The Road Not Taken Read online

  The Road Not Taken

  Harry Turtledove

  The Road Not Taken

  by 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 f
irst 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.