Footfall

He takes the flat tire off, putting the five nuts in the hubcap. The stranger watches. He pulls the spare tire out of the trunk. The stranger watches. Motorist is getting nervous. What’s a maniac doing out so late at night? Why is he staring like that? Motorist rolls the tire around from the back and steps on the rim of the hubcap, which flips all of the nuts into tall weeds. Motorist goes after them. He finds one nut.

The mental patient speaks. “Take a nut off each of the other tires. Put them on the fourth wheel. Four nuts each. It’ll get you to a gas station.”

Motorist says, “That’ll work.” Then, “Hey, that’s brilliant! What the hell are you doing here?”

Patient says, “I’m here for being crazy. Not stupid.”

The air pipes were a little more than a yard across. There we no handholds. At first Alice had floundered, lost and nauseated and fighting the fear of falling. It was better now. Jeri and Melissa actually enjoyed the low gravity, and they’d shown Alice how.

Alice had always been thin. Pale face, fiery hair, slender body, vividly pretty, for whatever that was worth. Now she was gaunt. She tried to eat, but there was no appetite, and the horrors tried to foist nauseating alien plants and meat on her. The others accepted such treatment. They ate ca

Living wasn’t worth the effort under these circumstances. Alice had slashed her wrists once, long ago, for reasons that seemed trivial now. Something sharp would presently come her way. Yet she was half sure she wouldn’t use it.

After all, who would care?

The little girl, Melissa, treated her with something between fear and contempt. Jeri was nice, but she spent a lot of time with the Russians. I think she likes the big one. He does things for her. Brings her things. Got the blanket to put around the toilet pool; that was nice.

Nobody does things for me. They resent me. With Wes Dawson it went far beyond resentment. He gave orders. He lectured. He taught the language of the horrors — an expected the women to use it. He was persuasive and smooth and condescending, like that first psychiatrist they had given her, the one who thought using Q-tips was a form of masturbation. She’d gotten along all right with the second one. Mrs. Carmichael had looked a little like Jeri Wilson. A little plumper, and not as scared, Alice thought.

The horrors were worse than Dawson. Anything short of instant obedience puzzled them. They solved the problem by prodding with their trunks or the butts of the twisted-looking guns. They wouldn’t listen to anything she had to say. They treated her like a thing. If Alice McLe

This cleaning of air pipes: it was make-work, a way of keeping the prisoners busy, like picking tomatoes at Me

And like the make-work at Me

Well, there was dust and rust, and it came off. There were wads of goop and soil and feathers in the filters. And, moving around in the pipes, she began to learn a kind of skill. There were no handholds; of course not, the horrors had never expected that living things would need them in here. She learned to move in a zigzag jumping style, swiping at the sides with the cloth. It worked.

It worked, and she was getting better at it, but it was makework, and she couldn’t wait to get back to the garden, with its open spaces.

Some of the plants were sprouting. Alice was afraid to touch them. Mrs. Woodward chuckled. “Rice. I might have known it would be rice. Rice likes it wet.”

“What do we do now?”

“Nothing. There ain’t any bugs here. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Maybe we want to block off the water pipes that feeds some of the other stuff.”

Alice nodded. She pushed herself back to look at the vegetable plot. Was that another tuft of green, where they’d planted corn and ru

It didn’t bother her much. She was used to free-fall. She floated, waiting for Thuktun Flishithy’s minuscule thrust to pull her someplace useful.

Something wrapped around her ankle. She jumped as if she’d been electrocuted, and looked down at a cluster of tentacles, a broad brown head, wrinkled with age, and recessed eyes. “Raztupisp-minz?”

“You have learned to recognize me? Good. How is your health, Alice?”

“I’m fine.”

“Your plants are sprouting. I am pleased. I think our plants will grow in your world.”

Alice held her face expressionless. Dawson had suggested if the plants grew well, Earth would become more desirable to the horrors — and she hadn’t believed him. Should the plants die … easy enough, but she’d have to go on eating what they fed now.

“I want to explain something,” the teacher said. “You may have noticed that some of the fithp are acting strangely. The mating season has started for one class of us, the sleepers, and it affects their behavior. They are not turning rogue, but do not irritate them.”

“You’re not a sleeper, are you? And Takpusseh is.”

“Mating season goes with the females, the sleeper females are spaceborn, and so is Tashayamp. For most of the year, many days to come, you may see me as neuter.”

She studied him, but there was nothing to be read in his alien face. Yet this was a teacher and a manipulator. “Can you hear thought?”

“Hear thought?” He snorted. “No! But I can see. You talk of mating with females. You shy from males when you can. You are thin in the hips, your breasts are flat. Sometimes there are fithp who are shaped like females but never come into season.”

Alice leapt away, back to the seed plot, back to the company of the other prisoners. Nobody had ever suggested such a thing to her! They thought she was strange, yes, but a neuter? A freemartin? If she didn’t like men, it was because men were … were …

She feared the teacher would follow, but in fact he was was speaking to another fi’ — to the other teacher, Takpusseh.

She remembered, now, that men had tried to tell her that she was strange, to put her on the defensive. Fuck me to prove you’re a woman.

The thought of being raped by Raztupisp-minz was ludicrous and horrible… mostly ludicrous, she decided. No man had ever started by telling her to think of him as a neuter.

Tashayamp took her back to the cell, with Mr. and Mrs. Woodward and Wes Dawson. They were there long enough to eat and use the toilet. The only thing that could have made that tolerable to Alice was watching how it bothered the others.

An hour’s rest, then fithp came to escort them to the ducts. None of the humans had noticed that she wasn’t talking. Maybe they were glad.

Alice broke away from the others as soon as she could, and let the wind carry her away, farther than she’d ever gone before. She wasn’t feeling sociable. Presently she braked herself and began desultorily to clean the walls.

The wind had grown cold. It matched her mood; she hardly noticed at first. But the wall was even colder, on one side. Here was a curve to mark a side cha