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16: Submission

A human being in a prison camp, in the hands of his enemies, is flesh and shudderingly vulnerable.

The disciplines that hold men together in the face of fear, hunger, and danger are not natural. Stresses equal to, and beyond, the stress of fear and panic must be laid on men. Some of these stresses are called civilization. And even the highest of civilizations demands leadership.

—T. R. FEHRENBACH, This Kind of War

COUNTDOWN: H PLUS 80 HOURS

The hullside wall was down and level; the door was in the ceiling. Wes judged that things were likely to remain so for some time.

There had been an hour or so of acceleration, then half an hour of freefall; then the ship had begun to spin. Some days had passed without further change. Odds were it would take an hour or more to remove the spin.

Spin would hamper the mother ship in a battle. Earth must he far aft and out of reach.

Nikolai and Dmitri talked quietly: Nikolai sullen, Dmitri doing most of the talking. Wes understood a few words, and sympathized. Nikolai was once again a cripple.

The aliens had wasted no time. They were already teaching their language to the humans. Wes found this reassuring. However, the Soviets were educated separately, and they had expressed disinterest in sharing their lessons with Wes. He went over them alone, whispering alien sounds as he remembered them.

Srupk: Wes had memorized the term as strunk, "standard trunklength." It was just about six feet. A makasrupk was five hundred and twelve strunks, just about a kilometer.

Wes had sought a word for the trunk. There wasn't one. A sharp snort, snnfp, named the nostrils, or the upper trunk. Pa' was one branch, one finger of a trunk; pathp, the plural, could mean the entire cluster.

Chaytrif meant foot.

Sfaftiss was Takpusseh's title; it meant teacher. The other sfaftiss didn't speak, and his name was harder: Raztupisp-minz. The two sfaftissthp looked aged, but as if they had weathered in different patterns. Were there two races of Invader? But they called themselves by the same words:

Chsapt meant move. Chtaptisk: moving. Chtaptisk fithp meant themselves, everyone who had left their home planet. The Traveler People?

Fi' was the word for an alien. A syllable chopped short by a kind of hiccup, it sounded like a piece of a word. And fithp was the entire species. As if an individual was not a whole, complete thing, just as a pa' was only one branch of the pathp, the trunk. Herdbeasts? Takpusseh said tribe, not herd; but men didn't say herd to mean thinking beings.

Tashayamp was Takpusseh's assistant. Dawson thought of her as female: the leather or plastic patch on her harness covered a different area, further back on her torso. He knew he might have the sexes reversed; he was not prepared to ask—

The door opened upward, a trapdoor. The prisoners looked up, waiting.

Takpusseh: Wes had learned to recognize their teacher or trainer by the loose look of his thick skin, and by his eyes, which behaved as if the lights were always too bright. Takpusseh watched while alien soldiers attached a platform at the level of the trapdoor. The platform descended smoothly along grooves in the padding of the starboard wall. The platform might have held one alien; it held Wes and Arvid with room to spare. Wes had expected a ladder, but a ladder would be useless to these aliens.

Takpusseh and Tashayamp and eight armed soldiers waited in the corridor. The platform descended again for Dmitri and Nikolai. They had left Giorge behind.

* * *

Arvid had been hoping for a window. There were none. The soldiers moved four ahead, four behind. Takpusseh and Tashayamp moved forward to join the prisoners. They had found a wheeled cart for Nikolai. Arvid took charge of pushing it. Wes was trying to tell Tashayamp that they needed heat to prepare their food. Arvid ignored that. He was trying to get some idea of the mother ship's layout.

The rug was spongy and squishy-wet; the prisoners had not been given shoes. Doors in the floor opened upward against the corridor wall.

"I believe," Arvid said in Russian, "that any aperture big enough for one of the aliens would pass two or three of us at once. Perhaps they will not think to guard small openings that will pass a man."

Dmitri nodded.

"They are surely not built for climbing. A wall that could be scaled by a man would be impossible for one of them."

Dmitri nodded again.

"Have you seen anything I might have missed?"

Dmitri spoke. "You waited until we were in a corridor, and moving, before you said any of this. I approve, but are you certain that our trainers do not speak Russian?"

"They speak English and do not hide the fact. Why would they hide a knowledge of Russian? In any case, we must speak sometime."

"Perhaps. Do you think we could use their rifles?"

Grooves for the branched trunk were far forward on the barrel, and so was the trigger. The bore was huge. The butt was short and very broad. "It would not fit against a man's shoulder, and it would probably kick him senseless, unless . . . you'd have to brace it against something, a floor, a wall, a piece of furniture. Difficult to aim."

"Don't do anything at all without word from me. What of Dawson? Will he try something foolish?"

"I—" Arvid cut it off. They had reached their destination.

The wide doorway would be used when the mother ship was under acceleration. The permanently fixed platform elevator next to it would be for use under spin gravity. The room below was big, and more than a dozen aliens were already present.

The prisoners descended; the soldiers remained above.

The aliens stared up. Most of them had their trunks folded up against the top of the heads: evidently a resting position. The eyelids drooped mournfully. The eyes had black pupils fading to smoky-gray whites. They were set wide, but not too wide to prohibit binocular vision. The thick muscle structure at the base of the trunk formed grooves; with the trunk up, the eyes focused along the grooves, like gunsights. Their stare was unnerving.

Nikolai was wire-tense, staring his captors down. Arvid murmured, "Docile, Nikolai. We docile servants of the new regime await instructions."

Nikolai nodded. His eyes dropped He sounded calm enough. "I saw no air vents. The air may be filtered through the carpeting. And the rug was wet. They like wet feet."

The room would have held three or four times as many. Takpusseh spoke rapidly to the assembled aliens, then more slowly to the humans. Arvid tried to file the introductions: Pastempehkeph. K'turfookeph. Fathisteh-tulk. Chowpeentulk. Fistarteh-thuktun. Koolpooleh. Paykurtank. Two smaller aliens were not introduced. They stared at the humans and huddled close against larger aliens. Children, then.

He'd have trouble remembering the names. It was the array that was important. The aliens came in clusters; he'd be a long time learning their body language, but that much was obvious.

Pastempeh-keph (male) and K'turfookeph (female), with their child (male), were the top of the ladder, the Chairman or President or Admiral. The similarity in the last syllable meant they were mated; he'd learned that much already. One would hold title. Arvid would not lightly assume that it was the male. Similarly, Fathisteh-tulk and Chowpeentulk were mated, and they stood with the Admiral. Advisors? The male was doing all the talking. So.

Fistarteh-thuktun (male), Koolpooleh (male), and Paykurtank (female) also formed a cluster. The extra syllables would mean that Fistarteh-thuktun had a mate. He was an old one, with wrinkled skin and pained-looking eyes . . . like the teacher, Takpusseh. He wore elaborate harness, like tapestry made with silver wire. He studied the humans like a judge. The pair with him were younger: clear eyes, smoother skin, quick movements.

Nikolai said, "I thought the top ranks would wear uniforms. They all wear those harnesses with the backpacks. The colors and patterns, could those—"

"Yes, insignia of rank. Dawson believes that we will not see clothing on any alien. With those bulky bodies they will have trouble shedding heat."

"I would not have thought of that."

The room darkened. One wall seemed to disappear, and Arvid realized that he was in a motion picture theater.

Rogachev recognized the huge Invader spacecraft, a cylinder about as wide as it was tall. The aft rim was spiky with smaller craft, and some had not been moored in place yet. An arc of worldscape, blue and white, might have been the Earth, though Arvid could not pick out any detail of landscape. A polished sphere nearby . . . a moon? No, it was drifting slowly.

Takpusseh was talking. Arvid caught a word here and there, and translated freely to "Watch, don't move. You see . . . trip (chtapt) to (Earth?). Build . . . Thuktun Flishithy." Arvid smiled. He had thought that was their name for the mother ship, and sure enough, that was what they were putting together onscreen.

He watched and didn't move. The aliens around him were silent, motionless.

The last of the smaller craft were moved into place in seconds. This was time-lapse photography. A length of stovepipe, a little wider than Thuktun Flishithy, drifted in from the edge of the screen and was moored in place behind the ring of smaller craft.

The shiny sphere was moved into place at the fore end of the mother ship. It was bigger than all of the rest of the ship combined. A pod, perhaps a cluster of sensing instruments, reached out on a snakelike arm to peer around it.

Something fell inward from the edge of the picture: bright flames of chemical rockets around . . . something rectangular. It dwindled to a dot, headed straight for the ship. "Put Podo Thuktun in Thuktun Flishithy," Takpusseh said.

That word: thuktun. He had thought it meant skill or knowledge, but—Fistarteh-thuktun? A mate for that one had not been named. Was that particular fi' married to the ship?

All in good time. Arvid glanced at Dawson; Dawson's eyes were riveted to the screen. That left Arvid free to covertly observe the aliens.

Five of the fithp showed signs of a lingering illness: an illness that left loose skin and wounded-looking eyes. It didn't seem to be a matter of age—Pastempeh-keph and K'turfookeph (Admiral and mate) were not youths, but they hadn't had the sickness either. The sick ones tended to cluster. They looked to be about the same age; the rest varied enormously.

The Admiral's advisor and his mate were among the sick ones. Another sick one was trying to talk to them, while a female rather unsubtly tried to prevent it.

A division among the aliens might be useful.

* * *

Wes Dawson was watching a planet recede . . . a world colored like Earth, blue with clotted white frosting—He spent no more than a few seconds trying to make out the shapes of continents. None were familiar. Of course not.

The Invader ship had been on camera for only a minute or so. The camera that filmed that would have remained behind. But Thuktun Flishithy was more than the cylindrical warship that had reached Earth. A sphere rode the nose, a tremendous fragile looking bubble in contrast to the warship's spiky, armored look. Fuel supply, of course. And the ring—He was looking aft along Thuktun Flishithy's flank, past a massive ring like a broad wedding band, watching a sun grow smaller. A second sun moved in from offscreen. Both shrank to bright stars: white stars, the light not too different from Earth's own sun. He'd anticipated that from the color of the lights in his cell.

The cameras showed a steady white light behind the ring. Wes saw—and wasn't sure he saw—the drive flame go dim, and a faint violet tinge emerge from the black background.

Wes Dawson wouldn't have noticed a bomb going off in the theater. With a fraction of his attention he tried to track what the Instructor was saying. "Thuktun Flishithy must move very fast before we use the (long word). Saves—" something. "Halfway to Earth-star"—Earth's sun?—"we begin to slow down. This is difficult."

But the pictures made more sense than the words.

Time onscreen speeded up. The drive flame brightened, then died—and the background violet glow he thought he'd seen wasn't there. Tiny machines and mote-sized aliens emerged to dislodge the bubble at the nose; the stars wheeled one hundred and eighty degrees around; the drive flamed again, and dimmed, and the stars forward were embedded in violet-black—so he hadn't imagined it—and Thuktun Flishithy surged past the abandoned fuel tank and onward.

The way the film jumped, a good deal of it must have been missing. Perhaps it would have shown too much interior detail. Wes took it for granted that prisoners would not learn much of the interior detail of Thuktun Flishithy. The next scene was a timelapse view of an ordinary star becoming a bright star, and brighter, until it virtually exploded in Dawson's face. He cursed and covered his eyes, and immediately opened them again.

They must have dived within the orbit of Mercury. Somewhere in there, the white glow of the drive had brightened . . . and the ship's wedding band had vanished. Dawson hadn't noticed just when it disappeared. Now he grunted as if he'd been kicked in the stomach.

Takpusseh stopped talking, and his eyes flicked Dawson with the impact of a glare. Nobody else noticed.

 

The camera looked along the mother ship's nose while Earth's sun shrank. There were long-distance telescopic photos of Mars and Jupiter, then Saturn growing huge. The great ship moved among the moons, neared the rings, still decelerating. Wes picked out the three classic bands of the ring, separating into hundreds of bands as the ship neared. The F-ring roiled and twisted as the ship's fusion exhaust washed across it.

Ships departed Thuktun Flishithy, launched aft along rails. The cameras didn't follow. A telescope picked out something butterfly fragile but not as pretty. Freeze-frame. Takpusseh pointed and made noises of interrogation.

"Voyager," Dawson said. He tried a few words of the Invader language. "We made it. My fithp. United States of America!"

"Did it come to—" garble. The instructor tried again. "To look on us? Did you know of us?"

The word must be spy. "No."

"Then why?"

"To see Saturn." An anger was building in Wes Dawson, and he didn't understand it. They had come in war and killed without warning, but he'd known that for days. What new grievance—

They had used Saturn! Deep in his heart Dawson felt that Saturn belonged to Earth—to mankind—to the United States that had explored Saturn system, to the science establishment and science fiction fandom. Goddaminit, Saturn is ours!

He kept his silence. The film started again, and jumped. They'd skipped something: they'd skipped most of what they were doing in Saturn system. Two crescents, Earth and Moon, were growing near. Wedge-shaped markers pointed out the United States and Soviet moon bases, artifacts in orbit, weather satellites, Soviet devices of unknown purpose, the space station . . .

"Question, time you know we come," Takpusseh said. Then louder: "Time you know we come!"

"One sixth part of a year," Arvid said in English. "A year is—" His hands moved, a forefinger circling a fist, while he spoke alien words: "Circle Earth around Earth-star."

"You slow to fight. You know we come. Why slow?"

Why had Earth's defenders responded so slowly? Wes said, "Earth fithp, chtaptisk fithp maybe not fight."

"You fight, you not fight, two is one. Earth fithp is chtaptisk fithp. Sooner if Earth fithp not fight."

The last time Wes Dawson had felt like this, he had put his fist into a Hell's Angel's mouth just as far as it would go. "You came to make war? Only to make war?"

"Make war, yes," Takpusseh said, as if relieved to be understood.

Wes barely felt a large hand closing on his arm, above the elbow. "What can you take, move to fithp world?" What could they possibly hope to steal? They'd dropped too much of their craft; they'd be lucky to return home themselves!

"Earth is world for chtaptisk fithp," Takpusseh said.

* * *

Warriors had come at Takpusseh's bellow. The humans were gone now. Fathisteh-tulk helped Takpusseh to his feet. "Are you injured?"

"My pride hurts worse than my eye—and snnfp. Dawson surprised me entirely. They look so fragile!"

"They don't know when to fight and they don't know how to surrender," the Herdmaster's Advisor said. "One would think that would be good news for the invasion, but I wonder."

"Dawson is mad," Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz said. "His behavior tells us nothing. Must we keep him?"

"He is a puzzle that needs cracking. He speaks English as his native language, and we will need that too until the others know the speech of the fithp a srupk or two better."

"They must surrender, at once, formally," Raztupisp-minz stated. "We should have taught them how, and much earlier, so that they can teach future prisoners."

The memory flashed in Takpusseh's mind; it hurt worse than his eye. Takpusseh realized why he had delayed this crucial step. "Of course you're right, Breaker-One. I want to visit the medical section. I'll meet you afterward, above the restraining cell."

* * *

It hurt to breathe, but he had to breathe. Hands were on him, probing a stabbing agony in his ribs. Wes gasped and fought to open his eyes. Red mist . . . gradually clearing . . . the shapes around him resolved into human faces . . .

"What happened?"

"You attacked the teacher, Takpusseh. I tried to stop you." Dmitri said. "Do you remember?"

Seeing red . . . but his mind must have been working well on some level. He hadn't just swung a fist. He'd lunged forward and reached between the branches of Takpusseh's trunk, closed his fingers hard in Takpusseh's nostril, and pulled back savagely to keep himself moving. The teacher screamed; his digits had whipped around Wes's rib cage. With his ribs collapsing and the air sighing out of him, Wes Dawson reached along the trunk and slid his thumb under Takpusseh's thick right eyelid—was he flying?—and did his damnedest to twist it off. He didn't remember any more.

"Why did you do it?"

"They never had the least intention of negotiating anything," he said. "They came to take the Earth away from us."

Dmitri Grushin took Dawson's chin in his hand and twisted it to put them eye to eye. "Do not attack them again. You would kill us all for nothing. For nothing."

They were quiet for some time. Then Arvid and Dmitri began to talk. Wes, with too little Russian, quickly lost track. He was more interested in the pictures in his own mind.

Presently he asked, "Did you notice? They threw away half their ship."

"Yes," Arvid said. "The external fuel tank, and the massive looking ring."

"I think it was a modified Bussard ramjet."

"Explain."

"It's a way of reaching the stars. Fusion drive, but you get your fuel by scooping up interstellar hydrogen."

Arvid dismissed that. "Certainly nobody has ever built a Bussard ramjet. How would you recognize one?"

"After they got going they changed something. It made a violet glow behind the ship. Arvid, the point is that they threw it away when they got here. It was used to cross interstellar space, and they dropped it. They let it fall back toward the stars. They're serious. They've got no plans to go home."

"I was more interested in watching our captors. So. They dropped it to save weight, of course, but . . . well. As if your ancestors had burned the Mayflower. Yes, they came to stay." Arvid's eyes went to the trapdoor in the ceiling, which once again was closed against them. "Did you notice anything else worthy of comment?"

Wes pounded a fist on his knee, twice. "They were at Saturn when the Voyagers went by. They spent years there. We might have noticed something if Saturn wasn't so weird. We'd have had fifteen years warning!"

"It is difficult to put the mushroom cloud back into the steel casing."

"At least we know this is the mother ship. This is all they've got."

"They did not exceed lightspeed?"

"They didn't even come very close." Wes had been watching for the effect of relativity; stars blue-shifted ahead and reddened aft. It hadn't happened.

"Good. They cannot expect help. But they must be desperate. Where can they go if we defeat them?"

"They'll have to land sometime. They must expect to beat us on the ground. They're crazy."

Arvid saw no reason to answer. Dawson was not of his nation. But any cosmonaut knew that from a military standpoint the command of space was priceless. The Soviet Union, which had always expected to rule the world, had held that position until three days ago.

"Yeah. Well. They didn't show much of the inside of the ship. They showed only the last leg of their approach to Earth. They showed the mother ship being refueled, but they didn't show where the fuel came from. So maybe they scooped methane snow off a moon and refined deuterium and tritium out of it. But why didn't they show that? They're hiding something."

"Of course."

"Something specific."

"Of course."

The trapdoor swung open.

The platform descended into a wary silence. Takpusseh was quite alone. His right eye was covered with soft white cloth. Another patch covered his nostril. He carried his branched trunk at an odd angle. A second fi' followed him down. The soldiers remained above.

* * *

The Breakers faced the humans alone.

The captives looked harmless enough. They were clustered in a corner, frightened, wary. The black one was on his back and trying to roll over. He seemed to be just becoming aware of the aliens.

Raztupisp-minz told them, "Move away from the dark one."

The humans discussed it. Instant obedience would have been reassuring, but in fact they seemed to be interpreting for each other. Then they moved away. The black one protested and tried to move in the same direction, Then his eyes fixed on Raztupisp-minz. He breathed as if the chamber had lost its air, his eyes and mouth opened improbably wide, as Raztupisp-minz walked toward him.

Raztupisp-minz set his foot solidly on the black man's chest.

He lifted it and backed away. "You," he said, and his digits indicated the crippled one. "Come."

The humans discussed it heatedly. Then Nikolai pulled himself across the floor on his hands.

Dawson had moved, without permission. He knelt by the black man with his bony digits on the man's throat. He spoke to the others, in English. "Dead."

Takpusseh let it pass rather than interrupt the ceremony.

"Roll," Raztupisp-minz said, and he rotated his digits in a circle. Nikolai didn't appear to understand. Raztupisp-minz forcibly rolled the man onto his back, set his foot on the man's chest, and stepped away. He pointed to another. "You."

One by one the Soviets submitted to the foot on the chest until only Dawson was left, Then, as they had discussed, Raztupisp-minz stepped aside and Takpusseh came forward.

The man stood balanced, forelegs slightly bent, hands open, palms outward, It came to Takpusseh that Dawson expected to die.

It wouldn't bother Takpusseh that much if he did. He swung his digits with nearly his full strength. Dawson ducked under it, fast, and lunged forward. Takpusseh caught him on the backswing and flung him spinning across the cell and against a wall. As the man started to topple. Takpusseh was there, catching him and rolling him on his back. The man blinked, opened his eyes and mouth wide. Frozen in fear? Takpusseh raised his foot over Dawson's chest.

I was almost the last to be thawed awake. Some of the sleepers were brain-damaged. They fought, or they didn't respond at all. Most accepted the change.

It was Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz who accepted their formal surrender. My grandson, though older than I, discounting the eights of years slept. This was nothing new to him.

His task it was to break me too. Nonetheless he was uncomfortable, because we are related, or because afterward I must teach him his profession. "Your position won't change, Grandfather. Who but you has the training to break alien forms of life to the Traveler Herd? But the Traveler Herd has changed, and you must join it again."

I roll over on the floor, feet in the air, trunk splayed, vulnerable. Others watch. My spaceborn grandson's foot on my chest. "There, that's over. Now you must begin to train me," his voice dropping, for my ears alone. "to break me. I must know something of what we must do."

I feel it now, the foot lightly crushing my chest. Takpusseh lowered his foot. A mere tap would not do; this was no token surrender. He felt the man's ribs sag before he lifted his foot.

Dawson waited for more, but there was no more. He rolled aside, convulsively, groaning with the pain of damaged ribs.

"Now you belong to the Traveler Herd," Takpusseh said in his own speech. He saw Dawson take it in and relax somewhat. Dawson moved to join the other prisoners. "Is the black one dead?" Takpusseh asked. "What killed him?"

The one called Dmitri answered in the fithp speech. "Fear you. Fear foot make dead. Take him out?"

Takpusseh summoned the warriors. Two came down and moved the black man onto the platform. It rose. It descended to take the fithp up one by one. Takpusseh went last.

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