The Man-Kzin Wars 07

CHAPTER 2

My first-year politics tutorials this week dealt with Nazi foreign policy and the lead-up to the war. I decided to loosen things a bit and just generally chat… How strange that university politics students should never have heard of the little ships that took the British Expeditionary Force off the beaches in May 1940. Or de Gaulle. Or a Spitfire. No knowledge of any of it… This was the stuff that was supposed never to be forgotten thirty, forty years ago. Next week we do the Holocaust…

– Letter to the author, October 10,1991

Snow whirled round. A snarling roar shook the eardrums. Over the crest of a snow-covered ridge a saber-toothed head appeared, fangs dripping. With a single fluid motion the feline leaped to the top of the rock, poised for a moment, the eyes in its flat head blazing at us.

I caught myself flinching, sudden instinctive terror mixing with awe at the size and malevolence of the thing. Shrieking, the great cat launched itself through the air at us, its body suddenly seeming to elongate to an impossible narrowness.

It passed between us and there was a scream of animal pain and terror as its huge incisors sank into its prey. Blood spurted.

Arthur Guthlac turned off the holo, and the Pleistocene gallery faded.

"Kids love it," he said. "For some reason the Smilodon's even more popular than Tyrannosaurus Rex these days.”

"Love it! It actually scared me!”

"Preschool children still have vestiges of the savage in them. You of all people should understand that. They like to be scared. They like a bit of bloodshed too.”

"I'm aware of it," I told him. "Part of my job is to detect antisocial behavior early. And I don't particularly like to be scared.”

Guthlac laughed. A laugh with an edge in it.

"But you, my dear Karl, are a mature, adjusted human being. Not one of our little savages.”

Warm air flowed gently round as the gallery returned to its normal temperature. A voice announced the museum would be closing in ten minutes as we stepped out of the gallery into the corridor.

I wondered if he was aware of the real meaning of the word 'adjusted' in my case. It probably didn't matter.

"That's better," I told him. "You make this place a lot too cold for comfort.”

"The Pleistocene was cold. That's why you had the mammoth and mastodon, the cave bear and the dire wolf and the saber-toothed tiger. Big bodies save heat. An age of giants and ice. Then a monkey adapted to the cold by growing a big brain and that was the end of the story.”

"I know that. But we're not in the Pleistocene now. I don't know how you can choose to work in these conditions.”

"Well, the idea is we should at least know our planets past. What's the point of a historical display if it isn't real? Nature really was red in tooth and claw once. Remember the Africa Rover.”

"A good deal too red in tooth and claw for me to want to know about, thanks. I'll leave that to the children. But you know I don't mean you putting up with cold air currents and nasty holograms. I mean spending your life here.”

"Look at this," said Arthur. He touched a display of letters below a permanent reproduction of a great felinoid. "It's a poem from an ancient children's book on paleontology called Whirlaway: 'The Song of the Saber-Tooth':”

On all the weaker beasts I work my sovereign will. Their flesh supplies my feasts, my glory is to kill. With claws and teeth that rend, with eyes that pierce the gloom I follow to the end my duty and my doom. For I shall meet one day a beast of greater might, And if I cannot slay I'll die in rapturous fight

"Don't you think it's got a sort of ring to it?”

It was my job, but I still found myself rather shocked, not just at the antisocial content of the poem, but because it seemed unpleasantly close to holos and flats I had been studying. Why had he chosen it to quote? "Do you think that's really suitable for children?" I asked.

"I don't think it can do any harm to show what prehistory – prehuman history – was like. You don't feel any sense of wonder looking back at the mammoth, the cave bear and the dire wolf?”

"Well, a bit, I suppose.”

"You can be creative here.”

Arthur turned to a smaller holo in a cabinet by the door leading into the main diorama space. A hominid on the shore of an alkaline lake screamed and ran from another great cat. Other hominids jerked up from their clam gathering to scatter before it. Long-extinct birds rose in a screaming cloud. This time the saber-tooth was foiled. Geological and evolutionary time had passed since the first scene. The hominids were taller and some of them had sticks.

The guard operated another switch and the scene changed again.

"We have a lot of things to do here. This is a new one for the children. Our might-have-beens." He spoke to a pane! and a succession of prehistoric animals appeared, altered.

"You can do your own genetic engineering here: These are how our friends might have developed had conditions been different." He turned a dial and the holos changed. "Look! Here other creatures got the big brains.”

Tigerlike creatures walked improbably erect, with fanciful tigerish cities in the background.

"It's been worked out what might have happened.”

There was something here. I didn't understand it, but there was a hint of a scent. Had something been planted here?

Not, I thought, by Arthur Guthlac. All that was marked in his file was a certain interest in unsuitable games and reading, perhaps an occupational risk for someone in his job, and a general restlessness and reluctance to apply himself (apply himself to what?). Further, I had already checked that he had no conceivable financial or other links with anyone or anything that might profit from stories of space madness. I kept my voice casual.

"Yes, I'm sure the children love it. But all the same, you must get sick of it, day after day. I don't know why you bother with such a job. If you want to work, there are plenty of better things to do.”

"No," he said, "I don't really get sick of it. It can be fun working with the holos. The children can make it fun, too. In any case, what else should I be doing? Nobody's going to send me into space, are they?" There was resentment buried somewhere there, I noted. Buried none too deeply, at that.

"This wing is largely a children's museum, as far as display goes," he continued. "Which is why they have human guides, of course. You know it's impossible to make anything child-proof if they're left to run loose without supervision. A lot of the equipment here is expensive.”

Arthur paused and then added, "And, after all, Karl, history is important.”

"Of course it is. But the world is full of people telling themselves their hobbies are important. We've all got a great deal of leisure time to fill. All right, I agree we need people doing what you are doing. But you wanted to go into space once.”

"What good is an amateur savant in space? They sent plenty of real professors to Wunderland, but someone like me would only take up valuable room on a colony ship. I know.

"I applied a long time ago… I have no skill that would justify the expense of transporting me, or will allow me to earn enough money to pay my own way. One family seems to have been rationed to one space-farer. But you haven't heard me complaining, have you?”

"Not in so many words." I kept my voice neutral. There was nothing to be gained by thinking of why I would never be allowed very far into space.

His sister, I knew, was a navigator on the Happy Gatherer, a genius, genetic engineer turned space pilot. He was proud of her and, I guessed, subconsciously resentful.

"Anyway, look at this." Arthur opened another door onto a vast panorama of the asteroid belt, as seen from the surface of Ceres, the rocky landscape lit by the blue-white fusion flame of a miners ship passing closer than a real ship would ever be allowed.

He touched another switch, and we seemed to stand on the red surface of Mars. Our feet disappeared in dust.

"You can do a lot with holos," Arthur said. "Being a gallery supervisor can be a lot of fun if the museums big enough and has VR as good as we have here.”

He gestured. "Do you want to see our Great Moments in History? The Sportsman's Hall of Fame? The panorama of the Olympic Games? The Hall of Music? We've got it all here. Science, the history of space flight: Werner von Braun sending up the first V-2?" He pointed down the hall, to the strange yet familiar shape of the historic weather-research rocket's replica suspended from the ceiling.

"There's the Shame Gallery, too, the displays of creatures we exterminated, like the trusting dodo bird. But the truth of the matter is I like working in the museum because we have an excellent library here. I'd still like to do something in the field of prehistory. Somehow.”

The main doors of the great building whispered shut. On Arthur's computer a pattern of green lights appeared, as surveillance monitors locked into a nighttime control center. Security was light, a precaution against accident more than crime.

A holo showed an outline of the complex, secured sections turning green, the last departing visitors white flashing dots of light. A few red dots for the skeleton human staff who would monitor the surveillance screens and occasionally patrol the corridors during the night. Cleaning and maintenance machines began to stir:

"I'm off duty now. I'm glad you made this visit, Karl,”

"Its been a long time. I thought it would be a good idea if we caught up with each other.”

"Well, we're closing down now. Would you like to come home for a while?”

"Would your family mind an uninvited guest?”

"I live alone. I thought you knew.”

"Well, I've no engagements tonight. The little savages are having their tapes played to them by now. Yes, all right. Thank you.”

We stepped into a transit-tube. Arthur Guthlac's quarters, I guessed from the near-instantaneous passage, were somewhere in the museum complex itself.

Psychologically the rooms were easy to read. There were high-detail models of spaceships, a deep-space exploration vessel dominating them, and a flat map of the interstellar colonies.

Arthur was ARM, of course, with some clearances. Most of the museum personnel, certainly all the general staff, were under the organizations wing, even if they had no idea of what its real size and ramifications were (for that matter, I was well aware that I knew very little of that myself). They came in contact with too much history for any other arrangement to be conceivable.

Anyone involved with history had ARM's eye on them, and it was better to have such people inside the organization than out. We could afford that now. The occasional secret covens of military fantasists we came across – the Sir Kays and Lady Helens with their ceremonies and Namings – were a continuing if diminishing nuisance but were no longer seen as any real threat, and with modern medical science the organ banks had long been closed.

Still, our present problem was before us and there is wisdom in the book of sports about keeping your eye on the ball. I took him through most of what Alfred O'Brien had told me, with the major visuals. He thought it over for a while, then he said:

"Show me the picture of the skull again… It’s odd, but this almost reminds me of something." "A skull is a skull, surely." I didn't tell him that it almost reminded me of something, too. "Yes, but, somewhere, somehow, I've got a feeling I've seen something like this before." "It's a pretty freakish-looking thing," I said. "So it should be easy to identify." He turned to a computer terminal. "We've got a good identification program here for type specimens," he said. "Let me scan this in." He placed the picture in the slot and we waited as the display began to reel off numbers. "We've got all the major type specimens here," he said, "but not the oddities." He pressed more keys. "It's too much," he said after a while. "I was wrong. We'd have to write a new program to get anything in the next month or so." "Surely not. I know these programs. They can carry virtually unlimited data. That's what they're for!" "Yes, when the data's been given to them. This hasn't been. There is, it seems, no general catalogue of freaks." "We'll have to go through this practically museum by museum," he said after a minute. "This is broken down into ancient national collections, even provincial – as you probably know, most animal classification is very old and often parochial. It should have been updated, but it never has been. I don't even know what some of these countries were, let alone the districts and provinces!" I thought of the poem the controller had shown me. "Start with Australia," I said. The screens rolled briefly. Guthlac shook his head. The poem seemed to exist in isolation, and read in full seemed to have been concerned with quantum mechanics.

"There are no true felines native to Australia," he said after a while. "The Tasmanian tiger and so forth were marsupials – convergent evolution." "Perhaps some sort of convergent evolution is what we're after." More figures. Then lines of text. "Abnormal feline morphology… teratology… " Guthlac read, muttering to himself. "Convergent evolution… See… “

He began to punch up pictures of fanged skulls. None had a cranium anything like the skull in the picture the crew of the Angel's Pencil had sent back. "That's all the Australian collection has," he said. "Ordinary felines imported from elsewhere for zoos and so forth, domestic cats and a few convergent marsupials… Did you know there was once a marsupial lion? Died with the rest of the megafauna when man got there, though. Their main natural history concern as far as cats are involved seems to have been with the effects of domestics gone feral.”

Gone feral. It sounded a funny concept to apply to animals. Its ARM usage was reserved to apply to a certain rare type of human. "Yes. The life-forms there had evolved in isolation, and had no defenses when the cats came with bigger teeth and claws and quicker reflexes. They wiped out a lot of species.”

Was that why the hoaxers had chosen cats, I wondered? Some play on subconscious associations? When the cats came. The words seemed to hang in the air for a moment. Then: "Wait… here's something else… the Vaughn Tiger-Man." "What's that?" Was there the faintest ripple of memory somewhere in my own mind at the words? "A tiger killed in India in 1878 by Captain, later Colonel, Henry Vaughn of the Fourth Lancers." "What name did you say?" An alarm bell rang in my mind. "Vaughn." He spelled it out. One of the Angel's Pencil's crew was named Vaughn.

"What are lancers, do you suppose?" "I don't know. What's a colonel?" As a matter of fact I knew what a colonel was, and from that I could guess what lancers had been, but there was no point in letting Arthur Guthlac know that. I made a mental note that these natural history records needed editing. And I saw from his body language, plainly, that he was lying too. He knew what those terms meant.

"Go on," I said.

"This is an old journal. Produced by some amateur natural history society. Colonel Henry Vaughn killed an abnormal tiger." "But they're protected species!" "Not then. And this one was a man-eater." We knew that phrase: 'Man-eater' had been a term of sensational horror recently. A boutique airship, carrying tourists slowly and silently fifty feet above the African savanna, had developed engine trouble and landed. The passengers in their closed and comfortable gondola need have only waited a few hours for rescue – less if they had said it was urgent. But they had left the craft and wandered out, apparently unaware of any danger. It had been a sobering thought during the investigation which followed that any of us might have done the same. Arthur went on.

"He kept the skull and skin and settled in Australia later. But it's not in the Australian Museum collection. When he died his family gave the skull to the British Museum.”

"Is there a picture of it?”

"Yes. But it's only a drawing. And half of it is missing.”

"Let me see.”

Half a two-dimensional drawing. The front of a big skull, oddly distorted. There wasn't much detail, but such a skull could be the inspiration of the Jenny Hannifer. What there was of it was closer than anything else we had seen. And I felt I had seen that picture somewhere before. Somewhere connected with childhood, just as the words 'Vaughn Tiger-Man' aroused some faint chord that had something to do with long ago. I felt almost sure that I had heard that phrase before.

I closed my eyes and concentrated: an image of a big room, with giant furniture, and giants. A child's-eye view of house and parents. My giant father reading to me from a yellow-covered book? I thought that was what it was, but I couldn't be sure.

Perhaps the original illustration had been reproduced in one of those books which we discouraged:

Strange Tricks of Nature, Great Unsolved Mysteries, The Wonder-book of Marvels.

There had been a spate of them once. My father had collected them. Well, I was in a position to know where they were gone to now. More screens of numbers. Then a beeping sound, and a pointer flashing red at one of these. Guthlac scrolled down another menu and searched again. "I've located a box number for it." He said, "It’s in England, but I gather from this it's not been put on display, or not for a very long time. It was put into storage when it arrived there in 1908 and I gather it stayed there.”

"Can you get any description?”

"Not much. A sport, a freak, it says here. There was some interest in it when it was first shot. But it wasn't regarded as scientifically important. It was just a piece of gross pathology." "The only one of its kind?" "Exactly. Like the Elephant-Man. Not much for an ambitious student to make a name on there. That was a great age of biological discovery, you know, with all sorts of larger projects to occupy researchers. Vaughn wrote about it himself. Abnormal limbs and fangs and a large cranial tumor. It was grossly deformed. Pity he didn't keep the whole skeleton.”

Arthur turned to me. He seemed suddenly embarrassed. When he spoke it was with an odd hesitancy in his voice. "Karl?" "Yes?" "How important is this?" "I'm here, aren't I?" "If this does matter, then I've done ARM a service, haven't I?" "Of course." "Would there be… a reward?”

"You have a real job. Isn't that reward enough? Important work. You said so yourself. You are one of the elite twenty-five percent who have something more than sport to fill their lives. How many people out there would give all they have for that?”

"I want to get into space.”

"So save up for a few years.”

"No! Not as a passenger. I want… I want… “

His voice trailed off. I knew what he wanted. Isolated, celibate, a square peg keeping a tight hold on normality. I knew. I was glad to break the awkward silence.

"Yes. You mentioned a skin.”

"Nothing about that here." Then he burst out: "You have your hunts to enjoy!”

There was no point in arguing with him, but how wrong he was! Someone who enjoys my work in the sense I knew he meant would be useless. In any case, the mental preparation arranged for us is thorough. What I do is a duty, and not an ignoble one. Our world has – no, our worlds, plural, have – become complicated beyond imagining. There is a phrase coming into use: 'known space'. Someone has to hold it together. It has never been a matter of the hunt for its own sake, or of searching for excitement.

Warn him off. Now. Arthur had quite a lot of museum junk littering a workbench. All there legitimately, I assumed, but among it was a small heap of brown paper, the pages of old books far gone in acid decay.

"What are these?" I asked casually.

"Sports history. It's been a hobby of mine.”

"Oh." My eye caught the bottom of one of the loose pages.

At the end of March, 1943, the thaw started on the eastern front. 'Marshal Winter' gave way to the still more masterful 'Marshal Mud', and active operations came automatically to an end. All Panzer divisions and some infantry divisions were withdrawn from the front line, and the armor in the Kharkov area was concentrated under the 48th Panzer Corps. We assumed command of the 3rd, 6th and 11th Panzer divisions, together with P.G.D. Gross Deutschland. Advantage was taken of the lull to institute a thorough training program, and exercise…

He looked over my shoulder at it. "Winter Olympics, I think," he said. "They were just starting to do things on a really big scale with team games then. The Space Age year.”

It dealt with a period before the literary era I specialized in and it didn't mean a lot to me. I didn't particularly like it, but for a low-grade ARM officer to possess a few lines of old books without specific clearance was not exactly an offense, even if it might amount to skating on thinnish ice. In any case I had other things to do now.

ARM had special facilities for deep hypnosis available for people like me, since memory and association are our most unique assets.

Certain specific parts of my childhood and juvenile memory had been blocked as a routine precaution when I joined ARM but the block was intended to be bypassed in a matter of need. It wasn't perfect recall but I did bring back a clearer picture. An old, old book in my father’s collection, Great True Stories of Adventure for Boys, with a story of a strange tiger hunt and crude black-and-white line.

Although these stacks were in Dr. Humphrey's charge, he had apparently not seen it before. That was understandable. There were miles of shelving on compactus tracks.

"It's no tiger," he said. "It's like no animal I've ever seen.”

"A freak?”

"No. No tiger so abnormal would have grown to adulthood.”

"What about these lesions?”

"I've seen them on specimens before. Gunshot wounds when it was killed. And look at this!" He gestured at the literature he had brought and then down at the thing itself. "Cranial tumor indeed!”

It took the two of us to turn the skull over. He inserted a probe. "That's all braincase. Bigger than yours or mine.”

I had a picture of a skull sent by the Angel's Pencil with me. There was no mistake about the identification: the Pencil's 'alien' skull was copied from this one. I left the British Museum's storage section and headed for the archives, still as good as any in the world.

The Vaughn family were still in Australia. They had survived what happened there in 2025 and even emerged with some of their land intact and productive: The farm near the New South Wales rain forest which the colonel had retired to on his pension when all the British Empire was practically one country. I was there a few hours later.

Arthur Vaughn-Nguyen seemed cooperative when I presented myself as a Historian. He was in late middle age, probably about a hundred and ten, unattached. There was still farming going on, but robots did the work. He had two sons (so his genes must have checked out well) but they were not there. One, I gathered, was off-planet.

Perhaps he was talkative because he was bored. How many bored people there were! Or was he being too cooperative? I felt suspicious from the start. The farm had a sense of history about it, too, and not just because it belonged to one of the Survivor families.

Too much history, I thought, as I looked at some of the books and artifacts preserved in cases and along the walls of the main hall.

It was probably just as well that Vaughn-Nguyen did not know my thoughts, as I sat in his main living room with a live dog resting its head on my feet and a glass of Bungle-Bungle rum, a local delicacy said to date from Old Australia, in my hand. The family appeared to regard it as traditional. There was a suspicious amount of tradition left at the Vaughn station.

Colonel Vaughn himself was there, an ancient larger-than-life-size portrait hanging on the wall. He was rather as my reading had led me to imagine a 'colonel' might be: crook nosed, wearing an elaborate jacket called a 'uniform', with decorations on it called 'medals'. I had seen such things before, both in books and in the military fant cults. Somehow it struck me as odd and after a little thought I saw why: The man in the picture had no hair at all. No mustache, no eyebrows. It was anachronistic. I didn't think there had been a fashion for hairlessness until modern cosmetics were developed.

Probably it didn't matter. In those days men did lose their hair involuntarily. But this continuing public display of a military fant-type uniform was a different story. ARM should have paid the Vaughn-Nguyens a visit before.

A lot of this was headed for Black Hole. I wondered what compensation it would be necessary to pay the colonel's descendant for the removal of his antiques. Not much. We had destroyed the market for this sort of gear long ago.

It reminded me of something from our first training. When what is now known as ARM began the prelude to the program, as long ago as the American and French advancements at the end of the eighteenth century, it had made one of its priorities the ridiculing and destruction of the notion of hereditary titles of honor.

It was amusing (our instructor had said) to think this had been done in the names of liberty, democracy, equality and progress, when the real purpose had been to consolidate power. Even constitutional monarchy had been destroyed by a prolonged and often subtle political and media campaign, removing the only significant institution that remained as a rival and therefore a check upon its power (apart from the churches, for which there were other plans).

Family history and traditions were dangerous. Interest in the memory of an 'ancestor' was but a short step from family pride and loyalty, and that was clearly and totally inimical to the interests of Earth's good government, or, as far as they were distinguishable, of ARM.

But if the Vaughn-Nguyens thought too much of the past, that was useful to me now.

"The old colonels tiger-man? Yes. Quite famous in its day," he said. Then he added perfectly casually, "Would you like to see the skin?”

I had not been expecting this. I looked at Arthur Vaughn-Nguyen closely. What was he really up to?

"You have it here?”

"Why, yes.”

He led me into another room. The dog followed us for a few steps, and then stopped, making a peculiar noise.

"Is he all right?" I asked.

"You've just seen a family mystery in the flesh." He said, "No animal will go into that room." He laughed. "We say it's haunted by a ghost tiger.”

Against the wall stood a large box of some dark wood, obviously very old, hand carved with decorations. It was much more elaborate than the one at the museum.

Another antique, and this time, I would have guessed, of great value. There was, I noticed, no electronic lock on it, no recording device. Impossible to prove when it had been opened last. Had any of the Angel's Pencil crew been here? I didn't fancy the time-consuming job of tracking down their movements over the last generation.

"Its in there?”

"We keep it here. We used it for a rug once, but it was put away, a long time ago.”

It had been a crime to keep the skins of rare animals. In the days when there was a never-ending demand for material for the organ banks, and crimes, however minor, attracted only one punishment. Those days were long gone, but the Vaughn-Nguyens must have some genes for either courage or foolhardiness for one of their ancestors to have risked keeping the thing at all. Did this point to involvement in criminal behavior today? "I'd like to see it very much," I said. The chest smelled bad when it was opened, not powerful at first, but like nothing I have ever smelled before. Like nothing I have ever smelled before? There was something about that smell, something that made me want to be away from that place. I guessed what it was after a moment, though I had never encountered it before: It must be the tiger smell. I got it under control easily enough. I heard, from the next room, a howl and a frantic scrabble of claws on flooring as the dog fleet. My host pulled out the skin and rolled it out across the floor. Although parts were missing, it was huge as the skull we had seen was huge. It had longer legs than any tiger and it was still a blazing orange. There were some darker markings but it was not a normal tigers striped pelt. It almost looked as if it had been made of some synthetic fabric (Perhaps it was. Well, that would be tested).

The head was enormous. It felt toylike when I examined it because the cavity where the skull had been was stuffed with some sort of papier-mache, now crumbling. The jaws were set in a huge gape, and I thought absurdly for a moment how many feet must have caught on them when it was used as a rug, The eyes were glass balls, and the teeth ivory pegs.

The hind part and chest had been crudely stitched to pull it together around what I now guessed had been, assuming it was genuine, bullet holes. "It hasn't got a tail," I said. There was a ragged gap at the base of the spinal ridge where the pelt had been hacked.

"No," said my host, "there was meant to be something wrong with the tail. They didn't keep it." "There seems to be something wrong with everything about it," I said. "But isn't there a breed of tailless cat?”

"I think so. The face is a cat's face, anyway. But look at those ears!" A cat's face, yes, even with the strangely large skull. The ears were complex arrangements, still flexible, reminding me of bat wings or bits of umbrella. They turned to something like leather at the outer parts, and ended raggedly in what might once have been membrane. There was something else about them, too. I examined the dark, gristly surfaces more closely. "They've been tattooed." "Oh. With anything in particular?" He seemed not to have known this. "I can't tell." He got a lamp. Shining this through the outer membrane I could see a pattern. It seemed to be made up of… I called them 'bones' for want of a better term. "Who'd tattoo a tigers ears? And why?" "Tattooing a live tiger would be a difficult job, I'd think. It must have been dead. Perhaps to identify it." "A creature as odd as this would hardly need further identification, I should think." "You're right there. Look at the hands. That's where the Tiger-Man' idea comes in.”

The oddly long forelimbs ended not in a tiger's pug paws but in four-digited hands with black extremities. One of the digits on each was like a thumb.

Did they work like cat's claws? I pressed the pad of one digit. Nothing happened. I pressed harder and a claw emerged. A black claw. I touched it and then jerked my finger back, to suck at a bleeding gash. It was razor sharp. All about was the fear smell. And a hint of something like… ginger.

"There's some of the colonels other stuff here, too," he said. "It all goes together.”

"It looks as if it hasn't been opened for a long time.”

"No. I was shown it as a child, but it was getting pretty moldy even then. I didn't want to touch it too much, and since then there has hardly been a lot of call. The house was shut up for a long time." He would have been a child, I guess, about a hundred years before.

A wooden grating divided the top and bottom of the chest The lower part contained rotting cloth. Some of this had once been dyed red, and on some was gold lace and wire, still unfaded. Parts of the colonels 'uniforms', I supposed.

The cloth parted at the folds as if cut with a knife. I had not realized before that ancient fabrics were so weak and perishable – or had they been weakened chemically to seem ancient?

Two metal things I recognized from ARM's special history course as weapons, one, called a 'sword', for cutting, one, called a 'revolver', was a sort of 'gun' for projecting 'bullets' – solid pieces of metal – by chemical explosion. I had had an idea the bullet-projector had come after the sword and was surprised to find they were evidently contemporaneous. Near the bottom was a bundle marked 'Tiger-Man'.

It contained some odds and ends wrapped further in cloth, and a piece of crumbling paper with what Vaughn-Nguyen said was the colonel's own handwriting: "This is what I found in the lair of the Tiger-Man.”

There was one thing in this last bundle whose use and purpose I recognized at once: an oversized knife, almost the size of the colonel's 'sword', but different, in a metal holder. When I drew it forth it was straight-bladed and, while the sword was black with age and pitted with rust, this looked new.

I am not a metallurgist, but the metal was different from any I had seen before. I took the sword in one hand and the sword-sized knife in the other. Their weight, balance and general feel were quite different too.

The old and rust-pitted sword was easier to move in my hand than the knife. The knife was too heavy and seemed badly designed. My fingers could only just close around the handle. There were grips for a hand bigger than mine, with one finger less. I held the two weapons up to the light, comparing their textures and cutting edges, then pressed the two blades against the wooden side of the box, not very hard. The rusty sword made no impression. The other cut into it effortlessly, as if it was edged with mono-molecular wire.

I apologized to Vaughn-Nguyen, and took it into the light. On the handle was a design in dots and claws.

The next thing was a hand-computer. But like the knife, built for an oversized hand, and of an unfamiliar design. It appeared to be damaged.

There was an oversized belt with pockets, and small metal artifacts. They and the computer-thing seemed to have come from the same shop and they had what looked like homogeneous power-couplings. On these too, and on the big knife, the bonelike design was repeated.

"There's also the old man's book," said Vaughn-Nguyen. "He wrote it for the family. There's a chapter on the Tiger-Man in it. Grandfather read it to us when I was a child. I think that was one of the last times we took the skin out of the chest. I don't imagine you can get copies of it anymore. It must have been out of print for a long time, and I don't think it was ever electronically transcribed.”

He was right there. You couldn't get a large number of those old books. There were old mine-tunnels full of them, veins of cellulose running through Earth's geological strata. There were whole construction industries, even space industries, whose main products came from pulped and highly compressed paper. Some of our best and most expensive natural-grown food came from soil that had originated as books, sent to vermiculture farms to be passed through the bodies of worms. The 'book-soil', or 'B-plus Compost' to give it its trade name, helped form the hydroponics gardens for the first-class kitchens of luxury spaceships.

Vaughn-Nguyen was hardly in a position to know (or was he?) that the censoring, removal and destruction of politically incorrect books and similar records had been the main activity of several hundred thousand highly trained men and women for generations. Vaughn-Nguyen was not acting like a man who knew he was under investigation. He seemed genuinely relaxed and friendly. Or had he had training too? He had been completely cooperative so far. Or was that part of some secret agenda? He was a man it would be possible to like. I hoped that if he had to join the Military Historians in the canyons of Mars he would be reasonable happy there.

He turned to his bookcase, another elaborate antique affair with sliding glass doors, and handed something down, carefully.

"It's pretty fragile.”

Vaughn-Nguyen did not want to let a Historian take family heirlooms away, even temporarily. I had to show him one of my identifications in the end. I also promised to return the things after examination.

Many pages of the book were missing, and several broke as I handled it. They didn't tear, just snapped and crumbled soundlessly. I learned sense then and stopped touching it. If it had been made of snowflakes, the thing could hardly have been less frail.

I had seen old books often enough professionally, but I had seldom had to puzzle out a lot of their contents. When in doubt, they went, as a general rule.

There were few pictures in the book and the ancient cramped layout and typefaces made it horribly difficult to read after a while, even though the spelling was relatively modern. I took a painkiller and then got the book to Bannerjee at the ARM Lab in New Sydney and had him photograph it before more harm was done. Then I got to the 'doc for treatment for my finger. I had hardly ever seen real blood before, certainly not my own, and I did not like the sight. Once, people like Colonel Vaughn must have seen a lot of blood.

The 'doc treated my finger, but nothing else. O'Briens direction on that matter had gone right through the system. I slept badly that night. A headache the 'doc again refused to medicate. A slight throb in my finger, all adding up to the unpleasant novelty of pain. It was like living in a fant book, I thought sourly, living, perhaps, as the military fants wanted it. And maybe my system was changing.