“We know they had taken human prisoners and perhaps they had learned things from them. Not just in space. When we killed one of their ships and boarded it we found bodies of human civilians from Wunderland.
“Apparently the Outsiders have been landing scouts in small cloaked ships for some time.”
“I'm surprised. If they are so aggressive, why didn't they just attack in force?”
“Cats stalk their prey. They study the ground before they pounce. It's after the pounce begins that their control goes. This may be the same thing. Some of the humans they took had kept hidden records, hidden in their cages. Apparently the Kzin didn't care. Why should they? They aren't nice reading.
“Our eggheads are puzzled. These creatures are something out of a nightmare: cruel, man-eating, killing, but with science that is in so many ways ahead of ours. It shouldn't have happened, but it has. I'm told there have been quite a lot of suicides among our eggheads… Oh yes, and from the prisoners' notes we found out why they sometimes behaved as if they could read our minds. They can.”
“What!”
“They can. Or a few of them can. Apparently it's rare. But you can tell when they are doing it: a sudden violent headache. It also explains how they came to know our languages so quickly—which they do.”
That hit me like a physical blow, though it took me a few moments to realize why.
“Can it be resisted?” asked Dimity.
“Don't know. The prisoners we know they tried it on were terrorized, injured, starving, tortured already. In no shape to resist. Anyway, that's the war, and it's been going on for weeks… I don't know how long… I think it's nearly over now.”
“We've heard nothing of this,” I said again. “We've been told nothing.”
“What was the point of telling?”
“It might have meant better war production.”
“I think so. Others thought it would lead to 'a collapse of civilian morale.' I think it was their own morale that was actually collapsing. They said there was as much material getting up to us as could be reasonably expected.”
I remembered my speed-reading of the last few weeks, and the attempted defense of Singapore in the Second World War. As the Japanese advanced down the Malay Peninsula towards it, the defending general had refused to construct field defenses in case they lowered the spirits of the civilians. It had not been a good decision.
“If people knew too much, I gather, it was feared they would simply flee into the hills, or mob the slowboats,” he went on. “And then there was that… that one brief shining moment… when it looked as if we were winning.
“There was another matter too, which we found out late in the day: Some of our politicians minimized the threat because they hoped to enlist the Kzin as allies for their own factions in our internal disputes here.”
I wished I could have said I found that unbelievable, but I knew too much.
“Maybe, if we could have duplicated their drive,” he went on, “got factories into production, maybe if we had had a few more months, or a year, we could have fought them on equal terms. As it is…
“Wunderland is their prime target, of course. Anyway, the Swarm is more difficult to subdue. Dozens of inhabited asteroids, with defenses now. But we haven't much left here. Those drives and weapons are too good for us. And they've got reinforcements too. More of the big carrier ships have arrived.”
“They could hardly have been alone,” said Dimity. “With drives like that and what we know about them from Sol. Where there was one ship there would be more coming…
“Tell me,” she asked him, “Is there any suggestion, any indication, that they may have got through the light-barrier?”
“No. They get close to the speed of light. They can match velocities with any of our ships, and of course they are much more maneuverable.”
“Could they have a superluminal drive in outer space and drop into subluminal close to star systems?”
“I don't know. We've not been in a position to observe. There's no evidence of it. Anyway it's impossible. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing.”
“I only saw a bit of what was happening. I'm just a meteor jockey. The fighting was spread all over the system.”
“You must have learned a bit about these creatures. Language, that sort of thing?”
“A bit.” The pilot took a red disk from a pocket. “It's here, what we know. The spoken language is hard to understand, even with a computer, at present impossible to imitate, although some people are trying. The written is a little easier, at least when it's not in war code. It's another of those things we might have got better at with time.”
“Can I play it?”
He shrugged and passed it to her. “I don't see why not. But what do you intend to do now?”
“Repair the car as soon as I can,” I said.
“You can't show a light or heat source. They're still around up there.”
“Well, we can't trek very far on foot, and we can't stay here. In any case, there are almost certainly a group of aliens in the Hohe Kalkstein caves. We know there's one.”
“Kzin,” he said. He pronounced it differently, a snarling cough it made my vocal chords ache just to hear. “They are called Kzin. Plural and possessive kzinti, we think.”
“Oh yes, I know.”
Kleist's nervous excitement was running down now. We were all pretty beaten up, and he and I sank into a sort of doze. Dimity had earphones on, and was playing the disk, staring at the screen. More than once I saw dark shapes, too sharp-edged to be cloud, driving high and silent across the luminous bands of the Swarm and the Milky Way, and more sliding lights that might have been meteors.
Chapter 12
“If I am the Scourge of God, you must be truly wicked.”
I woke in daylight. Modern cars have complex machinery and neither Dimity nor I were practical mechanics.
“I guess we're walking out of this one,” said Kleist. He added: “That's a Spacers' joke. It's got a bit threadbare lately.”
Repairing the car was an even longer job than I thought. I soon saw that without Kleist we would never have done it. We hoped the daylight heat reflected on the rocks of the mesa would mask what we were doing. We spent most of that day and the next working on the fuel line and its feeder controls, freezing when we saw flying things. We kept a watch in the direction of the Hohe Kalkstein, but though we thought we saw some distant activity on the escarpment nothing emerged from it to come our way. We also thought we saw an ordinary air-car flying well to the north close to the ground, but had no safe way of trying to signal it. It never came back. Alpha Centauri A had set by the time we were finished, Alpha Centauri B rising and casting long shadows in the purple twilight. And in the direction of the escarpment our glasses were definitely picking up lights and movement.
Where to go? I had tried to get Dimity away from München partly to protect her from rioting and chaos and also to protect her knowledge. But there seemed no obvious safer haven now. Kleist insisted he must get back to München, which in any case was the planetside center of the defense effort. (Had it been stupid of us to place our defense headquarters in our major city? I wondered, and came to the conclusion that it had been very stupid indeed.) Then Dimity recalled something.
“You said 'mob the slowboats.' What did you mean?”
“The old slowboats are still intact,” Kleist said. “The Kzin haven't bothered with them for some reason, at least they hadn't a few days ago, and I saw them in the sky last night. Presumably because they are deactivated they don't see them as a threat, or a high-priority target. But they are being reactivated. We're getting people out.”