He gestured. “Do you want to see our Great Moments in History? The Sportsman's Hall of Fame? The panorama of the Olympic Games? The Hall of Music? We've got it all here. Science, the history of space flight: Werner von Braun sending up the first V-2?” He pointed down the hall, to the strange yet familiar shape of the historic weather-research rocket's replica suspended from the ceiling.
“There's the Shame Gallery, too, the displays of creatures we exterminated, like the trusting dodo bird. But the truth of the matter is I like working in the museum because we have an excellent library here. I'd still like to do something in the field of prehistory. Somehow.”
The main doors of the great building whispered shut. On Arthur's computer a pattern of green lights appeared, as surveillance monitors locked into a nighttime control center. Security was light, a precaution against accident more than crime.
A holo showed an outline of the complex, secured sections turning green, the last departing visitors white flashing dots of light. A few red dots for the skeleton human staff who would monitor the surveillance screens and occasionally patrol the corridors during the night. Cleaning and maintenance machines began to stir.
“I'm off duty now. I'm glad you made this visit, Karl.”
“It's been a long time. I thought it would be a good idea if we caught up with each other.”
“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 organization's 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.