Footfall

A thread of actinic green light rose from hundreds of miles away… something was blocking it at the skyward end, something rising… another fireball winked near the base of the beam. Roger ducked fast, waited, looked again. Fireball rising. No laser beam. An orange point high up, drifting down. What was that all about?

Whatever. Lasers were aliens, atomic bombs were men, and the bomb had interrupted something. “Come on, guys,” Roger gloated. “Ruin their whole morning!”

Part 3 FOOTFALL

23. CLEANUP

The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes am on the move, we learn that we ate spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

Western Kansas was a black, dimpled land.

The army pilot gave the craters a wide berth, flying carefully upwind. A stutter tried to surface when he spoke, and he spoke seldom. His motions were jerky. He couldn’t have seen films of death-beams spiraling in on other helicopters, but rumors must have spread. Je

Sifting beside her, Jack Clybourne was as calm as an oyster.

Je

From time to time, at Je

There were black skeletons of automobiles, and corpses: enough half-burned human and alien corpses to satisfy anybody.

The helicopter circled a village, and Je

Rarely, bands of refugees looked up to watch the helicopter pass. Few tried to wave it down.

Je

It had been in sight for nearly an hour. Less than ten miles away now, it dominated the flat black landscape. It had fallen several miles. It was foreshortened, its hull split, like a Navy battleship dropped on its nose. It must have loomed large in the refugees’ eyes.

Like a coyote on a freeway, a fi’ corpse lay in the road, flattened to a pancake silhouette and rotted almost to its crushed bones. Its hang glider hadn’t opened. She’d seen dead snouts here and there. They stripped their dead, but often left them where they lay. Cremation would have been easy enough: stack the bodies, and one blast of a fithp laser would do it.

The helicopter settled near the stern. Je

They walked alongside the ruined hull. Only the warship’s tail, an outsize rocket-nozzle-shape with jet scoops facing forward, had survived the crash intact. The hull had split halfway along its length. Jack chi

Forward of the tank wall, the hull had wrinkled and torn again. From the bent nose a glassless window winked, the opening squeezed almost shut. Where ripped metal gaped conveniently wide, they climbed inside, Jack leading the way.

They came out faster than they went in. Je

“Sorry,” he said when he came back.

“Sure. I almost lost my lunch too.”

“First assignment I get Outside—”

“You haven’t done any harm,” Je

“Experts.” He looked at the wreckage. “You’d send your dreamers-for-hire into that?”

“It’s their job.”

Jack shook his head. He said. “Well, it’s for sure there weren’t any survivors.”

“Yes. Too bad.”

“Damn straight. Jeez, you’d think they’d have left some of their troops behind.”

“They must have been ready to evacuate. Just in case,” Je

“Maybe they pla

Je

“No. I wanted to come. I wasn’t doing any good inside the Hole.” Clybourne put on the gas mask. “Rrready.” His voice sounded hollow from inside the mask.

They reentered the rip in the life support system.

The interior was twisted and bent. Crumpled walls showed crumpled machinery and torn wiring buried inside. Alien bodies lay in the corridors. They stank. Too many days had passed since the combined U.S. and Soviet bombardment had driven the aliens back to space. Alien bodies had bloated and/or ruptured. Je

Not that I know what I’m looking for. She went deeper into the ship. Her flashlight picked out the remains of equipment; wherever she pointed, Jack took photographs. The whine of the recharger for his electronic flash sounded loud in the dead ship.

Nothing was intact. There can’t be anything here, or they’d have melted it from space. Wouldn’t they? How do they regard their dead? I’ll have to ask Harpanet. Get Reynolds to ask him, she cotrected herself. The science-fiction writers seemed to spend all their time with the captured alien; and Je

A large steel door lay ahead. It had been locked, but sprung partially open in the crash. Je

The room was tremendous, with a low ceiling and a padded floor that was now a wall. It was filled with death.

For a moment she didn’t recognize what she saw. Then her flashlight played across a human face, a child’s face, sweetly smiling-she was relieved to see that it was a doll. There was a white bloated thing wrapped in bright colored tartan under the doll. Je

Like a find-the-face puzzle: now her eyes found human shapes, a knee, the back of a head, a man folded in two around a snapped spine; but all piled together like melting clay. They must have been jammed in like cattle. Here a shape that made no sense at all, with human and snout features, until it snapped into focus. An alien guard must have struck like a bomb when the ship came down, and at least three prisoners had been under him.