by Larry Niven
The program had been to remove a strand of destructive madness from human culture, as its genetic aspect was to remove, eventually, a gene of destructive madness from the human gene pool. Useless and dangerous. But my own condition was madness without treatment, like the schizies ARM kept employed and did not medicate during working hours. Were we useless and dangerous? Presumably when the program was concluded we would be.
But too many things were not meshing. Or rather, too many of the wrong things were meshing. Things I had never thought about before.
I knew ARM kept forbidden knowledge even from its own people beyond what we needed to know, dangerous facts as well as dangerous inventions, but now I could not close my mind to all the inconsistencies displayed to me.
I tried to follow other thoughts: When the Angel's Pencil had left Earth, the program had been less far advanced. There might well have been crew aboard who had studied the more sensitive areas of history.
And the gross, glaring scientific errors in their descriptions of the alleged alien crafts capabilities: Were they deliberate signals, perhaps inserted by some crew member who did not want to be party to the business?
Bannerjee called again. He had been working on the artifacts in New Sydney.
"It's an electronic book," he said. "Look: you speak in here, and this is a memory bank of some sort. This is a display screen. Its a notebook. At least, I don't see what else it could be.”
"Can you read it?”
"It's damaged. I had it speaking back to me for a minute. At least I think it was speech, not just noise corruption. Sounded like a catfight. And it’s weird. The circuit design is quite odd. I can tell you the metal's been grown in space. Real high-tech stuff.”
"How old is it?”
"It would have to be pretty new, I'd say. Newer than it smells. It may be something the Belt dreamed up.”
"It's meant to have come from India," I said. "It's meant to be very old.”
"Umm... my father was keen on India. Brass bowls all over the house. This isn't brass though. Definitely Space Age. We had ancestors on the first Indian space program, you know. Well, the circuitry seems to be in order. I can give it power again, and see what happens.”
I stood by while he powered the thing up. There was a hissing, screeching sound. I couldn't tell if it was articulated or simply malfunctioning electronics. But it did seem varied and modulated as speech might be. Behind Bannerjee on the screen I could see other screens: banks of computers with endlessly changing arrays of numbers. I knew the class of those computers and felt awed and more than a little alarmed at what their use must be costing someone. This investigation of a hoax was getting out of hand.
"There's a relatively small group of frequently recurring sounds," said Bannerjee. "If its plain language and not encrypted, that might give us a start.”
"Keep me stitched in.”
I watched the groups of numbers and phonetic symbols dancing on the green sheets of glassine behind Bannerjee's dark face. The shape of the hoax was becoming clearer: I guessed that the tiger was to be presented as some sort of lost alien.
The Vaughn-Nguyens had used the story of their ancestors freak tiger as a starting point or inspiration for this. But why?
The 'language' in the 'book' was explained easily. A computer wrote it. Imaginary alien languages were a staple of some legitimate imaginative writing, and there were whole societies dedicated to concocting them, as there were societies of bored people dedicated to many things. ARM ran most of them. The language would have to be translatable eventually. It would be gilding the lily for those who had concocted it to have put it in cypher as well.
The 'relics', organic and inorganic? Easy enough to fake, given time and high-tech resources.
As far as I was concerned one possibility as least had been eliminated. That was that there might be a real space sickness and the reports of felinoid aliens had been products of genuine madness, triggered, perhaps, by some subconscious childhood memory of the story of the Vaughn Tiger-Man and too many hours in a virtual reality programmer. This had been deliberately constructed before the Angel's Pencil left Earth.
Was it an odd form of political rebellion, connected somehow with the Vaughn-Nguyens' notions of family pride? That was possible, too. Quite likely there were several motives.
An ancient tiger freak had been killed. That, as far as I could tell, had really happened. I did not think all the records I had searched could have been tampered with, or the direction of my searches anticipated. Apart from the accounts published later I had, after getting a special permit, retrieved the relevant part of the 4th Lancers' 'Regimental Diary' from underground archives in an operation more like archeology than historical research.
I remembered the old photographs, the two pictures of the colonel and his friends.
They were of the same respective 'ranks' in both photographs, and from what the book said the two had been taken only a short time apart.
Yet between the taking of the first picture and the second, these three had aged years. In the first picture Curlewis wore a strange 'pith helmet' which covered his head, but the others had evidently lost theirs and were bareheaded. They had full heads of hair, though cropped close in a way that looked strange beside todays fashions, and all three had mustaches. In the second picture, taken before some ceremonial dinner, all three were bareheaded, and all three were completely bald.
And there was the picture of the Indian hunter, Sher Ali, too. He wore an odd piece of cloth wound round his head in both pictures, but in his second photograph his face had been hairless. In the first, with the dead tiger, he had had a flowing black beard and mustache.
I called ARM, and there was another deep expedition into ancient British archives. Both Curlewis and Maclean had retired early, owing to recurrent illness.
Births and deaths had to be registered in Britain before the end of the nineteenth century, and with their army numbers it was, as it turned out, relatively easy to track them down. Both had died in their fifties, of cancer. Colonel Vaughn had lived longer. I had to go to the Australian records to find his death certificate, but he had eventually died of cancer, too.
ARM's bio-labs were still testing the skin and fur. So far they had been unable to match them with any known felines. In fact they had discovered quite radical differences. Now they were taking the dried tissue apart molecule by molecule, and from what they told me they were baffled by what they were finding.
But I still did not know the Vaughn-Nguyens' motives. I ran the possibilities through my mind again.
We had started with the presumption that if the story of a madness involving delusions of horrible aliens was somehow taken seriously, the immediate result would be to inhibit space exploration, but, as had also been immediately obvious, a scam would be very hard to get away with, at least on Earth. ARM would have records of anyone selling heavily in space-industry shares.
Religious fanatics? Highly unlikely, we ran most cults.
Chiliastic panics? ARM knew about them too. It had acted to turn several of them off (or on). This could, given promotion, be a socio-political forest fire. But why light such a fire at all?
I even wondered if it was an internal ARM power play. ARM's resources would make setting up even such a complex hoax relatively easy.
If that was so, there was nothing I could do. ARM was no monolith, I knew. There were conflicts in it, factions and sometimes accelerated promotions and early retirements, but the idea of ARM hoaxing ARM smelled wrong. If my intuition was worth anything at all, that wasn't the answer.
The artifacts? Where had they come from? Bannerjee had mentioned the Belt. Space-grown metals?
Were the Vaughn-Nguyens Belter agents? Earth-Belt rivalry had been (I was told) relatively dormant for generations, but any inhibition of Earth's space activities would give the Belt comparative advantage.
A story about warlike aliens — or of delusions about warlike aliens — would not do that in itself, but it could
be a start point in long-term psychological gaming.
Next, perhaps, physical remains would be produced. Not virtual-reality products this time but 'real' flesh-and-blood Jenny Hannifers grown in vats in Belt laboratories, perhaps the result of genetic tinkering with zoo felines. Had there been any thefts of genetic material from zoos recently? What genetic material might be available in Belt zoos or universities already?
Did the Belt have zoos? Living space was limited there but I knew that on Confinement Asteroid, which had been artificially created to provide an Earth-gravity environment for births, there had been a relatively large amount of extra space, years ago, space given over in part to parks, entertainment facilities and... zoos? But the Belt's population was bigger now. I asked for up-to-date data on Confinement.
And surely on the bigger asteroids there would be at least a few domestic cats. There were cats in space, too, as mousers (the superefficient — as they always reminded us — Belt might have done better, but the bigger flatlander ships such as cruise-liners never seemed quite able to eliminate the very last mouse), as company for spacers on lonely ships and rocks and as medical aids. A number of people were still kept in low gravities because of heart conditions, and for an ailurophile the old prescription of stroking and playing with a cat was still one of the best nonmedical tranquilizers known. Hell! The Belters must have a complete library of DNA codes and could grow and sew and splice what they liked!
The hoax could be built up in stages. Next, an 'alien' spaceship with specially grown 'alien' cadavers could be crashed on Earth or conveniently be 'found' in space. It might even be arranged that one or two Earth ships would disappear as further proof that here was something hostile and horrible in the black void reaching beyond the solar gravity-well. Something coming to get us. No, not just 'something': big orange catlike aliens. Hideous fanged carnivores in possession of technology far outreaching our own, images crafted by someone's perverted genius so that they were a terror even to look upon... triggering ancestral memories of the ancient predator: the feline was the most perfect killing machine nature had produced. An image for the minds of Earth's masses to seize on... Earth's masses for whom boredom was today the greatest enemy and the future's major anticipated social problem. An image came into my own mind of straw in a flame.
But why? I had got no closer to an answer to that question. I found it difficult to imagine any gain that could possibly justify such an investment of time and resources. Vaughn-Nguyen would tell us when a warrant was issued to take him in, but by then he might have alerted confederates and other damage might be done.
What if the motive was to impoverish Earth and weaken it relative to the Belt? Creating a war panic could do that.
That was a Belter-cunning idea: to win a real economic war by having Earth divert its resources preparing for a false war!
Would even the Belters be capable of such a crime? Even the Belters? What was I thinking of? Belters were people like us... surely? Thinking that way lay... an abyss.
I was no longer inclined to believe the conspirators wanted us to think they had been sent into a state of crazy delusions by some effect of prolonged deep-space travel. Their objective was more radical than that: They wanted us to believe the big catlike aliens were real. Hence the elaborate preparations at the Earth end.
Perhaps that was why some brave Earth crew member aboard the Angel's Pencil had secretly rewritten the message program to destroy its credibility, by putting in not just warlike aliens but obviously impossible inertia-proof aliens with reactionless drives whose ship could match velocities with another travelling at 0.8 light-speed and ignore Delta-V!
Or was that too complex? Look at simpler economic motives: inhibiting space colonization would cause a stock-market crash. The block-busting. But then there would be a flow of money that could hardly be concealed for long. It could be done through dummy companies and cutouts, even off-planet. Again, the Belt would make a good hiding place for the real manipulations. There were rumors of many things hidden in the Belt, even weapon hoards. Vaughn-Nguyen was complaining to the museum that he wanted his property back.
War with the Belt? It was out of the question. Space flight and war were incomprehensible. What gave this whole investigation its crazy aspect in the first place was that to think or speak of a race simultaneously warlike and scientific made no more sense than to speak or think of a square circle. But economic war? Economic... what was the word... sabotage?
And there had been that accusing look in the Military Historian's eyes. Why should that concern me? Look at what was before me: a massive, if still enigmatic, conspiracy that was quite enough to keep me fully occupied.
The Vaughn-Nguyens, whether principals or agents, had set themselves up to be investigated and to emerge with their story enhanced. The 'tiger', the provable source of the hoax and thus seeming at first a potential weakness, could be turned into a point in its favor: It would not have taken great resources of imagination to think of turning it into some sort of lost or exiled alien.
I called Bannerjee again. He thought he had begun to make a breakthrough with the language. He had identified certain frequently recurring groups of sounds and he had reasoned that anything purporting to be the records of a solitary creature stranded on an alien world would contain the word 'I'. Further, anything purporting to be the record of a space-traveling alien could be expected to make reference to space, space travel, spaceships and drives. I suggested to him that he look for the word 'bone' or 'bones', too, remembering the design I had seen.
The people who had cooked this up would want the language to be difficult — very difficult — to translate, it would have no credibility otherwise, but not quite impossibly difficult — that would defeat whatever their purpose was (Their purpose? To create a belief in aliens? Why? Why?).
There had been fads from the late twenty-first century at least about such things, claims the pyramids and Easter Island statues and circles in cornfields were made by aliens. Hadn't there been a film, suppressed centuries ago, about something called a Darth Vader? These had no foundation in any science, but they had made some people rich.
Were there still Cuthulu (was that the word?) worshipers?
Believers in old gods, not unlike the various military fant cults. Had frustrated, space-sick Arthur been involved? I was quite sure, remembering his literary collection, that even if he was not a full military fant he was on that path. Had he played a part and deliberately pointed me at the Vaughn-Nguyens? No, I had sought him out myself. Had Alfred O'Brien pointed me before that, with his quotation of the strange poem? Why? Why?
Motive? Motive? I had a teasing feeling somewhere in the back of my skull that the whole answer to the inexplicable situation was something much simpler that I was missing.
Careful. Lose the plot and I was useless. But... the museum. I suddenly knew something about the museum was important... not the British museum, with its ancient vaults, but Arthurs, with its educational displays and its ARM offices above. There was something there...
Something... I tried to let the images and associations run freely... Guthlac's dreams of space were involved, of going to Wunderland... No, not Guthlac's dreams, my own similar dreams, from long ago.
Why was that important? The museum... Wunderland. They were connected?
Wunderland, the nearest and oldest-established extrasolar colony in the Centauri system, four and a half light-years away... settled originally largely by a North European consortium, led by families from Germany, Holland, Scandinavia and the Baltic countries. German... I had learned German long ago, with the dream of Wunderland in my head.
German, and the museum with its history of space flight and science displays... space flight... they were connected... an ancient rocket in flight... a German rocket...
And now a thought came driving in from my peculiar chemistry, enigmatic still, but hard and sharp and clear: the designations of V-1 and V-2 could not have stood for 'weather rockets'.
&nbs
p; The German word for weather was not spelled 'Vetter' but 'Wetter'. It was pronounced as if, to an English speaker, it began with a V, but it actually began with a W.
It mattered. At that moment I didn't know why. But something felt different for me.
Isolated. Childless, long celibate. Schizies are often attractive. People like me less so. A secret policeman without attachments. Resentful, more or less, of my condition. Why was I suddenly feeling... no, there was no other word for... grateful? Grateful for loneliness and lovelessness? Grateful that I had no one? Why did the world suddenly seem more... not exactly more beautiful, but more... Precious?
Leave it. Any answer would surface by itself, I had other puzzles before me.
Three British soldiers dying of cancer. But surely in those days cancer had not been a big killer? As I recalled, few people had lived long enough to develop it.
I made a cursory search to confirm my notion: old medical records in the public domain were fragmented like other historical records, but comparatively easy to access. I found in the memory banks a 'Bill of Mortality' for London in one week of 1665. Not quite contemporary but close enough, something called 'Consumption' had killed 134 people; 'Feaver', 309; 'Spotted Feaver', 101 and 'Plague' an amazing 7,165. In all, 8,297 people had died that week, of diseases ranging from 'Ague' to 'Wormes', but only one had died of 'Canker'.
Back to the British Army records. The second photograph in the colonel's book had been a group photograph: there were thirty officers lined up, all their names spelled out in the caption underneath.
Computer search again, Several of the officers (I was coming to feel familiar now with terms I had only come across in banned fiction and military-fant circles before) had died in India in the regiment. The death certificates of others were traced, following a trail through what had been the British Records Office that I was coming to know. Most had died of illnesses that no longer existed, but no others had developed cancer.
Alfred O'Brien did not call me back when I asked for clearance to access more information on the V-1 and V-2 That in itself was an answer: I knew now what they had really been.