Larry Niven - Footfall

We’ve put the fithp symbol on the Archangel dome. And on the ships coming into there. No bigger than anywhere else. We had to. Otherwise we might as well paint Bomb Me on them. But if somebody paints that on an ammunition truck… Connie Fuller shuffled her notes on the plastic tabletop. “We don’t have much electricity. Gas pipelines are working, and some oil lines. They haven’t bothered nuclear power plants. There’s no reliable way to move coal, so we don’t have much electricity.

“We’re able to ship some staple foods, but we can’t move enough foodstuffs.

“In short, Mr. President, there is no national economy.”

There was a long silence. The Speaker cleared his throat.

“Yes, Mr. Dayton?”

“They don’t hit nuclear plants. Seems to me there were a bunch of those stalled by red tape. All across the country. Could we get cracking and complete them?”

“A good question,” the President said. “Jim, look into that, will you?”

“No problem.”

There’s a switch! Of course we can get them completed, if all the anti-nuke idiots stay out of the way. Including you — “We’ll need that electricity,” Mrs. Fuller said. “If we have electric power, we have a civilization. If we don’t—” There wasn’t any point in finishing that statement.

Message Bearer was under spin. The fithp seemed to prefer their gravity low, and Alice was near the axis anyway. The ducts curved more tightly here. She moved in low-angle leaps, against the wind, hurrying. Dust puppies tended to clump where the pipes turned, and she stopped occasionally to clean them away.

She heard something ahead. She called, “Wes?”

“Yeah. How are you doing? I don’t think the ducts were this clean when they were new.”

She rounded the curve. “It’s make-work,” she said.

“Yeah, but it lets us explore. Sooner or later we’ll use what we know.”

“Want to make love?”

He banged his elbow. He turned around clutching it, staring openmouthed. She started to laugh.

He said, “Sure I want to make love. I’ve been chaste for months. Are you aware that I’m a married person?”

“How far away is your wife?”

“Carlotta’s twenty-two thousand three hundred miles away. Wait a minute. That’s geosynchronous orbit, measured from the center of the Earth, and we’re over Africa, so… another two, three thousand miles.”

He was treating this as all too amusing. Alice said, “So she’s not likely to come barging in on us.”

“No. Why me, Alice?”

“I think you killed the Bull’s Advisor.”

Good, the amusement had gone out of him. “Again, why me?”

“Who else-would have the guts?”

“Any cluster of eight or more fithp who didn’t like his politics.”

Alice grinned. She’d been scared to death when she made this decision, but — “Play your games, Congressman, but you wouldn’t be hesitating if you weren’t guilty.”

“Oh, I… don’t… It wasn’t like you think.”

He did it! “How was it then?”

“I didn’t sneak up on the poor fithp and strangle him in his sleep. I—” The violence she knew was buried in Wes Dawson surfaced in his face. For a moment she regretted her decision. You can always find an excuse. If the horrors were listening there’d never be another chance. She moved closer to him.

Rage was in his eyes, and they looked through her. “I thought I had it all fixed! The Herdmaster’s Advisor wanted to leave Earth. What he wanted from me was arguments to use. I by God was willing to give them. He ran out of time, the first time we met, so we set something else up.

“After five days we were still cleaning out the ducts near the hull,” Dawson said. “The Bull probably thinks he’s training us to make repairs in that area. I’d seen the mudroom, I knew how to reach it. Fathisteh-tulk was supposed to be waiting in the mudroom.

“The duct was warmer this time. You saw the door, with a knob the size of a soup bowl? I turned the knob and the door went back on springs. I squeezed through. I left my gear in the duct, just behind me.

“There were warm and cold currents mixing. Grill at the end. I looked through and saw a lot of black mud. The air currents set up ripples in it, but there wasn’t enough thrust to move it. We were still pushing on the Foot then.

“Nobody was there.”

She could feel’ the disappointment. “Nobody? Nothing?”

“Not then. I was very very nervous. I kept wondering what he really wanted. Military information? It was a silly way to get it—

“They’re not that tricky.”

“Yeah. I didn’t know that then. If he tried something I didn’t like, I was going to back down the duct, scream for the warriors, and lay a charge of mutiny on him. But maybe he just wanted me on record, encouraging mutiny myself. I thought I’d better see if there were witnesses.

“So I took the wing nuts off and worked the grill loose. I was going to go in, but I heard something, so I pulled the grill back in place. Fathisteh-tulk came in, walking along the wall on those Velcro shoes they wear.

“He got right to the point, like we’d never ended the last conversation. He told me about the dissidents, the fufisthengalss, mostly spaceborn, who don’t think conquering Earth is worth the bother. It sounded ideal. I was actually wishing I had Dmitri Grushin with me. He said there are a lot of dissidents, and they want to make peace, but they, um, they’re diffident. They don’t want to make waves, they don’t want to be rogues. Stick with the herd. Like voters in the natural state. They need jazzing up, something to get them moving.”

His eyes shone, and he waved his hands excitedly. I can see why they vote for him. Especially women. She felt a tingling in her loins. It was a feeling she’d long since known was dangerous, and for a moment the old fears came back. He won’t like me. He left her no time for more thought.

“I said it would be easy to make peace. I tried to tell Fathistehtalk how often yesterday’s enemies become today’s allies. I think that confused him. For the fithp, yesterday’s enemies are today’s slaves are tomorrow’s citizens. I think he believed me, though.”

He would. I would.

“I told him. If the fithp would mine the asteroids, we could trade their metals for our fertilizer and soil and nitrogen. We’d all get rich! I told him we’d grow fithp plants and animals for them. There’s bound to be somewhere on Earth where any damn thing will grow that grows in water and air. I really don’t think I lied to him at any point.

“Alice, I can’t blame myself. I was being as persuasive as I knew how—”

“They’re different. They’re crazy.” It’s a great story. But get through with it! She’d never felt that way, not since a certain high school dance. The anticipation had been there, but things had gone too far too fast and she panicked and ran from the car… and the next morning everyone knew the tale. For a moment the dread rose in her again. But this was very different. She hadn’t expected to find herself

playing therapist. Should she resent it?

“Oh, but I had Fathisteh-tulk all figured out,” he said. “I talked about how to use space. I’m good at that too, I was doing the research in my teens. Solar power collectors. Free-fall chemistry. Alloys that won’t mix in gravity. Single-crystal fibers stronger than anything you can make in a gravity field. They’d missed a lot of that!”

“Why?”

“It’s not in their granite cubes. Alice, they’re powerful, but they’re stupid!”

“Not stupid. Crazy, maybe.”

“Or something in between. They don’t think for themselves. Maybe they never had to. But I told him. I told him about mass drivers. It’s easy to put stuff in orbit from the Moon. O’Leary’s plan to mine the asteroids, do you know that one? You land a fully equipped mine on a metal asteroid. Put a big bag-around the asteroid. You refine the metal, but you keep the slag-that’s what the bag is for. You make hemispherical mirrors from the metal and use them for solar power. More metal becomes a linear accelerator. It gets longer and longer. Before you quit, the accelerator’s so long that the asteroid looks like the head of a sperm. Now you run slag down the linear accelerator. You get a rocket with arbitrarily high exhaust velocity! You put the rest of the asteroid into orbit around Earth and—”