Larry Niven - Footfall

Dawson appeared in the cell something more than an hour after the rest arrived. He was shaking. He looked about at several sets of more or less questioning eyes, and he said, “They want me to tell the Earth to surrender.”

The Russians’ eyes met. Arvid grinned and Dmitri shrugged and Nikolai’s expression went quite blank.

“I won’t do it,” Wes Dawson said. “Vidkun Quisling, Pierre Laval, Benedict Arnold, I’d be remembered longer than any of them!”

Dmitri asked, “Why would you consider it?”

Wes flopped on his back on the padded aft wall. Looking at the featureless ceiling, he said, “There’s a symbol. It looks like a fi’ on its back. It means ‘Don’t bomb me.’ People can paint it on greenhouses and hospitals and trucks carrying food… like a Red Cross. But if they use it wrong, it’ll be rocks from the sky again.”

“If you do not speak, you cannot make food shipments safe?” Dmitri demanded.

“Yeah. There was some other stuff. Threats, mostly. Another Foot.” Wes shuddered. “I won’t tell them that.”

“We have no evidence that they have other asteroids ready to drop,” Arvid said.

“They don’t need them. There are plenty more where they got that one,” Jeri said. “Or in the asteroid belt. It might take a few years, but they’ve got years. They’ve already spent, what…?”

“Fifteen years just since they reached the solar system. Sure they can bring another, and another. But it’s worse than that.”

Alice demanded, “What could be worse than another Foot?”

“They’ll go to the Moon,” Wes said. “They don’t need to to Saturn, or the asteroids! They’ve wiped us off the Moon. The gravity’s low, and they can get as much Moon rock as they want.”

No. God, why? Jeri wanted to curl into a tiny ball. “Wes, what will you do?”

“You tell me. I need help.”

And all the time they’re listening, watching, while we talk about it.

“Perhaps,” Arvid said, “just perhaps it would be better if you make this speech. It would have to be carefully done. We could help you prepare.” He looked significantly at Wes.

“They want me to talk the human race into surrendering! They’ll tell me what to say. If I say something else, they’ll cut me off. What’s the good of that?”

Arvid glanced casually at the watching camera. “One must paraphrase.”

A long moment passed. Then Wes mused, “Of course, the fithp will need help with their phrasing. Their English isn’t that good…”

“But yours is.”

The rest were asleep. Alice curled in a protective ball, one arm thrown across her face, the other reaching to clutch the wall rung. They had never been given blankets; they slept in the clothes they wore. Thuktun Flishithy had gone over to spin gravity, and Alice could feel an eccentricity, a wobble. Dmitri snored with a sound like complaint. Alice uncurled. The hell with it.

Congressman Dawson slept a few feet from the rest, on his side, with his head pillowed on one arm. Alice watched him, Sleeping, he looked quite harmless. Yet he frowned in his sleep “Foot,” he muttered. “Feet. Giant mee… meteoroid imp. .”

Everybody in Menninger’s had nightmares. It wasn’t rare for Alice to wake in the middle of the night. Then she would watch and listen… and the others weren’t any better off than she was. She used to wonder about that. If she’d spent any amount of time in a dorm, she thought, she would have known she wasn’t unusual.

And if she hadn’t been sent to a girls’ high school, she might have grown used to… persons of the male persuasion. She’d have known how to handle them, like other women did. If her parents — “Dinosaurs. Oh, God, like the dinosaurs…” Dawson said in a breathy moan. Alice had never seen a man whimper.

Poor bastard. He could tell the world how to safeguard their food and hospitals, but what would they remember? Wes Dawson urging them to surrender to the horrors. Wes Dawson, traitor. Unfair! Learning what the horrors had planned, Wes Dawson had tried to tear the nose and eyelid off Teacher Takpusseh. He’d told Mrs. Woodward about it in Alice’s hearing. Alice tried to picture that. It must have been a short fight.

So safe, so harmless, asleep; but he was the only one who had fought back.

Greatly daring, Alice reached out and touched Wes Dawson’s wrist. Too little pressure would tickle him, too much would wake him.

He stopped breathing, and so did Alice. Then, “I can kill them. They can die,” Wes said. His face relaxed; his lips parted slightly and he was deep asleep.

After a moment Alice curled up beside him.

The helicopter settled onto the parking lot behind an odd gray building, granite base, brick towers at each corner. An elderly man waited with two others, all in tan uniforms. They held umbrellas against the drizzling rain. Jenny and Jack followed them inside.

“I’m Ben Lafferty. Sheriff. This is Deputy Young and Deputy Hargman. Anything you want, just ask them.”

“Actually, we’d expected to see the military intelligence people,” Jenny said.

Lafferty screwed his face into an exaggerated squint and eyed Jenny’s bright new silver oak leaf. “Well, Lieutenant Colonel, I’m a colonel in military intelligence myself. Matter of fact, I’m the senior one here.” His grin faded, and his face lost all traces joviality. “This is my town, lady. The state of Washington never had much need for Washington, D.C., and Bellingham never got much out of the state. We had a nice little university town he until you federal people came.”

Jack Clybourne reached into his pocket. Jenny laid her hand on his arm. “I can sympathize, Sheriff,” she said. “We’re just doing our job.”

“And what’s that? What the hell are you people building down in that harbor? And don’t give me crap about greenhouses. Green houses don’t need big iron things brought in hung under barges.”

“There is a war,” Jack Clybourne said.

“So they tell us.”

“Tell you! If you’d seen that crashed ship—” In a moment Jack Clybourne had calmed himself, but the sheriff had backed away a step. “I brought some films and I can get more. I believe I can persuade you that there’s a war. We’re losing it. We need all the cooperation we can get.”

“Yeah, sure you do.” The sheriff glanced at his watch. “Okay. Hargman and Young will take care of you. I got to go.” He left the office without looking back.

“What was that all about?” Jack Clybourne asked.

Deputy Young looked thoughtful, then lowered his voice. “He has a point. We got along fine until all of a sudden they announced this big greenhouse project. Only it isn’t a greenhouse, is it? I never heard of a greenhouse needing an astronaut general to run it.”

“Air Force,” Jenny said. “He happens to be my brother-in-law.”

“That so? You still didn’t tell me why we need the Air Force to raise groceries. Or why all the security stuff.”

“There is a reason.”

Deputy Hargman snorted. “Sure there is. One good enough to get this town and everybody in it killed by a meteor.”

“Not if they think it’s a greenhouse,” Jenny said. “They’ve never bombed a food storage place.”

“How will they know that’s what this is?”

“Maybe you take your chances,” Jack said. “Just like the rest of the world. Look, one hint gets to the snouts that Bellingham has a secret, and—” He spread his hands.

“No more Bellingham,” Young said. “How would they find out?”