Footfall Read online

  Takpusseh stopped talking, and his eyes flicked Dawson with the impact of a glare. Nobody else noticed.

  The camera looked along the mother ship’s nose while Earth’s sun shrank. There were long-distance telescopic photos of Mars and Jupiter, then Saturn growing huge. The great ship moved among the moons, neared the rings, still decelerating. Wes picked out the three classic bands of the ring, separating into hundreds of bands as the ship neared. The F-ring roiled and twisted as the ship’s fusion exhaust washed across it.

  Ships departed Thuktun Flishithy, launched aft along rails. The cameras didn’t follow. A telescope picked out something butterfly fragile but not as pretty. Freeze-frame. Takpusseh pointed and made noises of interrogation.

  "Voyager," Dawson said. He tried a few words of the Invader language. "We made it. My fithp. United States of America!"

  "Did it come to—" garble. The instructor tried again. "To look on us? Did you know of us?"

  The word must be spy. "No."

  "Then why?"

  "To see Saturn." An anger was building in Wes Dawson, and he didn’t understand it. They had come in war and killed without warning, but he’d known that for days. What new grievance—

  They had used Saturn! Deep in his heart Dawson felt that Saturn belonged to Earth—to mankind—to the United States that had explored Saturn system, to the science establishment and science fiction fandom. Goddaminit, Saturn is ours!

  He kept his silence. The film started again, and jumped. They’d skipped something: they’d skipped most of what they were doing in Saturn system. Two crescents, Earth and Moon, were growing near. Wedge-shaped markers pointed out the United States and Soviet moon bases, artifacts in orbit, weather satellites, Soviet devices of unknown purpose, the space station . . .

  "Question, time you know we come," Takpusseh said. Then louder: "Time you know we come!"

  "One sixth part of a year," Arvid said in English. "A year is—" His hands moved, a forefinger circling a fist, while he spoke alien words: "Circle Earth around Earth-star."

  "You slow to fight. You know we come. Why slow?"

  Why had Earth’s defenders responded so slowly? Wes said, "Earth fithp, chtaptisk fithp maybe not fight."

  "You fight,, you not fight, two is one. Earth fithp is chtaptisk fithp. Sooner if Earth fithp not fight."

  The last time Wes Dawson had felt like this, he had put his fist into a Hell’s Angel’s mouth just as far as it would go. "You came to make war? Only to make war?"

  "Make war, yes," Takpusseh said, as if relieved to be understood.

  Wes barely felt a large hand closing on his arm, above the elbow. "What can you take, move to fithp world?" What could they possibly hope to steal? They’d dropped too much of their craft; they’d be lucky to return home themselves!

  "Earth is world for chtaptisk fithp," Takpusseh said.

  * * *

  Warriors had come at Takpusseh’s bellow. The humans were gone now. Fathisteh-tulk helped Takpusseh to his feet. "Are you injured?"

  "My pride hurts worse than my eye-and snnfp. Dawson surprised me entirely. They look so fragile!"

  "They don’t know when to fight and they don’t know how to surrender," the Herdmaster’s Advisor said. "One would think that would be good news for the invasion, but I wonder."

  "Dawson is mad," Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz said. "His behavior tells us nothing. Must we keep him?"

  "He is a puzzle that needs cracking. He speaks English as his native language, and we will need that too until the others know the speech of the fithp a srupk or two better."

  "They must surrender, at once, formally," Raztupisp-minz stated. "We should have taught them how, and much earlier, so that they can teach future prisoners."

  The memory flashed in Takpusseh’s mind; it hurt worse than his eye. Takpusseh realized why he had delayed this crucial step. "Of course you’re right, Breaker-One. I want to visit the medical section. I’ll meet you afterward, above the restraining cell."

  * * *

  It hurt to breathe, but he had to breathe. Hands were on him, probing a stabbing agony in his ribs. Wes gasped and fought to open his eyes. Red mist . . . gradually clearing . . . the shapes around him resolved into human faces . . .

  "What happened?"

  "You attacked the teacher, Takpusseh. I tried to stop you." Dmitri said. "Do you remember?"

  Seeing red . . . but his mind must have been working well on some level. He hadn’t just swung a fist. He’d lunged forward and reached between the branches of Takpusseh’s trunk, closed his fingers hard in Takpusseh’s nostril, and pulled back savagely to keep himself moving. The teacher screamed; his digits had whipped around Wes’s rib cage. With his ribs collapsing and the air sighing out of him, Wes Dawson reached along the trunk and slid his thumb under Takpusseh’s thick right eyelid—was he flying?—and did his damnedest to twist it off. He didn’t remember any more.

  "Why did you do it?"

  "They never had the least intention of negotiating anything," he said. "They came to take the Earth away from us."

  Dmitri Grushin took Dawson’s chin in his hand and twisted it to put them eye to eye. "Do not attack them again. You would kill us all for nothing. For nothing."

  They were quiet for some time. Then Arvid and Dmitri began to talk. Wes, with too little Russian, quickly lost track. He was more interested in the pictures in his own mind.

  Presently he asked, "Did you notice? They threw away half their ship."

  "Yes," Arvid said. "The external fuel tank, and the massive looking ring."

  "I think it was a modified Bussard ramjet."

  "Explain."

  "It’s a way of reaching the stars. Fusion drive, but you get your fuel by scooping up interstellar hydrogen."

  Arvid dismissed that. "Certainly nobody has ever built a Bussard ramjet. How would you recognize one?’

  "After they got going they changed something. It made a violet glow behind the ship. Arvid, the point is that they threw it away when they got here. It was used to cross interstellar space, and they dropped it. They let it fall back toward the stars. They’re serious. They’ve got no plans to go home."

  "I was more interested in watching our captors. So. They dropped it to save weight, of course, but . . . well. As if your ancestors had burned the Mayflower. Yes, they came to stay." Arvid’s eyes went to the trapdoor in the ceiling, which once again was closed against them. "Did you notice anything else worthy of comment?"

  Wes pounded a fist on his knee, twice. "They were at Saturn when the Voyagers went by. They spent years there. We might have noticed something if Saturn wasn’t so weird. We’d have had fifteen years warning!"

  "It is difficult to put the mushroom cloud back into the steel casing."

  "At least we know this is the mother ship. This is all they’ve got."

  "They did not exceed lightspeed?"

  "They didn’t even come very close." Wes had been watching for the effect of relativity; stars blue-shifted ahead and reddened aft. It hadn’t happened.

  "Good. They cannot expect help. But they must be desperate. Where can they go if we defeat them?"

  "They’ll have to land sometime. They must expect to beat us on the ‘ground. They’re crazy."

  Arvid saw no reason to answer. Dawson was not of his nation. But any cosmonaut knew that from a military standpoint the command of space was priceless. The Soviet Union, which had always expected to rule the world, had held that position until three days ago.

  "Yeah. Well. They didn’t show much of the inside of the ship. They showed only the last leg of their approach to Earth. They showed the mother ship being refueled, but they didn’t show where the fuel came from. So maybe they scooped methane snow off a moon and refined deuterium and tritium out of it. But why didn’t they show that? They’re hiding something."

  "Of course."

  "Something specific."

  "Of course."

  The trapdoor swung open.

  The platform descended int
o a wary silence. Takpusseh was quite alone. His right eye was covered with soft white cloth. Another patch covered his nostril. He carried his branched trunk at an odd angle. A second fi’ followed him down. The soldiers remained above.

  * * *

  The Breakers faced the humans alone.

  The captives looked harmless enough. They were clustered in a corner, frightened, wary. The black one was on his back and trying to roll over. He seemed to be just becoming aware of the aliens.

  Raztupisp-minz told them, "Move away from the dark one."

  The humans discussed it. Instant obedience would have been reassuring, but in fact they seemed to be interpreting for each other. Then they moved away. The black one protested and tried to move in the same direction, Then his eyes fixed on Raztupispminz. He breathed as if the chamber had lost its air, his eyes and mouth opened improbably wide, as Raztupisp-minz walked toward him.

  Raztupisp-minz set his foot solidly on the black man’s chest.

  He lifted it and backed away. "You," he said, and his digits indicated the crippled one. "Come."

  The humans discussed it heatedly. Then Nikolai pulled himself across the floor on his hands.

  Dawson had moved, without permission. He knelt by the black man with his bony digits on the man’s throat. He spoke to the others, in English. "Dead."

  Tnkpusseh let it pass rather than interrupt the ceremony.

  "Roll," Raztupisp-minz said, and he rotated his digits in a circle. Nikolai didn’t appear to understand. Raztupisp-minz forcibly rolled the man onto his back, set his foot on the man’s chest, and stepped away. He pointed to another. "You."

  One by one the Soviets submitted to the foot on the chest until only Dawson was left, Then, as they had discussed, Raztupispminz stepped aside and Takpusseh came forward.

  The man stood balanced, forelegs slightly bent, hands open, palms outward, It came to Takpusseh that Dawson expected to die.

  It wouldn’t bother Takpusseh that much if he did. He swung his digits with nearly his full strength. Dawson ducked under it, fast, and lunged forward. Takpusseh caught him on the backswing and flung him spinning across the cell and against a wall. As the man started to topple. Takpusseh was there, catching him and rolling him on his back. The man blinked, opened his eyes and mouth wide. Frozen in fear? Takpusseh raised his foot over Dawson’s chest.

  I was almost the last to be thawed awake. Some of the sleepers were brain-damaged. They fought, or they didn’t respond at all. Most accepted the change.

  It was Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz who accepted their formal surrender. My grandson, though older than I, discounting the eights of years slept. This was nothing new to him.

  His task it was to break me too. Nonetheless he was uncomfortable, because we are related, or because afterward 1 must teach him his profession. "Your position won’t change, Grandfather. Who but you has the training to break alien forms of life to the Traveler Herd? But the Traveler Herd has changed, and you must join it again."

  I roll over on the floor, feet in the air, trunk splayed, vulnerable. Others watch. My spaceborn grandson’s foot on my chest. "There, that’s over. Now you must begin to train me," his voice dropping, for my ears alone. "to break me. I must know something of what we must do."

  I feel it now, the foot lightly crushing my chest

  . Takpusseh lowered his foot. A mere tap would not do; this was no token surrender. He felt the man’s ribs sag before he lifted his foot. Dawson waited for more, but there was no more. He rolled Side, convulsively, groaning with the pain of damaged ribs.

  "Now you belong to the Traveler Herd," Takpusseh said in his own speech. He saw Dawson take it in and relax somewhat. Dawson moved to join the other prisoners. "Is the black one dead?" Takpusseh asked. "What killed him?"

  The one called Dmitri answered in the fithp speech. "Fear you. Fear foot make dead. Take him out?"

  Takpusseh summoned the warriors. Two came down and moved the black man onto the platform. It rose. It descended to take the fithp up one by one. Takpusseh went last.

  17

  FARMHOUSES

  Generally in war the best policy is to take a state intact; to ruin it is inferior to this. To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

  —SUN-TZU, The Art of War

  COUNTDOWN: H PLUS 100 HOURS

  The house had belonged to Carlotta’s grandmother. Trujillo had married Castro had married de Alvarez, families whose names were respected when the Lowells and Cabots were field hands. Carlotta’s sister Juana had inherited the house. She married a man with the unlikely name of David Morgan.

  Of course Dawson wasn’t exactly in our conquistador heritage either. Carlotta lay in the exact center of the big four-poster and tried to count the spots on the ceiling. Thoughts came unbidden.

  Her superb imagination showed her a torn puffball of a corpse, dry and brittle, falling through vacuum and the savage sunlight of space. A dissection table with monstrous shapes around it. A carved corpse, the parts arrayed on a silver platter, surrounded by cooked plants of unearthly shape; voices chittering or booming as the banquet began.

  No!

  She leaped from the bed. The floor creaked as she scurried across the room to the door. The house was old, begun as a ranch house before the Civil War, added to as family required and money enabled. It had been built in clumps, and not all the additions fitted well together, although Carlotta rather liked the general effect. Now it had only four inhabitants, Carlotta, David, Juana, and an ancient housekeeper from Xuahaca who called herself Lucy. Juana’s children had long moved away. And Sharon is in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Will I ever see her again? Thank God the telephones worked long enough for me to tell her to stay there. How could she travel?

  Bright sunlight flooded the ball outside her bedroom, and when she reached the kitchen the windup clock said it was midafternoon. Lucy had put away the gin bottle. Or did I finish it to get to sleep? There should be some left in it. She went to the cabinet, but she felt Lucy’s disapproving stare.

  "Desayuno, Senora?"

  "Gracias, no. Por favor, solamente cafe." And damned right I’m going to sit on the patio in my housecoat. Who’s going to see me, or care if they do?

  The patio was too large. When Carlotta had visited as a child, the gardens were famous through the state. Pumpkins, melons, vegetables—all won prizes at county and state fairs. Now there was a big flagstone patio where the melon patch had been, and a field of sweet peas where celery and chard had grown. No gardeners. Plenty of people unemployed, but no one wants to raise vegetables for a retired professor and his wife. But it does make a nice patio. She sat at the big wrought-iron table. Lucy was setting the coffee down when the thunder began.

  Thunder from a clear sky was not unheard of in Kansas, but this didn’t come in claps and die away. It rolled in and stayed, renewed itself, grew louder and faded and grew louder still.

  Then brilliant points were drawing straight white lines across the sky, sowing clouds of dots that drifted away to west and south. Lucy whimpered in terror, and the need to reassure the older woman kept Carlotta calm. Invasion. Parachutes. What came for Wes has come for me. But nothing showed directly overhead. Not here. Not yet, anyway.

  "Carla," a voice spoke from behind her.

  "Yes, Juana?"

  "What is happening?" The noise had brought her sister outside. Juana Morgan held a small transistor radio that poured out static as she frantically turned the tuning knob this way and that.

  For once you will not look disapprovingly at me in my housecoat in mid-afternoon

  . "Vapor trails, I think, Perhaps the professor will know." "He went to town to buy newspapers." Juana paused. "And more gin."

  "Ah." Carlotta shrugged, and glanced significantly at Lucy. "They’re not coming here," she said. "Miles away. Not to Dighton, either."

  "Are you sure?" Juana demanded.

  "Yes." How the hell can
I be sure? And what could we do about it if they were coming here, or to Dighton? It’s ten miles to Dighton, and David has the only damned car—

  "David didn’t think they’d come, either," Juana said. "But his

  National Guard colonel wanted to mobilize. Maybe that’s where David is! With the Guard."

  "Could be." What good is that? Bunch of old men with worn out equipment . . . Wes always voted for bigger appropriations for the Guard, but nobody was really pushing it.

  "Lucy, perhaps it would be well to get out the candles and the storm lanterns," Juana said.

  "Si." Lucy shuffled away, still glancing up at the sky and looking away in fear.

  "Give her something to do and she bears up well," Carlotta said. She stared at the open work of the tabletop. "I wish I had something to do."

  "So do I."

  Carlotta nodded. "Yeah. I wouldn’t approve of me as a houseguest either."

  "It’s as much your house as mine," Juana said. "I haven’t forgotten how much you and Wes loaned us." She sat across from Carlotta. "Hell, get smashed every night if that’s what it takes. You really loved the guy, didn’t you?"

  "Yes. Still do."

  "Sorry—"

  "You don’t know he’s dead."

  "No." There was another peal of thunder. Juana shuddered. "I wish it had happened to me."

  Carlotta frowned.

  "I mean, that it had been David up there. Instead of Wes. Damn. That sounds horrible. I mean—well, you’re really in love with Wes. It’s breaking you up. I’d miss David; we’re very comfortable together, but—well, I wouldn’t be like you. I hate to see you like this, Carla. You were always the strong one—"

  "Yeah. I sure look it, don’t I. Oh damn, Juana, damn, damn, damn, what am I going to do?"

  Juana looked up at the dot-filled skies and shuddered.

  * * *

  The motorcycle was intact. Harry looked around furtively. No sign of the enemy. He lifted the motorcycle and stood it on its stand.