Much pain. Hear monkeys and slave-beasts approach… I do not think I can say more.
Avenge me. Honor my bones. Warrior's sons…
As I had predicted. It was the only way they could have fitted everything more or less together, once the tiger-man relics were found and identified, as, we now saw, they had been meant to be found and identified by someone like me.
The hoaxers had thought further ahead to get the details right than I had given them credit for. Even the impossible speed and maneuverability of the supposed alien ship had been accounted for, in a sense, by the reference to a technology of gravity control.
Even the Angel's Pencil's supposed fluke destruction of such a supposedly impossibly superior 'enemy' could be explained away according to the scenario the hoaxers had concocted: Such 'enemies', though technologically superior, might be taken by surprise, once, by a reaction-drive used as a makeshift weapon if they themselves had never needed to develop such a clumsy and primitive means of propulsion.
“You've wrapped it up,” said Alfred O'Brien. “But tanj! It was a set of twisted minds that packaged this idea.”
And a twisted mind that unraveled it, he didn't need to say.
“What will we do next?” I asked him.
“It'll move to another level for executive action. There'll be no interrogations. Nothing to cause any trouble with the Belt.”
“Shouldn't they make reparation, if they are parties to it? This must have all cost a lot of time and money.”
“No! That decision has been made at the highest level and it's quite unequivocal. If there is Belt involvement we don't want to know. There must never be an excuse for another conflict! Now that the problem's solved, no incidents.”
He looked straight at me, and spoke in a voice I had never heard before, a voice gray as ash. “Not when thousands of ships are powered with fusion-drives.” I thought I saw him shudder, and when the import of his words sank into me I shuddered too. Perhaps for the first time I truly understood what ARM's work and the program were for.
Then he continued in his normal voice.
“The Vaughn-Nguyens will have total memory-wipes and that will be the end of it. Into the Black Hole. The lot.”
“The Angel's Pencil?”
“Too far away for us to do anything. We'll simply block its transmissions. End of story. You've done well, Karl.
“You had better keep your present operating code for a few days,” he continued. “You may need to access the records again when you write your report…” He nodded to himself.
“You've done well,” he repeated. Did I detect a note of doubt in his voice? But, no. I had done well.
I thanked him and left. I planned to take a few days off, then move back to my usual routine.
There was one thing outstanding, a last piece of the puzzle. I wondered whether to bother touching it again or not, and decided there was nothing to lose by one small action that would settle forever a tiny voice whispering a final question. It was still day in England. I called Humphrey at the British Museum.
“How long,” I asked him, “was it since the skull of the Vaughn's Tiger was last examined? Before we saw it the other day.”
He called me back several hours later.
“The first part of the search didn't take long,” he said, “but I had to go through some very old records for the rest. That part of the vault hasn't been opened since the electronic locks were installed. That's more than a hundred years. And according to the written records, the box itself hasn't been opened since the first time — when the material was sent here from Australia in 1908.”
The last answer.
I recoiled. I felt like a man coming out of a dim cave, and, as he approached the daylight and the exit, placing his groping, overeager hand on a snake.
I recoiled, but I forced myself to approach it again, to face at last what that last answer was. And at last I knew why the Angel's Pencil had sent its message. My vague intuition had been right: There had been a simple explanation, before us all the time.
CHAPTER 6
Our predatory animal origin represents for mankind its last best hope… the apes were armed killers…
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. I 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.