I had the strakkaker out now. I jumped across the desk and grabbed him by the throat, jabbing the muzzle under his nose.
“Don't play games with me! You know exactly what I mean!”
“Brother!… Professor!… Nils?”
“It's disguised, isn't it? And it's not a satellite so much as a spaceship in orbit?”
He didn't try to dissemble.
“How did you know?”
“I remembered what you said, the night it all began: 'We came here independently… It almost bankrupted the Vatican.' Passage in a big slowboat would have been expensive, but not that expensive. I searched some of the old records when we got them up, and found no mention of your people on any of the slowboat passenger lists. My conclusion was: You came to Wunderland on your own ship.”
“Yes. We left later than the original slowboats but we came faster. The state of the art had advanced by the time it was launched.”
“Where did that ship go? Not back to Earth. There would be no justification for sending an empty craft all the way back. So it's still here. Isn't it?”
“Yes.”
“In a system as full of rubble as this it would be easy enough to cover with rocks and dust so it looks like another planetoid. With a low albedo and a high orbit it would be more or less unnoticeable from the ground among everything else that's up there. Your ace in the hole in case you really had to run or fight?”
“Yes.”
“You made sure it was forgotten.”
“Yes. Later we did a deal with some of the Families. Records of how we arrived were removed and people forgot. But we argued that in an emergency the ship would be at their disposal or ours—as lifeboat or… or warship. Then time went by and they forgot about it too. Who cared?”
“You denied it to the defense effort now, when we needed every ship we had to defend our world against alien invaders.”
“But it was deactivated. There are no weapons aboard. It couldn't have helped the defense effort.”
Weapons could have been fitted, and it might have been used for an ambush. Any spaceship is a weapon, properly used. But I let it pass. It would simply have been destroyed without affecting the eventual outcome of events, and at least it was a ship in being now.
“And now it's been activated again. These transmissions prove it.”
“Yes. One of the families helped us, and we have a shuttlecraft.
“You can put that gun down,” he said, “I'm not going to fight you. We have enough problems already.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Get some of our people away, and some refugees. But it's a small ship. We can't take many.”
“To Earth?”
“No. Earth is plainly under attack as well. What would be the point? I'm thinking of sending it to We Made It.”
“Why?”
“First, to give them warning. Second, because it's taking some of our eggs out of two threatened baskets. These kzin may not know of We Made It.”
“No. You must send it to Earth. With Dimity Carmody aboard.”
“Why? She is a shapely and clever young lady, and I know that you are in love with her. But your subjective feelings are not important now, Nils. As God is my witness I'm sorry, but to send her would be at the cost of not sending somebody else. It seems to me she is better equipped to survive here than some. If any are to survive the kzin.”
“At this moment she is in your infirmary, badly injured. Head injured. Isn't regrowing brain and central nervous tissue the hardest surgical procedure of all?”
It stopped him for a moment. But he replied:
“You must see that that makes no better case for her. To take her in that condition with a lot of medical equipment—equipment that's needed here—would mean leaving even more of the others behind… You cannot think I enjoy making decisions like this?
“I, of course will not go,” he went on. “These are my flock and I will not abandon them. In any case, I have already told you that it will not go to Earth. Earth warned us, remember. They already know of the kzin attack even if they are not directly experiencing it. And I can tell you we have had no laser messages from Sol System for some time. That strongly suggests their big lasers are busy.” The drug might be making him tell the truth but I could see it was not affecting his willpower.
“I will stay here if I must, but send her to Earth!” I shouted. “She thinks she has… she knows she has made a mathematical discovery that may have military applications.”
“Can you believe that?” He was nodding in his chair now. I hoped he was not going to lose consciousness.
“Do you know of her work?”
“I've heard of it. Who hasn't?”
“Given her own chair and research unit at the age of sixteen. Discoverer of Carmody's Transform. Can't you take what I say on trust? And if the Kzin get her…”
“If the Kzin get her she dies. Or perhaps not. Again, as a man, I'm more sorry than I can say, but I believe my duty is clear. I've thought of you as a friend and I've no wish to hurt you or any man or woman. But a lot of people are going to die. Having more neuronic connections in her brain than average doesn't morally entitle her to special treatment.”
“She has a military value. This is not for me or for her. The survival of the human race may depend on it.”
“Perhaps I should ask her.”
There was a soft phut, a pneumatic sound. I saw a dart appear in the back of my right hand. I reached to pull it out but it worked quicker and more heavily than the one I had used. The room began to go black. As I fell I saw Brother Peter advancing, with his own collecting gun.
I came around on a couch in the same room. The daylight slanting through the window told me a night and more had passed. And it was a smoky light, pulsating with distant fire. I felt, stupidly, for my strakkaker. It was gone, of course.
“How do you feel?” the abbot asked.
“Rotten.” There were pains everywhere. The locator implant in my arm was doing something. I thought in a disorganized way that it was probably triggered by my generally disordered metabolism.
“Well, you can be thankful. She's gone. You convinced me. You and rereading the effects and importance of Carmody's Transform and her other published work.”
“To Earth?”
“To We Made It.”
“That was a mistake.”
“Think about it. The Kzin have let the slowboats go so far. They may change their minds and pursue them. If so, they'll be likely to go after the big ones, which are all going the same way, only a few days apart. A smaller and faster ship on its own may have more chance. Anyway, she's safely away.
“The Kzin have been landing heavier warcraft in the last few hours and using heavier weapons,” he went on. “Apparently they've had enough play.”
“I could have gone with her.”
“I have watched you since you were a child. You have always been one of our human insurance policies, and now you are one of the few of them left alive. That last night you came here to the monastery, after the first feline was seen, I knew a storm was coming. The real reports from the Meteor Guard had been passed on to us for some time. Our culture was soft, complacent, faction-ridden, our people had lost much of their pioneering heritage very quickly, and few had survival skills. You have no faction and you know something of survival. You are even a public figure. You are needed here… as a leader, now.
“There is another thing,” he went on, meeting my gaze. “The shuttle was full. I had to have twelve people dragged off as it was to accommodate her and her medical equipment. God help me! The rest were families. Should I have broken them up to make room for one more?”
“Yes, God help you!” Then, loath as I was to ask him anything further, “Can I… see the ship?”
“Are you sure you want to?”
“I'm sure.”
“You can't see her,” he said, “Even if you should. She's in coldsleep. But you can see she's out of this horror. She's as safe as any can hope to be. And so is whatever's in her brain. There's a camera on the ship. You can see she's getting away.”