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 Arthur's, 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…