Footfall

“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—”

“You told him all that in fithp?”

Wes Dawion stared, then laughed. “I stuttered a lot and used simple words and waved my hands through the air. I must have got it across. It killed him.”

“How?”

“I told him too much the fithp don’t know. He said, ‘You must be of our fithp when we take the riches of the worlds! You must be swallowed into the Traveler Herd.’ ”