The Road Not Taken Read online

  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 firelight 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 ha
d 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 hav
e 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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