Vilcabamba

Vilcabamba Harry Turtledove

illustration by Jason Chan

The President of the United States looked out of an Oval Office window at Grand Junction, Colorado. The Oval Office was square, but the President’s workplace kept its traditional name. Harris Moffatt III sighed and bent to his paperwork again. Even in Grand Junction, that never disappeared.

Washington, D.C., remained the de jure capital of the United States. Harris Moffatt III had never been there. Neither had his father, President Harris Moffatt II. His grandfather, President Harris Moffatt I, got out of Washington one jump ahead of the Krolp. That the USA was still any kind of going concern came from his ever-so-narrow escape.

Harris Moffatt III was also Prime Minister of Canada, or of that small and mountainous chunk of Canada the Krolp didn’t control. The two countries had amalgamated early on, the better to resist the invading aliens. That, of course, was before they realized how far out of their weight they were fighting.

When the enormous ships were first detected, between Mars’ orbit and Earth’s, every nation radioed messages of welcome and greeting. The Krolp ignored them all. The enormous ships landed. There were still videos--Harris Moffatt III had them on his computer--of human delegations greeting the aliens with bouquets and bands playing joyful music. At last! Contact with another intelligent race! Proof we weren’t alone in the universe!

“Better if we were,” the President muttered. When the Krolp came out, they came out shooting. Some of those fifty-year-old videos broke off quite abruptly. And “shooting” was the understatement of the millennium. Their weapons made ours seem like kids’ slingshots against machine guns.

Seeing how the Krolp wanted things to go, half a dozen militaries launched H-bomb-tipped missiles at the great ships. They couldn’t live through that, could they? As a matter of fact, they could. Most of the missiles got shot down. Most of the ones that did land on target didn’t go off. And the handful that did harmed the Krolpish ships not a bit and the rampaging, plundering aliens running around loose very little.

They weren’t invulnerable. Humans could kill them. Unless somebody got amazingly lucky, the usual cost was about two armored divisions and all their matériel for one Krolp. Back in the old days, the United States was the richest country in the world. All the pre-Krolp books said so. Not even it could spend men and equipment on that scale.

Back before the Krolp came, a fellow named Clarke had written, Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Harris Moffatt III didn’t know about that. What the Krolp did wasn’t magic. The best scientists in the USA--the best ones left alive, anyhow--had been studying captured or stolen Krolpish gadgets for half a century now. Their conclusion was that the aliens manipulated gravity and the strong and weak forces as thoroughly as humans exploited electromagnetism.

Humans could use Krolpish devices and weapons. They could even use them against the invaders, for as long as they kept working. What humans couldn’t do was make more such devices themselves. The machines weren’t there. Neither was the theory. And neither was the engineering to turn theory into practice.

And so Harris Moffatt III ruled an attenuated state between the Rockies and the Wasatch Range. He understood too well that he ruled here not least because the Krolp hadn’t yet taken the trouble to overrun this rump USA (and Canada).

From everything he’d heard, the United States still was the richest country in the world. The richest human-ruled country, anyhow. And if that wasn’t a telling measure of mankind’s futility in the face of the aliens, Harris Moffatt III was damned if he could figure out what would be.

• • •

His appointments secretary stuck his head into the Oval Office. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but Grelch wants to see you.”

“Tell him I’ll be with him in a few minutes, Jack,” Moffatt said. “I really do need to study this appropriations bill.” Calling the economy in the independent USA rotten would have praised it too much. So would calling it hand-to-mouth. Robbing Peter to pay Paul came closest, except Paul mostly got an IOU instead.

Jack Pagliarone turned to pass the news on to Grelch--but Grelch didn’t wait to hear it. The Krolp shoved past the appointments secretary and into the office. “I see you, Moffatt,” he said--loudly--in his own language.

“I see you, Grelch,” Harris Moffatt III answered--resignedly--also in Krolpish. There was a lot of Grelch to see. He was big as a horse: bigger, because he was a tiger-striped centauroid with a head like a vampire jack-o’-lantern. He had sharp, jagged jaw edges--they weren’t exactly teeth, but they might as well have been--and enormous eyes that glowed like a cat’s. He smelled more like Limburger cheese than anything else.