"Don't you know what he wants to ask you about? Or want to know?"
"Not particularly. I'm not in the business of advising ratcats." He laughed abruptly. "If one bizarre day they got the vote and they were in my Parliamentary constituency I suppose I'd have to talk to them. I can't see that happening, somehow."
"Well, I seem to have come on a fool's errand," said Cumpston. "Still, seeing your work has been fascinating."
"Come back in another five years," said Rykermann. "We might have a clean planet by then. Leonie will show you the way back to the crepuscular zone."
Cumpston fed the tapes of the conversation and the films of Rykermann and Leonie into the car's computer. Buford Early was back to him before he had traveled far.
"According to the speech and body language analyses, coupled with the analyses of their earlier speeches and their contact profiles several things emerge plainly," he said. "Rykermann is an Exterminationist. His wife isn't. She half-knows he is and she's trying to convince herself he doesn't mean it."
"That's bad."
"But it's not quite that simple. He wants all kzin dead but he feels under a debt to Raargh. For Leonie's life at least as much as for his own. I don't think he values his own life very highly. There's a lot of death wish in that boy."
"Do we know why?"
"Do I have to draw you a diagram? Little thing you might have noticed called the war. It screwed up a lot of Wunderlanders pretty badly. And not only Wunderlanders. People did things they can't live with now, lost people they can't live without, sometimes. The euphoria of Liberation is wearing off and survivors' guilt is coming back. People are blaming themselves for things they did to stay alive. Certainly he has a major hang-up about this girl professor, for whose death he blames the Kzin and himself about equally, depending on the weather and what he last ate. Who knows all the details? But after fifty-three years of Kzinti occupation there aren't too many on Wunderland who are a picture of glowing mental health. And Rykermann had a tougher war than most. Why do you think he's working a lot harder than he needs to now?"
"Because he's politically ambitious?"
"In that case he'd be concentrating on the one thing: politics. Instead of which he's scattering himself all over the shop-politics, cave antics, television features, the memorial to this professor-all displacement activity. He's trying to stop himself thinking, and I think he's going to snap soon, but he could do a lot of harm before he does."
"So what do we do?"
"Give me time to think, boy. I can't come up with an optimum plan in a second."
"Raargh is seeking him out."
"What for? Still wanting his head for a wall decoration? Wouldn't be popular now, not with Rykermann a celebrity. That's how he found him, I suppose. The old devil must watch monkey television."
For his advice. I gather he trusts him because of their old alliance."
"Advice? Advice on what?"
"What to do about Vaemar's future. I think Vaemar is with him."
"Cumpston, Vaemar is valuable!"
"Raargh thinks so too. For what it's worth, so do I. That's why I disturbed your esteemed labors."
There are hopes riding on that cub for… for… Where are they now?"
"Close by. I've got them on the tracker."
"Get in closer. In fact check them now."
"They're not far away. But… Buford, the signal is odd. Muzzy. But it's there. They may be resting up in a cave. They're cats. They love exploring holes."
"Find them! Go in now! Close enough to help them if need be. If they must see you, so be it. Keep them away from Rykermann. If you need help I'll send the cavalry."
"They called the spaceport the Himmelfahrte," said Jocelyn. "The way to Heaven. Not for the reason you might think obvious, but because so many humans died slaving here when the Kzin wanted to expand it in a hurry. This place is built on human bones."
"I see," said Arthur Guthlac.
"There are the memorials."
"Pretty realistic. Are those children?"
"Yes," she said. "We commissioned the best sculptors on Wunderland. Something never to be forgotten. There are going to be a lot of memorials on this planet. We're going to make sure nothing's forgotten, ever."
A section of one of the kzinti warcraft hulks, cut free, fell to the ground in a metallic crash and a cloud of dust. A clutch of dead kzin, freeze-dried in space years before, stared out eyelessly at them from the new cavity in the hull. Jocelyn banked the car away and headed for the main spaceport building. "I suppose the ratcat-lovers are very pleased it's all kzin-sized," she remarked as they flew between the huge doors into the parking bays. "Convenient for them when they come back." In fact human-sized facilities were replacing the giant and brutally utilitarian kzinti military buildings and installations. Black paint was smeared over a wall that had once been adorned with a heroic kzin mural. "That'll be them now." She gestured to the tube extending from a recently-landed shuttle. Professor Meinertzhagen, the head of the Wunderland Science Authority, and other gray-uniformed Wunderland officials who Arthur Guthlac had met previously, joined them.
"She's turning a few heads!" he remarked, as the We Made It party approached.
"Not my image of a hyperdrive expert," Jocelyn told him. There was no need to specify who they meant. "That's odd," she added.
"What?"
"I'd say she's a Wunderlander. That's not a Crashlander's musculature. Look at the rest of them. Far more solidly built. Blondie's muscles were formed in Wunderland gravity with a lot of exercise, although I'd say she's lived in Crashlander gravity for a while since. Also, she's walking scared."
"Agoraphobia? The original Crashlander party that returned to Earth tended to suffer from it under an open sky."
"There are treatments for that now. And those ears. Those are Herrenmann ears."
"I wouldn't know."
"You're a flatlander. And I'm a cop, remember?" She gave him an enigmatic smile as she said it. Her swinging hand brushed his and for a moment she squeezed his fingers.
"We notice things like that," she went on. "Look at her eyes. She's as jumpy as a Kzin on a hot osmium roof. Watch." She made a peculiar and difficult noise with her lips. The ears of the blonde woman and of several passersby twitched noticeably. The blonde woman looked bewildered. Jocelyn's face was composed as if nothing had happened.
"Once I looked for UNSN infiltrators."
Her words had taken them into uncomfortable territory. The head of the Crashlander delegation shook hands, carefully restraining his grip.
"Patrick Quickenden," he introduced himself. "Helen Moffet, Roger Selene, Sam Kim… "
We've got a couple of cars waiting," said Jocelyn when the introductions were completed. "We're lunching at the university. You'll be able to see the city on the way."
The Crashlander party had seen Earth, but as the belt carried them toward the cars, they gazed in astonishment at Wunderland's open skies, mild weather, tall hills and buildings and blazes of multicolored plants. We need not spend our lives under a single star again, thought Arthur Guthlac. Once I saved money in the hope of a cheap holiday on the Moon before I died. The hyperdrive has liberated us from more than the Kzin. Let this war finish-let the threat be destroyed, and Starman will come into his own! And then, Why, I could be a Wunderlander!
"There's more dust in the air," said the blond woman suddenly. She had been watching a flutterby that rested on the tip of her finger, fanning its delicate wings.