by Larry Niven
. Jeri crammed the shoe box into the saddlebag and climbed on behind Harry. "All right. I’m ready." She didn’t look back as they drove out of the town.
15
THE WHEAT FIELDS
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.
—James Elroy Flecker, Prologue to The Golden Journey to Samarkand
COUNTDOWN: H PLUS 60 HOURS
They were through the last of the foothills and into the rolling prairies of Kansas, a land of straight roads and small towns. Wheat and cornfields made the landscape monotonous. Whenever they stopped, the hot winds and bright sunshine drove them back into motion again.
Conversation was impossible over the noise of the motorcycle. The radio had nothing to say. Harry drove mindlessly, trying not to think of his back and the cramps in his legs. Fantasies came easily.
Jeri’s a right pretty woman, and she’s all alone. Don’t know what she’ll do in Kansas
. Maybe there wouldn’t be enough rooms. They’d have to share a room and a bed, and the first night he could just hold her, and— Part of his mind knew better, but the thoughts were more pleasant than his back pains.
Dighton, Kansas, was forty miles ahead. The engine sputtered, and Harry switched to the reserve tank. They’d just make it, with a dozen miles to spare. Good enough, thought Harry. Good enough. There was a smaller city four miles away. Logan, Kansas. Nothing to stop there for—
There was a bright flash ahead and to the left. "Holy shit!" Harry shouted. He clamped the brakes, skidding the bike to a halt. "Off! Off and down!" He’d heard George and Vicki’s lectures too.
Jeri and Melissa threw themselves into the ditch alongside the road. Harry laid the motorcycle down. He found he’d been counting. It was nearly a minute before thunder rolled over them. There wasn’t any shock wave.
"Ten, twelve miles," Harry said.
"We were closer to the other one," Melissa said. She was trying to look brave and calm, but she was having trouble forgetting that she was a ten-year-old girl who’d been protected all her life.
There were more rumblings, a series of sonic booms, and the sky was full of sound.
"What in hell is worth bombing here?" Harry asked.
Jeri sat up. She shook her head. "I don’t—Harry!" She pointed up. Something dart-shaped crossed the sky, high up, glowing orange at the nose and leaving a wavery vapor trail. "What is that?"
Harry shook his head. The fading vapor trail curled and twisted. Winds did that in the high stratosphere. "Russian? Not like any American plane I ever saw." They looked at each other in wonder. "Naw," Harry said. "It couldn’t be."
The craft was already too small to see . . . until it began blinking, pulsing in harsh blue pinpoints of light, like the lights Harry had seen that first night.
Dust motes were drifting out of the vapor trail.
Another ship crossed the bright sky, and another, on skewed paths. Dust sifted from the vapor trails. The motes left by the first ship were growing larger, becoming distinct dots. Harry watched with his knees in ditch water. A fourth ship . . . and the first two were pulsing now, pulling away.
They must be much larger than they seemed. Thirty miles up or more: they had to be that high, given what they were doing. They were streaking through the high atmosphere at near-orbital speed, dropping clouds of . . . dots, then accelerating free of Earth. So. Dots?
The fourth ship wasn’t pulsing. It was turning, banking in a wide arc.
The dots had become falling soap bubbles, and the lowest of them were breaking open. Hatching. Hatching winged things—
"Paratroopers," Melissa said. Her voice held wonder. "Mom, they’re invading!"
* * *
At nearly sixty-four makasrupkithp of altitude[] the troposphere tore at the hull, blasting the digit ship with flame. Its mass seemed no more protection than the transparent bag around Octuple Leader Chintithpit-mang. The planet was all of his environment, vast beyond imagination, and dreadfully close.
[] {Thirty to thirty-five miles. (A standard trunklength or srupk = 5.8 feet = 176.78 cm = 1.77 meters. 512 skrupkithp = 1 makasrupk = 905.13 meters.)}
He was one in eight rows of sixty-four bubbles each, and each flaccid bubble held a fi’, his face hidden by an oxygen mask. He was first in his line, with the transparent door just a srupk from his face.
They were holding up well. Why not? The lowest ranks were all sleepers. A planet was nothing new to a sleeper. This must be like homecoming to them. As for the spaceborn, the Octuple Leaders and higher ranks, how could they let the sleepers see their fear? And yet—
Aft is raw chaos, a roiling white fog of vapor trail. But look down, where greens and blues and browns sweep beneath. Here the patterns are equally random, for worlds happen by accident, and there is no sign of mind imposing order. Layers of curdled water vapor almost make patterns. They seem more real, more solid, than the land. The snaky curve of yonder river holds more water than is stored in all of Message Bearer. Any one in that line of mountains they’d crossed a few 64-breaths ago would outmass the Foot itself—
"Octuples, you disembark now."
Octuple Leader Chintithpit-mang’s breathing became shallow, fast.
He had been born in the year that Thuktun Flishithy rounded this world’s primary star. The Year Zero Herd had all been born within a couple of eight-days of each other—naturally—and that age group was closer than most. One and all, males and females, they were dissidents. They had no use for worlds.
Chintithpit-mang fiercely resented the Herdmaster’s splitting of the Year Zero Herd. He did not want to be here.
The aft door cracked. Air hissed away. The bubbles grew taut. The door folded outward while the chamber filled with a thin singing: troposphere ripping at the digit ship. A line of bubbles streamed out, sixty-four fithp falling above the fluffy cloudscape. Another stream of bubbles followed them. Then—The Octuple Leader was first in line, of course.
Falling meant nothing to Chintithpit-mang. It was the buffeting that held him in terror. The survival bubbles dropped through the troposphere, slowing. The digit ship shrank to a dot . . . and presently began pulsing, accelerating, pushing itself back to orbit.
The buffeting increased. Thicker air. The shape of the land was taking on detail. There, the crater that was both landmark and first strike; beyond, the village that was their target. Chintithpit-mang watched the numbers dropping on his altimeter.
Now
. He opened the zipper. Air puffed away. He crawled out of the fabric and let it fall away into the wind. The land was yellow and brown, crossed by a white line of road, and now was a good time to learn if his flexwing would open. It popped out by itself, and dragged at the air, unfolding as pressurized gas filled the struts. His senses spun as blood tried to settle into his feet. The landing shoe on a hind foot had been jerked almost loose. He bent his head and stretched to adjust it; his digits would just reach that far.
The shoes prisoned his toes: big, clumsy platforms of foamed material that would flatten on impact so that the bones of his feet would not likewise flatten.
He looked for other flexwings. The colors of his Octuple were rose and black and green. He found six others and steered toward them. One missing. Where?
The land drifted: He steered above the road that the crater had broken, then along the road toward the city. Six flexwings moved into line behind him. Still one missing. And no way to avoid the ground now. The planet was all there was.
Details expanded. Three dots scrambled from a tiny vehicle to lie by the side of the road. He steered toward them. They grew larger, LARGER! Chintithpit-mang bellowed and pulled back in his harness to catch more air in his flexwing, increasing lift, striving desperately to avoid contact with the planet.
The planet slammed against his feet. They stung. His landing shoes were smashed flat. He stripped them off, dropped his flexwing and looked about him.
Big. Planets were big.
* * *
A line of insect-sized flyers converged toward the town ahead. Those weren’t parachutes. "Delta wings," Harry Red murmured. "Hang gliders." The shapes hanging under the delta wings were not human.
Harry ran to the bike and lifted the seat. The .45 Government Model felt comfortable in his hand, and the slide worked with a satisfying click, but the secure feeling the big pistol usually gave him was entirely lacking.
A group of hang gliders broke away from the formation and came toward them. They split into two groups, one on either side of them.
Melissa peered through the binoculars. "Elephants," she said. "Baby elephants."
Jeri grabbed the glasses. Then she began to laugh. She handed the glasses to Harry.
He said, "That funny, eh?’ and looked.
Baby elephants with two trunks drifted out of the sky beneath paper airplanes. Harry chortled. They were wearing tall, conspicuous elevator shoes. He laughed outright. Rifles with bayonets were slung over their backs. Harry stopped laughing.
Two lines of delta-wing gliders swept along a hundred yards to either side of them. They were sinking fast into the wheat fields. A much larger group had drifted over Logan.
"Let’s get the hell out of here!" Harry shouted. He raised the bike.
It wouldn’t start. Laying it on its side in the dirt hadn’t been a good idea. The smell of gas was strong.
The electric starter whirred again. The engine caught. Harry turned the bike—
A delta-wing craft glided onto the road half a mile behind them. The Invader came down hard. It freed its weapon, then stepped out of the elevator shoes. Other gliders settled to each side. A much larger vehicle swept overhead: a flat oval with upward-pointing fins. It glided along the road, settling slowly, until it landed more than a mile away.
"We’re surrounded." Jeri sounded tired, already defeated.
"Let’s go," Harry ordered. "Out in the fields. Get out there and lay low. Go on, now."
Jeri took Melissa’s hand and dragged her off into the wheat fields. They left an obvious trail behind them. The wheat stalks were thickly planted, and you couldn’t move through without knocking some of them down.
We can’t hide. Maybe they don’t want us
. Harry took a fresh grip on the pistol and followed.
* * *
Eight-cubed Leader Harpanet kept only the vaguest memories of his fall.
Bubbles had streamed from digit ship Number Twenty-six into a dark blue sky and were instantly lost in immensity. Far, far below, a vast rippling white landscape waited for him. Voices chattered through a background of static; voices called his name. He didn’t answer.
He might have spoken anytime during the years of preparation. He’d heard lectures on planetary weather: the variations in temperature, "wind chill factor," and the Coriolis forces that cause air to whirl with force sufficient to tear dwellings apart: A vast worldwide storm accidentally formed, beyond the control of fithp. The Predecessors’ messages tried to tell us. Random death in the life support system!
Harpanet had been in the Breaker group, trying to learn of the prey. They’d watched broadcasts that leaked through the target world’s atmosphere. I can’t make sense of these pictures. They don’t mean anything. The more he knew, the more alien they seemed. Breaker Takpusseh could live with his ignorance and wait to learn more. To Harpanet, these are not fithp at all. They build tools, and they kill, and we will never know more.
Others of the spaceborn had had private interviews with Fistarteh-thuktun, and later been taken from the lists of Winterhome-bound soldiers. What they told the priest must have resembled his own thoughts: I can’t stand it. The things who will try to kill me are the least of it. I fear the air and I fear the land, and I can’t tolerate the thought of an ocean! They were shunned thereafter. Their mothers never mentioned them again.
Harpanet could have joined the dissidents. He had kept his silence.
He kept it now. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t make a sound save for a thin keening like the keening of the air through which he fell. The thin skin of the bubble rippled under the atmosphere’s buffeting. The sky grew more inaccessible every second.
He was late to open his bubble. The flexwing popped and the struts began to expand before it was clear. Harpanet shrieked. He was falling toward a rippling white landscape, vast in extent, and his collapsed bubble was still tangled around his flexwing. He clawed his way up the suspension harness and forced his digits under the fabric against the resistance of the inflated struts, and pulled. The planet’s white face came up to smash him.
It was nothing. He fell through it without resistance. He was still clawing at the bubble fabric, and suddenly it was floating loose above him. He had to nerve himself to let go of the flexwing; and only then did it begin to drag at the air until he was flying.
It was some time before he recovered enough to look for other flexwings.
He found a swarm of midges far away. Away from the sun. It is late in the day. The planet turns away from the star. My warriors are spinward.
The octuples under his command had steered toward their place on the rim of the great circle on the Herdmaster’s map. The circle would converge. Defenses would be erected. Digit ships would presently pick them up and return them to the darkness, the immensity, the security of space.
A rise of land blocked his view of the other wings. Undulations of yellow fur streamed beneath him, terribly fast, and Harpanet had seconds in which to learn to fly. Through his terror came a single memory, that lifting the fore edge of the flexwing would cause him to slow and rise. He slid back in the harness. The wing rose, and slowed . . . and hovered, and dropped, and picked up speed, and hurled him against the dirt. He rolled. The harness rolled with him; the flexwing wrapped around him; one of the struts hissed in his face as his bayonet punctured it. When he finally managed to disentangle himself, his radio was dead. One knee was twisted, so that he could walk on three legs only. Gravity pulled at him.
It was an experience he would never want to remember. But he was sixty-fours of makasrupkithp to antispinward from his assigned landing point.
* * *
Jenny woke with a start. A duty sergeant was standing over her. He chattered excitedly. "Right now, Major. The Admiral wants you in the war room now; it’s an emergency. There’s an invasion."
Invasion?
She sat up. "All right, Sergeant. I’m coming." "Now, Major—"
"I heard you. Thank you."
"Yes, ma’am."
She dressed quickly, putting on combat fatigues. He hadn’t said anything about sidearms. We’re at war, but surely they weren’t invading Colorado Springs!
When she reached the war room she wasn’t so sure.
Admiral Carrell, still in civilian clothes, was in one of the balcony offices overlooking the control room. Jenny stood outside the door, wondering what to do.
"Come in, Major." Carrell pointed to the big screens below. They showed Kansas and southern Nebraska dotted with red flashes and hand-drawn gray squares. Jenny stared for a moment, trying to understand.
"We don’t have symbols for a parachute invasion of Kansas," Admiral Carrell said. "So we had to draw them in. Not that it means much, since we don’t know all the places they’re landing."
"Are all those red marks nuclear strikes?" Jenny asked.
"Probably none of them," Carrell said. "So far they haven’t used nukes. They haven’t had to."
"No, sir." Kinetic energy weapons. Throw big rocks.
An Army lieutenant general bustled in. He wore combat fatigues and he’d buckled on his pistol.
"You’ve met General Toland," Carrell said. "No? General, Major Crichton is my assistant. What’s the score, Harvey?"
"Damned if I know. Thor, this doesn’t make sense. They can’t possibly be invading Kansas. I don’t care how goddam big that ship is; it can’t hold that many troops."
"Then what are they doing?"
General Toland shoo
k his head.
Carrel said, "Jenny, I want you to get those sci-fi gentry together and get them working. You can use the big briefing room. Get TV monitors set up, get maps, get coffee, get whiskey, hell, get them prostitutes if that’s what they want, but get me some explanations!"
* * *
Harry lay in the wheat field and sweated. There was a hot wind and bright sun, but he’d have sweated in a blizzard.
He couldn’t see the road, but he heard a vehicle on it. The motor didn’t sound like anything Harry had ever heard before.
Now there were sounds in the wheat. Someone—something—was coming.
The wheat was too thick to see through. His world had shrunk to five yards or less. He could just see Melissa’s bright head scarf. Should have told her to take it off. Too late now. Not that we can hide anyway.
The sounds came closer. They were all around him.
What the fuck do I do?
The pistol held no comfort for him. He wasn’t a good shot. He remembered a merc who’d served in Africa telling him about elephants. They were hard to stop, harder to kill. You had to hit them just right. A .45 probably wouldn’t even bother one, not unless he hit a vital spot— They aren’t elephants. Maybe they’re not as tough. And maybe I don’t know where the vital spots are
. He heard Jeri scream, and then two shots from her Walther. Melissa’s scarf bounced up, then something happened and she disappeared into the wheat. There was nothing to shoot at. Harry leaped to his feet and ran toward the sound.
As he did, he heard something behind him. He turned—
An elephant was charging him. Another closed in from the side. They were wearing hooded coats! Harry held out the pistol and fired. The elephant kept coming. A flurry of whips lashed his arm and side, spinning him around, tearing the pistol from his hand.
The other elephant came toward him. The trunk was built like a cat-o’-nine-tails; it held a bayoneted rifle. The bayonet was pointed at his throat. "Melissa! Run!" Jeri screamed. Harry turned to go to her.