Footfall Read online

  "It’s quiet out there," she said.

  Roger climbed up to the landing.

  She was older than he’d thought from her voice. Roger guessed she was almost forty. She wore jeans and a wool shirt and a bandana, and her face was covered with soot and grime. Her nose had once been broken, and wasn’t quite straight. Not quite ugly, but she could work on it. "What’s happening?"

  "I think they’ve gone. I’m Rosalee Pinelli, by the way."

  "Roger Brooks. Where did they go?"

  She shrugged. "All I know is they were out there all night. I could hear them. But they never came in here."

  "Did you go look?"

  She shook her head vigorously. "Not me. We didn’t hear anything for a couple of hours, so about dawn the five guys who were in here with me went out to look." She indicated a hole in the concrete structure. "You can see ‘em through here."

  Roger looked. There was a pile of bodies in the street. "That’s more than five."

  "They made a pile," Rosalee said. "They left people alone until some guys blew one of their tanks." She shook her head. "Goddam, it was beautiful! They used dinner plates to look like mines, and when one of the snouts stopped they hit it with Molotov cocktails! Beautiful!"

  "Until the snouts blew up the town," Roger said under his breath. "Yeah. I saw it."

  "After that, the snouts started that pile of bodies out there," she said. "I haven’t seen or heard anything since about nine this morning, but I’ve been afraid to go out."

  "I’ll look around,"

  "Be careful—here, I’ll come with you."

  "They’re gone," Brooks said. "Let’s get the hell out of here."

  "How?" Nat Reynolds asked.

  "There’s some junk on the ramp," Brooks said. "But with a little work we can get it clear and drive out."

  "Aren’t there cars up above?"

  "Not like this one," Brooks said. He patted the VW diesel Rabbit. "f can get two thousand miles on the fuel in this. More, now that we drained that truck."

  "Come on, Nat. I’ll help," Carol said. She took his hand.

  Possessive as hell. "Yeah, let’s get at it," Roger said.

  Rosalee was already tossing away light debris. In an hour they had a pathway he could drive through. The four of them piled into the Rabbit.

  I don’t remember asking either of the women. Not that it matters. Reynolds isn’t going to leave that one behind, and there’s room for Rosalee. I might as well get her story.

  "Where to?" Reynolds asked.

  "Colorado Springs. The government’s got to be there."

  "East!" Rosalee shouted. "Away from the snouts!"

  "I’m for that," Reynolds agreed.

  They drove up the ramp.

  "You sure they’re gone?" Carol asked.

  "Yeah," Roger said. "I looked." They came out of the structure. Lauren, Kansas, looked like Berlin after World War II. Buildings were gutted. Bodies lay in the streets, not just the pile the snouts had created, but others as well.

  "Godalmighty damn," Roger muttered. He threaded his way through the debris. "All that in revenge for one tank—"

  "Traitors," Reynolds said. "They were killing traitors, or rogues, or crazies."

  "What the hell do you mean by that?" Rosalee demanded.

  "We surrendered," Reynolds said. "As far as they’re concerned, we surrendered, and then we attacked them."

  "That doesn’t make sense," Carol protested.

  I wonder

  . Roger drove past another ruined building. "How do you know, Nat?" Reynolds laughed. "I don’t. I’m guessing. But look, gang, I’m not a scientist and I’m not a newsman. When I guess wrong, nothing happens. Maybe I even sell the story—"

  "If you guess wrong here you’ll get us all killed!" Rosalee snarled.

  "Shall I stop guessing? We could die that way too, because I’m the only expert you’ve got."

  When they reached the end of the debris, he turned south despite the others’ protests. There was no sign of an enemy.

  20

  SCHEMES

  No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

  —Ancient military maxim

  COUNTDOWN: H PLUS 180 HOURS

  The engineers who built Message Bearer must have considered the communal mudroom expendable. They had located it just inside the hull. This had its advantages.

  Under spin, a srupk’s depth of mud formed a shell inside the hull; it would shield the ship from an unexpected attack. Mud boiling from a rent would freeze in place, a plug to hold air.

  The mudroom was under full spin gravity. Winterhome’s mass and surface gravity had been established by telescopic studies, a year before the ship reached the ringed giant. For sixteen years, since birth in many cases, the communal mudroom had taught fithp to move under Winterhome gravity. Warriors bound for the surface would have at least that advantage.

  It was the biggest room aboard Message Bearer, covering an eighth of the hull surface of the life support region. From the middle it curved out of sight in both directions. The mud was good sticky-wet horneworld dirt below, with nearly clear water floating on top. Fathisteb-tulk remembered the ceiling as oppressively close, and bare. It was still close, but not oppressively so. Generations of spaceborn had decorated it with painted friezes.

  Above his head was a full-sized representation of a thuktun: a weathered granite rectangle covered with script and with a centered representation of a thuktun, which was covered with script and a representation of a thuktun, which . . . Fathisteh-tulk wondered if the priest Fistarteh-thuktun had ever seen this part of the ceiling. Such a thuktun would be a legendary thing. The thuktunthp spoke of every subject a fi’ could imagine, but none spoke of the thuktunthp themselves, nor of their makers.

  Fathisteb-tulk was the only sleeper in a crowd of spaceborn.

  "It’s not that we don’t trust planets," the gangling warrior said. "We trust one planet, the Homeworld, the world on which you were born, sir. We trust other worlds to obey other rules."

  "Mating seasons," Fathisteh-tulk said, half listening.

  He filled his mouth and sprayed water at a spaceborn female, barely mature, who had been avoiding him. This social barrier between spaceborn and sleepers had to be broken, even if done one fi’ at a time. There was power in Fathisteb-tulk’s lungs. She preened in the spray, then (belatedly, but as protocol required) sprayed him back. She was just able to reach him.

  The gangling warrior—Rashinggith? something like that—was still talking. "Exactly! The target world orbits in about seven eighths of a Homeworld year. After three generations in space, we still follow a mating season of one year; and the sleepers, because they were wakened at the wrong time—"

  "I know. During your mating season we feel a discomfort, an itch we can’t wet."

  "It’s the same with us. So, will both mating seasons be skewed on the target planet?" The spaceborn dissidents did not obey the custom established by the Herdmaster. They would not call the target world Winterhome. "Suppose some of us adjust and some do not? A few generations on the target world and we could all be mildly in heat all the time. Woo!"

  "Two mating seasons a year might be fun. If it comes, it will come whether we land or not."

  "And that’s only one possible problem. There are bound to be parasites we never adjusted to—"

  A voice bellowed through the room. "Tulk!"

  "I am summoned," Fathisteh-tulk said, and he moved toward the voice of his mate, answering with a cheerful "Tulk"

  Moving among sleepers now, spraying muddy water to greet friends, he passed beneath an older frieze. The time was mating season, by the state of the foreground plants and the activities of half-seen fithp among the trees. He had worked on this bas-relief himself. He was pleased to see that it had been kept up, repainted.

  But these next ones were recent. Here a swath of jet black powdered with white points, and a small pattern of concentric rings: the Winterhome sun, repeatedly outlined as it grew larger
over the decades. There the ringed storm-ball with its company of moons, and the raggedly curved horizon of the Foot, with a mining party around a digit ship tanker—

  "Tulk!"

  He stopped his dawdling.

  She waited impatiently at the exit. Smatter than the average female, Chowpeentulk was turning massive with the increase in her unborn child. She said, "Come. We must discuss."

  The platform elevator lifted them into a corridor. Fathisteh-tulk said, "We are halfway between Winterhome and the Foot. What can be urgent?’

  "You were among dissidents!"

  "So I was. ‘Dissidence isn’t forbidden."

  "Tulk, I think it will be, soon. The dissidents claim that—the War for Winterhome is unnecessary. I remind you that we are fighting that war now. Will you persuade warriors not to fight, even as they struggle with the prey? Need I remind you that Fookerteh is even now on the ground of Winterhome, and that he is the favorite of K’turfookeph?"

  "I’ve said little. Mostly I listen. What I hear makes sense. We reached the ringed gasball with the ship depleted of virtually every necessity. Within three years Message Bearer was resupplied. We could have left then if we had not needed the Foot, or we could have stayed as long as we liked."

  Fathisteh-tulk had not bred her when mating season followed the Awakening. This was common enough, even expected, among males who had lost status. Chowpeentulk remembered that she had been almost relieved. Her next child would not be of fighting age during the War for Winterhome

  The Traveler Herd had reached the ringed gasball and were at work on the Foot when her season came again. Again her mate was impotent. Perhaps she had treated him badly then. She remembered her own irritability well enough.

  The next season he had recovered; and the season after that had borne fruit. Her mate’s status as the Herdmaster’s Advisor had been enough; he had recovered his self-respect. She had been slow to recognize the other change in him.

  Fathisteh-tulk was still talking. "Space holds most of the resources we need, and no prey to be robbed. We—"

  "Tulk! Have you forgotten what it is like to wallow in natural mud beneath an open sky? To take natural prey? The difference between a shower and rain?"

  He hesitated. "No."

  "Then what is this nonsense?"

  "I’ve talked to spaceborn. They don’t remember. They don’t miss it. Tulk, we’ve started the war, and that is well. But if we have to back off, we know the natives can’t follow us. We should be prepared for this. A generation hence we may be trading with them, nitrogen for refined metals—"

  "Trading? With fragile, misshapen things that look like they would fall over any moment?"

  "Isn’t that better than enslaving them into the Traveler Herd? We would then be living with them, Can you picture them as our equals, generations from now? That is the fate of successful slaves."

  He laughed as she flinched from that picture. "It won’t hurt to keep those now in power a little unbalanced. I want to keep their minds working. The dissidents are doing something worthwhile."

  That dangerous, destructive humor. She simply hadn’t noticed in time.

  Fathisteh-tulk was not mad, exactly. Not suicidal. He would never hurt the Traveler Tribe or his family or their cause. But political interactions just didn’t mean anything to him anymore. Nor did his mate’s authority in matters of family. In the twelve years that passed between her first and second pregnancies, he had lost his sense of these nuances too.

  "We are at war," she said. "When a herd moves it must not scatter to the winds."

  "It may be a needless war. Certainly these think so."

  "Let them do their work without your support. You’re damaging the position of all sleepers. The first step is docility."

  "We have not joined a new tribe. Our tribe was captured from within. Tulk, it may be that I am wrong. I intend to find out."

  "How?"

  But that he would not tell her.

  * * *

  Jenny led the way inside. The large conference room was filled with sound, although there weren’t more than a couple of dozen people in the room. Knots of people, mixed groups of science fiction writers, uniformed officers, and civilian defense analysts stood at blackboards, others around tables. Viewscreens had been set up to show what was displayed on the big situation-room screens. It reminded Jenny of the newsroom at JPL during the Saturn encounter.

  There’s Ed

  . One of the officers was her brother-in-law, Ed Gillespie. She’d heard about his arrival, but she’d been too busy to see him. There’d been nothing useful in his report on the mission to deliver Congressman Dawson to Kosmograd, and Jenny had no time for social visits. Jack Clybourne came in after Jenny. He looked nervously at the crowd in the room. "Seems all right," he said.

  But he watches everyone just the same

  . Jenny advanced into the room. "Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States." She got A reaction to that. All the military people jumped to attention. The science-fiction writers stared curiously; then those sitting down remembered their manners and stood. The babble quieted, although there was an undertone of whispered conversation.

  The President came in with Admiral Carrell and General Toland. He looked blankly at the large mom with its disorderly crowd.

  "Carry on," Admiral Carell said. "Well, Major? It’s your show."

  "Yes, sir." Jenny led the way to the blackboard where Ed Gillespie stood with the group of writers who’d been chosen as spokespeople. Anson, of course. He doesn’t look very strong. Dr. Curtis. Joe Ransom. I guess Sherry Atkinson was too shy— By the time the President arrived the writers were talking to each other, but they fell silent when he reached them, The President nodded to Ed Gillespie. "Glad to see you, General." He turned to let Jenny introduce him to the writers.

  "Mr. President, this is Robert Anson. He’s the senior man among the writers."

  "Mr. President," Anson said formally. He introduced the others.

  "David Coffey," the President said. "Major Crichton says you’ve got something for me."

  "Yes, sir," Anson said. "Thank you for coming. I’ll not waste more time in pleasantries. First. It now seems clear that their objective is conquest, either of the Earth or of a substantial part of it. The evidence says they want it all."

  "What evidence is that?" the President asked. He sounded curious, rather than demanding.

  "They chose to attack the United States," Anson said. "Clearly the strongest nation on Earth."

  "But—"

  Anson fell silent at the interruption, but when the President didn’t say anything else, he continued. "Clearly the strongest nation, at least as seen from space. Roads, dams, cities, cultivated lands, harbors, electronic emissions—all would indicate that the United States is the dominant nation, at least as seen from space. Roads, dams, cities, cultivated lands, harbors, electronic emissions—all would indicate that the United States is the dominant nation." Anson looked around as if for contradictions, but no one said anything. "Yet they chose to land here, and according to all the intelligence reports we have, they’re setting up a perimeter defense. As if they intend to stay."

  "We’ll see about that," General Toland muttered.

  Anson raised an eyebrow.

  Toland looked around nervously. "We’re planning a big attack," he said. "In about two hours."

  "With what?" Dr. Curtis demanded.

  Toland looked at the writer with disapproval.

  "It will be a large assault," the President said. "Mr. Anson, I agree that they intend to stay. Do they have a choice? I don’t see how they can expect to launch enough ships to get their people off the Earth."

  "Lasers," Curtis said.

  They all looked at him. He shrugged and pointed to Anson. "Sorry, it’s Bob’s turn."

  "We’ll let Dr. Curtis explain in a moment," Anson said. "We agree then that they’ve come to stay. Despite their early successes, I would be greatly surprised if they expected this first effort
to succeed. Eventually we’ll win, throw them out of Kansas. Surely they expect that. Therefore, they plan other attempts. One supposes they will make certain preparations for those attempts."

  "What might they do?" the President asked.

  Anson turned to Joe Ransom. "Mr. Ransom will address that."

  "They’ve already used kinetic energy weapons," Ransom said. "It’s clear that any ship capable of crossing interstellar space will have a very powerful engine. Mr. President, I think they’ll drop a Dinosaur Killer."

  The President looked puzzled, but Joe Ransom was Only hitting his stride. "An asteroid some nine kilometers across very probably killed the dinosaurs and wiped out most of the life on Earth at the time. There’s a layer of dead clay that corresponds to that era, and we find asteroidal material in it. all over the world—but skip the evidence; it almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that the aliens have already thrown rocks, and they’ve got the power to move a small asteroid. We’ve got the mathematics to work out the results. The effects will be global, and very bad."

  There’s an understatement, Jenny thought. Jack’s scared too. Well, we ought to be. "Depending on how large, and where it strikes, an asteroid could do just about anything." Anson said. "Tidal waves may destroy many coastal cities. Cloud cover: we could get weeks or months of endless night and endless rain. It could trigger a new ice age."

  "You can’t be sure they’ll hit us with an asteroid," the President said.

  "It’s the way to bet. I wish we could guess how big it will be."

  "Mr. President," Anson said. "They obviously have the ability to do it. They’ve been out in space for fifteen years. Surely they’ve thought of it."

  "I see." Coffey nodded seriously.

  "Is there anything we can do about it?" Admiral Carrell demanded. "Could we deflect it?"

  "How? They shoot down anything we send up," Curtis said.

  "So what do we do?" Admiral Carrell asked.

  Anson turned to the other writer. "Dr. Curtis has given that some thought. Wade—"

  "We’ll never beat them while they own space," Curtis said. "As long as they control space, they can find junk to hit us with. One Dinosaur Killer after another."