Harry Turtledove - The Road Not Taken

“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?”