Back | Next
Contents

PART 3: FOOTFALL

23: Cleanup

The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL,
Rochester, New York, 1941

COUNTDOWN: H PLUS FOUR WEEKS

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.

Sitting 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 corrected 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 fithp 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-tulk, I believe I forgot to do anything about the mudroom!"

"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 a flood 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 Herd 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? Breaker One?"

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 Herdmaster 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 without 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-tulk. 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-rimmed 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, axis-bound.

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 smart. 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."

Back | Next
Framed