Larry Niven - The Man-Kzin Wars 07

"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.”