Larry Niven - Footfall

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 daquiri. “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 daquiris. 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.