We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans . . . we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
—Sir Winston Churchill, after Dunkirk
Nat was measuring ingredients into a blender. He moved briskly. Lime juice, sugar, rum, scoop out half a Crenshaw melon, add ice. Low setting. The blades tended to break on the ice at higher settings. In defense against the godawful noise he moved up alongside Harpanet's head and raised his voice.
"You're used to long wars."
"There are records from the homeworld. The Shape Wars lasted five generations. There were others." Harpanet paused for thought, then: "I cannot comment from the loser's point of view. I never wondered until you taught me. For the winning fithp, wars are long. Losers cease to be a fithp. The Traveler Fithp did not taste war until now."
"Was the taste to your liking?" Nat hit the button that ended the howl of the blender.
Digits swiped at thin air: How can I know? "I fell from the sky, I lost my fithp, I tried to surrender. No human knew how to take my surrender. You have warriors from Kansas, isn't it? Ask them."
"They're not sane." Curtis joined the group. "Left alone too long, maybe."
Harpanet let his digits and lower eyelids droop in the gesture they'd learned to interpret as sadness.
Ransom held his glass out for Reynolds to fill. "I sure feel sorry for Dawson."
Curtis nodded. "Yeah. Poor bastard risks his arse to give you some information, and a lot of nerds think he's turned traitor. What worries me are the ones who think he meant it and want to take his advice."
"Maybe we should," Sherry said. "But it wouldn't work. There are too many like you and Ransom."
"You ought to be glad of that."
"Hey." Reynolds moved between them. "Have a drink." He poured. "Sherry, you don't want to surrender."
"No, but I don't want to fight, either!"
"Wasn't you we asked to fight," Curtis said.
"Enough," Ransom said. "The question is, what will the President do? He sure didn't take it very well. Maybe he'd want to quit."
"Nah," Curtis said. "He's not my favorite choice, but he's got more guts than that."
"Sure?"
"He damned well better have."
Harpanet spoke insistently. "What are you leading me to?"
"Eh?"
"You speak of challenging your herdmaster."
"Naw—"
Sherry laid her hand across Harpanet's brow. "It's not what it sounds like," she said.
"But they said—"
"We are the Dreamer Fithp," Reynolds said. "We say anything. But we're not going to challenge the President. Wade wasn't ever thinking that way." He put an edge to his voice. "Were you, Wade?"
"No, of course not." Curtis grinned wolfishly. "Besides, it wouldn't work."
Nat filled a sizable mug with what remained in the blender: about half. "Swim?"
"Ssshure."
"Yeah," Ransom said. "Only I want a real drink, not that slop. Wade? Sherry?"
"Thank you, yes," Curtis said. After a moment Sherry Atkinson nodded and followed them out.
Reynolds and Harpanet walked into the mudroom, and into the mud-filled pool, without interrupting their conversation. It faltered when they noticed the near stranger. The President of the United States floated in the warm mud with his eyes closed.
Harpanet dipped his nostril. Nat said, "Not in the face. He looks too tired to play."
"I heard that," the President said. "I am."
Harpanet shimmied. The wall of his flank sent warm, muddy water sloshing gently across President Coffey. The President smiled. "Heating just one end of the pool," he asked, "who thought that up?"
"Human fithp need it too warm. Too much surface for volume. Shed heat too fast."
Nat said, "The guy who thought of that was the curator of the San Diego Zoo, George Pournelle. He had some very rare rhinos, and he didn't know what kind of temperature they liked. So he put a temperature gradient across the cage and let them make their own decisions."
The President nodded. He was in the hottest part of the pool. He looked very relaxed. He opened one eye and fixed it on Harpanet. "You've hit us hard."
Harpanet asked, "Was it the Foot?"
"It was. You've killed a great many people."
"Not I. I am of the Dreamer Fithp now. Can I help?" It was a rebuke.
The President stirred. "Reynolds, have you seen the tapes?"
"Yeah. This is a melon daiquiri. Have some. I don't have any mouth diseases."
"Neither do I, and thanks for not asking. Jesus, you make them big. Were you going to drink all of this?"
"Yeah. I told you, I've seen the tapes."
The President drank. He said, "Nice. Are we going to live through this?"
"The species is. Hell, they can't conquer us. Some of us will live. We could get down to 'The Men in the Walls'—"
" 'What's that?"
"William Tenn. Humans living like parasites in the aliens' environment, and we still win, because we're small enough to hide in places they can't get to. But it won't come to that. This is our planet, and we own every corner. Siberia, the Sahara, Greenland, they can't come after us there."
"They don't have to," David Coffey said. "They just keep pounding away, killing more and more people, until we can't stand it any longer. If we have to give up anyway, why prolong it? Let the survivor types go to Siberia. The rest surrender."
"It is sensible," Harpanet said.
"No." Reynolds wanted his drink, but he was too polite to reach for it. "In the first place, it wouldn't work. Too many would stay behind. Pretend to surrender, but they'd hide weapons and kill snouts whenever they got a chance. You can't surrender for everybody—"
"I agree."
"Well, the fithp think you can. They'll hold us all responsible. What the fithp call surrender, we don't know how to do that."
Coffey said, "But we have to do something."
"Maybe the fithp lasers only come in a couple of frequencies. We can make reflective paint for those frequencies. Paint them on the bombers."
"That'll take a while, won't it?"
"Sure. Set up a research station."
Harpanet said, "The lasers can be—changed. The color can be made different."
Reynolds shrugged. "So maybe that doesn't work."
The President let himself sag into the mud. He still had Reynolds' mug of melon daiquiri. "What else should we be doing?"
"Study our friend Harpanet. Find out how to keep him happy."
"I'm for that," Harpanet said.
"Why isn't anyone studying me?" the President asked plaintively.
"Harpanet's bound to need things. Maybe it's dietary supplements, things that don't get into our foods. Settlers in Brazil had a terrible time with vitamin deficiencies. The soil is peculiar. Well, there's bound to be something missing from African soil. Not for us, we evolved there, but the Traveler Fithp didn't! What's missing? How can we stop the fithp from getting to it? Maybe they can't sleep in total darkness. Keep knocking out their power sources and in a few days they'll fall over—"
"No," said Harpanet.
"Okay, no, but you see what I'm getting at. We tried playing baseball with Harpanet. There's no way to put a glove on him, of course, so we tried tossing a softball around, maybe he could catch it bare-handed. He can't. He can't throw it either."
"This skill was not prized among the Traveler Fithp," Harpanet said placidly.
"We could probably rig up a glove for him," Nat said earnestly. "It would look like an umbrella, but he could catch. He still couldn't throw. He's hopeless with a football. I thought he would be, but it's—we've got films, and we've been showing them to your soldiers, and it gets them rolling around on the floor. Harpanet spreads his trunk like a great fan, and the ball either goes through it or ricochets away. We want to try basketball or volleyball. We think the ball is big enough that he won't lose it—"
The President was laughing so hard that it looked like he was going to lose the mug, so Nat took it. "This is research?"
"Mr. President, the delicate point I'm trying to pound home is that Harpanet is at his limit. He—"
"Mug."
Nat drank, then handed across the mug. "He's at his limit, that's all. He gets just so good and no better. We still play, of course. We all need exercise him most of all.
"Sherry's sure we're anthropomorphizing. Maybe the fithp have games we'd be awful at. But I think she's assuming symmetry where there just isn't any need for it.
"The fithp have bad hands. They're just bloody clumsy, and no wonder, with no bones in their grasping digits! I think they're a young race. God knows humanity never finished evolving in any direction, but I think the fithp are even younger than that. They're too young to have space travel. They didn't even discover it for themselves! What got them here was those great granite messages left by an extinct species. They shouldn't be here at all."
"They're doing well, considering their handicaps."
"We need to know their handicaps. Set up a research station. You have other prisoners now. Study them. They've got a mating season—Dawson said so too, and emphasized it—and their mating practice is more reflexive than ours. Can we duplicate their pheromones and drive them nuts?"
The President was still laughing. "Somebody told me once that I'm not fit to mold the future because I'm only allowed to think up to the next election. Who is it that plans for the future of the human race?"
"Speaking." Nat took the mug, drank deeply, passed it back.
"Then why am I in charge?"
"Somebody told you it was your turn in the barrel, and made you believe it."
Coffey laughed. "That's one way to look at it. My God, when I think of what I had to do to get this job! Mr.—"
"Reynolds. Nat Reynolds."
"Nat, I ought to come down here more often, only I don't suppose I can."
"Why?"
"Mr. Clybourne. I've sent him off on an errand, but he'll be back."
"So you ignore him," Reynolds said.
"I can't do that. He's doing his job, the best he can—and maybe one day I really will need him."
You might at that, Reynolds thought. "If you're done warming that mug—"
Things got a little hazy thereafter. Nat remembered making another batch of daiquiris. Harpanet cut the melon, but he was fairly clumsy at it. He did none of the drinking. The fithp didn't use alcohol.
"There's plenty we can do. Elephant guns. We should be producing them as fast as we can. Who makes elephant guns?"
"There are people I can ask," said the President. "The British? They made a big double-barreled rifle, a 'Nitro Express'—"
"Round up all you can find," Reynolds said. "Send 'em to Africa. Somebody there can use them." He laughed. "It worries me to excess, there may be a young Zulu warrior somewhere who doesn't have an elephant gun."
"Are your stories that bloody too? Ah, I've got something. Harpanet, are you willing to speak to your ship?"
"I am. They will take it that I am speaking for your fithp."
"I know, but you can at least tell them that you were allowed to surrender. They may be afraid to try by now."
"Good," said Nat. "Now, Dawson's sign of the friendly fithp the 'Don't Bomb Me'—"
"Yeah," said the President. "Is it possible they want that sign so they'll know where our food sources are? So they can bomb them?"
Harpanet reared; displaced mud made a godawful sucking sound. "They would not. Bomb the local-surrender sign? They would not!"
"All right," Coffey said mildly.
"By the same token, we use it only where appropriate." Reynolds thought, If it isn't on the Bellingham greenhouse, they'll notice. If the sign is too big, they'll notice. I can't say any of that where Harpanet can hear. At that moment the President winked at him.
Reynolds looked at the foaming glass and shuddered. "What's that?"
"One of the last Alka-Seltzer in existence, you ungrateful bastard," Joe Ransom said. "And Wade found you a vitamin B1. Here."
"Bless you." Reynolds washed the tablet down. "I think it was worth it. Even at worst, he needed to get drunk. Did I save civilization? I can't quite remember."
"Yeah. We watched you from the TV in the lounge. You got him thinking about the long run. We think you put some iron in his spine."
"I hope so." Nat moved gingerly down the hall toward his room. Then he stopped. "It shook up Harpanet a bit. He told me he'd never had a conversation with his herdmaster. Much less an argument."
"He'll get over it. Now he thinks you're more important than he thought." Ransom glanced at his watch. "My turn, I guess. You know something? I hate mud. Why couldn't they like swimming in something sensible, like lime Jell-O?"