“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.”
“Can you get any description?”
“Not much. A sport, a freak, it says here. There was some interest in it when it was first shot. But it wasn't regarded as scientifically important. It was just a piece of gross pathology.”
“The only one of its kind?”
“Exactly. Like the Elephant-Man. Not much for an ambitious student to make a name on there. That was a great age of biological discovery, you know, with all sorts of larger projects to occupy researchers. Vaughn wrote about it himself. Abnormal limbs and fangs and a large cranial tumor. It was grossly deformed. Pity he didn't keep the whole skeleton.”
Arthur turned to me. He seemed suddenly embarrassed. When he spoke it was with an odd hesitancy in his voice.
“Karl?”
“Yes?”
“How important is this?”
“I'm here, aren't I?”
“If this does matter, then I've done ARM a service, haven't I?”
“Of course.”
“Would there be… a reward?”
“You have a real job. Isn't that reward enough? Important work. You said so yourself. You are one of the elite twenty-five percent who have something more than sport to fill their lives. How many people out there would give all they have for that?”
“I want to get into space.”
“So save up for a few years.”
“No! Not as a passenger. I want… I want…”
His voice trailed off. I knew what he wanted. Isolated, celibate, a square peg keeping a tight hold on normality. I knew. I was glad to break the awkward silence.
“Yes. You mentioned a skin.”
“Nothing about that here.” Then he burst out: “You have your hunts to enjoy!”
There was no point in arguing with him, but how wrong he was! Someone who enjoys my work in the sense I knew he meant would be useless. In any case, the mental preparation arranged for us is thorough. What I do is a duty, and not an ignoble one. Our world has — no, our worlds, plural, have — become complicated beyond imagining. There is a phrase coming into use: 'known space'. Someone has to hold it together. It has never been a matter of the hunt for its own sake, or of searching for excitement.
Warn him off. Now. Arthur had quite a lot of museum junk littering a workbench. All there legitimately, I assumed, but among it was a small heap of brown paper, the pages of old books far gone in acid decay.
“What are these?” I asked casually.
“Sports history. It's been a hobby of mine.”
“Oh.” My eye caught the bottom of one of the loose pages.
At the end of March, 1943, the thaw started on the eastern front. 'Marshal Winter' gave way to the still more masterful 'Marshal Mud', and active operations came automatically to an end. All Panzer divisions and some infantry divisions were withdrawn from the front line, and the armor in the Kharkov area was concentrated under the 48th Panzer Corps. We assumed command of the 3rd, 6th and 11th Panzer divisions, together with P.G.D. Gross Deutschland. Advantage was taken of the lull to institute a thorough training program, and exercise…
He looked over my shoulder at it. “Winter Olympics, I think,” he said. “They were just starting to do things on a really big scale with team games then. The Space Age year.”
It dealt with a period before the literary era I specialized in and it didn't mean a lot to me. I didn't particularly like it, but for a low-grade ARM officer to possess a few lines of old books without specific clearance was not exactly an offense, even if it might amount to skating on thinnish ice. In any case I had other things to do now.
ARM had special facilities for deep hypnosis available for people like me, since memory and association are our most unique assets.
Certain specific parts of my childhood and juvenile memory had been blocked as a routine precaution when I joined ARM but the block was intended to be bypassed in a matter of need. It wasn't perfect recall but I did bring back a clearer picture. An old, old book in my father’s collection, Great True Stories of Adventure for Boys, with a story of a strange tiger hunt and crude black-and-white line drawings. Including the drawing of that odd skull.
Memory-wipe is not a form of death, whatever some people say. It can be controlled and stopped at a certain point. An individual's childhood memories might be left intact—they often were. I am not a killer. I am nothing remotely like a killer.
CHAPTER 3
One of Japan's ubiquitous television crews took to the streets last week to find out what people thought about the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor… Such has been the rewriting of history in Japan that many teenagers had not even heard of Pearl Harbor and several expressed amazement Japan had fought a war with the United States.
London was gearing up for the first rounds of “Graceful Willow,” and the streets were full of supporters wearing team colors when I arrived, bowing to one another, giving way in air-cars and on pedestrian walks, competing already among themselves in the game's values of courtesy and noncompetitiveness.
Dr. Humphrey of the British Museum had been contacted and briefed to help me. Together we read through all of the very little literature we had been able to find on the specimen. Of course he was ARM too. He knew better than to ask why we were making this peculiar investigation.
The man who had taken the name of Sir Kay had had tears in his eyes when he was taken away, but he would in no other way betray fear. Why not? I knew how terrified he was. Was it something to do with courage, with the barbaric code of warlike “nobility” that they had dabbled in to their disaster? “Have you any conception of what you are destroying?” the girl who had called herself the Lady May had asked me when I identified myself and arrested them. Yes, I had a conception. ARM does not do what it does for nothing.
It took time to locate the storage data on the specimen, even with the search tools we had available, and then there was a further purely physical hunt for it, in the recesses of sealed vaults far underground, containing the detritus a great museum acquires over centuries.