Footfall

10. THE ARRIVAL

The Army had been at work in the Oval Office. Technicians had installed TV monitors in all the corners, as well as in front of the President’s desk. They showed the command center of the Soviet Kosmograd satellite. At the moment nothing was happening.

Despite its large size, the Oval Office was jammed. There was the President and Mrs. Coffey, most of the Cabinet, the White House staff, diplomats, TV crew—

Jenny sat well back, behind the TV cameras, nearly in the corner. In theory she was there as Admiral Carrell’s representative, ready to advise the President, but there was no way she could have spoken to him if he’d wanted her to, not in this zoo. Everyone wandered about — everyone but the Secret Service men.

It was easy to spot them, once you knew how. They were the ones who never looked at the President. They watched the people who were watching him. Jenny caught Jack Clybourne’s eye and winked. He didn’t respond. He never did when he was on duty.

He didn’t look happy. Jenny had overheard an argument between Jack’s boss and the President. “Mr. Dimming, I appreciate your concern, but I have told the country I would watch from the Oval Office, and by God that’s where I’ll be, so there’s an end to it,” President Coffey had said.

Selected newspeople were invited, which meant the Secret Service people as well. They knew them all, reporters and camera crew, and Jack looked as relaxed as he ever did when on duty, but Jenny could see that he was worried. They had wanted the President in a bomb shelter.

But we’re here. Jenny thought. Here and waiting, in the most famous office in the world, but we’re only spectators. It’s the Soviets’ show. All the computer projections showed the alien craft arriving at Kosmograd. Only the time was uncertain.

She glanced at her watch. It was very late, well past midnight. The aliens were due and past due. Coffee service was available in the hall outside, but someone would probably take her chair if she went out. Better to wait—

The television monitors blanked momentarily, then showed the dark of space. In the far distance something flickered and flashed.

Heretofore the telescopes on Earth and in Earth orbit had seen only a long, pure blue-white light and the murky shadow at its tip. Now, as the tremendous half-seen mass approached Kosmograd, something changed. Twinkling lights flashed in a ring around the central flame, round and round, chasing their tails like light bulbs in a bar sign.

The communications lounge was crowded. Eight present, four crew busy elsewhere. Wes watched the picture being beamed from the telescope to a screen half the size of the wall. The ship was minutes away. Wes tried not to think what would happen if it came a bit too fast. It was decelerating hard. Those extra engines hadn’t been needed until now. Sixty or seventy tiny engines—

Symmetrical. Sixteen to a quadrant. Wes Dawson grinned in delight. Sixty-four engines: the aliens used base-eight arithmetic!

Or base four, or binary digits … engines much smaller than the main engine, and probably less efficient. Fission or fusion pulse engines, judging by the radiation they were putting out. Why hadn’t the alien slowed earlier? It still hadn’t replied to any message.

It had grown gigantic in the telescope field. A blaze of light washed out the aft end: Wes saw only the long flame and the ring of twinkling jets. He made out bulges around the cylindrical midsection. He saw tiny fins and guessed at landing craft spaced out around the hull. A knob on the end of a long, jointed arm: what was that, a cluster of sensing devices? It was aimed at the station.

“We have some shielding,” Arvid said without being asked. “We can handle this much radiation, but not for too much longer. I hope they have some way of maneuvering with chemical rockets.”

Wes nodded. He thought, You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred, but nobody aboard would have understood the reference. He said, “This may be a violation of the Geneva Convention.”

It sparked laughter. Arvid said, “Use tact when you tell them. Nikolai, that’s enough of the telescope. Show us a camera view from—” and interrupted to strain forward.

Wes’s hands closed hard on the arms of his chair.

For the alien ship was sparkling like a fireworks display. Four of the twinkling jets expanded outward, away from the drive flame; then four more. Those pulse-jets were the main drives for smaller spacecraft! Showers of sparks flowed from the hidden bow end. Missiles? Missiles in tremendous number, then, and this was starting to look ominously like a Japanese movie. Not first contact, but space war.

The picture flickered white and disappeared.

Arvid was out of his seat and trying to reach God knows what, and Wes was checking his seat belt, when the whole station rang and shuddered. Wes yelled and clapped hands over his ears. The others were floating out of their seats — free-fall? He swept an arm out to push Giselle back into her seat, and she clutched the arms. He couldn’t reach anyone else.

Free-fall? How could that be? The connecting tunnel must have come apart! Nikolai was screaming into a microphone. He stopped suddenly. He turned and looked around, stunned, ashen.

Behind Wes the wall smashed inward, then outward. The buckle on Wes’s seat harness popped open. Wes grabbed instinctively, a death grip on the arm of his chair, even before the shock wave reached him. The Nigerian snatched at Wes’s belt and clung tight. He was screaming. Good! So was Wes. Hold your breath and you’d rupture your lungs.

For the stars were glaring in at them through the ripped metal, and the air was roaring away, carrying anything loose. Giselle Beaumont flapped her arms as if trying to fly. Her eyes met Wes’s in pure astonishment — and fly she did, out into the black sky and gone. Shit!

Vacuum! Dawson’s eyes and ears felt ready to pop. Giorge’s grip was growing feeble, but so was the wind; the air was almost gone. So. What have I got, a minute before the blood boils out through my lungs? I’ll never reach my million-dollar pressure suit, so where are the beach balls? I located them first thing, every compartment, the emergency pressure balloons, where the hell were they? If Americans had built this place they’d be popping out of the walls, because Ralph Nader would raise hell if they didn’t.

Nothing was popping out of the walls. Dawson’s intestinal tract was spewing air at both ends. His eyes sought … Rogachev, there, clawing at a wall. Dawson patted the shoulder at his waist and kicked himself toward Rogachev. Giorge hung on, in good sense or simple panic.

His throat tried to cough but it couldn’t get a grip.

Wes bounced against a wall, couldn’t find a handhold, bounced away. Losing control. Dying? The black man caught something. but kept one arm around Wes’s waist. Rogachev looked like a puffer-fish. He was fighting to tear open a plastic wall panel. It jerked open and he bounced away.

Bulky disks, four feet across, turned out to be flattened plastic bags. Wes skimmed one at Rogachev. He pulled another open, crawled inside and pulled the black man in too. Zipper? He zipped them inside. Tight fit. Some kind of lock at the end of the zipper. With his chin on the black man’s shoulder Wes reached around the man’s neck and flipped the lock shut, he hoped.

Air jetted immediately.

Reverse pressure in his ears. He pulled in air, in, in, no need to exhale at all. They were going to live. They were floating loose, and nothing to be done about it, because the pressure packages were nothing but balloons with an air supply attached. Rogachev’s too was bouncing about like a toy, but at least he’d gotten inside.

Wes’s passenger was beginning to struggle. It was uncomfortable. Wes wanted to say something comforting, or just tell him not to rip the goddam beach ball! Rut now his throat had air to cough with, and he couldn’t stop coughing. He sounded like he was dying. So did Giorge.

Nothing happened for a long time. Giorge discovered the blood pooling in his ears. He wailed. He fought his way around until he could look into Wes’s face, and then he wailed again. His eyes showed bloody veins, as if he’d been on a week-long drunk. Wes’s own eyes must look just that bad. His nose was filled with blood; a globule swelled at the tip.

He had no idea how much air there was in these things.

Something showed through the ripped wall, just for an instant: reflecting glass that might hide eyes, and a glimpse of what might be a tentacle, a real honest-to-God tentacle.

Giorge made a mewling sound and ceased struggling. Wes froze too. He hadn’t believed. He’d fought like a demon to be at this event, but somewhere inside him he’d been ready for disappointment.

There had been the pulsars: precisely timed signals coming from somewhere in interstellar space. Beacons for Little Green Men? He’d been in college when the pulsars were shown to be rapidly spinning neutron stars, weird but natural. Much younger when the canals of Mars became mere illusion. The dangerously populated swamps of Venus were red hot, dry, and lifeless.

The starship too would be something else, some natural phenomenon—

The alien approached cautiously. A quick look, dodge back, maybe report to a companion. Look again, reflecting faceplate swinging side to side, along with the snout of what must be a weapon.

It crawled through, being careful not to snag its pressure suit. It was compact and bulky and three or four times the size of a man. A dull black pressure suit hid most of it, but it wasn’t even vaguely man-shaped. It was four-footed. The boots were armed with … claws? Pincers? There was a tail like the blade of a paddle. The transparency at the front might indicate its face. Reflection hid the detail behind it. But a single rubbery-looking tentacle reached out from just below the transparent plate, and then branched, and branched again.

There was no doubting that the branched tentacle held a large bore gun. The handle was short and grotesquely broad, but the rest was easy to recognize: magazine, barrel, trigger halfway up the barrel—

Packs at the alien’s sides puffed gas from fore-and-aft snouts. The alien’s approach slowed, and it floated toward Wes with the gun barrel and the reflecting faceplate looking right at him.

Wes lifted his hand in greeting, for lack of a better idea; waved, then opened and closed his thumb across the palm. He said, inaudibly, with vacuum between them, “I’m a tool user too … brother.” The alien didn’t react.

He’d been prepared for disappointment, but not for war. Idiot. Yet he could hope. He wasn’t dead yet, and a border skirmish did not constitute a war.

The tentacle swept backward, slid the gun into a holster on the creature’s back. The tentacle pulled a line from a backpouch, fixed something to the end, something sticky. Yes. The alien was mooring the beach ball to a line, using adhesive tape. Wes began to believe that he would not be killed just yet.

Ambassador to the Galactic Empire … he could still make it. Maybe they were only paranoid, only very cautious. He would have to be cautious himself. A diplomat, was Wes Dawson, good at finding the interfaces between disparate viewpoints. Let him come to understand them: he could find the advantage in friendship between Earth and aliens.

Unless they really had come to conquer Earth. The specter of Herbert George Wells was very much with him.

Everyone in the Oval Office was shouting. Jenny stared at the screen, not quite comprehending what she’d seen.

“Major Crichton!”

The President! “Sir!”

“Please call Admiral Carrell. You people, make room for her, please. Jack, help her get over here.”

“Yes, sir.” Jack Clybourne shouldered through the crowd, then helped her get to the President’s desk. Coffey was still seated. His face was ashen. Jeanne Coffey sat beside him, her eyes staring at the blank TV screen.

“I don’t think we need the newspeople here just at the moment,” the President said. “Or the staff. Or the Cabinet, except for Dr. Hart and Mr. Griffin—”

State and Defense. Yes, we’ll need them. Hap Aylesworth stayed also. Jenny almost giggled. The political advisor. Political implications of war with the aliens — how would this affect the next election?

There were three telephones on the stand behind the President’s desk. Jenny lifted the black one and punched in numbers before she realized there was no dial tone. “Dead,” she said. The President looked at her uncomprehendingly. “Should I use this one?” she asked. The [sic — should be “she”] indicated the red telephone.

“Yes.”

There was no dial tone on that one either, but the Air Force officer on duty in the White House basement came on. “Yes, sir?”

“Priority,” Jenny said. “HQ NORAD.”

“Right. Wait one, there’s something coming in — they’re calling you. Here you are.”

“Mr. President?” a familiar voice said.

“Major Crichton, Admiral. The President is here.” She held out the telephone.

His calm is going. Mrs. Coffey looks horrible, and—

“What happened, Admiral?”

The Secret Service had managed to clear nearly everyone out of the room. Jack Clybourne stood uncertainly at the door.

The President touched a button. Admiral Carrell’s voice filled the mom.

“—little left. We have no operational satellites. Just before we lost the last observation satellite, it reported a number of rocket plumes in the Soviet Union.”

The President looked up and caught the eye of the Secretary of State. “Arthur, get down to the hot line and find out!”

“Right.” Dr. Hart ran to the door.

Secretary of Defense Ted Griffin went pale. “If the crazy bastards have launched at us, we’ve got to get our birds up before theirs hit!”

“We can’t just shoot!” the President shouted. “We don’t know they’ve attacked us. We have to talk to them—”

“I doubt that you can get through,” Admiral Carrell said. “I took the liberty of trying. Mr. President, it appears that a large nuclear device has been detonated in the very high stratosphere, far too high to do any harm to ground installations — except for the pulse effect, which has severely damaged our communications capabilities. especially on the East Coast.”

“We must get through — Admiral, do you believe the Soviets are attacking us?”

“Sir, I don’t know. Certainly the aliens have attacked our space installations—” Admiral Carrell’s voice broke off suddenly.

“Admiral!”

There was a long silence. “Mr. President, I have reports of ground damage. Hoover Dam has been destroyed by a large explosion.”

“A nuclear weapon?”

“Sir, I don’t know what else it could be. A moment …” There was another silence.

“God damn!” Ted Griffin shouted. “They did it, the crazy Russian bastards did it!”

The Admiral’s voice came on faintly. “One of my advisors says it could have been what he calls a kinetic energy weapon. Not nuclear. It could not have been a Soviet rocket, they couldn’t have reached here in time.” Another pause. “I’m getting more reports. Alaska. Colorado. Mississippi — Mr. President, we are being bombarded. Some of the attacks are coming from space. May I have permission to fight back?”

David Coffey looked at his wife. She shuddered. “Fight who?” the President demanded.

“The aliens,” Admiral Carrell said.

“Not the Soviets?”

“Not yet.”

“Ted?” David Coffey asked.

“Sir?” The Secretary of Defense looked ten years older.

“Is there any way I can authorize Carrell to fight a space battle without giving him the capability to launch against the Soviet Union?”

“No.”

“I see. Jeanne, what do you think?”

“I think you’re the President, David.”

Jenny held her breath.

“You don’t have any choice,” Hap Aylesworth said. “What, you’ll let them attack our country without fighting back?”

“Thank you,” Coffey said quietly. “Admiral, is Colonel Feinstein there?’

“Yes, sir. Colonel—”

Another voice came on. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“Colonel, I authorize you to open the code container and deliver the contents to Admiral Thorwald Carrell. The authentication phrase is ‘pigeons on the grass, alas.’ You will receive confirmation from the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council duty officer. Ted—”

“Yes, sir.” Ted Griffin took the phone, almost dropped it, and read from a card he’d taken from his wallet. Then he turned to Jenny. “Major—”

“Major Crichton here,” Jenny said. “I confirm that I personally have heard the President order the codes released to Admiral Carrell. My authentication code is Tango. X-ray. Alfa. Four. Seven. Niner. Four.” And that’s done. Lord, I never—

“Admiral,” the President said. “You will not launch against the Soviet Union until we have absolute confirmation that they have attacked us. I don’t believe they’re involved in this, and Earth has troubles enough without a nuclear war. Is this understood?”

“Yes, sir. Mr. President, I suggest you come here as quickly as you can. Major Crichton, assist the President, and stay with him as long as you’re needed. I’ll put Colonel Hartley on now.”

Something rang in his head.

Harry Reddington woke, and thrashed, and slapped the top of his alarm clock: the pause, to give him another ten minutes sleep. The ringing went on. The room was pitch dark, and it wasn’t the clock ringing, it was the telephone. Harry picked up the receiver. His voice was musical, sarcastically so. “Hellooo …”

A breathy voice said, “Harry? Go outside and look.”

“Ruby? It’s late, Ruby. I’ve got to get up early tomorrow.”

There was party music in the background, and a woman’s voice raised in laughing protest. Ruby’s voice was bathetically mournful, She must be ripped; at a late party she was bound to be. “Harry, I went outside for a hit. You know Julia and Gwen, they don’t like anyone smoking anything in there. They don’t like tobacco any better than pot—”

“Ruby!”

“I went out and it’s, it’s … It looks so real, Harry! Go out and look at the sky. It’s the end of the world.”

Harry hung up.

He rolled off the Dawsons’ water bed and searched for his clothes.

He’d stayed up too late anyway. It would have been a good night to get drunk with friends, but word of honor on record. He’d come home and had a few drinks as consolation for being alone while interstellar ambassadors made first contact with humanity. The clock said 2:10, and he’d been up past midnight watching the news. There hadn’t been any; whatever the Soviets were learning, they hadn’t been telling. Eventually he went to bed. Now—

His eyes felt gritty. The cane was leaning against the bedstead. He gave up on finding a jacket; he wouldn’t be out long. He unlocked the back door and stumbled out onto the Dawsons’ lawn.

Ruby had been using marijuana, and spreading the word of it like any missionary, since the mid-sixties. She worked as a clerk in the head shop next to the Honda salesroom. What had Harry outside in a coolish California May night was this reflection: a doper might see things that aren’t there, but she might see things that are.

The sky glowed. Harry was an Angeleno; he judged the mistiness of the night by that glow, the glow of the Los Angeles lights reflected from the undersides of clouds. The glow wasn’t bright tonight, and stars showed through.

Something brighter than a star showed through, a dazzling pinpoint that developed a tail and vanished, all in a moment.

A long blue-white flame formed, and held for several seconds, while narrow lines of light speared down from one end. Other lights pulsed slowly, like beating hearts.

The sky was alive with strange lights.

Harry got back inside, fished the tiny Minolta binoculars out of a drawer, found his windbreaker on a chair, and stumbled out, all without turning on a light. He wanted his night vision. The sky seemed brighter now. He could see streaks of light rising from the west, flaring, disappearing. Narrow threads of green lanced west: down. There were phosphorescent puffs of cloud, lazily expanding.

On another night Harry might have taken it for a meteor shower. Tonight … He’d read a hundred versions of the aliens conquering Earth, and they all sounded more spectacular than this flaring and dying of stars and smudges of lights. Any movie would have had sound effects too. But it looked so real.

Still without turning on the lights he fumbled his way back into the house to find a transistor radio. He carried it outside with him and tuned to the all-news station.

“… have fired on the Soviet Kosmograd space station,” the newsman’s voice said. “The President has alerted all military forces. People are asked to stay in their homes. We cannot confirm that the United States Air Force has fired on the alien spacecraft. Pentagon spokesmen aren’t talking. Here is Lieutenant General Arlen Gregory, a retired Air Force officer. General, do you think the United States will fight back?”

“Look at the sky, you silly buzzard,” a gravelly voice said. “What the hell do you think all the lights are?”

Harry watched and thought as a flame curved around the western horizon, flared and died. Then two more. No question what that was. And now what do I do?

Stay and watch the house. Only — Jesus. Congressman Wes was in Kosmograd! And Carlotta Dawson would be in western Kansas by now, present situation unknown. If she’d taken the gun … if she’d been the type to take the .45. But she wasn’t.

The radio began the peculiar beep beep of an incoming news bulletin.

“We have an unconfirmed report that San Diego harbor has suffered a large explosion,” the announcer said. He sounded like a man who’d like to be hysterical but who’d used up all his emotions.

Maybe I should go help Carlotta. Wes would want me to. Jesus, how?

The Kawasaki was in pieces. There hadn’t been nearly enough money for everything that should have been done to it, and Harry hadn’t wanted to push. He’d done most of the work himself, as much as he could. But only the Honda shop could rebuild the engine: He’d finished taking the bike apart and carried the engine in, and as far as he knew it was ready. It had better be.

There must be others watching tonight. They’d sure as hell know by morning.

Harry watched and thought and made his plans. (That long blue flame had formed again, and this time it didn’t seem to be dying. Stars rising from the west seemed to be reaching for it until threads of green light touched them; then they flared and vanished. The blue flame crept east, accelerating. The binoculars showed something at the tip. Harry’s eyes watered trying to make out details.)

Then he went inside and washed his face.

Carlotta didn’t like him. And so what? Harry opened Dawson’s liquor cabinet and opened a bottle of Carlos Primera brandy. Sixty bucks a bottle; but it was all that was left. He poured a good splash, looked at it, thought of pouring some back, and drank half.

Carlotta doesn’t like me. The country’s at war with aliens. Wes asked me to look after things. Nothing I can do here, and if I stay here long I’ll be here, and for good.

He went to the telephone and dialed the Kansas number Carlotta had left. It rang a long time. Then a voice, not sleepy. Male. “Mrs. Carlotta Dawson. Please,” Harry said. He could sound official when he wanted to.

It took a moment. “Yes?”

“Harry Reddington, Mrs. Dawson. Is there anything you want me to do?”

“Harry — Harry, they don’t know what happened up there.”

“Yes, ma’am. Can I help you?”

“I don’t know.”

Carlotta Dawson’s voice dissolved in hisses. Another voice came on the line. “Is this an official telephone call?” it asked through the static. Then the line went dead.

Harry emptied his glass. Now what? She didn’t say. And if I stay in Los Angeles tomorrow, I’ll be in Los Angeles forever …

He drank half an inch more brandy and closed the bottle. Firmly.

When he left he was in clean shirt and a sports jacket that was years old but had almost never been worn. He carried ID and a sleeping bag and Congressman Dawson’s letter. At 3:30 A.M. he was on the front steps of the Security Pacific National Bank, spreading his sleeping bag.

Pavel Bondarev stared at the blank screen. All around him officers and aides at the command and communications consoles began to speak at once, and the babble brought him to life. “Colonel, I wish this chatter to cease.”

“Da, Comrade Director.” Colonel Suvorov was efficient if unimaginative. He shouted, and the cacophony of voices died away.

The aliens had fired on Kosmograd. He had seen that much before all communications were lost. The aliens had fired without warning, without provocation.

An amber light blinked insistently. Pavel lifted the scrambler telephone. “Da, Comrade Chairman.”

There was only a soft hiss, then a sudden rush of static. The officers at the command consoles burst into chatter again.

“What has happened?” Bondarev demanded.

“A high-altitude nuclear explosion. Perhaps more than one. The pulse effect has crippled our telephones,” Suvorov reported.

“I see.” And without communications — Bondarev felt rising panic. The scrambler phone was dead. “Get me Marshal Shavyrin.”

“There is no answer,” Suvorov said.

“It is vital. Use another means. Use any means,” Bondarev ordered. He fought to keep his voice calm. The scrambler telephone remains silent. Is the Chairman in communication with anyone else? Perhaps not. Perhaps we are safe.

“I have Shavyrin,” Colonel Suvorov said.

“Thank you.” Pavel put on the headset. “Comrade Marshal—”

“Da, Comrade Director?”

“Have you launched any missiles?”

“No, Comrade Director. I have received no instructions from the Defense Council.”

Bondarev discovered that he had been partially holding his breath. Now he let it out slowly. “You understand that the aliens have fired on Kosmograd?”

“Comrade Director, I know someone has. Two of my generals believe this a Western trick—”

“Nonsense, Comrade Marshal. You have seen that ship. Neither we nor the United States nor both nations working together could have built that ship.”

There was a long pause. Pavel heard someone speaking to the Marshal, but he could not make out the words. “Marshal,” Bondarev insisted, “that ship was not built on this Earth, and we know the United States cannot have sufficient space facilities. If they did, they would long ago have defeated us.”

There was another long pause. Then Shavyrin said. “Perhaps you are correct. Certainly that is true. What must we do now?”

I wish I knew. “Immediately before the aliens destroyed Kosmograd, they launched many smaller ships. I say smaller, although they were each larger than Kosmograd. Have you had success in tracking any of those?”

“Only partially. Even with our largest radars it is difficult to see through the electronic storms in the upper atmosphere. The aliens have set off many weapons there.”

“I know—”

“Also, they have fired laser beams at three of our large radars,” Marshal Shavyrin said.

“Laser beams?”

“Da. The most powerful we have ever seen.”

“Damage?”

“The Abalakovo radar is destroyed. The Sary Shagan and Lyaki radars are damaged but survive. We have not activated the large radar near Moscow for fear that it will draw their fire.”

“I see.” Intelligent of him. “We will need information, but not at that cost. Now tell me what you know of their smaller ships.”

“My information is not complete. We have lost communications with many of our radars.”

“Da, but tell me what you have learned.”

“The ships have scattered. Most are in polar orbits.”

“Track them. If they come within range of the ion beam weapons, fire at them. Be prepared to fire SS-20 missiles under ground detonation control. Meanwhile, attack the main alien ship with the entire force of SS-18 missiles based in Kamensk.”

“Comrade Director, I require authorization from the Chairman before I can do any of this.”

“Comrade Marshal, the Chairman has directed me to conduct this battle. We have no communication with Moscow. You must launch your forces against the aliens, particularly their large mother ship. We must cripple it before it destroys us on the ground.”

“Comrade Director, that is not possible—”

“Comrade Marshal, it must be made possible—”

“If we attack the alien ship, we will destroy Kosmograd as well. And all survivors.”

A strange sentiment for the commander of strategic rocket forces. “Kosmograd is already destroyed. The survivors cannot be important now.”

“Comrade Director,” Colonel Suvorov shouted. “I have the Chairman.”

“Marshal, the Chairman is calling me. Please stand by.” Bondarev took the other phone.

There was no mistaking the thick voice. “Bondarev, what must we do?”

“Destroy the alien ship. I would prefer not to, but there is no choice.”

“Have the aliens attacked the United States?”

“Comrade Chairman, I do not know.”

“They have attacked us,” Chairman Petrovskiy said. “Can we defeat the aliens? Can we destroy their ship?”

“I do not know. We certainly cannot capture it. We can try to destroy it.”

“Da. Try, then. Meanwhile, we will do what we can. There are reports of severe damage in the harbors. The rail center west of Moscow is in ruins. So is Brest Litovsk.”

“But …” Bondarev spoke in horror. “The Germans—”

“Da. The Germans may rise in revolt. The Poles as well.” The Chairman’s voice rose. “All the Warsaw Pact nations may rise against us. Our harbors are destroyed, harbors and rail centers. We face a new civil war. If the United States remains undamaged—”

“Comrade Chairman, I do not know that they are undamaged. I do know that we must destroy that ship. You must order Marshal Shavyrin to accept my orders to launch missiles at the alien.”

There was a long pause. “We must retain enough missiles to prevent the United States from attacking us now that we are weakened,” Petrovskiy said.

“Da. I will do that,” Bondarev said. “But if we do not act quickly, we cannot act at all.” I have never spoken this way to the great ones, not even to my father-in-law. But I must — “Comrade Chairman, there is no time to lose.”

There was another long pause. Then “Da. I will give the orders. But — have a care, Pavel Aleksandrovich. Have a care.”

11. LIGHTS IN THE SKY

The air was foul and growing fouler; it was like being trapped inside a whale’s lungs. Giorge, gasping and coughing and fighting the soft walls, had finally fainted. The beach ball’s oxygen supply wasn’t designed for two occupants.

It was a hell of a situation in which to try to relax, but Wes tried: he held his breathing slow and steady (punctuated with coughing); he let his eyelids droop (though he had to watch that great armored city in the sky coming toward him!) Half curled toward fetal position, he consciously relaxed his muscles in pairs, as if he were fighting a night of insomnia.

All this, while traveling like a tethered balloon behind their massive inhuman captors.

Naked in the glare of the stars, helpless as a babe, Wes fell toward an alien artifact bigger than the World Trade Center. He saw detail as he neared the thing: a pod on a jointed arm, rectangles of blackness, a jet of blue flame from a cluster of cones. But the air was like soup. His nose was clogged with drying blood. Hold the breathing down, stay awake, there are things you have to see … no use. His chest heaved, a coughing fit wracked his body, and everything went out of focus.

Arvid Rogachev was finding a great deal to awe him, and not much to surprise him. A ship the size of a city: of course, if they hoped to conquer a planet! The aliens: very alien. The attack: why not? Whatever they expected from contact with humankind, it was their safest approach.

Which was not to say that he wasn’t angry.

How would they treat prisoners? Human precedent showed a wide spectrum … but wouldn’t they want to inspect the natives more closely? These attackers hadn’t had time to build up a hatred for the enemy, not yet. What they found alive, they would keep alive … unless they were xenophobic beyond sanity, or found the human shape intrinsically disgusting …

Still, a corpse dead of explosive decompression was not the ideal subject for dissection. Might they prefer a healthy Soviet executive?

Arvid shrugged off that line of thought. Who still lived? Dawson, of course, and Giorge. Nikolai too had reached a survival bubble. Aliana? The other American, Greeley?

A dozen of the beasts had followed the first, the scout, through the ripped wall, paused briefly to inspect the humans, then gone off into other parts of the wrecked station. The four who remained had enlarged the rip with a series of explosive gun blasts. Now the survival bubbles were being towed toward what seemed an infinite metal wall.

He wished for a better look at the aft end, the drive; but they were approaching from the side. Dark holes showed along the flank, with doors snugged against the hull. Airlocks, or missile ports? Those oval windows: for passengers, or lasers? A sudden narrow string of twinkling points against the black sky: random dust motes reflecting a laser beam? Sure enough, a new star blazed far away, then winked off. Far below, lights flashed against Earth’s night sky. Something blossomed impossibly bright, and Arvid turned his head away.

A nuclear weapon. Whose? And how close was it? He fought real panic. How long do I have to live? Almost he laughed. It had been a long way away, near the Earth’s surface, ten thousand kilometers and more. I have looked upon the cocatrice and survived …

Other lights flared far down toward Earth. Light beams stabbed downward through space flecked with dust and debris. Bondarev is attacking the alien ship. Perhaps the United States as well. He had never felt more helpless.

They were close enough to the ship for him to see details. Grooves ran along the spacecraft’s flank, like railroad tracks, but much farther apart. Smaller craft could have been anchored there … smaller, but still big, perhaps as big as a pocket battleship. The entire hull might function like an aircraft carrier’s deck. Or—

Arvid felt hampered here. This kind of guesswork was no task for an executive, nor a soldier either. He needed a combination of mechanic and strategist: a mechanic with imagination. Had Nikolai survived, or Mitya?

The ship had become a cubistic landscape.

… Rectangular pock, too small to be an airlock … No. It was larger than he’d thought. Alien-sized, he saw, as one of his captors moved up against it. A cavity the size of an alien in a pressure suit. Alien 1 disappeared within. The door closed.

The door opened. Alien 2 pushed Arvid’s survival bubble into the airlock. It brushed the sides, but it fit. The outer door closed, the survival bubble sagged, Arvid’s abused ears popped. An inner door opened. Alien 1 pulled the survival bubble out into a corridor … a wide rectangular corridor, curved, painted in three tones of green camouflage style, with carpet along two walls. Arvid was disoriented. Would they spin the ship for gravity? Certainly he was still in free-fall …

The doors he saw were all closed.

Then an open door, and it was thick, massive … as one would expect aboard a warship.

The alien paused. Arvid saw that he was boxed between the two aliens.

They acted in concert. A long-handled bayonet sliced through the side of the survival bubble, a forked tentacle reached in and closed around him. Arvid couldn’t help himself: he screamed and slammed a fist against the alien’s faceplate. Only his fist was hurt. The tentacle birthed him from the collapsed bubble and hurled him into the room. Did they breathe poison? He was breathing it already!

He hit the far wall without the jolt he’d expected. It was padded. The room was big, and padded over walls and floor and ceiling. The air … the air was damp, with a smell both earthy and strange. It didn’t smell like it would kill him.

A large, conspicuous glass-faced tube poked through the padding in one corner of the room. A camera.

The aliens followed him in. Arvid tried to relax as they came toward him. One still clutched the bayonet in its tentacle. Dissection? He wouldn’t scream again.

But it was difficult not to fight. One alien held him — it felt like pythons were squeezing him to death — while the other used the bayonet to slice through his clothing: down the back and along his arms and legs. They stripped him naked and collected the ruined clothing and backed out, carefully, as if he might still be dangerous.

He was alone.

His fear edged over into black rage.

Dangerous? When you can see me as dangerous, then I am harmless. This hour or this day, this year or next year, you will lower your guard. By then I will know more.

Wes had missed it all. His oxygen-starved mind had been fading in and out, catching fragmentary glimpses of alien wonders while his lungs strained at the dirty air … as if he were trapped in a burning theater that was showing Star Wars. Half-felt forces pulled him through some kind of strangling barrier into air he could breathe. His lungs clawed at air that was damp and cool, sweet life-giving air, while something sharp ran down his torso and arms and legs, and decidedly queer hands peeled him like an orange.

He was naked. Falling. Spots danced before his eyes.

Where are the others? Is this all of us?

There were other bodies, all naked. Rogachev: white skin covered with black hair, and bright eyes watching him. Giorge: black skin, almost hairless, dull eyes that saw nothing. Another fell past him and bounced against the rubbery wall. Pale skin, joltingly inhuman shape … stumps for legs … Nikolai. There were scars on Nikolai’s belly. Oh, boy, that had been some accident!

Arvid Rogachev and Nikolai talked in Russian. They sounded indecently calm.

Four. Where were the others?

Giorge was curled loosely in a ball. His mouth was slightly open. Wes took his shoulder and turned him to bring them face to face. Giorge’s eyes were open, but they weren’t looking at anything. “Giorge? It’s all right now. All right for the moment. We’re not in any danger just now. Can you hear me, Giorge?”

Giorge said a word in his own language. Wes couldn’t get him to say any more.

He’s nearly catatonic. Wes could understand the temptation. It would be easy to curl into a fetal position and close his eyes. Easy but not sensible.

They attacked. Without warning, without talking. Oh, God, Carlotta saw it all! She must think I’m dead. Or have they told Earth they have prisoners?

The door opened again. Dmitri Grushin flew among them, cursing vigorously in a high, hysterical voice. Rogachev snapped orders: they had to be orders. Grushin blinked and quieted, and Rogachev’s voice went from authoritative to fatherly. Dmitri nodded.

Now there were five. Seven missing, Including both women.

Arvid Rogachev turned and spoke in English. “You are well, Congressman?”

Wes tested his throat. “I’d want a doctor’s opinion. I’m alive, but I hurt all over. Bends, probably. How are you?”

“The same. Wes, we have seen men exposed to vacuum before. We will live. You’ll see ruptured veins on your face and body—”

“Shit, there goes my career.”

Arvid laughed. “President Reagan used makeup. So did Nixon.”

“You’re such a comfort. Arvid, what’s going on? I would have — I did bet my life that conquering another planet across interstellar space just isn’t cost-effective. War of the Worlds. Does it look like that to you?”

“I like the phrase your computer programmers use. Insufficient data.”

“Is this all of us?”

“I do not know. Dmitri tells me that Captain Greeley is dead. He saw it, after the aliens had him in tow. An alien moved into Captain Greeley’s chambers, in vacuum, mind you. The door was a bit small for the alien, and while it was in the doorway Captain Greeley fired a handgun into the alien, then continued firing through the wall. He must have been firing through his survival bubble. The aliens raked the chamber with explosive bullets.”

Wes couldn’t decide how he felt about that. Too many shocks … “Sounds like John.”

There was a sound, almost subsonic, as if a tremendous gong had been struck. Wes saw a wall come at him: he was falling! He struck. They were all piled against the damp padding … and then the thrust eased off and left them floating.

“So. We still have some defenses,” Arvid said.

“Zapsats?”

“Ground-based beam weapons, I would think. The aliens will know all about it before we do. At least it tells us we can still fight.”

“I wish we had a window,” Wes said.

I wish we had a suitcase fission bomb, Arvid thought. Do I? It would end my life too. That will come soon enough. Patience.

The B-1B flew just above the treetops at near sonic speed. For a while Jenny looked out the tiny crew windows, but there was little to see: just shapes flashing past, an occasional light. Most of the United States was dark.

There was a bright flash off to starboard. Jenny shuddered.

“What?” Jack asked. He touched her hand, then moved his away. She reached for him and brought his hand back and held it in both of hers.

“Another dam,” she said.

She listened as the artificially calm voice from Colorado Springs spoke into her earphones. “Spring Lake Dam, near Peoria, Illinois,” it said. “They’ve hit most of the dams from there north and west. Floodwaters are rising all along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. We’re ordering evacuation, but it won’t be in time.”

“Isn’t there anything else?” The President’s voice interrupted the Air Force talker. “Get the National Guard out with helicopters—”

“Sir, we’re trying, but we have almost no communications. Most of the reports I’m giving you come from direct observation by Air National Guard pilots flying wherever they see a flash.”

We could lose a lot of pilots that way.

“Is there anything more on the Russians?” Jack asked.

“No. Just a lot of damage reports,” Jenny answered.

“Then we don’t even know if we’re at war?”

Jenny gave a short laugh. “We’re at war all right. We just don’t know who with—”

“Could the aliens be allied with the Russians?”

“Don’t know. I don’t think so,” Jenny said. “I’m sure we’d have heard if they were in communication. We’d have heard something. I think—”

“Yeah.” He leaned back in the bombardier’s seat and closed his eyes. In seconds he was asleep.

Jenny shook her head in admiration. Nothing for Jack Clybourne to do, so he rests up for the next assignment. I wish the President would do that. There’s not enough information for him to make any decisions, not here.

I wish I could do it.

The reports continued. Missiles launched against the smaller alien ships. The large alien ship remained invisible behind a screen of noise, charged particles, and chaff. No confirmation of any Soviet missile landing in the United States, and no confirmation of any cities destroyed.

Jenny leaned back in the electronic warfare officer’s seat and tried to close her eyes, but the temptation to look out the window was too much. The thick leaded glass would shield her eyes from anything that wouldn’t kill her …

The bomber flew on toward Colorado Springs.

The steps of the bank were cold and damp. Harry settled as near the door as he could reach, and turned on the transistor radio.

“Power failures throughout Southern California,” the announcer was saying. He sounded nearly hysterical. “We have reports thai something hit Hoover Dam. Laser beams, for God’s sake!”

The long blue flame sank into the east. Harry settled against the bank door. He thought of what else he could do. Steal a car. Steal a motorcycle. Break into the shop and steal his own motorcycle: Any of that might work, but it might not.

I’m not as quick as I used to be.

He tried to think of someone who’d help him, but anyone who’d believe him either wouldn’t be any use, or would already be doing something. After a while he closed his eyes and slept a little.

He woke again when someone moved in beside him: a small, pudgy man who puffed from his climb up the steps. He settled on the step below Harry. “Mind?”

“No,” Harry said. “Did you see the sky? Or the news?”

“Both. The TV’s gone off, though. One of the radio people keeps saying it’s all a big mistake, but I can’t get through to New York.”

Sure can’t. Or to Dighton, Kansas. Harry nodded, The pudgy man was shivering. Harry thought he should have worn more.

“I keep remembering The War of the Worlds. What are they, what do they want? They could be … anything.”

“Not my department,” Harry said, and he closed his eyes. As he drifted off, he felt grateful for his brief military stint. He had learned to sleep anytime.

And if everything went just right, it was going to be one miserable day.

— =

He kept waking to watch the sky. “There,” the pudgy man said. He pointed south. “Like — what did they call it? The high-altitude atom bomb test. Back in the fifties.”

“Wouldn’t remember,” Harry said. He frowned. Something came back to him. They’d blown off a nuclear weapon in the stratosphere, and mucked up the ionosphere and communications all over the world, and it had taken months for things to get right again. And that was one bomb.

There was nothing but static on the radio. Harry tuned across the band. Sometimes he heard stations but he couldn’t really make out words. He shrugged and kept tuning.

There were a lot of faintly phosphorescent smudges, north, south, and west. East was getting pink, and he couldn’t tell if explosions were there, too.

War of the Worlds? In that movie, the aliens had landed. His random sweep picked up a news station. He listened, but there wasn’t much news. Official announcements, everyone to remain calm and stay home. Hysterical announcers with unconfirmed reports of anything you liked. Orphanage burned in Los Gatos . Dams broken. Trains derailed. Europe laid waste. But no one had been hurt in Los Angeles , and as far as Harry could tell, the announcer didn’t know about anybody who’d been hurt. Just lots of rumors.

When the sky turned light a dozen were in line. Only two had thought to bring sleeping bags. One weathered-looking man brought an entire backpack, with sleeping bag, self-inflating mat, a blowup pillow, a tiny stove. He got himself settled, then made coffee and sent it up and down the line in a Sierra cup. He seemed to be having a wonderful time. So were the two Boy Scouts with him.

They talked in low voices. A thin woman’s voice kept rising into hysteria, then chopping off. Harry dozed.

The voices changed. Harry rolled over and was looking up at two blue police uniforms. He exposed his hands, then carefully reached into his sports jacket and opened his wallet. “Harry Reddington. I’m here to make a withdrawal.” He didn’t bother to smile.

“Sir, why are you here?”

Harry suppressed an urge to point to the sky and giggle. “I told you, I’m here to make a withdrawal.”

“The Federal Emergency Management Agency has issued orders for all citizens to stay home,” the older policeman said.

“Sure,” Harry said. “We always do everything Washington says, don’t we?” This time he couldn’t help the grin. “How’d they learn to deal with this situation? Experience?”

“Sir—”

The younger officer interrupted his companion. They whispered for a moment. Harry used the opportunity to take out his Baggie-wrapped letter. He held it out.

“If you’ll shine your light here,” Harry said.

The older policeman moved closer. His light showed the Capitol stationery clearly.

“… Mr. Harry Reddington, whom I have authorized to stay in my house and guard my possessions and interests …”

If they had read further they’d have come to the weasel words, but they didn’t, and Harry swallowed his sigh of relief.

“Yes, sir?” the officer said. This time the “sir” sounded a great deal more sincere.

Some of the crowd behind them was muttering. “Fucking pigs,” someone said, not too loud. The voice sounded cultured, and not at all what you’d expect someone saying that to sound like.

Harry was tempted to take advantage of that. Instead, he spoke in a low voice. “I’ll be glad to hold a place for you,” he said. “Or one of your family.”

The younger policeman thought that through, then nodded. “Her name is Rosabell. She’ll he here in an hour.”

Interstate 40 had been completely dark for an hour. One moment she had been trying to read an illuminated sign; the next moment there was no light except her headlights. The radio had gone dead at the same instant, and now she could only get static.

High mountains loomed to either side, as the car steadily climbed into the Chuska mountains of western New Mexico .

The gas gauge read less than a quarter full.

“Mom, I’m hungry.” Melissa said from the back seat.

“There’s bread and cheese,” Jeri said.

“Not any more.”

“Good God, that was supposed to last a while. You mean there’s none left at all?”

“Aw, there wasn’t very — what was that?”

Overhead the sky blazed in green and blue, then a long red streak that went all across the sky and downward to earth. “I don’t know,” Jeri said. She shuddered. Aliens. They were out there all the time, waiting, fifteen years, and now they’ve attacked us.

“We’re gonna need gas.”

“I know. Albuquerque is ahead. We can get gasoline there.”

“I don’t know, Mom,” Melissa said.

“Huh?”

“Space war, aliens — you sure we want to go into a city? Lots of people running away, I bet. Traffic jams—”

“You could be right.”

Her headlights picked up a reflective sign.

“Gas food ahead,” Melissa said. “We could use some. Eat and run the car on the gas—”

“Very funny.” Jeri watched for the off-ramp. There it was. Everything was dark over there, but she took the ramp anyway. If a town was nearby, it was invisible.

“There’s the station,” Melissa said. “Somebody’s in it.”

“You’re right.” Jeri pulled into the station.

“Yes, ma’am?” a voice said from nowhere. The station attendant switched on his flashlight. He was a young man, certainly not more than twenty, and dark. Jeri thought he looked Indian.

This is the right part of the country for it. “Uh — I need some gasoline. Badly.”

“The power’s off,” the attendant said. “Can’t get the pumps to work.”

“Oh. But I have a long way to go, and I really need some gasoline. Isn’t there anything you can do?”

He looked thoughtful. “I have a hand pump. I suppose I could pump some out into a can. It’d be a lot of work—”

“Oh, please,” Jeri said. “I’d be glad to pay you.”

“Not sure money’s worth much now. Did you hear the news?”

“Yes—” If you don’t want money, what do you want?

“Guess it’ll he all right, though.” He went inside the station. The flashlight flickered through the windows.

He seems nice enough. So why am! scared? Is civilization that fragile?

Part of her kept saying Yes!

The eastern windows blazed. The television hissed and sprayed random light. The radio spoke of an explosion on Interstate 5 between Everett and Marysville.

Close. Isadore rolled to his feet and turned the TV off. The radio announcer sounded hysterical. That’s got to be the long causeway, Isadore thought. We got over it just in time …

All of the kids were asleep. Vicki Tate-Evans had staggered away an hour ago. Her husband George was snoring on the couch with Clara’s feet in his lap. They got along fine as long as they were both asleep.

Isadore felt punchy, twitchy, as if he should be doing something. War in the sky … Just in time! Clara was right, push on, don’t stop, something might happen. If we’d waited any longer for Jeri, it would have been too late.

And where is she? On the road somewhere, and nothing I can do about it.

We were near enough dead getting in last night. He remembered the bright flashes on the highway behind them. Maybe that was the causeway. We hadn’t got to Sedro Wooley, so if we’d been an hour later — That’s cutting things close …

They’d come in ready to collapse, to find the television set running and a dead silence in the crowd that faced the set. When the TV went blank they’d all trooped outside to watch the war in the sky.

He said, as he’d said before, “Son of a bitch.”

“Yeah,” Shakes said. He came in from the kitchen carrying a cup of coffee. “You were right.” He looked like he would never sleep again.

“We were right.” Isadore laughed, and didn’t like the high pitch of it. “Seventeen years we were right before it looked even sensible. We should be putting the shutters over the windows. We should have bricked up the windows! Is anybody feeling ambitious?”

Nobody stood up and went out to fix the metal screens in place. Shakes said, “I never thought it was real.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“My whole damn family gets to use this place for only about thirty percent of what it would cost us. That’s a damn good deal for a vacation spot. I don’t even mind admitting it now. We haven’t slacked off. This place is built to keep all of us alive, and me and my family did most of it. You haven’t even seen the shelter, Izzie.”

Clara suddenly sat upright. “Food. How are the food supplies?”

“The food supplies are fine,” Shakes said in some irritation.

“Good. I could eat your arm off. I’m going to make breakfast,” Clara said, and she stood, staggering a little, and made her way into the kitchen, veering around Jack and Harriet McCauley, who were asleep on the rug.

By eight-thirty the line ran around the corner. The original police had gone, but two other pairs had come, and one team of two had stayed.

Rosabell Hruska had come at eight. She was a slender, frightened woman in her twenties. She carried a baby girl, and she didn’t talk to anyone except one of the visiting police.

At ten Harry watched an old man in a guard’s uniform open the doors. The line behind him rustled impatiently, but he waited. When the doors opened, Harry held it for Rosabell. Two more elbowed past him before he could let go and get to a cashier.

The cashier looked nervous.

At least there is a cashier, Harry thought. He’d been worried. Would they all stay home? There were twelve windows, but only four had cashiers.

“I want to make a withdrawal,” said Harry.

“We’re restricting withdrawals to five hundred dollars.” The cashier was an older woman, probably long since graduated from sitting in a cage and talking to customers, now filling in. She looked defiant and afraid at the same time.

The eastern banks had been open for three hours. Harry wondered, not whether there was a rush on the banks, but how bad it was.

Two windows down, Rosabell was shouting at the younger cashier she’d chosen. “It’s our money!” she screamed.

Too bad, Harry thought. But it was no skin off Harry’s nose. He had only fifty-eight dollars in his account. He asked for it all in coins, got two twenty-dollar rolls of quarters and eighteen ones. Then he moved to the deposit boxes. His contained one Mexican gold peso and thirty silver dimes. He’d been able to keep them because of the symbolic number; if he’d spent one, he’d have spent them all.

Once there had been a lot more. He took his money and left the bank. Tap city, he thought. Tap city on my total resources.

The radio spoke of the need for calm.

12. MESSAGE BEARER

The Herdmaster’s family occupied two chambers near the center of Message Bearer. Space was at a premium. The sleeproom was not large, though it housed two adults and three children. It was roomier now; the Herdmaster’s eldest male child was aboard one of the digit ships that would presently assault the target world.

The mudroom, smaller yet, gave privacy. Some discussions the children might be permitted to hear, but not this one.

Herdmaster Pastempeh-keph lay on his side in the mud. He was far too relaxed for his mate’s aplomb. “It’s a thoroughly interesting situation,” he said.

K’turfookeph blared a trumpet blast of rage. A moment later her voice was quietly intense. “If your guards heard that they’ll think we’ve lost our reason … as your Advisor has. Keph, you must dissociate yourself from him!”

“I can’t. That is one of the interesting aspects. The sleepers expected to wake as masters of the ship. They are as docile as one could hope, and no more. Fathisteh-tulk was their Herdmaster. They will not permit me to remove him completely from power, not even if they know him to be insane. They would lose too much status.”

K’turfookeph sprayed warm water along her mate’s back. He stirred in pleasure, and high waves marched toward the high rim of the tub. Gravity was inconveniently low, so near the ship’s center. But any force from outside would destroy the ship before it penetrated so far.

She asked, “Then what can be done?”

“Little. I must listen to him. I am not required to obey his suggestions.” The Herdmaster pondered. The War for Winterhome was finally under way, and his relaxation time was all too rare. He resented his mate’s encroachment on that time. “Turn your mind around, Mother of my Immortality—”

“Don’t play word games with me! It’s half a year until mating season, and we don’t need soothing phrases between us, not at our age.”

He sprayed her, scalp to tail, making a thorough job of it, before he spoke again. “Your digits grasp the handle of our problem. The mating cycles for sleeper and spaceborn are out of phase. It makes all controversy worse. The seasons on Winterhome will be out of phase for both … Never mind. Turn your mind far enough to see the humor. The sleepers never considered any path but to conquer a new world. We spaceborn have spent seventy years in space. We feel in our natal-memories that we can survive without a planet. We know nothing of worlds. The dissidents want to abandon Winterhome entirely.”

“They should be suppressed.”

“That can’t be done, Keph,” he said, using the part of their name they shared in common — as no other would. “It would split the spaceborn. The dissidents may be one in four of us by now — and Fathisteh-tulk is a dissident.”

“Chowpeentulk should control him better! She’s pregnant; it ought to mean something to him—”

“Some females have not the skill sufficient to control their mates.”

Irony? Had she offended him? She sprayed him; he seemed pleased rather than mollified. A male as powerful as the Herdmaster didn’t need to assert himself over his mate … She said, “The situation cannot continue.”

“No. I fear for Fathisteh-tulk, and I don’t like his clear successor. Can you speak to Chowpeentulk? Will she control him?”

She shifted uncomfortably, and muddy water surged. “I have no idea.” A sleeper was not in her class; they didn’t associate.

Tones sounded. The Herdmaster stretched and went to dry himself. It was time to return to duty.

The target world already bore a name in the Predecessor language.

The species had been nomads once. The Traveler Herd had become nomads again. But when mating season came, even a nomad herd must settle in one place until the children had been born.

Winterhome.

Winterhome was fighting back. Its rulers were no longer an unknown. Despite damage and loss of lives, Pastempeh-keph was relieved.

During the long years of flight from the ringed planet, the prey had not acted. The Herdmaster and his Advisor debated it: had they been seen? Electromagnetic signals of the domestic variety leaked through Winterhome’s atmosphere and were monitored. Most of it was gibberish. Some was confusing, with pictures of enormous spacecraft of unrealistic design. What remained held no word of a real starship drawing near.

Then, suddenly, beams were falling directly on Thuktun Flishithy. Messages, demands for answers, words promising peace before there had been war: first a few, then more, then an incessant babble.

What was there to talk of? How could they expect to negotiate before their capabilities had been tested? But the prey had sent no missiles, no ships of war. Only messages.

The Breakers wondered if the prey might not know how to make war. This violated all the Herdmaster knew of evolution. Yet even when the attack began, the prey did little. The orbiting satellites didn’t defend themselves. Half of them were gone in the first hour. Warriors braced to fight and die veered between relief and disappointment.

But the natives did have weapons. Not many, used late, but … a long scar, melted and refrozen, lay along Message Bearer’s flank, crossing one wing of a big troop-carrying lander. Digit ship Forty-one might still operate in space, but it would never see atmosphere. Four more digit ships had been destroyed in space.

Missiles still rose from the planet’s surface, and missiles and beam weapons still fired from space. A few satellites remained in orbit. Message Bearer surged under the impact of a plasma jet, and trembled as a missile launched away toward the jet’s origin.

Oh, yes, the great ship had suffered minor damage. But this was good, in its way. The warriors would know, at least, that there was an enemy … and now they knew something about the alien weapons, and something about their own fighting ability. And the Herdmaster had learned that he could count on the sleepers.

He’d wondered. Would they fight, these ancient ones? But in fact they were doing well. Ancient they might be, considered from their birthdates; but frozen sleep was hard on the aged. The survivors had been eight to sixteen years past sexual maturity. They had run the ship for four years before their bodies had been frozen; they knew its rooms and corridors and storage holds as well as those who had been born aboard.

“Permission to report,” said Attackmaster Koothfektil-rusp.

“Go ahead.”

“I think we’ve cleared everything from orbit, Herdmaster. There could be something around the other side of Winterhome, moving in our own orbit. We’ll have to watch for that. We find four missiles rising from Land Mass Three. Shall I send them some bombs?”

“No. Wasteful. We’ve done enough here. Defensemaster, take us out of here, out of their range.” Most of the native weapons would barely reach orbit — as if they were designed to attack other parts of the planet. Knowing the launch site was enough. It could be destroyed just before the troops went down to test the prey’s abilities.

The digit ships could trample lesser centers before they descended: destroy dams, roads, anything that looked like communication or power sources. He hoped it would go well. His son Fookerteh’s eight-cubed of warriors would be in the first assault. K’turfookeph was much concerned about him, though pride would never allow her to admit it …

“Follow the plan, Defensemaster. Take us behind that great gaudy satellite on a freely falling curve. Hide us. Attackmaster, I want every prey’s eyes on that moon stomped blind before we begin the second phase of our acceleration.”

The Herdmaster waited for acknowledgments, then ordered, “Get me Breaker-Two.”

Breaker-Two had been a profession without an object until now. Takpusseh had been chosen young. He was only entering middle age, if one excluded the decades he had spent in frozen sleep, and the years worth of damage that had done. He had been trained to deal with aliens since before the starship ever left home; yet his training was almost entirely theoretical.

Almost. There had been another intelligent race on Takpusseh’s homeworld. The Predecessors had died out before Takpusseh’s race developed gripping appendages and large brains. They were the domain of Fistarteh-thuktun the historian-priest, not of Takpusseh.

Fistarteh-thuktun was a sleeper. Since the Awakening he had become more stiff and formal, more withdrawn, than ever. His spaceborn apprentices spoke only to him. His knowledge of the thuktunthp would be valuable here. Perhaps Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz — with the authority of a spaceborn, and a tact that was all his own — could draw him out …

The sleepers knew, in their hindbrains and spines and in their very cells, how to live on planets, what planets were like. The spaceborn could only guess. And yet — more was at stake than this artificial division of the Traveler Herd. The sleepers would die, one by one, eventually, and the Traveler herd would be one fithp again. The fithp needed what Fistarteh-thuktun knew: the stored knowledge of that older, now alien species.

Before they received the first pictures broadcast by the prey. the question had been debated endlessly. Would Winterhome’s natives resemble the Predecessors? Or the fithp?

They did not.

Breaker-Two watched the surviving locals through a one-way transparency, while his assistant and a pair of soldiers worked with the alien artifacts. “They look so fragile,” he said.

The ship shuddered.

“They’ve hit us again,” one of the soldiers said. “Fragile they may be, but they’re fighting back.”

“They do fight. Some were dead and some surrendered. Their plight was hopeless,” said the Octuple Leader. “Yet one fired a weapon through its life support system! It killed itself to kill two of my warriors!”

“Your explanation?”

“Do you forget your place?”

“Your pardon. Shall I request that your superiors ask you? Shall I call the Herdmaster and request that he tell you to answer my questions? Wish you to continue this?”

“I don’t know! It killed itself to kill two warriors! Surrender would have been easy. I — I have no explanation, Breaker. This is your own task.”

“Have you a theory, Octuple Leader?”

“Mad with battle lust … or sick? Dying? It happens.” His digits knotted and relaxed, knotted, relaxed. “I should be fighting.”

It happens. Fumf! The spaceborn know only what they have read, and studied, yet they — These thoughts were useless. “If you’re needed, you’ll be summoned,” Breaker-Two Takpusseh told him. “I need you now. You were aboard the ruined space habitat. I will have questions.”

“Ask, Breaker.”

Takpusseh hadn’t yet learned enough to ask intelligent questions. “What did we take, Octuple Leader … Pretheeteh?”

“Pretheeteh-damb … sir. We took out quite a lot of stuff; there wasn’t room for it all in here.”

Alien voices from the restraint room formed a muted background. Takpusseh half listened while he meandered through the loot Pretheeteh-damb’s troops had moored to walls. For fifteen years he had studied the alien speech that crossed on radio waves between Winterhome and the ringed giant. Sometimes there had been pictures. Strange pictures, of a herd that could not exist. Boxes that danced with legs. Bipeds that changed shape and form. Streams of very similar paintings arriving within tiny fractions of a second. Contrasts; cities with tall buildings and machines, cities of mud huts and straw roofs.

Reception was terrible, and some of what could be resolved was madness. Such information was suspect, contaminated, contained falsehoods. Better to trust what one learned directly.

One fact stood out. Most of the broadcasts had been in one language. Takpusseh was hearing that language now, but he was hearing another too.

The prisoners were of two or more herds. For the moment that hardly mattered, but it would. It would add interest to a task that was already about as interesting as a fi’ could stand.

There were big metal bins filled with smaller packages, each bearing a scrawled label: FOUND FROZEN. Piles of cloth too thin to be armor: protection from cold? Alien-looking machines with labels scrawled on them:

Corpses, bloated by vacuum, had been stuffed into one great pressure package, half frozen during the crossing and stuck together. Breaker-Two Takpusseh pulled the package open and, ignoring a queasy tremor in his digestive system, let his eyes rest on an alien head. This body had been ripped half apart by projectiles. Takpusseh noted sense organs clustered around a mouth filled with evil-looking teeth and a protruding flap of muscle. Two bulging, vulnerable-looking eyes. The nose was a useless knob; the paired nostrils might as well have been flat to the face. But the array was familiar, they weren’t that peculiar. Bilateral symmetry … He reached to pick up a partially thawed foreleg and found five digits reinforced with bone. The aliens used those modified forefeet for making and using tools. They certainly didn’t use that bump-with-holes for anything but smelling. All known from pictures — but this was different.

The weapon: it was a tiny thing, with a small, curved handle. Could this modified foot really hold it aimed and steady? “This is the weapon it used?”

“Yes, Breaker-Two. That weapon killed two warriors.”

“Thank you.” Takpusseh moved the digits of an alien forefoot, thoughtfully, noting how one could cross over the flat surface behind the other four. And they all curved inward—

He was wasting time. “First priority is to get their food separated out. They’re bound to need water, they’re certainly wet inside. Then autopsies. Let’s get some idea what’s inside them. Pretheeteh-damb, did you put these things in pressure containers after they had been subjected to vacuum?”

“Breaker, they were bound to suffer some damage during an assault. I suppose you could have come along to guard them.”

Takpusseh was stung. “You suppose wrongly. The Herdmaster refused me permission.” Because he was too valuable, or because a sleeper was untrustworthy: who could know?

Again he looked through one-way glass at the prisoners. “We’ve watched their ships take off. Chemicals: hydrogen and oxygen, energetic and difficult to handle, but still chemical fuels. The expense must be formidable. We must assume that these prisoners are the best they breed; else they would not be worth the cost of lifting them.”

His assistant twitched her ears in assent. “Language first. We must make them teachers for future prisoners.”

“You say that easily, Tashayamp. It will be difficult. It may be impossible, with most of our team lost to the military mission.” Breaker-Two turned to the stacked cloth from the space station, then to cloth that had been cut from the prisoners. It was oddly curved; it had fastenings in odd places. Designed to fit an odd shape. These stiffened cups for the hind feet were thicker, padded. Takpusseh found nothing that might protect the fragile-looking foreleg digits.

“Pretheeteh-damb, did you search this detritus for weapons?”

“Yes. There were none, not even a bludgeon.”

“The prisoners were all covered with cloth, weren’t they?”

“They were. So were the corpses.”

“It isn’t a rank symbol and it doesn’t hold personal weapons. They were in a space habitat; they’d regulate the temperature. Could they be so fragile? I think we had better give them cloth to protect their skins.” He looked back into the padded room.

Could the cloth be used for humidity regulation? If they didn’t exude enough moisture to be comfortable … Well, that would be tested.

Hunch prodded him to add, “And get the cloth off the corpses, Tashayamp. Start with this one.”

“The Herdmaster for you, Breaker-Two.”

Takpusseh took the call. The Herdmaster looked tired, in the fashion of those whom exhaustion turns nasty. “Show them to me, Breaker-Two.”

Takpusseh turned the camera toward the one-way glass wall. The Herdmaster was silent for two or three breaths. Then, “And these you must integrate into the Traveler Herd? I don’t envy you. Breaker-Two. What do you know so far?”

“Their skins are fragile. They need cloth for protection.”

“Will they survive?”

“One seems near death … and it isn’t the legless one. That one seems active enough. As for the rest, I’ll have to be careful. We have their stored food, thanks to the troops, though we will have to identify it.”

“How soon can I expect—”

“When I tell you so. You have heard the sounds they make. They will never speak well. Another matter: We do not have a representative sampling here. That may be to the good; they may be more easily taught than their dirtyfoot kin.” Takpusseh glanced at the smallest of the half-frozen corpses, now denuded of cloth. Eyes protruding, mouth wide open, distress frozen in its face. The protected area between the legs …

His guess had been right. The genitalia were oddly placed. He tried to imagine how they might mate. But this was a female; the breasts confirmed it. “Our survivors are all adult males. Before we can understand anything about the natives we will need to study females, children, the crippled, the insane, the merely adequate—”

“Do what you can, Breaker. We won’t be able to furnish you with other prisoners for some days yet. Unless you would prefer to stay behind with the digit ships?”

Takpusseh’s ears flattened against his head. Had he just been named a coward? “At your orders, Herdmaster.”

“I wasn’t serious, and neither are you. You’re needed here.”

“Sixty-four of us are needed here, Herdmaster! You’ve taken all but three of us for the digit ships, and you expect—”

“They must be near the battle to advise our warriors regarding the prey’s mentality, and to learn. Do what you must.” The Herdmaster’s face faded.

The prisoners were not very active now. The one who spoke a known language was prowling, exploring the restraint room. The rest were talking in their own gibberish. They must belong to Land Mass One, the largest land block, and not to the herd that was so free with their radio noise … all but the prowler, and possibly the dark-skinned one, who might almost have been dead.

Might that be a disease, a lethal skin condition? Could the rest catch it? Leaving the Breakers without a profession again. One more thing to worry about.

He assumed, and would continue to assume, that Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz was listening via intercom. They would talk later. Meanwhile — “Pretheeteh-damb, your attention.” Takpusseh pointed through the one-way transparency of the wall. “That one. He’s talking now; do you see his mouth moving?”

“I see.”

“Take your octuple and fetch him to me.”

“Breaker-Two, I would have no trouble fetching it myself, save for fear of crushing it by accident.”

“Take your octuple.” Takpusseh felt no need to justify himself. They were an unknown. Best to be wary. At worst the show of strength might impress the aliens.

They did look fragile. Fragile enough to make him queasy.

He couldn’t afford to think that way. He was Breaker-Two, and these alien beings constituted the only career open to him. We must come to know each other well. Without you I’m nothing.

The door was square, ten feet by ten feet or thereabouts, and padded. When Wes pounded on it with his fist he got a peculiar echo, not quite like metal. Foamed metal? Thick, like the door on a bank vault. What do they think we are, The Hulk? Could they have picked up some Saturday-morning TV? It opened inward. he remembered; but no hinges were in sight. And no handle. Maybe the Invaders had prepared this cell before they knew what humans would be like. Maybe it was built for Invader felons or mental cases.

Whatever. We won’t get out of here with just muscle.

CLACK! The door jumped under his hand. Wes kicked himself away as it swung open.

What showed first were pale brown tentacles gripping a bayoneted rifle. The Invader entered behind the blade, slowly, its wary eyes on the cloud of drifting humans. It looked — Wes found himself grinning. He let it spread. It wouldn’t know what a grin meant.

The Invader looked like a baby elephant. The tentacle was an extended nose: a trunk. It branched halfway down, with a nostril in the branch; and branched again near the tip, and again. Eight digits. Base eight!

Straps of brown leather wove a cage around it, with a flap of cloth between the legs and a pouch behind the head.

Wes struck the wall opposite the door and managed to absorb most of the recoil.

Another baby elephant with two trunks entered, similarly dressed, similarly armed. They took positions against the bulkhead to each side of the door. Their claws sank easily into the thick, dampened padding. Their weapons were aimed into the room, not at anyone, but ready. A third, unarmed, stayed in the doorway.

The cell was getting crowded. Giorge was finally showing signs of life, staring wall-eyed, making feeble pushing gestures at the air. Arvid pulled the black man behind him. The recoil drifted him into the first Invader. It skillfully turned the rifle before Rogachev could impale himself, then gently thrust him away with the butt.

The Invader in the doorway held Dawson’s attention. This one wore straps dyed scarlet, and a backpouch patterned in green and gold. Its feet were clawed, not really elephant-like except for the size. The tail was paddle-shaped. The head was big; the face, impressive. Grooves of muscle along the main trunk focused attention on the eyes: black irises surrounded by gray, looking straight at Wes Dawson.

It pushed itself into the cell.

It was coming for him. Wes waited. He saw no point in trying to escape.

The jump was skillfully done. The Invader landed feet-first against the wall, just next to Wes; wrapped its trunk around Wes’s torso (and two of the eight branches had him by the neck); jumped on the recoil, thrust him through the doorway ahead of itself (a fourth Invader had pulled aside), and barely brushed the doorway as it came through behind. It would have crushed Wes against the corridor wall if its claws hadn’t closed on the doorjamb.

Wes was near strangling. He pulled at the branches around his neck, then slapped thrice at the joint with the flat of his hand. Would it understand? Yes: the constriction eased.

Five more Invaders waited in the corridor. Three moved off to the left. Wes’s captor followed, and the others followed him. They must think we’re hot stuff, he thought. Maybe we really are hurting them. Or maybe … just how many are they, that they can spare eight behemoths to collect one fragile man?

Where are they taking me?

Dissection? But with so many around him, there was surely no point in struggling.

They were floating down the curved corridor. A sound like a ram’s-horn blared through the ship. Dawson’s guards moved quickly to one of the corridor walls. Their claws sank into the thick damp matting that lined the passageway.

What? A warning? There was nothing to hold on to. It hardly mattered. The tentacles held him tightly.

The air vibrated with a supersonic hum. What had been a wall became a floor. After a few moments the baby elephants seemed to have adjusted, and released their grip. They moved off down the corridor, surrounding him but letting him walk.

They were staring. How must it look to them? A continual toppling controlled fall?

They pushed him through a large door at the end of the corridor. One followed. The others waited outside.

A single Invader waited behind a table tilted like a draftsman’s table. It stared at him.

Dawson stared back.

How long does this go on? “I am Congressman Wesley Dawson, representing the United States of America .”

“I am Takpusseh.”

My God, they speak English! “Why have I been treated this way?”

“I do not comprehend.”

The creature’s voice was flat, full of sibilants, without emotions. A leaking balloon might have spoken that way.

“You attacked us without warning! You killed our women!” Here was a chance to protest, finally a target for his pain, and it was just too much. Wes leaned across the tilted table; his voice became a scream. “There was no need! We welcomed you, we came up to meet you. There was no need.”

“I do not always understand what you say. Speak slowly and carefully.”

It felt like a blow to the face. Wes stopped, then started over, fully in control, shaping each word separately. “We wanted to welcome you. We wanted to greet visitors from another star. We wanted to be friends.”

The alien stared at Wes. “You will learn to speak with us.”

“Yes. Certainly.” It will be all right now! it is a misunderstanding, it must be. When I learn to talk with them — “Our families will be concerned about us. Have you told Earth that we are alive?”

“I do not comprehend.”

“Do you talk to Earth? To our planet?”

“Ah. Our word for Earth is—” a peculiar sound, short and hissing. “We do not know how to tell your people that you live.”

“Why do you lock us up?” He didn’t get that. Maybe why is too abstract. “The door to our room. Leave it open.”

The alien stared at Wes, then looked toward a lens on the wall. Then it stared at Wes again. Finally it said, “We have cloth for you. Can you want that?”

Cloth? Wes became aware that he was naked. “Yes. We need clothing. Covering.”

“You will have that. You will have water.”

“Food,” Dawson said.

“Yes. Eat.” The alien gestured. One of the others brought in boxes from another compartment.

Clothes. Canned goods. Oxygen bottles. A spray can of deodorant. Whose? Soap. Twelve cans of Spam with a London label. A canned Smithfield ham. The Russians must have brought that.

Wes pointed to what he thought was edible. Then he took a Spam can and pantomimed opening it with his forefinger, tying to indicate that he needed a can opener.

One of the aliens drew a bayonet and opened the Smithfield ham by cutting the top off, four digits for the can, four for the bayonet, He passed the can to Wes.

Stronger than hell! Advanced metals, too … but you wouldn’t make a starship out of cast iron. Okay, now what?

“Do you eat that?” the alien behind the draftsman’s table asked. The interrogative was obvious.

“Yes.”

It was hard to interpret the alien’s response. It lifted the ears. The other, the one that brought the packages, responded the same way. Vegetarians? Are they disgusted?

The alien spoke gibberish, and another alien came in with a large sheet of what might have been waxed paper. It took the ham from the can, wrapped it (the stuff was flexible, more like thick Saran wrap), and gave it to Wes. It left carrying the can.

“You attack — you fight us. There is no need.”

“There is need. Your people is strong,” the alien said.

A flat screen on one wall lighted, to show another alien. A voice came into the room. It babbled, in the liquid sibilants Wes had heard them use before.

“You must go back now. We turn now,”

It didn’t make sense. “If we were weak, would you fight us?”

“Go.”

“But what do you want? Where do you come from? Why are you here? Why is it important that we are strung?”

The alien stared again. “Go.”

“I have to know! Why are you here?”

The alien spoke in sibilants.

Tentacles wrapped around his waist and encircled his throat. He was dragged from the room. As they went down the corridor, the ram’s-horn sound came again, and the aliens held him against the wall.

“You don’t have to hold me,” Wes said.

There was no response. The alien soldier carried a warm smell, something like being in a zoo. It wouldn’t have been unpleasant, but there was too much of it, this close.

How many of them speak English? He — it — said I should learn their language. They’ll try to teach me. He looked down at himself, naked, wrapped in tentacles. Think like them. They’re not crazy — assume they’re not crazy! — just different. Differences in shape, and evolution, and senses. What do I smell like to this … soldier, pulled right up against its nostrils like this? It held him like a nest of snakes, and its black-and-gray eyes were unreadable.

You knew the job was dangerous …

13. THE MORNING AFTER

Son of a bitch! Sergeant Ben Mailey shepherded his charges off the helicopter and watched them climb into the staff car. The President! Son of a bitch! He grinned widely, then sobered. It took a war to get the President Inside. And I’m not going in with him.

Jenny ushered the President into the Command Center . She had enjoyed her previous trip Inside. Maps and screens showed what was going on across the nation. You could see everything at a glance. A dozen Army and Air Force officers sat at consoles. Large screens flashed with maps of the United States . Aircraft in flight, major trains, and larger ships showed up as blobs of light on the maps.

But there weren’t many lights, and many of the harbors showed dark splotches. Rail centers like Omaha had pinpoint dark spots as well.

Jack Clybourne followed them into the cavernous room. He looked puzzled, and Jenny felt sorry for him. There was no real need for a presidential bodyguard, not here in the national command center. His job was done the moment they got the President into the Hole, but nobody had thought to tell him that.

And I sure won’t.

Admiral Carrell stood to attention as the President entered. So did the mustached civilian who’d been seated with him. Admiral Carrell wore a dark civilian suit, but he looked very much an officer. “Glad to see you, sir.”

“Thank you.”

He sounds a million years old, and I feel older. I look like a witch — She felt giddy, and suppressed an insane desire to giggle. Suppose Admiral Carrell inspects my uniform, with wrinkles and unbuttoned buttons and — and I’m drunk on fatigue poisons. We all are. I wonder when the Admiral slept last?

“The cabinet will be coming later,” Coffey said. “That is, State and Interior will be. We’re dispersing some of the others so that — I don’t really know the aliens’ capabilities.”

Admiral Carrell nodded. “They may know the location of this place,” he said.

“Could they do anything if they did know?”

“Yes, sir. They hit Boulder Dam with something large and fast, no radioactive fallout. As my Threat Team keeps telling me, they’re throwing rocks at us. Meteorites. They have lasers that chew through ships. Mr. President, I don’t know what they could do to Cheyenne Mountain .”

They, they, they, Jenny thought. Our enemy has no name!

“Let’s hope we don’t find out, then. What is the situation? What about the Russians?”

“They’ve been hit badly, but they’re still fighting. I don’t know what forces they have left.” Admiral Carrell shook his head. “We’re having the devil of a time getting reports. We used up half our ICBM’s last night, firing them straight up and detonating in orbit. The aliens got half of what was left. They seem to have targeted dams, rail centers, harbors — and anyplace that launched a missile. I presume they did the same to the Soviets, but we can’t know.”

“We can’t talk to them?”

“I’m able to communicate with Dr. Bondarev intermittently. But he doesn’t know the status of his forces. Their internal communications are worse than ours, and ours are nearly gone.” Carrell paused a moment and leaned against a computer console.

He’s an old man! I never really saw it before. And that’s scary—

“What about casualties?” the President demanded.

“Military casualties are very light — except for F-15 pilots who launched satellite interceptors. Those were one hundred percent. We’ve lost a number of missile crews, too.

“Civilian casualties are a little like that. Very heavy for those living below dams or in harbor areas, and almost none outside such areas.”

“Total?”

Carrell shrugged. “Hard to find out. I’d guess about a hundred thousand, but it could be twice that.”

A hundred thousand. Vietnam killed only fifty thousand in ten years. Nobody’s taken losses like that since World War II.

“Why don’t you know?” the President demanded.

“We depend heavily on satellite relays for communications,” Carrell said. “Command, control, communications, intelligence, all depended on space, but we have no space assets left.”

“So we don’t know anything?”

“Know?” Admiral Carrell shook his head again. “No, sir, we don’t know anything. I do have some guesses.

“Something seems to have driven their large ship away; at least it withdrew. The Soviets attacked it heavily. According to Bondarev they probably damaged it, but if he has any evidence for that, he hasn’t told me about it.”

Jenny cleared her throat. “Yes?” Carrell asked.

“Nothing, sir. We all know about claims. If I were a Soviet official and I’d just expended a lot of very expensive missiles, I’m sure I’d claim it was worthwhile too.”

The President nodded grimly. “Assume it wasn’t damaged.”

“Yes, sir,” Carrell said. “It’s very hard to track anything through the goop in the upper atmosphere — and above, for that matter. The aliens have dumped many tons of metallic chaff. This gives some very strange radar reflections.

“As far as we can tell, they’ve left behind a number of warships, but the big ship withdrew. We think they headed for the Moon.” Admiral Carrell’s calm broke for a moment. “God damn them, that’s our Moon.”

“Have we heard from Moon Base?”

“Not ours, and the Soviets have lost contact with theirs. I think they’re gone.”

Fifty billion dollars. Most of our space program. Damn!

The President looked older by the minute. “What do we know about their small ships?”

Carrel shrugged. “They have several dozen of them. We say small, but the smallest is the size of the Enterprise . I mean the aircraft carrier! We shot some of them out of space. I know we got two, with a Minuteman out of Minot Air Force Base. Then they clobbered Minot . We think the Russians got a couple too.”

“None of which explains why they ran away,” the civilian said.

“Mr. President, this is Mr. Ransom, one of my Threat Team,” Admiral Carrell said, “He and his colleagues are the only experts we have.”

“Experts?”

“Yes, sir. They’re science-fiction writers.”

Who else? And the President isn’t laughing …

“Why did they run away, then, Mr. Ransom?”

“We don’t know, and we don’t like it,” Ransom said. “Back in the Red Room you can get a dozen opinions. Curtis and Anson are back there trying to get a consensus, but I don’t think they’ll do it. The aliens could have their mates and children aboard that main ship. They came a long way.”

“I see,” David Coffey said. He looked around the big control room. “Is there somewhere I can sit down?”

“You’d do better to get some rest,” Admiral Carrell said.

“So should you.”

“After you, sir. Someone has to be on duty. We might get through to the Russians again.”

This time Jenny couldn’t help laughing. When the President and Admiral Carrell stared at her, she giggled, then sobered quickly. “I never thought we’d be so eager to hear from the Russians.”

Carrell’s smile was forced. “Yes. It is ironic. However—”

He broke off as red lights flashed and a siren wailed through the enormous room. The Admiral took a headset from one of the sergeants. After a moment he said, “They haven’t all left. They just hit a major highway junction.”

“Highway junctions. Railroad yards. Dams.” the President muttered.

“Yes,” Admiral Carrell agreed. “But not cities or population centers. San Diego but not New York harbor. Cities along major riven are flooded, some severely. Some parts of the country are undamaged but have no electricity. Others are without power, and effectively isolated. Some places have electric power and are utterly untouched. It’s an odd way to fight a war.”

Message Bearer hummed. The vibration from the main fusion drive was far higher than any normal range of hearing; but it shook the bones, and it was always there. Sleepers and spaceborn alike had learned to ignore it during the long days of deceleration into Winterhome system. It could not be sensed until it was gone.

… It was gone. Thrust period was over. The floor eased from under the Herdmaster and he floated. Six eights of digit ships had been left behind to implement the invasion, while Message Bearer fell outward toward the Foot. The acceleration, the pulses of fusion light and gamma rays, had been blocked by the mass of Winterhome’s moon. Let Winterhome’s masters try to detect her, an inert speck against the universe.

The Herdmaster blew a fluttering sigh. Several hours of maneuvers had left him exhausted. It was good to be back in free-fall, even for a few minutes.

“That’s over,” he said. “Now we’ll trample the natives a little and see what they do.”

“It’s their terrain. We will lose some warriors,” Fathisteh-tulk’s lids drooped in sleepy relaxation, and the Herdmaster spared him a glare. The Herdmaster’s Advisor had himself been Herdmaster; he could have saved the Herdmaster this chore, spared him for other work … except that spaceborn warriors might not take his orders. He was a sleeper; his accent marked him.

So he was being unjust. But Fathisteh-tulk enjoyed the situation. The Herdmaster sighed again and turned to the intercom. “Get me Breaker-Two.”

Takpusseh too spoke with the archaic sleeper accent, He stood at a desk littered with alien artifacts.

“You have spoken with the prey,” the Herdmaster asked.

“I have spoken with one of them, Herdmaster. This one is of the Land Mass Two herd that babbled to us as we approached. Some of the others speak that language, but they are not part of that herd.”

“What have you learned?”

“Herdmaster, I do not know what we learned from that interview. Certainly that herdless one did not submit.”

The Herdmaster was silent for a moment. “It was helpless?”

“Herdmaster, I sent an armed octuple to fetch it. I left it naked, and required it to stand before my table. It demanded explanations. It was abusive!”

“Yet it lives? You show remarkable restraint.”

Takpusseh vented a fluttering snort. “I did not understand all it said at the time. It was only after it was sent back to the restraining pen that we listened carefully to the recordings. Herdmaster, these are alien beasts. They do not obey properly. It will take time to make them a part of the Traveler Herd.”

“Perhaps, being herdless, it is insane. Were there others of its herd in the satellite?”

“Yes. It said that its mate had been killed in the attack.”

“It is insane, then. Kill it.”

“Herdmaster, there is no need for haste. It speaks this language the prey call English far better than do the others.”

“Have the others submitted?”

“Herdmaster, I believe they have.”

“The herdless one comes from the continent with the most roads and harbors and dams. Surely the most advanced herd will not all be insane.”

“Surely not, Herdmaster.”

“Do you have advice?”

“Herdmaster, I believe we should continue the plan. Trample the prey before we speak with them. If they are arrogant in defeat, they must be impossible before they are harmed.”

“Very well. Will you continue to speak with this one?”

“Not without new reason. I found the interview painful. I will speak with it again when we have obtained more of its herd. Perhaps it will regain its sanity. Until then, Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz will study the herdless one. He chooses not to speak with it.”

The Herdmaster twitched his digits against his forelegs. Takpusseh was being tactful. Raztupisp-minz was not fluent in the language of the prey.

“The other prisoners are in my domain, but we house them together,” Breaker-two Takpusseh finished.

“Do any of them submit?”

“I have had no opportunity to examine the others while Message Bearer maneuvers violently. Instead, we have experimented with their living conditions. We gave them cloth from the great stores they kept in the orbiting habitat. They draped themselves with it. We gave them water and watched how much they used, and analyzed their excreta. We change their environment. How do they treat their food? Which of our foods can they tolerate? Do they like more oxygen, or less? Warm air or cold? To what extent can they tolerate their own exhalations?”

“I expect they breathe the air mixture of Winterhome.”

“Of course, but where on Winterhome? Equator or poles? High altitude or low? Wet or dry? We are learning. They like pressure anywhere between sea level and half that. They can tolerate our air mix but prefer it dryer. They cover their skins with cloth even when far too hot; that deceived us for a time. They drink and wash with clean water and ignore mud. Their food is treated; they have to wet it and heat it. They would not eat ours. And in the process of experiment, we gave them strong incentive to learn to speak to us.”

The Herdmaster laughed, a fluttering snort. “Of course they would like to tell you to stop. Can they speak?”

“We have begun to teach them. It is easier with those who speak the language called English. I see no need to learn the others’ language. The herdless one called — Dawson — can translate until they gain skill at our speech. Their mouths are not properly formed. One day I think there will he a compromise language; but they will never be taken for ordinary workers of the Traveler Herd, even in pitch dark. The smell is distinctive.”

“Are they in good condition?”

“The dark-skinned one is unresponsive and doesn’t eat. I think he must be dying. He too is herdless. The other four seem ready for training.”

“The other herdless one will die as well.”

“Perhaps. He seems in health. We must watch him. Herdmaster. from what region do you intend to take prisoners?”

“You have no need to know.”

“Herdmaster, I must know if Dawson will have companions of his own herd. I must know if he is insane, or if all those of his herd act so strangely.”

“He is insane,” the Herdmaster said.

“Lead me, Herdmaster.”

“Perform your task. I gave no order.”

“Thank you. Herdmaster, it is likely that he is insane. Surely he has never been as far from his herd as he is now. But we must know.”

The Herdmaster considered. “Very well. We will attempt to seize and keep a foothold in Land Mass Two, North, the source of most of the electromagnetic babble. We will take prisoners.”

“As many as possible, Herdmaster: I require females and children. It would also be well to have immature and aged, cripples, insane—”

“I have other priorities, but the warriers [sic] will be told. How shall we identify the insane?”

“Never mind. Some will go insane after capture.”

“Anything else?”

“I would like to show the prisoners some records.”

“Good. Where? The communal mudroom? My officers and their mates are clamoring to see the natives.”

“I’m not sure they’re ready for … Lead me. We will display them, but not in the mudroom. Use the classroom. They’ll have to get used to us sooner or later—”

“And my fithp must get used to them. We’ll be starting spin immediately. You can put your show on afterward. Will you show them the Podo Thuktun?”

“No! They’re not ready. They wouldn’t know what it means. Fistarteh-thuktun would stomp me flat.”

The Herdmaster disconnected. Fathisteh-tulk, who had not spoken during the exchange, said, “Takpusseh was a good choice. Many sleepers have lapsed into lethargy since the awakening. Takpusseh has kept his enthusiasm, his sense of wonder.”

“Yes. Why has he no mate? He is of the age, and his status is adequate … though as a sleeper he lost rank, of course—”

“His mate did not survive the death-sleep.”

“Ah.” The Herdmaster pondered. “Advise me. Shall I expect these prisoners to develop into cooperating workers? Can they persuade their race to surrender without undue bloodshed?”

“You know my opinion,” the Herdmaster’s Advisor said. “We don’t need this world or its masters. We are not dirtyfeet. We should be colonizing space, not inhabited worlds.”

Dirtyfeet: only sleepers used that term for those who had remained comfortably behind on the homeworld. The spaceborn felt no need to insult ancestors who were forever removed in space and time.

Never mind; Fathisteh-tulk had raised another problem. “Odd, that a spaceborn should hear this from a sleeper. You know my opinion too. We came to conquer Winterhome. Regulations require that I consult you as to methods.”

“Do you intend that our prisoners shall not learn of the Foot?”

The Herdmaster frowned. “It is standard procedure …”

A fluttering snort answered him. “Of course. A soldier should never know more than he must, for he might be captured and accepted into the enemy’s herd. But how could the forces of Winterhome rescue our prisoners without taking Message Bearer herself? In which case all is already lost.”

“I suppose so. Very well—”

“Wait, please, Herdmaster. My advice.”

“Well?”

“Your judgment was right. Tell them what they must know. Tell them that they must submit, and show them that we can force them to obey. Then let them speak to their people. But we must not depend upon their aid.”

“Breaking them into the Traveler Herd is the task of the Breakers. Takpusseh and Raztupisp-minz are conscientious.”

“Even so. Don’t let them know all. They are alien.”

The Kawasaki was an LTD 750 twin with a belt drive, an ’83 model which Harry had bought at the year-end sale in ’84. He had saddlebags for it and a carry rack for his guitar. Two weeks ago he had borrowed Arline Mott’s pickup truck and taken the engine in.

He was driving the same pickup truck now, and he felt guilty about it.

He’d telephoned Arline at 5:00 AM., before she’d been up or able to listen to the radio. “I’ll have it back by noon,” he’d said.

Since Arline didn’t get up before noon, that wouldn’t be a problem. She’d put the key outside her door and gone back to bed.

She ought to be getting the hell out of Los Angeles!

If I’d told her, Harry thought. But if I didn’t call her, who would? And she’d be in bed until noon anyway. So all I have to do is get the damn truck back to her.

He pulled into a 76 station. There were three cars ahead of him. He filled the truck, then filled two gas cans Arline kept in the back. Least I can do for her.

Gas was still being sold at the pump prices. That couldn’t last.

He drove North along Van Nuys Boulevard. The tools and all of the Kawasaki except the engine were in the back. It was still in pieces. A glance at Road and Track Specialties, which specialized in racing motorcycles, sent him off on a daydream. He really ought to steal one of those. It would get him there faster and more dependably, if he didn’t get himself arrested, and certainly the emergency justified it … he drove past without slowing, and on to Van Nuys Honda-Kawasaki.

His walk slowed as he passed through the salesroom. His money hadn’t stretched far enough. He needed a new fender, spare brake and clutch levers, a fairing … Jesus, that Vetter Windjammer fairing was nice. I could use the emergency thousand that Wes keeps — Only that wouldn’t work. That thousand belonged to Carlotta, and Harry intended to take it to her. Not all, but as much as possible.

No Vetter fairing, then. Just tie-down straps, and paper bags to put his hands in. He stepped up to the counter, next to a bulky, younger man.

“Hairy Red,” the man said. Harry almost recognized him; the name wouldn’t surface. “How they hanging?”

“This is the day nobody knows that,” Harry said. “Did you see the light show?”

“Damn right. I’m getting out.”

“I’m headed east. I could use a partner.”

“North looks safer,” the half stranger said. Harry nodded; he agreed. When a clerk appeared he paid the rest of what he owed out of Wes Dawson’s thousand. He paid for the engine repairs and restrained the urge to buy anything. He might need money more.

— =

He brought truck and engine to the parking lot across the alley from the motorcycle shop. The transistor radio was telling the world that there had been a horrible mistake. The aliens had attacked certain parts of the United States and the rest of the world, but now they were going away. The delegation that had been aboard the Soviet Kosmograd had been taken aboard by the aliens. Negotiations were proceeding. Citizens should remain calm. Anyone who could go to work should do that. Conserve electricity and water. Don’t waste anything. There would be inconveniences. Expect rationing soon.

That was one station. On another, the announcer was hysterical. The Martians had landed in New Jersey.

The one thing that every station announced was that all military and police personnel were to report for duty immediately.

Harry began to work.

An hour later he had some appreciation of what he’d lost.

Harry felt the urgency (what was happening now around Carlotta Dawson? And where, in hell or heaven, was Congressman Wes?) and the certain knowledge that hurrying was a mistake. His vertebrae, dreaming that they had become solid bone, woke to grating agony as he lifted and twisted and crouched and crawled. He worked muscles that had forgotten their function. They protested and were ignored. He worked as he had to, letting details fill his mind from edge to edge. It was like the calm from being ripped on marijuana, or (he presumed) from transcendental meditation. He had read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance long ago.

It was killing labor, and Harry was drenched with sweat. He was old, old. But the Kawasaki was a motorcycle again.

This would be a hellish shakedown tour for a newly mounted engine. Harry smoked while the crankcase drained onto the weeds. He refilled it with a very light oil. He started the engine and let it run for the life span of a cigarette. He drained the engine again and refilled it with a heavier oil.

Puffing, he began to pack the Kawasaki . The sleeping bag went on the rack. It would normally carry his guitar, but not this trip! He’d already turned that over to Lucy Mott for safekeeping. He ran his spare cables alongside the working cables, ready to be attached in an instant. He reached into the fuel tank’s wide-mouthed fill — was there anyone to see? — to attach the gold peso and the dimes. Carlotta Dawson’s .45 auto went under the seat, with two clips. The .25 Beretta was in his jacket pocket. A one-quart botta bag was more convenient than a canteen for drinking while riding; he’d want to fill it before he left.

What had he forgotten? He had spare belts, high-speed belts built for industry, which fit the cycle and cost a quarter as much as store-bought. He checked everything: spare oil, ratchet set, screwdriver set, four wrenches, electrical tape, spare fuses, a can of hydraulic oil for the brakes. Tubing cut to fit. Spare clothing in a plastic garbage bag. The binoculars.

Finally he buckled on the wide kidney belt. It reduced his stomach by inches, and made him feel ten years younger.

He went to the head shop next door for cigarettes. There was only one clerk, and Harry was surprised to see her.

“Ruby?”

“Yeah, man. How’s it, Harry?”

“I thought you’d be in the mountains by now,” Harry said.

She looked puzzled.

“Aliens? Space war? Lights in the sky?”

She laughed. “What you need, Harry?”

“Two cartons of Pall Mall . No filter. Ruby, you told me about it.”

She got out the cigarettes. Harry handed her money, and she gave him back change. No premium price. “Told you about what?”

“What I said. Space War.”

She laughed again. “I thought I remembered calling somebody; was that you?” She laughed some more. “Wow, that Colombian stuff is strong, Harry. I really thought it was real!”

He was still shaking his head when he got outside. It was tough loading the Kawasaki into the truck, but he got help from the guys in the shop.

Got to return the truck, he told himself. Got to.

Fifteen hundred miles, near enough. Wish I didn’t have to take the truck back. Ought to get started … Hell, it’s only five miles to Arline’s place. Damn near on the way. Let’s get it done.

If he’d been in a car, he’d never have made it.

All the highways out of Los Angeles were jammed. Cars all over the road. Cars stalled on the wrong side of the road, people driving on the left side, anything to get out. And then the first wrecks, and the endless fields of cars behind them.

Many were piled high with clutter. Baby cribs. Footlockers. A typewriter. Blankets, toys, any damned thing you could think of, lashed on top of the cars. One king-size mattress on top of a car full of kids.

There weren’t many police, and where there were any, they were turning people back. Harry had to take out Dawson’s letter a dozen times, until he was good with the spiel.

“I’m Congressman Wes Dawson’s assistant,” Harry would say. “He’s aboard the alien ship. I have to look after his wife.”

One of the national guardsmen even said “sir” to Harry after he’d seen the letter.

“Heard much, Sergeant?”

“No, sir. They hit Hoover Dam. We know that much. Seem to have hit a lot of dams and power plants and railroad yards. Nobody knows why. Now they’ve gone.”

Harry nodded sagely. “Thanks.” Then he couldn’t resist. “Carry on, Sergeant,” he said, and roared off.

By mid-afternoon he was through the Cajon Pass , headed east across the Mojave Desert . His back had begun to hurt.

14. THE DAM

Jeri Wilson woke with a start. The sun was in the west, sinking toward one of the snowcapped peaks that surrounded the twisting mountain road. Melissa sat quietly in the backseat.

“It’s after noon,” Jeri said accusingly. “Why did you let me sleep so long?”

“You looked like you needed it.”

Jeri yawned. “I guess I did, punkin.” She glanced at the seat beside her, then looked down at the floor. “Where’s the map?”

“I have it,” Melissa said. “I was trying to figure out where we are, but I can’t.” She handed over the Auto Club map.

Jeri traced a yellow line along the map. “I’m not exactly sure myself,” she admitted. “I thought about what you said and decided we didn’t want to go through Albuquerque. Hairy Red marked a route up into Colorado. He’d have loved it, lots of twists and turns. Good thing you slept through it; you’d have got carsick.”

“So how far is it now?”

“About three hundred miles in a straight line, but I don’t know how far on the road.”

“Is — does Daddy really know we’re coming?”

“Well — sort of.”

“Does he want us to come?”

“I think so,” Jeri said. He didn’t say no! “Pour me some coffee from the Thermos. We’ve got to cross the Continental Divide this afternoon. Best we get started.”

Jeri coasted down the twisting Rocky Mountain roads in low gear, with the motor turned off, scared as stiff as the unpowered power steering. The highway was nearly deserted. Twice she pulled off for huge trucks, then used the motor to get back on the road. Once a Corvette shot into her rearview mirror, fishtailed as the driver saw her, and was still wobbling as it went past. Melissa, stretched out on the backseat, didn’t wake up.

The highway began to straighten out as it reached the bottom. The Great Plains stretched infinitely ahead. Jeri took the car out of gear, started the motor to get her brakes and steering back, and reached the Great Plains doing sixty in neutral. She waited until she’d lost some speed before going into gear.

It was mid-afternoon of a cloudless day. Behind her the Rockies, receding, seemed to grow even larger as the scale came into focus: a wall across the west of the world. She held her speed at fifty-five.

She jumped when she realized Melissa was peering over her shoulder. Melissa said, “When the gas needle says Empty, how much gas is left?”

“I don’t know. Could be anywhere from none to … five?”

They’d be out of gas soon. All she could think of was to get as far as she could. Maybe there would be gasoline at the next station, wherever that might be …

Jeri’s rearview mirror flared like a spotlight in her eyes. She slapped the mirror aside and screamed, “Don’t look, Melissa! Get down on the floor!” Hoping Melissa would obey; wishing she could do the same. Braking carefully, edging toward the right lane. Melissa said, “What—”

WHAM! Ears popped, the car lurched, the rear window crazed and went opaque. She’d expected it to shatter, to lace her head and neck with broken glass. The news had spoken of bombs falling on hydroelectric dams, railroads, major highways. George and Vicki Tate-Evans had told her (speaking in relay, impossible to interrupt) how to recognize a thermonuclear bomb flash, and how to survive.

She pulled off the road and waited. When you see the whole world turn bright, don’t look. Drop to the ground. Grip your legs, put your head between your knees. Now kiss your ass good-bye. Behind her, a Peterbilt ten-wheeler that had been charging up on her tail wobbled and tipped over and kept coming, on its side, leaving a trail of fire as it slid past and finally came to a stop ahead of her.

“Atomic bomb,” Melissa said, awed.

“Stay down!”

“I am.”

A man crawled out of the truck shaking his head. That really wasn’t much of a fire: just a streak leading to the truck, a few flames under it. Maybe the truck was out of gas too.

She waited for the softer WHAM!, the second shock wave as air rushed back to fill the vacuum beneath the rising fireball. When the station wagon stopped shuddering she pulled around the burning truck and kept going. A flaming toadstool lit her way. She kept glancing back, watching it die.

She made another six miles before the motor died. She hoped they were far enough from the radioactive cloud. She hoped it wouldn’t rain.

The old one-lung Harley had begun sputtering ten miles back. Now it died. Gynge let it coast and thought of his alternatives.

He could probably make it run another couple of hundred miles, but the damned thing had been nearly dead last year. It wasn’t getting younger.

He could walk.

There had to be something better. Up ahead was a rest area. Gynge let the Harley’s last momentum take it off the edge of the highway and into the picnic area.

The highways were deserted. At first the cops and national guards were stopping everything. Gynge had detoured three times around them. Damn good thing he knew the country. After he got into the mountains he left the main roads. There weren’t any cops at all.

A semi roared past. There was a little traffic. Food trucks. Come to that, in normal times one out of every three trucks carried food. People had to eat. But there wasn’t a hell of a lot except trucks.

The rest area was empty. Almost empty. Not quite. He heard sounds at the far end, and went to investigate.

What Gynge saw was a tired old man on a picnic table with his pants off and a girdle stretched out beside him. Bikers called it a “kidney belt,” but it did the same thing any girdle did: it held in a sagging gut. The old man’s gut was a good-sized beer belly. He was trying to hug one knee against his chest, but his gut blocked the way.

The man sat up, blowing. His frame was large; Gynge saw that he must have been formidable in his time. He didn’t look formidable now. His red beard had gone mostly gray, and the hair of his head was following. He sat up, consulted the book beside him. Then he stretched his right leg out in front of him, bent forward as far as he could manage, threw a hand towel around the arch of his foot, and pulled on both ends.

If the man had brought friends, they had had plenty of time to appear. Gynge watched a little longer. The red-and-gray-haired man switched legs, groaning.

One full day on a motorcycle had done him in.

Harry lay on the picnic table and groaned. Two whiplash accidents within two weeks would leave their mark for the rest of his life. His spine felt like a crystal snake dropped on flagstones! He knew well enough that he was overweight. That was what the kidney belt was for, but it hadn’t been enough, and his guts were about to fall out all over the picnic table.

He’d bought a book of stretching exercises. Some of those were supposed to help a bad back. It was worth a try … but it felt like he was breaking his back rather than mending it.

He had switched legs before the stranger stepped into view. A biker, probably. He strolled up to Harry’s bike, in no apparent hurry; ran his eyes over it; then stepped up to Harry. Looming. He was all muscles and hair and dirt, no prettier than Harry felt, though younger and in better condition.

He asked, “Why a towel?”

Harry flopped on his back, panting. He said, “A towel is the most massively useful thing a traveler can have. And that was a stretching exercise, because my back is giving me hell. See—”

“Skip it. Give me the key to the Kawasaki.”

“Help me up.”

The bandit did, by the slack of Harry’s jacket. He looked down at the feel of something hard over his heart. Harry’s jacket trailed from his hand, and the .25 Beretta was in the jacket pocket.

“I hold the key to a door you don’t want to open,” Harry said.

Anyone with a grain of sense would have at least stopped to think it over. The bandit reacted instantly: he batted at the threatening hand and swung a fist at Harry’s jaw.

Harry fired at once. The fist exploded against his jaw and knocked him dizzy. His gun hand was knocked aside too. Harry brought it back and fired twice more, walking the pistol up the man’s torso.

He shook his head and looked around fast. The gun wasn’t very loud. It wasn’t big either, and Harry didn’t entirely trust a .25 bullet. Any sign of a companion? No. The bandit was still on his feet, looking startled. Harry fired twice more, reserving one bullet for mistakes.

Now the bandit toppled.

Harry had spent some time finding the campground, but it wouldn’t be possible to stay. He rolled off the table, pulled his pants on. then his kidney belt. He paused to catch his breath and to listen.

The bandit was still breathing, almost snoring. Harry looked down at him. “I’ll do you the best favor I can,” he said. “I won’t check to make sure you’re dead.”

The wounded man said nothing. Ah, well.

Harry walked his bike to the bandit’s motorcycle. There was nearly a gallon of gasoline in it. Whistling, Harry disconnected the fuel line and drained the gas into a pickle jar he fished out of the trash. When he’d put the last drop into the Kawasaki, he went through the bandit’s possessions. There wasn’t much.

Then he mounted the Kawasaki and rode away, groaning. Harry was a firm believer in natural selection.

Jeri woke at dawn. Melissa was awake, but huddled in her sleeping bag. “I never knew deserts could be cold,” she said.

“I told you,” Jeri said. “Now watch.” The sleeping bags were head to head, with the Sierra stove between. Jeri made two cups of cocoa without poking more than her head and shoulders out of her bag. In the half-hour they spent drinking cocoa and eating oatmeal, the world warmed. Jeri put her hat on and made Melissa don hers. They left their sleeping bags and rolled them with one eye each on the highway below.

They had moved uphill, away from the car, into a clump of bushes at the crest. With heads above the bushes, using binoculars, they could see clearly for miles. The highway ran straight as a bullet’s flight, broken by a dish-shaped crater nine miles to the west. The precision of that crater grew scarier the more Jeri thought about it. It sat precisely on the intersection of two highways.

They watched for traffic. Jeri’s hand kept brushing the hard lump in her purse, the .380 Walther automatic. If she saw a safe-looking ride, she and Melissa could get down to the highway in time to stick out their thumbs. She hadn’t seen much yet. Traffic was nearly nonexistent. A clump of four motorcycles had passed, slowed to examine the stalled car, argue, then move on west. She stayed hidden.

“What will we do?” Melissa asked.

“We’ll think of something,” Jeri told her. I may have to pay for a lift. Hopefully with money. She prayed for a policeman, but there weren’t any. Someone ought to come look at the crater. Is it radioactive? And why here? What could aliens possibly care about, this far from anywhere?

From the west came a motorcycle. It slowed as it approached the crater. Jeri wondered if it would turn back. It moved out into the desert and circled the lip of the crater. Big cycle, big rider. He had some trouble lifting it back onto the road. He rested afterward, smoking, then started up again. They watched him come.

Ten minutes later Melissa lowered the binoculars and said, “It’s Harry.”

Jeri snorted.

“It’s Hairy Red, Mom. Let’s go down.”

“Unlikely,” Jeri said wearily, but she took the glasses. The lone biker’s head was a wind-whipped froth of red hair and beard; that was true enough. He kept the bike slow. He couldn’t be a young man, not with the trouble he’d had lifting the bike. The bike: it sure looked like Harry’s bike. Hell’s bells, that was Harry Reddington!

“Go,” Jeri said, “run!” She sprinted downhill. Melissa surged past her, laughing. They reached the bottom well ahead of the biker. Jeri puffed and got her wind back and screamed, “Harry! Harreee!”

It didn’t look like he would stop.

Harry saw the four bikers coming from a long way off. They were on the wrong side, his side, of the dirt divider. He was seeing trouble as he neared them … but they veered across the divider and, laughing, doffed their helmets to him as he passed. Harry would have liked to return the gesture, but he had one hand on the handlebars and one on the gun Carlotta hadn’t taken … because Hairy Red sure wasn’t in shape to defend himself with his fists. His belly band was tightened to the last notch, and Harry felt like he was leaking out from under it.

Beyond the bikers was a station wagon, presumed DOA. Beyond the wagon, two figures running downhill. Harry made out a woman and a little girl.

He didn’t have time for emergencies or room for passengers,

They reached the road. They were yelling at him. The adult was a good-looking woman, and it was with some regret that he twisted the accelerator.

— “Harreee!”

Oh, shit. Harry’s hands clamped the brakes. Jeri and Melissa Wilson, standing in the road. Just what he needed.

Your word of honor on record, he thought. Dead or captured by God knows what, Wes Dawson had left his life on Earth’s surface in Harry Reddington’s care. Carlotta Dawson wasn’t the type to survive without help. Stuck out here with a dead station wagon, what were the chances that Jeri Wilson and her daughter would ever tell anyone that Hairy Red had driven past them? He twisted harder, and stopped precisely alongside Melissa, and smiled at the little girl. Shit.

Harry Reddington climbed from the bike as if afraid he’d break, and straightened up slowly. “Jeri. Melissa. Why aren’t you at the Enclave?”

“I have to find my husband. Oh, Harry, thank God! Where are you going?”

Harry answered slowly; he seemed to be doing everything slowly. “I was staying at Congressman Dawson’s house. Now his wife is in Dighton, Kansas, and he sure can’t do anything to take care of her, so it’s up to me.”

“Well. Want some cocoa?”

“Sure, but — You’ve got a Sierra stove?”

“Up the hill.”

“What’s wrong with the car?”

“Out of gas.”

“Let’s get that cocoa.” Harry accepted Jeri’s hospitality knowing full well what it implied, knowing that it was too late. Three passengers on a motorcycle was going to kill his shock absorbers. “Those bushes at the top? I’d better ride the bike up. I’d hate to lose it.”

Harry let the bike coast to a stop. It was hot as soon as they stopped moving. Harry poured a little water onto his bandana and mopped his face. Getting sunburn to go with the windburn. Bloody hell.

“We’re almost there,” Jeri said. “Why are you stopping?”

“Got to,” Harry said. “Everybody off.”

Melissa leaped off from her perch on the gas tank in front of Harry. Jeri climbed off the back. Every muscle complaining. Harry slowly got off and set the stand. Then be tried to bend over.

“Back-rub time?” Jeri asked.

“Can’t hurt,” Harry said. He pointed to a stream that ran beside the road. “Melissa, how about you go fill the canteens.”

“Doesn’t look very clean—”

“Clean enough,” Harry said.

“Pour all the water we have into one canteen and just fill the other from the stream,” Jeri said. “Harry, you look like a letter S. Here, bend over the bike and I’ll work on that.”

Harry waited until Melissa was gone. “I don’t quite know how to say this. Hate to be the one to do it, but somebody’s got to. We’re almost there. Another ten, twelve miles—”

“Yes. Thank you. I know it was out of your way, and it can’t be comfortable, riding three on a bike—”

“It’s not, but that isn’t the problem,” Harry said. “You got across the Colorado River the day before the aliens came, didn’t you?”

“Yes—”

“And all you’ve seen since is a few towns, and that crater.”

“Harry, what are you trying to say?”

“I looked on the map. That town you’re headed for — there’s a dam just above it.” He didn’t say anything for a moment, to let that sink in. “Jeri, I goddam near didn’t get across the Colorado River. There’s nothing left of the town of Needles. Or Bullhead City. Or anything along the Colorado. They hit Hoover Dam with something big. When Lake Mead let go, it scoured out everything for two hundred miles. I mean everything. Dams, bridges, houses, boats — all gone. I had to get a National Guard helicopter to take me and the motorcycle across.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. So I don’t know what we’re going to find up ahead. You got any idea of where Dave lived in that town?”

“No,” Jeri said. “He never told me anything about it. Harry — Harry, it’s got to be all right.”

“Sure,” Harry said. He couldn’t even try to sound sincere.

One more rise. Over the top of that little ridge—

Jeri sat uncomfortably among the gear tied to the bike. She couldn’t stop crying. Wind-whipped, the tears ran tickling across her temples and into her hair. Damn it, I don’t know anything yet, why am I crying? At least Melissa can’t see.

What should I tell her? Warn her? But …

The bike lumbered over the top of the ridge.

A sea of mud lay below. The reservoir had been ten miles long and over a mile wide; now there was only a thick sluggish ripple at its center, a tiny stream with obscenely swollen banks. A thick stench rose from the mud. They rode slowly, feeling that hot wind in their faces, smelling ancient lake bed mud.

There was no need to tell Melissa anything. She could see the dead lake, and must be able to guess what was ahead. It used to be we could protect children, spare them from horrible sights. They always do that in the old novels.

They rode along the mud, banks toward the ruins of the dam at the far end. Long before they reached the dam there were new smells mingled with the smell of decayed mud and the hot summer. Everywhere lay the smell of death.

The town below the dam was gone. In the center the destruction was complete, as if a bulldozer had come through and removed all the buildings, then another came along to spread mud over the foundations. Farther away from the stream bed was a thin line of partially destroyed houses and debris. One house had been torn neatly in half, leaving three-walled rooms to stare out over the wreckage below.

Above the debris line nothing was touched. People moved among the debris, but few ventured down into the muddy bottom area.

They’ve given up looking for survivors. She could feel Harry’s chest and back tighten as they got closer to the ruined town.

A sheriff’s car stood beside a National Guard jeep to block the road. Harry let the bike coast to a stop. He had his letter ready to show, but it wasn’t needed.

“I am Mrs. David Wilson,” Jeri said. “My husband lives here, at 2467 Spring Valley Lane—”

The young man in sheriff’s uniform looked away. So did the Guard officer.

She knew before the sergeant spoke.

“You can see where Spring Valley Lane was, just down there, about a mile,” the sergeant said. He pointed at the center of the mud flat.

“Maybe he wasn’t home,” Melissa said. “Maybe—”

“It happened about two in the morning,” the sergeant said. “Maybe five minutes after they blasted the Russian space station.”

“Warning didn’t help anyway,” the deputy sheriff said. “They did something that knocked out the phone system at the same time. The only way we could warn anybody downstream was to try to drive faster than the water. That wasn’t good enough.”

“How bad was it?” Harry asked.

“Bad,” the Guard officer said. “The whole Great Plains reservoir system, everything along the Arkansas River, is gone. There’s flooding all the way to Little Rock and beyond.” He drew Harry aside, but Jeri could make out what he was saying.

“There’s a temporary morgue in the schoolhouse three miles east of here,” the officer was telling Harry. “Some bodies still there. The best-looking ones. We’ve had to bury a couple of hundred. Maybe more. They’ve got a list of all they could identify.”

“Thanks. I guess we better go there. Anyplace I can get some gas?”

The officer laughed.

The wallet held two pictures of Jeri and one of Melissa. Jeri stared at her own face distorted by the tears that kept welling in her eyes.

My pictures. I think he would have been glad to see me. The driver’s license was soaked, but the name was readable. “That’s his,” Jeri said.

The thinly bearded young man in dirty whites made notes on a clipboard. “David J. Wilson, of Reseda, California,” he said. “Next of kin, Mrs. Geraldine Wilson—”

He went on interminably. He took David’s wallet and went through that; noting down everything inside it. Finally he handed her a shoe box. It contained the wallet, a wristwatch, and a wedding ring. “Sign here, please.”

She carried the box out into the bright Colorado sunshine. My God, what am I going to do now? There was no sign of Harry or Melissa. She sat down on a bench by the school.

What do they want? Why are they doing this? Why?

“Mom—”

Jeri didn’t want to look at her daughter.

“Harry told me, Mom.” Melissa sat beside her on the bench. After a moment Jeri opened her arms, and they held each other.

“We have to go,” Melissa said.

“Go?”

“With Harry.”

“Are we — where are we going with Harry?”

“Dighton, Kansas,” Harry said from behind her. “And we got to be starting right now, Miz W. We’re on the wrong side of the river, and there aren’t any bridges downstream at least as far as Dodge City. We have to go upstream and cross above where the reservoir was. It’s maybe two hundred miles the way we’ve got to go. We need to get started,”

Jeri shook her head. “What — I don’t know anyone in Kansas.”

“No, ma’am, and I don’t either, except Mrs. Dawson.” Harry snorted. It was easy to tell what he was thinking. Harry Red had no woman of his own, just other people’s widows …

“Harry, you don’t want us on your bike.”

“I sure don’t,” he said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

Melissa stood and pulled her by the hand. “Come on, Mom, we don’t want to stay here.”

I might meet David’s friends. Find out how he spent his last months—

That’s morbid, and you’ll more likely meet his New Cookie. Or was she with him? Did the Earth move for you, sweetheart? “All right, let’s go, then. Harry, I thought you were out of gas.”

“He used his letter,” Melissa said. “Talked the highway patrolman into a full tank for the motorcycle.”

“Should get us there,” Harry said. He led the way around the corner. The bike stood there. It didn’t look in very good shape. It looked overloaded even with no one on it.

“Even loaded down with three?”

“Should.” Harry climbed aboard, groaning slightly. He looked a little better; the monstrous belly was tighter, and his back wasn’t quite so thoroughly bent. “Anyplace you want to go first?” he asked.

Jeri shook her head. “They…” — she took Melissa’s hand — “they buried over a hundred in a common grave. I don’t want to see that—”

“Me, neither, Mom.” Melissa hopped onto the bike in front of Harry.

The young are so damned — resilient. I guess they have to be. Especially now. Jeri crammed the shoe box into the saddlebag and climbed on behind Harry. “All right. I’m ready.”

She didn’t look back as they drove out of the town.

15. THE WHEAT FIELDS

They were through the last of the foothills and into the rolling prairies of Kansas , a land of straight roads and small towns. Wheat and cornfields made the landscape monotonous. Whenever they stopped, the hot winds and bright sunshine drove them back into motion again.

Conversation was impossible over the noise of the motorcycle. The radio had nothing to say. Harry drove mindlessly, trying not to think of his back and the cramps in his legs. Fantasies came easily.

Jeri’s a right pretty woman, and she’s all alone. Don’t know what she’ll do in Kansas . Maybe there wouldn’t be enough rooms. They’d have to share a room and a bed, and the first night he could just hold her, and—

Part of his mind knew better, but the thoughts were more pleasant than his back pains.

— =

Dighton , Kansas , was forty miles ahead. The engine sputtered, and Harry switched to the reserve tank. They’d just make it, with a dozen miles to spare. Good enough, thought Harry. Good enough. There was a smaller city four miles away. Logan , Kansas . Nothing to stop there for—

There was a bright flash ahead and to the left. “Holy shit!” Harry shouted. He clamped the brakes, skidding the bike to a halt. “Off! Off and down!” He’d heard George and Vicki’s lectures too.

Jeri and Melissa threw themselves into the ditch alongside the road. Harry laid the motorcycle down. He found he’d been counting. It was nearly a minute before thunder rolled over them. There wasn’t any shock wave.

“Ten, twelve miles,” Harry said.

“We were closer to the other one,” Melissa said. She was trying to look brave and calm, but she was having trouble forgetting that she was a ten-year-old girl who’d been protected all her life.

There were more rumblings, a series of sonic booms, and the sky was full of sound.

“What in hell is worth bombing here?” Harry asked.

Jeri sat up. She shook her head. “I don’t — Harry!” She pointed up. Something dart-shaped crossed the sky, high up, glowing orange at the nose and leaving a wavery vapor trail. “What is that?”

Harry shook his head. The fading vapor trail curled and twisted. Winds did that in the high stratosphere. “Russian? Not like any American plane I ever saw.” They looked at each other in wonder. “Naw,” Harry said. “It couldn’t be.”

The craft was already too small to see … until it began blinking, pulsing in harsh blue pinpoints of light, like the lights Harry had seen that first night.

Dust motes were drifting out of the vapor trail.

Another ship crossed the bright sky, and another, on skewed paths. Dust sifted from the vapor trails. The motes left by the first ship were growing larger, becoming distinct dots. Harry watched with his knees in ditch water. A fourth ship … and the first two were pulsing now, pulling away.

They must be much larger than they seemed. Thirty miles up or more: they had to be that high, given what they were doing. They were streaking through the high atmosphere at near-orbital speed, dropping clouds of … dots, then accelerating free of Earth. So. Dots?

The fourth ship wasn’t pulsing. It was turning, banking in a wide arc.

The dots had become falling soap bubbles, and the lowest of them were breaking open. Hatching. Hatching winged things—

“Paratroopers,” Melissa said. Her voice held wonder. “Mom, they’re invading!”

At nearly sixty-four makasrupkithp of altitude[] the troposphere tore at the hull, blasting the digit ship with flame. Its mass seemed no more protection than the transparent bag around Octuple Leader Chintithpit-mang. The planet was all of his environment, vast beyond imagination, and dreadfully close.

[] {Thirty to thirty-five miles. (A standard trunklength or srupk = 5.8 feet = 176.78 cm = 1.77 meters. 512 skrupkithp = 1 makasrupk = 905.13 meters.)}

He was one in eight rows of sixty-four bubbles each, and each flaccid bubble held a fi’, his face hidden by an oxygen mask. He was first in his line, with the transparent door just a srupk from his face.

They were holding up well. Why not? The lowest ranks were all sleepers. A planet was nothing new to a sleeper. This must be like homecoming to them. As for the spaceborn, the Octuple Leaders and higher ranks, how could they let the sleepers see their fear? And yet—

Aft is raw chaos, a roiling white fog of vapor trail. But look down, where greens and blues and browns sweep beneath. Here the patterns are equally random, for worlds happen by accident, and there is no sign of mind imposing order. Layers of curdled water vapor almost make patterns. They seem more real, more solid, than the land. The snaky curve of yonder river holds more water than is stored in all of Message Bearer. Any one in that line of mountains they’d crossed a few 64-breaths ago would outmass the Foot itself—

“Octuples, you disembark now.”

Octuple Leader Chintithpit-mang’s breathing became shallow, fast.

He had been born in the year that Thuktun Flishithy rounded this world’s primary star. The Year Zero Herd had all been born within a couple of eight-days of each other — naturally — and that age group was closer than most. One and all, males and females, they were dissidents. They had no use for worlds.

Chintithpit-mang fiercely resented the Herdmaster’s splitting of the Year Zero Herd. He did not want to be here.

The aft door cracked. Air hissed away. The bubbles grew taut. The door folded outward while the chamber filled with a thin singing: troposphere ripping at the digit ship. A line of bubbles streamed out, sixty-four fithp falling above the fluffy cloudscape. Another stream of bubbles followed them. Then — The Octuple Leader was first in line, of course.

Falling meant nothing to Chintithpit-mang. It was the buffeting that held him in terror. The survival bubbles dropped through the troposphere, slowing. The digit ship shrank to a dot … and presently began pulsing, accelerating, pushing itself back to orbit.

The buffeting increased. Thicker air. The shape of the land was taking on detail. There, the crater that was both landmark and first strike; beyond, the village that was their target. Chintithpit-mang watched the numbers dropping on his altimeter.

Now. He opened the zipper. Air puffed away. He crawled out of the fabric and let it fall away into the wind. The land was yellow and brown, crossed by a white line of road, and now was a good time to learn if his flexwing would open.

It popped out by itself, and dragged at the air, unfolding as pressurized gas filled the struts. His senses spun as blood tried to settle into his feet. The landing shoe on a hind foot had been jerked almost loose. He bent his head and stretched to adjust it; his digits would just reach that far.

The shoes prisoned his toes: big, clumsy platforms of foamed material that would flatten on impact so that the bones of his feet would not likewise flatten.

He looked for other flexwings. The colors of his Octuple were rose and black and green. He found six others and steered toward them. One missing. Where?

The land drifted: He steered above the road that the crater had broken, then along the road toward the city. Six flexwings moved into line behind him. Still one missing. And no way to avoid the ground now. The planet was all there was.

Details expanded. Three dots scrambled from a tiny vehicle to lie by the side of the road. He steered toward them. They grew larger, LARGER! Chintithpit-mang bellowed and pulled back in his harness to catch more air in his flexwing, increasing lift, striving desperately to avoid contact with the planet.

The planet slammed against his feet. They stung. His landing shoes were smashed flat. He stripped them off, dropped his flexwing and looked about him.

Big. Planets were big.

A line of insect-sized flyers converged toward the town ahead. Those weren’t parachutes. “Delta wings,” Harry Red murmured. “Hang gliders.” The shapes hanging under the delta wings were not human.

Harry ran to the bike and lifted the seat. The .45 Government Model felt comfortable in his hand, and the slide worked with a satisfying click, but the secure feeling the big pistol usually gave him was entirely lacking.

A group of hang gliders broke away from the formation and came toward them. They split into two groups, one on either side of them.

Melissa peered through the binoculars. “Elephants,” she said. “Baby elephants.”

Jeri grabbed the glasses. Then she began to laugh. She handed the glasses to Harry.

He said, “That funny, eh?’ and looked.

Baby elephants with two trunks drifted out of the sky beneath paper airplanes. Harry chortled. They were wearing tall, conspicuous elevator shoes. He laughed outright. Rifles with bayonets were slung over their backs. Harry stopped laughing.

Two lines of delta-wing gliders swept along a hundred yards to either side of them. They were sinking fast into the wheat fields. A much larger group had drifted over Logan .

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Harry shouted. He raised the bike.

It wouldn’t start. Laying it on its side in the dirt hadn’t been a good idea. The smell of gas was strong.

The electric starter whirred again. The engine caught. Harry turned the bike—

A delta-wing craft glided onto the road half a mile behind them. The Invader came down hard. It freed its weapon, then stepped out of the elevator shoes. Other gliders settled to each side. A much larger vehicle swept overhead: a flat oval with upward-pointing fins. It glided along the road, settling slowly, until it landed more than a mile away.

“We’re surrounded.” Jeri sounded tired, already defeated.

“Let’s go,” Harry ordered. “Out in the fields. Get out there and lay low. Go on, now.”

Jeri took Melissa’s hand and dragged her off into the wheat fields. They left an obvious trail behind them. The wheat stalks were thickly planted, and you couldn’t move through without knocking some of them down.

We can’t hide. Maybe they don’t want us. Harry took a fresh grip on the pistol and followed.

Eight-cubed Leader Harpanet kept only the vaguest memories of his fall.

Bubbles had streamed from digit ship Number Twenty-six into a dark blue sky and were instantly lost in immensity. Far, far below, a vast rippling white landscape waited for him. Voices chattered through a background of static; voices called his name. He didn’t answer.

He might have spoken anytime during the years of preparation. He’d heard lectures on planetary weather: the variations in temperature, “wind chill factor,” and the coriolis forces that cause air to whirl with force sufficient to tear dwellings apart: A vast worldwide storm. accidentally formed, beyond the control of fithp. The Predecessors’ messages tried to tell us. Random death in the life support system!

Harpanet had been in the Breaker group, trying to learn of the prey. They’d watched broadcasts that leaked through the target world’s atmosphere. I can’t make sense of these pictures. They don’t mean anything. The more he knew, the more alien they seemed. Breaker Takpusseh could live with his ignorance and wait to learn more. To Harpanet, these are not fithp at all. They build tools, and they kill, and we will never know more.

Others of the spaceborn had had private interviews with Fistarteh-thuktun, and later been taken from the lists of Winterhome-bound soldiers. What they told the priest must have resembled his own thoughts: I can’t stand it. The things who will try to kill me are the least of it. I fear the air and I fear the land, and I can’t tolerate the thought of an ocean! They were shunned thereafter. Their mothers never mentioned them again.

Harpanet could have joined the dissidents. He had kept his silence.

He kept it now. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t make a sound save for a thin keening like the keening of the air through which he fell. The thin skin of the bubble rippled under the atmosphere’s buffeting. The sky grew more inaccessible every second.

He was late to open his bubble. The flexwing popped and the struts began to expand before it was clear. Harpanet shrieked. He was falling toward a rippling white landscape, vast in extent, and his collapsed bubble was still tangled around his flexwing. He clawed his way up the suspension harness and forced his digits under the fabric against the resistance of the inflated struts, and pulled. The planet’s white face came up to smash him.

It was nothing. He fell through it without resistance. He was still clawing at the bubble fabric, and suddenly it was floating loose above him. He had to nerve himself to let go of the flexwing; and only then did it begin to drag at the air until he was flying.

It was some time before he recovered enough to look for other flexwings.

He found a swarm of midges far away. Away from the sun. It is late in the day. The planet turns away from the star. My warriors are spinward.

The octuples under his command had steered toward their place on the rim of the great circle on the Herdmaster’s map. The circle would converge. Defenses would be erected. Digit ships would presently pick them up and return them to the darkness, the immensity, the security of space.

A rise of land blocked his view of the other wings. Undulations of yellow fur streamed beneath him, terribly fast, and Harpanet had seconds in which to learn to fly. Through his terror came a single memory, that lifting the fore edge of the flexwing would cause him to slow and rise. He slid back in the harness. The wing rose, and slowed … and hovered, and dropped, and picked up speed, and hurled him against the dirt. He rolled. The harness rolled with him; the flexwing wrapped around him; one of the struts hissed in his face as his bayonet punctured it. When he finally managed to disentangle himself, his radio was dead. One knee was twisted, so that he could walk on three legs only. Gravity pulled at him.

It was an experience he would never want to remember. But he was sixty-fours of makasrupkithp to antispinward from his assigned landing point.

Jenny woke with a start. A duty sergeant was standing over her. He chattered excitedly. “Right now, Major. The Admiral wants you in the war room now; it’s an emergency. There’s an invasion.”

“Invasion? She sat up. “All right, Sergeant. I’m coming.”

“Now, Major—”

“I heard you. Thank you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She dressed quickly, putting on combat fatigues. He hadn’t said anything about sidearms. We’re at war, but surely they weren’t invading Colorado Springs !

When she reached the war room she wasn’t so sure.

Admiral Carrell, still in civilian clothes, was in one of the balcony offices overlooking the control room. Jenny stood outside the door, wondering what to do.

“Come in, Major.” Carrell pointed to the big screens below. They showed Kansas and southern Nebraska dotted with red flashes and hand-drawn gray squares. Jenny stared for a moment, trying to understand.

“We don’t have symbols for a parachute invasion of Kansas ,” Admiral Carrell said. “So we had to draw them in. Not that it means much, since we don’t know all the places they’re landing.”

“Are all those red marks nuclear strikes?” Jenny asked.

“Probably none of them,” Carrell said. “So far they haven’t used nukes. They haven’t had to.”

“No, sir.” Kinetic energy weapons. Throw big rocks.

An Army lieutenant general bustled in. He wore combat fatigues and he’d buckled on his pistol.

“You’ve met General Toland,” Carrell said. “No? General, Major Crichton is my assistant. What’s the score, Harvey?”

“Damned if I know. Thor, this doesn’t make sense. They can’t possibly be invading Kansas . I don’t care how goddam big that ship is; it can’t hold that many troops.”

“Then what are they doing?”

General Toland shook his head.

Carrel said, “Jenny, I want you to get those sci-fi gentry together and get them working. You can use the big briefing room. Get TV monitors set up, get maps, get coffee, get whiskey, hell, get them prostitutes if that’s what they want, but get me some explanations!”

Harry lay in the wheat field and sweated. There was a hot wind and bright sun, but he’d have sweated in a blizzard.

He couldn’t see the road, but he heard a vehicle on it. The motor didn’t sound like anything Harry had ever heard before.

Now there were sounds in the wheat. Someone — something — was coming.

The wheat was too thick to see through. His world had shrunk to five yards or less. He could just see Melissa’s bright head scarf. Should have told her to take it off. Too late now. Not that we can hide anyway.

The sounds came closer. They were all around him.

What the fuck do I do? The pistol held no comfort for him. He wasn’t a good shot. He remembered a merc who’d served in Africa telling him about elephants. They were hard to stop, harder to kill. You had to hit them just right. A .45 probably wouldn’t even bother one, not unless he hit a vital spot—

They aren’t elephants. Maybe they’re not as tough. And maybe I don’t know where the vital spots are.

He heard Jeri scream, and then two shots from her Walther. Melissa’s scarf bounced up, then something happened and she disappeared into the wheat. There was nothing to shoot at. Harry leaped to his feet and ran toward the sound.

As he did, he heard something behind him. He turned—

An elephant was charging him. Another closed in from the side. They were wearing hooded coats! Harry held out the pistol and fired. The elephant kept coming. A flurry of whips lashed his arm and side, spinning him around, tearing the pistol from his hand.

The other elephant came toward him. The trunk was built like a cat-o’-nine-tails; it held a bayoneted rifle. The bayonet was pointed at his throat. “Melissa! Run!” Jeri screamed. Harry turned to go to her.

Something lashed around his ankles and whipped them away from him. He fell heavily into the wheat field. The elephant stood over him, bayonet pointed at him. The other came and stood with It.

“Psh-thish-ftpph.”

Harry glared up.

The elephants repeated their phrase, only louder.

“Okay, goddamm it, you got me!” He stayed where he was, rolled half onto his knees. Give him half a chance and he’d—

Once more the aliens shouted. Then suddenly the trunk swept down and rolled Harry onto his back. One Invader pulled Harry’s hands out over his head. The other reared above him.

My God, they’re going to trample me! Harry writhed to get away. The foot came down on his chest. It settled almost gently. Harry struggled: he yanked one hand free and scraped at the foot with his nails, tried to push it upward, tried to roll. The pressure increased. There were claws under his jaw, and a mass that was crushing his chest. The air sighed out of him in a despairing hiss. He blacked out.

Fog in his mind; memory of a nightmare. He was breathing like a bellows. Harry rolled over in … wheat? Inhuman screaming and bellowing reached his ears, sounds like a fire in a zoo.

Oh, God. Jeri! Harry tried to stand up and made it to one knee.

The baby elephants were converging on the road. Harry glimpsed Melissa on an Invader’s back, held firmly by a branching trunk. Jeri was walking, stumbling, with Invaders around her.

A vehicle waited on the road, the size of a large truck, but it had no wheels. It looked like a huge sled. The motor wasn’t running.

They loaded Melissa into the vehicle, then pushed Jeri in behind her. Others jumped onto the broad platform. The vehicle lifted on a cloud of dust: an air cushion. It sped away.

They seemed to have forgotten Harry entirely.

He crawled away slowly, disturbing the wheat as little as possible. What else could he do? They’d taken the big gun, but they might have left the motorcycle, and Carlotta still waited. Unless they’d landed there too.

By vehicle and on foot, the prey fled the village. Humans on foot were allowed to surrender. They had to be taught: in many cases they must he knocked down and rolled into position. Then, if they could stand, they were allowed to pass. But vehicles were considered to be weapons and were treated as such.

The village had suffered more damage than was needed. It grieved Chintithpit-mang: locals dead, or torn and still screaming, buildings smashed, the smell of explosives and of burning, the flattened crater where the rock came down … We’re dealing with unknowns. Better to err on the side of excessive strength.

By asking those he passed, Chintithpit-mang found the leader of his eight-cubed in a large red building with pillars in front.

Siplisteph was surrounded by squarish bundles of printed sheets, bound at one edge and gaudily decorated. He was leafing through a bundle of print with drawings in it. The youthful sleeper seemed relaxed, very much at home. He looked up dreamily and said, “It’s so good to see a sky again.” His eyes focused on Chintithpit-mang. “You come late.”

Chintithpit-mang said, “One never reported. Otherwise we have no casualties.”

Siplisteph lifted his digits in response. “We have lost warriors. You are promoted. In addition to your octuple, you will be deputy leader to your eight-squared.”

“Were there heavy losses, eight-cubed Leader?”

“Many within the leadership. We have lost an eight-cubed leader.”

“The leadership. They are all spaceborn—”

“It would be well not to finish that thought, Chintithpit-mang.”

Sleeper! Winterhome is home to you, but how can we find ourselves within this infinite horizon, beneath this tremendous sky? He could say none of that. “Lead me.”

“Continue your report.”

“I obey. Eight-cubed Leader, I took two females. One was mated to a big male, the other their child. I took the male’s surrender and left him.”

Siplisteph’s ears snapped alert. “The male surrendered?”

“He had to be shown.” But the episode had left a bad taste, and Chintithpit-mang went on talking. “Eight-cubed Leader, I knocked him down and put my foot on him, lightly. He struggled; he fought. I pushed harder until he stopped struggling. But when I took my foot away he did not move. I wonder if I simply killed him.”

“This is the Breakers’ problem, not ours.” Siplisteph’s eyes returned to the pictures.

“Lead me,” said Chintithpit-mang, and he went to rejoin his octuple. But it bothered him. By now the taking of Winterhome, in falling rocks and disrupted supply chains, must have killed close to eight to the sixth of the poor misshapen rogues. Well, that was what war was about. But a fi’ did not kill needlessly, did not kill when he could take surrender. If the beast was so fragile, why did it continue to fight?

Chintithpit-mang remembered its rib cage sagging under his foot. It thrashed and clawed and finally stopped moving … it didn’t know how to surrender. They didn’t know how to surrender. Bad.

16. SUBMISSION

The huilside wall was down and level; the door was in the ceiling. Wes judged that things were likely to remain so for some time.

There had been an hour or so of acceleration, then half an hour of freefall; then the ship had begun to spin. Some days had passed without further change. Odds were it would take an hour or more to remove the spin.

Spin would hamper the mother ship in a battle. Earth must he far aft and out of reach.

Nikolai and Dmitri talked qialetly: Nikolai sullen, Dmitri doing most of the talking. Wes understood a few words, and sympathized. Nikolai was once again a cripple.

The aliens had wasted no time. They were already teaching their language to the humans. Wes found this reassuring. However, the Soviets were educated separately, and they had expressed disinterest in sharing their lessons with Wes. He went over them alone, whispering alien sounds as he remembered them.

Srupk: Wes had memorized the term as swank, “standard trunklength.” It was just about six feet. A makasrupk was five hundred and twelve strunks, just about a kilometer.

Wes had sought a word for the trunk. There wasn’t one. A sharp snort, snnfp, named the nostrils, or the upper trunk. Pa’ was one branch, one finger of a trunk; pathp, the plural, could mean the entire cluster.

Chaytrif meant foot.

Sfaftiss was Takpusseh’s title; it meant teacher. The other sfaftiss didn’t speak, and his name was harder: Raztupisp-minz. The two sfafissthp looked aged, but as if they had weathered in different patterns. Were there two races of Invader? But they called themselves by the same words:

Chsapt meant move. Chtaptisk: moving. Chtaptiskfithp meant themselves, everyone who had left their home planet. The Traveler People?

Fi’ was the word for an alien. A syllable chopped short by a kind of hiccup, it sounded like a piece of a word. And fithp was the entire species. As if an individual was not a whole, complete thing, just as a pa’ was only one branch of the pathp, the trunk. Herdbeasts? Takpusseh said tribe, not herd; but men didn’t say herd to mean thinking beings.

Tashayamp was Takpusseh’s assistant. Dawson thought of her as female: the leather or plastic patch on her harness covered a different area, further back on her torso. He knew he might have the sexes reversed; he was not prepared to ask—

The door opened upward, a trapdoor. The prisoners looked up, waiting.

Takpusseh: Wes had learned to recognize their teacher or trainer by the loose look of his thick skin, and by his eyes, which behaved as if the lights were always too bright. Takpusseh watched while alien soldiers attached a platform at the level of the trapdoor. The platform descended smoothly along grooves in the padding of the starboard wall. The platform might have held one alien; it held Wes and Arvid with room to spare. Wes had expected a ladder, but a ladder would be useless to these aliens.

Takpusseh and Tashayamp and eight armed soldiers waited in the corridor. The platform descended again for Dmitri and Nikolai. They had left Giorge behind.

Arvid had been hoping for a window. There were none. The soldiers moved four ahead, four behind. Takpusseh and Tashayamp moved forward to join the prisoners. They had found a wheeled cart for Nikolai. Arvid took charge of pushing it. Wes was trying to tell Tashayamp that they needed heat to prepare their food. Arvid ignored that. He was trying to get some idea of the mother ship’s layout.

The rug was spongy and squishy-wet; the prisoners had not been given shoes. Doors in the floor opened upward against the corridor wall.

“I believe,” Arvid said in Russian, “that any aperture big enough for one of the aliens would pass two or three of us at once. Perhaps they will not think to guard small openings that will pass a man.”

Dmitri nodded.

“They are surely not built for climbing. A wall that could be scaled by a man would be impossible for one of them.”

Dmitri nodded again.

“Have you seen anything I might have missed?”

Dmitri spoke. “You waited until we were in a corridor, and moving, before you said any of this. I approve, but are you certain that our trainers do not speak Russian?”

“They speak English and do not hide the fact. Why would they hide a knowledge of Russian? In any case, we must speak sometime.”

“Perhaps. Do you think we could use their rifles?”

Grooves for the branched trunk were far forward on the barrel, and so was the trigger. The bore was huge. The butt was short and very broad. “It would not fit against a man’s shoulder, and it would probably kick him senseless, unless… you’d have to brace it against something, a floor, a wall, a piece of furniture. Difficult to aim.”

“Don’t do anything at all without word from me. What of Dawson ? Will he try something foolish?”

“I—” Arvid cut it off. They had reached their destination.

The wide doorway would be used when the mother ship was under acceleration. The permanently fixed platform elevator next to it would be for use under spin gravity. The room below was big, and more than a dozen aliens were already present.

The prisoners descended; the soldiers remained above.

The aliens stared up. Most of them had their trunks folded up against the top of the heads: evidently a resting position. The eyelids drooped mournfully. The eyes had black pupils fading to smoky-gray whites. They were set wide, but not too wide to prohibit binocular vision. The thick muscle structure at the base of the trunk formed grooves; with the trunk up, the eyes focused along the grooves, like gunsights. Their stare was unnerving.

Nikolai was wire-tense, staring his captors down. Arvid murmured, “Docile, Nikolai. We docile servants of the new regime await instructions.”

Nikolai nodded. His eyes dropped He sounded calm enough. “I saw no air vents. The air may be filtered through the carpeting. And the rug was wet. They like wet feet.”

The room would have held three or four times as many. Takpusseh spoke rapidly to the assembled aliens, then more slowly to the humaqs. Arvid tried to file the introductions: Pastempehkeph. K’turfookeph. Fathisteh-tulk. Chowpeentulk. Fistartehthuktun. Koolpooleh. Paykurtank. Two smaller aliens were not introduced. They stared at the humans and huddled close against larger aliens. Children, then.

He’d have trouble remembering the names. It was the array that was important. The aliens came in clusters; he’d be a long time learning their body language, but that much was obvious.

Pastempeh-keph (male) and K’turfookeph (female), with their child (male), were the top of the ladder, the Chairman or President or Admiral. The similarity in the last syllable meant they were mated; he’d learned that much already. One would hold title. Arvid would not lightly assume that it was the male. Similarly, Fathistehtalk and Chowpeentulk were mated, and they stood with the Admiml. Advisors? The male was doing all the talking. So.

Fistarteh-thuktun (male), Koolpooleh (male), and Paykurtank (female) also formed a cluster. The extra syllables would mean that Fistarteh-thuktun had a mate. He was an old one, with wrinkled skin and pained-looking eyes… like the teacher, Takpusseh. He wore elaborate harness, like tapestry made with silver wire. He studied the humans like a judge. The pair with him were younger: clear eyes, smoother skin, quick movements.

Nikolai said, “I thought the top ranks would wear uniforms. They all wear those harnesses with the backpacks. The colors and patterns, could those—”

“Yes, insignia of rank. Dawson believes that we will not see clothing on any alien. With those bulky bodies they will have trouble shedding heat.”

“I would not have thought of that.”

The room darkened. One wall seemed to disappear, and Arvid realized that he was in a motion picture theater.

Rogachev recognized the huge Invader spacecraft, a cylinder about as wide as it was tall. The aft rim was spiky with smaller craft, and some had not been moored in place yet. An arc of worldscape, blue and white, might have been the Earth, though Arvid could not pick out any detail of landscape. A polished sphere nearby… a moon? No, it was drifting slowly.

Takpusseh was talking. Arvid caught a word here and there, and translated freely to “Watch, don’t move. You see… trip (chtapt) to (Earth?). Build… Thuktun Flishithy.” Arvid smiled. He had thought that was their name for the mother ship, and sure enough, that was what they were putting together onscreen.

He watched and didn’t move. The aliens around him were silent, motionless.

The last of the smaller craft were moved into place in seconds. This was time-lapse photography. A length of stovepipe, a little wider than Thuktun Flishithy, drifted in from the edge of the screen and was moored in place behind the ring of smaller craft.

The shiny sphere was moved into place at the fore end of the mother ship. It was bigger than all of the rest of the ship combined. A pod, perhaps a cluster of sensing instruments, reached out on a snakelike arm to peer around it.

Something fell inward from the edge of the picture: bright flames of chemical rockets around… something rectangular. It dwindled to a dot, headed straight for the ship. “Put Podo Thuktun in Thuktun Flishithy,” Takpusseh said.

That word: thuktun. He had thought it meant skill or knowledge, but-Fistarteh-thuktun? A mate for that one had not been named. Was that particular fi’ married to the ship?

All in good time. Arvid glanced at Dawson; Dawson’s eyes were riveted to the screen. That left Arvid free to covertly observe the aliens.

Five of the fithp showed signs of a lingering illness: an illness that left loose skin and wounded-looking eyes. It didn’t seem to be a matter of age — Pastempeh-keph and K’turfookeph (Admiral and mate) were not youths, but they hadn’t had the sickness either. The sick ones tended to cluster. They looked to be about the same age; the rest varied enormously.

The Admiral’s advisor and his mate were among the sick ones. Another sick one was trying to talk to them, while a female rather unsubtly tried to prevent it.

A division among the aliens might be usefuL

Wes Dawson was watching a planet recede… a world colored like Earth, blue with clotted white frosting — He spent no more than a few seconds trying to make out the shapes of continents. None were familiar. Of course not.

The Invader ship had been on camera for only a minute or so. The camera that filmed that would have remained behind. But Thukiun Fllsljithy was more than the cylindrical warship that had reached Earth. A sphere rode the nose, a tremendous fragile looking bubble in contrast to the warship’s spiky, armored look. Fuel supply, of course. And the ring — He was looking aft along Thuktun Flishithy’s flank, past a massive ring like a broad wedding band, watching a sun grow smaller. A second sun moved in from offscreen. Both shrank to bright stars: white stars, the light not too different from Earth’s own sun. He’d anticipated that from the color of the lights in his cell.

The cameras showed a steady white light behind the ring. Wes saw-and wasn’t sure he saw-the drive flame go dim, and a faint violet tinge emerge from the black background.

Wes Dawson wouldn’t have noticed a bomb going off in the theater. With a fraction of his attention he tried to track what the Instructor was saying. “Thuktun Flishithy must move very fast before we use the (long word). Saves—” something. “Halfway to Earth-star” — Earth’s sun? — “we begin to slow down. This is difficult.”

But the pictures made more sense than the words.

Time onscreen speeded up. The drive flame brightened, then died-and the background violet glow he thought he’d seen wasn’t there. Tiny machines and mote-sized aliens emerged to dislodge the bubble at the nose; the stars wheeled one, hundred and eighty degrees around; the drive flamed again, and dimmed, and the stars forward were embedded in violet-black-so he hadn’t imagined it-and Thuktun Flishithy surged past the abandoned fuel tank and onward.

The way the film jumped, a good deal of it must have been missing. Perhaps it would have shown too much interior detail. Wes took it for granted that prisoners would not learn much of the interior detail of Thuktun Flishithy. The next scene was a timelapse view of an ordinary star becoming a bright star, and brighter, until it virtually exploded in Dawson’s face. He cursed and covered his eyes, and immediately opened them again.

They must have dived within the orbit of Mercury. Somewhere in there, the white glow of the drive had brightened… and the ship’s wedding band had vanished. Dawson hadn’t noticed just when it disappeared. Now he grunted as if he’d been kicked in the stomach.

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 iato 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 into 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

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.

The saddlebags with his gear had vanished. They’d taken them along with Jeri and Melissa—

God damn the bastards! Harry cursed steadily until he had control of himself. Then he felt ashamed. Cursing wouldn’t change the situation. He’d lost two women he was supposed to protect. The fact that he couldn’t have done anything about it didn’t help much.

He felt a lump in his pocket. The little .25 Beretta was still there. They hadn’t bothered to search him. He thought about that for a moment, then began to search the wheat field. Sure enough, a blue-gray object was just visible in the wheat. The .45 automatic, with dirt in the barrel. One of the invaders must have flung it aside.

Why the saddlebags, then? Clothes? Jeri’s and Melissa’s clothing. Which means they’ll be keeping the girls. Why take them and not me? But there was no answer to that.

The motorcycle started easily enough. It hadn’t been damaged at all. He heard noises ahead. The Invaders were still in Logan . Harry cleaned out the barrel while he felt something stir in his guts, but then he shook his head. It would be pointless. The Invaders wore body armor. His pistol hadn’t done him any good at all when there were only a few of them. Charging into Logan to rescue Jeri wouldn’t do Jeri any good. She might not even be there any longer.

He tried to remember the map. That part of Kansas was laid out in a grid, roads at section and range boundaries, other roads parallel to them. Few diagonal roads. Farmhouses at regular intervals. Dirt tracks crossed the wheat fields. Those tended to parallel the main roads, too, but they led to farmhouses, not towns.

Logan was several miles ahead Harry gambled that there’d be a farm access mad leading north before he came into sight of the Invaders. He put the pistol into his kidney belt where he could reach it easily, and started off east.

He saw the smoke long before he reached the ruined farmhouse. He came up slowly, ready to leap off the motorcycle and run into the wheat. He stopped several times to listen, but there was nothing to hear. The dirt road led through the wheat fields to the farmhouse. He could go back the way he’d come; or go on. He went on.

The house itself was a wreck, roof sagging, doors torn from their hinges, but it hadn’t burned. The barn was burned to ashes. The bodies of a man and two dogs lay in the dusty yard between the house and the barn. A shotgun lay across the man’s chest.

Another dog whimpered from under the wreckage of the farmhouse.

“Ho! Anyone home?” Harry shouted. There was no answer except the whimpering of the dog. He stopped the motorcycle and got off. Large tracks were visible in the dust. They didn’t really look like the tracks of elephants, because they left claw marks. Nothing on Earth left tracks like that.

He stalked cautiously around the yard, and after a while he went inside the house. There were women’s clothes in the closet with the farmer’s clothes. Another room had been occupied by a boy. Harry guessed he’d been about Melissa’s age, ten or eleven. A model of the starship Enterprise hung from the ceiling and toy guns stood in the corner. Clothing for a small boy was flung onto the floor. Two dresser drawers were empty.

Prisoners? They’re taking women and children, but not men? That doesn’t make sense.

There were letters scattered across the front room floor. John Thomas Kensington, RFD #3… Harry went back outside. Kensington lay on his back, his eyes staring upward to the sky. He’d been torn in two halves by one shot. The bore on those alien guns was as big as a fist. Twenty yards from his body the ground had been torn up by something large thrashing in the dust, and there were dark stains. John Thomas Kensington had sold his farm dearly. Harry saluted and went back into the collapsing house.

They take their dead with them. Dead or wounded. A shotgun ought to do some damage at hat range. Wonder what he was using?

The refrigerator had been wrecked, but the food inside wasn’t spoiled. Harry rooted around until he found bread and cheese and lunch meat and made a sandwich. While he was looking for bread he found a box of shells for the shotgun. It was number six bird shot, suitable for doves and quail. Not much of a load for elephants. He waited until he’d eaten before he went to take the gun from the man’s lifeless fingers.

The dog under the porch continued to whimper.

Bury the dead? Shoot the dog before it turns feral or starves?

Harry had always believed himself tough, but he’d never thought he’d be faced with decisions like this. Dead bodies were matters for the police and the coroner’s office and the undertakers.

There won’t be a coroner. Harry went looking for a shovel.

He made another dozen miles before the sonic boom tore at his ears. Harry braked the motorcycle and looked up. Three contrails led from the west, passing nearly overhead. Harry cheered. “Go get the bastards!” he shouted.

As he watched, one of the contrails broke into a ball of black smoke. Something bright seemed to stab upward from the east, and the second contrail died. The third traced a complex curve; then it, too, ended in a ball of black smoke.

“Damn. Damn and hell.” Harry started the bike again.

The big situation map in the war room changed every few minutes, but no one was sure how current its information was. A vast area of Kansas , stretching northward into Nebraska , was covered with bright red symbols. Someone had finally got stylized parachutes to show where alien units had landed. They covered an area that looked much like an amoeba, with its nucleus at Great Bend . Pseudopods reached east and west.

The Situation Room was the center of the underground North American Air Defense complex. It was located under nearly a mile of granite, separated from the outside world by sealed corridors, water barriers, guard rooms, and more granite. A row of offices overlooked the Situation Room. Jack Clybourne stood outside one of the office doors.

Jenny came up to him and winked. He didn’t respond. “I’m supposed to report to Admiral Carrell,” Jenny said. Her voice held slight irritation.

“Sure.” Jack shook his head. “Sorry, hon. I’m about as useful as a fifth leg here. Where’s the President safer? But I’m the only Presidential Protective Unit agent here, and I have to act like it.”

“Yeah. Look, there’s no such thing as off duty down here, but we have to eat sometimes. Sleep, too…Dinner tonight?”

“I’d love that—”

“I’ll be around.” She grinned. “If they leave the door open, be sure to watch the screens.”

“You’ve got pictures of the aliens?”

“We think so.” Jenny tapped at the door. It wasn’t closed properly, and the door swung open. One wall of the office was glass. It overlooked the big screen displays and control consoles on the floor below. There was one desk. President David Coffey sat there staring at the maps. Admiral Carrell stood next to him. General bland stood grimly on the other side of the desk from Carrell, his lips a tight line.

“Roughly a circle,” Admiral Carrell said.

“But what do they want?” the President asked.

“This is obviously a reconnaissance in force,” Carrell said. He shook his head. “As to what their ultimate aims might be, I don’t know, sir.” He looked up to see Jenny at the door. “Come in, Major. Have your intelligence people got the displays ready?”

“Yes, sir. We have reports from refugees, and some pictures one brought out. The pictures should be up from the lab any minute.”

“Have you seen them?”

“No, sir, they’re color, and you don’t look at color while it’s being developed.”

“But you have descriptions?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, tell us!” the President demanded.

“Mr. President-sir, it will only be another minute until the pictures are ready. I’d-sir, I’d rather you saw for yourself.”

“Refugee reports,” General Toland said. “They’re letting people out, then?”

“Yes, sir, if they’re walking. No vehicles allowed out. Anyone who goes out is required to undergo a sort of ceremony.”

“Ceremony?”

“Yes, sir. They-the science-fiction people say it’s reasonable, given the way the aliens look, but—”

“Major, your air of mystery is rapidly becoming tiresome,” Admiral Carrell said.

The phone chirped. Saved.

The Admiral lifted the phone. “Carrell… Yes, put the photographs up on the big screens. Let everyone see what we’re up against.”

There were five screens. One by one they filled with pictures of baby elephants. Some hung from paper airplanes and wore elevator shoes. Others were on foot. All earned weirdly shaped rifles.

Laughter sounded on the floor below, but it soon died away as the screen showed photographs of ruined buildings and wrecked cars, with alien shapes in the foreground. Bodies lay in the background of most of the pictures.

Jenny studied the photographs. They were quite good; the photographer who’d taken them said she’d sold to Sports Illustrated and other major magazines. That’s the enemy.

“They do look like elephants,” Admiral Carrell said.

“Yes, sir,” Jenny said. “But they’re not really elephants.”

“No. They’re invaders,” General Toland said.

The President studied the screens carefully, then turned to Jenny. “This ceremony. What was it?”

“Before they’ll let anyone leave the area they control, they make you lie down on your back, arms stretched out overhead. Then one of the-aliens-puts his foot on you. After that you’re free to go.”

“And your sci-fi people think that’s reasonable?” the President asked.

“Yes, sir. The way the aliens are built, they must think in terms of trampling their enemies beneath their feet. They may be the biggest animals on their planet. Most Earth species have a surrender ritual. This is theirs.”

The President nodded slowly.

God, he looks awful. I wonder if he got any sleep at all?

“Do your experts have any theories on what the invaders want?” the President demanded.

“The Earth,” Jenny said.

General Toland was adamant. “Kick their butts, don’t piss on them,” he said. “Mr. President, we cannot commit our forces piecemeal! You’ve got to let me gather my strength before we go in there.”

“American citizens are being killed there. Property destroyed. God damn it, they’ve invaded the United States .” David Coffey’s voice was cold with anger. His hands gripped the arms of his chair. “We have to do something! What’s the Army for if it can’t defend the nation?”

Toland fought visibly to control himself.

“That is hardly fair, Mr. President,” Admiral Carrell said. “The Army is not generally deployed to fight enemies within the nation.”

“If they’d let us call up some reservists before that goddam ship got here,” General Toland muttered. “Mr. President, I’m doing all I can. Our best units are in Europe and Central America and Lebanon , and there’s no chance we can get those troops home. Not while the enemy dominates space. They can see everything we do!”

See it and kill it, Jenny thought. Lasers for the airplanes, kinetic energy weapons for ships…

“So when will we be able to do something for our people, General Toland?” the President demanded.

“Two more days,sir. I hope. Mr. President, we can’t mass our forces! The commander at Fort Knox loaded tanks onto a train to send west. They hit the train. Their air defenses are superb. Anything we send into that area either gets zapped from space or hit by a ground-launched missile.”

“Or worse,” Jenny said.

They all looked at her.

“They’re setting up ground-based laser defense systems. The reports are just coming in. I’ll have them on the screens in a few minutes.”

“Lasers,” the President said.

“Yes, sir. Much better than ours.”

“So what the hell are they doing with them?” General Toland demanded.

Jenny shook her head. “We don’t know, sir. It appears they’re setting up a strong perimeter defense inside the area they control — but we don’t know, because we can’t get inside there to find out.”

“So they have it all their way.” The President’s voice was low and tired, as if he’d already been defeated.

It frightened Jenny. “Not all their way, sir,” she said. “Some reports get out. Mostly ham radio. They don’t get to broadcast long before something smashes them. Also, there’s bound to be resistance. National Guardsmen. Farmers with deer rifles.”

“Sure, they’ll fight,” Toland said. “Even without orders.”

Jenny nodded. “But they’ll be disorganized. We can’t communicate!”

“And there’s nothing else we can do?” the President asked. There was despair in his voice. “With all our power, all our nuclear arsenal-can’t we use nukes on them?”

“They’re all mixed in with our people,” Admiral Carrell said.

“General, do something. Hurt them,” the President said. “Hit them hard. Isn’t there any place where there are a lot of them, and none of our people?”

“None, no. Not many, yes,” Toland said.

The President stared grimly at the screens. “Hurt them. Now. It will help American morale.”

“But, sir—”

“That was an order, General.”

Toland snapped to attention. “Yes, sir. I take it you don’t want a general bombardment.”

“No. But they can’t have it all their way. We have to hurt them. How else will we drive them out of America ?”

Why are we so sure we can do it? Jenny almost blurted it out.

“We may not be able to drive them out,” Admiral Carrell said. “We may simply have to kill them all.”

“It may come to that,” General Toland said. “It comes under the heading of destroying the country in order to save it. What we need is neutron weapons.”

“What would they do?”

“They kill without destroying the cities.” General Toland drummed his fingers against the glass wall of the office. “If our people are inside, behind stone walls, in basements-don’t most Kansans have root cellars? Places underground?”

“Many do,” the President said.

“A few feet of dirt would protect our people,” Toland said. “If the elephants are out in the open, we could zap them without destroying Kansas. Only trouble is, we don’t have the bombs.”

“Why not?”

“The few we have are in Europe ,” Admiral Carrell said carefully. “Because of public protest, we were never allowed to manufacture any large number of neutron weapons. I have asked the laboratories at Sandia and Los Alamos to try to assemble makeshift enhanced radiation weapons, but they cannot give us a schedule for their delivery.”

“But this is insane,” the President said. “A few thousand elephants-how many are there, anyway?’

“We don’t know,” Jenny admitted. “Certainly fewer than fifty thousand.”

“Even so, it must be a significant part of their ground combat strength,” General Toland said. “More troops than they can afford

to lose. If we kill them all, they may have to leave us alone in future.”

“They still control space,” Admiral Carrell said. “Major Crichton, you look like a lady who wants to say something.”

“Yes, sir,” Jenny answered. “You asked me to get the science fiction people to work. It wasn’t hard. They’ve got a number of ideas about the war.”

“Well?” the President demanded.

“Sir, I think it would be better if you heard for yourself.”

David Coffey frowned. Then suddenly he grinned. “Sure, why not? As you say, they’re the only experts we have.”

When night came, David Morgan still wasn’t home. No gin, either, Carlotta thought. Only two inches in this bottle. She’d found blackberry wine in the root cellar. It would have to do.

They sat by candlelight in the living room. There were distant sounds of thunder, and far to the east and south were flashes of light.

The skies were clear overhead. Juana sat next to a kerosene lamp with a Jane Austen novel.

“Aren’t you worried?” Carlotta asked.

“Sure, but what good does that do? David’s got a good car and a rifle. He can’t phone. What should I do?”

“I don’t know. What about—” She paused, and after a moment there were more distant sounds. “About that?”

“Nothing we can do. Should we run away? Where would we go? It’s miles to the nearest house, and Lucy can’t walk that far.”

“Don’t you have another car?”

“Not one that works. Even if we did, where would you rather be?”

“I don’t know. Want some wine?”

“No.”

And you don’t think I should, either. To hell with you. Carlotta drank the blackberry wine. It was much too sweet.

Morning came, bright and clear and cloudless, a glorious Kansas day except for ominous black clouds rising far away in the east. There was still no sign of Professor Morgan. Carlotta and Juana sat outside on the patio with coffee. The night sounds were gone. An hour passed, then part of another; then there were noises, and dust to the west.

“Cars. Trucks. Lots of them,” Juana said. She listened again. “Sound strange. Now maybe is a good time to run.”

“What’s the difference?” Carlotta asked. Maybe they’ll know something about Wes!

Juana peered down the mad. “It’s the army!” she shouted. “Our army!”

Carlotta was almost disappointed.

She counted a dozen tanks, and five truckloads of soldiers. They came up the drive and circled on both sides of the house, going right on past and out toward the abandoned barn. One vehicle that looked like a tank, but had wheels, drove up to the house and stopped. An elderly officer with a graying mustache got out.

“Joe!” Juana called.

He saluted. “Lieutenant Colonel Halverson, Kansas Militia, ma’am.” He tried to grin. “Come to see if you need help.”

“Have you seen David?” Juana demanded.

“Yes, ma’am, Major Morgan will be along in a bit. He helped us round up troops. Thought he ought to come home last night and tell you, but he said you’d understand, and we sure did need him, him and that four-wheel of his.”

“What do you intend, Colonel?” Carlotta asked. She remembered she was dressed in a wrinkled housecoat, and was ashamed.

“This is my sister,” Juana said.

“Mrs. Dawson?” Halverson asked. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.” He climbed down off the armored car. “As to what we intend, well, first I’m waiting for my helicopters. Takes time to get them spruced up. Meantime, we came out to see if you needed help. When the choppers get here, we’re going south and east until we see what the hell has invaded us.”

Carlotta nodded. A dozen tanks, two of those armored car things, trucks. And helicopters. Weekend warriors. Most of them are pretty old, but — “You look formidable enough. Fast work.”

“Started mobilizing the Guard the night they started shooting,” Halverson said. There was pride in his voice. “Been rounding up troops from all over the county. Would have called Major Morgan, but the phones were out. Lucky we ran into him in town.”

“But what is happening?”

Halverson shrugged. “Juana, we haven’t been in touch with any government above the county seat since those-aliens started shooting. Phones don’t work, nothing but static on the radios. Most of our communications stuff was designed to work with satellites, and we sure as hell don’t have any of those left. Even so—” His back straightened. “I don’t figure Washington wants me to just sit back and wait for orders, not while they’re dropping out of the skies! Soon as my choppers get here, we’re going to show ’em what it means to mess around with Americans. Especially Kansas Jayhawks!”

18. THE JAYHAWK WAR

Harry spent the night in a wheat field, using wheat straw for bedding and more of it piled on top to stay warm, He didn’t dare risk a fire. There were flashes and thunder all around him. By counting time between flash and sound, he estimated some were as close as three miles, far too close.

Morning came, and he missed Jeri’s camp stove and cocoa. Can’t think about that. Got to get moving. But goddammit. 1 should have done something; 1 should have saved her. Hell, I should have left her by her car-she’d have been safer’ Come with me. I’ll take care of you, shit—

The motorcycle ran fine. He estimated that he had another twenty miles to go, and fuel for thirty.

Harry turned up the lane toward the big house and shook his head in disbelief. Made it, by God! At least it certainly looked like the place Wes had once described, and it was on the right road, ten miles west of Dighton, and there was no other house within a mile.

It was nearly noon. The skies were blue and clear, and there were only occasional thunderclaps and flashes of colored light.

He frowned. An army Light Armored Vehicle stood in front of the house. There were deep tread marks on both sides of the drive, leading out behind the house. Half a mile out through the fields were at least six tanks, a couple of obsolete M-1 Abrams tanks and at least two Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles.

A big blue GM Jimmy four-wheel-drive truck stood in the driveway beside the LAV. Harry nodded at it approvingly. He let the motorcycle coast up to the front porch. Two soldiers older than Harry sat on top of the armored car. One waved at Harry.

“Hi,” Harry called.

“Hi,” one of the soldiers answered.

Something moved behind the glass-paneled front window.

“Is Mrs. Dawson at home?” Harry asked. No point in asking why the army had surrounded the house.

“Think so,” a sergeant said. “Hey, Juana, visitor for your sister.

“The front door opened. Carlotta Dawson, in blue jeans, her hair bundled into a kerchief, rushed down the steps. She didn’t say anything. She just grabbed Harry and pulled herself against him, burying her face in his beard.

She stood that way for a moment, then looked up at the soldiers on the LAV. “He came all the way from L.A. ,” she said. “To help me.”

“Tough going?” the sergeant asked.

“Some,” Harry said.

“Heard it was bad out west.”

“Hoover Dam’s gone,” Harry said. “They took out all the cities along the Colorado River . Same thing happened with all the dams along the Platte . They seem to like hitting dams.”

An officer came out of the house. “Colonel Halverson, this is Harry Reddington,” Carlotta said. “A friend of-of Wes and me. He’s come from L.A. Harry, you must be starved.”

“Yeah, but, Miz Dawson, we’ve got to move. The damned elephants”

“Elephants?” Colonel Halverson demanded. “Elephants?”

“Yes, sir,” Harry said. “The invaders—”

“Why do you say elephants?”

“They look like baby elephants with two trunks.”

“You’ve seen them, then?”

“Yes, sir, I sure have.” Harry winced. This wasn’t going to be easy. Why tell it at all? “Shot one, too, but they wear armor, so I doubt if I hurt it.”

“Armor?”

“Yeah. Body armor, and they have rifles. They kill people. They kidnapped-they took some people prisoner from a farmhouse. Killed the farmer.”

“Just how close did you get to them?”

Harry shuddered, “Too damn close! Close as you and me!” One stood on my chest — He wouldn’t say that. It shamed him.

Halverson looked skeptical. “How’d you get away from them?”

“They let me go. Look, you guys do what you want, but Mrs. Dawson and me have to get out of here. They’re all around, it’s damned lucky they didn’t get here yet.”

“Tell me more,” Colonel Halverson said. “Tell me everything.”

“There’s just not that much,” Harry said. They wore elevator shoes and they came down on paper airplanes. If I say that — “They came down on hang gliders. Then bigger stuff landed”

“How big? Where?”

“Near Logan . They had flying things about as big as a jetliner only not so wide in the wings. And a floating thing about as big as a diesel semi. That’s what I saw. There may have been bigger.”

“Tanks? Field guns?”

“None I saw.”

“And they let you go?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“They let others go?”

“Yes—”

“From Logan . Southwest of here.” Halverson pounded his right fist into his left hand. “But we know they’re east of us, and nobody’s come out of there. They would, too, if the-if those things would let them. Maybe there’s something they want to hide. Son, you better tell me everything you know.”

Gradually Halverson dragged the story out of Harry. Finally it was done. “So I found the gun,” Harry said. “I thought about going after Mrs. Wilson, but I came here, instead.”

Halverson looked thoughtful. “Hell, what else could you do? You’re no army. The next time they’d just shoot you. But I sure wish I knew what they’re hiding out to the east—”

“Colonel?” The sergeant seated on top of the armored car jumped off. He looked older than Halverson.

“Yeah, Luke?”

“Colonel, I heard a funny story last night. Over in Collinston.”

“Collinston? That’s fifty miles from here! What were you doing in Collinston?”

“Took some of the boys over for a drink. You didn’t need us. We weren’t going anywhere.”

“Next time you leave camp, you tell me,” He chuckled. “Okay, so you found a bar open in Collinston. Guess it takes more than war and a parachute invasion to close the bars in that town.”

“Sure does. Anyway, there was a guy in the bar. He’d been drinking a lot, so nobody paid much attention. He said he’d seen an elephant. A little one. In a willow patch outside of town. Thought it escaped from some circus, because it was a trained elephant.”

“Trained? Trained how?” Halverson demanded, “Don’t know.”

“Harry.” Carlotta’s voice was low and urgent. “Harry, that’s an invader. We have to go capture it. We have to get it alive. Maybe it knows about Wes. Harry, we have to!”

Harry gulped hard. “Sure, but I need gas—”

“I’ll get it out of David’s car,”

“Hey, hold on,” Colonel Halverson said. “I can’t let you do that—”

“Why not?” Carlotta demanded. “You’re going east. You’ll see lots of invaders, you don’t need this one.”

“But-look, those things are armed—”

“It didn’t hurt that man in the bar,” Carlotta said. “Why would he think it was trained? Maybe-maybe it lay down and rolled over!”

“Holy shit!” Harry said. “Hey, she might be right.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Colonel, my husband was a personal friend of the President. President Coffey himself sent Wes up to meet the aliens. It’s my right to find out what happened to him. You give Harry some gasoline, and then go fight your war. Harry and I will do the rest.”

Yeah, Harry thought, sure.

“I say we go in after them.” Evan Lewis sounded very sure. “Hell, Joe, we have to! We can’t let those-things run all over Kansas ,”

“Wasn’t me arguing with you. Captain,” Lieutenant Colonel Halverson said. He looked at the others seated at Juana Morgan’s dining room table. Evan Lewis, who ran a tractor sales and repair agency, and commanded the tanks. George Mason, lawyer, who commanded the six helicopter gunships. The fourth man at the table was David Morgan, retired professor of business administration, Halverson’s adjutant and chief of staff. Morgan was the smallest one at the table, and he spoke with a clipped eastern accent that irritated hell out of Joe Halverson, but he was certainly the smartest man in the battalion.

“And I still don’t like it,” George Mason said. “Colonel, we don’t know what we’re up against, and we don’t know what the Army has in mind.”

“So what do you suggest we do?” Halverson asked.

“Wait for orders.”

“How heroic,” Captain Lewis said.

“Enough.” David Morgan spoke quietly, but they all heard him. “We don’t need bickering.”

“So which side are you on, Professor?” Evan Lewis had never liked Professor Morgan. On the other hand, it was David Morgan’s house, and they all felt like guests, military uniforms or not.

“I agree with Colonel Halverson’s reasoning,” Morgan said. “The invaders are hiding something to the east. We’re a cavalry outfit. It’s our duty to explore-but carefully. In particular, we have to be certain that any information we get will be useful. That won’t be easy. They’re jamming all communications and the phones don’t work.”

Joe Halverson nodded thoughtfully. “Suggestions, Major?”

“We’ll have to string things out. Use the Bradley vehicles as communications links.” He sketched rapidly on the table cloth. “Corporal Lewis” — Morgan nodded to Evan Lewis; everyone knew that Evan’s son Jimmy was an electronic genius — “Jimmy rigged up those shield things that let the tanks talk to each other, as long as the antennas are aimed straight at each other. Fine. We send the choppers forward as scouts and flankers, making sure they stay in line of sight to the tanks. Tanks in the middle, concentrated enough to have some firepower, spread out enough to not make such a good target. Then string the Bradleys and the LAVs out behind as connecting links.”

“What do they connect to?” Mason asked.

“We leave two troopers here with my wife and a radio. Juana writes down everything, if we don’t come back, she gets the hell out.”

“Not much chance she’d have to do that,” Halverson said. “Hell, we’re not an army, but we’ve got a fair amount of strength here.” He looked out the window at his command. Six helicopters, with missiles. A dozen tanks, with guns and missiles. The communications weren’t any good because the Invaders were broadcasting static from space. But even without communications a troop of armored cavalry was nothing to laugh at.

“Sounds all right to me,” Lewis said. “At least we’ll be doing something.”

“I’d rather wait for orders,” George Mason said. “But what the hell, I’m ready if you are.”

Joe Halverson stood. “Right. Let’s go.”

“I’m Jimmy Lewis,” the corporal said. He climbed through the attic window to join Harry on the roof of the big frame house.

Harry nodded greeting. “Hi. They tell me you invented this.” He hefted the hand-talkie radio whose antenna was wrapped in a tinfoil cone stiffened with coat-hanger wire.

“Yeah,” Jimmy Lewis said. His tone was serious. “It’s the only way I’ve figured to keep communications. You have to point it pretty tight, though, or you’ll lose the signal

Harry regarded the device, then the similar but larger tinfoil monstrosity on one of the Bradley Fighting Vehicles in the yard down below. “Yeah. So I point this at the Bradley, and maybe I can hear. What then?”

“Use this,” Jimmy Lewis said. He handed Harry a Sony tape recorder. “There’s three hours of tape on there. More than enough. Just plug it into the radio, here, like that, and turn it on when we move out. Listen in the earphones, and you’ll hear a tone if you’re pointed close to the tank, and nothing at all when you’re dead on, except when they’re talking; then you’ll hear them talk, of course. It sounds hard, but it’s pretty easy, really.”

“Sure.”

Major Morgan was in the front yard. Harry couldn’t hear what he was saying, but Juana Morgan didn’t like it. Their housekeeper sat in the front seat of the four-wheel-drive Jimmy, but Juana Morgan didn’t want to drive it.

Finally, though, she got in, and the blue Jimmy drove off. And now it’s just Carlotta and me. David Morgan stood very straight as he went to his tank and climbed in.

Colonel Halverson came over to stand below them. “Bout time, Jimmy,” he shouted up at them.

“Yes, sir.” Corporal Lewis waved to Harry and crawled back inside through the window.

“Thanks, Mr. Reddington,” Halverson shouted. “I need all my troopers. Good of you to fill in. I doubt you’ll be needed, but—”

“Yeah. No problem, Colonel.” Of course Carlotta’s goin’ nuts, wanting to go get that elephant. Maybe it’s safer up here!

“Thanks, then,” Halverson said. He walked briskly up the line to the lead tank and climbed in. He stood in the turret for a moment, then waved dramatically. “Wagons-hoooo!” he shouted.

The helicopters rose in a cloud of dust and swept forward and off to each side in groups of three The tanks fanned out and moved ahead, leaving the Bradleys behind.

“Watcher, this is Jayhawk One. Do you read?”

Harry keyed the mike. “Roger, Jayhawk One, this is Watcher.”

“Course is 100 degrees, moving forward at 1220 hours,” the tanker’s voice said in Harry’s ear. Harry started guiltily and switched on the tape recorder.

When the Bradley began to move eastward, it was much harder to keep the radio aimed properly. Harry braced it against the chimney. The rooftop was steep and it wasn’t easy to keep his footing.

The helicopters wove in complex patterns ahead of the tanks. “Moving, ahead at twenty klicks,” the voice said.

About ten miles an hour, Harry thought. He could still remember kilometer signs on highways, although he hadn’t seen one in years.

A half-hour went by. The helicopters and lead tanks were nearly invisible. The others were strung out behind them. Harry’s radio contact was a good five miles ahead, and it took all his attention to keep the antenna aimed properly. He was about to key the mike to tell them that.

“Light overhead,” the tanker’s voice shouted.

Harry could see it. A bright green flash, more visible high up than near the ground.

“It’s moving in a circle-Number Three Helicopter reports the beam is moving around them in a circle, it’s tightening in on them—” There was a pause. “No contact with the choppers. Colonel Halverson reports they’ve all been attacked by some kind of beam—”

Jesus.

“So far nothing’s shot at us—”

There was a roar and the sharp snap of multiple sonic booms. Harry looked up. Dozens of parallel white lines crossed the sky from the southwest; they dropped like the lines in Missile Command, downward toward where Colonel Halverson’s force was centered. There were bright flashes at the horizon and along the line where the connecting vehicles had been strung out. After a long pause, there was the sound of thunder.

“Jayhawks, this is Watcher,” Harry said. “Any Jayhawk, this is Watcher. Come in—”

Harry poured the last of the gas into the motorcycle.

“What was it?” Carlotta asked.

“I don’t know. It looked like a video game. It was unreal.” Harry went on checking the motorcycle. Making a motorcycle work was a good test of sanity, and one he could win. Death from the sky-we owned the sky once. Then the Soviets took it away. Now we’ve got to take it back from baby elephants.

“Motor’s in good shape. We’ll make it fine. You’ll have to hold the rifle.” He handed Carlotta the 30-06 Winchester that David Morgan had loaned him.

“Not an elephant gun, but it’ll give them pause to think,” Morgan had said.

Not a loan anymore. They were dead, all of them. He’d waited an hour. “Maybe I ought to go look?”

“No.” Carlotta was positive. “You’ll get yourself killed. It’s more important that we capture that stray—”

“Mrs. Dawson, you don’t know that’s a stray.”

“What else could it be?”

Harry shruigged. All I know is I’m gettin’ damned tired of ridin’ this motorcycle, and I wish I had another tube of Preparation H. But my back isn’t as bad as it was. “All aboard.”

He patted his pocket to be sure the tape was in it. Somebody would want that tape.

“I will never go metric—” Harry sang.

A clump of cars and people was clustered around a big semi ahead. “We’re just about to Collinston,” Harry shouted. “That looks like trouble.”

He slowed, and drove the motorcycle up to the semi. A highway patrol cruiser was parked nearby, and a lieutenant of the highway patrol stood facing a knot of angry farmers and truckers. Most of them held rifles or shotguns.

“Oh, shit,” Harry muttered.

The lieutenant eyed Harry and Carlotta. Red beard, dirty clothes; middle-aged woman in designer jeans. He watched Carlotta dismount. “Yes, madam?”

“I am Carlotta Dawson. Yes, Dawson. My husband was aboard the Soviet Kosmograd. Lieutenant, I gather there is an alien here?”

“Damn straight,” one of the truck drivers shouted. “Goddam snout blew George Mathers in half!” He brandished a military rifle. “Now it’s our turn!”

“We have to take it alive,” Carlotta stated.

“Bullshit! This one was a farmer. “I come out of Logan, lady. The goddam snouts killed my sister! They’re all over the fucking place.”

“How’d you get out? Foot on your chest?” Harry asked.

The driver looked sheepish.

“Thought so,” Harry said. “Look, give us a chance. The military wants to question that thing. We’ll go in after it.” He pointed to the willow trees a hundred yards from the highway. “Over there, right?”

“Over there and go to hell,” someone yelled.

“Let’s go,” Harry said. He gestured to Carlotta. She climbed on behind. “In there.”

“There” was a dirt path leading to the clump of willow trees. As Harry started the motorcycle, he heard one of the truck drivers. “We can blow it away when he gets out.”

There were mutters of approval.

When he stopped at the swamp’s edge, he could hear something big in the creek.

For Harpanet, things had become very odd. He had gone through terror and out the other side. He was bemused. Perhaps he was mad. Without his herd about him for comparison, how was a fi’ to tell?

Try to surrender: fling the gun to the dirt, roll over, belly in the air. The man gapes, turns and lurches away. Chase him down: he screams and gathers speed, falls and runs again, toward lights.

Harpanet will seem to be attacking. Cease! Hide and wait.

A human climbs from the cab of a vehicle. Try again? The man scampers into the cab, emerges with something that flames and roars. Harpanet rolls in time to take the cloud of tiny projectiles in his flank instead of his belly. The man fires again.

He has refused surrender. Harpanet trumpets: rage, woe, betrayal. He sweeps up his own weapon and fires back. The enemy’s forelimbs and head explode outward from a mist of blood.

In Harpanet’s mind his past fades, his future is unreal. His digits stroke his side, feeling for the death wound.

No death wound; no hole big enough for a digit to find. What did the human intend? Torture? Harpanet’s whole right side is a burning itch covered with a sheen of blood. An eight to the eighth of black dots form a buzzing storm around him. He lurches through the infinite land, away from roads, downhill where he can, within the buzzing storm and the maddening itch The jaws of his mind close fast on a memory, vivid in all his senses, more real than his surroundings, He moves through an infinite fantasy of planet, seeking the mudroom aboard Message Bearer.

Green… tall green plants with leaves like knife blades, but they brush away the hungry swarming dots… water? Mud?

He rolls through mud and greenery, over and over, freezing from time to time to look, smell, listen.

Harpanet’s past fades against the strange and terrible reality. If he has a future, it is beyond imagining, a mist-gray wall. There is only now, a moment of alien plants and fiery itch and cool mud, and here, mudroom and garden mushed together, nightmarishly changed. He rolls to wash the wounds; he plucks gobs of mud to spread across his tattered flank.

Afraid to leave, afraid to stay. What might taste his blood in the water, and seek its source? The predators of the Homeworld were pictures on a thuktun, ghosts on an old recording tape, but fearsome enough for, all their distance. What lurks in these alien waters? But he hears the distant sound of machines passing, and knows that they are not fithp machines.

A machine comes near, louder, louder. Harpanet’s ears and eyes project above the water.

The machine balances crazily on two wheels, like men. It slows, wobbles, stops.

Humans approach on foot.

Harpanet’s muscles know what to do when he is hurt, exhausted, friendless, desperate, alone. Harpanet’s mind finds no other answer. But he sees no future—

He lurches from the water. Alien weapons come to bear. He casts his gun into the weeds. He rolls on his back and splays his limbs and waits.

The man comes at a toppling run. No adult fi’ would try to balance so. The man sets a hind foot on Harpanet’s chest, with such force that Harpanet can feel it. He swallows the urge to laugh, but such a weight could hardly bend a rib. Nonetheless he lies with limbs splayed, giving his surrender. The man looks down at his, captive, breathing as if he has won a race…

“We got him!” Harry shouted “Now what?” He waved uphill, where a score of armed men, hidden, waited with weapons ready.

“I can talk to them—” Carlotta sounded doubtful.

“They won’t listen.” And dammit, this is my snout, they can’t kill it now. Harry thought furiously. A guilty grin came, and he lifted the seat of the motorcycle, where he kept his essential tools.

“You’ve thought of something?”

“Maybe.” He dug into the tool roll and found a hank of parachute cord. It was thin, strong enough to hold a man but not much use against one of those. He gestured to the captive, using both hands to make “get up” motions.

The alien stood. It looked at them passively.

“Gives me the creeps,” Harry said. He clutched his rifle. One 30-06 in the eye, and we don’t have a problem. “See if it’ll carry you,” Harry said.

“Carry me?”

“Sheena. Queen of the Jungle. I know they’re strong enough.”

A dozen truckers and farmers stood with ready weapons.

Harry walked ahead of the invader, leading it on a length of cord. Carlotta rode its back, sidesaddle, She beamed at them. “Hi!” she called.

None of the watchers spoke. Perhaps they were afraid of saying something foolish.

“It surrendered,” Carlotta shouted. “We’ll take it to the government.”

There was a loud click as a safety was taken off.

Harry whistled: Wheep. wheep, wheep! “Here, Shep! Hey, it’s all right, guys. Shep big gray peanut-loving doggie!”

There were sounds of disgust.

19. THE SCHOLARS

Pavel Aleksandrovich Bondarev fingered the priceless tapestry covering the bare concrete wall. “It doesn’t really look like a bomb shelter,” he said.

Lorena rolled lazily in the big bed. “They are very nice rooms,” she said.

Her own room was just down the corridor, close enough that only a few of Bondarev’s staff knew just how late she stayed. They wouldn’t talk. As secretary to the acting commander of the Soviet space defense forces, Lorena was one of the most powerful women in the Soviet Union . As long as my wife is not offended. She must know, but so long as I am discreet…

Lorena rolled off the bed and walked to the closet, where his uniforms hung. She fingered the shoulder straps on one of them. “I had never thought to see you a general,” she said. “And now there is talk of making you a Marshal of the Soviet Union—”

“Hah.”

“You do not wish promotion?”

“Of course not. I never wanted to be part of the military at all. I would rather talk with the aliens than fight them! They were in space for decades, out between the stars where there is no interference, no radio noise-think of what they must have learned!”

“They have destroyed half of Russia , and you wish to talk to them!”

He sighed. “I know it is impossible. Perhaps, though, when we defeat them, I will learn what they know of stars.” Only it is not so certain that we can defeat them. Whenever we launch a missile, they destroy the missile base.

“They have landed in America . Perhaps the Americans have captured aliens.”

“Perhaps.”

“And perhaps not. It is late.” She moved provocatively. He didn’t react. “So. You are satisfied for the moment,” she teased. “Perhaps later—”

“I have other things to concern me,” Boudarev said.

Lorena laughed. “They do not always keep your attention—”

A chirp sounded from the other room. Bondarev put on a robe. He could not cut short a conversation with whoever called on that phone. “Bondarev here,” he said.

“Narovchatov.”

“Da, Comrade Narovchatov?”

“I am told that the Americans have called you.”

“Only to test the telephone line. I did not myself speak to them.”

“Who did?”

“My secretary.”

“What was said?”

“Nothing, Nikolai Nikolayevich. Comrade Polinova spoke to an American technician. She was told that the Americans wished to speak with me, but then the connection failed.” Bondarev spoke nervously. Should I have reported this? But there was nothing to report.

“It is a matter of great concern,” Narovchatov said. “We have been unable to make contact with the Americans. The Chairman wishes to speak with the American President. Are your technicians working on reestablishing this connection?”

“The failure was not here, Comrade Narovchatov. I understand that the cable crosses the Atlantic, then passes under the Mediten’anean, and comes through Istanbul . I believe the break was in Marrakech.”

“Where there is chaos,” Narovchatov muttered.

“Da.” Bondarev had sporadic communications with a large Soviet armored force in Africa , but that group was far to the south and east of Marrakech.

Lorena came in with a glass of hot tea and set it beside him. Bondarev nodded his thanks.

“Perhaps the KGB has agents in Marrakech,” Bondarev said. “Perhaps they could facilitate the repair of the cable.”

“A splendid suggestion. I will send the orders. The matter is urgent, Pavel Aleksaridrovich. There is unrest in Germany and Poland . We have reason to believe the West Germans may attempt something. The Americans must restrain them.”

If they can. And if they will. “Da. I understand.”

“Have you anything to report?”

“Only rumors. Our station in Tehran confirms that the Invaders have landed in the central United States , and there is land warfare. The Americans in Tehran know little else, but they pretend high confidence.”

“You will call if you learn more, or if you make contact with the Americans.”

“At once.”

“Your wife sends her regards,” Narovchatov said, “She is well and your children are well.”

“Thank you.”

The connection broke. Bondarev sipped his tea. “My family is well,” he said musingly.

“But they did not say where.”

“No. With the Chairman and the Politburo. Somewhere near Moscow , I would presume.”

She sat on the couch and leaned against his shoulder. “I am glad they are safe. I am also glad your wife is not here.”

“The Chairman wishes to speak with the Americans. It is urgent.”

She sat up quickly. “Why?”

“There is unrest, in Poland and Germany .”

She cursed. “They dare!”

“Da. They dare.” Now that we cannot send the army. Now that the army is needed in the Turkic republics, and Latvia , and Estonia .

“I hate them,” Lorena said.

They were under the house, inspecting the support pillars. Carlotta was more frightened than Wes. He tried to reassure her-not hearing what he was saying, but knowing he was lying badly. The quake was coming. Soon. These pillars had to be reinforced before the San Andreas fault tore loose and sent everything rolling downhill in a spray of debris. A sound like a brass trumpet ripped through the world; and then the world tilted and everything started to roll.

Wes Dawson woke to the blare of the acceleration warning, and Russian curses, and the deep hum of Thuktun Flishithy’s drive. The floor was tilted, not toward a wall but toward one corner… the outer-aft-antispinward corner. The fithp must be accelerating and decreasing spin, simultaneously.

The fithp would have no time for prisoners during maneuvers. Wes did what the others were doing. He spread out on his belly like a starfish knd curled his fingers and toes in the padding-dry here, though damp throughout the rest of the ship-and dozed.

The tilt grew more pronounced as Thuktun Flishithy’s spin decreased. After several hours everyone shifted to the aft wall. They were awake and talking, but not to Wes Dawson. Once he heard “amusement park” in English, and Nikolai made rollercoaster motions with his hands while the rest laughed.

Another several hours and the aft wall had become a flat floor. Thuktun Flishithy’s drive was pushing at one Earth gravity or close to it.

The door opened.

It was a door now, and four fithp warriors rolled through without pause. They herded the humans into the corridor, where four more warriors waited with the teacher’s female assistant, Tashayamp. Dmitri bowed to her. “Greetings,” he said (the pattern of sound that they had learned for a greeting; it had the word time in it). “Question, destination selves?”

“Destination Podo Thuktun,” Tashayamp said. “Ready your minds.”

With no superior present, she seemed surer of herself. Now, what gave him that impression? Wes watched her. She walked like an unstoppable mass, a behemoth. She wasn’t adjusting her gait! He had seen her veer from contact with warriors and humans alike. Now the warriors were presumably her guardians, and her human charges had demonstrated both the agility and the motivation to dodge her ton-plus of mass.

Never mind; there was something he wanted from het “Question, destination Thuktun Flishithy?”

“In two mealtime-gaps this status will end. There will be almost no pull. You will live floating for a long time. You must learn to live so,” she said. She hadn’t answered his question; but then, they often didn’t.

The corridor branched. The new corridor dipped, then curved to the right. Now, why the curve? This ought to be a radial corridor. Wes remembered that the streets of Beverly Hills had been laid in curves just to make them prettier. Was that it? Under spin the corridor would rise at twenty or twenty-five degrees…

But under spin, a radial corridor would be vertical. Fithp couldn’t climb ladders. The routes inward had to be spirals. Look for fast elevators too?

As the Soviets had stopped talking to Wes, so Wes had stopped talking to them. He had fallen into a kind of game. Observe. Deduce. Who will learn faster, you or me?

Tashayamp says we’ll be living in nearly free-fall in a day or so. What makes nearly free-fall, and why not spin the ship to avoid it? The fithp liked low gravity, but not that low. What could prevent them from spinning the ship?

Ah. An asteroid, of course. They’ve got an asteroid base, a small one, and we’re going to be moored to it. I wish to hell they’d let us near a window.

And now we’re to see the Podo Thuktun. They showed that in the picture show. Installing the Podo Thuktun was a big deal, so important that they recorded it and showed it to us. As important as the fuel. So what was it?

Thuktun means message or lesson or a body of knowledge; I’ve heard them use it all three ways. Thuktun is part of the mother ship’s name. Fistarteh-thuktun, the sleeper with the tapestry harness, is mated to thuktun and doesn’t seem to have a normal mate. What, then, are we about to see?

The curved corridor ended in a massive rectangular door. Unlike most, this door didn’t seem to have automatic controls, and it took two warriors to shoulder it aside.

The troop marched in.

A spiral ramp ran up the sides of the cylindrical chamber. The cylinder was nearly empty: conspicuous waste in a starship. In the center was a vertical pillar no thicker than Wes’s wrist. He looked up to where it expanded into a flower-shaped cradle for…

For the Podo Thuktun, of course. It was a relic of sorts: a granite block twenty-five or thirty feet long by the same distance wide by half that in height. Its corners and edges were unevenly rounded, as if it had weathered thousands of years of dust laden winds.

There was writing on it. In it: Wes could see overhead light glinting through the lines. Something like a thread-thin laser had written script and diagrams all the way through the block.

He was being left behind. Tashayamp and half the warriors were escorting the Soviets up the spiral ramp; the other warriors were coming for Wes. He hurried to join them. Platforms led off the ramp at varying heights, and on one of these three fithp were at work. They ignored the intruders.

Fistarteh-thuktun and his spaceborn acolytes looked down for a long moment of meditation before beginning their work. It was a ritual, and necessary. One could become too used to the Podo Thuktun; could take it for granted. That must never happen.

At one time bloody wars had been fought over the diagram in the central face of the Podo Thuktun. Was that diagram in fact a picture of a Predecessor? Half the world had been conquered by the herd that thought it was. Many generations had passed, and heretics had been raped of their status with dismaying regularity, before the fithp realized the truth.

Message Bearer’s interstellar ramjet had been made from that diagram.

The priest and his acolytes turned to the library screen. Paykurtank tapped at a tab the size of a human’s fist. The screen responded by showing a succession of photographs. One after another, granite half-cubes appeared in close-up against varying half-seen backgrounds.

“Skip a few,” Koolpooleh suggested.

“I countermand that,” Fistarteh-thuktun said instantly. “We’ll at least glance at them all. We’re seeking any relevant information left by the Predecessors regarding aliens, or Winterhome, or its natives,”

The thuktunthp were arrayed in order of their discovery, and roughly in order of simplicity of the lesson delivered. The history of the fithp could be read in the order of discovery of the thuktunthp. Uses of fire, mining and refining of metals, uses of the wheel: the Predecessors had made these easily available to their successors. Later discoveries had been found in caves or mountaintops or lifeless deserts.

“Pause that. Koolpooleh, is this nothing but mathematics?”

“I have no trouble reading the Line Thuktun, Fistarteh-thuktun. Simple plane geometry, a list of axioms.”

“Go to the next one.”

“The Breaker has arrived with trainees.”

“Ignore them. Pause that!”

Koolpooleh and Paykurtank were watching the humans, furtively, with one eye each. Fistarteh-thuktun pretended not to notice. Perhaps they could learn from watching the aliens. Perhaps not. The fithp warriors were even now aground and dealing with the prey.

Fistarteh-thuktun remembered what it was like to run, to take prey from a rushing stream, to see nothing but mountains in the distance and clouds overhead…

These creatures must first be defeated. Surely the knowledge was here! All knowledge was contained in the thuktunthp.

The Life-Thuktun was surely interesting enough. The script and diagrams dealt with biology, and Fistarteh-thuktun had studied it before. Hierarchies of plant life to the left, animal life to the right. Tiny, ancient single-nucleated life at the bottom, scaling toward complex warm-blooded air breathers at the top. Simple sketches at every level. The sketch that was third from the top resembled a stunted fi’. It was bulky, flat-skulled, with but one branch to its trunk. The feet were clubs, each with a tiny afterthought of a claw.

The creatures sketched above the prom-fl’ were extinct, though skeletons had been found preserved in soft sedimentary rock. Other pictured life forms had disappeared too, but…shouldn’t that top sketch be the lineaments of a Predecessor? Wouldn’t they have considered themselves the top of the ladder of life? Wars had been fought over that question, too.

It was not easy to ignore Tashayamp, half an octuple of soldiers, and four of Winterhome’s small, flat-faced natives, including one in a wheeled cage. Fistarteh-thuktun could hardly fail to hear Takpusseh lecturing them in baby talk. He let himself glance at the humans. They didn’t resemble that top sketch in any way. Fistarteh-thuktun felt a relief he would not let himself admit.

Since his revival from the death-sleep, the priest’s position had never been stronger. The average fit’ aboard Message Bearer had no grasp of what the Predecessors were all about, or how much Fistarteh-thuktun didn’t know.

But he had a task. He must advise the officers. He must seek any relevant information left by the Predecessors.

He had Koolpooleh’s attention again. “Go on,” he said.

The next thuktun explained the making of aluminum.

“Not known, the shapes of the—” Others? Predecessors? “No pictures of selves. Shape of Predecessor minds, half known.” Tashayamp was speaking slowly, and Wes was catching most of the meaning, he thought. He had to concentrate.

“There were eights of eight-cubed of thuktunthp scattered about the world. The Predecessors” — Tashayamp glanced toward the priest, busy at his huge display screen, and her breathy trumpet of a voice dropped a little — “did not know everything. They did not know that what they did with their machines would ruin the world for them. Maybe they did not know where life would be in the world, after the world healed. They left the thuktunthp everywhere.

“Not told, things about fithp, things about Predecessors. Perhaps thuktunthp were thuktun” — meaning message here — “to Predecessor children’s children. But Predecessor children were not made.”

Arvid asked, “What happened?”

“Fistarteh-thuktun knows. I talk to him. Wait.” Tashayamp turned away. She stood behind the priest and did nothing, waiting.

Wes looked down.

From below, the cradle had blocked some of the script. From above, it didn’t. The sculptors had left a meter or more of margin around the writing; it had worn away unevenly, leaving bulges the cradle arms could grip.

The script was lost to him. Wes studied the diagrams.

The patterns in the Podo Thuktun: here a spray of dots in which Wes could recognize the Summer Triangle: a star pattern. There a pattern of curves that might be the magnetic fields in a Bussard ramjet… Podo could mean starflight or stars or just sky. Certain words and phrases became clear. He was sure that Thuktun Pushithy meant Thuktun Carrier or Message Bearer. Fistarteh-thuktun was a priest; it might bethat he worshiped the Podo Thuktun. He seemed to function as a Librarian too. Loremaster.

Fistarteh-thuktun had turned from the screen and was talking with Tashayamp, too fast to be understood.

“Not known what happened to end Predecessor children,” Tashayamp said. “Perhaps they do not want children because they have destroyed the world. Perhaps they cannot have children.” She spread her digits in the pattern Dawson had come to call a shrug: a futile clawing at the air. It meant, “I do not know and do not believe it can be known.”

She turned back to Fistarteh-thuktun. Wes studied the star patterns again. The constellations are nearly the same as Earth’s. Nearly, but not identical. They must be from somewhere near — He shuddered. Can more be coming? No, only one ship was in the films they showed us. “Nearby” is meaningless when we’re talking about stars!

Fistarteh-thuktun was speaking again. Wes moved closer to listen to Tashayamp translate into fithp baby-talk.

Their quarters had become tolerable as the fithp learned what they liked. The padding over the six walls was no longer wet. Dawson was almost comfortable.

Dmitri was speaking English. Dawson was ashamed at how glad that made him. I am not a communist. Nobody ever called me that except the goddamn Birchers. But I can’t live alone!

“They were dying. Wes, did it sound as if they destroyed their environment themselves?”

“I thought that’s what Fistarteh-thuktun said.”

“But they must have thought some of them would live. Changed. Could it be true?”

“Do you mean, could the Predecessors be their ancestors? No. There was a thuktun onscreen with a column of biology sketches till Fistarteh-thuktun shifted to something else. Didn’t you notice the sketches? That misshapen fi’ was third from the top. If you were making a hierarchy of life on Earth, would you put humanity third from the top?”

“No,” Dmith said in some irritation, “but I might leave humanity off entirely if I were Christian or some such! Then I might put apes third from the top, if I seriously liked dolphins and whales!”

“That’s too many ifs.”

“Or a Christian or Muslim might put fanciful angels above him—”

“For the moment, we might as well believe as Tashayamp believes,” Arvid said soothingly. “The fithp have studied the subject for much longer than the hour we have been granted. So. A race died of overpollution. The world was changed. In the changed world something new grew up-perhaps a pet or a work animal, an evolved dog or horse. They do seem to worship the Predecessors.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Wes wondered. “Consider what would happen to tribes who didn’t study the thuktunthp. There were… eight to the fourth power is around four thousand thuktunthp, and a lot of them were duplicates. For every one of those, the first tribe-herd?-to use the information would be the first to rule. It must have happened hundreds of times. Of course they worship the Predecessors!”

Arvid shrugged. “I like to think of them as a tamed elephant. Then the world came apart. Dwarfing is caused by ages of famine. flash floods winnowed those who could not grow claws to grip a passing rock.” He smiled. “There is no proof. Choose the picture you like.”

“Shape wars,” Dmitri said. “Is it your belief that these were religious wars based on interpretation of the thuktunthp?”

“Yes,” He shook his head. “Very strange.”

Dmitri laughed. “Why strange? Human history is full of such. The Byzantine Church was divided, and civil wars resulted, from what icons were permitted to be shown in churches. The Christian god has no shape, yet one of the prophets was permitted to see his hindquarters. Not his front, you understand. Only his hindquarters. I do not know if that resulted in wars among the Jews, but it easily might.”

“You’d think there would be some pictures of the Predecessors,” Dawson said.

“Perhaps there were,” Dmitri mused. “Only-suppose there were descendents of the Predecessors, and the fithp killed them. It would not be an easy thing to face, that you had killed the sons of your gods.

One hell of a guilt trip. “Or maybe there were pictures of the Predecessors,” Wes said. “Maybe they were destroyed as blasphemous, in the period when they thought the Bussard ramjet diagram was the shape of a Predecessor.”

“Perhaps,” Arvid said.

“And then-excuse me,” Dmitri said. He spoke rapidly in Russian. After a while the Russians moved away to their own corner, leaving Wes Dawson alone again.

They don’t trust me. I might do something to warn the aliens. At least I have a few answers. I need answers!

Nat Reynolds could remember exactly when he got into trouble. It started the second morning after the aliens blew up Cosmograd, ending the science-fiction convention where he was guest of honor, and stranding him in Kansas City . He was sitting in Dolly Jordan’s breakfast room, with good coffee and eggs sunny-side up, trying to think of what to do now that all the stories about alien invaders were turning bloodily obsolete.

Why couldn’t it have been Wells’ martians? We’d have had ’em in zoos inside of twenty-four hours.

“There’s somebody here to see you,” Dolly Jordan had said. She set another plate and a coffee cup at the table.

Nat looked up with irritation. Someone he’d met at the OZcon? But the man Dolly led into her breakfast room didn’t have the look. He was too old (although there were older science-fiction fans) and too well dressed (although some fans dressed well), and what was it? He just didn’t have that sensitive fannish face.

“I’ve looked all over for you,” the man said. “Hah. You don’t remember me, do you? I’m Roger Brooks. Washington Post.”

You’d think the press would know by now: no science-fiction writer can be expected to function before noon. Nat shook his head. “I have a lousy memory.”

“It’s all right. Mind if I sit down?”

“Dolly already set a place for you.”

Brooks sat. Dolly appeared with a coffeepot. She was plump and cheerful, and smart enough not to chatter in the morning. After she filled Brooks’s cup, she went back to the kitchen, leaving them alone.

“Why were you looking for me?” Reynolds asked.

“Because you probably know where the government is.”

Reynolds shook his head in confusion.

“Just before the aliens arrived, all the science-fiction writers vanished,” Brooks explained. “At least all the hard science-fiction writers did.”

“Oho!”

“You do know something.” Brooks leaned forward eagerly. “What?”

“Nothing real,” Nat said. “A month or so ago, Wade Curtis called. Asked where I’d be when the aliens arrived. When I told him I’d be Guest of Honor at OZcon, he changed the subject.”

“And that’s all?”

“Yeah. Wade wouldn’t ask me to violate that kind of promise. What’s this about the government?”

“The President left Washington two hours after the aliens blew up Kosmograd,” Brooks said. “By yesterday morning, the Cabinet and most of the Pentagon brass were gone.” Brooks shrugged. “No stories left in Washington . Nobody there knows what’s happening.”

“So you came looking for me?”

“Yeah.’ The writers vanished a couple of weeks ago. Then just before the aliens arrived, the President sent an important intelligence officer to Colorado to talk to them. I figure that’s where the government went, to Cheyenne Mountain. Kansas City’s on the way.” Roger sipped his coffee. “When the hotel said you’d left with the whole SF convention, I took a chance and came to the chairman’s house.”

“Sorry you went to so much trouble for nothing—”

“Maybe not for nothing,” Brooks said. “Look, the writers are in Cheyenne Mountain , I’m sure of it. You were invited. You have the invitation, I have a press pass and a VW Rabbit diesel with more than enough fuel to get there. Want to pool our resources?”

I don’t have any invitation to Cheyenne Mountain . I was booked at the OZcon, so I wasn’t invited. All I had to do was say so!

And I always sign too many book contracts. I have trouble saying no. If I were a woman I’d be pregnant all the time.

Reynolds stood at a second-story window at Collins Street . The apartment building was separated from the street by a wide grassy strip. The buildings were old brick, with a new McDonald’s just down the block.

They were in Lauren , Kansas , somewhere near Topeka . He’d never been in the town before, and didn’t want to be here now, but there wasn’t much choice, because while they were driving across Kansas the sky erupted with paper airplanes carrying baby elephants.

He’d met Carol North at the convention, and his address book showed she lived in Lauren , Kansas . They’d gone to her apartment. We could have kept on driving. There can’t be that many aliens. They can’t be everywhere…

Instead they’d parked in an underground lot and waited.

The invaders came.

A ceremony, Reynolds thought. It even makes sense. Humiliating, but it makes sense. And once they’ve put you through that, they leave you alone.

What do they want?

Reynolds turned back to the window. In the street outside, three men hid among the trash cans behind the McDonald’s. They’d laid dinner plates on the street surface. From somewhere nearby came the roar of large motors.

“You had to tell them,” Reynolds said.

“It was a story I’d heard from the Hungarian uprising. How did I know they’d try it?”

“Bat turds, Roger! George Bergson was itching to kill an alien, so you told him how! You knew he’d try it if it killed him. It will, and we’re too close. What if they bomb this building?”

Roger Brooks shrugged. “George promised they wouldn’t to anything to call attention to this place.”

“He’s going to get himself killed,” Reynolds said. “And probably us with him.”

“Stop saying that,” Carol North said. “Please stop saying that.”

“Okay.” But it doesn’t change anything. Your friend is doomed, lady. A thought came unbidden. She’d come to his, room at the convention. Her relationship with George Bergson was clearly an open one. Would she be faithful to his memory once he got killed? That could be inconvenient.

The roaring grew louder. “They’re coming,” Roger said. “The snouts are coming …” He stayed well back in the room and aimed his camera out toward the dinner plates in the road.

Two large armored vehicles came into view. They floated a foot or more off the road surface. Their crews were invisible inside.

It’ll be okay. George will kill some invaders and live through it, and we’ll all learn levitation and fly to safety. Right? But Nat’s belly and guts were knotted in fear. He heard Roger say, “It worked in Budapest …”

The first ground effect vehicle approached the line of dinner plates and stopped. Something protruded from the forward deck and extended toward the plates.

George Bergson and his friends stood and threw their bottles at the armored vehicles. Two of the bottles hit the lead tank, and burst into flames, Flame spread across the vehicle, and rivers of fire ran off its sides and were dispersed by the ground effect fan. There was a high-pitched whine and grinding noises, and the vehicle fell heavily to the roadway.

Two more gasoline bombs arced out.

The second vehicle began rapid fire. Holes the size of baseballs appeared in the buildings behind Bergson and his crew. The men dashed behind the McDonald’s building.

The gunfire continued, The McDonald’s building was chopped nearly in half. The upper part of the building fell into the lower part.

From somewhere far above a beam of greenish light speared the McDonald’s building. The wreckage exploded in flame. The green light-pencil drew an expanding spiral around the pillar of flame, first tightly, then in ever-spreading arcs that grew and grew…

Reynolds dived away from the window.

There was the sound of crashing glass. The tank outside continued to fire, and two large holes appeared in the wall in front of him. Carol and Roger Brooks dove into the hallway. Carol lay next to Reynolds. “Jesus,” she whispered. “Jesus Christ. They’re killing everybody-you knew!”

Reynolds shook his head. “I didn’t know, but it was a good guess. Look at them! Herd beasts. No speed, and all their defenses in front, and have you ever seen less than six together? I bet their ancestors stood in a ring to fight. It was a reasonable guess that if someone does something they don’t like, they go after the offenders’ whole herd, not just the individual!”

The gunfire continued to pound.

“Smoke!” Carol shouted. “The building’s on fire.”

Trapped!

“Out the back way,” Roger Brooks said. “Quick!” He crouched low and ran down the hallway to the stairs. “Stay low. Stay away from windows!”

Nat Reynolds ran down the hall. He heard Carol behind him.

Roger sat in the biggest Cadillac in the lowest level of the underground parking structure. It was noon. They’d been here almost twenty hours.

There were sounds from inside another Caddy two cars away. Jeez, what does she see in him? Roger wondered. They were at it not six hours after her live-in boyfriend bought it.

And you’re jealous, because you had nothing to distract you from the thought that they’d tumble the building down on your head. Or from them — There hadn’t been any sounds from outside for hours. Roger couldn’t stand it any longer. He crept toward the exit. Another small group-a man, two women, and four small children — huddled in one corner of the garage. They stared at Roger as he went past, but they didn’t say anything.

The ramp was blocked by debris, but the stairs were intact. Roger climbed up, pausing at each landing.

“Ho.”

He jumped, startled. The voice had been feminine and definitely human. “Hello.”

“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

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 fonned 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.” 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.”

Blunt son of a bitch, Jenny thought.

“We can’t stop them from bombarding us with asteroids until we can take control of space again, and we’ll never get space away from them while they have that mother ship,” Curtis continued.

“Perfect naval doctrine,” Admiral Carrell said. “But a navy needs ships, Dr. Curtis!”

“Orion,” Curtis said. “Old bang-bang.”

The President looked puzzled, and Jenny thought Curtis looked pleased as he turned to the blackboard. Not too often a writer gets to lecture to the President of the United States .

“Take a big metal plate,” Curtis said. “Big and thick. Make it a hemisphere, but it could even be flat. Put a large ship, say the size of a battleship, on top of it. You want a really good shock absorber system between the plate and the ship.

“Now put an atom bomb underneath and light it off. I guarantee you that sucker will move.” He sketched as he talked. “You keep throwing atom bombs underneath the ship. It puts several million

pounds into orbit. In fact, the more mass you’ve got, the smoother the ride.”

Admiral Carrell looked thoughtful. “And once in space—”

“The tactics are simple,” Curtis said. “Get into space, find the mother ship, and go for it. Throw everything we have at it. Ram if we have to.”

“Hard on the crew,” the President said.

“You’ll have plenty of volunteers, sir,” Ed Gillespie said. “The whole astronaut corps for starters.”

True enough. Most of them had friends at Moon Base. Odd, they did use nuclear weapons there, but nowhere on Earth.

“Is this-Orion-feasible?” Admiral Carrell asked.

Curtis nodded. “Yes. The concept was studied back in the sixties, Chemical explosive test models were flown. It was abandoned after the Treaty of Moscow banned atmospheric nuclear detonations. As far as I know, though, Michael is the only quick and dirty way we have to get a battleship into space.”

“Michael?” the President asked.

“Sony, sir. We’ve already given it a code name. The Archangel Michael cast Satan out of Heaven.”

“Appropriate enough name. However, our immediate problem is to get them out of Kansas …

“That does no good,” Curtis said. “As long as they own space, they can land whenever and wherever they want, and there’s damned little we can do about it. Mr. President, we have to get to work on Michael now.”

The President looked thoughtful. “Perhaps I agree.” He turned to Ed Gillespie. “General, we’re pretty shorthanded here. I believe you’re presently without an assignment?”

“Yes, sir,”

“Good. I want you to head up the team for Project Archangel. Look into feasibility, armament, who you need for a design team, where you’d build it, how long it would take. Report to Admiral Carrell when you know something. Perhaps these gentlemen can help you.” He looked to the writers.

“Sure,” Curtis said. “One thing, though—”

“Yes?”

“We could use my partner. Nat Reynolds. Last I heard, he was in Kansas City .”

“Combat area,” General Toland said.

“Nat’s pretty agile, though. He may have got away. And he’s just the right kind of crazy,” Curtis said earnestly.

“Major Crichton can see to that,” the President said. “Now, to return to something you said earlier. Lasers?”

“Yes, sir,” Curtis said “I believe they’ll use lasers to launch theft ships from the ground”

“Why?”

“Why wouldn’t they? They’ve got good lasers, much better than we have, and it’s certainly simple enough if you’ve got lasers and power.”

“I asked the wrong question,” Coffey said. “How?”

Curtis looked smug again. He sketched. “If you fire a laser up the back end of a rocket-a standard rocket-motor bell shape, but thick-you get much the same effect as if you carried rocket fuel aboard, but there’s a lot more payload, because you can leave your power source on the ground. Your working mass, your exhaust, is air and vaporized rocket motor, hotter than hell, with a terrific exhaust velocity. It uses a lot of power, but it’ll sure work. Pity we never built one.”

“Where would they get the power?” the President asked. “They’ve blown up all our dams. They can’t just plug into a wall socket,”

Curtis pointed to a photograph pinned to his blackboard. It showed a strange, winged object, fuzzily seen against the back ground of space.

“Ransom found that picture, among a lot of them Major Crichton’s people gave us to look at,” he said. “Joe—”

Ransom shrugged. “An amateur astronomer brought that in to the intelligence people. I don’t know how he talked the guards into getting it inside, but I ended up with it. It looks like they’re deploying big solar grids, way up in geosynchronous orbit.”

“We looked into building those,” the President said.

“Sure,” Curtis said dryly. “But Space Power Satellites were rejected. Too costly, and too vulnerable to attack.”

“They’re vulnerable?”

“Not to anything we have now,” Curtis said. “To attack something in space you’ve got to be able to get at space.”

Coffey looked around for support. Admiral Carrell shrugged. “It’s true enough,” he said. “They’ll shoot down anything we send up long before it can get that high.”

“So what can we do?”

“ Archangel ,” Ed Gillespie said. “When we send something up, it needs to be big and powerful and well armed. I’ll get on it.”

“And meanwhile, they’re throwing asteroids at us,” the President said. “General, I think you’d better work fast.” He turned to go.

“One more thing, Mr. President,” Curtis said insistently.

“Yes?”

“Today’s attack. I suppose you’ll be sending in lots of armor.”

The President looked puzzled.

“We’ll do it right, Doctor,” General Toland said. He turned to leave. “And I’d like to get at it.”

“Thor,” Curtis said.

Toland stopped. “What’s that? It sounds like something I’ve heard of—”

“Project Thor was recommended by a strategy analysis group back in the eighties,” Curtis said. “flying crowbars.” He sketched rapidly. “You take a big iron bar. Give it a rudimentary sensor, and a steerable vane for guidance. Put bundles of them in orbit. To use it, call it down from orbit, aimed at the area you’re working on. It has a simple brain, just smart enough to recognize what a tank looks like from overhead. When it sees a tank silhouette, it steers toward it. Drop ten or twenty thousand of those over an armored division, and what happens?”

“Holy shit,” Toland said.

“Are these feasible?” Admiral Carrell asked.

“Yes, sir,” Anson said. “They can seek out ships as well as tanks—”

“But we never built them,” Curtis said. “We were too cheap.”

“We would not have them now in any case,” Carrell said. “General, perhaps you should give some thought to camouflage for your tanks—”

“Or call off the attack until there’s heavy cloud cover,” Curtis said. “I’m not sure how well camouflage works. Another thing, look out for laser illumination. Thor could be built to home in that way.”

“Yes. We use that method now,” Toland said. His tone indicated triumph. These guys didn’t know everything.

“Maybe we should delay the attack,” the President said. General Toland glanced at his watch. “Too late. With our unreliable communications, some units would get the word and some wouldn’t. The ones that didn’t would go in alone, and they’d sure be slaughtered. On that score, we’ve got to get back up to Operations.”

“Thank you, gentlemen,” the President said.

As they left, Jenny heard Curtis muttering. “What do they do if it doesn’t work? They’ll have to call the Russians for help.”

The sign read ELVIRA. It couldn’t have been a large town to begin with, now it was deserted, except for some military vehicles.

There were soldiers in camouflage uniforms at the entrance to the Elvira Little League playing field. Brooks stopped the car.

“What?” In the backseat, Reynolds struggled to wakefulness. “Where are we?”

“Not far from Humboldt,” Brooks said. He got out. Rosalee, half awake now, got out on the passenger side. Nat eased himself out from under Carol’s head and arm and — wiggled out past the driver’s seat. Carol stretched out in the backseat without waking.

Roger had seen people sleep like that after some disaster. In the dark of Carol North’s mind, kinks were straightening out… or not. She would wake sane, or not.

“You can’t park that here,” one of the soldiers shouted.

He was a very young soldier and he looked afraid. There’d been an edge of panic in his voice, too.

Out beyond him the Little League field was covered with troops. They huddled around small fires. Plenty of soldiers. No tanks. No vehicles at all. Why? Further down the road and on the other side, in what had been a park, was a big tent with a bright red cross on it. Other tents had been put up next to it. There were stretchers outside the tents.

“A MASH unit,” Nat Reynolds said. He kept his voice low. “Full up, from the stretchers outside. Roger, Rosalee, I think we better get out of here.”

“Not yet.” Brooks went up to the soldiers at the gate. He showed them his press card. “What happened, soldier?”

“Nothin’.”

Roger pointed to the MASH. “Something did.”

“Maybe. Look, you can’t park that thing here. They shoot at vehicles. Maybe at cars! Move it, damn it, move it! Then think about going on foot!”

“In a second. Can you call an officer?”

The soldier thought about that for a moment. “Yeah.” He shouted back into the camp. “Sarge, there’s a guy here from the Washington Post wants to talk to the Lieutenant.”

They went from the Lieutenant to the Colonel in one step. By then Rosalee was back in the car, but Nat wasn’t. He found that odd, but he trailed along.

“We don’t have facilities for the press,” Colonel Jamison was saying. “In fact, Mr. Brooks, we don’t have accommodations for civilians at all, and I don’t see any reason why I should talk to you.”

Brooks looked around the tent. It held two tables and a desk, a field telephone, and a canteen hanging from the center pole. “Colonel, I’m the only national press reporter here.”

Jamison laughed. “And where are you going to publish?”

Roger gave him an answering chuckle. “Okay. I don’t even know if my paper exists anymore! But surely the people have a right to some news coverage of this—”

Jamison spoke slowly, from exhaustion. “I’ve never been sure of that. Whatever happened to Loose lips sink ships? Okay, Mr. Brooks. I’m going to tell you what happened, but not for the reason you think.”

“Then why?”

Jamison pointed to Nat Reynolds. “Your friend there.”

Nat Reynolds looked up from the map he’d been studying. “What?”

“You’re an important man, Mr. Reynolds,” Colonel Jamison said. “We have a total of no fewer than forty messages from Colorado Springs , and one of them asks us to watch out for you. That’s why Lieutenant Carper brought you to me. We’re supposed to cooperate with you, and send you back to Cheyenne Mountain first chance we get. Now why is that?”

Reynolds thought it over, and smiled. “Wade.”

The colonel waited.

“Dr. Wade Curtis. My partner. He must be working with the government. It follows that he’s alive…Reynolds looked back down at the map. “We’re still a long way from Colorado if we can’t go through Kansas .”

“We can’t,” Jamison said. “God knows we can’t.”

“So what did happen?” Brooks asked.

Jamison sighed. “Nothing to brag about. This morning we were supposed to make a big push. Throw the goddam snouts all the way back to Emporia . Went pretty good at first. And then—”

“Then what?”

“Then they stamped us flat.”

“A whole armored division?’

“Three divisions.” Jamison shook his head as if to ward off the memory. “The tanks went in. Everything was fine. We saw some of those floating tanks they use, and we shot the shit out of them! Then these streaks fell out of the sky. Lines of fire, hundreds of them-parallel, slanting, like rain in a wind, they pointed at our tanks and the tanks exploded.”

“Thor,” Reynolds said, as if he were talking to himself. He looked up from the map. “That’s what it was.”

“You know what did that to us?”

“Yah. It wasn’t just science fiction,” Reynolds said wonderingly.

“Reynolds! What did they do to my men?”

“It’s an orbital weapon system. They dropped meteors on you, Colonel. There wasn’t anything you could do. Shall I explain?”

“Sure, but not just to me,” Jamison said. “Marty! Marty, get on the line and see what’s keeping Mr. Reynolds’s transportation! They need him back at the Springs!”

The helicopter came an hour later.

Rosalee was over by the car, pacing, but Carol was awake and frightened. “What will happen to me? Nat, you can’t leave me here—”

“No, of course not.” Reynolds looked around helplessly for someone in charge. He shouted toward the chopper, and a uniformed woman came out, a major.

By God! “Jenny!” Roger Brooks caned. “Jenny, it’s me, Roger! Can you take me to the Springs?”

“Roger? Hi! No, there’s not room.”

“You have to make room,” Reynolds shouted. “For Carol!”

Jenny shook her head. “Mr. Reynolds, we have several hundred miles to go. The fuel situation is critical. We can’t carry extra weight.”

Picture of a torn man, Brooks thought. So what will he do?

“Carol’s not heavy,” Reynolds said. “I’ll leave my suitcase.”

“No.” Major Crichton was firm. “Mr. Reynolds, you’ll endanger all of us if you insist. Believe me, your friend is safer here.”

“Then why am! getting into that thing?” Reynolds demanded.

“Because the President of the United States told me to bring you,” Jenny said. “Sergeant, help Mr. Reynolds aboard.”

Reynolds spread his arms, broadcasting helplessness. “If they want me that bad— Sony, Carol.”

He let the Army sergeant assist him into the helicopter. Major Crichton climbed in after him. She turned in the doorway to wave; then the door closed and the engine revved up.

And now I’ve got five hundred miles to go, fuel for six hundred, and two women to worry about. “Come on, ladies,” Roger said. “We’ll just have to take the low road.”

21. WAR PLANS

Jenny laid the printed copies of the agenda on top of the yellow tablets, and stepped back to admire her work. Then she grinned wryly. It didn’t look much like the Cabinet Room in the White House. Instead of a big wood conference table, there were two Formica-topped folding tables set together. Most of the chairs were Army issue folding chairs, although they had managed to get one big wooden armchair for the center of the table.

A slide projector was set up at one end of the room. Jenny inspected it, turning the light on and off. In addition to the places at the table, another score of chairs faced the President’s seat in the center.

The U.S. and presidential flags stood behind the chair. They looked out of place against a bare wall.

“It’ll have to do.”

“What’s that?” Jack Clybourne came in.

“The conference room,” Jenny said.

Jack nodded. “Made you a secretary, did they?”

“Somebody’s got to do it,” Jenny protested. “We don’t have a full staff, and—”

“Gotcha.”

“Yep.”

“Heck, they have me typing his appointment list,” Jack said. “Not that I mind. Gives me something to do.”

She grinned. “Not going to search for bombs in the flag stands?”

“Phooey. Whatcha doing after dinner?”

“I don’t know-why?”

“My roommate’s going Outside,” Jack said. He grinned. “Of course I could clean up my room—”

“You can do that tomorrow. See you about midnight. Now I’ve got to go get my science-fiction writers.”

Three aides sat at chairs near the wall. No one else was in the room. It would fill according to rank, with the most junior coming in to wait for the more senior.

Jack Clybourne studied the names on his list. Joe Dayton from Georgia , the Speaker of the House of Representatives. He’d be the highest-ranking man after the President. Senator Alexander Haswell of Oregon , the President Pro Tern of the Senate. Senator Raymond Can from Kansas . Admiral Carrell. Hap Aylesworth, with no title listed after his name. Mrs. Connie Fuller, Secretary of Commerce. Jim Frantz, Chief of Staff. General Toland. Arnold Biggs, Secretary of Agriculture. They’d all have seats at the table.

Jenny came in with the science-fiction people. Robert Anson. He seemed older than the last time Jack had seen him. Dr. Curtis. And a new one.

“This is Nathaniel Reynolds,” Jenny said. “Mr. Reynolds, Jack Clyhourne is in charge of security for the President.”

“Hi,” Reynolds said.

He looks confused. Not that I blame him.

Jenny conducted the writers to chairs near the wall. Then she went out again. After a few minutes she returned with an older woman.

Attractive, if a bit used, important. And not on my list at all-.

“This is Mrs. Carlotta Dawson,” Jenny said.

Aha. “Thank you.” Jack waited to see where Jenny would seat her. At the table, but at one end, facing the President but with her back to the writers and staff.

Jenny went out again. A few minutes later, the rush began.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States ,” Jack Clybourne announced formally.

He does that well, Jenny thought. And it’s needed, a formality to remind us that what we’re doing is important, that this is the real thing.

President Coffey took his place at the table. He noticed the flags and acknowledged Jenny with a nod. Then he nodded to the Chief of Staff. “Jim—”

“Yes, sir.” Frantz indicated the Xeroxed agenda sheets. “As you can see, we have a lot to cover.

“Item One. Appointments. The President has appointed Admiral Thorwald Carrell as Secretary of Defense. Mr. Griffin, who formerly held that post, will become Under Secretary, and remain with the Vice President. Admiral Carrell will also retain the post of National Security Advisor. Lieutenant General Harvey Toland is promoted to General of the Army, and has been designated Commanding General of the United States Aimed Forces.

“The Vice President, the rest of the Cabinet, and a number of congressional leaders will remain in the alternate command post,” Frantz continued. “For the moment, the Congress is represented by the Speaker and the President Pro Tern of the Senate. Mr. Speaker.”

Joe Dayton stood. “Mr. President, this is Mrs. Carlotta Dawson. Being that Congressman Dawson is missing, we’ve asked Mrs. Dawson to take his place. Sort of represent him. It’s not strictly constitutional, but nothing’s very normal just now.”

The President nodded wearily. “Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mrs. Dawson, welcome aboard. We all pray for your husband’s safe return.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“There’s another reason for Mrs. Dawson to be here,” Speaker Dayton said. “She’s brought in our first by God captive Invader!”

And that got a reaction! Jenny almost laughed, but she managed to control her face. What if I’d brought Harry Redd to this Cabinet meeting!

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” Jim Frantz said. “To return to the agenda. Our first item of business. The Secretary of Defense.”

Admiral Carrell didn’t stand. “There’s little to say. Early this morning we launched a non-nuclear attack employing three Regular Army armored divisions, supported by a number of National Guard units and all the military aircraft we could muster. As you all know, they were utterly defeated.”

There were murmurs, but no one said anything.

“The enemy used a variety of advanced weapons,” Carrell continued. “The most important were lasers, ground-based and orbital, and space-based kinetic energy weapons. Flying spears, if you prefer to think of them that way. They seek out and destroy armored vehicles.

“The lasers intercept our missiles. They also backtrack and home in on missile launch sites and artillery. The ground-based laser weapons are radar directed and sufficiently powerful to punch their way through cloud cover. The result was not merely the defeat of our forces but their near annihilation. Major Crichton has recently visited the headquarters of Third Army. Major, how would you describe what you saw?”

“Sir, it was a disaster area,” Jenny said. “1 found only one General officer. The rest were killed or missing. The MASH was overfilled, and the only vehicles were commandeered civilian machines, or the very few that hadn’t been committed to the attack.”

“Thank you,” Carrell said evenly. “Was it your opinion that the attacking forces gave it their best?”

“God, yes, Admiral. We could give out a hundred posthumous Silver Stars without even trying.”

“You agree, General Toland?” Carrell asked.

“Yes, sir. We took our best shot.”

“That concludes my report, Mr. President.”

There was stunned silence.

“Jesus,” the Speaker said. “Admiral, General Toland, what did we do to the enemy?”

“Mr. Speaker, I don’t know,” Admiral Carrell said. “To the best of my knowledge, very little.”

“They whupped us,” Dayton said in his careful drawl.

“Yes, sir. They whupped us.”

“So what do we do now?” the Speaker demanded.

“Use nukes,” General Toland said.

“That’s what we’re here to decide,” the President said.

“You can’t mike Kansas!” Senator Can was adamant. “No way!”

“We don’t have any choice,” General Toland said.

“Choice be damned!” Can shouted.

“Gentlemen,” Jim Frantz said.

“Senator, I agree it’s an extreme measure,” the President said. “But what else can we do? The aliens must be driven off this planet!”

“At the expense of my people—”

“Senator, we aren’t saving the people of Kansas by doing nothing. The invaders are slaughtering them. Major Crichton, you were there. Describe what you saw.”

“Yes, sir. Sergeant—”

Sergeant Malley turned on the slide projector. Photographs of a pile of bodies, at least fifty, covered one wall of the room. There were gasps.

“We took these pictures in Lauren , Kansas . Much of the slaughter was witnessed by Mr. Nat Reynolds, a member of our special advisory staff. Mr. Reynolds will answer questions later.

“Mr. President, our attacking forces found a number of such scenes during the brief period of their advance. Refugees report that wholesale slaughter of hostages is their general response to any act of resistance. Next slide, Sergeant.”

She showed another dozen pictures before mercifully turning the lights back on. Senator Carr looks sick. Well he might. I don’t feel very good myself.

“Mr. Reynolds,” the Speaker said. “You saw this happen?”

Nat Reynolds stood. “Yes, sir. More or less—”

“Why did they do that?” the President demanded.

Reynolds explained the attack.

“As soon as the one tank was destroyed, the other started shooting, and they called in the lasers. After they’d shot up enough buildings, they went hunting individual people, and when they found anyone, they killed him and added him to the pile.”

“Jesus.” Senator Can crossed himself.

“They thought they were killing traitors,” Reynolds said.

“What does that mean?” the President asked.

“They’re herd beasts. I doubt they do very much on their own initiative. As far as they were concerned, the whole town had surrendered, and when they were attacked, the whole town was in rebellion. It’s the way their minds work.”

“Major Crichton,” the President said. “You’ve been interrogating the captured alien?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you agree with their assessment?”

“We haven’t learned much from the prisoner except his name, sir.”

“Name, rank, and serial number, eh?”

“No, sir. He seems totally cooperative. It’s just that he’s confused.”

“He’s insane,” Curtis muttered. “Or certainly will be.”

“Why do you say that, Dr. Curtis?” Admiral Carrell asked.

“Herd beast,” Curtis said. “What Nat said-they don’t do things on their own initiative. Like elephants. Like zebras. Isolate one of them, and what happens?” He shrugged. “So we’re trying to bring this one into our herd. It might work, too.”

President Coffey looked interested. “How do you do that?”

“Never leave him alone,” Curtis said.

“Talk to him,” Reynolds said. “Surround him with people—”

“Until he believes he’s human,” Curtis finished.

“Have you learned anything useful?” the President demanded.

“No, sir,” Jenny said.

“We know they took prisoners from Kosmograd,” Carlotta Dawson said.

“Ah. That’s good news,” President Coffey said. Then he frowned. “I suppose it’s good news. At all events, we must decide what to do now.”

During the fifty years since its first construction, the underground complex east of Moscow had been decorated, air conditioned, carpeted, and enlarged. There were swimming pools, barbershops, and fine restaurants; the reinforced concrete walls were covered by tapestries and paintings; and everything had been done to disguise the fact that it was, at bottom, a bomb shelter.

Party First Secretary Narovchatov strode on parquet wooden floors to the Chairman’s office, and remembered another time long ago, when Stalin had reviewed a Guards division during the Great Patriotic War against Hitler. The Germans were so close that the Guards had marched across Red Square and walked directly to the front to take part in an attack.

From review to engagement with the enemy, he thought. That will not happen now. The enemy is not so close, but there are enough enemies.

Tartars, Hungarians, Poles, Latvians, Czechs, were in open revolt, and many others, even the Ukrainians, were restless. Narovchatov strode past the Chairman’s secretary.

“Halt, Comrade Narovchatov.”

Narovchatov looked up in surprise. A Guards Division colonel stood with three armed soldiers.

“I regret, Comrade Narovchatov, that we must search you—”

There was a roar of laughter from inside the office. Chairman Petrovskiy appeared in the doorway. He chuckled again. “It is well that you are alert, Comrade Colonel.” Petrovskiy said. “But I think you need not be so diligent with the First Secretary, who is, after all, my oldest friend. Come in, Nikolai Nikolayevich. My thanks. Comrade Colonel. Return to your duties.”

Nikolai Nbrovchatov closed the massive door behind him and stood against it. He had not had time to react. Now he thought of the situation outside and frowned.

“Da,” Chairman Petrovskiy said. “It can be that serious. Come and sit, I have much to tell you. Will you have vodka? Or whiskey?”

“I will join you in a cognac.” Narovchatov took the drink and sat in front of the massive desk.

“To humanity,” Petrovskiy said. “No idle toast.” They drank. “Not an idle toast at all,” the Chairman said. “I had a call today. From the American President.’

“Ah.”

“A very strange call,” Petrovskiy continued. “The Americans want our help.”

“As we need theirs,” Narovchatov said.

“Exactly.”

“Did you tell them this?”

“In part. I told them that unless they undertook to restrain the Germans, we would not be interested in talking with them.” Petrovskiy paused dramatically. “They agreed instantly. I heard the President give the orders.”

“But—”

“Of course I could not be certain,” Petrovskiy continued. “But I believe they were sincere. Nikolai Nikolayevich, they are truly desperate. The alien invasion is succeeding.”

Narovchatov shook his head in disbelief, as he had when he first heard that an alien army-of small elephants!-had landed in the American heartland.

“Succeeding?”

“Da. The enemy holds their breadbasket, the source of their grain-and the Americans have been unable to dislodge them. They have lost some of their best military units.”

For a moment Narovchatov felt triumph. Then his grin faded. “But Anatoliy Vladimirovich, if they cannot drive the aliens from the planet—”

“If they cannot, we certainly could not,” the Chairman said grimly. “Nikolai Nikolayevich, no matter who wins, we have lost. It will be many years before we regain our strength. Do you agree?”

“Da, Anatoliy Vladimirovich. Even if there were no military difficulties, even if we regained control of the provinces and the Warsaw nations without further difficulty, it will take years merely to replace the dams and bridges.”

“I believe we must help the Americans,” Petrovskiy said slowly.

“How?”

“In every way we can. They have a plan. A coordinated attack, on the enemy ships in space and on the alien forces in Kansas. We will both use our remaining strategic rockets.”

“We have few enough left,” Narovchatov said.

“I know.” The Chairman paused. “The Americans also want us to use submarine forces.”

“For what?”

“Some to fire at enemy ships in space, some to fire at Kansas.”

“At Kansas!”

“They also wish us to fire long-range strategic rockets at Kansas.”

“To bomb Kansas,” Narovchatov said wonderingly. “Anatoliy-Comrade Chairman, this is madness!”

“Da. The KGB believes that too.”

“They know of this?”

Petrovskiy nodded. “My call was recorded. I had not known that Trusov could do that-but within minutes after the President called, he was here.”

“He admitted listening! To you!”

“Da. He professed loyalty, but regarded conversations with the Americans as a matter of state security.”

Narovchatov thought furiously. “Thus the colonel and his guards outside your office?”

“And elsewhere. I have sent them to your quarters. And to protect your daughter and grandchildren.”

“Are things that serious, then?’

Petrovskiy shrugged. “Chairman Trusov was nearly hysterical.

He could not believe that I might seriously consider this proposition. ‘Let the aliens destroy the United States,’ he said. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the Americans are the enemies of communism everywhere. The aliens are herd beasts, they will respect communism. That is why they have invaded the United States. The Americans have lost only one state. They have fifty. Let the aliens weaken them more.’ That is what he said.”

“Could he be right?”

“Do you believe so?”

Narovchatov shook his head slowly. “No. These aliens, these — elephants I — are the real enemy. They will enslave us all

The Chairman’s face clouded. “And that we will not permit,” he said. His frown deepened, and he pounded his fist against the desk. “No one shall rule us! Russia shall always remain independent. The worst of the Czars knew that much Russia shall obey orders from no outsider! We must not allow that.”

Narovchatov sighed. “You are correct, as always, Anatoliy Vladimirovich. But I am afraid. The KGB is everywhere, and if they resist— What shall we do?”

“We will call your son-in-law, and order him to work with Marshal Shavyrin. Together they will develop a plan.”

Narovchatov nodded agreement. “Pavel Aleksandrovich will be loyal,” he said.

“1 have known Shavyrin almost as long as I have known you,” Petrovskiy said. “I can trust him. Within hours he can be with Bondarev at Baikonur. But he must be warned. When he joins Bondarev, he must take with him his loyal troops, his headquarters guards and his personal staff.”

It has come to this. “Da.” Narovchatov stood. “I will see to it.” He moved to the door, then turned. “When, Anatoliy? Will Russia ever have a government without fear?”

He did not wait for an answer.

An octuple of warriors came for them.

Gravity was next to nothing. The humans moved in a chaotic cloud, bounding from the corridor walls, Nikolai as agile as the rest. Warriors moved four ahead and four aft, keeping orderly pace, using slippers with surfaces like Velcro that interacted with the damp rugs.

Takpusseh and Tashayamp waited where a section of rugcovered wall had been pulled up, leaving a black hole.

“Greeting,” Takpusseh said cheerfully. “We must find a task for you until Number Six digit ship arrives. You will clean the air circulation system. Climbing is one thing you may do better than fithp. You will find it easy now that Thuktun Flishithy-chaytrif.”

What? Wes remembered that chaytr(f meantfoot. Now that the mother ship is mated to a foot?

Never mind. Tashayamp was distributing equipment. To each human was given a sponge, a bag like a plastic garbage bag, a smaller bag filled with soapy water, and a flashlight. All had handles, big metal loops suitable for a fi’s digits. They were strung on a loop of cord.

“The outer ducts need you most,” Takpusseh said. “Empty the collectors into the bag. Wipe the sides. For this day’s mission, circle this way, spinward.” His trunk described a clockwise arc. “Go as far as you can, prove your endurance, then come out at any grill. Summon the first warrior you see. Any warrior will escort you to your cells.”

Would the fithp really allow prisoners to explore their air duct system? Arvid and Dmitri seemed as bemused as Wes, but they were obeying, looping the line loosely around themselves.

Best to assume that he’d be watched. Even so, Wes would enjoy the chance to spy a little. Certainly the Soviets would… Nikolai was being urged into the hole. Arvid and Dmitri followed.

They’ll assume that we’ll want to stay together, but I don think we’ll have to. Wes moved toward the opening.

A branch of living hose looped around his ankle. “Pause a moment,” Takpusseh said. “Dawson, you are to be separated from the others. From this moment Raztupisp-minz is your teacher. When you see a warrior, tell him, ‘Raztupisp-minz.’ ”

Wes shrugged. The Soviets hadn’t been good company lately. “The cause, I attack you?’

“The cause, we decide this. Go.”

He moved through the air duets, cleaning as he went. The work was not difficult. Do what they want for now. Dmitri wants us docile. He may be right, for now.

He worked until he was too tired to go on: five or six hours, he thought.

There were wing nuts on the outsides of the grills. Fingers had to reach through the grills to turn them. That was easy enough:

the wings were five inches across, suited to fi’ digits. Wes was talking to himself before he realized that the screws turned the wrong way. Takpusseh must have wondered if the humans would be reduced to screaming for help through the grills.

He called to two passing warriors. “Take me to Raztupisp-minz.”

One stopped. “Wes-Dawson? You are to go to a restraint room.” Wes paused to refasten the grill, then moved away between the warriors.

Lorena brought the teapot. “More tea. Comrade Marshal?” she asked.

“Thank you, no,” Marshal Shavyrin said. He glanced at the clock on the wall, then at Lorena.

Pavel Bondarev saw, and made a tiny gesture of dismissal. Lorena left the room. Bondarev thought she closed the door heavily, but if so, Marshal Shavyrin did not notice it.

“It is fantastic,” Shavyrin said. A hastily assembled report with bright red coven lay on Bondarev’s desk next to Bondarev’s ancient brass telescope. Shavyrin lifted the report and idly thumbed through the pages. “Fantastic,” he repeated.

“I agree,” Bondarev said. “Yet we must believe—”

The telephone chirped. Bondarev touched a button to put the telephone on amplifier. “Bondarev.”

“Petrovskiy.”

“Da, Comrade Chairman!” Bondarev said. “We have prepared the report you ordered. Marshal Shavyrin is here.

“Good. You are well, Leonid Edmundovich?”

“Da, Comrade Chairman.”

“Very well. General Bondarev, you have spoken with the American generals?”

“Da. What they ask is barely possible, Comrade Chainnan.”

“Will it succeed?”

Bondarev looked helplessly at Shavyrin. The Marshal was silent for a moment, then said, “Comrade Chairman, who can know? Yet it may be the only possible plan. The timing, however, is very critical.”

“And your recommendation? Do we do this?”

Shavyrin was silent.

“Well?” the Chairman demanded.

“It is very critical,” Shavyrin said finally. “Part of their plan depends on their Pershing missiles. They are to fire them from Germany, to attack the alien spacecraft. Many of those missiles will come toward the Soviet Union. There will be no way to know their real targets-which might be Moscow or Kiev or our remaining missile bases.

“There is more,” Shavyrin continued. “Whenever we have launched missiles, the aliens have bombarded the base from which they came. They will attack our remaining bases. Few strategic rocket forces will remain after this battle. If the Americans do not use their missiles, we will be disarmed and nearly helpless, and they will retain their strategic striking power. Suppose they do not launch their Pershing missiles, but keep them. They could destroy us within minutes, whenever they wanted, and we would be unable to retaliate.”

Narovchatov’s voice came onto the line. “Is it your recommendation that we do not cooperate with the Americans?”

“No, Comrade First Secretary,” Shavyrin said. “But it is my duty to make you and the Chairman aware of all the implications.”

“We have very little time,” Chairman Petrovskiy said. “The American President is waiting for my answer. He says the situation is desperate. I am inclined to agree. I must give him our decision now.”

“All depends on the Pershing missiles,” Shavyrin said. “If the Americans do not launch them-for any reason-then it is unlikely that our missiles will get through the enemy defenses. If the Americans are successful, then some of our missiles will reach their targets.”

“Bondarev?” the Chairman demanded.

“I believe this may be our last chance. If we do not aid the Americans now, then the Americans will be defeated, and how long will it be before Russia falls to the aliens?”

“Your recommendation?”

This is recorded. Not only the Chairman. The KGB will listen. If we fail — “Comrade Chairman, I recommend that we aid the Americans, provided that they use their Pershing missiles, all of their Pershing missiles, in both England and Germany, to assist our penetration.”

“You agree, Marshal Shavyrin?”

“Da, with those conditions, Comrade Chainnan.”

There was a long silence. Then the Chairman said, “Very well. I will inform the American President, and we will soon tell you the time for this attack.” There was another pause, then the Chairman’s voice came on again. “Academician and General of the Army Pavel Aleksandrovich Bondarev, and Marshal Leonid Edmundovich Shavyrin, I instruct you to take command of all strategic forces of the Soviet Union, including the submarine forces, and to employ them in aid of the battle plan code-named WHIRLWIND. If you jointly agree, you are authorized to use all of the forces in your command in aid of the American effort to drive the aliens from the planet. Is this understood?”

“Da, Comrade Chairman,” Shavyrin said.

Pavel Bondarev gulped hard. “Da.”

22. SOMETHING IN THE AIR

Pavel Bondarev looked up at the big clock on his wall. “Ten minutes,” he said.

Marshal Shavyrin grinned. “Da. You are nervous, Comrade!”

“Of course,” Bondarev said with irritation. “We are about to make the most important decision in Russian history. Should I not be nervous?”

“Certainly, but you will permit that I do not openly join you? I have known for five years that I might be faced with this moment.”

“True,” Bondarev said. He looked at the twin electronics consoles installed against one wall of his underground office. Lights winked in complex patterns. In the lower right corner of each console was a switch. Bondarev patted his throat, to feel the key on its silver chain. “Does it make it easier?”

“The peasants say you can become accustomed to anything, even hanging, if you hang long enough-what was that?”

There were sharp sounds from outside. Bondarev went to the door.

“No! Do not open that door!” Shavyrin commanded. He lifted his telephone. “Colonel! What is the situation?” He listened for a few moments. “They must not enter,” he snapped: “The cost does not matter. Our orders come from Chairman Petrovskiy himself! Do what you can. What you must,” he said. He put down the phone.

Bondarev looked the question at him.

“KGB,” Shavyrin said. “They have sent soldiers as well as their agents. My security forces are resisting them.”

“But—” Pavel lifted the telephone. “Get me Chairman Petrovshy—”

Shavyrin shook his head. “Colonel Polivanov has already reported that the KGB has cut the telephone lines. We no longer have communications with Moscow.”

Bondamv looked up in horror. “But—”

Before he could speak, the door opened. Lorena came in.

“What are you doing here?” Bondarev demanded.

She hesitated for a moment, then showed what was in her hand. She held a small automatic pistol. “You are both under arrest, in the name of State Security,” she said.

“No!” Bdndarev shouted. “Not you!”

“The KGB is everywhere,” Shavyrin said. He reached for the telephone—

“Stop that!” Lorena shouted. Hysteria tinged her voice.

“Comrade, I must speak to the rocket forces,” Shavyrin said.

“To order them to aid the Americans,” she said. “Never! The aliens will destroy the Soviet Union—”

“Then they will do it anyway,” Shavyrin said. “Understand this. The Americans are to launch” — he glanced at the clock on the wall — “even now are launching their Pershing missiles. Those missiles will come toward us. They are supposed to provide a diversion to allow our missiles to penetrate, but there is always the chance that the Americans will use this as an opportunity to attack us. With that in mind I have given orders that if the rocket forces do not hear from us, they will attack the United States. Not attack Kansas, but all of the United States!”

“I know nothing of this,” she shouted. “You will move there, to that wall, away from the desk, away from the telephones!”

“Lorena,” Bondarev said. “Lorena, you cannot do this.” He moved toward her. She backed away.

“Stop! I will shoot! I will!”

Bondarev advanced.

The little gun spat at him. He felt a sharp pain in his chest. “Lorena!” he shouted. He swayed against the wall.

She looked in horror. “Pavel, Pavel—”

As she spoke, Marshal Shavyrin moved. He lifted the brass telescope from Bondarev’s desk and swung it, bringing it down on Lorena’s head, striking so hard that the telescope bent over her head and a lens fell onto the floor.

She collapsed instantly. Shavyrin dropped the telescope and moved to close the door. Then he hurried to Bondarev. “Comrade,” he said. “Pavel—”

Pavel heard him as from a distance. He tried to take a deep breath, but pain prevented him, and he heard blood burbling in his lungs. More shots sounded from outside in the corridors. They seemed much closer.

“I-am alive,” Bondarev said. Each word was an effort. He looked at theclock. “It is time! We must know, did the Americans fire the Pershing missiles?”

Shavyrin lifted the telephone. “Polivanov. Shavyrin here. Colonel, did the Americans fire their Pershings?” There was a long pause. “I see,” Shavyrin said. “Do we have communications with the strategic forces? I see. Thank you.” He put the telephone down. “The KGB has cut us off from all reports from the West,” he said carefully. “Their spetsnaz troops came in such force that we could not hold all of this headquarters. My troops chose instead to,defend the command circuits, which remain intact.” He pointed at the winking lights. “The keys will work, Comrade Academician. What do we do?”

Pavel breathed in short gasps. It hurt terribly. He collapsed in a chair in front of his console. “The Pershings—”

“We will never know about the Pershings,” Shavyrin said. “And from the sounds in the corridors, we do not have much more time.” As he spoke he unbuttoned the breast pocket of his uniform and took out a key. He looked at it for a moment, then inserted the key into his console and turned it.

“You know more of these things than I, Pavel. I have aimed my panel. It is your decision now.” Shavyrin drew his pistol and turned toward the door. “But I think you must decide quickly.”

Jt felt as if his head was padded with cotton wool. Each breath hurt, and Shavyrin’s voice seemed to fade and return. What must 1 do? We cannot know, we cannot know. Have the Americans tricked us? Could the KGB be right?

Lorena lay on his Persian carpet. The broken brass telescope lay over her left arm, partly covering the expensive bracelet that Pavel had bought her. He could not see whether she was breathing.

The gunfire in the corridors outside was very close.

Quickly! Pavel fumbled with his shirt buttons. It seemed to take forever to open the links of the chain, and when he tried to jerk it off it wouldn’t break. Patience—

He opened the catch at last, and for a moment stared at the-brass key; then quickly and decisively he thrust it into the key switch and turned it.

One by one the lights on the board blinked from green to red.

“It is done,” Bondarev said.

“Da,” Shavyrin said. There was a loud click as he released the safety catch of his pistol.

There was something in the air. It affected all fithp differently. Spaceborn females only felt a nervousness, a wrongness; they tended to snap back if approached wrongly. Sleepers were easily distracted; they had to be held to their duties. Even spaceborn males felt a belligerent optimism, as if their bodies wanted to dance or fight.

Defensemaster Tantarent-fid had the air circulation running on high. The only effect was a breeze. Something in the air: even the human fithp might have known the difference among all the alien scents. The sleeper mating season had begun.

The skewed mating seasons had come twice a year for fifteen years. The Herdmaster knew the feeling well, but he couldn’t help it: he felt good all over. The war was going well. Minor reversals had occurred on Winterhome, but the base was still in place. We learn. And this gathering will produce results.

Pastempeh-keph didn’t use the display room much, though his predecessor had. It was too large for comfort. He hadn’t seen it since the history lesson, since the day Dawson attacked his own Breaker. He felt he needed it now. Message Bearer could run itself for a few hours, and screens wouldn’t do. It must be a full gathering. He wanted to watch their body language.

Seven fithp rested on their bellies in a circle: the Herdmaster, his Advisor, both Breakers, the Attackmaster, the Defensemaster, and Fistarteh-thuktun. The Herdmaster looked around at the fithp he had summoned. He said, “We are going to leani why the humans behave as they do. We will learn now.”

Even Fathisteh-tulk looked uneasy; and that was somehow gratifying.

“Priorities first. Defensemaster, what is our status?”

Tantarent-fid was the youngest present. He was a smallish male, space-born, mated, father of two male children well below fighting age. He was not known to have dissident leanings. His predecessor, who did, had been retired while the Foot was departing the ringed giant.

The Defensemaster’s business was the survival of the Traveler Herd. His domain included air systems, food sources, hull integrity, the main drive, course determinations, the mounted digit ships, and the lasers that would defend the ship from meteors or alien weapons. He shared these last three domains with the Attackmaster.

He answered readily enough. “Message Bearer is fully able to defend itself, and well beyond attack range in any case. Main drive running well. We’ve used more than half our fuel, of course, and that will have to be replaced sometime. Sixteen digit ships moored for boost, and more returning from Winterhome. We’re on schedule. We’ll match with the Foot in two days. In twenty-two days we’ll have set the Foot on course, as you and Attackmaster Koothfektil-rusp may decide. We’ll disengage and leave Winterhome on a fast parabola.”

“You have prey in the air ducts.”

“Yes, the Breakers have had some success in training the human flthp. They show a gratifying agility. For two days now we’ve had them cleaning and re-impregnating the filters. We had hoped that would take the mating scent out of the corridors, but—” Tantarent-fid clawed the air, perfunctorily. “We’ll reserve the humans as backup to the automatic systems. The Breakers can best tell you whether they would react well during a real emergency.

“Good enough. Attackmaster Koothfektil-rusp, how’s the texture of the mud?”

The Attackmaster’s business was war. “I believe we can hold the base on Land Mass Two,” he said. “Digit ships are in transit with prisoners and loot. if things continue to go well, we will not need the Foot; but we must make that decision soon.” He paused, then, “We’ve lost Digit Ship Twenty—”

“How did you lose this digit ship?”

Koothfektil-rusp reared up on his forelegs. “Digit Ship Twenty was rising on a launch laser during heavy weather. We believe that the beam itself precipitated a funnel storm. The beam was blocked by clouds and debris. The ship rose too slowly; the pilot tried to land. During that vulnerable period an aircraft fired a missile.”

Some losses had to be expected, of course. Spaceborn had little grasp of planetary weather. Choose another topic — “Attackmaster, I have the impression that the prey continually repudiate their surrender.”

“They do.”

“Your response?”

The Attackmaster looked uncomfortable. “Which thuktun shall we read? Fithp do not do such things. My warriors trample all humans within sixty-four srupkithp of where prey break their bond to the Traveler Herd. If a prey hides well enough to survive our wrath, we take him to be sane and harmless. But this is hard on my fithp, Herdmaster. It is hard to crush those who have surrendered!”

“I have my problems too. Breaker-One, is the Attackniaster’s approach correct?”

“I don’t— It won’t teach them surrender, Herdmaster. Attackmaster Koothfektil-rusp has told us this: they attack after surrender, singly and in octuples and in still larger groups. This goes beyond an epidemic of rogues. It grows likely that the typical human resembles Dawson, and not the Soviets. They make their own decisions: each an entire fithp wobbling on two legs. Killing those who were not involved in a breach of faith… may accomplish nothing at all, or give them reason to question our sanity.”

“Dawson. Fumf—” The Herdmaster considered. He must have answers. Was he even asking the right questions? “To call such behavior insane is futile. If all are insane— Advisor, you have been uncommonly silent.”

“Lead me Herdmaster. Breaker-One, there is the matter of predictability. If all are insane, are they all insane in the same fashion?”

“Not even that. I have no complaints of the Soviets.”

But Takpusseh stirred, and Fathisteh-tulk caught it. “BreakerTwo?”

“They keep secrets. The Soviets speak their own language, though they practice the thuktun-speech too. They know more of the air ducts than we have asked them to learn. Ask us again after Digit Ship Six gives us more prisoners.”

Fathisteh-tulk turned to another source. “Keeper of the thuktun, what have you learned? The prey are described as insane. I remember the pflit of the Homeworld—”

Speaking of the Homeworld to a fellow sleeper, Fistartehthuktun waxed loquacious. “Of course, the pflit reproduced at a furious rate. They were little mottled gray beasts the same colors as the Sunward Forest they lived in. and the way they clustered made fithp look roguish. An individual life meant nothing in the survival strategy of the pflit, so they evolved no defense against predators, and they migrated in swarms, even if the path led off a cliff… What insight are you seeking? The prey throw their lives away, but they don’t breed faster than we do.”

“Probably true,” Takpusseh said.

“You miss my point,’ The Advisor said, “Is it not true that nature shapes life to fit its style of life?”

We’re wasting time, Pastempeh-keph thought, but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t speak. A Herdmaster must trumpet softly, lest a suggestion be taken for an order.

“The Life Thukiun tells us so,” Fistarteh-thuktun said slowly. “The Thuktun of the Long Path shows how new forms arise from old. Evolution goes by groups, by herds; but ripper fthuggl live alone, attacking their prey one on one: all rogues. They need room to find prey; they meet only to mate. Fithp surrender in herds, or accept surrender into the victor herd. What style of life has shaped our prey? The prey-they don’t Surrender to superior force. Perhaps they die to guard genes related to theirs. Or—”

“Think of a hunting carnivore,” Takpusseh said in sudden excitement. “Food is scarce, so they scatter. Siblings might be separated by seas or mountains. More dangerous predators come. Might a prey die to kill them, because the marauders might reach its genotypes?”

“But humans are omnivores,” Raztupisp-minz reminded them. “Still, the sky of Winterhome seethed with aircraft before our attack. I think you have it. They do not remain in families. Like ripper fthuggl, individuals go to make their own territory. To kill something dangerous is for the good of all. For surviving heroes it may even mean mating privileges, to judge by our studies of their broadcasts. We believe that they have no specific mating season. Indeed, they do not always remain with one mate!”

The Herdmaster called them back to specifics. “What does this do for us, if true?”

Into the uneasy silence Fathisteh-tulk said, “It makes us aware of the awesome magnitude of our problem. We take surrender in herds, do we? Our prey doesn’t come in herds! A family might be scattered across half the planet!”

“Surely—”

Whatever the Attackmaster was about to say would never be heard. His digits flipped back to cover his skull-the classic reflexive response to threat-as he listened to the shell-shaped phone under his earfiap.

It is not good news. The Herdmaster waited. If there were danger to the ship, both he and the Defensemaster would know instantly. What could be important enough to interrupt this meeting— He knew soon enough.

The Attackmaster took a microphone from his harness. “Flee. Save what we can.” He returned the microphone. “Herdmaster, we no longer have a base in Kansas.”

“How is this?”

“The prey have used thermonuclear bombs. Bombs rise among the orbiting digit ships—”

“But these can be stopped.”

“Stopped, of course. But more bombs fall on our base, and our ships are too busy to stop them. Bombs are rising from both land masses and from the sea.”

“Prom both land masses?” The Advisor looked thoughtful. “You are certain?”

“I am certain of nothing. Advisor. They sow radioactive fire on their own croplands! Herdmaster, I must—”

“Certainly.” The Herdmaster stood, releasing his fithp to their duties. They scattered.

“What now?” he demanded. “What do you make of this?”

Advisor Fathisteh-tulk struck at invisible flies. “1 would not tread on the Breakers’ ground—”

“Your advice, drown you!”

“Soviets and Dawson’s tribe cooperate. When they must. As we hear of our losses, we must not forget this. Go fight your war.” He spoke to the Herdmaster’s back.

Roger Brooks drove south, then angled west. For two days there had been cornfields and no sign of war.

Rosalee was stretched out, taking advantage of the now roomy backseat of the Rabbit. Road conditions had been mixed, good roads alternating with stretches where the highways and intersections were utterly destroyed. It’s still a long way to Colorado Springs. There’s nothing on the radio, and I’m half asleep.

Roger asked, “Carol, are you slept out?”

She hadn’t spoken in hours. Her eyes were wide, doing a continual slow swivel. Shejumped when he spoke and said, “Yeah. I must say, that’s the damnedest convention I ever half saw.”

“I believe it.”

“Though I heard about one in St. Louis that was canceled, and nobody told the Guest of Honor.”

“Why do you go?”

“Oh…mostly we go to meet each other, I guess. And the people who write the books we read.” Flicker of a smile. “There were three men for every two women, and the ratio used to be even better. And fun things tend to happen, like the masquerades and listening to the dirty filksongs—”

“Filksongs?’

“And half a dozen writers going off to dinner, with an editor to pay, and Nat taking me along. And the room parties, and the elevator parties, and smoffing… damn.” She was crying. “I guess I’m in mourning.”

“I’m sorry about George. But he did get a tank. I don’t think anyone could have stopped him.” Did she blame Roger?

Apparently not. “George. I thought that was stupid, I told him so… George.” Her head was turned away, watching the passing cornfields. She broke a long silence in a sudden rush of words. “It’ll never happen again. It’s all dead! The publishing industry is probably dead, half of science fiction is obsolete, we’re all going to be scrabbling for something to eat for years to come, and how can you hold a convention with no airlines?”

She misses science fiction. If the best troops in the Army can’t drive the aliens out, the whole damn planet is doomed, and she misses science fiction. It came to him, suddenly and frighteningly, that the war might already be lost.

“That first night Nat had a three-pound Lobster Savannah, and he started talking to it. ‘Hospital Station thinks they can cure you.’ ‘The Federation doesn’t think your people can defend themselves alone.’ ‘Now will you speak of your troop movements, wretched crustacean?’ By dessert we were calling him Speaker to Seafood—” Her voice changed. “Oh my God!”

The corner of Roger’s eye had caught light brighter than sunlight. He braked without looking. “What is it?”

“They `it hitting us again!”

He eased the Rabbit over to the dirt rim of the highway before he dared look. One glance was enough. “Don’t look.” He opened the door and slid out, low. “Follow me. Rosalee, wake up and get out on my side! Stay low!”

The blast came, not as bad as he had expected, followed by a wind, followed by another blast and more wind. The Rabbit’s windows rattled. By then all three were crouched on the highway side of the car. There were more bright lights high overhead, and another to the north. When the light died a little, Roger peeked over the hood.

Fiery mushrooms bloomed amidst the Kansas wheat fields.

“Mushrooms. I think this is the real thing,” he said. “Not meteors. Atomic bombs, and that’s occupied territory. Those are ours.”

“Bombing Kansas?”

Roger laughed, and meant it. “If you’ve got a better idea, you should have been in the helicopter. At least we’re fighting back!” He peeked again. There were four fire-mushrooms in view, all a good distance north

A thread of actinic green light rose from hundreds of miles away… something was blocking it at the skyward end, something rising… another fireball winked near the base of the beam. Roger ducked fast, waited, looked again. Fireball rising. No laser beam. An orange point high up, drifting down. What was that all about?

Whatever. Lasers were aliens, atomic bombs were men, and the bomb had interrupted something. “Come on, guys,” Roger gloated. “Ruin their whole morning!”