Larry Niven - Footfall

He stayed in bed, with the sheet over him. Fastidious. Likes to see me nekkid, but not to be seen. I’d say it was cowardice, but how can you say that about a guy who’ll put his ass in from of a bullet for the President? Maybe his scars are classified…

“Is this legal?” Jack asked.

“Sure. I’m Intelligence. I can do anything!”

“Yeh, as long as they don’t replace the Supreme Court. Jenny, we’ve got to obey the rules, because we can get away with not obeying them.”

“It’s all right. The writers know they’re being watched. And Harpanet’s a prisoner. No rights. Satisfied?”

“Yeah—”

“And there’s nothing else to watch on my TV, I guarantee you that.” She switched on the set.

The picture swam into focus. An empty box of a room: no rugs, no furniture, no occupants; nothing but a movie screen and projector, and a broad doorway with edges of freshly cut concrete. “Wrong room,” she said, and fiddled again. “We’ve already assigned three rooms in the complex, and God knows what they’ll think they need next. Hem.”

The alien lolled at his ease in a sea of steaming mud. The humans around him were in beach chairs and swimsuits. Mud had splashed Sherry and Joe and Nat, who were crowded close to the edge. Wade Curtis stayed farther back, wearing an African safari bush jacket and seated in a fold-up chair with a beer can in his hand. Just above him was a huge globe of the Earth. A bar on wheels showed in one corner.

“See? They took our swimming pool! We move the furniture out when nobody’s using it. The alien likes his floor room,” Jenny said. “How about a swim?’

Jack eyed the mud with distaste. “No, thanks. Have you got all the rooms bugged?’

“No. Hell, no! Half these hard-SF people are ex-military, and they’d spot that, and the other half are liberals! We’ve got pickups in the mudroom and the Snout Room and the refuge, that’s the room they use to write up their notes and talk and get drunk, but it’s right next to the Snout Room. The mud’s new. He seems to like it, doesn’t he?”

“Can you get us sound too?”

“Sure.” Jenny turned a dial.

Wade Curtis’ unmistakable voice boomed from the speaker. “We’ve pretty well driven the Traveler Fithp out of Kansas. We’re picking through the debris now. We’d like to know where the fithp will attack next.”

“I wasn’t told,” Harpanet said. His pronunciation was good, yet something blurred the words: loose air escaped through the nose and lips, and there was an echo-chamber effect, perhaps due to his huge lung capacity.

Jack said, “He learns fast. I’ve talked to French diplomats with thicker accents.” But Jenny was repressing a shudder. The carnage in the smashed digit ship was still with her, and she had trouble facing the Snout.

Curtis was saying, “Your officers don’t seem to tell you much of what you’re doing.”

“No. A fi’ learns little because he might be taken into the enemy herd. That has happened with me. I have told you this.” The alien might have been affronted.

“It is a new way of thinking, and hard for us,” Sherry Atkinson said. “We must learn what we can.” She slipped into the mud, quite unselfconsciously, and rubbed behind the alien’s ear with both hands. She was already the muddiest of the lot, Jenny noted.

Curtis asked, “Did your superiors show interest in any area besides Kansas?”

“Kansas?”

“The region you invaded, this area.” Wade pointed. The erstwhile snout-held territory in Kansas was already circled on the great globe, with a black Magic Marker.

“No such interest was shown in my presence.”

“What we’re afraid of is a massive meteorite impact, something of asteroid size.”

The alien was silent for a time. Reynolds busied himself at the bar. Suddenly the alien said, “Thuktun Flishithy-Message Bearer?-was docked to a moonlet of the ringed planet for many years. This many.” The alien’s trunk emerged from the mud, and he flexed a clump of four digits, three times. “Pushing. We were not told why. I once heard officers call the mass chaytnf.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means this part of a fi’.” The alien rolled (and Sherry shied from a wave of mud). One broad clawed foot emerged.

The sci-fi types all seemed to freeze in place; but Jenny didn’t need their interpretation. Her hand closed painfully on Jack’s arm. “My God. It’s real. Of course, the Foot, they’re planning to stomp us—”

“They’re talking too damn much.”

“Huh? The alien’s talking a lot more than they are.”

The blurry voice from the TV set was saying, “It was not so large as many of the-asteroids-at the ringed planet. I think 8 to the 12th standard masses—”

“Standard mass is your mass? About eight hundred pounds… Curtis took a pocket calculator out of his bush jacket. “Jesus! Twenty-seven billion tons

Nat Reynolds said, “At… ten to twenty miles per second, that could-Harpanet, where are they going to drop it?”

“I was never told that it would be impacted against Earth. If so, the Herdmaster may have sought more data, perhaps in Kansas.”

“Jesus, Jenny,” Jack said, “they’re telling too much. We have to see them. Now.”

When a pretty girl enters a swimming pool, the natural thing to do is follow. Nat didn’t follow at once. The pool was filled with thick mud, but he was already muddy, and there were showers he set his glass down, jumped in, and waded forward. Harpanet turned and sprayed Sherry with a jet of dark mud. Nat saw her startled and appalled before she threw up her arms and turned her back. Hell, Sherry was from Oklahoma; this was hardly fair! A California boy knows how to water-fight. Nat half cupped his hands and sent water jetting at the invader.

The alien preened. He liked it. Sherry was laughing, and three others had leaped to her aid and were jetting mud over the alien’s back. Curtis’ tall wife showed impressive ambidextrous firepower.

The alien sprayed them back impartially, with the capacity of a small fire truck, his digits splayed from around the nostril.

Jack Clybourne and Jenny walked into a mist of mud and a roar of echoing laughter, and a water fight raging at the center. They stopped in the doorway and waited.

None of the Threat Team noticed them. The water fight stopped, and two muddy writers were now fondling the alien’s trunk. Reynolds asked, “Can you bend it in any direction?”

“No.”

Sherry began braiding the bifurcations, the ‘digits.’ “Does this hurt?”

“No. Discomfort.” The trunk lifted and writhed and was no longer braided.

“I wonder just how mobile your tail is,” Curtis said from behind the alien.

The short, somewhat flattened tail flapped up, down, left, right. “Control the speed of a floating car with tail. Accelerate and stop.”

“Mmm. We couldn’t drive your cars, then, even if we could capture one.”

“Not one. Two human could drive. Or I drive for you.”

Nat Reynolds noticed the visitors. He moved to the doorway without disturbing the rest. “Major Jenny, did you notice that he’s telling us how to steal fithp cars?”

“I wondered how much you were telling him,” Jack said.

Nat looked at Jack. He grinned and said, “Anything. Everything. Harpanet is part of the Threat Team.”

“You needn’t be so damned flippant. He acts like he’s switched sides, snout to human. I take it he’s got you convinced?”

“We’re still watching, Clybourne, but it’s a little more than that. He expects us to act like he’s switched sides. He’s not putting any sweat into convincing us. Sherry thinks it’s herdbeast behavior.”

“I still don’t think you should be telling that alien exactly what we’re afraid of at all times!”