“No, you weren't.” Davis' accusation was as casual as if he were describing the chemical makeup of urea. “That ship was four hundred miles away. You would have had to sight on it with a telescope to hit it. You knew what you were doing, too, because you turned off the drive as soon as you'd burned through the ship.”
Steve's back muscles would no longer support him. He flopped back to horizontal. “All right, you know,” he told the ceiling. “Do the others?”
“I doubt it. Killing in self-defense is too far outside their experience. I think Sue's guessed.”
“Oooo.”
“If she has, she's taking it well,” Davis said briskly. “Better than most of them will, when they find out the universe is full of warriors. This is the end of the world, Steve.”
“What?”
“I'm being theatrical. But it is. Three hundred years of the peaceful life for everyone. They'll call it the Golden Age. No starvation, no war, no physical sickness other than senescence, no permanent mental sickness at all, even by our rigid standards. When someone over fourteen tries to use his fist on someone else we say he's sick, and we cure him. And now it's over. Peace isn't a stable condition, not for us. Maybe not for anything that lives.”
“Can I see the ship from here?”
“Yes. It's just behind us.”
Steve rolled out of bed, went to the window.
Someone had steered the ships much closer together. The Kzinti ship was a huge red sphere with ugly projections scattered at seeming random over the hull. The beam had sliced it into two unequal halves, sliced it like an ax through an egg. Steve watched, unable to turn aside, as the big half rotated to show its honeycombed interior.
“In a little while,” said Jim, “the men will be coming back. They'll be frightened. Someone will probably insist that we arm ourselves against the next attacks, using weapons from the other ship. I'll have to agree with him.
“Maybe they'll think I'm sick myself. Maybe I am. But it's the kind of sickness we'll need.” Jim looked desperately unhappy. “We're going to become an armed society. And of course we'll have to warn the Earth…”
IRON
by
Poul Anderson
The kzin screamed and leaped.
In any true gravity field, Robert Saxtorph would have been dead half a minute later. The body has its wisdom, and his had been schooled through hard years. Before he really knew what a thunderbolt was coming at him, he had sprung aside — against the asteroid spin. As his weight dropped, he thrust a foot once more to drive himself off the deck, strike a wallfront, recover control over his mass, and bounce to a crouch.
The kzin was clearly not trained for such tricks. He had pounced straight out of a crosslane, parallel to Tiamat's rotation axis. Coriolis force was too slight to matter. But instead of his prey, he hit the opposite side of Ranzau Passage. Pastel plastic cracked under the impact; the metal behind it boomed. He recovered with the swiftness of his kind, whirled about, and snarled.
For an instant, neither being moved. Ten meters from him, the kzin stood knife-sharp in Saxtorph's awareness. It was as if he could count every red orange hair of the pelt. Round yellow eyes glared at him out of the catlike face, above the mouthful of fangs. Bat-wing ears were folded out of sight into the fur, for combat. The naked tail was angled past a columnar thigh, stiffly held. The claws were out, jet-black, on all four digits of either hand. Except for a phone on his left wrist, the kzin was unclad. That seemed to make even greater his 250 centimeters of height, his barrel thickness.
Before and behind the two, Ranzau Passage curved away. Windows in the wallfronts were empty, doors closed, signs turned off; workers had gone home for the nightwatch. They were always few, anyway. This industrial district had been devoted largely to the production of spaceship equipment which the hyperdrive was making as obsolete as fission power. There was no time to be afraid. “Hey, wait a minute, friend,” Saxtorph heard himself exclaim automatically, “I never saw you before, never did you any harm, didn't even jostle you—”
Of course that was useless, whether or not the kzin knew English. Saxtorph hadn't adopted the stance which indicated peacefulness. It would have put him off balance. The kzin bounded at him.
Saxtorph released the tension in his right knee and swayed aside. Coming upspin, his speed suddenly lessening his weight, the kzin — definitely not a veteran of space — went by too fast to change direction at once. As he passed, almost brushing the man, the gingery smell of his excitement filling the air, Saxtorph thrust fingers at an eye. That was just about the only vulnerable point when a human was unarmed. The kzin yowled; echoes rang.
Saxtorph was shouting too, “Help, murder, help!”
Somebody should be in earshot of that. The kzin skidded to a halt and whipped about. It would have been astounding how quick and agile his bulk was, if Saxtorph hadn't seen action on the ground during the war.
Again saving his breath, the man backed downspin, but slantwise, so that he added little to his weight. Charging full-out, the kzin handicapped himself much more. The extra drag on his mass meant nothing to his muscles, but confused his reflexes. Dodging about, Saxtorph concentrated first on avoiding the sweeps of those claws, second on keeping the velocity parameters unpredictably variable. From time to time he yelled. One slash connected. It ripped his tunic from collar to belt, and the undershirt beneath. Blood welled along shallow gashes. As he jumped clear, Saxtorph cracked the blade of his hand onto the flat nose before him. It did no real harm, but hurt. The kzin's eyes widened. The pupil of the undamaged one grew narrower yet. He had seen the scars across his opponent's chest. This human had encountered at least one kzin before, face to face.
But Saxtorph was 15 years younger then, and equipped with a Gurkha knife. Now the wind was gusting out of him. His gullet was afire. Sluggishness crept into his motions. “Ya-a-ah, police, help! Ki-yai!”
A whistle skirled. The kzin halted. He stared past Saxtorph. The man dared not turn his head, but he heard cries and footfalls. The kzin turned and sped in the opposite direction, upspin. He whirled into the first crosslane he came to and disappeared.
And that wasn't like his breed, either. Saxtorph sagged back against a wallfront and sobbed breath into his lungs. Sweat was cold and acrid on him. He felt the beginnings of the shakes and started calling calm down on himself, as the Zen master who helped train him for war had taught.
One cop waved off a score or so of people whom the commotion had drawn after him and his companion. The other approached Saxtorph. He was stocky, clean-shaven, unremarkable except for the way he cocked his ears forward — neither aristocrat nor Belter, just a commoner from Wunderland. “Was ist hier los?” he demanded somewhat wildly.
Saxtorph could have recalled the Danish of his childhood, before the family moved to America, and brushed the rust off what German he'd once studied, and made a stab at this language. The hell with it. “Y-y-you speak English?” he panted.
“Ja, some,” the policeman answered. “Vat is t'is? Don't you know not to push a kzin around?”
“I sure do know, and did nothing of the sort.” Steadiness was returning. “He bushwhacked me, completely unprovoked. And, yes, this sort of thing isn't supposed to happen with kzinti, and I can't make any more sense of it than you. Aren't you going to chase him?”
“He's gone,” said the policeman glumly. “He vill be back in Tigertown and t'e trail lost before ve can bring a sniffer to follow him. How you going tell vun of t'ose Teufel from anot'er? You come along to t'e station, sir. Ve vill give you first aid and take your statement.”
Saxtorph drew a long breath, grinned lopsidedly, and replied, “Okay. I'll want to make a couple of phone calls. My wife, and — it'd be smart to ask Commissioner Markham if I can put off my appointment with him.”