Footfall

by Larry Niven

  Whatever the Attackmaster was about to say would never be heard. His digits flipped back to cover his skull—the classic reflexive response to threat—as he listened to the shell-shaped phone under his earfiap.

  It is not good news

  . The Herdmaster waited. If there were danger to the ship, both he and the Defensemaster would know instantly. What could be important enough to interrupt this meeting— He knew soon enough. The Attackmaster took a microphone from his harness. "Flee. Save what we can." He returned the microphone. "Herdmaster, we no longer have a base in Kansas."

  "How is this?"

  "The prey have used thermonuclear bombs. Bombs rise among the orbiting digit ships—"

  "But these can be stopped."

  "Stopped, of course. But more bombs fall on our base, and our ships are too busy to stop them. Bombs are rising from both land masses and from the sea."

  "Prom both land masses?" The Advisor looked thoughtful. "You are certain?"

  "I am certain of nothing. Advisor. They sow radioactive fire on their own croplands! Herdmaster, I must—"

  "Certainly." The Herdmaster stood, releasing his fithp to their duties. They scattered.

  "What now?" he demanded. "What do you make of this?"

  Advisor Fathisteh-tulk struck at invisible flies. "I would not tread on the Breakers’ ground—"

  "Your advice, drown you!"

  "Soviets and Dawson’s tribe cooperate. When they must. As we hear of our losses, we must not forget this. Go fight your war." He spoke to the Herdmaster’s back.

  * * *

  Roger Brooks drove south, then angled west. For two days there had been cornfields and no sign of war.

  Rosalee was stretched out, taking advantage of the now roomy backseat of the Rabbit. Road conditions had been mixed, good roads alternating with stretches where the highways and intersections were utterly destroyed. It’s still a long way to Colorado Springs. There’s nothing on the radio, and I’m half asleep.

  Roger asked, "Carol, are you slept out?"

  She hadn’t spoken in hours. Her eyes were wide, doing a continual slow swivel. Shejumped when he spoke and said, "Yeah. I must say, that’s the damnedest convention I ever half saw."

  "I believe it."

  "Though I heard about one in St. Louis that was canceled, and nobody told the Guest of Honor."

  "Why do you go?"

  "Oh . . . mostly we go to meet each other, I guess. And the people who write the books we read." Flicker of a smile. "There were three men for every two women, and the ratio used to be even better. And fun things tend to happen, like the masquerades and listening to the dirty filksongs—"

  "Filksongs?’

  "And half a dozen writers going off to dinner, with an editor to pay, and Nat taking me along. And the room parties, and the elevator parties, and smoffing . . . damn." She was crying. "I guess I’m in mourning."

  "I’m sorry about George. But he did get a tank. I don’t think anyone could have stopped him." Did she blame Roger?

  Apparently not. "George. I thought that was stupid, I told him so . . . George." Her head was turned away, watching the passing cornfields. She broke a long silence in a sudden rush of words. "It’ll never happen again. It’s all dead! The publishing industry is probably dead, half of science fiction is obsolete, we’re all going to be scrabbling for something to eat for years to come, and how can you hold a convention with no airlines?"

  She misses science fiction. If the best troops in the Army can’t drive the aliens out, the whole damn planet is doomed, and she misses science fiction.

  It came to him, suddenly and frighteningly, that the war might already be lost. "That first night Nat had a three-pound Lobster Savannah, and he started talking to it. ‘Hospital Station thinks they can cure you.’ ‘The Federation doesn’t think your people can defend themselves alone.’ ‘Now will you speak of your troop movements, wretched crustacean?’ By dessert we were calling him Speaker to Seafood—" Her voice changed. "Oh my God!"

  The corner of Roger’s eye had caught light brighter than sunlight. He braked without looking. "What is it?"

  "They ‘it hitting us again!"

  He eased the Rabbit over to the dirt rim of the highway before he dared look. One glance was enough. "Don’t look." He opened the door and slid out, low. "Follow me. Rosalee, wake up and get out on my side! Stay low!"

  The blast came, not as bad as he had expected, followed by a wind, followed by another blast and more wind. The Rabbit’s windows rattled. By then all three were crouched on the highway side of the car. There were more bright lights high overhead, and another to the north. When the light died a little, Roger peeked over the hood.

  Fiery mushrooms bloomed amidst the Kansas wheat fields.

  "Mushrooms. I think this is the real thing," he said. "Not meteors. Atomic bombs, and that’s occupied territory. Those are ours."

  "Bombing Kansas?"

  Roger laughed, and meant it. "If you’ve got a better idea, you should have been in the helicopter. At least we’re fighting back!" He peeked again. There were four fire-mushrooms in view, all a good distance north

  A thread of actinic green light rose from hundreds of miles away . . . something was blocking it at the skyward end, something rising . . . another fireball winked near the base of the beam. Roger ducked fast, waited, looked again. Fireball rising. No laser beam. An orange point high up, drifting down. What was that all about?

  Whatever. Lasers were aliens, atomic bombs were men, and the bomb had interrupted something. "Come on, guys," Roger gloated. "Ruin their whole morning!"

  Part 3

  FOOTFALL

  23

  CLEANUP

  The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes am on the move, we learn that we ate 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.

  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.<
br />
  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 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 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 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."