Short Stories (22 page)

The Secretary of Alien Affairs lingered. “I was poking around in the library at Mesa State the other day,” he remarked, with luck not apropos of nothing.

“Okay,” the President said. The college library held mostly human knowledge. Education in things Krolpish hadn’t trickled through the system even now. The chaos of the past half-century had a lot to do with that. Educators’ slowness had even more. Moffatt went on, “You found something interesting?”

“Might be. Might be just depressing,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs replied.

“That’s what I need, all right,” Moffatt said. “And you’re going to tell me about it, aren’t you?”

“Unless you don’t want me to, sir.”

“Oh, go ahead,” the President said. “It can’t possibly make me feel worse than I do when I think about telling Prilk no.”

“You could still tell him yes,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs said.

“That doesn’t do me any good, either,” Harris Moffatt III said, shaking his head. “So go on. Say your say. Depress me some more.”

“Er . . . Yes, Mr. President. You probably know the Spaniards conquered the Incas in Peru six hundred years ago.”

“Sure.” Now Moffatt nodded. He remembered that from studying history, too. And Peru--or the mountainous, inaccessible parts of Peru--still maintained a precarious freedom from the Krolp. Moffatt had exchanged a few messages with el Presidente. That was as much as either one of them could hope to do. “What about it?”

“The Incas never knew what hit ’em. They were just starting to use bronze. They didn’t even write. The Spaniards had guns. They had armor. They had swords. They rode horses. They . . . Well, to make a long story short, they had three thousand years on the Incas. The Native Americans fought like hell, and it didn’t do ’em one goddamn bit of good.”

Harris Moffatt III felt an unpleasant frisson. Given his circumstances, how could he not? “What goes around comes around. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Not exactly, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs said, which wasn’t reassuring to Moffatt. His advisor went on, “The Incas who didn’t give up built a new town called Vilcabamba, in the jungle on the east side of the Andes. Their ruler--the Inca--lived there, and his court, and stuff like that. And they tried to . . . to adapt to what had happened to them.”

“What do you mean, adapt?” Moffatt asked.

“They learned whatever they could. They stole horses and swords. Some of them became Christians--mostly to keep the Spaniards off their backs, I think, but also because their own gods weren’t doing them much good. But other ways, too, littler ways. Some of the houses there had tile roofs instead of the thatch they’d always used before.”

“Huh,” the President said uneasily, remembering the LED display that aped a real Krolpish minisun. He asked the obvious question: “What happened to them?”

“They hung on for about forty years. They had trouble with their renegades, too,” the Secretary of Alien Affairs said. “Then the Spaniards finally got sick of their nuisance raids and overran them.”

“We’ve lasted longer than they did, anyhow,” Harris Moffatt III said. “We’ve just got to keep on doing it, that’s all.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State replied. What else was he supposed to say?

• • •

Prilk and his guards waited impassively in the square. “Well, Moffatt, what is it going to be?”

“You can’t mine silver on our land,” Moffatt said. “You would ruin our whole country”--what’s left of our whole country--”if you did.”

“We are going to mine that silver,” the Krolpish envoy said, his voice flat and hard. “You cannot stop us from doing it. Because you cannot stop us, you cannot say in truth that the land is yours.”

“If your folk come onto our land without our leave, you will see what we can do,” Harris Moffatt III said. His son was already on his way back to the free USA from St. Louis. He hoped.

Prilk let out flatulent Krolpish laughter. “I foul myself in fear,” he said.

A sarcastic Krolp was the very last thing the President needed. “You will see,” he repeated. “Tell Governor Vrank the land is ours, the silver is ours, and he may not have it.”

Prilk leaned his torso forward, toward the President. As with humans, that meant earnestness among the Krolp. “Moffatt, you had better think again. You have no hope of winning.”

“We have no hope if you trash our country, either,” Moffatt said, which was nothing but the truth.

“But we would not interfere with you if you did not act like a fool,” Prilk said.

“If I did what you told me to do, you mean,” Moffatt replied. “And you would interfere with the United States. You would interfere badly. That interferes with me.”

“You will be sorry,” Prilk warned.

“I am already sorry. Everyone on Earth is sorry. We are sorry you ever found us,” the President said.

“Which has nothing to do with how many claws are on a franggel’s foot,” Prilk said.

Harris Moffatt III had never seen a franggel. Come to that, neither had Prilk. The Krolp had hunted them to extinction hundreds of years before. They lingered on in proverbs, though. The President had heard this one many times before. Nothing to do with the price of beer, an English-speaking human probably would have said. But he’d heard about a franggel’s foot even in English. Krolpish phrases, Krolpish ideas, gained. Human notions retreated. Pretty soon, they’d have nowhere to retreat to.

Vilcabamba.

The President hadn’t imagined he’d remember the name of the place, not while the Secretary of Alien Affairs was yakking about it. He also hadn’t imagined he would sympathize with the poor befuddled Inca holdouts who’d tried to hang on to their old way of life there. If the Krolp started strip-mining in Utah, the old American way of life, or what was left of it, was gone forever.

“Envoy Prilk, we will fight to stop you,” he repeated, his voice firmer than it had been a few minutes earlier.

“Moffatt, we will eat your brains, if you have any.” Prilk turned and walked away. His guards formed up around him. If the humans wanted to start fighting now, they were ready. Here, though, human and Krolpish customs coincided. The envoy was suffered to leave in peace. Trouble would start soon, but not yet. Not quite yet.

• • •

The free United States had to keep the Krolp away from the place in northeastern Utah under which they’d found silver. If the aliens started mining, they would turn too much of what was left of the country into a place not worth inhabiting. But the free USA also needed to show the Krolp that fighting a war for the silver would be more expensive than it was worth.

If we can, Harris Moffatt III thought gloomily. If we can.

He’d already got out of Grand Junction by then. He’d pulled north to Craig, Colorado, just in case. He sat in front of a microphone that led to an AM sending unit. AM radio had been almost extinct even on Earth when the Krolp came. To the striped centauroids, it was as one with hand axes and bows and arrows. That made it as secure a communications system as humanity had left. Smoke signals were primitive, too, but as long as the Native Americans could read them and the U.S. Cavalry couldn’t . . .

“Execute Plan Seventeen,” Moffatt said into the mike. “I repeat--execute Plan Seventeen.”

In the room next to his, an engineer flicked a switch, then lifted his thumb in the air. The order had gone out, and now the radio was off again. The cavalry could learn what smoke signals meant, and the Krolp--or the human traitors who served them--might monitor the AM band. You never could tell.

Moffatt’s mouth twisted. Oh, yes, you could. Whatever the aliens did drove more nails into the coffin of human freedom. It wasn’t even always intended to, but it did.

They didn’t attack the instant Prilk left the free USA. The President had feared they might. That would have complicated things for the United States--complicated them even worse than they were already. But, although Moffatt had feared a sudden assault, he hadn’t really expected one. The Krolp were so arrogant, they had trouble believing human beings still dared to tell them no and mean it.

He wished he could launch thermonuclear-tipped missiles at all the increasingly Krolpified cities in the occupied United States. In point of fact, he could; it wasn’t as if he didn’t have them. The only trouble was, they wouldn’t do much good. The Krolp would swat them out of the air with contemptuous ease.

No, you couldn’t stand toe to toe with the centauroids and slug. First they’d stand on your toes. Then they’d stand on you.

Well, the Native Americans couldn’t slug things out with the U.S. Cavalry. They still drove it crazy for a hell of a long time. They also lost in the end, something Harris Moffatt III didn’t care to dwell upon.

He and his Department of Defense experts monitored as many Krolpish channels as they could. They had to rely on bought and stolen devices; they could no more make the communicators the aliens used than Geronimo could have manufactured a telegraph clicker. But the aliens weren’t very good at keeping things secret from humans. They didn’t think they needed to bother, and most of the time they were right.

A major brought Moffatt a report: “The Subgovernor of the South Central Region has been taken ill. He’s in a Krolpish hospital. They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with him.”

“I hope it’s nothing trivial,” Moffatt said.

“Me, too, Mr. President.” The major grinned. He wore one broad red stripe on each of his collar tabs to show his rank. That was a human adaptation of the Krolpish system. Once upon a time, the USA had used rank badges of its own. Harris Moffatt III happened to know that. What they were, he couldn’t have said. He’d never seen them. A few antiquarians might know, if the free United States still boasted antiquarians.

More reports floated into the free USA. Krolp administrators and their human flunkies came down with exotic illnesses or sudden cases of loss of life. A Krolpish flyer--which bore about the same relationship to a 797 airliner as the airliner did to a paper plane--slammed into the ground, killing several aliens and injuring several more. (Most survived unharmed. The Krolp built tough.) Bridges and overpasses mysteriously--or not so mysteriously--collapsed.

We can hurt you, the free USA was saying, as loud as it could. We can cause you more trouble than you thought we could.

So far, so good. Pretty soon, though, the Krolp would have some things of their own to say. Moffatt didn’t care to listen to them. As far as the Krolp were concerned, that meant less than nothing.

The free USA was as ready as it could be. Soldiers guarded the passes through which the centauroids were likeliest to come. The ground was mined, sometimes with nuclear explosives. The blasts wouldn’t bother the Krolp much. The avalanches they were positioned to set off would do more . . . everyone hoped.

Winning wasn’t in the cards. The President knew as much. Fifty years of bitter experience had taught him as much--him and the rest of the handful of surviving independent human leaders. Living, and living free, to fight another day was as much as he could hope for.

He got reports that Krolpish forces were advancing on both the Rockies and the Wasatch Range. That didn’t sound good. Neither did the fact that one of those reports cut off all at once, as if the human sending it got interrupted. Fatally interrupted? Moffatt didn’t know. It gave him one extra thing to worry about, as if he needed any more.

And Grelch disappeared. Even Craig, Colorado, didn’t feel safe enough to suit the renegade. He had no confidence that the free USA could hold the line against his own people.

“Don’t worry about it, Mr. President,” the Secretary of Defense said. “The Krolp always underestimate us. We never would have been able to hang on this long if they didn’t.”

“I know,” Moffatt said, wishing the Cabinet official hadn’t tacked on that last sentence. In the hierarchy of wishes, though, that was only a sprat. As always, the big fish was wishing the Krolp had never found Earth. Yes, and wish for the moon while you’re at it, the President thought. Had they found anything on it they wanted, the Krolp would have strip-mined the moon, too.

Two days later, the centauroids started hitting back. That was the day after the assassination attempt against Governor Vrank failed. It took out several of his guards and quite a few merely human minions, but Vrank survived. And he was not happy, any more than a cat the mice had tried to bell.

Perhaps because the Governor of North America wasn’t happy, his soldiers slammed headlong into the free USA’s defenses. The Krolp killed far more humans than they lost themselves. They always did. But they didn’t get very far, not with that first thrust. If humans spent enough blood and laid enough traps beforehand, they could slow down the alien invaders.

They could. For a while. The idea was to make the mining scheme unprofitable for the Krolp. That was the human idea, anyhow. But the Krolp had ideas of their own. One of those ideas was not to let the backward natives get uppity and start thinking they could push their betters around.

Quite suddenly, Grand Junction ceased to exist. That wasn’t an H-bomb, though it might as well have been. But Harris Moffatt III hadn’t just slipped away from Grand Junction by himself. He’d feared the Krolp would strike his capital. People started slipping out as soon as he told Prilk he would fight. Most of them were safe. So were most of the data stored in Grand Junction, and even some of the factories that had been there.

Craig was unlikely to last long, either. Moffatt and his advisers moved farther north still, up into an even smaller town. As long as you had radio, where you were didn’t matter too much.

That all made good military sense. So did stopping the enemy when he came at you. Surprising the Krolp once hadn’t been too hard. Neither had disrupting them behind their lines. But disrupting them wasn’t the same as killing them all, and killing them all was what the free USA really needed. The centauroids shook off the disruption. They weren’t so easily surprised the second time they attacked.

And the American defenses crumbled. Human-made arms never did much against the Krolp. Captured, stolen, or bought alien hand weapons performed like--well, like hand weapons against the full weight of Krolpish military might. As well turn a .357 magnum on a tank. You could, sure, but how much good would it do you?