Estou tentando localizar o título ou autor de - ou algumas pistas para - um conto que pode ser da Era de Ouro.
"Espiada! Eu vejo você!" , uma novela de Pan Anderson , publicado pela primeira vez em Analógico , fevereiro de 1968 .
Eu o li em uma coleção de contos que provavelmente comprei no período de 1960 a 1980.
Provavelmente a coleção Poul Anderson de 1975 Homeward and Beyond .
Piloto humano particular vê o que ele acha ser uma nave espacial sobre uma área bastante desabitada
He took lessons and got his license. Then he bought himself a used VTOL aircraft and went to scout the territory.
Thus it was that he saw the spaceship.
He was droning leisurely along at about 3500 meters. The peaks were not extremely far below him. Their landscape was awesome: vast, steep, cragged, a ruddiness slashed by mineral ochers and blues, a starkness little relieved by scattered mesquite, greasewood, and sagebrush. Here and there, a streamlet turned the bottom of a canyon green. But mostly this was desert land, people-empty land, hawk, buzzard, jackrabbit, and coyote land. The sun was westering in a deep, almost purple sky. Updrafts boomed briefly and trickily, shaking the plane in its course.
[. . . .]
But it was real. Not just his rocking mind said so. His instruments did.
Other memories from boyhood and youth boiled up. "Judas Priest," he whispered. That's a sho-nuff flying saucer."
em uma reserva Navajo ou Pueblo (ou alguma outra reserva indígena americana).
Updrafts were tricky; and this was a somewhat battered, cranky craft he had. For a while he was too occupied with controls, instruments, hiss and shudder around him, to heed much else. He did see how the saucer squatted imperturbable in the bright late sunlight. Tawny mud-brick walls, red canyon sides, deep blue sky, green meadows and cornfields, green cottonwoods and willows along the quicksilver stream, dusty sage and juniper farther back—and in the middle, a spaceship from the stars!
His landing gear touched. He cut the power. Silence hit him like a thunderclap. He unharnessed, opened the door, and sprang shakily forth. The air was thin, dry, pungent with resinous odors. Except for a breeze, tinkle of water, bleating from a pasture shared by sheep and goats, the silence continued.
It was not broken by the approaching locals. They were ordinary Pueblo types, a few hundred medium-sized dark-complexioned folk of every apparent age. Men and women both wore their hair in braids. Clothing varied, from more or less traditional breechcloths, gowns, and blankets, to levis and sport shirts. Lindquist's sharpened perceptions noted that the people were better clad, seemed more healthy and prosperous, than the average Southwest Indian. And they were strangely uncordial. Not that they threatened him. But they drew up in a kind of phalanx, and stared, and said never a word. Even the littlest children sucked their thumbs in a marked manner.
O piloto humano pousa e caminha até os alienígenas e diz, no efeito de: "Ah ha, eu sabia!" Alien, com desapontamento em seu rosto, vira-se para o piloto e diz "Ok, bem, desde que você nos encontrou - bem-vindo ao Império Galáctico".
His eyes rolled. He gasped. Urgo bawled, "Oh, no!" and Pazilliwheep looked ill.
Other humans emerged. So did a television camera on a dolly. "We alerted the news services," Lindquist said happily. "Of course they thought this was a lunatic-fringe project, but they did agree to stand by, in case we came up with anything good for laughs. Smile, you're on candid camera. Now we better break the news gently to my assistants, though you aren't quite the godlike beings most of them think you are." He stopped, blushed through his stubble, and beckoned to a companion. "Pardon me. I was so excited I forgot. Here's Professor Rostovtsev from Colorado U. He speaks Hopi."
Klak't'klak had already adjusted his machine to English. He turned it off for a minute, while he expressed himself in his own tongue. Then he closed the circuit again.
"Never mind," he said resignedly. "Welcome to the Galactic Federation."
A questão era que os alienígenas sentiam que apenas os nativos americanos, não toda a humanidade, eram dignos de serem membros do Império Galáctico.
"Right. The 143ans who do know about us and do have membership are friendly, dignified, unaggressive, mind-their-own-business people who'll work for us when we need help at an honest wage for honest labor, and who produce salable handicrafts. Do you wonder that we hide our existence from everyone else?"
(Para a Galactics, nosso mundo é "Estação de Reposição 143".)