The Road Not Taken

“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