Free Alien Contact by Marty Halpern Page A

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 Ransisc 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 as 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 duffel bag over his shoulder and tramped out to the waiting truck. “We should be meeting the star people with open arms, not with a show of force.”
    “You tell ’em, Professor,” Sergeant Santas 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 the passenger compartment. The seats 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 their heads. “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, MICVs, 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?”
    “Sure,” Cox said, because Sandy, while he wasn’t a bad guy, was a sergeant. All the same, the Neo-Armalite between Cox’s boots seemed very futile, and his helmet and body armor as thin and gauzy as a stripper’s negligee.

    The sky outside the steerers’ dome began to go from black to deep blue as the Indomitable entered atmosphere. “There,” Olgren said, pointing. “That’s where we’ll