indomitable
- entered atmosphere. "There," Olgren said, pointing. "That's where we'll land."
- "Can't see much from this height,'' Togram remarked.
- "Let him use your spyglass, Olgren," Ransisc said. "He'll be going back to his company soon."
- Togram grunted; that was more than a comment -- it was also a hint. Even so, he was happy
- to peer through the eyepiece. The ground seemed to leap toward him. There was a moment
- of disorientation as he adjusted to the inverted image, which put the ocean on the wrong side
- of the field of view. But he was not interested in sightseeing. He wanted to learn what his
- soldiers and the rest of the troops aboard the Indomitable would have to do to carve out a
- beachhead and hold it against the locals.
- "There's a spot that looks promising," he said. "The greenery there in the midst of the
- buildings in the eastern -- no, the western -- part of the city. That should give us a clear
- landing zone, a good campground, and a base for landing reinforcements."
- "Let's see what you're talking about," Ransisc said, elbowing him aside. "Hmm, yes, I see the
- stretch you mean. That might not be bad. Olgren, come look at this. Can you find it again in
- the Warmaster's spyglass? All right then, go point it out to him. Suggest it as our setdown
- point."
- The apprentice hurried away. Ransisc bent over the eyepiece again. "Hmm," he repeated.
- "They build tall down there, don't they?"
- "I thought so," Togram said. "And there's a lot of traffic on those roads. They've spent a
- fortune cobblestoning them all, too; I didn't see any dust kicked up."
- "This should be a rich conquest," Ransisc said.
- Something swift, metallic, and predator-lean flashed past the observation window. "By the
- gods, they do have fliers, don't they?" Togram said. In spite of the pilots' claims, deep down
- he hadn't believed it until he saw it for himself.
- He noticed Ransisc's ears twitching impatiently, and realized he really had spent too much
- time in the observation room. He picked up his glowmite lantern and went back to his
- troopers.
- A couple of them gave him a resentful look for being away so long, but he cheered them up
- by passing on as much as he could about their landing site. Common soldiers loved nothing
- better than inside information. They second-guessed their superiors without it, but the game
- was even more fun when they had some idea of what they were talking about.
- A runner appeared in the doorway. "Captain Togram, your company will planet from airlock
- three."
- "Three," Togram acknowledged, and the runner trotted off to pass orders to other ground
- troop leaders. The captain put his plumed hat on his head (the plume was scarlet, so his
- company could recognize him in combat), checked his pistols one last time, and ordered his
- troopers to follow him.
- The reeking darkness was as oppressive in front of the inner airlock door as anywhere else
- aboard the Indomitable, but somehow easier to bear. Soon the doors would swing open and
- he would feel fresh breezes riffling his fur, taste sweet clean air, enjoy sunlight for more than a
- few precious units at a stretch. Soon he would measure himself against these new beings in
- combat.
- He felt the slightest of jolts as the Indomtable's fliers launched themselves from the mother
- ship. There would he no luofi aboard them this time, but musketeers to terrorize the natives
- with fire from above, and jars of gunpowder to be touched off and dropped. The Roxolani
- always strove to make as savage a first impression as they could. Terror doubled their
- effective numbers.
- Another jolt came, different from the one before. They were down.
- A shadow spread across the UCLA campus. Craning his neck, Junior said. "Will you look at
- the size of the mother!" He had been saying that to the last five minutes, as the starship
- slowly descended.
- Each time, Billy Cox could only nod, his mouth dry, his hands clutching the plastic grip and
- cool metal barrel of his rifle. The Neo-Armalite seemed totally impotent against the huge bulk
- floating so arrogantly downward. The alien flying machines around it were as minnows beside
- a whale, while they in turn dwarfed the USAF planes circling at a greater distance. The roar of
- their jets assailed the ears of the nervous troops and civilians on the ground. The aliens'
- engines were eerily silent.
- The starship landed in the open quad between New Royce, New Haines, New Kinsey, and
- New Powell Halls. It towered higher than any of the two-story red brick buildings, each a
- reconstruction of one overthrown in the earthquake of 2034. Cox heard saplings splinter
- under the weight of the alien craft. He wondered what it would have done to the big trees that
- had fallen five years ago along with the famous old halls.
- "All right, they've landed. Let's move on up," Lieutenant Shotton ordered. He could not quite
- keep the wobble out of his voice, but he trotted south toward the starship. His platoon
- followed him past Dickson Art Center, past New Bunche Hall. Not so long ago, Billy Cox had
- walked this campus barefoot. Now his boots thudded on concrete.
- The platoon deployed in front of Dodd Hall, looking west toward the spacecraft. A little breeze
- toyed with the leaves of the young, hopeful trees planted to replace the stalwarts lost to the
- quake.
- "Take as much cover as you can," Lieutenant Shotton ordered quietly. The platoon scrambled
- into flowerbeds, snuggled down behind thin treetrunks. Out on Hilgard Avenue, diesels roared
- as armored fighting vehicles took positions with good lines of fire.
- It was all such a waste, Cox thought bitterly. The thing to do was to make friends with the
- aliens, not to assume automatically they were dangerous.
- Something, at least, was being done along those lines. A delegation came out of Murphy Hall
- and slowly walked behind a white flag from the administration building toward the starship. At
- the head of the delegation was the mayor of Los Angeles: the President and governor were
- busy elsewhere. Billy Cox would have given anything to be part of the delegation instead of
- sprawled here on his belly in the grass. If only the aliens had waited until he was fifty or so,
- had given him a chance to get established--
- Sergeant Amoros nudged him with an elbow. "Look there, man. Something's happening--"
- Amoros was right. Several hatchways which had been shut were swinging open, allowing
- Earth's air to mingle with the ship's.
- The westerly breeze picked up. Cox's nose twitched. He could not name all the exotic odors
- wafting his way, but he recognized sewage and garbage when he smelled them. "God, what a
- stink!" he said.
- "By the gods, what a stink!" Togram exclaimed. When the outer airlock doors went down, he
- had expected real fresh air to replace the stale, overused gases inside the Indomitable. This
- stuff smelled like smoky peat fires, or lamps whose wicks hadn't quite been extinguished. And
- it stung! He felt the nictitating membranes flick across his eyes to protect them.
- "Deploy!" he ordered, leading his company forward. This was the tricky part. If the locals had
- nerve enough, they could hit the Roxolani just as the latter were coming out of their ship, and
- cause all sorts of trouble. Most races without hyperdrive, though, were too overawed by the
- arrival of travelers from the stars to try anything like that. And if they didn't do it fast, it would
- be too late.
- They weren't doing it here. Togram saw a few locals, but they were keeping a respectful
- distance. He wasn't sure how many there were. Their mottled skins -- or was that clothing? --
- made them hard to notice and count. But they were plainly warriors, both by the way they
- acted and by the weapons they bore.
- His own company went into its familiar two-line formation, the first crouching, the second
- standing and aiming their muskets over the heads of the troops in front.
- "Ah, there we go," Togram said happily. The bunch approaching behind the white banner had
- to be the local nobles. The mottling, the captain saw, was clothing, for these beings wore
- entirely different garments, somber except for strange, narrow neckcloths. They were taller
- and skinnier than Roxolani, with muzzleless faces.
- "Ilingua!" Togram called. The veteran trooper led the right flank squad of the company.
- "Sir!"
- "Your troops, quarter-right face. At the command, pick off the leaders there. That will
- demoralize the rest," Togram said, quoting standard doctrine.
- "Slowmatches ready!" Togram said. The Roxolani lowered the smoldering cords to the
- toucholes of their muskets. "Take your aim!" The guns moved, very slightly. "Fire!"
- "Teddy bears!" Sandy Amoros exclaimed. The same thought had leaped into Cox's mind. The
- beings emerging from the spaceship were round, brown, and furry, with long noses and big
- ears. Teddy bears, however, did not normally carry weapons. They also, Cox thought, did not
- commonly live in a place that smelled like sewage. Of course it might have been perfume to
- them. But if it was, they and Earthpeople were going to have trouble getting along.
- He watched the Teddy bears as they took their positions. Somehow their positioning did not
- suggest that they were forming an honor guard for the mayor and his party. Yet it did look
- familiar to Cox, although he could not quite figure out why.
- Then he had it. If he had been anywhere but at UCLA, he would not have made the
- connection. But he remembered a course he had taken on the rise of the European nationstates
- in the sixteenth century, and on the importance of the professional, disciplined armies
- the kings had created. Those early armies had performed evolutions like this one.
- It was a funny coincidence. He was about to mention it to his sergeant when the world blew
- up.
- Flames spurted from the aliens' guns. Great gouts of smoke puffed into the sky. Something
- that sounded like an angry wasp buzzed past Cox's ear. He heard shouts and shrieks from
- either side. Most of the mayor's delegation was down, some motionless, others thrashing.
- There was a crash from the starship, and another one an instant later as a roundshout
- smashed into the brickwork of Dodd Hall. A chip stung Cox in the back of the neck. The
- breeze brought him the smell of fireworks, one he had not smelled for years.
- "Reload!" Togram yelled. "Another volley, then at 'em with the bayonet!" His troopers worked
- frantically, measuring powder charges and ramming round bullets home.
- "So that's how they wanna play!" Amoros shouted. "Nail their hides to the wall!" The tip of his
- little finger had been shot away. He did not seem to know it.
- Cox's Neo-Armalite was already barking, spitting a stream of hot brass cartridges, slamming
- against his shoulder. He rammed in clip after clip, playing the rifle like a hose. If one bullet
- didn't bite, the next would.
- Others from the platoon were also firing. Cox heard bursts of automatic weapons fire from
- different parts of the campus, too, and the deeper blasts of rocket-propelled grenades and
- field artillery. Smoke not of the aliens' making began to envelop their ship and the soldiers
- around it.
- One or two shots came back at the platoon, and then a few more, but so few that Cox, in
- stunned disbelief, shouted to his sergeant, "This isn't fair!"
- "Fuck 'em!" Amoros shouted back. "They wanna throw their weight around, they take their
- chances. Only good thing they did was knock over the mayor. Always did hate that old
- crackpot."
- The harsh tac-tac-tac did not sound like any gunfire Togram had heard. The shots came too
- close together, making a horrible sheet of noise. And if the locals were shooting back at his
- troopers, where were the thick, choking clouds of gunpowder smoke over their position?
- He did not know the answer to that. What he did know was that his company was going down
- like grain before a scythe. Here a soldier was hit by three bullets at once and fell awkwardly,
- as if his body could not tell in which direction to twist. There another had the top of his head
- gruesomely removed.
- The volley the captain had screamed for was stillborn. Perhaps a squad's worth of soldiers
- moved toward the locals, the sun glinting bravely off their long, polished bayonets. None of
- them got more than a half-sixteen of paces before falling.
- Ilingua looked at Togram, horror in his eyes, his ears flat against his head. The captain knew
- his were the same. "What are they doing to us?" Ilingua howled.
- Togram could only shake his head helplessly. He dove behind a corpse, fired one of his
- pistols at the enemy. There was still a chance, he thought -- how would these demonic aliens
- stand up under their first air attack?
- A flier swooped toward the locals. Musketeers blasted away from firing ports, drew back to
- reload.
- "Take that, you whoresons!" Togram shouted. He did not, however, raise his fist in the air.
- That, he had already learned, was dangerous.
- "Incoming aircraft!" Sergeant Amoros roared. His squad, those not already prone, flung
- themselves on their faces. Cox heard shouts of pain through the combat din as men were
- wounded.
- The Cottonmouth crew launched their shoulder-fired AA missile at the alien flying machine.
- The pilot must have had reflexes like a cat's. He sidestepped his machine in midair; no plane
- built on Earth could have matched that performance. The Cottonmouth shot harmlessly past.
- The flier dropped what looked like a load of crockery. The ground jumped as the bombs
- exploded. Cursing, deafened, Billy Cox stopped worrying whether the fight was fair.
- But the flier pilot had not seen the F-29 fighter on his tail. The USAF plane released two
- missiles from point-blank range, less than a mile. The infrared-seeker found no target and
- blew itself up, but the missile that homed on radar streaked straight toward the flier. The
- explosion made Cox bury his face in the ground and clap his hands over his ears.
- So this is war, he thought: I can't see, I can barely hear, and my side is winning. What must it
- be like for the losers?
- Hope died in Togram's hearts when the first flier fell victim to the locals' aircraft. The rest of
- the Indomitable's machines did not last much longer. They could evade, but had even less
- ability to hit back than the Roxolan ground forces. And they were hideously vulnerable when
- attacked in their pilots blind spots, from below or behind.
- One of the starship's cannon managed to fire again, and quickly drew a response from the
- traveling fortresses Togram got glimpses of as they took their positions in the streets outside
- this park-like area.
- When the first shell struck, the luckless captain thought for an instant that it was another gun
- going off aboard the Indomitable. The sound of the explosion was nothing like the crash a
- solid shot made when it smacked into a target. A fragment of hot metal buried itself in the
- ground by Togram's hand. That made him think a cannon had blown up, but more explosions
- on the ship's superstructure and fountains of dirt flying up from misses showed it was just
- more from the locals' fiendish arsenal.
- Something large and hard struck the captain in the back of the neck. The world spiraled down
- into blackness.
- "Cease fire!" The order reached the field artillery first, then the infantry units at the very front
- line. Billy Cox pushed up his cuff to look at his watch, stared in disbelief. The whole firefight
- had lasted less than twenty minutes.
- He looked around. Lieutenant Shotton was getting up from behind an ornamental palm. "Let's
- see what we have," he said. His rifle still at the ready, he began to walk slowly toward the
- starship. It was hardly more than a smoking ruin. For that matter, neither were the buildings
- around it. The damage to their predecessors had been worse in the big quake, but not much.
- Alien corpses littered the lawn. The blood splashing the bright green grass was crimson as
- any man's. Cox bent to pick up a pistol. The weapon was beautifully made, with scenes of
- combat carved into the grayish wood of the stock. But he recognized it as a single-shot piece;
- a smallarm obsolete for at least two centuries. He shook his head in wonderment.
- Sergeant Amoros lifted a conical object from where it had fallen beside a dead alien. "What
- the hell is this?" he demanded.
- Again Cox had the feeling of being caught up in something he did not understand. "It's a
- powderhorn," he said.
- "Like in the movies? Pioneers and all that good shit?"
- "The very same."
- "Damn," Amoros said feelingly. Cox nodded in agreement.
- Along with the rest of the platoon, they moved closer to the wrecked ship. Most of the aliens
- had died still in the two neat rows from which they had opened fire on the soldiers.
- Here, behind another corpse, lay the body of the scarlet-plumed officer who had given the
- order to begin that horrifyingly uneven encounter. Then, startling Cox, the alien moaned and
- stirred, just as might a human starting to come to. "Grab him; he's a live one!" Cox exclaimed.
- Several men jumped on the reviving alien, who was too groggy to fight back. Soldiers began
- peering into the holes torn in the starship, and even going inside. There they were still wary;
- the ship was so incredibly much bigger than any human spacecraft that there were surely
- survivors despite the shellacking it had taken.
- As always happens, the men did not get to enjoy such pleasures long. The fighting had been
- over for only minutes when the first team of experts came thuttering in by helicopter, saw
- common soldiers in their private preserve, and made horrified noises. The experts also
- promptly relieved the platoon of its prisoner.
- Sergeant Amoros watched resentfully as they took the alien away. "You must've known it
- would happen, Sandy," Cox consoled him. "We do the dirty work and the brass takes over
- once things get cleaned up again."
- "Yeah, but wouldn't it be wonderful if just once it was the other way round?" Amoros laughed
- without humor. "You don't need to tell me: fat friggin' chance."
- When Togram woke up on his back, he knew something was wrong. Roxolani always slept
- prone. For a moment he wondered how he had got to where he was... too much water-of-life
- the night before? His pounding head made that a good possibility.
- Then memory came flooding back. Those damnable locals with their sorcerous weapons! Had
- his people rallied and beaten back the enemy after all? He vowed to light votive lamps to
- Edieva, mistress of battles, for the rest of his life if that were true.
- The room he was in began to register. Nothing was familiar, from the bed he lay on to the light
- in the ceiling that glowed bright as sunshine and neither smoked nor flickered. No, he did not
- think the Roxolani had won their fight.
- Fear settled like ice in his vitals. He knew how his own race treated prisoners, had heard
- spacers' stories of even worse things among other folk. He shuddered to think of the refined
- tortures a race as ferocious as his captors could invent.
- He got shakily to his feet. By the end of the bed he found his hat, some smoked meat
- obviously taken from the Indomitable, and a translucent jug made of something that was
- neither leather nor glass nor baked clay nor metal. Whatever it was, it was too soft and
- flexible to make a weapon.
- The jar had water in it: not water from the Indomitable. That was already beginning to taste
- stale. This was cool and fresh and so pure as to have no taste whatever, water so fine he had
- only found its like in a couple of mountain springs.
- The door opened on noiseless hinges. In came two of the locals. One was small and wore a
- white coat -- a female, if those chest projections were breasts. The other was dressed in the
- same clothes the local warriors had worn, though those offered no camouflage here. That one
- carried what was plainly a rifle and, the gods curse him, looked extremely alert.
- To Togram's surprise, the female took charge. The other local was merely a bodyguard. Some
- spoiled princess, curious about these outsiders, the captain thought. Well, he was happier
- about treating with her than meeting the local executioner.
- She sat down, waved for him also to take a seat. He tried a chair, found it uncomfortable --
- too low in the back, not built for his wide rump and short legs. He sat on the floor instead.
- She set a small box on the table by the chair. Togram pointed at it. "What's that?" he asked.
- He thought she had not understood -- no blame to her for that; she had none of his language.
- She was playing with the box, pushing a button here, a button there. Then his ears went back
- and his hackles rose, for the box said, "What's that?" in Roxolani. After a moment he realized
- it was speaking in his own voice. He swore and made a sign against witchcraft.
- She said something, fooled with the box again. This time it echoed her. She pointed at it.
- "'Recorder,'" she said. She paused expectantly.
- What was she waiting for, the Roxolanic name for that thing? "I've never seen one of those in
- my life, and I hope I never do again," he said. She scratched her head. When she made the
- gadget again repeat what he had said, only the thought of the soldier with the gun kept him
- from flinging it against the wall.
- Despite that contretemps, they did eventually make progress on the language. Togram had
- picked up snatches of a good many tongues in the course of his adventurous life; that was
- one reason he had made captain in spite of low birth and paltry connections. And the female
- -- Togram heard her name as Hildachesta -- had a gift for them, as well as the box that never
- forgot.
- "Why did your people attack us?" she asked one day, when she had come far enough in
- Roxolanic to be able to frame the question.
- He knew he was being interrogated, no matter how polite she sounded. He had played that
- game with prisoners himself. His ears twitched in a shrug. He had always believed in giving
- straight answers; that was one reason he was only a captain. He said, "To take what you grow
- and make and use it for ourselves. Why would anyone want to conquer anyone else?"
- "Why indeed?" she murmured, and was silent a little while; his forthright reply seemed to have
- closed off a line of questioning. She tried again: "How are your people able to walk -- I mean,
- travel -- faster than light, when the rest of your arts are so simple?"
- His fur bristled with indignation. "They are not! We make gunpowder, we cast iron and smelt
- steel, we have spyglasses to help our steerers guide us from star to star. We are no savages
- huddling in caves or shooting at each other with bows and arrows."
- His speech, of course, was not that neat or simple. He had to backtrack, to use elaborate
- circumlocutions, to playact to make Hildachesta understand. She scratched her head in the
- gesture of puzzlement he had come to recognize. She said, "We have known all these things
- you mention for hundreds of years, but we did not think anyone could walk -- damn, I keep
- saying that instead of 'travel' -- faster than light. How did your people learn to do that?"
- "We discovered it for ourselves," he said proudly. "We did not have to learn it from some other
- starfaring race, as many folk do."
- "But how did you discover it?" she persisted.
- "How do I know? I'm a soldier; what do I care for such things? Who knows who invented
- gunpowder or found out about using bellows in a smithy to get the fire hot enough to melt
- iron? These things happen, that's all."
- She broke off the questions early that day.
- "It's humiliating," Hilda Chester said. "If these fool aliens had waited a few more years before
- they came, we likely would have blown ourselves to kingdom come without ever knowing
- there was more real estate around. Christ, from what the Roxolani say, races that scarcely
- know how to work iron fly starships and never think twice about it."
- "Except when the starships don't get home," Charlie Ebbets answered. His tie was in his
- pocket and his collar open against Pasadena's fierce summer heat, although the Caltech
- Atheneum was efficiently air-conditioned. Along with so many other engineers and scientists,
- he depended on linguists like Hilda Chester for a link to the aliens.
- "I don't quite understand it myself," she said. "Apart from the hyperdrive and contragravity, the
- Roxolani are backward, almost primitive. And the other species out there must be the same,
- or someone would have overrun them long since."
- Ebbets said, "Once you see it, the drive is amazingly simple. The research crews say
- anybody could have stumbled over the principle at almost any time in our history. The best
- guess is that most races did come across it, and once they did, why, all their creative energy
- would naturally go into refining and improving it."
- "But we missed it," Hilda said slowly, "and so our technology developed in a different way."
- "That's right. That's why the Roxolani don't know anything about controlled electricity, to say
- nothing of atomics. And the thing is, as well as we can tell so far, the hyperdrive and
- contragravity don't have the ancillary applications the electromagnetic spectrum does. All they
- do is move things front here to there in a hurry."
- "That should be enough at the moment," Hilda said. Ebbets nodded. There were almost nine
- billion people jammed onto the Earth, half of them hungry. Now, suddenly, there were places
- for them to go and a means to get them there.
- "I think," Ebbets said musingly, "we're going to be an awful surprise to the peoples out there."
- It took Hilda a second to see what he was driving at. "If that's a joke, it's not funny. It's been a
- hundred years since the last war of conquest."
- "Sure -- they've gotten too expensive and too dangerous. But what kind of fight could the
- Roxolani or anyone else at their level of technology put up against us? The Aztecs and Incas
- were plenty brave. How much good did it do them against the Spaniards?"
- "I hope we've gotten smarter in the last five hundred years," Hilda said. All the same, she left
- her sandwich half-eaten. She found she was not hungry anymore.
- "Ransisc!" Togram exclaimed as the senior steerer limped into his cubicle. Ransisc was
- thinner than he had been a few moons before, aboard the misnamed Indomitable. His fur had
- grown out white around several scars Togram did not remember.
- His air of amused detachment had not changed, though. "Tougher than bullets, are you, or
- didn't the humans think you were worth killing?"
- "The latter, I suspect. With their firepower, why should they worry about one soldier more or
- less?" Togram said bitterly. "I didn't know you were still alive, either."
- "Through no fault of my own, I assure you," Ransisc said. "Olgren, next to me--" His voice
- broke off. It was not possible to be detached about everything.
- "What are you doing here?" the captain asked. "Not that I'm not glad to see you, but you're
- the first Roxolan face I've set eyes on since--" It was his turn to hesitate.
- "Since we landed." Togram nodded in relief at the steerer's circumlocution. Ransisc went on,
- "I've seen several others before you. I suspect we're being allowed to get together so the
- humans can listen to us talking with each other."
- "How could they do that?" Togram asked, then answered his own question: "Oh, the
- recorders, of course." He perforce used the English word. "Well, we'll fix that."
- He dropped into Oyag, the most widely spoken language on a planet the Roxolani had
- conquered fifty years before. "What's going to happen to us, Ransisc?"
- "Back on Roxolan, they'll have realized something's gone wrong by now," the steerer
- answered in the same tongue.
- That did nothing to cheer Togram. "There are so many ways to lose ships," he said gloomily.
- "And even if the High Warmaster does send another fleet after us, it won't have any more luck
- than we did. These gods-accursed humans have too many war-machines." He paused and
- took a long, moody pull at a bottle of vodka. The flavored liquors the locals brewed made him
- sick, but vodka he liked. "How is it they have all these machines and we don't, or any race we
- know of? They must be wizards, selling their souls to the demons for knowledge."
- Ransisc's nose twitched in disagreement. "I asked one of their savants the same question. He
- gave me back a poem by a human named Hail or Snow or something of that sort. It was
- about someone who stood at a fork in the road and ended up taking the less-used track.
- That's what the humans did. Most races find the hyperdrive and go traveling. The humans
- never did, and so their search for knowledge went in a different direction."
- "Didn't it!" Togram shuddered at the recollection of that brief, terrible combat. "Guns that spit
- dozens of bullets without reloading, cannon mounted on armored platforms that move by
- themselves, rockets that follow their targets by themselves... And there are the things we
- didn't see, the ones the humans only talk about -- the bombs that can blow up a whole city,
- each one by itself."
- "I don't know if I believe that," Ransisc said.
- "I do. They sound afraid when they speak of them."
- "Well, maybe. But it's not just the weapons they have. It's the machines that let them see and
- talk to one another from far away; the machines that do their reckoning for them; their
- recorders and everything that has to do with them. From what they say of their medicine, I'm
- almost tempted to believe you and think they are wizards -- they actually know what causes
- their diseases, and how to cure or even prevent them. And their farming: this planet is far
- more crowded than any I've seen or heard of, but it grows enough for all these humans."
- Togram sadly waggled his ears. "It seems so unfair. All that they got, just by not stumbling
- onto the hyperdrive."
- "They have it now," Ransisc reminded him. "Thanks to us."
- The Roxolani looked at each other, appalled. They spoke together: "What have we done?"
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