The Man-Kzin Wars 07

CHAPTER 6

Alfred O'Brien dumped me in an autodoc. In a 'doc, not at a 'doc. Big-league treatment. They even had a human doc look at me.

I think now that he had guessed some time before what my final report would be and had been waiting for it.

No one could have replicated exactly and in three dimensions the shape of a skull of which no complete drawings existed and which had been locked away before any of us was born.

I went on a holiday. ARM moved me up the waiting list for a permit to hike and camp in the Great Slave Lake Park and dive at Truk Lagoon. I visited Easter Island and the Taj Mahal.

After the Taj Mahal I spent a little more time in India. left the tourist routes and headed north, not exactly hiding but not calling attention to myself.

Near the high jungle where Assam meets Tibet there was a new restricted area. Part of the park, a valley, needed special maintenance work, I was told. As I left, I saw some of the machinery going in. It was heavy digging machinery and it was heading for what I knew from a fragment of map I had seen was the site of an ancient landslide.

I do not know if ARM will want me again. A year and half has passed and I have heard nothing official.

Unofficially, I have kept a few contacts.

ARM moves slowly and obliquely as a rule. I do not know when, or if, they will use the plans of the alien's bomb-missiles and laser-cannon that the Angel's Pencil sent us to begin tooling up factories. And there was a description of a gravity-motor.

Perhaps they will move too slowly. If so, I am unlikely to know before the end.

Did the crew of the Angel's Pencil think to search for a call-beacon in the wreckage of the enemy warship? Did they neutralize it? Too late to ask them now.

I have been warned not to leave Earth, and under no circumstances to contact anyone connected with either the Belt or the media.

Have I been duped? Suppose the whole thing was as we first suspected an enormously elaborate setup, perhaps not to make a bear market in some space industries but to create a bull market in a new military industry? Despite the fact we found no trace of any money movements and despite the fact no warlike race or culture could ever achieve civilization and science, let alone handle the energy processes space travel requires?

But I have learned more about that now, and it cuts the last ground away: The axiom that a warlike race cannot progress to the point of space travel is a pious fiction, a lie made into a self-evident proposition, never tested. But before I handed in my last report, I searched those old military records one more time, following the trail whose whole length only I had come to know. Our Space Age was born in war.

I think it is too late to re-bottle the genie now. Already, I know, there is increased use by ARM personnel of keys to ancient military history records. There is a new special history course and batches of selected ARM personnel are being put through it. My Military Historians are, I think, involved. Anyway, they have disappeared and I am sure they are not tending machinery on Mars.

For the rest, Anton Brillov is involved, and that means Buford Early. A new base has been set up on the moon. It is not another resort for budget-class tourists. I think that in the power struggle going on inside ARM Buford Early's masters are winning.

There have been, I have learned, unexpected postings. And I have noticed some of the sort of people posted. While waiting for my permits I called about a dozen of my acquaintances, ostensibly for company on my holiday.

In fact, I was most interested in the whereabouts of two among the dozen: specialists in x-ray lasers. Both had suddenly relocated and I could not trace them. Some of ARM's house-schizies, my near colleagues, have disappeared, too.

And there have been unscheduled meetings with the Belt leadership. I have heard rumors of a new spaceship design team being put together. I can guess some things about the new spaceship they will be designing. It will be well equipped with signaling devices to assist in contact, devices using large amounts of energy. But to design a new type of ship and to build it are different propositions.

I have noticed changes in our games and entertainment. 'Graceful Willow' has disappeared from the newscasts. A new game, 'Highest Hand', has an emphasis on winning. There are no more dances.

If those behind Early win, I think I will have a role in what is to come. Otherwise, I imagine, someone will be calling on me soon and I will be taken in to a memory-wipe. There is no point in running, ARM can find me anywhere on Earth, and if I somehow got into space, what would I be running to there?

Arthur Guthlac has been seconded to special duties, along with several others who were at the edge of forbidden studies. But he has kept his museum title of Assistant to the Chief of the General Staff. Early's joke?

Messages have been beamed out to his sister's ship after all, ordering it to turn back. No one has said why. Those messages will reach it in about seven years' time, and what has happened has happened already.

I pity Arthur Guthlac and try not to imagine what he feels, but part of me wonders if he may have found the purpose in life that always eluded him.

I have done what I could. If there is any future history now, no doubt historians will look at the chance the whole thing turned on. Colonel Vaughn shot well. He bought us five hundred years.

They are capable of mistakes. They are capable of wishful thinking. Skragga-Chmee's creatures did not come. We had to go to them.

The main purpose of my holiday was to say good-bye to what has been, to what we always took for granted. I visited places of Earth I had known in a longish life that has, I suddenly realize, almost too late, had its share of good times. Scenes of beauty, peace, tranquility or thronging human life. Scenes from the last days of the Golden Age.

What will these same scenes show in a few years?

War factories worked around the clock by forced labor? Glowing bomb craters? Or the hunting territories of Earth's felinoid conquerors?

Time is running out.

What shape is space? Space will put on The shape of any cat…

I look up at night and know what is coming. ARM may or may not move in time. Perhaps the felinoids have too great a technological edge over us anyway. They have been in space a long time. Perhaps it is too late for us to rearm, and perhaps as a species we have deprived ourselves of the capacity to fight.

Sir Bors, Lady Helen! If you and yours had been arrested three days earlier, how different an ending your story might have had! But I cannot say whether a better ending or a worse one.

One thing I know is that the program and everything I have worked for is in ruins.

Perhaps that is why I feel so happy.