Brother Joachim dropped on his knees and pointed to a patch of bare ground.
The tracks were of four-toed, clawed feet. The claws of a carnivore, I was sure. And they were big. Bigger than a human foot, and sunk farther into the ground than a human footprint would have been. Something very solid indeed appeared to have made those tracks. Unless this was some sort of hoax-and I could not imagine why these monks might be hoaxers-it was a creature that was still very heavy in Wunderland's gravity.
Now I saw it had left an obvious trail. A wide swath of vegetation, including small trees, was broken and beaten flat. Its tracks pointed straight for the swamp. I cocked the collecting gun with its tranquillizer darts, meant to be good for both Earth and Wunderland animal physiologies. The monks unslung and cocked the strakkakers. Brother Joachim moved in front of me.
Following the trail could hardly have been easier. As we descended into the marshy ground the prints grew deeper. Clawed-up divots of dirt confirmed the creature had been moving at speed, and here and there were the marks of forepaws… very curious forepaws.
Near the borders of the swamp proper the trail turned aside, towards the grove of Wunderland trees. It entered the grove.
And ended. There was a wide circle of disturbed ground, nothing more. I wondered if the creature had somehow buried itself or tunneled out of the grove. That seemed contrary to everything we knew. And those prints were not from the claws of a digging animal. But Wunderland was not Earth… I got the car then and we examined the site from the air. The car's ground effect obliterated the trail as it went but we filmed it first. The track from the grove to the spot where the monks had seen the creature became obvious, as did the track back to the grove, and the wide circular disturbance of the ground and bushes there. It appeared plain that the creature had left the grove and proceeded to higher ground near the monastery as if to observe the buildings.
There was no indication of how it had entered the grove in the first place or where it had gone. There was no disturbance to indicate a tunnel or burrow. This was not the cave country of the limestone ranges, there were no cracks or sinkholes, and radar had charted the location of all the shallow local caves long ago. We flew over the swamp's margins, and saw nothing new. Even the normally teeming flying and swimming creatures of the swamp seemed unusually silent and scarce.
The monks and the abbot seemed almost apologetic, but any biologist learns to bear with frustration and delay in fieldwork. I asked them to keep their eyes open and not to hesitate to call me if they saw the odd creature, or any other odd creature, again, and then I flew back to Munchen. But if I was reasonably philosophical about it, some disappointment remained. To have captured an unknown species of large animal, carnivore or otherwise, would have been a very big thing.
And the monks had been good witnesses that there had been something there. Something big and catlike. I was sure they were telling the truth to the best of their ability. Before leaving I had examined them separately and their accounts remained consistent. I wondered if I would ever see one. The voicemail on the instrument panel lit as I approached the city. I thought it might be the Monastery calling to say they had seen anything new, but it was something that struck me as a good deal odder: the mayor's office. They wanted me right away.
Chapter 3
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
"I'm frankly somewhat embarrassed to have called you like this, Professor," Deputy-Mayor Hubertstein said. "I understand you've been on a field trip today."
"Not much of a trip. But I can't think what this is about."
"We're setting up rather a rushed conference to put a number of experts in the picture, including a biologist.
"A bit of a possible problem has come up. I've got to tell you straight away, though: this meeting and its… subject matter… are, well, potentially embarrassing at the moment. I know you are a responsible man. You'll keep secret about this?"
"I still don't know what 'this' is, but yes, I suppose so."
"All right. Come this way, please."
There was Police Chief Grotius, Captain von Thetoff and another, more senior, officer of the Meteor Guard, with both spacer and Herrenmann written all over him. Others joined us in the capsule that took us up to the Lesser Hall. Most of the seats there were already filled.
A string of my colleagues from different departments of the university. There was Herrenmann Kristin von Diderachs, spokesman (dictator, some said) to the City Council for the Nineteen Families, smooth, confident, plump and complacent, radiating pride and authority, who I had been presented to but who would hardly have deigned to acknowledge me. There was van Roberts, his opposite number for the Progressive Democrats. Some other politicians had cross-party friendships but I knew these two hated each other and were said to be barely on speaking terms even in the Council.
Others I recognized as political figures and industrialists. And in a majority of them the dress, features, and unmistakable body language of the Nineteen Families.
There was The Markham, there was Freuchen, there was Thor Mannstein, there was a representative of the Feynman clan, and there were others: Montferrat-Palme, of an old family coming down in the world, Talbot with his defiantly symmetrical beard, The Dunkley of Dunkley, Schleisser, The Argyl, Mannteufel, Franke, Johnston, Buxton, von Kenaelly, Lufft. Golden or flaxen hair and those mobile ears. A more than usual number of asymmetrical beards with their own subtle identifications and codings of status. But there were other people too: as well as professionals of nebulous status like me (our beards asymmetrical but not blatantly so), there were a couple of obviously wealthy and successful prolevolk and a good number of the new declasse. Also a man who I knew slightly as one of the town librarians.
I had been vaguely annoyed at having my evening interfered with, and further by being sworn to secrecy by someone like Hubertstein. I hadn't had anything like that done to me before.
As we entered the hall annoyance gave way to curiosity. Not just because of the caliber of those present. With modern communications, any sort of large face-to-face meeting like this was rare. And there was something in the body language of some of those already gathered: Grotius, who called us to order, and Mayor Larsen, who took the podium.
I had met the mayor socially a few times. I had even heard her speak formally before. But never like this. She opened new buildings and presided at civic banquets. She was another mouthpiece for the Nineteen Families. Her speeches were as a rule long on sonorous bromides and short on content. She normally began by working through the titles of the more or less distinguished ones present. This time she did not.
"We have had a warning from Sol system about hostile aliens in space. They have been attacking Sol ships."
There was a long moment of echoing silence.
"It seems the aliens have no interest in negotiation or communication. They have some kind of gravity control that gives them acceleration and maneuverability which no conventional ship can match. They have matched velocities with ships travelling at. 8 lightspeed."
There was a brief hubbub of exclamations. She waited for it to subside before continuing to state the obvious.
"Of course, this message is more than four years old."
The hall was on a column, high above nearly all of the city lights, and had a plexidome for a roof. The designers wanted to make the most of Wunderland's sky. Sol was there, easy to pick out as part of a constellation in the new Wunderland zodiac, the Tigripard, made principally from the great "W" of Cassiopeia.