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.