Footfall

16. SUBMISSION

A human being in a prison camp, in the hands of his enemies, is flesh and shudderingly vulnerable.

The disciplines that hold men together in the face of fear, hunger, and danger are not natural. Stresses equal to, and beyond, the stress of fear and panic must be laid on men. Some of these stresses are ca!Ied civilization. And even the highest of civilizations demands leadership.

The huilside wall was down and level; the door was in the ceiling. Wes judged that things were likely to remain so for some time.

There had been an hour or so of acceleration, then half an hour of freefall; then the ship had begun to spin. Some days had passed without further change. Odds were it would take an hour or more to remove the spin.

Spin would hamper the mother ship in a battle. Earth must he far aft and out of reach.

Nikolai and Dmitri talked qialetly: Nikolai sullen, Dmitri doing most of the talking. Wes understood a few words, and sympathized. Nikolai was once again a cripple.

The aliens had wasted no time. They were already teaching their language to the humans. Wes found this reassuring. However, the Soviets were educated separately, and they had expressed disinterest in sharing their lessons with Wes. He went over them alone, whispering alien sounds as he remembered them.

Srupk: Wes had memorized the term as swank, “standard trunklength.” It was just about six feet. A makasrupk was five hundred and twelve strunks, just about a kilometer.

Wes had sought a word for the trunk. There wasn’t one. A sharp snort, s

Chaytrif meant foot.

Sfaftiss was Takpusseh’s title; it meant teacher. The other sfaftiss didn’t speak, and his name was harder: Raztupisp-minz. The two sfafissthp looked aged, but as if they had weathered in different patterns. Were there two races of Invader? But they called themselves by the same words:

Chsapt meant move. Chtaptisk: moving. Chtaptiskfithp meant themselves, everyone who had left their home planet. The Traveler People?

Fi’ was the word for an alien. A syllable chopped short by a kind of hiccup, it sounded like a piece of a word. And fithp was the entire species. As if an individual was not a whole, complete thing, just as a pa’ was only one branch of the pathp, the trunk. Herdbeasts? Takpusseh said tribe, not herd; but men didn’t say herd to mean thinking beings.

Tashayamp was Takpusseh’s assistant. Dawson thought of her as female: the leather or plastic patch on her harness covered a different area, further back on her torso. He knew he might have the sexes reversed; he was not prepared to ask—

The door opened upward, a trapdoor. The prisoners looked up, waiting.

Takpusseh: Wes had learned to recognize their teacher or trainer by the loose look of his thick skin, and by his eyes, which behaved as if the lights were always too bright. Takpusseh watched while alien soldiers attached a platform at the level of the trapdoor. The platform descended smoothly along grooves in the padding of the starboard wall. The platform might have held one alien; it held Wes and Arvid with room to spare. Wes had expected a ladder, but a ladder would be useless to these aliens.

Takpusseh and Tashayamp and eight armed soldiers waited in the corridor. The platform descended again for Dmitri and Nikolai. They had left Giorge behind.

Arvid had been hoping for a window. There were none. The soldiers moved four ahead, four behind. Takpusseh and Tashayamp moved forward to join the prisoners. They had found a wheeled cart for Nikolai. Arvid took charge of pushing it. Wes was trying to tell Tashayamp that they needed heat to prepare their food. Arvid ignored that. He was trying to get some idea of the mother ship’s layout.

The rug was spongy and squishy-wet; the prisoners had not been given shoes. Doors in the floor opened upward against the corridor wall.

“I believe,” Arvid said in Russian, “that any aperture big enough for one of the aliens would pass two or three of us at once. Perhaps they will not think to guard small openings that will pass a man.”

Dmitri nodded.

“They are surely not built for climbing. A wall that could be scaled by a man would be impossible for one of them.”

Dmitri nodded again.

“Have you seen anything I might have missed?”

Dmitri spoke. “You waited until we were in a corridor, and moving, before you said any of this. I approve, but are you certain that our trainers do not speak Russian?”

“They speak English and do not hide the fact. Why would they hide a knowledge of Russian? In any case, we must speak sometime.”

“Perhaps. Do you think we could use their rifles?”

Grooves for the branched trunk were far forward on the barrel, and so was the trigger. The bore was huge. The butt was short and very broad. “It would not fit against a man’s shoulder, and it would probably kick him senseless, unless… you’d have to brace it against something, a floor, a wall, a piece of furniture. Difficult to aim.”

“Don’t do anything at all without word from me. What of Dawson ? Will he try something foolish?”

“I—” Arvid cut it off. They had reached their destination.

The wide doorway would be used when the mother ship was under acceleration. The permanently fixed platform elevator next to it would be for use under spin gravity. The room below was big, and more than a dozen aliens were already present.

The prisoners descended; the soldiers remained above.

The aliens stared up. Most of them had their trunks folded up against the top of the heads: evidently a resting position. The eyelids drooped mournfully. The eyes had black pupils fading to smoky-gray whites. They were set wide, but not too wide to prohibit binocular vision. The thick muscle structure at the base of the trunk formed grooves; with the trunk up, the eyes focused along the grooves, like gunsights. Their stare was u

Nikolai was wire-tense, staring his captors down. Arvid murmured, “Docile, Nikolai. We docile servants of the new regime await instructions.”

Nikolai nodded. His eyes dropped He sounded calm enough. “I saw no air vents. The air may be filtered through the carpeting. And the rug was wet. They like wet feet.”

The room would have held three or four times as many. Takpusseh spoke rapidly to the assembled aliens, then more slowly to the humaqs. Arvid tried to file the introductions: Pastempehkeph. K’turfookeph. Fathisteh-tulk. Chowpeentulk. Fistartehthuktun. Koolpooleh. Paykurtank. Two smaller aliens were not introduced. They stared at the humans and huddled close against larger aliens. Children, then.

He’d have trouble remembering the names. It was the array that was important. The aliens came in clusters; he’d be a long time learning their body language, but that much was obvious.

Pastempeh-keph (male) and K’turfookeph (female), with their child (male), were the top of the ladder, the Chairman or President or Admiral. The similarity in the last syllable meant they were mated; he’d learned that much already. One would hold title. Arvid would not lightly assume that it was the male. Similarly, Fathistehtalk and Chowpeentulk were mated, and they stood with the Admiml. Advisors? The male was doing all the talking. So.

Fistarteh-thuktun (male), Koolpooleh (male), and Paykurtank (female) also formed a cluster. The extra syllables would mean that Fistarteh-thuktun had a mate. He was an old one, with wrinkled skin and pained-looking eyes… like the teacher, Takpusseh. He wore elaborate harness, like tapestry made with silver wire. He studied the humans like a judge. The pair with him were younger: clear eyes, smoother skin, quick movements.