Footfall

His task it was to break me too. Nonetheless he was uncomfortable, because we are related, or because afterward 1 must teach him his profession. “Your position won’t change, Grandfather. Who but you has the training to break alien forms of life to the Traveler Herd? But the Traveler Herd has changed, and you must join it again.”

I roll over on the floor, feet in the air, trunk splayed, vulnerable. Others watch. My spaceborn grandson’s foot on my chest. “There, that’s over. Now you must begin to train me,” his voice dropping, for my ears alone. “to break me. I must know something of what we must do.”

I feel it now, the foot lightly crushing my chest. Takpusseh lowered his foot. A mere tap would not do; this was no token surrender. He felt the man’s ribs sag before he lifted his foot.

Dawson waited for more, but there was no more. He rolled Side, convulsively, groaning with the pain of damaged ribs.

“Now you belong to the Traveler Herd,” Takpusseh said in his own speech. He saw Dawson take it in and relax somewhat. Dawson moved to join the other prisoners. “Is the black one dead?” Takpusseh asked. “What killed him?”

The one called Dmitri answered in the fithp speech. “Fear you. Fear foot make dead. Take him out?”

Takpusseh summoned the warriors. Two came down and moved the black man onto the platform. It rose. It descended to take the fithp up one by one. Takpusseh went last.

17. FARMHOUSES

Generally in war the best policy is to take a state intact; to ruin it is inferior to this. To win one hundied victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

—SUN-TZU, The Art of War

COUNTDOWN: H PLUS 100 HOURS

The house had belonged to Carlotta’s grandmother. Trujillo had married Castro had married de Alvarez, families whose names were respected when the Lowells and Cabots were field hands. Carlotta’s sister Juana had inherited the house. She married a man with the unlikely name of David Morgan.

Of course Dawson wasn’t exactly in our conquistador heritage either. Carlotta lay in the exact center of the big four-poster and tried to count the spots on the ceiling. Thoughts came unbidden.

Her superb imagination showed her a torn puffball of a corpse, dry and brittle, falling through vacuum and the savage sunlight of space. A dissection table with monstrous shapes around it. A carved corpse, the parts arrayed on a silver platter, surrounded by cooked plants of unearthly shape; voices chittering or booming as the banquet began.

No! She leaped from the bed. The floor creaked as she scurried across the room to the door. The house was old, begun as a ranch house before the Civil War, added to as family required and money enabled. It had been built in clumps, and not all the additions fitted well together, although Carlotta rather liked the general effect. Now it had only four inhabitants, Carlotta, David, Juana, and an ancient housekeeper from Xuahaca who called herself Lucy. Juana’s children had long moved away.

And Sharon is in Peterborough , New Hampshire . Will I ever see her again? Thank God the telephones worked long enough for me to tell her to stay there. How could she travel?

Bright sunlight flooded the ball outside her bedroom, and when she reached the kitchen the windup clock said it was midafternoon. Lucy had put away the gin bottle. Or did I finish it to get to sleep? There should be some left in it. She went to the cabinet, but she felt Lucy’s disapproving stare.

“Desayuno, Senora?”

“Gracias, no. Por favor, solamente cafe.” And damned right I’m going to sit on the patio in my housecoat. Who’s going to see me, or care if they do?

The patio was too large. When Carlotta had visited as a child, the gardens were famous through the state. Pumpkins, melons, vegetables-all won prizes at county and state fairs. Now there was a big flagstone patio where the melon patch had been, and a field of sweet peas where celery and chard had grown. No gardeners. Plenty of people unemployed, but no one wants to raise vegetables for a retired professor and his wife. But it does make a nice patio. She sat at the big wrought-iron table. Lucy was setting the coffee down when the thunder began.

Thunder from a clear sky was not unheard of in Kansas , but this didn’t come in claps and die away. It rolled in and stayed, renewed itself, grew louder and faded and grew louder still.

Then brilliant points were drawing straight white lines across the sky, sowing clouds of dots that drifted away to west and south. Lucy whimpered in terror, and the need to reassure the older woman kept Carlotta calm. Invasion. Parachutes. What came for Wes has come for me. But nothing showed directly overhead. Not here. Not yet, anyway.