Vilcabamba

Prilk waved his hands. They looked funny by human standards: they had four fingers in the middle and a thumb on each side. The thumbs had nails. The fingers had claws. Even a weaponless and unarmored Krolp was no bargain. “I do not care about the renegades, Moffatt. We do not care about the renegades. If we cared about the renegades, you would have never seen them. Believe it. It is true.”

Maybe so, maybe not. The Krolp weren’t immune to bullshit: one more hard lesson out of so many the past fifty years had taught mankind. But if Prilk said the renegades weren’t the issue now, they weren’t. They probably aren’t, Harris Moffatt III amended to himself. Prilk might find a way to come back to them later.

Warily, the President asked, “Well, what do you want, then?”

Prilk waved his hands again, this time purposefully. A map appeared in the air between the envoy and Harris Moffatt III. It was, naturally, a Krolpish map, with the place names written in the Krolpish language. That hardly mattered. Moffatt read Krolpish as well as speaking it. And the aliens had borrowed most of the place names from English. Why not? That was easier than making up their own.

Long before the Krolp landed, Americans had borrowed a lot of place names from the Native Americans who’d lived in these parts before them. Much good that did the Native Americans, most of whom were swiftly dispossessed. And much good the English toponyms on a Krolpish map did the USA, too.

“You see this place here?” Prilk pointed. A small patch of northeastern Utah glowed red on the map. How? Harris Moffatt III didn’t know, any more than he knew how the map appeared when Prilk waved. Krolpish technology was that far ahead of anything humanity could do. Or--shit--maybe it was magic. Harris Moffatt III sure couldn’t prove it wasn’t.

“I see that place there,” Moffatt said. “What about it? I see it is in the territory that belongs to the free United States. I see that it is in territory that belongs to me. Not to you. Not to Vrank.” Vrank was Prilk’s immediate superior, the Krolpish governor of North America. The President took a deep breath. “Not to your ruler, back on your planet, either.”

There. He’d made it as plain as he could. Too plain, maybe. As far as the Krolp were concerned, anything they could get their weird hands on belonged to them. But that glowing patch lay right in the middle of what was left of the USA. Harris Moffatt III had to do whatever he could to hang on to it. If he didn’t, what point to being President?

Prilk opened his jack-o’-lantern mouth wide. It looked like a threat display--I will eat you. As a matter of fact, it was. “You say this to me, Moffatt?” he growled.

“I say this to you, Envoy Prilk,” Moffatt answered, as steadily as he could. “Flarglar agreed that this land belonged to humans. Belonged to the USA. Belonged to my father.” Flarglar had been Vrank’s next-but-one predecessor. U.S. archives still held a copy of the treaty.

How much good would showing it to Prilk do? The envoy waved once more, dismissively. “Flarglar is not here anymore. Neither is your father.”

Flarglar, sure enough, had been recalled to the homeworld in disgrace. A drunken Krolpish renegade (the Krolp, damn them, loved whiskey as well as snarfar) had killed Harris Moffatt II. He’d died for it. Not much was left of West Yellowstone, Montana, these days, but that renegade was by God dead.

“The agreement is here. Your ruler did not reject it. It is still good,” Harris Moffatt III said, with more confidence than he felt.

“We did not know everything when we made that stupid agreement. We have been here longer now. We know more,” Prilk said. “There is silver under this land, silver and some gold. We want it.”

Winter ran through the President of the United States. The Krolp took human works of art, in exactly the same way as human conquerors looted the folk they overwhelmed. And the Krolp took minerals in a way that was like nothing on Earth--which was putting things mildly.

They thought Earth was a treasure trove. It was more tectonically active than most of the planets they knew, which meant it kept recycling its riches instead of locking most of them away beyond even Krolpish reach. And the reach of the Krolp went far beyond anything humanity could match. Twenty miles down? Fifty miles? A hundred? The Krolp didn’t care. Controlling the forces they did, they could go that deep with ease.

Of course, they made kind of a mess in the process. Harris Moffatt III knew people had strip-mined whole mountains. The Krolp strip-mined whole countries. Not much worth living on was left of Spain. The Krolp had found a big deposit of mercury under there, and they’d gone after it, and they’d got it. The environment? They worried about the environment on the homeworld. Not here. No, not here.