Footfall

Reynolds and Harpanet walked into the mudroom, and into the mud-filled pool, without interrupting their conversation. It faltered when they noticed the near stranger. The President of the United States floated in the warm mud with his eyes closed.

Harpanet dipped his nostril. Nat said, “Not in the face. He looks too tired to play.”

“I heard that,” the President said. “I am.”

Harpanet shimmied. The wall of his flank sent warm, muddy water sloshing gently across President Coffey. The President smiled. “Heating just one end of the pool,” he asked, “who thought that up?”

“Human fithp need it too warm. Too much surface for volume. Shed heat too fast.”

Nat said, “The guy who thought of that was the curator of the San Diego Zoo, George Pournelle. He had some very rare rhinos, and he didn’t know what kind of temperature they liked. So he put a temperature gradient across the cage and let them make their own decisions.”

The President nodded. He was in the hottest part of the pool. He looked very relaxed. He opened one eye and fixed it on Harpanet. “You’ve hit us hard.”

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.”