Footfall

He grinned at her fleetingly. “The sci-fi writers, they cheer me up. They don’t tell me horrible things aren’t happening, I don’t mean that. But it doesn’t seem to bother them. They think bigger than that. Like an interstellar war is a great way to build up to the real story. And that tame snout of theirs — It helps to know that they will surrender if we can just hit them with something hard!”

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.

31. MAXIMUM SECURITY