Footfall

23. CLEANUP

Western Kansas was a black, dimpled land.

The army pilot gave the craters a wide berth, flying carefully upwind. A stutter tried to surface when he spoke, and he spoke seldom. His motions were jerky. He couldn’t have seen films of death-beams spiraling in on other helicopters, but rumors must have spread. Jenny guessed that he was waiting to be speared by green light.

Sifting beside her, Jack Clybourne was as calm as an oyster.

Jenny saw reports from the observatories as they came in, and she kept no secrets from Jack. Earth’s most recent moons still included more than a score of destroyer-sized spacecraft; but the mother ship had disappeared into interplanetary space with half its retinue, and the remaining ships seemed to be doing nothing. Waiting? If the pilot had known what Jenny knew, he might be calmer. But the vivid green death was still possible. Jenny wasn’t as calm as she looked. Jack Clybourne was Jenny’s own true love, but he was not about to out-macho her.

From time to time, at Jenny’s orders, the pilot skimmed low over burned cornfields and along broken roads. The roads were strewn with hundreds of what might have been gigantic tablecloths in neon-bright colors, and thousands of dinner-plate-sized pieces of flattened foam plastic. The hang-glider fabric would become clothing, come winter, for refugees who would be glad to have it. But the alien landing shoes would be indestructible litter. A hundred years from now farmers would still be digging them up in the cornfields. Would those farmers have hands, or bifurcated trunks?

There were black skeletons of automobiles, and corpses: enough half-burned human and alien corpses to satisfy anybody.

The helicopter circled a village, and Jenny couldn’t find a single unburned structure. The inhabitants had fled ahead of the aliens, and the aliens had fled from fission bombs, and nobody remained to fight the fires.

Rarely, bands of refugees looked up to watch the helicopter pass. Few tried to wave it down.

Jenny’s eyes kept straying to the alien ship.

It had been in sight for nearly an hour. Less than ten miles away now, it dominated the flat black landscape. It had fallen several miles. It was foreshortened, its hull split, like a Navy battleship dropped on its nose. It must have loomed large in the refugees’ eyes.

Like a coyote on a freeway, a fi’ corpse lay in the road, flattened to a pancake silhouette and rotted almost to its crushed bones. Its hang glider hadn’t opened. She’d seen dead snouts here and there. They stripped their dead, but often left them where they lay. Cremation would have been easy enough: stack the bodies, and one blast of a fithp laser would do it.

The helicopter settled near the stern. Jenny and Jack got out.

They walked alongside the ruined hull. Only the warship’s tail, an outsize rocket-nozzle-shape with jet scoops facing forward, had survived the crash intact. The hull had split halfway along its length. Jack chinned himself on the edge of the rip. “Nothing. A fuel tank.”

Forward of the tank wall, the hull had wrinkled and torn again. From the bent nose a glassless window winked, the opening squeezed almost shut. Where ripped metal gaped conveniently wide, they climbed inside, Jack leading the way.

They came out faster than they went in. Jenny took off the gas mask and waited. Jack Clybourne ran into the cornfield. After a few moments she heard sounds of gagging. She tried not to notice.

“Sorry,” he said when he came back.

“Sure. I almost lost my lunch too.”

“First assignment I get Outside—”

“You haven’t done any harm,” Jenny said. “We’re not likely to do any good here, either. The ship’s a mess, it’s a job for experts.”

“Experts.” He looked at the wreckage. “You’d send your dreamers-for-hire into that?”

“It’s their job.”

Jack shook his head. He said. “Well, it’s for sure there weren’t any survivors.”

“Yes. Too bad.”

“Damn straight. Jeez, you’d think they’d have left some of their troops behind.”

“They must have been ready to evacuate. Just in case,” Jenny said.

“Maybe they planned it that way. Maybe they did just what they came for. Kansas is gone. This place is a wound, a cemetery. We’ve got no dams, no highways, no railroads, and we’re afraid to fly. And we’ve got one prisoner. How many of our people did they get?’

Jenny shook her head. “I don’t know. A lot, from the missing persons reports. But we can’t rely on those.” We’re stalling, she thought. “Look, I’ve got to go back in. Alone. No need for both of us to get sick.”

“No. I wanted to come. I wasn’t doing any good inside the Hole.” Clybourne put on the gas mask. “Rrready.” His voice sounded hollow from inside the mask.

They reentered the rip in the life support system.

The interior was twisted and bent. Crumpled walls showed crumpled machinery and torn wiring buried inside. Alien bodies lay in the corridors. They stank. Too many days had passed since the combined U.S. and Soviet bombardment had driven the aliens back to space. Alien bodies had bloated and/or ruptured. Jenny tried to ignore them; they were someone else’s job. She hoped the biologists would come soon to remove them.

Not that I know what I’m looking for. She went deeper into the ship. Her flashlight picked out the remains of equipment; wherever she pointed, Jack took photographs. The whine of the recharger for his electronic flash sounded loud in the dead ship.

Nothing was intact. There can’t be anything here, or they’d have melted it from space. Wouldn’t they? How do they regard their dead? I’ll have to ask Harpanet. Get Reynolds to ask him, she cotrected herself. The science-fiction writers seemed to spend all their time with the captured alien; and Jenny couldn’t face one, not after this.

A large steel door lay ahead. It had been locked, but sprung partially open in the crash. Jenny pulled and it moved slightly. She wasn’t strong enough to move it farther. Jack slung the camera over his shoulder and took a grip on the door. When they pulled together it opened just far enough to let them squeeze by.

The room was tremendous, with a low ceiling and a padded floor that was now a wall. It was filled with death.

For a moment she didn’t recognize what she saw. Then her flashlight played across a human face, a child’s face, sweetly smiling-she was relieved to see that it was a doll. There was a white bloated thing wrapped in bright colored tartan under the doll. Jenny moved closer until her light showed what the doll rested on.

Like a find-the-face puzzle: now her eyes found human shapes, a knee, the back of a head, a man folded in two around a snapped spine; but all piled together like melting clay. They must have been jammed in like cattle. Here a shape that made no sense at all, with human and snout features, until it snapped into focus. An alien guard must have struck like a bomb when the ship came down, and at least three prisoners had been under him.

She gagged, and bile filled her mouth, splashed against the gas mask. Reflexively she lifted the mask. The smells of death filled her lungs. She turned and ran from the ship.

The bridge hummed with soft voices.

Behind Message Bearer a glow was fading, dying. Its death was carefully monitored. One couldn’t turn the main drive on and off like a light switch, lest showers of lethal particles burst from the magnetic bottle and spray through the ship.

Puffballs of flame streamed from sixteen digit ships mounted along the aft rim, fine-tuning Message Bearer’s velocity. Bridge, personnel watched the view from a sensor pod that reached out from the hull like a big-headed metal snake. Pastempeh-keph watched the screens, letting it happen. His flthp could manage this without his help.

Thrust shifted him against the web that held him to his couch. He watched a black-and-gray mass approach his ship.

The Foot was woefully changed.

Within the outer fringe of the gas giant’s ring they had found a rough-surfaced white egg, two makasrupkithp along the long axis, against a backdrop of terrible beauty. It had been like something out of the Shape Wars, a heretical representation of the Predecessors: a featureless head, lacking digits and body, lacking everything but brain.

The mining team had chosen it for its size and composition, out of an eight-cubed of similar moonlets. Over the next ten Homeworld years its icy strata had hatched water and air and fuel; its rock-and-metal core gave up steel alloys, and soil additives for the garden section.

It was no longer an egg. Six-eighths of its mass was gone. The ice was gone, leaving ridges and gouges and runnels and pits in a makasrupk-long nugget of black slag. A faceless alien head had become an asymmetrical alien skull. It drifted closer now, an ugly omen.

“I hoped that we could shunt it aside,” Pastempeh-keph said.

“We gave ourselves the option,” said his Advisor. “If the prey had proved tractable, our present foray might have become a base of operations. We might have taken Winterhome without the Foot.”

Pastempeh-keph trumpeted in sudden rage. “Why do they always wait to attack?”

“It’s not a serious question, Herdmaster.” Fathisteh-tulk was placid as always. “We organized our foray over the past several years. Why would they not take a few eights of days to gather their forces? So. Now they have used fission bombs on their own Garden regions, and I must admit that that seems excessive—”

“Mad.”

“Mad, then. If they are truly mad, our problem is worse yet. Give thanks that it is the Breakers’ problem, not ours, not yet.”

“It will be soon.”

“Yes. But Digit Ship Six approaches with new prisoners and a considerable mass of loot. The Breakers should learn a great deal when it arrives.”

The Herdmaster trumpeted satisfaction. That, at least, was as expected. Nothing else is. “Why have the natives not sent messages?”

“Before there was anything to say, they wanted to talk,” Fathisteh-tulk said. “Now that we have some estimation of our relative strengths, they say nothing. No demands, no offers. Twelve digit ships are destroyed, and vast stretches of cropland, and the prey’s herdmasters have nothing to say to us. Perhaps the Breakers will learn why.” Again, that overly placid, languid, irritating voice. There is nothing to be done, the Herdmaster told himself. He is Advisor. What would I do, in his place?

Message Bearer surged backward, and shuddered. A fi’ turned and said, “Herdmaster, we are mated to the Foot. Soon we may begin acceleration. Have we a course?’

This was the moment. Long ago the Predecessors had destroyed a planet. Now — “Continue the Plan. Guide the Foot to center its impact on Winterhome. The Breakers’ group will find us a more specific target.” He stiffened suddenly. In a lowered voice he said, “Fathisteh-thlk, I believe I forgot to do anything about the mudmom!”

“Phoo. Defensemaster—”

“I saw to it that the mudroom was fully frozen before we stopped our spin.” Tantarent-fid said complacently. “I evacuated your private mudroom too, Herdmaster.”

“Good. Well served.” Pastempeh-keph shuddered at a mental picture: globules of mud filling the air, fithp in pressure suits trying to sweep it away— Lack of a communal mudroom would cause its own problems.

Henceforth every fi’ would be vaguely unhappy-as if the skewed mating seasons were not enough. He lifted his snffp high. I drown in afloat! of troubles.

Fathisteh-tulk made sympathetic gestures.

Not sympathy. Answers. “Defensemaster, bring the Breakers, the Attackmaster, and the priest to the conference pit. We must make decisions regarding the prey and the Foot.”

“Attackmaster?”

“We have discontinued the base in Kansas,” Koothfektil-rusp said. “Digit ships are in transit with prisoners and loot. We lost Digit Ship Thirteen, which carried the bulk of what we had gathered, but we saved several prisoners and some material on other ships.”

“How was this one lost?”

Koothfektil-rusp’s digits snapped back to cover his head. Did he feel threatened? “We did not anticipate that the American FIeni would bomb their own major food-bearing domain! We did not anticipate that the Soviet Herd would cooperate with them; and that they surely did! Our beams stopped many of their suborbital bombs, but many got through, and the launch devices had moved before we could fire on them.”

“The ship?”

“Thirteen was rising on a launch beam when a thermonuclear missile from a submarine vehicle destroyed the laser facility.”

“The bombs: were they all from the Soviet Herd?”

“From desert territories on the Soviet continent, and from offshore of the American continent, from submarine vehicles that were shielded by water when our lasers fell. None of the thermonuclear devices came from the United States itself.”

The Herdmaster pondered that. “Breaker-One, must we assume that the United States Herd has surrendered to the other? Or has the Soviet Herd attacked our foothold in Kansas, risking their wrath?”

Raztupisp-minz glanced at Takpusseh before speaking. “You must also consider that two human herds may cooperate when neither has surrendered to the other.”

The Herdmaster had feared this. Too many answers were no answer.

“And yet we may prosper,” Attackmaster Koothfektil-rusp said soothingly. “There is lithe industry, little transportation in our chosen target area. We may find genotypes clustered when we land following Footfall

“Footfall, yes.” Keep to specifics. “Must the Foot fall? BreakerOne?”

Raztupisp-minz said, “They must be made to know that they are hurt.” Takpusseh stirred but kept silent.

“Hurt? In America they will starve! They have seared their crops with radioactive fire!” The Herdmaster took firm hold of his emotions. The air was heady with pheromones, and seven spaceborn males were ready to butt heads “Attackmaster? The Foot?”

Koothfektil-rusp’s answer was predictable. “Stomp them. Show our might. We have chosen the location, Herdmaster. This time we attack a weaker herd. We must secure a foothold on Winterhome, and expand from there. Weather following Footfall will make retaliation difficult. Fate gifts us with a side effect: the weather worldwide will be wetter and mole to our liking.”

“Show me.”

Koothfektil-rusp lit the wall screen. Under his direction a globe of Winterhome rolled, and stopped. The Attackmaster’s digit indicated the body of water that Rogachev called the Indian Ocean. “Here, in the center. Look how the waves expand from the impact point. East, they roll many makasrupkithp to the island nations. North, even further. Westward, they cover the lowlands where we see city lights; the highlands are left free. Northwest, fuel sources that serve worldwide industry are drowned. These herds that cooperated against us may still not cooperate with the savage herds of the Southern Hemisphere, and wild air masses make transport impossible to them, and where would they send their forces? We might land east or west or north; the rolling sea subdues the prey in all directions. My sleeper aides tell me that the Foot has the mass and velocity to do the work we want.”

They would drown, by eight to the eighths. The Herdmaster mourned in advance. “Have you chosen our foothold?’

“Here, I think. We would find not only mines but possible allies. One problem, Herdmaster: launching facilities will be a problem, here or anywhere. We must build in continual rain. Perhaps we must launch through rain, requiring more laser power, making a launch more conspicuous…

The Herdinaster felt himself relaxing. He knew military strategy. This was easier than talking about the craziness of the prey, which made his mind hurt.

Advisor Fathisteh-tulk vented a fluttering snort. “Possible allies?” His digits swiped at thin air: We can’t know that.

The Attackmaster snapped back. “They have little transportation! We will find true herds. When they surrender—”

The Herdmaster was tired. “Enough. Do it your way, Attackmaster. I’ve heard no better suggestion. Breakers, keep me aware. We must understand the prey; we must teach them our way. To your duties.”

He waited while the rest scattered. Then, “Fathisteh-tulk, you know planet dwellers better than we.” Have we erred? Could we win withozu the Foot? A Herdmaster could not ask.

The Advisor repeated what Breaker-One had said. “They must know that they have been hurt. Whether that will be enough… Herdmaster, can you spare me now?”

“Go, Fathisteh-Wlk. Your mate nears her term.”

The Soviets moved in a series of horizontal leaps, launching themselves down the corridor in long trajectories. The gravity was very weak, so weak that it took many seconds to fall from the center of a corridor to its wall. Nikolai found the conditions perfect. He had no trouble keeping up with the others even though they used their legs for propulsion and he had to launch himself with arms alone.

Sometimes he turned flips as he traveled through the corridor.

“They keep Dawson in his cell,” Dmitri said. “For five days they have done this. Why?”

Arvid shrugged. “It did not seem to me that he caused them any special trouble. Perhaps Takpusseh bears a grudge.”

“I think not.” Dmitri cursed fluently. “Dawson is a fool, and may get us all killed.”

“We could strangle him,” Arvid said.

Dmitri looked thoughtful for a moment. “No. We do not know how our captors will react. Docile, Comrade. We will continue to be cooperative. If they wish more geography lessons, you will give them. They learn nothing they have not obtained from children’s books from the United States. They wish us to join their herd. We will do so.”

They reached the entry point. Nikolai removed the grill and climbed into the air duct. Dmitri and Arvid followed.

When they had first been given the assignment, Arvid was sure that the ducts would be too small for fithp. In an emergency a young fi’ might be sent in to make repairs; but there were not even handholds for such a case. Yet, would prisoners be let loose where they could not even be monitored? Surely there would be cameras.

He had thought the cameras would be hard to identify, but they were not. Nikolai located a brush-rinined ring of just the right

size to fill a duct. It was in a recess, not moving. There were glass eyes at opposite points, and a metal tentacle coiled around the inner surface. — A cleaning robot. During the next few days they looked for others. Occasionally one would be seen far down a tube. It was comforting to know that they were watched-and how.

“Show your stamina,” Takpusseh had said. Dawson wouldn’t have the wit to hide his capabilities if they permitted him out of his cell. They had not seen him for days. Dmitri and Arvid and Nikolai stopped when they were tired, but before they were exhausted, four days in a row. Today was the fifth day, and it was time-to move.

A ring-shaped duct cleaner was far behind them, rolling on ball bearings in the outer rim. Arvid and Dmitri moved side by side, close together. They had become good at that. Nikolai was ahead of them, Perhaps the cameras would not see him. Perhaps he would be seen but not observed: in the waving of alien limbs, three humans might well seem to be two. If another duct cleaner appeared ahead, Dmitri would say, casually, “Another time.”

None did.

Nikolai spotted a side duct ahead. He speeded up. Taking his cue, Arvid and Dmitri speeded up too. The curve of the corridor had left the duct cleaner behind when Nikolai disappeared, axisbound.

Arvid stopped to clean out a dust-catch. The robot had him in view when he caught up to Dmitri.

The Rabbit topped a final rise. Pikes Peak had been visible ahead for hours; now they could see its base. The city of Colorado Springs lay spread out in the valley below them.

“We’re here,” Roger said.

“Now what?” Carol asked. “Are you sure Nat is here? Will he want to see me?”

“Yes, and I don’t know,” Roger said.

“What will we do?” Rosalee asked.

With a possessive tone. Why is it that women get that tone when they’ve been sleeping with you? And that men respond to it? But I’m glad I met her. “There are bound to be newspapers. The Washington Post still exists. It might even have a Colorado Springs headquarters. I’ll be welcome there. So will you, if I bring you in.”

“I can type,” Rosalee said. “And maybe I can help in other ways.”

She probably can. Librarians read a lot. She’s sman. Not very pretty, but there’s something about her — “Sure. We’ll work together. Reporters need research assistants.”

“Where will Nat Reynolds be?” Carol asked. “I want to see him.”

He’ll be Inside, and I’ve told you that a dozen times, so why the hell are you asking me again? “We’ll see.” He started the car down toward the city center.

“It’s all so damned-different,” Carol said.

“Yeah. That’s for sure,” Rosalee agreed. “Maybe it will always be different.”

24. MEETINGS

Digit Ship Six was moored in place at Message Bearer’s stem. While fuel flowed into the digit ship, Chintithpit-mang’s eightsquared, now reduced to forty-one, moved through the airlock and forward along the mating tube.

The prisoners had suffered on the trip out. Hours after takeoff, warriors checking their cell had found the air stinking with the smelt of half-digested food. They must have been breathing the stuff until the air flow pulled it out. In free-fall they were like fish out of water, they acted like they were dying. Chintithpit-mang’s warriors had to tow them like baggage. They towed other baggage: food stocks, maps, books full of pictures, tape cassettes, and projection machines.

Chintithpit-mang himself moved clumsily. One leg was braced straight, and it interfered with his every motion. A thermonuclear device had exploded near the ship just before takeoff. Chintithpitmang and six prisoners had slammed against a wall. The prisoners, with their negligible mass, were barely bruised, but Chintithpitmang’s right hind leg had snapped under him.

Two octuples of warriors met them at the end of a makasrupk of tunnel. They all looked irritatingly clean and healthy. Chintithpit-mang was glad to mm his prisoners over to them. If any died, he preferred that another have them in charge.

He took the shortest route toward Shreshleemang. His mate would be waiting.

Humans in a corridor startled him. He was reaching for his gun before he realized that they must be prisoners. They seemed to want something… He glared at them and kept moving. The next corner brought him face to face with Fathisteh-tulk.

Had the Herdmaster’s Advisor noticed? “May your time stretch long, Advisor,” he said, and would have passed.

“Stay,” said Fathisteh-tulk. “I need you.”

Chintithpit-mang suppressed a fluttering snort of displeasure, but the Advisor sensed it anyway. “This is of massive importance, and none other will do,” be persisted. “You are of the Year Zero Fithp, and a dissident. So is your mate. She will assume that yow duties kept you at the ship until you can explain to her. Come.”

Dmitri and Arvid climbed wearily from the air duct.

Two female fithp looked at the Soviets and passed on. A passing fi’ warrior trumpeted anger at them; they flinched back. Dmitri frowned. “Why did he do that? I thought they had their instructions—”

“He may have had other instructions,” Arvid said.

“No. He was injured. A ship must have arrived from Earth — that series of thuds this morning—”

“Da. Injured warriors will not like humans.”

The next Ii’ warrior seemed friendly enough. Perhaps he was glad of a touch of strange in his life. He made conversation, and the Soviets answered in kind. He dawdled for the benefit of the tired duct-cleaners, who moved a little more slowly than necessary. Hide your strength!

The Herdmaster looked up from his viewscreen and snorted angrily. His digits pounded a baseball-sized button. “Communications, get me Fathisteh-tulk. Find out why he isn’t on duty.”

“Will you talk to him yourself?”

“No. Send him here. Has Digit Ship Six arrived?”

“It arrived while you slept, Herdmaster.”

“After you have the Advisor, get me Breaker-One.”

“The Advisor doesn’t answer, Herdmaster.”

“What? Never mind. Get me Breaker-One,”

The screen showed Raztupisp-minz looking as if his youth had returned. Power could do that for an aging fi’. He had had power while breaking the sleepers to their new role. Now his human charges had given him his authority back.

“We will put the new prisoners to distributing the dietary supplements,” he said, “and let them talk with the Soviets, with Tashayamp present. First, however, I intend to house them with Dawson. Dawson has been alone for several days now. We hoped that, like a newborn meatflyer, he would fixate on me if he had no other companionship.”

“Did it work?”

“It is too soon to tell, but I think not. Dawson is not newborn. He talks to me, but not as a new slave talks to one who has taken his surrender. There is anger if not impudence, Herdmaster, I wonder if there is a surrender symbol among humans that we have not discovered.”

“He surrendered. He must be made to know the implications.”

“At your orders—”

“Drown you, your task is not within my thuktun! I advise only. You will do what you can, in whatever way you feel is good, and you will accept full responsibility for failure!”

“Lead me, Herdmaster. Companions from Dawson’s herd may give him back his rationality.”

“Your scarlet-tufted female was considered a curable rogue. Will her presence in Dawson’s cell affect Dawson’s sense of reality?”

“Mice accepted surrender. She obeys orders. Eight-cubed leader Siplisteph says she seems saner than most.”

“Keep me informed. Are the air ducts clean?”

Raztupisp-minz bridled at his sarcastic tone. “The prisoners have covered perhaps six sixty-fourths of the network. They’re doing well. Herdmaster, you are aware that a battle might destroy the duct sweepers or rip the ducts open. The humans are gaining practice against real need.”

“Your meaning wets my mind. I take it that they are indeed being broken to the Traveler Herd.”

Breaker-One hesitated. Then, “They do not interpret orders rigorously. One has explored regions to which he was not assigned. This may demonstrate the curiosity native to a climbing species, or they may hope to gain knowledge that will make them of more benefit to us—”

“Still they do not obey. Carry on.” The Herdmaster broke contact. “Get me Chowpeentulk.” If he knew Chowpeentulk, she would know where her mate was under almost any circumstances.

Communications tracked her to the infirmary, where Chowpeentulk was in the act of delivering an infant. Even a Herdmaster had to wait sometimes.

The cell door was ajar; it opened to Wes Dawson’s touch. He pushed it shut with his feet, and heard the lock click. Thoughts and memories boiled in his head. He pushed them deep into his mind, concentrating on the pain in his leg, and on not appearing injured. The fithp are not telepathic, he thought. But why take chances?

The cell was large and lonely. He had lived there for five days now. He liked the elbow room and he hadn’t liked dealing with the Soviets. Nonetheless—

They’re punishing me. But for what? it must be punishment. To a herd beast, being left in solitary must be agony.

They want to break me. I won’t let them. Think of something. What? There’s nothing to read…

Thuktun Flishithy’s main drive was a universal subliminal hum in Dawson’s mind. Its source was a gnawing ache.

It must be pushing against an enormous mass, for the acceleration to be so low. The fillip must have a hell of a big reserve of deuteriwn-tritium mix. That’s an ominous thought. It’s a big ship, and it can fight.

It has to be D-T mix. Any other assumption is worse. A fusion motor using simple hydrogen would have to be far more sophisticated, halfway from science fiction to fantasy. Wes Dawson preferred a more optimistic assumption.

Endlessly he waged the Fithp-Human War in his mind.

The door opened.

The intruder wailed as she entered. She had bright red hair and a pale face that would have been pretty if she hadn’t looked so sick. She was slender as a pipe cleaner, fragile-looking. Free-fall was making her terribly unhappy.

Wes caught her arm. The newcomer wailed at him without seeing him.

Others came into the cell. A blond girl, no more than ten years old, floated gracefully to remove his hand from the slender woman’s arm. “It’s all right, Alice,” the girl said.

“Makes me sick, oh God, I’m faaaluinggg.

New prisoners. Not astronauts. My God, they’ve invaded Earth)

The thin-faced redhead screamed again, and the blond girl said something soothing. Wes pushed woman and girl toward a wail, recoiled from the opposite wall, and was with them before they could bounce away. He pushed the woman’s hands into the rug surface until she got the idea: her fists closed tight and she clung. The blond girl stayed with her.

Now he could look at the others.

There were four more. One was a boy of nine or so, blackhaired, darkly tanned. Two were in their fifties, weathered like farm people, umnistakably man and wife from the way they clung to each other.

The final one was probably the blond girl’s mother. She had the same shade of blond hair and the same finely chiseled nose. She floated at arm’s length, like an acrobat.

The blond woman looked at him hard. “Wes Dawson? Senator?”

Did she expect him to recognize her? He didn’t. He smiled at her. “Congressman. Which way did you vote?”

“Jeri Wilson. We met at JPL, fifteen years ago, when the Voyager was passing Saturn… Uh, Republican.”

A long time ago. She couldn’t have been more than twenty then. Maybe not that old. And he’d met a lot of people since.

“Right. The Saturn encounter seems almost prehistoric now. How did you get here?”

“We were captured—”

“Sure, but where?”

“You don’t know?” Jeri asked. “Oh. I guess you wouldn’t. We were captured in Kansas. The aliens invaded.”

“Kansas-where in Kansas?”

“Not far from your wife’s home,” Jeri said. “About forty miles from there—”

“How the devil do you know where my wife is staying?” Dawson demanded.

“We were on our way there,” Jeri said. “Do you believe in synchronicity? I don’t, not really, but-well, actually it’s not too big a surprise. Nothing is, now.”

Wes shook his head in confusion. Aliens in Kansas. “Why were you going to find Carlotta?”

“It’s a long story,” Jeri said. “Look, we were going west, getting out of Los Angeles, when we ran out of gas. I was afraid to stop anyone until I saw Harry Reddington—”

“Hairy Red? You know him?”

“Yes. He tried to help us, and when-when that didn’t do any good, he was trying to go help your wife, and he took us with him, only the aliens landed—”

“All right,” Wes said. “I can get the details later. Is Carlotta all right?’

“I don’t know. Something happened in Kansas. Something bad for the snouts, because first they were happy, and then all of a sudden our guards turned mean.”

“Snouts?”

“That’s what everyone calls them now.”

“Good name.”

He turned to the others. “Didn’t mean to ignore you. You must have a lot of questions?”

“Some,” the man said.

“Reckon the Lord will tell us what we have to know,” the woman added. She put a protective arm around the boy.

“John and Carrie Woodward,” Jeri Wilson said. “From Kansas, but they didn’t see any more of the war than I did. And Gary Capehart. They left his parents behind. We don’t know why. And that’s my daughter Melissa, and her friend there is Alice. What’s going to happen to us?”

“Good question. I wish I knew. What’s wrong with Alice?”

The redhead’s face was pressed tight into the wall padding, and her back was stiff. Jeri said, “She wouldn’t tell us her last name. She said a bomb hit Menninger’s and they all ran. You know Menninger’s? She must have been a patient.”

Carrie Woodward sniffed, loudly.

The voice came muffled. “Free wing.”

Wes said, “I beg your pardon?”

The small face turned halfway. “I was on the free wing. No locked doors. You know what that means? I wasn’t one of the really sick ones, okay?”

Wes said, “Pleased to meet you all. I was getting lonely.” He didn’t try to shake hands. None could have spared hand; they were all clinging to the dubious security of the wall rug. “Aren’t there others?”

“We thought so,” Jeri said. “But we haven’t seen any. Are you the only one alive from Kosmograd?”

“No, there are some Russians. The fithp-that’s what they call themselves, and you’ll have to learn their language-the fithp sometimes keep us together and sometimes separate us. There are a pair of them in charge of teaching us.”

“Teachin’ what?” Carrie Woodward asked. Her voice was filled with suspicion.

“Language. Customs. People, they will expect you to suiTender. Formally. Sooner or later Takpusseh or Raztupisp-Minz — one of our fi’ teachers will come here and expect you to roll over on your back, and he’ll put his foot on your chest. Don’t fight. He won’t crush you.”

“They already did that,” Melissa said.

Jeri laughed. “We were scared silly. But really, why would they wait till now? We’d just float away.”

“Once that’s done, they expect you to cooperate. Not just passively.”

“You mean they think we’re one of them now?” Melissa asked.

“Something like that,” Dawson agreed. He pointed casually to the large camera in one corner of the room. “They have no sense of privacy,” he said. “They watch us when they please.”

Jeri Wilson frowned.

John Woodward looked at the camera, then seemed to hunch into himself.

He doesn’t look good. Like Giorge did.

“It isn’t right,” Woodward said. His wife nodded agreement.

“Maybe, but that’s how it is,” Dawson said.

“Okay,” Jeri said. “So we learn to act like snouts—”

“And learn their language. Are you hungry?”

Melissa shook her head. Jeri said, “Hah! No.”

Alice said, “Oh,” and reached into her blouse and pulled out a big vitamin bottle. The pills were big too, and the label was a book’s worth of tiny print, listing thirty-odd vital nutrients and their sources: bee pollen, comfrey, dandelion, fennel, hawthorne berry, ginger, garlic… Fo-Ti, Dong Quai… Siberian ginseng, rose hips…

“You raided a health food store?”

Alice said, “Yeah. They took me through a grocery and a health food store and made me point at things I thought we’d need. Any objections?”

“Not bloody likely.” He swallowed a fat pill with greenish flecks in it, dry. “There’s some food from the-Soviet station, and the fithp grow some things we can eat if you close your eyes first, but I’ve been worrying about vitamins.”

“What was it like?” Jeri Wilson asked. “You were on the space station—”

He told it long. It didn’t look like anything would interrupt them for a while.

“Your turn,” Dawson said.

Alice wasn’t eager to talk until she got started. “We were in the basement, along the walls. It was just like a tornado scare. They crowd all the patients in, in any order, mixed in with the orderlies. It’s the only time you see the ones on the locked wing.

Anyway, there was a terrific noise and some of the walls fell in. Anyone who could still stand up ran away screaming, even some of the orderlies. I just ran. I got into the zoo next door and hid in the mammal house, but there wasn’t any place to hide, really. James came in and I told him to go away, but he wouldn’t. When the horrors came in I thought some of the zoo animals had got loose.”

The aliens had moved through Topeka, through shattered buildings and corpses beginning to decay. They took books and magazines from libraries and drugstores: anything with pictures. They led the prisoners through a supermarket and various small stores. Jeri and Melissa and the Woodwards had refused to cooperate, but Alice tried to assemble a collection of fresh and canned food, vitamins and mineral supplements — “Did you have a chance to get coffee?”

“Hell, no, I didn’t get cigarettes either. Bad for you. I got some herb teas, though.” And when Dawson laughed she looked furious.

The images on the video screen faded. Raztupisp-minz continued to stare at it, as if that would bring meaning to what he had seen. Finally he turned. “What do you believe this means?” he asked.

Takpusseh’s digits flared.

“The Herdmaster will not be amused,” Raztupisp-minz hissed. He glanced at the camera in one corner. “Perhaps he has seen already.”

“His annoyance will be as nothing when Fistarteh-thuktun sees these recordings,” Takpusseh said. He flared his digits again. “We know they have curious courtship and mating habits. Apparently the females are continuously in estrus, and do not care what male satisfies their urges.”

“Then how do the females control them?” Raztupisp-minz demanded. “It cannot be possible—”

“Much is possible,” Takpusseh sighed, “Forgive me, grandson, but you have seen only life aboard ship. You have never lived on a world rich with life.”

“They eat their own kind! And sing as they do! I do not care to live on such a world.”

“If that is what we saw,” Takpusseh said. “We must ask the prisoners.”

“Does Dawson speak well enough?”

“No. Nor do I know their speech so well. But Tashayamp does. She has been studying.” Takpusseh took a deep breath. Then another.

Raztupisp-minz did likewise. Pheromones filled his lungs. A sweet flavor.

“Grandson, you are my only relative,” Takpusseh said. “Leader of my family, I wish to speak with you.”

Raztupisp-minz backed away slowly, then settled to a crouch. He waited until Takpusseh was similarly postured. “Speak.”

“I wish you to carry winter flowers with me.”

“Ah. I have seen you grow stronger with new domains. I am glad, Takpusseh-but have you not waited overlong? The Time is upon the Sleeper Herd, and you are hardly able to be rational.”

“I know of no unmated Sleeper who would have me to mate. I speak of Tashayamp.”

“Ah. Of acceptable lineage, and competent in her work. Yes.” He let his voice trail to nothing, without a stop.

“But,” Takpusseh said. “Yes. She is not comely. Indeed, some would say she is misshapen. Yet I find her attractive enough, and as you say, she is diligent at her work.”

“It happens seldom that spaceborn mates to sleeper. Do you know that you are acceptable?”

“How should I? I have no one to speak for me. None save you—”

“Yamp,” Raztupisp-minz mused. “Her grandfather is Persantipyamp. He is said to be irascible. A warrior in his day.” And say no more; there was no war, bus had there been, it could only have been against the sleepers. “You wish me to speak with him.”

“I ask that, my leader.”

“Tashayamp.” Raztupisp-minz snorted wry mirth. “1 have little experience in this, I should ask you what to say! Our roles are indeed reversed, in all ways. Let me see if I recall the words I am to say—”

“1 know them,” Takpusseh admitted. “But let the customs be kept.” He listened as Raztupisp-minz stumbled through the traditional lecture: that the fithp mate for life, that mating is an alliance forever, not to be entered through passions.

“Are you certain it is not passion? It is Time for your herd—”

“Not mere passion,” Takpusseh said. “Recall, I am-somewhat-older than you. I was mated to your grandmother. I know something of passion, and of reason as well.”

“Yes. Politically, it is a good match. The yainp clan holds a wide domain; and you have taken your own.” And you are male, mating with a spaceborn female. It is not as there were the other way, spaceborn male to submit — “I will speak with Persantipyamp, and if he will consent, I will come with you to present the winter flowers.” Raztupisp-minz rose to his feet. “And my congratulations!”

25. THE GARDEN

They had floated forward, then inward along half a mile of spiral corridor, not quite in free-fall, but with so little gravity that motion was difficult for the newcomers. Wes tried to help where he could.

Two alien warriors carried large boxes. Tashayamp led the way.

A huge door opened for them: a cargo door, much bigger than would be needed to pass a fi’. They entered.

This huge chamber must be along the axis of the ship, forward of the chamber of the Podo Thuktun. A line of yellow-white light ran down the middle, too bright to look at directly. Elsewhere there was green, everywhere green, with splashes of carmine and yellow. Alien plants grew in cages, rooted in thick wet pads fixed along the walls. Green banners flapped in the breeze from the air conditioning. A field of yellow flowers turned as if to look at the intruders.

Here was a roughly rectangular block of loose dirt. Vines wrapped it loosely, and it was riddled with seven-inch holes. A head popped from a hole and was gone before Wes could react. A streamlined head, it had been, like a ferret’s, with red beads for eyes.

It was, finally, like being on another world.

Wes stole a glance at the others. Jeri Wilson was keeping her calm. Carrie Woodward expected to be killed at any moment. The prospect didn’t seem to frighten her much. Before she allowed herself to be escorted from the cell, she had led the others in prayer, and stared disapprovingly at Wes Dawson when he didn’t join in.

Melissa and Gary were gaping: not frightened, but delighted. Plants, birds, animals-and distant objects, after confinement in cells and corridors. Melissa pointed at something above them. It was gone before Wes could see it. but they all stopped to look.

Takpusseh looked back impatiently. “Come!” They followed hastily. Otherwise the warrior fithp would use their gun butts as prods, not brutally but playfully, as if they were herding children.

A tree grew along the ship’s axis, thirty feet tall. One continuous green leaf ran round it in a spiral. Guy wires along its trunk braced it against lateral acceleration.

Something dived at Wes’s head. He ducked as the warrior behind him casually brushed the thing aside with his mink. The thing flapped off shrilling a musical curse. A bird. They were everywhere: long-necked birds with large, colorful aft wings that turned up sharply at the tips, and small canards set to either side of the long neck. Wes gaped in wonder. “Is this your food source?” he asked.

“Ours and yours.” Takpusseh waved his trunk at a plot of bare dirt. It must have been recently cleared: dust and plant detritus floated in the air around it. The teacher said, “Now you have plants from your own world to grow here. Space has been set aside.”

John Woodward came forward to the boxes of soil. Gingerly he took a handful and rubbed it in his fingers. “Good Kansas soil,” he said. “Maybe we’ll live long enough for something to grow.”

“You will live,” Takpusseh said. He peered at the farmer. “Do you suffer for your distance from your home? One day you will land with us.”

Woodward didn’t answer. His eyes glittered.

“For now you will grow your own food,” Tashayamp said. “On the level trays, and in those.” She pointed to cages filled with earth. “There is a flower. This.” She held out a flower, bright, shaped like a long, thin trumpet. It was as large as a sunflower, with wild colors. Strange shapes lurked deep within the blossom.

She’s learned English fast, Wes thought. But her posture is— strange. Why? I wish I could read their body language.

“We have seeds,” she said. “You will grow this in soil from your world.”

“What if it won’t grow?” John Woodward demanded.

“It will grow. If need, we will mix soil from other world. It will grow.”

“And that’s important?” Wes asked.

“It may be,” she said. She glanced at Takpusseh. “You will begin now.”

“You will also grow to feed you.” Takpusseh took a seed packet from one of the boxes. It was tiny in his ropy digits. He peered at it, tore it open. Some of the seeds spilled. A warrior was prepared: he swept a fine-mesh net through the cloud. Takpusseh himself ignored the incident. “Farming is different when you float. Seed must be pushed in, so, with small tool… no, your digits are small enough. Water comes from below, from wall. Against forward wall’, find special tools. Sticks to hold plants against thrust. Tools to stir dirt.”

John and Carrie Woodward were examining the dirt plot. They began taking seeds out of the boxes. John said “Plants should grow taller here,” with a question in his voice.

The children moved warily away, their eyes wide with wonder. Something like a bird whizzed past.

“Not there,” Tashayamp called. She motioned the children back to the group. “You wait here: Do not disturb those—”

Aft, from the grove of spiral-wound trees, came the windinstrument murmur of fithp voices.

The Herdmaster had climbed a huge pillar plant. Like the humans themselves, in the minuscule gravity he had become a brachiator. He found the viewpoint odd, amusing. He watched.

In a forward corner of the Garden the human prisoners worked. The Herdmaster admired their agility, newly trained dirtyfeet that they were. They seemed docile enough as they planted alien seeds in alien soil. Yet the Breakers’ disturbing reports could not be ignored much longer. It was more than enough to make his head ache.

Yet here were smells to ease his mind: plants in bloom, and a melancholy whiff of funereal scent. The end of life for the Traveler Fithp was the funeral pit, and then the Garden. Twelve fithp warriors, wounded on Winterhome, had gone to the funeral pit after Digit Ship Six returned them to Message Bearer.

The Garden was in perpetual bloom. Seasons mixed here, created by differing intensities of light, warmth, moisture. The alien growths might require alterations in weather. He hoped otherwise. Winterhome would be hospitable to Garden life, if the humans actually persuaded anything to grow here.

The Herdmaster would have preferred to loll in warm mud, but Message Bearer’s mudrooms had been drained while her drive guided the Foot toward its fiery fate. He had sought rest in the Garden; and it was here that the Year Zero Fithp confronted him. In the riot of scents he had not smelled their presence. Suddenly faces were looking at him over the edges of leaf-spiral, below him on the trunk of the pillar plant.

He looked back silently, letting them know that they had disturbed his time of quiet.

Born within a few eight-days of each other in an orgy of reproduction that had not been matched before or since, the Year Zero Fithp all looked much alike: smooth of skin, long-limbed and lean. Why not? But age clusters didn’t always think so much alike. These were the inner herd that led the larger herd of dissidents.

One was different. He looked older than the rest. His skin was darkened and roughened, one leg was immobilized with braces, and there was a look. This one had seen horrors.

With the Advisor’s consent, the Herdmaster had chosen to divide the Year Zero Fithp. Half the males had gone down to Winterhome. They were dead, or alive and circling Winterhome after the natives’ counterattack. That injured one must be fresh from the wars.

The Herdmaster’s claws gripped the trunk as he faced nine fithp below him. For a moment he thought to summon warriors; then a sense of amusement came over him. Dissidents they might be, but these were not rebels. So. They sought to awe the Herdmaster, did they?

And they had brought a hero fresh from the wars. No, these were no rogues. They wanted only to increase their influence…

“You have found me,” he said mildly. “Speak.”

Still they were silent. Two of the smaller humans wandered toward the group, but were retrieved by Tashayamp. Now the humans worked more slowly. They watched, no doubt, though they must be out of earshot. What passed here might affect all the herds of Winterhome. Still it was an imposition, and the Herdmaster would have asked Tashayamp to remove them if he could have spared the attention.

Finally one spoke. “Advisor Fathisteh-tulk had said that he would gather with us. He said that he had something to tell us. He did not come. We are told that he has not been seen on the bridge in two days.”

“He has neglected his duties,” Pastempeh-keph said mildly. “He has avoided the bridge, and his mate, nor does he answer calls. I have alerted my senior officers, but no others. Is it your will that I should ask for his arrest?”

They looked at each other, undecided. One said firmly, “No, Hercimaster.” He was a massive young fi’, posed a bit ahead of the others: Rashinggith, the Defensemaster’s son.

“So you do not know where he is either?”

“We had hoped to find him through you, Herdmaster.”

“Ha. I have asked his mate. She has not seen him, yet she has a newborn to show.” The Herdmaster became serious. “There are matters to decide, and we have no Advisor. What must I do?”

They looked at each other again. “The teqthuktun—”

“Precisely.” Pastempeh-keph breathed more easily. They still worried about the Law and their religion. Not rogues, not yet. “I can take no counsel nor make any decisions without advice from the sleepers. It is the teqthuktun. the pact we made with them, and Fistarteh-thuktun insists upon it. Now I have no Advisor, and there are matters to decide. Speak. What must I do?”

“You must find another Advisor,” the wounded one said.

“Indeed.” This hardly required discussion. The Traveler fithp might continue on their predetermined path, but no new decisions could be made without an Advisor.

Fathisteb-tulk might be dead, or too badly injured to perform his duties. He might have shirked his duty, crippling the herd at a critical moment. He might have been kidnapped… and if some herd within the Traveler Herd had been pushed to such an act, it would be stripped of its status. But the Advisor would still lose his post, for arousing such anger, for being so careless, for being gone.

The Herdmaster had already decided on his successor. Still, he must be found. “You, the injured one—”

“Herdmaster, I am Eight-Squared Leader Chintithpit-mang.”

He had heard that name; but where? Later. “You must come fresh from the digit ship. Do you know anything of this? Or are you only here to add numbers?”

“I know nothing of the Advisor. What I do know—”

“Later. You, Rashinggith. If you knew where the Advisor might be, you would go there.”

His digits knotted and flexed. “I assuredly would, Herdmaster.”

“But you might not tell me. Is there a place known only to dissidents? A place where he might commune with other dissidents, or only with himself?”

“No. Herdmaster, we fear for him.”

There must be such a place, but the dissidents themselves would have searched it by now. “I too fear for Fathisteh-tulk,” the Herdmaster admitted. “I went so far as to examine records of use of the airlocks, following which I summoned a list of fithp in charge of guarding the airlocks—”

“I chance to know that no dissidents guard the airlocks,” Rashinggith said.

An interesting admission. “I was looking for more than dissidents. Did it strike any of you that what Fathisteh-tulk was doing was dangerous? Consider the position of the sleepers. In herd rank the Advisor is the only sleeper of any real authority. The sleepers could not ask his removal. Yet he consistently opposed the War for Winterhome. How many sleepers are dissidents? I know only of one: Fathisteh-tulk.”

They looked at each other, and the Herdmaster knew at once that other sleepers held dissident views. Later. “There are sleepers in charge of guarding the airlocks. The drive is more powerful than the pull of the Foot’s mass. A corpse would drop behind, but would not disintegrate. The drive flame is hot but not dense. Our telescopes have searched for traces of a corpse in our wake.” Pause. “There is none.

“Shall we consider murder, then? By dissidents seeking a martyr, or conservative sleepers avoiding future embarrassment? Or did Fathisteh-tulk learn something that some fi’ wanted hidden? Or is he alive, hiding somewhere for his own purposes? Rashinggith, what did Fathisteh-tulk plan to tell you?” The Herdmaster looked about him. “Do any of you know? Did he leave hints? Did he even have interesting questions when last you saw him?”

“We don’t know he’s dead,” Rashinggith said uneasily.

“Enough,” the Herdmaster said. “We will find him. I hope to ask him where he has been.” That was a half-truth, Fathisteh-tulk would cause minimal embarrassment by being dead. On to other matters. The Herdmaster had remembered a name.

“Chintithpit-mang, you had someting to say?”

Nervous but dogged, the injured warrior got his mouth working. “The prey, the humans, they don’t know how to surrender.”

“They can be taught.”

“There was a-a burly one, bigger than most. I whipped his toy weapon from his hand and knocked him down and put my foot on his chest and he clawed at me with his bony digits until I pushed harder. I think I crushed him. Of the prisoners we brought back, only the scarlet-headed exotic would help us select human food! Even after we take their surrender they do not cooperate. Must we teach them to surrender, four billion of them, one at a time? We must abandon the target world. If we kill them all, the stink will make Winterhome like one vast funeral pit!”

Chintithpit-mang was one of six officers under Siplisteph.

Siplisteph’was a sleeper; his mate had not survived frozen sleep, and he had not mated since. He had reached Winterbome as eightcubed leader of the intelligence group. It was an important post, and Siplisteph had risen higher still due to deaths among his superiors. The Herdmaster intended to asic him to become his Advisor, subject to the approval of the females of the sleeper herd-and Fistarteh-thuktun, as keeper of the teqthuktun.

Chintithpit-mang was among those who might have Siplisteph’s post.

“Why did you seek me?” the Herdmaster demanded.

The response was unexpected: first one, then others, began a keening wail. The rest joined.

It was the sound made by lost children.

Frightening. Why do I feel the urge to join my voice to theirs?

“We no longer know who we are, Herdmaster,” Chintithpitmang blurted. “Why are we here?”

“We bear the thuktunthp.”

“The creatures do not seek the thuktunthp. They have their own way.” Chintithpit-mang insisted.

“If they do not know the thuktunthp, how can they know they do not seek them?” Could this one be worthy of promotion? Are any? Shall I ask him to remain? No. Now is not the time to judge him, fresh from battle and still twitching, injured, and plunged suddenly into the scents of blooming Winter Flower and sleeper females in heat. “Chintithpit-mang, you need time and rest to recover from your experience. Go now. All of you, go.”

For one moment they stood. Then they filed away.

The Herdmaster remained in the Garden, trying to savor its peace.

Chintithpit-mang did not now seem a candidate for high office. Another dissident! Yet he had fought well on Winterhome; his record was exemplary. Give him a few days. Meanwhile, interview his mate. Then see if she could pull him together. He didn’t remember Shreshleemang well… though the mang family was a good line. At a Shipmaster’s rank the female muss be suitable and competent.

Where was Fathisteh-tulk? Murdered or kidnapped. He had suspected the Year Zero Fithp, but that now seemed unlikely. They were nervous, disturbed, as well they should be; but not nervous enough. They could not have hidden that from him. Who, then, had caused the Herdmaster’s Advisor to vanish? How many? Of what leaning? He might face a herd too large to fear the justice of the Traveler Herd; though the secrecy with which they had acted argued against it.

There were herds within herds within the Traveler Herd. It must have been like this on the Homeworld too, though in greater, deeper, more fantastical variety. Even here: sleepers, spaceborn, dissidents; Fistarteh-thuktun’s core of tradition-minded historians, the Breakers’ group driving themselves mad while trying to think like alien beings: the Herdmaster must balance them like a pyramid of smooth rocks in varying thrust.

“He is late,” Dmitri whispered. “We must go.”

“Not yet. We will wait for him,” Arvid Rogachev said.

“But—”

“We will wait.”

Dmitri shrugged.

He obeys me because he has no choice, ye: he considers himself my superior. Perhaps he is. He is a better sn-ate gist.

There was a rustle behind them, and Nikolai’s legless form appeared from a lateral shaft. He fell to the corridor between them, catching himself with his arms just before he struck the deck. Once more Arvid marveled at how agile a legless man could be in low gravity.

“Whert have you been?” Dmitri demanded.

Nikolai ignored him and turned to Arvid. “Comrade Commander, I have success,” he said.

“Come.” Arvid led the way out of the air shaft. They took their time about attaching the grill covers. Arvid worked in silence. Although he didn’t feel especially tired, he thought of how exhausted he was, and presently he felt it. Be wary. Do not let them know our true strength. Dmitri says this. I am beginning to think like KGB now. Is this good?

“I have seen women,” Nikolai said in an undertone.

“Ah,” Dmitri said.

Arvid felt a twinge. Women! I have been long in space — “Where?”

“In the center of the ship, in a garden area, Comrade Commander. They were with the American, Dawson.”

Dawson! How has he deserved this — “The newly arrived warriors,” Dmitri said. “They came with those. New prisoners from Earth. Were they Russian?”

“No, Comrade Colonel. They were by their dress American. There were children also. Three women, two children, a man, and Dawson. I could not know what they were saying.”

Nikolai lifted the heavy grill. Crippled, Arvid thought. He has more strength in his arms than I have in my legs.

“Tell us,” Dmitri said.

“As you ordered, I explored farther than ever before. At first I took each turn that presented itself. There are grills everywhere. There are radial ducts. Some ducts are too small even for me, but” — Nikolai stretched his antis above his head, exhaled completely, and grinned. — “I can make myself narrow.

“The fore end of Thuktun Flishithy is too far. We expect to find the bridge there, but I made no try to reach it. I saw a big mom full of sleeping fithp, all females, sleeping with all four feet gripping the wall rugs, like gigantic fleas. I saw a slaughterhouse or a kitchen. Fithp were cutting up plants and animal parts and— and arranging them, but there was nothing like a stove.

“I tired of this and went inward along radial ducts. I found the room of the Podo Thuktun, and the priest all alone at the television screen. He muttered to himself, too tow to understand. I found the greetthouse region. It is lighted. It was there that I saw Dawson and the newcomers. They were all at work planting things. The garden is at the center of the ship. There were many fithp.

“I saw no need to watch Dawson longer, and I had little time, so I continued aft. I found what may be a bridge aft of the greenhouse. No ducts run aft of that point. It may be an engine room, serving the main drive, but it is also an emergency bridge.”

“Da,” Dmitn said. “At the axis it would be quite safe, like the Podo Thuktun. So?”

“The room is circled by television screens, square and thick, with the same proportions as the Podo Thuktun. I saw our prison, empty, of course. I saw Dawson and one of the newcomers, a redhaired woman, working in the garden. They worked together, but they ignored each other. I saw you, Comrade Rogachev. Heh-hehheh. Very industrious you looked.”

“Go on,” Arvid said,

“There was much on those screens. One showed three of the fithp watching a viewscreen. On the screen they were watching, were scenes of a man and a woman-Comrades, the man had an enormous pecker, and she swallowed it, all of it.”

“What is this?’ Dmitri asked sharply.

“I have told you what I saw,” Nikolai said. “On one viewscreen were three fithp who watched a viewscreen. On that viewscreen was that scene, and others like it.”

“What else did the woman do?” Arvid asked.

“Nonsense,” Dmitri hissed. “What did the fithp do when they saw this?”

“Comrade Colonel, they must have found it interesting, because they rewound the tape and watched it again. Then they spoke among themselves, and spoke into communications equipment.”

“So,” Dmitri said to himself.

“What?” Arvid demanded.

“I do not know why, but I find it disturbing,” Dmitri said. “Did you see who they spoke with?”

“No. Soon that screen was blank. I waited, but there was no more. Then when I was ready to leave, I saw two views of the main control room, and there is a window, so it must be at the fore end. I knew there must be other screens, so I circled through the ducts for another view.” Nikolai’s voice had dropped until he was nearly whispering. Dmitri and Arvid crowded close. They pretended to have difficulty replacing the fastenings for the grill.

“I saw outside. Four screens in a row. Three look at the stars, and the views move back and forth. So does the fourth, but it looks out on black rock. At one end of its swing the screen looks along the hull of Thu ktun Flishithy. The fore end is right up against the rock,

“Do you remember the films they showed us? Thu ktun Flishithy leaving that other star? The nose was up against a kind of ball, pushing it. Now it is against black rock that has been carved like the kind of sculpture the Americans in New York are so fond of, twisted shapes that tell nothing.”

Arvid said, “So they have an asteroid base.”

“But they are pushing it,” Dmitri said. “Can’t you feel it?”

The hum of the drive: he had learned to ignore it, but it was there.”

Pushing it-yes. Where? I cannot think we will like the answer. So, Nikolai, you saw along the hull. Was it smooth, or was there detail?”

“I was lucky. One of the star-views turned to look sideways at an oval hatch. It opened while I watched, and a big metal snake uncoiled. Then the view shifted, and it was a view from the head of the snake, looking at another metal snake as it coiled itself into its own hatch. Then it turned and looked back along the hull. I saw quite a lot before it turned again and looked at nothing but stars. Aft of the ship is a violet-white haze. Ships are mounted along the rim, big ships, but there were many empty mountings.”

“Empty. Good,” Dmitri said. “Perhaps ships we have destroyed.”

“And perhaps ships that remain to attack our world,” Arvid said. “You have done well, Nikolai.”

Women! It has been long…

26. CONFRONTATION

The Herdmaster paused at the door. More problems awaited him inside. At least I will no longer have the strange views of Fathisteh-tulk to confound me. One of the guards moved to open the door.

Where can he be? He must be dead. A secret corpse, and a key to more terrible secrets. “Thiparteth-fuft!”

“Lead me, Herdmaster.”

“Have the funeral pits searched. I am certain that the Advisor is dead, and I wish to know how he died.”

“At once”

Dead or not, I had no choice. Pastempeh-keph trampled conflicting feelings deep into the muddy substrate of his mind. The Traveler Herd must continue, and without an Advisor no decisions are possible. A replacement was needed. I have found one. Why am I so disturbed?

Siplisteph is a good choice. He has been to Winterhome. He commanded spaceborn, and they accepted his leadership. The sleeper females acclaimed him even though he is not mated. Now he must mate— Pastempeh-keph thought of eligible females. There are so few. Would the sleepers accept a spaceborn mare for the Advisor? That would go far toward uniting the Traveler Herd.

The door opened. Pastempeh-keph moved decisively into the theater. He need not have bothered to compose himself. Siplisteph, Raztupisp-minz, and Fistarteh-thuktun were shoulder to shoulder before the projection wall. They did not look up.

Thiparteth-fuft lifted his snnfp to bellow for attention, but the Herdmaster laid his digits across the guard officer’s forehead. “There is no need. Come, let us see what so fascinates them.”

The equipment had come from Winterhome; the only fithp equipment was a makeshift transformer to mate the human recording machines to Message Bearer’s current.

The Herdfnaster stood behind them. The forward and inward walls were a smooth white curve, a screen that would serve under thrust or spin. Advisor, breaker, and priest were in agitated argument. Their waving digits made shadows on the forward wall, where two humans similarly waved their arms and bellowed, trumpeted, a sound no fi’ could have matched. To fithp ears it seemed a song of rage and distress. Their clothes were thick, layered, a padding against cold. The male waved something small and sharp that glittered.

“At last my digits are whole again,” Raztupisp-minz translated.

“Meaning?” the Herdmaster asked.

The three fithp turned quickly. “Your pardon,” the Breaker said. “I did not hear you enter.”

“No matter. I ask again, what was the meaning of what the human said?”

“None. He was not crippled.” Raztupisp-minz turned back to the screen.

The Ilerdmaster waited. The humans on the screen huddled, conspired, all in that ear-splintering keening voice. “Have you ever heard them speak like that?” the Herdmaster demanded.

“Once. Nikolai, the legless one, spoke like that at length once, but far more softly. They call it singing.”

“What are they building?”

Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz only folded his digits across his scalp.

“The other recordings,” Raztupisp-minz demanded. “Siplisteph, you have brought others.”

Siplisteph only needed a moment to change tapes.

The four humans looked soft and vulnerable without their clothing. Two patches of fur apiece only pointed up their nakedness. Alien music played eerily across fithp nerves. “Mating.” Said Breaker-One, “Odd. I had the idea they sought privacy when they did that. Herdmaster, that isn’t the female’s genital area at all!”

“But that is the male’s.”

“Oh, yes. I’ve never seen it in that state… but of course they usually cover themselves. Does it seem to you that she might harm him accidentally?”

The priest spoke. “Why would they record this? Advisor, where was this found?”

“All tapes came from two sources, a building that displayed 83 of such, and one room of a dwelling. They’re marked. Ah, this came from the dwelling.”

The scene had shifted. Here was the same female and a different male, both covered. Not for long. Raztupisp-minz said, “I don’t see how children could be born of this. Yet they seem to think they’re mating… Ah, that seems more likely. Could we be viewing an instnction tape? Might humans need instruction on how to mate?”

“A ridiculous suggestion,” the priest scoffed. “What animal does not know how to mate?”

“Entertainment,” Siplisteph said. “So I was told by one who surrendered.”

“You are certain?” Breaker-one asked.

“No. I know too little of their language.”

Fistarteh-thuktun continued to stare at the screen. “I… I think there can be no good reason for such an entertainment.”

The Herdmaster moved forward to join Siplisteph, It was irritating that his Advisor must here perform two functions at once. “You have been to Winterhome. You have seen thousands of humans, more than any of us. Have you formed opinions?”

“None. Nowhere in these tapes do humans act as I have seen them act. I wonder if they act the part of something other than humans. Not Predecessors, but… there are words, god and archetype.”

“They could hardly pretend to be ready to mate. Show me the first one again,” the Herdmaster said. And presently he asked, “Did we just witness a killing? Show that segment again.”

Siplisteph did. An arm swung; the man in the strange chair mimed agony; the chair tilted and the man fell backward through the floor. “They never die so calmly,” the new Advisor said. “They fight until they cannot.”

“The neck is very vulnerable,” Raztupisp-minz objected. “A nerve trunk could be cut — but the fat one would then be a rogue. Why does the female associate with him? Could a pair of rogues form their own herd?”

“You are quiet, Fistarteh-thuktun. What do you believe of this?”

The priest splayed his digits wide. “Herdmaster, I learn. Later I will speak.”

“You do not seem pleased”

There was no answer.

“A place of puzzles,” Pastempeh-keph said. “They surrender and have not surrendered. Their tapes show rogues acting in collusion. They live neither in herds nor alone. What are they?”

“What do they believe themselves to be?” Fistarteh-thuktun asked. “Perhaps that is more important.”

“An interesting question,” Raztupisp-minz said quietly.

Pastempeh-keph bellowed, “1 want answers! I have enough interesting questions to keep me busy, thank you very much. Razwpisp-minz, bring them all. All humans, here, now.”

“Herdmaster, is this wise? Bring just one. I want to keep them separate as we study—”

“Bring them!”

“At your orders, Herdmaster.”

Raztupisp-minz waited. This is the moment, if there is to be any challenge.

There was none. Raztupisp-minz turned to the communications speaker on one wall.

Gary and Melissa were bounding around the cell in an elaborate game of tag. The rules weren’t apparent, but it was obvious that the game couldn’t have been played in normal gravity.

Jeri Wilson lay against the “down” wall and hugged her knees. She was wishing that the children would stop, and glad that they didn’t. They were all right. Prisoners of monsters, far from home, falling endlessly: they were taking it well.

Stop feeling so damned sorry for yourself! Hell, if Gary can take it, you sure can. Next you’ll be whimpering. Jeri turned her head within her arms. No. We don’t want Melissa to hear that.

John Woodward lay near by. He’s trying, but it’s like he’s fading out. Carrie’s all that keeps him going.

It’s the toilets. I could stand anything, if they’d just give us a decent toilet. We’re not built to use a stupid pool of water, with everyone watching.

She heard the low-pitched hum that signaled the door was opening. By the time it was open, the tag game was over; by tacit agreement they were all together opposite the doorway.

Jeri recognized Tashayamp. Behind her was a full octuple of warriors, all armed. They don’t bring guards unless they’re taking us somewhere, Jeri thought. But they don’t always bring them then, either. We’ve gone places with no one but Tashayamp or one of the other teachers. So why do they sometimes have armed guards? It’s like Melissa’s tag game. There are rules. I just don’t know them.

“All come,” Tashayamp directed in the fithp tongue.

“Where?” Wes Dawson demanded.

“Come.” Tashayamp turned to lead the way out. “Right,” Jeri said. She uncurled, and dove across the pens. “Come on, Melissa.”

The others followed, with Dawson bringing up the rear. Tashayamp led them through corridors toward We center of the ship.

They entered a large, nearly rectangular room, with huge steps around three sides. Machinery had been set up near the fourth wall. Four fithp watched them without comment.

Tashayamp followed them in. The eight fithp soldiers stayed in the corridor. Dawson moved up beside Jeri and said, “Theater. We’ve been here.”

“No seats,” Jeri said, then laughed at a mental picture of a fi’ collapsing a beach chair. “Of course, no seats. What’s… ah. That videotape machine must have come from Kansas.”

“The one in the fancy harness, he’s a priest or librarian or both. The one at the top of the stairs is the big boss. They call him the Herdmaster, something like that.” Dawson imitated the flthp sound. “The other two are teachers. At least I call them that, they’re supposed to teach us, but they don’t always, so I’m not sure. Every, time I think I understand them, something else happens, and—”

The door opened again, to let in three men in coveralls. One had no legs, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

Russians. That stocky one was on TV before the snouts came. I thought he was handsome — “Arvid Rogachev, Dmitri something or another, and the one with no legs is Nikolai. I never heard them call him anything else,” Dawson said.

Rogachev. He looks even better in person. Wes Dawson is a bit of a wimp compared to him.

And what does that mean? Am I looking for a big strong man to take care of me?

Would that be such a bad idea?

“You will watch,” Tashayamp said. She bellowed something infithpl

The scree’n lit up. Jeri caught a glimpse of the lead-in.

“What is this?” Jeri asked.

Carrie Woodward had a puzzled look. “John, didn’t we hear something about that movie?”

The Russian Dawson had called Dmitri frowned. The other one seemed amused. “For this they have taken casualties?”

The screen raced past the titles to the sex scenes. Then it slowed to show Linda Lovelace doing her stuff in living color.

Carrie Wood ward watched just long enough to be sure of what she was seeing. “Gary! Melissa! Come here. You’re not to watch this. Come—”

Gary Capehart went to her at once. Melissa looked doubtful. “You come here, young lady. Now.” Carrie was insistent. Melissa looked to her mother for guidance.

O Lord. Now what? “Melissa, do as she says.”

“Aw, Mom—”

“Now.”

Carrie gathered the children to her ample bosom. “How dare you’?” she shouted. “Don’t you critters have any sense of decency at all? No shame?’

The Herdmaster trumpeted something. Tashayamp replied.

Now what kind of trouble has she got us into?

“What is your difficulty?” Tashayamp demanded. “Why have you done this?’

“You know perfectly well it’s not decent to show pictures like that.”

“Mrs. Woodward,” Dawson said. “They don’t think the way we do—”

“And of course you’ve seen worse,” Carrie said. She faced away from the screens, away from the Herdmaster. That left her facing the Russians. “I leave it to you, is this decent for children?” she demanded of them.

“Not at all,” Arvid agreed. Dmitri said something harsh in Russian.

“Bad-worse,” Tashayamp said. “What does it mean, ‘bad’? Why is this bad?”

“I think they really don’t know, Mother,” John Woodward said. His voice held wonder, “They really don’t.”

“I was trying to tell you,” Dawson said.

“You keep out of it. You don’t know either,” John Woodward said. “Your kind never did.”

All of the snouts were talking at once until the Herdmaster trumpeted. They fell silent instantly.

“I keep telling you they don’t see things as we do,” Dawson said. His voice rang loudly in the silence. “John, they didn’t make these movies. They found them in Kansas, Remember that.” John Woodward interrupted him, then Canie started to say something—

One of the teachers trumpeted.

“Raztupisp-minz commands that you speak one at a time,” Tashayamp said.

“There are many meanings of good and bad,” Dawson began. The teacher said something else.

“Not to begin with you,” Tashayamp said. She pointed to the Russians. “What is bad about this?”

“Filth. Typical capitalist garbage for the mind,” Dmitri said. “Why does this surprise anyone? The capitalist system caters to anyone with money, and inevitably produces decadence.”

“It’s freedom of speech!” Dawson shouted. “I don’t like it, but I don’t have to. If we start shutting people’s mouths, where—”

“Not we,” Carrie Woodward said. “We’d lock up the people that peddle that filth if it wasn’t for you federal people. We had a nice, decent town until your judges and your laws came.”

The two teachers were both speaking at once until the Herdmaster intervened. Tashayamp spoke at length, obviously trailslating since she used several human words. What can they make of this? What do 1 make of it? Jeri wondered.

“You believe this bad,” Tashayamp said. “You, all, show digits extended if you believe bad.”

The Woodwards showed palms up held at arm’s length. Then the Russians. Jeri held her hand out. What do! believe? I don’t really want Melissa watching this stuff. She might get the wrong idea about what men and women are supposed to do. Women aren’t toys. Free speech and all that, but, yes, I guess I’d be happier if they still had laws against pornography. Less ammunition for perverts…

Dawson was the only holdout. Finally he raised his own hand.

“You agree this is bad?’ Tashayamp asked.

“I do, for children,” Dawson said. “I just don’t think we have the right to stop it.”

“Why bad for children?”

“It’s filth,” Carrie Woodward protested. “Not fit for anyone.”

“You do not-do these things?’ Tashayamp asked.

Jeri smothered a laugh. Came Woodward’s face turned beet red. “My Lord, no, we don’t do that, no one really does that.”

Well, in your world, maybe. My turn to blush…

“This is true? No one does these things?”

“Some do,” John Woodward admitted. “Decent people don’t. They sure don’t put it on film!”

“The word. Decent. Means what?” Tashayamp demanded.

“Means right-thinking people,” Carrie Woodward said. “People who think and act like they’re supposed to, not like some people I know.”

Tashayamp translated. There was more discussion among the fithp.

“We’ve got to be careful,” Wes Dawson said. “Lord knows what ideas they’re getting—”

“None they shouldn’t have, Congressman,” Carrie Woodward said firmly.

“They don’t think like us. You’ve seen the toilets, haven’t you? Look, we all have to give them the same story,” Dawson insisted.

“Say little.” Dmitri said in Russian. Jeri was surprised that she could still understand. It has been a long time…

Evidently Dawson had understood that, too. “Right. Best they don’t find out too much.”

Find out what? That we don’t act the way we want to? That’s the very definition of human — “you explain this,” Tashayamp demanded. “How many humans do bad things?”

“All of them,” Jeri blurted. “Capitalists,” Dmitri said. “Commies,” Woodward retorted.

“All humans do bad things?” Tashayainp demanded. “All do what they know they must not do? Tell me this.”

They all began speaking at once.

Jeri sat against the wall with Melissa. She wasn’t really part of the discussion Wes Dawson was having with the Russians, but she was too close to ignore it.

“Perhaps we have told them too much,” Dmitri said.

Dawson said, “It’s better if they understand us—”

“What you call understanding a military man would call intelligence information,” Arvid Rogachev said.

“What can it hurt? Arvid, you’ve been helping them with their maps!”

“They show me maps and globes. I nod my head, and tell them names for places. This is not your concern.”

“It’s my concern if you side with the fithp. Look, Arvid, you’ve seen what they’ve done. Destruction and murder—”

“I understand war. I—”

“But do you understand what they could have done? They came here with a mucking great asteroid, and we’re still moored to it. Suppose they’d come with the same size asteroid, but a metal one. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of metals. Now they negotiate. Trade metals for land, for concessions, for information, anything they want. They could buy themselves a country. If we won’t play, even if we buy the metals and don’t pay their bills, they’ve still got their mucking great asteroid to drop!”

Dmitri Grushin was nodding, grinning. “What a pity. They don’t understand money. They are not capitalists. That’s your complaint, Dawson.”

And who cares? They’re going to smash the Earth. At least they decided they wouldn’t make the children watch Deep Throat and those other tapes. Jeri recalled going to a theater to see Deep Throat. Stupid. But they’ve put us all together, and now there are three more men to watch me use the toilet.

John and Carrie Woodward stayed near Jeri, as far from the Russians as possible, but it wasn’t far enough. They could still hear. They kept Gary with them.

They’ve got a problem. But we’re going to have to get along with the Russkis—

Jeri said, “Carrie, did you notice that you and John sounded a lot like the Russians?”

“Yeah,” John Woodward said. “I noticed. They’re for decency. Not like Dawson. He’d excuse anything—”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

“There are things people can do, and things they can’t do,” Carrie Woodward said. “Isn’t that what insanity means? Can’t tell right from wrong?”

“No.” Alice was across the room, far enough away that they’d nearly forgotten her. “It wasn’t why I was in Menninger’s.”

“Why were you there?”

“None of your business. I was afraid all the time.”

“Of what?’ Carrie Woodward asked.

Alice looked away.

Dawson looked over at them. The Woodwards wouldn’t meet his eyes. Carrie continued to talk to Jeri as if Dawson were not there.

“Don’t tell me you never wanted to be better than you are,” Carrie Woodward said. “Everyone wants to be better than they are. Jt’s what it means to be human.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Jeri said. “We don’t do the things we think we should, and we do things we’re ashamed of-what was it, in the Book of Common Prayer? We have done those things we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those things we ought to have done, and there is no health in us.’ People have wanted to do the right thing for most of history.”

“But nobody really knows what right and wrong are,” Dawson protested.

“Sure they do,” Jeri said. “C. S. Lewis saw that well enough. Most of us know what’s the right thing, at least most of the time. The problem is we don’t do it. That’s how we’re different from rocks. They don’t have any choice about obeying the laws. They do what they have to do. We do what we want. We sound like an undergraduate bull session.”

“Perhaps this is true,” Arvid said. “But we would not say laws, but—”

“Moral principle,” Dmitri said firmly. “Established by Marxist science.”

“Commies don’t have morals,” Carrie Woodward protested.

“This is unfair. It is also not true,” Arvid said. “Come, we do not so much disagree, you and I. It is your leader, your congressman who protests.”

Carrie looked to her husband. They didn’t say anything.

An hour later they were summoned to the theater again. This time the fithp stood in formal arrays, Herdmaster and mate at the top, others on steps below him, most with mates. Tashayamp stood near him. She trumpeted for silence.

The Herdmaster spoke at length.

Finally Tashayamp translated. “You are a race of rogues. You say you wish to live by your laws, but you do not do it. You say you have always wanted to live by your rules and you do not. Now you will. You will become part of Traveler Herd, live as fithp live, but under your rules. This we will give you. This we promise.

“You will teach us your laws. Then you will live by them.

“You go now.”

27. THE PHONY WAR

High fleecy clouds hung over the San Fernando Valley. The temperature stretched toward a hundred degrees, with a hot wind sweeping down to shrivel any vegetation not protected from it,

Ken Dutton carefully closed the door to his greenhouse. Once inside he dipped water from a bucket and threw it around, wetting down the lush growth. Then he hastened outside to turn the handle on the makeshift fan, drawing fresh hot dry air through the greenhouse.

When that was done, he went inside. The house had thick walls and cooled rapidly at night, so that it was tolerable in the daytime. Dutton lifted the phone and listened.

There was a dial tone. There often was. He took a list from the telephone drawer and began to make his calls.

“I’m still the chef,” he told Con Donaldson, “but I can use some help. Can you get here around noon? Bring whatever you can find in the way of food, and tell me what I can count on now.”

“Rice.”

“Rice.” He made a note. “How much rice?”

“Lots. I mean really a lot.” She giggled. “Only good thing about this war, I’m losing weight, because I’m getting sick of rice-hey, I look good. You’ll like the new me.”

“Great. Okay, then. Bye.” He inspected his list and dialed again.

There was no beef in the land, Sarge Harris complained. “Cattle cars are too big. Snouts blast ’em, think they’ve got tanks or weapons in them.”

Probably not. The major says they’re not doing that just now. But no point in arguing. “Yeah. Chicken costs an arm and a leg, too.”

“Maybe that’s how chicken farmers get red meat,” Sarge said.

“Heh-heh. Sure. Look, what can you bring?”

“Eggs. Traded some carpentry work for them.”

“Good. Bring ’em.” Ken hit the cutoff button and dialed another number.

Patsy Clevenger admitted to being one of the lucky ones. An occasional backpacker, she’d stored considerable freeze-dried food in sealed bags; but the steady diet was driving her nuts. She jumped at his offer. Sure, she could bring a freeze-dried dessert, and flavored coffee mix, and pick up Anthony Graves, who was seventy and couldn’t drive anymore. Ken shifted the receiver to his other ear.

The Copeleys lived at the northern end of the San Fernando Valley, They could get fresh corn and tomatoes, and almonds, and oranges. Could they bring a pair of relatives? Because the relatives had gas. Hell, yes!

He tried Marty Carnell, just on the off chance. The meteorchewed highways had probably stranded him somewhere on a dog-show circuit—

But Marty answered.

“I’ve done this once before, and it worked out,” Ken told him. “It isn’t that everyone’s starving. Things haven’t got that bad. But anyone’s likely to have a ton of something and none of everything else, and the way to make it work is to get all the food together and make a feast.”

“Sounds good.”

“Okay. Get here around noon—”

“For dinner?”

“Stone soup takes time, and I want sunlight for the mirror. I’d guess we’ll eating all day and night. Come hungry. Have you got meat?”

“I found a meat source early on. I can keep the dogs fed till I run out of money, but it’s horsemeat, Ken. I’ve been eating it myself—”

“Bring it. Can you bring five pounds? Four will do it, and you won’t recognize it when I get through, Marty. I’ve got a great chili recipe. Lots of vegetables.”

The Offutts would have to come by bicycle. Chad Offutt sounded hungry. With no transportation, how the hell were they to get food? How about some bottles of liquor in the saddlebags? Ken agreed, for charity’s sake. Damn near anyone had liquor; what was needed was food.

Ken hung up.

He caught himself humming while he lugged huge pots out into the backyard and set them up around the solar mirror. It seemed almost indecent to be enjoying himself when civilization was falling about his ears. But it did feel good to finally find a use for his hobbies!

The Copeleys had brought everything they’d promised, and yellow chilis too. The pair of guests were a cousin’s daughter and her husband-Halliday and Wilson; she’d kept her maiden name — both much younger than the others, and a little uncomfortable. They seemed eager to help. Ken put them to cutting up the Copeley’s vegetables.

“Save all seeds.”

“Right.”

The lost weight looked nice on Con Donaldson. She chatted while she helped him carry dishes. Things were bad throughout the Los Angeles Basin… yeah, Ken had to agree. Con had tried to get to Phoenix, but her mother kept putting her off, she wouldn’t have room until her brother moved out… and then it was too late, the roads had been chewed by the snouts’ meteors. Yeah, Ken had tried to get out too.

He should have asked someone — to bring dishwashing soap! Someone must have an excess of that.

Marty was cuffing horsemeat into strips. “Could be a lot worse,” he said. “We could be dodging meteors. I can’t figure out what the snouts think they’re doing.”

“They think they’re conquering the Earth,” Ken said. “It’s their methods that’re funny. They’re thorough enough. I haven’t heard of a dam still standing. Have you?”

“No big ones. No big bridges either.”

“But they don’t touch cities.” Could be worse, He might have fled with no destination in mind. Still, it was hard times. Food got in, but not a lot, and not a balanced diet. There would have been no fruit source here without the Copeleys’ oranges and the lemon tree in Graves’ backyard.

Reflected sunlight blazed underneath Ken’s largest pot. The water was beginning to boil. He ladled a measured amount into the chili, then moved it into the focus.

He’d built the solar minor while he was still married, and after the first month he’d almost never used it. They’d gone vegetarian for a few months too, and his wife hadn’t taken the cookbooks with her. He had the recipes, he had the skills to build a balanced meal, and the phones worked sometimes. If the snouts shot those down, he might try to form a commune. His next-door neighbor had fled to the mountains, leaving the keys behind. More important, he’d left a full swimming pool. Covered, to prevent evaporation, the water would last until the fall rains, and the goldfish would keep the mosquitoes down.

Then there was the golf course across the street. The President asked everyone to grow food, especially to put up greenhouses. There wasn’t any water for the golf course, but there were flat areas, good places for tents if the commune got big enough.

When the aliens had blasted Kosmograd, everything had turned serious. So had Kenneth Dutton. Two years before he’d studied greenhouses; but in one two-day spree he’d built one, from plastic and glass and wood and hard work, and goddam had he been proud of himself. It worked! Things grew! You could eat them! He’d built two more before he’d even started the Stone Soup Parties, just because he could.

Past two o’clock, and the Offutts weren’t here yet. Not surprising, if they were on bicycles, especially if malnutrition was getting to them. Sarge Harris hadn’t arrived either. Lateness was less a discourtesy than a cause for worry: had dish-shaped craters begun to sprout in city roads? The snouts had been gone for three weeks, but when might they return? And with what?

Patsy Clevenger arrived with Anthony Graves. Graves was short and round and in fair health for a man pushing seventy. He had been a scriptwriter for television. He brought treasure: lemons from his backyard and a canned ham. They settled him in a beach chair from which he could watch the proceedings like a benevolent uncle.

Ken pulled the kettle to the side, where sunlight spilling from the mirror would keep the chili simmering. “An hour,” he announced to nobody in particular. He dumped rice into another pot, added water, and set it in the focus. Fistfuls of vegetables went into the water pot. Cook them next. Chop up vegetables, boil or steam them, add mayonnaise and a chopped apple if you had it. Leave out a few vegetables, fiddle with the proportions, forget some of the spices, as long as you didn’t put in broccoli it was still Russian salad if you could get mayonnaise. Where was Sarge Harris?

Sarge didn’t arrive until four. “I got a late start, and then there was a godawful line for gas, and then I tried three markets for potatoes, but there weren’t any.” At least he had the eggs. Ken set Cora to making them into mayonnaise.

The sun was getting too low for cooking. Mayonnaise didn’t need heat. Coffee did. Better start water warming now. Sometimes there was no gas. Patsy’s flavored coffee could be drunk “iced”: room temperature, given the lack of ice.

The chili was gone, and a vegetable curry was disappearing, and the Copeleys’ young relatives were just keeping up with the demand for lemonade. There was breathing space for Ken to find conversations; but he tended to drift when his guests started talking about how terrible things were. By and large, they seemed cheerful enough. It felt like Cora might stay the night, and that would be nice, since it felt like Patsy would not.

Tarzana didn’t have electricity. Ken Dutton and his guests stayed outdoors. Light came from the bellies of the clouds, reflected from wherever the Los Angeles and San Fernando Valleys still had electricity. Occasionally a guest would go inside, feeling his way through the darkness toward the flickering light from the bathroom. At the next Stone Soup Party there would probably be no candles at all.

He’d boiled a few eggs to decorate the Russian salad. That looked like it would hold up until the party was over.

Some of the guests were cleaning out the pots. It had been settled without much discussion: better to get most of the cleaning done before Ken served coffee. The suspicion existed that anyone who conspicuously shirked cleanup duties might not be invited back. For some it was true.

Sarge poured a torrent of dirty water into a patio drain. “At least we kicked them out of Kansas,” he said.

Graves, who had seemed half as’eep in his beach chair, said, “Did we? I’m told they spent much of their efforts raiding libraries and collecting… well, memorabilia, items that might tell them something of our nature.”

“Sure. Wouldn’t you?”

“It was a reconnoitering expedition. In a way, it reminds me of the Phony War.”

“The what?”

The old man laughed. “I don’t blame you. Nineteen thirty-nine to summer of 1940. Germany and France were officially at war, you see. But nothing was happening. They stared at each other across the Maginot Line, between two lines of trenches, and did nothing. The papers called it the Phony War. I expect they didn’t like not having a story. For the rest of us, it was a calm and nervous time.”

“Like now. Nothing happening,”

“Precisely. Then the Nazis came rolling across and took France, and nobody said Phony War any more.”

Patsy followed through. “Suddenly they’ll bomb all the cities at once’?”

“They might give us a chance to surrender first. The trouble is, they’ve never answered any of our broadcasts. This may be that chance, by their lights, and we’re obliged to work out how to surrender. Well, how?”

“If we spend all our time thinking about how to surrender, thea they’ve got us beaten,” Patsy said heatedly. “I’d rather be trying to flatten them. Even if we lose a few cities.”

Ken nodded, though the thought brought a chill. Los Angeles? Behind him Marty said, “Ken, could I have a word with you?”

They stepped inside, found chairs by feel. It was too dark to read expressions. Faint sounds from somewhere in the house might indicate that a couple had felt their way to a couch or a bedroom. Life goes on.

Marty asked, “Were you serious about getting out?”

“Sure, Marty, but there are problems. I don’t own a piece of the Enclave.”

“Yeah. Well, I do, as long as the law holds up. Heh. After the law stops mattering is when a man needs something like the Enclave, and I’m short in my dues”

“Well, they might—”

“No, what I was thinking was John Fox. He’s in-this isn’t to get around-he’s in Shoshone, just outside of Death Valley, camping out till this is all over. He knows what he’s doing, Ken.”

“1 never knew you were much of a camper.”

“No. But Fox is, and he might be glad to see us if we showed up with food. Would you like to go with me?”

Ken glanced through the picture window, automatically, before he answered. No fights going, nobody looked particularly unhappy; the Russian salad hadn’t disappeared yet, though Bess Church’s wheel of Cheddar cheese had gone like snow in a furnace. The host wasn’t needed: good. He said, “Food and camp gear, sure. I don’t have camp gear, and I bet it’s in short supply. Anyway, suppose John isn’t glad to see us? No way we could phone ahead.”

“Shoshone’s still a good bett Why in God’s name would even snouts bomb Shoshone? And John doesn’t own those caves. We camp out nearby—”

“No.”

“Then where?”

“I mean no, I’m not leaving.” Ken Dutton had made his decision before he understood the reasons. Now they were coming to him, in the sight and sounds of his crowded and happy territory. “Maybe I’m crazy. I’m going to stick it out here.”

“Yup, you’re crazy. Thanks for dinner.”

Marty’d go, Ken realized. He hadn’t done any of the cleaning up. He wasn’t planning to come back.

Jenny woke to a tingling in her left arm, the one that had been under Jack. When she opened her eyes, she saw his.

“Hello, sailor. New in town?”—

He grinned. “I like watching you.”

She extracted her arm to look at her watch. “Time we got to work.”

“We still have an hour.” He moved closer to her. “Not that I can—”

“It’s all right. But I can’t sleep.”

“So?”

She sat up. “Let’s watch the weirdos. We’ve got pickups in the Snout Room.”

“Sounds good.”

He stayed in bed, with the sheet over him. Fastidious. Likes to see me nekkid, but not to be seen. I’d say it was cowardice, but how can you say that about a guy who’ll put his ass in from of a bullet for the President? Maybe his scars are classified…

“Is this legal?” Jack asked.

“Sure. I’m Intelligence. I can do anything!”

“Yeh, as long as they don’t replace the Supreme Court. Jenny, we’ve got to obey the rules, because we can get away with not obeying them.”

“It’s all right. The writers know they’re being watched. And Harpanet’s a prisoner. No rights. Satisfied?”

“Yeah—”

“And there’s nothing else to watch on my TV, I guarantee you that.” She switched on the set.

The picture swam into focus. An empty box of a room: no rugs, no furniture, no occupants; nothing but a movie screen and projector, and a broad doorway with edges of freshly cut concrete. “Wrong room,” she said, and fiddled again. “We’ve already assigned three rooms in the complex, and God knows what they’ll think they need next. Hem.”

The alien lolled at his ease in a sea of steaming mud. The humans around him were in beach chairs and swimsuits. Mud had splashed Sherry and Joe and Nat, who were crowded close to the edge. Wade Curtis stayed farther back, wearing an African safari bush jacket and seated in a fold-up chair with a beer can in his hand. Just above him was a huge globe of the Earth. A bar on wheels showed in one corner.

“See? They took our swimming pool! We move the furniture out when nobody’s using it. The alien likes his floor room,” Jenny said. “How about a swim?’

Jack eyed the mud with distaste. “No, thanks. Have you got all the rooms bugged?’

“No. Hell, no! Half these hard-SF people are ex-military, and they’d spot that, and the other half are liberals! We’ve got pickups in the mudroom and the Snout Room and the refuge, that’s the room they use to write up their notes and talk and get drunk, but it’s right next to the Snout Room. The mud’s new. He seems to like it, doesn’t he?”

“Can you get us sound too?”

“Sure.” Jenny turned a dial.

Wade Curtis’ unmistakable voice boomed from the speaker. “We’ve pretty well driven the Traveler Fithp out of Kansas. We’re picking through the debris now. We’d like to know where the fithp will attack next.”

“I wasn’t told,” Harpanet said. His pronunciation was good, yet something blurred the words: loose air escaped through the nose and lips, and there was an echo-chamber effect, perhaps due to his huge lung capacity.

Jack said, “He learns fast. I’ve talked to French diplomats with thicker accents.” But Jenny was repressing a shudder. The carnage in the smashed digit ship was still with her, and she had trouble facing the Snout.

Curtis was saying, “Your officers don’t seem to tell you much of what you’re doing.”

“No. A fi’ learns little because he might be taken into the enemy herd. That has happened with me. I have told you this.” The alien might have been affronted.

“It is a new way of thinking, and hard for us,” Sherry Atkinson said. “We must learn what we can.” She slipped into the mud, quite unselfconsciously, and rubbed behind the alien’s ear with both hands. She was already the muddiest of the lot, Jenny noted.

Curtis asked, “Did your superiors show interest in any area besides Kansas?”

“Kansas?”

“The region you invaded, this area.” Wade pointed. The erstwhile snout-held territory in Kansas was already circled on the great globe, with a black Magic Marker.

“No such interest was shown in my presence.”

“What we’re afraid of is a massive meteorite impact, something of asteroid size.”

The alien was silent for a time. Reynolds busied himself at the bar. Suddenly the alien said, “Thuktun Flishithy-Message Bearer?-was docked to a moonlet of the ringed planet for many years. This many.” The alien’s trunk emerged from the mud, and he flexed a clump of four digits, three times. “Pushing. We were not told why. I once heard officers call the mass chaytnf.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means this part of a fi’.” The alien rolled (and Sherry shied from a wave of mud). One broad clawed foot emerged.

The sci-fi types all seemed to freeze in place; but Jenny didn’t need their interpretation. Her hand closed painfully on Jack’s arm. “My God. It’s real. Of course, the Foot, they’re planning to stomp us—”

“They’re talking too damn much.”

“Huh? The alien’s talking a lot more than they are.”

The blurry voice from the TV set was saying, “It was not so large as many of the-asteroids-at the ringed planet. I think 8 to the 12th standard masses—”

“Standard mass is your mass? About eight hundred pounds… Curtis took a pocket calculator out of his bush jacket. “Jesus! Twenty-seven billion tons

Nat Reynolds said, “At… ten to twenty miles per second, that could-Harpanet, where are they going to drop it?”

“I was never told that it would be impacted against Earth. If so, the Herdmaster may have sought more data, perhaps in Kansas.”

“Jesus, Jenny,” Jack said, “they’re telling too much. We have to see them. Now.”

When a pretty girl enters a swimming pool, the natural thing to do is follow. Nat didn’t follow at once. The pool was filled with thick mud, but he was already muddy, and there were showers he set his glass down, jumped in, and waded forward. Harpanet turned and sprayed Sherry with a jet of dark mud. Nat saw her startled and appalled before she threw up her arms and turned her back. Hell, Sherry was from Oklahoma; this was hardly fair! A California boy knows how to water-fight. Nat half cupped his hands and sent water jetting at the invader.

The alien preened. He liked it. Sherry was laughing, and three others had leaped to her aid and were jetting mud over the alien’s back. Curtis’ tall wife showed impressive ambidextrous firepower.

The alien sprayed them back impartially, with the capacity of a small fire truck, his digits splayed from around the nostril.

Jack Clybourne and Jenny walked into a mist of mud and a roar of echoing laughter, and a water fight raging at the center. They stopped in the doorway and waited.

None of the Threat Team noticed them. The water fight stopped, and two muddy writers were now fondling the alien’s trunk. Reynolds asked, “Can you bend it in any direction?”

“No.”

Sherry began braiding the bifurcations, the ‘digits.’ “Does this hurt?”

“No. Discomfort.” The trunk lifted and writhed and was no longer braided.

“I wonder just how mobile your tail is,” Curtis said from behind the alien.

The short, somewhat flattened tail flapped up, down, left, right. “Control the speed of a floating car with tail. Accelerate and stop.”

“Mmm. We couldn’t drive your cars, then, even if we could capture one.”

“Not one. Two human could drive. Or I drive for you.”

Nat Reynolds noticed the visitors. He moved to the doorway without disturbing the rest. “Major Jenny, did you notice that he’s telling us how to steal fithp cars?”

“I wondered how much you were telling him,” Jack said.

Nat looked at Jack. He grinned and said, “Anything. Everything. Harpanet is part of the Threat Team.”

“You needn’t be so damned flippant. He acts like he’s switched sides, snout to human. I take it he’s got you convinced?”

“We’re still watching, Clybourne, but it’s a little more than that. He expects us to act like he’s switched sides. He’s not putting any sweat into convincing us. Sherry thinks it’s herdbeast behavior.”

“I still don’t think you should be telling that alien exactly what we’re afraid of at all times!”

“Why? What is he going to do, disguise himself as a general and walk out? Change clothes with one of us? Come on! Or wait for rescue? Clybourne, if the snouts can get him out of Cheyenne Mountain, we’ve bloody well lost!

“But never mind that. Think about this. Somewhere in the sky, aboard their mother ship, they’ve got human prisoners. They got some from Kansas, they may have saved some from the Soviet space station. They’re probably treating their human prisoners as if they had changed sides. If nobody’s shot his mouth off too much, it’ll be just like Hogan’s Heroes, with the fithp totally gullible and the prisoners running rings around them!”

Jack’s eyes changed. He said, “Mr. Reynolds, do you really believe that? Or are you spinning daydreams?”

“Oh… some of both. But it could be true. For a while. Before the aliens catch on, our people might actually do some damage.”

“And then? One human does some damage, they’ll kill them all, won’t they? I saw those piles of bodies in Topeka.”

Nat nodded soberly. “I’d have liked to meet Wes Dawson again. The snouts are ruining what used to be a fun thing. Anyway, you can see we’re learning things.”

“Yeah.”

“The asteroid strike will be an ocean strike. They like things wet. Vaporizing a billion tons of seawater won’t bother them at all. I guess it’s time to talk to the President again.”

Shoshone was a short strip of civilization in the midst of alien wilderness: a market, a gas station, a primitive-looking motel, a diner. The population must once have been about twenty. Now, at first glance, there were none.

He drove up the dirt track behind the motel. The track led through a field of immature tumbleweeds, still growing, not yet nomadic. They were well distributed, as if cultivated, or as if the plants had made agreements between them: this three square feet is mine, you get the same, intrude at your peril. But the plants looked dead and dried, the kind of plant that ought to grow in Hell.

Martin Carnell drove on through, slowly. Fox had described Shoshone to him once. Where were those caves?

He spotted Fox’s truck.

He parked beside the truck and went wandering on foot. There was a timeless feel here, as if nobody could possibly be in a hurry.

Martin turned the dogs loose into the desert. They dashed about, enjoying their freedom, running back to make contact and dashing away over the small knolls. He missed Sunhawk. At fifteen years Sunhawk had gotten too old. Marty had had to put him to sleep, just before Ken’s Stone Soup Party.

Marty wandered up and down the low rock hills. Presently he found the rooms.

Five of them, dynamite-blasted into the rock. They were roughly rectangular, with shelves and, in one instance, a door. All the comforts of home, he thought. Miners? Miners would think in terms of dynamite. What were they after, bauxite? Had there been real caves to be shaped?

Marty crossed the low ridge, puffing. On the other side were more caves, and John Fox dressed in khaki shorts and a digger hat, looking up at him.

Fox didn’t seem surprised to see him. “Hello, Marty. I heard you clumping around. The rock carries sound.”

“Hello, John. I’m carrying some perishables. You’re invited to dinner.”

“Is it just you?”

“Me and the dogs. That’s Darth, he’s just a puppy,” Darth had come running up to sniff at Fox before rejoining his master.” and I’ve got Lucretia and Chaka and — here, this’s Othello.” The dogs were behaving, more or less.

“How are things in Los Angeles?”

“Not good. Short of food, no electricity in spots… but mainly there’s a feel. I think the snouts are going to start bombing cities any minute now.”

“Why?”

“No reason. Anyway, I got out.”

“What are your plans?”

“Stay here, if you don’t mind a neighbor. I have fresh artichokes. And avocados and bay shrimp. Also fresh.” Fox looked doubtful. “A case of wine, too.” Fox stood up.

“Okay.”

28. THE PRISONERS

It was exhausting work. Jeri hated it. Machines can do this. They have machines to do it. Why us? The why didn’t matter. She didn’t know what the fithp would do if she refused to work, but she didn’t want to find out.

Raztupisp-minz sent them out in groups, but no one objected if they separated. Jeri didn’t think the fithp would ever understand the human need for privacy, simply to be alone some of the time, but they were beginning to accept it. They can watch us. Better work. Wearily she took up the cleaning materials and began.

“You are diligent.”

The voice from behind startled her. “Oh. Hello, Commander Rogachev.”

“Arvid. We have no rank here.” He laughed cynically. “We have achieved an equality that Marx would have admired, although perhaps not in quite the way he envisioned.”

“I thought you were a good communist.”

He shrugged. “I am a good Russian. You work too hard. Take a short rest.”

“But they—”

He lowered his voice. “Dmitri says, and I agree, that we must not show them our true strength. If you work hard, they will expect hard work always. You harm the others if you do too much work.”

“Sounds like a good excuse — all right. Lord knows I’m tired.” She stretched out in midair, letting the weak gravity slowly take her to the air-shaft walls. “Feels good to relax. I would kill for a cigarette.”

Arvid snorted. “There is nothing to kill. There is nothing to smoke, either.” It wasn’t that funny, but she wanted to laugh, and she did. Playing up to the nearest hero?

Shut up.

“So. You are here with your daughter. Where is your husband?”

“Drowned.”

“I am sorry.”

“So am I. We hadn’t lived together for a year, but — I was going to meet him, and the snouts blew up a dam, the first night, I guess the same time they captured you. His house was below it.”

Arvid pointedly looked away.

He’s nice. Or trying to be. “Are you married?”

“I do not know. I was. Like you, we had not lived together for some months, but that was not estrangement. I was in space. Now … so many have died. My wife was Russian; the base was in the Ukraine. John Woodward tells me he heard tales of revolt in the Soviet Union. The Moslem republics would see this invasion as the punishment of Allah. The Ukraine was never satisfied to be part of Russia either. Perhaps …” He shrugged. “So many have died.”

“Doesn’t it upset you? Not knowing?”

“Of course. We Russians are great sentimentalists. What should I do, mourn? To her I am dead, even if she lives. I am not likely to see her again in any case.”

Jeri gasped. “I … I guess I never thought about it that way. We’re none of us going to get back alive, are we?”

Arvid shrugged again. “The only way we will be taken to Earth is as part of their herd. That implies victory for them. I do not believe Russia will surrender easily. Or the United States. Americans are stubborn.”

“Stubborn. Maybe that’s it. We like to say we love freedom.”

“Did you hear much of Russia?” Arvid asked seriously.

“No. There was a little on the radio, about how Russia was being attacked just like we were. I didn’t see much of what they did to us. The dam, I saw that. And Harry told me about other dams and bridges. And they made a big crater on a main highway, right where two highways crossed. But I didn’t see much until they landed.”

“And that was the first attack,” Arvid said. “The next time will be more serious.”

“What will they do?”

“The ship is ‘mated to a foot.’ I do not think it will be long mated. Nikolai has seen it.” He told her of Nikolai’s report.

“So you think they’ll throw the asteroid at Earth?”

“Why should they not?” Arvid asked seriously.

“No, of course it makes sense.” She shuddered. “And we thought it was bad when they attacked the bridges and dams! Now’s when it gets really bad.”

“Yes. I must say it is pleasant not having to explain these things to you.”

She made an irritated gesture. “Women aren’t stupid, you know.”

He shrugged. “Some are, some are not. As with men. Perhaps it is time to begin work again. Come, we can stay together. If you do not mind?”

“It’s all right.”

Fog lay across the Bellingham harbor, and rain drizzled from the skies. From the harbor area distant sounds of work drifted up to the Enclave: hammers, trucks, barge motors… something that buzzed…

“They’re sure building a hell of a greenhouse,” Isadore said. He laughed.

George Tate-Evans looked at their own efforts and joined the laughter. “Well, I guess it’s more than we did.” They went back into the house.

Kevin Shakes watched them go, then went back to work. “I thought we’d done pretty well,” he said.

“Sure,” Miranda answered. “Enough to send Mom up the walls.” In fact they had done a lot. Where picture windows had surrounded the X-shaped house, now there were steel shutters. Where the tennis court had been, above the hidden bomb shelter, there stood the skeleton of a greenhouse. Kevin was nailing glass plates into place with exquisite care. He’d finished the bottom two rows. Now he must work on the ladder, with Miranda to hand him tools and panes and move the ladder on its wheeled base.

George Tate-Evans and Isadore Leiber came out carrying half a dozen sheets of glass, laughing as they came. Kevin heard: “-still isn’t talking to you?”

“Vicki is ominously silent. Iz, I thought it was over once we got the shutters up. You know, ‘The house feels like a prison! I never thought we’d be living in a prison …’ And then she settled down. And then there was the President saying everyone should build greenhouses, and two days later you and Jack were saying that for once the fuzzy-headed liberal son of a bitch was probably right… Kevin, Miranda, how’re you doing?”

“So far so good,” Kevin said. “Maybe another two days. You could start planting now.”

“Let’s look it over, Iz.”

The older men set the glass on a pair of sawhorses. Isadore followed George around the corner and into the greenhouse. They walked the imaginary aisles, avoiding the white chalk markings put down to show where the plants would go. There was no glass to diminish their voices.

George was saying, “Iz, by the time we got serious about the greenhouse, all the glass in Bellingham and most of the plastic was bought up. Where else were we going to get glass?”

“You can see their point, though.”

“Clara too?”

“Damn straight.”

“All right, so it’s ugly. Why do we have to have all the women on our backs?”

“It’s not just ugly. We took out the windows. That means we’ll have these damn shutters till we can take down the greenhouse. If ever. Maybe we can put the windows back after the government job gets going.”

From above their heads Kevin said, “What?”

Isadore looked up in surprise. George didn’t bother. “Iz, you’re nuts. Depend on the government for food? God knows what the government’s going to do with the stuff it grows, but you can be sure we don’t get any of it.”

“Sure,” Kevin said. “Why else would they build greenhouses at the harbor unless they were going to ship it all out? We’ll never get any.”

“What make you so sure it is a greenhouse?” George asked.

“Oh, come on, it’s been all over the radio,” Isadore said. “Anyway, what else could it be? They say they’re setting up a whole regional grain belt. They’ll renovate the harbor and dredge it because they need it to ship the grain out. Isn’t that great? After all the trouble we spent finding ourselves a sleepy little backwater town…”

“Yeah, I suppose,” George said.

Isadore nodded. “Another thing. Prices’ll go up. That’ll hit your dad, Kevin, but we can stand it. Rohrs should like it.”

“Things’ll get crowded. Tourists. Traffic jams.”

“Kevin?” Miranda called.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s take a break.”

“But …” When his sister had that edge in her voice, there was something to it. Even their father knew that. “Be right with you.” He slid down the ladder.

“What?” he asked when they got to the water bucket.

“I was out with Leigh last night…”

“Yeah, you sure were. You were out late enough to have Dad pacing the floor. Mother wasn’t too happy, either. She kept saying you had to be safe, you were out with a policeman, but she didn’t mean it. Something happen — something we need to tell them? — Did he propose? Are you pregnant?

“Well, maybe, but not that.” She giggled. “No, Leigh told me something. He’s seen an astronaut.”

“Astronaut?”

“Gillespie. The one who commanded the last Shuttle, the flight that took that poor congressman up to the Russian space station. Gillespie’s in charge of this big government project — and they’re setting up all kinds of guard stations, fences, everything.”

“For a greenhouse?”

“That’s what I wondered. Leigh says they told him it’s to protect the food.”

“That makes sense. Look at all the trouble Dad went to to protect ours!”

“Sure, maybe, but an astronaut? Why, Kevin?”

“I don’t know, Randy.”

“I don’t either, and I think we should tell Dad.”

Bill Shakes was toting up accounts with the help of his pocket computer. Kevin and Miranda waited until they saw him pause. Then Kevin said, “We’ve got an astronaut in Bellingham.”

Shakes looked up. “So?”

“Major General Edmund Gillespie. He went up to Kosmograd with Dawson. Now he’s here. Miranda found out about it yesterday.” He was careful not to say last night.

Miranda took up the tale. “Leigh spent day before yesterday and part of yesterday taking him all over Bellingham. I asked him where he was, and he told me all about it.”

“What’s he want? I mean Gillespie.”

“I don’t know. Leigh says he looked over everything. He looked at the harbor, he looked at the railroad, he toured the whole town. All that, for a government greenhouse?”

Shakes scowled. “So we’ve got a real live astronaut scouting Bellingham. We’re getting too damn conspicuous. The thing about being a survivalist is you keep your head down.”

“We have to,” Miranda said. “There’s no gasoline, and Leigh says they’re going to close off the highway except for essential traffic, to save maintenance.”

“Hmm.” It was easy to see what Bill Shakes was thinking. Bellingham lay between mountains and the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Restricting highway use was the same as not letting them leave town. “Not that there’s anyplace better for us to go to,” Shakes said carefully. “We’ve invested a lot here, and we can’t take it with us.”

“Well, we thought you should know,” Kevin said.

“Yeah. Yeah … why an astronaut? I suppose he doesn’t have much of anything better, with the snouts shooting spaceships out of the sky. Still… it doesn’t fit.” Shakes frowned. “You like this deputy sheriff, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Good. See more of him.”

Kevin suppressed an urge to giggle.

Jack Clybourne stood in the doorway, blocking the President’s path. “No, sir,” he said firmly.

“Mr. Clybourne,” Admiral Carrell said mildly.

“No,” Jack said firmly. “Before the President goes in there, you get that alien out, or you give me a hell of a lot more gun than this pistol, and that’s final.”

Admiral Carrell sighed.

“Jack …” Jenny stepped forward. How do I get him out of this? “Jack, will you agree if I bring in Sergeant Bonner and two MPs with military rifles?”

“You can’t do that,” Sherry Atkinson protested. “We can’t make Harpanet feel that we don’t trust him!”

“Damn it all. Mr. President!” Wade Curtis said.

“Yes, Mr. Curtis?” the President asked. He sounded as if he was suppressing a chuckle.

“Their top brass travel with armed guards. Harpanet won’t see anything unusual in having the President escorted by soldiers.”

“Do you think I will need them, Mr. Curtis?”

“No. But I see Jack’s point. If Harpanet decided to take on the President, he’d be damned hard to stop. Incidentally, if you’re going to do this, do it right. None of those dinky little Mattel toy rifles. Get a couple of thirty-ought-sixes.”

“And where will we find those?” Jenny asked.

“There’s one in my room. Ransom’s got another,” Curtis said.

“That’s why, Mr. President.” Joe Ransom finished his presentation. The room, filled with writers and engineers and soldiers stood in silence, so that the only sound was the heavy breathing of the alien captive.

“Impressive,” President Coffey said. He looked bewilderedly around the room until his eyes met those of the alien. Harpanet stood thirty feet away, as far as Clybourne could put him, with four armed combat veterans between the alien and the President.

And still too close, Jenny thought.

“What do you call him? Has he a title?” the President asked.

“Just Harpanet, Mr. President,” Robert Anson said. “Any title he might have had from his own people was lost when he surrendered, and we have not yet given him one.”

“Harpanet,” the President said quietly.

“Lead me.”

“Have you understood what was said here?”

“Yes.”

“Is it true? They will drop a large asteroid on the Earth?” The alien spread his digits.

“He says he can’t know,” Sherry interpreted.

“But your ship was to be — mated with a foot?”

“Yes.” The s sound fluttered.

“Is there anyone here who disagrees?” the President demanded. There was only silence.

President Coffey began to pace. “We’ll have to warn as many people as possible. Worldwide. God, I wish they hadn’t made such hash of our communications. Yes, Admiral?”

“I think we don’t dare.”

“Dare what? Warn the world? We’d be condemning millions! Tidal waves, storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, it’ll be like a weeklong disaster movie festival!”

“And if we do issue a warning, we will certainly condemn thousands. Tens of thousands,” Admiral Carrell said. “They will flee from the coasts. All the coasts.”

“But it’s better than doing nothing!”

“Mr. President.” Robert Anson seemed to have aged ten years in months, but his voice was firm and insistent.

“Yes, Mr. Anson?”

“If you issue a warning, people will flee the coastal towns. Bellingham is a coastal town.”

“But …?”

“You dare not have people flee from every town except Bellingham,” Anson said.

“He is certainly correct,” Admiral Carrell said. “If you issue a warning, you will disrupt Project Archangel. Perhaps permanently.”

“And Archangel is the only goddam chance we have,” Curtis said.

The President sat heavily. His fingers drummed against the desk. After a few moments he looked up. “Thor, would you send Mrs. Coffey in, please? I’ll speak with the rest of you later. Thank you for your advice.”

Mrs. Carmichael had told Alice a story once. Later Alice had asked around, and everyone had heard it. The psychiatrists probably thought it did their patients good. Maybe it did.

A motorist finds himself with a flat tire on a back road, late at night. There’s a fence. Someone is peering through it, not doing anything, just watching. The motorist sees a sign in the headlights. He’s parked next to a mental institution.

He takes the flat tire off, putting the five nuts in the hubcap. The stranger watches. He pulls the spare tire out of the trunk. The stranger watches. Motorist is getting nervous. What’s a maniac doing out so late at night? Why is he staring like that? Motorist rolls the tire around from the back and steps on the rim of the hubcap, which flips all of the nuts into tall weeds. Motorist goes after them. He finds one nut.

The mental patient speaks. “Take a nut off each of the other tires. Put them on the fourth wheel. Four nuts each. It’ll get you to a gas station.”

Motorist says, “That’ll work.” Then, “Hey, that’s brilliant! What the hell are you doing here?”

Patient says, “I’m here for being crazy. Not stupid.”

The air pipes were a little more than a yard across. There we no handholds. At first Alice had floundered, lost and nauseated and fighting the fear of falling. It was better now. Jeri and Melissa actually enjoyed the low gravity, and they’d shown Alice how.

Alice had always been thin. Pale face, fiery hair, slender body, vividly pretty, for whatever that was worth. Now she was gaunt. She tried to eat, but there was no appetite, and the horrors tried to foist nauseating alien plants and meat on her. The others accepted such treatment. They ate canned food and alien food, they ate the vitamins and protein powder and brewer’s yeast she had supplied and they thrived.

Living wasn’t worth the effort under these circumstances. Alice had slashed her wrists once, long ago, for reasons that seemed trivial now. Something sharp would presently come her way. Yet she was half sure she wouldn’t use it.

After all, who would care?

The little girl, Melissa, treated her with something between fear and contempt. Jeri was nice, but she spent a lot of time with the Russians. I think she likes the big one. He does things for her. Brings her things. Got the blanket to put around the toilet pool; that was nice.

Nobody does things for me. They resent me. With Wes Dawson it went far beyond resentment. He gave orders. He lectured. He taught the language of the horrors — an expected the women to use it. He was persuasive and smooth and condescending, like that first psychiatrist they had given her, the one who thought using Q-tips was a form of masturbation. She’d gotten along all right with the second one. Mrs. Carmichael had looked a little like Jeri Wilson. A little plumper, and not as scared, Alice thought.

The horrors were worse than Dawson. Anything short of instant obedience puzzled them. They solved the problem by prodding with their trunks or the butts of the twisted-looking guns. They wouldn’t listen to anything she had to say. They treated her like a thing. If Alice McLennon slashed her wrists, it would be one less damn thing for the horrors to worry about.

This cleaning of air pipes: it was make-work, a way of keeping the prisoners busy, like picking tomatoes at Menninger’s. Alice wasn’t fooled. I’m here for being crazy, not stupid. The horrors were too big to fit in the pipes. What had they done before people turned up? Maybe they had Roto-Rooters, or maybe the pipes just never needed cleaning, or — she’d glimpsed something like a steel doughnut just the size of the pipe, with a glittering eye that watched her, from a distance. Robots?

And like the make-work at Menninger’s, it served its purpose. They’d pushed her into the ducts when she balked. Those rubbery split trunks were irresistibly strong. She floundered in there, disoriented and nauseated, and took the great wad of cloth and the plastic bag that were shoved in after her. Then she hadn’t done anything for a while. Then … she started to clean the pipes.

Well, there was dust and rust, and it came off. There were wads of goop and soil and feathers in the filters. And, moving around in the pipes, she began to learn a kind of skill. There were no handholds; of course not, the horrors had never expected that living things would need them in here. She learned to move in a zigzag jumping style, swiping at the sides with the cloth. It worked.

It worked, and she was getting better at it, but it was makework, and she couldn’t wait to get back to the garden, with its open spaces.

Some of the plants were sprouting. Alice was afraid to touch them. Mrs. Woodward chuckled. “Rice. I might have known it would be rice. Rice likes it wet.”

“What do we do now?”

“Nothing. There ain’t any bugs here. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Maybe we want to block off the water pipes that feeds some of the other stuff.”

Alice nodded. She pushed herself back to look at the vegetable plot. Was that another tuft of green, where they’d planted corn and runner beans together? Alice belatedly realized that she was too far from a handhold.

It didn’t bother her much. She was used to free-fall. She floated, waiting for Thuktun Flishithy’s minuscule thrust to pull her someplace useful.

Something wrapped around her ankle. She jumped as if she’d been electrocuted, and looked down at a cluster of tentacles, a broad brown head, wrinkled with age, and recessed eyes. “Raztupisp-minz?”

“You have learned to recognize me? Good. How is your health, Alice?”

“I’m fine.”

“Your plants are sprouting. I am pleased. I think our plants will grow in your world.”

Alice held her face expressionless. Dawson had suggested if the plants grew well, Earth would become more desirable to the horrors — and she hadn’t believed him. Should the plants die … easy enough, but she’d have to go on eating what they fed now.

“I want to explain something,” the teacher said. “You may have noticed that some of the fithp are acting strangely. The mating season has started for one class of us, the sleepers, and it affects their behavior. They are not turning rogue, but do not irritate them.”

“You’re not a sleeper, are you? And Takpusseh is.”

“Mating season goes with the females, the sleeper females are spaceborn, and so is Tashayamp. For most of the year, many days to come, you may see me as neuter.”

She studied him, but there was nothing to be read in his alien face. Yet this was a teacher and a manipulator. “Can you hear thought?”

“Hear thought?” He snorted. “No! But I can see. You talk of mating with females. You shy from males when you can. You are thin in the hips, your breasts are flat. Sometimes there are fithp who are shaped like females but never come into season.”

Alice leapt away, back to the seed plot, back to the company of the other prisoners. Nobody had ever suggested such a thing to her! They thought she was strange, yes, but a neuter? A freemartin? If she didn’t like men, it was because men were … were …

She feared the teacher would follow, but in fact he was was speaking to another fi’ — to the other teacher, Takpusseh.

She remembered, now, that men had tried to tell her that she was strange, to put her on the defensive. Fuck me to prove you’re a woman.

The thought of being raped by Raztupisp-minz was ludicrous and horrible… mostly ludicrous, she decided. No man had ever started by telling her to think of him as a neuter.

Tashayamp took her back to the cell, with Mr. and Mrs. Woodward and Wes Dawson. They were there long enough to eat and use the toilet. The only thing that could have made that tolerable to Alice was watching how it bothered the others.

An hour’s rest, then fithp came to escort them to the ducts. None of the humans had noticed that she wasn’t talking. Maybe they were glad.

Alice broke away from the others as soon as she could, and let the wind carry her away, farther than she’d ever gone before. She wasn’t feeling sociable. Presently she braked herself and began desultorily to clean the walls.

The wind had grown cold. It matched her mood; she hardly noticed at first. But the wall was even colder, on one side. Here was a curve to mark a side channel in the duct, but it was blocked by a hatch. She passed it. Soon the wall warmed.

Alice went back.

She didn’t like taking orders, and she didn’t like knowing that things were hidden from her. The goddam psychiatrists always had something they weren’t telling her.

There was a slot to house the hatch. Alice got her fingers into a crack and pushed, and the door moved back against springs, enough to let her through.

The air was terribly cold and still. She followed a short duct and found a grill.

Ten yards beyond was a peculiar surface, black and nearly smooth, but with undulations in it, like very dirty ice. With her face pressed to the grill Alice could see the curve of it, like the inner wall of a cylinder.

She studied it for a time. There was a bulge in the surface … like an unfinished raised relief painting… a frieze of one of the horrors. Dirty ice? Dawson had said… what? The horrors liked mud. It puzzled them that humans bathed in clean water. But frozen mud?

The grill was loose in her hands.

She pushed it aside and floated in.

It was frozen mud on one side, a ceiling of painted friezes on the other. The artwork was weird, alien, sometimes beautiful. Horrors — fithp — half hidden among weird trees; she recognized some from the Garden area. Here a good representation of one of the horrors faced a block covered with alien script. And sculpted into the opposing mudbank was a similar shape…

She’d freeze here. Alice backed into the duct, pulled the grill after her, and set it in place.

Alice didn’t like secrecy. She would have to learn more. She found an exit from the air shaft.

This part of the ship was strange, and she didn’t know how to get home. It was hard, stopping one of the horrors in the corridor She said, “Raztupisp-minz,” and followed it after it gave up trying to talk to her.

She was tired and she ached. The horrors on Earth had stopped her before she got around to collecting conveniences like cosmetics and liniment. Cleaning out air ducts was so much like flying! She hadn’t noticed how hard she was working. She wanted Ben Gay. She wanted to curl up and wait for the pain to go away.

“Alice wants to tell you something,” Melissa said.

Jeri stirred wearily. “How do you know?”

“She keeps looking at you. But she wants to see you alone. I know, Mom. I can tell. Alice is—”

“Yeah.” Interesting. Can you read her mind? Or are you guessing? Or what? Jeri floated lazily over to grip the wall beside Alice.

“How’d it go?”

Words bubbled out quickly. “Jeri, I found a peculiar place. Cold enough to freeze your ass off. Locked off. Black ice everywhere, or something like it. A long way from here.”

“Storage room? Anything stored there?”

“No, just ice, all along the one wall, the hull wall. Dawson said they like mud. Maybe it’s their idea of a big spa. Why would they freeze their spa?”

“Let’s ask Arvid.”

Alice looked afraid again.

“He won’t … he’s a good man, Alice.”

“Oh, all right …”

Rogachev frowned deeply. “Frozen solid?”

“I didn’t touch it. It must have been. It was cold.”

“No gravity. No spin, because we are mated to the foot. They cannot bathe in mud under those conditions, but from the pictures they showed us we know they enjoy that. They will have a place for mud, and they must keep it when there is no gravity. Da. So they froze it in place.”

“That makes sense,” Jeri said.

“Yeah,” Alice agreed. “All right, explain this one. There was a shape in the mud, like a frieze — like one of those horrors under a blanket.

“How? As if it were lying on its side?”

“Yeah. Now, what was that?”

Wes Dawson was close enough to hear. “You’re sure of this?”

“Yes.”

“A frieze of a fi’?”

“I didn’t say it was a frieze! I said it was like that,” Alice said.

“Certainly.” Dawson made his voice soothing. He made no move to come closer to her. “Arvid, what do you think?”

“I do not know.”

“I think we should tell Raztupisp-minz.”

“We will consider that,” Arvid said. He turned to Dmitri. “You have heard?”

“Da.”

They spoke rapidly, in Russian.

Jeri took Arvid’s arm. “They learn languages quickly,” she said. “They say they don’t know any Russian.”

Arvid smiled. “If they have learned rapidly enough to comprehend the accented dialect we are now speaking, nothing will defeat them.” He turned back to the others. The liquid syllables continued. Finally Dmitri nodded. Arvid turned to the others. “Da. We will do it, then. Alice, you must tell your story to our masters.”

The mudroom was warm enough for comfort, and the mud was thawing, by the time Pretheeteh-damb arrived.

Raztupisp-minz had told him that the red-haired human was certified rogue. She could be hallucinating… The comfort that gave Pretheeteh-damb vanished as he entered. There in the ceiling was a frieze of Thowbinther-thuktun, a half-legendary priest of two eight-cubeds of years ago. Opposite Thowbinther-thuktun was an entirely similar bulge.

Some fi’ must have an odd sense of humor. He must have entered the mudroom after acceleration stopped; had shaped the mud into a ribald parody of the ancient discoverer of the Podo Thuktun. But Preetheeteh-damb was beginning to shiver, and it comforted him that his octuple were all spaceborn. “Remove the mud,” he told one of his fithp, “carefully. But waste no time. We resume acceleration shortly.”

This couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Within hours they would release the Foot. Then there would be violent maneuvers as they placed Thuktun Flishithy in position to send down the digit ships.

The Invasion of Winterhome was about to begin, and now this.

The warrior scraped away softened mud with the back of his bayonet, and Fathisteh-tulk began to take shape.

The Herdmaster waited impatiently for the call. Then Pretheetel-damb came onto the screen. There was activity behind him.

“Report.”

“It is indeed Fathisteh-tulk, Herdmaster. He was drowned. We find no breaks in the skin.” By now the corpse was free from the ice, visible in the screen. It rotated slowly for inspection by the octuple’s physician. “There’s a deep groove in Fathisteh-tulk trunk, above the nostril. It might have been made by a cord pulled very tight, but it wouldn’t have killed him. Mud caked in the fi’s mouth. It looks like a ritual execution. He was drowned.”

“Thank you.” Pastempeh-keph broke the connection. The octuple clan must be informed. The women will not be pleased. Murder. Murder was rare among the fithp. It was almost always the beginning of rebellion.

“We approach the final moments, Herdmaster,” the Attackmaster said. “What shall we do?” Run away. Drop the Foot to slow the humans. Confine them to their planet while we take the rest of their solar system, which is more valuable than the planet anyway.

Fathisteh-tulk would have given that advice. Gladly. Advisor Siplisteph will not. The sleeper women will never consent to that. Nor will Fistarteh-thuktun.

“Attackmaster.”

“Lead me.”

“Continue with the battle plan. You are in charge of Thuktun Flishithy.”

29. FOOTFALL

The funeral pit was a cylinder of soil, garbage, bones, and what remained of the honored dead, all being gradually churned into an indistinguishable matrix. Instruments sampled the blend for acidity, bacterial population, temperature. The atmosphere within was unbreathable. Workers in pressure suits maintained a cavity in the matrix, open at the fore end. They had removed several tons of it into the Garden to make room for this day’s funeral proceedings

The cold had preserved Fathisteh-tulk. His eyes looked off at different angles. As lines lowered him to join the Silent Fithp, his digit-cluster bent strangely above the nostril. One eye met Pastempeh-keph’s. My breath was closed with rope, and then with mud. Why both? What might I have said that I did not say while alive, who never hesitated to speak? Who closed my mouth with mud?

The Herdmaster shook his head. I will learn. He had already spoken his formal farewell to today’s half-dozen dead, recognizing posthumous accomplishments, sometimes authorizing upgrades in harness colors before a corpse was stripped for burial.

Elaborate funeral practices had evolved among the spaceborn during three generations of interstellar flight. Inevitably they were geared to a life in spin gravity. The funeral pit was on the ship’s axis. Ceremonies were held in the leavetaking chamber, a partial ring along the lip of the funeral pit, where spin gravity was almost nil. Today’s ceremony obeyed tradition. The main drive was running at high thrust; the hum of it was everywhere; yet there was almost no acceleration.

Pastempeh-keph sensed the immense mass against which Message Bearer was pushing. Message Bearer was even now issuing its final direction to the nickel-and-iron residue of an icy moonlet. She must break loose within a 512-breath, or ride the Foot down to Winterhorne. Had a lessor personage led these rites they might have been postponed until after the maneuvers; but after they separated from the Foot, there would never again be time. Fathisteh-tulk deserved all honors. And even if he did not, I could not seem niggardly in granting honor to a former Herdmaster!

Chowpeentulk watched through glass as Fathisteh-tulk came rest in the moving earth. Her digits wrapped the child and held it to her throat to suckle. He was male, eight days old. Under light thrust he would already have walked. In nearly free-fall he drifted with waving legs. He seemed to enjoy it.

“My mate was murdered,” Chowpeentulk said. “Who?”

“I face too many answers,” Pastempeh-keph said. “Your mate was never careful of whom he might offend.”

She trumpeted wildly. The child, startled, flung its stubby digits across its head and tried to burrow between Chowpeentulk’s legs. In the minuscule thrust its efforts lifted her from the floor. It was strong for a newborn.

The loss of dignity slowed her not at all. “This crime was committed against the whole of the Traveler Fithp!” she bellowed. “Sleepers and spaceborn, how can we hold together unless the murderers face judgment?”

The Herdmaster let silence follow, letting Chowpeentulk see how the others, the fithp and the little clump of humans, stared at her. Then, “We will solve this. You know that I like puzzles. Do you also know that I must fight a war?” He looked into the funeral pit. “Farewell, Fathisteh-tulk. You have too much company.”

He joined Takpusseh as they were leaving. “Fathisteh-tulk had always the virtue of asking interesting questions,” he said. “Now I must find my own.”

“You will have an Advisor,” said Takpusseh.

“Bah. Siplisteph will have to be trained. Breaker-Two, did Fathisteh-tulk ask you interesting questions?”

Takpusseh snorted. “I did not find them so. He wanted to interview the humans in privacy.”

“Why?”

“He would not say. The humans are not his thuktun. I told him that I myself would translate, and that I would inform you of all that transpired. He declined. He said that he would simply wait for me to do my job.”

“Very proper,” said Pastempeh-keph. “Did he propose questions for you to ask?”

“He did not.”

A pity. “Will you be on the bridge during Footfall?”

“No. To think of humans as enemy or prey would ruin my empathy with them… such as it is.”

Tashayamp left them at the cell door. “You will stay in place. Be prepared to cling to the walls. First that wall, but change walls when you are warned. The direction of pull will change often. Before each change you will hear this.” She trumpeted, then spoke in a breathy trombone chant. “You understand? Good.”

They went to the bulkhead. Jeri dug her nails into the rug.

“It is indelicate,” Arvid said. “But they gave no indication of time. It would be well to use the facilities while we are able.”

“Good thinking,” Dawson said. “Ladies first.”

Nobody else wanted to be first, so Jeri went. It wasn’t so bad now that Arvid and Nikolai had rigged a blanket to enclose the shallow pool.

Jeri went back to the wall. “Melissa, I want you here.”

“If you do not object, I will stay with you also,” Arvid said.

“Thank you.”

“What did you think of their funeral rites?” Arvid asked.

“My anthropology teacher said funeral rites were the most important clues to a tribal culture,” Jeri said. “But I think that was because she was an archaeologist, and graves are about the only things they can find with anything important in them.”

“The Predecessors must like bad smells,” Melissa said. “Because that place stank.”

Gary giggled agreement. Jen said, “There, that’s what I meant. There’s nothing arbitrary aboard a spaceship. They don’t have to put up with that smell. They want it. It must be part of the funeral, the sense that the dear departed is turning into fertilizer, then plants, then …”

Arvid said, “You understood more of his speech than I.”

“I got some of it too,” Wes Dawson said. “The long speech by the priest. He talked about Fathisteh-tulk ‘coming back to Traveler Fithp.’ I wondered if he meant in person.”

“Do you think they believe in that?” Jen asked.

“Dunno,” Dawson said. “The body recirculates. Maybe they think the soul does too.”

“I think not,” Arvid said. “Else why would they make no mention of the newborn one?”

“The Predecessors are always with us,” he said. “How could that other species join the Traveler Fithp? Their bodies recirculate and there are the thuktunthp, but—”

“Of course they do not believe bourgeois myths of gods immortality,” Dmitri said. “There is much to admire in these fi’. They work together, and if need be they give their lives for herd.”

John Woodward sniffed loudly and turned away.

“That one didn’t,” Alice said. “The widow said he was murdered, and the Bull Elephant wasn’t happy about it, either.”

“An interesting mystery,” Arvid said. “Who might have killed him?”

“We’ll never know,” Dawson said.

“Why do you say that?” Dmitri demanded. “The Leader told the widow that he would find the murderer. He has great resources. Why would he fail?”

“Why would he tell us? If he did, would we know the name? Hey, I read mysteries too, but I expect to know the names of suspects!”

“The Bull isn’t a detective,” Jen said. “He has too much else to do. And — people, I’m kind of scared. All this violent maneuvering, they’re going to do something special, but what?”

“I am very much afraid we all know,” Arvid Rogachev said.

Jeri took a fresh grip on the wall carpeting.

“Major! Major, wake up!”

Jenny sat bolt upright. “Yes, Sergeant?”

“Message from Australia, ma’am. They’ve seen it!”

Oh my God. She strained to open her eyes and peered through sleep at her watch. Five A.M.

“Comin’ fast, about an hour to impact,” Sergeant Ferguson said.

“The Admiral—”

“Mailey already woke him up. ’Scuse me, ma’am, I got to get the others.”

The Threat Team had split into two groups around the coffeepot and the large globe. Ransom and Curtis already had coffee, and were tracing paths on the globe.

“Water. I was sure of it,” Ransom said.

“Sure,” Curtis muttered. “Why at bloody dawn?”

“Why water?” a naval officer asked.

Ransom didn’t look up from the globe. “Lieutenant, a meteorite that size actually does more damage if it hits water. It’ll rip through the water and the ocean floor into the magma. The energies don’t go back to space; the water absorbs them, and you get even more heat from the exposed magma. It all goes into boiling the ocean. We think a quarter of a billion tons of seawater may vaporize. Salt rains all over the world …”

Jenny shuddered. “How many people will it kill?”

“Lots,” Curtis said. “Look.” He traced a path northward from the Indian Ocean. “Bays. They funnel the tsunamis, let them build even higher before they break. Calcutta, Bombay, the Rann of Kutch — all gone. Persian Gulf, same thing. East Africa—”

“We have to warn them!”

“I’m sure the Aussies have done that,” Ransom said.

“It does not matter.” Admiral Carrell’s voice was even.

Jenny reflexively straightened to attention. “Sir?”

“We have no reliable communications with East Africa. I believe that Mr. Ransom is correct and that the Australians have sent a warning, but if not—”

“They’ll know soon enough,” Curtis said. “What about ships? Subs? We still have communications with the submarine fleet, don’t we?”

“In fact, yes,” Carrell said. “Our long-wave devices still function. I have already given the appropriate orders.”

Reynolds came over with coffee. Curtis pointed to a spot on the globe. Reynolds bent to examine it.

“Tsunamis. Hurricanes. I wish we knew exactly where it’ll hit,” Curtis said. “Maybe we could tell just how much weather slop will get into the Northern Hemisphere.”

“Lots,” Ransom said. “It’s too near the equator.”

“Mess up both hemispheres,” Reynolds said. “Neat.”

“Fear, fire, foes,” Curtis muttered. “Tsunamis, hurricanes, rainstorms…” He stood with a satisfied look. “One thing, it won’t hurt Bellingham.”

“That’s a comfort,” someone said.

“Goddam right it is,” Curtis said. “About the only one we’ve got.”

“As strategy it’s hard to beat,” Joe Ransom said. “Look when the tidal waves—”

“Shut up,” a young naval officer shouted. “Later, man, but for now just shut up.”

Jenny bent over to listen as Curtis and Ransom continued to talk.

To the east: the island of Madagascar would shadow Mozambique and South Africa, a little. The waves would wash Tanzania, Kenya, the Somali Democratic Republic, wash them clean of life. Northeast, it would wash the Saudi Arabian peninsula. The Arabian Sea would focus the wave; a mountain range of water would march into Iran and Pakistan. That’s the end of OPEC, Jenny thought with a flash of vindictive triumph. The end of the oil too.

India would be covered north to the mountains. The Bay of Bengal would focus the wave again: it might cross Burma as far as China. The islands of the Java Sea would be inundated. The wave would wash across western Australia…

“My God,” the naval officer said in sudden realization. “They’ll try to land afterward, of course, but where?”

“That’s why it’s such a—”

“Marvelous strategy, yes, Mr. Ransom,” Admiral Carrell said. “Where would we send our fleets? India? Saudi Arabia? Australia? Africa?”

“South Africa,” Curtis said. “Look here. Most of the industry and white population are down at sea level. Tsunamis will wreck all that. Beyond the coast is the Drakensberg escarpment, up to the high plateau country, and that’ll survive just fine. So they land at Johannesburg and Pretoria and they have themselves an isolated industrial foothold.”

Admiral Carrell bent over to examine the globe. “Perhaps …”

A horp warbled through the room. “Now hear this. Ten minutes to estimated time of impact.”

The room fell silent.

Herdmaster Pastempeh-keph felt the tiny thrust decrease further as he made his way to the bridge.

Matters there ran over smooth trails. Koothfektil-rusp turned to say, “The Foot is on target. The Defensemaster may break us loose at any time.”

“Do it,” said Pastempeh-keph. “Defensemaster, you lead now.” He settled himself on his pad and set his claws on the recessed foothold bars.

A recording bellowed for attention throughout the huge ship. “Take footholds! Take footholds! Thrust in eight breaths.”

The Herdmaster’s claws tightened on the bars. What can go wrong? The drive won’t fail us; we’ve been running it steadily for many eight-days. The prey can’t possibly stop the Foot now. If they could harm Message Bearer, they would have acted earlier. Message Bearer surged steadily, smoothly backward, swinging round to face outward from Winterhome.

As the pitted and gouged mass of nickel and iron moved away, a magnificent blue-and-white crescent moved into view. Thrust built up, and the Herdmaster felt himself sagging into the pad. His muscles, grown slack in low gravity, protested. He welcomed the feeling of gravity.

At a thrust higher than homeworld gravity, acceleration peaked. Then the motors on the digit ships began to fire, and thrust rose again. The crescent was dead aft, growing tremendous. Message Bearer was accelerating outward and backward from Winterhome.

The Foot would strike ahead of Message Bearer. The impact point would still be in view.

The Herdmaster summoned a view of the humans’ quarters. They’d reached the restraint cell safely; they were on their bellies on the padding. It looked uncomfortable.

Thrust dropped in increments as pairs of digit ships left their moorings around the aft rim. The Herdmaster watched their pulsing drive flames curve away. They must decelerate more drastically to take up orbit about Winterhome. The last four merely took up station alongside the mother ship. If something deadly rose from Winterhome, they might be of help.

But nothing broke the curdled clouds. The terminator swung round until half the disk was lighted, and the Foot was invisible against the night side. There, just inside the shadow, a red pinpoint flare! The pinpoint glowed orange, then white, then blinding white, all within the fraction of a breath. Herdmaster Pastempeh-keph contracted his pupils. It wasn’t enough. He turned away. The lurid light on the walls of the control complex flared, and held, and dimmed. He turned back.

A white flare was dimming, expanding, reddening. Rings of cloud formed and vanished around an expanding hemisphere of flame. Clouds spread outward through the stratosphere, hiding what was beneath.

Fistarteh-thuktun spoke formally. “Our footprint is on their sea bed.”

“Attackmaster, it’s right in the middle of that stretch of water. Is that where you wanted it?”

“Exactly on target,” said Koothfektil-rusp.

“Well done.”

Message Bearer was passing Winterhome at sixty makasrupkithp per breath; but Winterhome’s rotation kept the Footprint in sight. A fireball stood above the planet’s envelope of air. It clung to the mass of the planet like a flaming leech.

Light reflected orange from a solid stretch of cloud cover. The fireball stood in a ring of clear air. A ring-shaped ripple beneath the cloud sheet expanded outward at terrible speed. The ripple picked up distortions as it traveled.

“The shock wave through the ocean distorts the cloud cover,” Koothfektil-rusp said. “Like bulges moving beneath a fallen tent. Our experts will be able to pick out the contours of the continents and ocean floor by the way they retard the wave.”

It was mysterious and horrible. It only suggested the millions of prey who would drown beneath the clouds and the seawater.

“Thus we achieve equality with the Predecessors,” said Fistarteh-thuktun.

The Herdmaster was jolted. “Are you serious?”

“I don’t know. What horror lies beneath that fortunate shroud of water droplets? How many of the prey will we drown? How much terrain do we bar to the use of any living thing? What was our own world like when the Predecessors were dying and our fithp were brainless beasts?”

The layer of cloud was now flowing backward, into the fireball. Another layer formed above, high in the stratosphere, beginning to spread. Waves of blue light formed and dispersed. Pretty pictures, abstracts, but on an awesome scale…

One may hope that we have not invented a new art form. Awe and horror: the Herdmaster trampled them deep into the bottom of his mind. “We came to take Winterhome. Do the thuktunthp hold knowledge to help us understand this?”

“Perhaps. We accept, do we not, that the Predecessors altered the natural state of a world? Their world, our world. Now Winterhome is our world. Look how we distort its natural state. What did their meddling cost the Predecessors? Have we done better?”

Have we done better? We must speak again, you and I. But this path was chosen long ago, and we must follow it. “Attackmaster. You may assume command of the digit ships. Begin your landings.”

Commander Anton Villars stared through the periscope and tried to look calm. It wasn’t easy. An hour before the message had come to USS Ethan Allen. The long-wave transmitters were reliable but slow. The message came in dots and dashes, code tapped out and taken down to be put through the code machines. It couldn’t be orders to attack the Soviet Union. There was no Soviet Union. Villars had been prepared to launch his Poseidon missiles against an unseen enemy in space. Instead:

Safe? From four thousand megatons? There wasn’t any safety. Villars’ urge was to submerge and flee at flank speed.

Off to starboard, the island of Rodriguez blazed with the colors of life. Jungle had long since given way to croplands. In the center bare rock reared sharply, a peak a third of a mile high. Waves broke over a surrounding coral reef. That reef would provide more cover when the tsunami came, but it was a danger too.

Fishing boats were straggling in through the reef. Probably doomed. There was nothing Villars could do for them.

It was just dusk. Clouds covered the sky. It would be difficult to see anything coming. Four thousand megatons. Bigger than any bomb we ever dreamed of, much less built.

The crew waited tensely. John Antony, the Exec, stood close by.

“About time,” Antony said.

“If their estimate was on.”

“If their time was off, so were their coordinates.”

I know that. I had the same instructor at Annapolis as you did.

Somebody laughed and choked it off. The news had filtered through the ship, as news like that always did.

The cameras were working. Villars wondered how many would survive. He peered through the darkest filter available. Four thousand megatons…

Suddenly the clouds were blazing like the sun. “First flash at 1854 hours 20 seconds,” he called. “Log that.” Where? Where would it fall?

All in an instant, a hole formed in the clouds to the northeast, the glare became God’s own flashbulb, and the cameras were gone. “Get those other cameras up,” Villars bellowed at men who were already doing that. His right eye saw nothing but afterimage. He put his left to the periscope.

He saw light. He squinted and saw light glaring out of a hole in the ocean. A widening hole in the ocean, with smoothly curved edges; wisps of mist streaming outward, and a conical floodlight beam pointing straight up. The beam grew wider: the pit was expanding. Clouds formed and vanished around a smoothly curved wall of water sweeping smoothly toward the sub.

The rim of a sun peeped over the edge.

“I make it about forty miles east northeast of present position. Okay, that’s it.” Villars straightened. “Bring in the cameras. Down periscope. Take us to ninety feet.” How deep? The further down, the less likely we’ll get munched by su,face phenomena, but if those tsunamis are really big they might pile enough water on top of Ethan Allen to crush us. “Flank speed. Your course is 135 degrees.” That leaves us in deep water and puts Rodriguez between us and that thing, for whatever good it’ll do.

So we’ve seen it. A sight nobody ever saw — well, nobody who wrote it down, anyway. Now all I have to do is save the ship.

Ethan Allen was about to fight the biggest tsunami in human history — and just now he was broad on to it. He glanced at his watch. Tsunamis traveled at speeds from two hundred to four hundred miles an hour. Call this one four. Six minutes…

“Left standard rudder. Bring her to 85 degrees.”

“Bring her to 85, aye, aye,” the quartermaster answered.

“Warn ’em,” Villars said.

“Now hear this. Now hear this. Damage control stations. Stand by for depth charges.”

Might as well be depth charges…

The ship turned.

It surged backward. Villars felt the blood rushing into his face. Somewhere aft, a shrill scream was instantly cut off, and the Captain heard a thud.

Minutes later: “There’s a current. Captain, we’re being pulled northeast.”

“Steady as she goes.” Goddam. We lived through it!

The news came on at nine A.M. when you could get it. Marty always listened. Fox didn’t always bother.

No matter how early he got up, Marty always found Fox was awake with a pot of coffee. It was no use persuading Fox to go easy on the coffee.

“When we run out, we do without. Until then, we have coffee,” was his only answer to Marty’s pleas to conserve.

“You know your trouble, Marty?”

Marty looked up from the radio he was trying to tune. “Eh?”

“You’re still connected to that world you left. As long as you let civilization worry you, it’s one more way the desert can kill you. Relax. Go with the punches. There’s nothing they can do to us. We’ve already given up everything they control. Now it’s us.”

“Yeah, sure.” Marty tuned the set carefully. “You think you’ve quit, huh?” He’d thrown a wire for an antenna across the top of the tall pole somebody had set up as a flagpole years ago. It worked pretty well.

Four hours after dawn Shoshone would normally have been a furnace. This morning some strange clouds, wispy and very high, had begun to form quite early. They weren’t thick enough to block off the sun, but they must have had some effect. It was still hot enough to bring sweat.

Fox said, “I’m just taking a break. I’ll save the world when it wants saving again.”

“Okay, so nobody’s worried about the snail darter when the sky is full of bug-eyed monsters. But I’ve listened to you, John and you’d still like to make Washington—”

“Not Washington anymore.”

“Yeah. Atom bombs in Kansas don’t ruffle your feathers?… I think I got it tuned.”

“Ruffled feathers be damned.” Fox had his self-inflating mattress stretched out on a flat rock. He didn’t seem to notice the heat. Sprawled out with his coffee mug sitting on a flat stone, he looked indecently comfortable. “The question is, who’s going to listen?”

“Shh.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

“Hey, John, we got the President on.”

“Yeah?” But Fox moved his mattress closer.

“My fellow Americans, this morning the alien invaders struck at Earth with a large artificial meteor, which landed in the Southern Hemisphere, in the Indian Ocean. The effect was that of a tremendous bomb. My advisors inform me that we can expect some severe weather effects.”

“Meteor,” Fox muttered. He looked up, and Marty did too. There were more clouds now… and they were swirling, changing, growing dense and dark, streaming east like foam on a breaking wave. Marty remembered how fast clouds moved in a Kansas tornado. These were moving faster.

“…Global weather will definitely be affected. This makes Project Greenhouse even more important. I call upon every one of you to raise food. In small pots, indoors, outdoors, wherever you can. If you can build greenhouses, do so. County agents and other Department of Agriculture experts will show you how.

“America must feed herself.”

Marty thought, Not here, we won’t. But the grin wouldn’t come.

“Global weather,” Fox said again. “Christ, have they thrown us a dinosaur killer? Indian Ocean. How long will that take? Marty?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“How much gas do we have?”

“About five gallons.”

“Better gas up the truck. I think I want to use it.”

By noon the clouds covered the sky. The sun that had blazed like a deadly enemy since Marty’s arrival two days ago was hidden now. Marty watched Fox with some concern; for Fox watched the sky as if he feared a corrosive rain. The rain started at one. The first huge drops drummed on the truck cab, and Marty lifted his face to taste it. It was only plain water… not plain, not at all, and Marty felt a thrill of fear when he tasted silt and salt. Fox shouted, “Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“Come on, damn it!”

Marty jumped in after him. He had just time to whistle up the dogs and let them jump into the truck bed. He was a little worried about Darth, who was young enough to try jumping out when the truck was moving.

“Damn dogs, can’t even stay and watch the camp.”

“Sure they can, if that’s what you want,” Marty said. “Are we coming back?”

“Huh? Yeah, we’re coming back.”

“Then stop long enough for me to tell them what to do!”

“Oh. Yeah, sure.”

Fox stopped the truck. Marty posted the dogs, except for the pup, who’d have to come with them. “Guard.”

Chaka looked up mournfully, but obeyed.

The rain was falling hard now. Rain in July? in Shoshone above Death Valley? Sea-bed silt, when the meteor struck in the Indian Ocean? I don’t believe this. “Where are we going?”

“Place I know. Come on.” Fox drove down the dirt track to the main road.

A big gasoline tanker was parked at the diner. Marty felt a twinge. That tanker held enough gas to get them both to the Enclave in Bellingham a hundred times over. I wonder where he’s taking it?

They drove up the paved road, then turned left onto a gravel road. Fox drove as he always did, faster than Marty would, but carefully. He ground his lean jaw as he drove.

What’s got to him?

They rounded a peak and drove onto a wide ledge.

Fox got out slowly. Marty followed. Darth came with him, huddling against his leg.

Death Valley was spread out below them, barren as the Moon.

More like Mercury, Marty thought, remembering the terrible heat. But he could see very little. Rain obscured the view, and a fog was rising too. The rain would evaporate as it struck.

Fox gestured, like Satan offering Christ the world. “This is what trapped them, the first ones here. Look how gently it slopes down. It’s just barely steep enough to stop a horse-drawn wagon from getting back up.”

“I’ve been here.”

“And you’ve seen the Devil’s Golf Course and Scotty’s Castle, I don’t doubt, and the dunes. But have you seen the life?” The rain was loud, but John Fox was louder. He wasn’t shouting; he was letting his voice project, as if he had an audience of thousands. “It’s like another planet here. Plants and animals have evolved that couldn’t survive anywhere else. If conditions—”

For a moment the roar of wind and rain drowned out even John Fox. It was as if a bathtub of salt water had been poured on Marty’s head. He screamed, “John, John, what’s happening?”

“The damned aliens, they’re terraforming Earth to their own needs! They’ve thrown an asteroid in the Indian Ocean! And I was trying to stop atomic plants. I should have been screaming for atomic plants to power laser rockets! I tried to stop the Space Shuttle, damn me for a fool. They’ve smashed every environment on Earth! Damn you,” he shouted into the sky. “Pour fire on the Earth, pile bodies in pyramids! We can live anywhere! We’ll hide in the deserts and mountain peaks and the Arctic ice cap, and one day we’ll come forth to kill you all!”

Death Valley was a bowl of steam. There was nothing to see, yet John Fox peered into it, seeing nightmares. “An old sea bed,” he said in an almost normal voice. “A salt sea. They’ll all die.”

The rain fell.