"I know that. But we're not in the Pleistocene now. I don't know how you can choose to work in these conditions.”
"Well, the idea is we should at least know our planets past. What's the point of a historical display if it isn't real? Nature really was red in tooth and claw once. Remember the Africa Rover.”
"A good deal too red in tooth and claw for me to want to know about, thanks. I'll leave that to the children. But you know I don't mean you putting up with cold air currents and nasty holograms. I mean spending your life here.”
"Look at this," said Arthur. He touched a display of letters below a permanent reproduction of a great felinoid. "It's a poem from an ancient children's book on paleontology called Whirlaway: 'The Song of the Saber-Tooth':”
On all the weaker beasts I work my sovereign will. Their flesh supplies my feasts, my glory is to kill. With claws and teeth that rend, with eyes that pierce the gloom I follow to the end my duty and my doom. For I shall meet one day a beast of greater might, And if I cannot slay I'll die in rapturous fight
"Don't you think it's got a sort of ring to it?”
It was my job, but I still found myself rather shocked, not just at the antisocial content of the poem, but because it seemed unpleasantly close to holos and flats I had been studying. Why had he chosen it to quote? "Do you think that's really suitable for children?" I asked.
"I don't think it can do any harm to show what prehistory – prehuman history – was like. You don't feel any sense of wonder looking back at the mammoth, the cave bear and the dire wolf?”
"Well, a bit, I suppose.”
"You can be creative here.”
Arthur turned to a smaller holo in a cabinet by the door leading into the main diorama space. A hominid on the shore of an alkaline lake screamed and ran from another great cat. Other hominids jerked up from their clam gathering to scatter before it. Long-extinct birds rose in a screaming cloud. This time the saber-tooth was foiled. Geological and evolutionary time had passed since the first scene. The hominids were taller and some of them had sticks.
The guard operated another switch and the scene changed again.
"We have a lot of things to do here. This is a new one for the children. Our might-have-beens." He spoke to a pane! and a succession of prehistoric animals appeared, altered.
"You can do your own genetic engineering here: These are how our friends might have developed had conditions been different." He turned a dial and the holos changed. "Look! Here other creatures got the big brains.”
Tigerlike creatures walked improbably erect, with fanciful tigerish cities in the background.
"It's been worked out what might have happened.”
There was something here. I didn't understand it, but there was a hint of a scent. Had something been planted here?
Not, I thought, by Arthur Guthlac. All that was marked in his file was a certain interest in unsuitable games and reading, perhaps an occupational risk for someone in his job, and a general restlessness and reluctance to apply himself (apply himself to what?). Further, I had already checked that he had no conceivable financial or other links with anyone or anything that might profit from stories of space madness. I kept my voice casual.
"Yes, I'm sure the children love it. But all the same, you must get sick of it, day after day. I don't know why you bother with such a job. If you want to work, there are plenty of better things to do.”
"No," he said, "I don't really get sick of it. It can be fun working with the holos. The children can make it fun, too. In any case, what else should I be doing? Nobody's going to send me into space, are they?" There was resentment buried somewhere there, I noted. Buried none too deeply, at that.
"This wing is largely a children's museum, as far as display goes," he continued. "Which is why they have human guides, of course. You know it's impossible to make anything child-proof if they're left to run loose without supervision. A lot of the equipment here is expensive.”
Arthur paused and then added, "And, after all, Karl, history is important.”
"Of course it is. But the world is full of people telling themselves their hobbies are important. We've all got a great deal of leisure time to fill. All right, I agree we need people doing what you are doing. But you wanted to go into space once.”
"What good is an amateur savant in space? They sent plenty of real professors to Wunderland, but someone like me would only take up valuable room on a colony ship. I know.
"I applied a long time ago… I have no skill that would justify the expense of transporting me, or will allow me to earn enough money to pay my own way. One family seems to have been rationed to one space-farer. But you haven't heard me complaining, have you?”
"Not in so many words." I kept my voice neutral. There was nothing to be gained by thinking of why I would never be allowed very far into space.
His sister, I knew, was a navigator on the Happy Gatherer, a genius, genetic engineer turned space pilot. He was proud of her and, I guessed, subconsciously resentful.
"Anyway, look at this." Arthur opened another door onto a vast panorama of the asteroid belt, as seen from the surface of Ceres, the rocky landscape lit by the blue-white fusion flame of a miners ship passing closer than a real ship would ever be allowed.
He touched another switch, and we seemed to stand on the red surface of Mars. Our feet disappeared in dust.
"You can do a lot with holos," Arthur said. "Being a gallery supervisor can be a lot of fun if the museums big enough and has VR as good as we have here.”
He gestured. "Do you want to see our Great Moments in History? The Sportsman's Hall of Fame? The panorama of the Olympic Games? The Hall of Music? We've got it all here. Science, the history of space flight: Werner von Braun sending up the first V-2?" He pointed down the hall, to the strange yet familiar shape of the historic weather-research rocket's replica suspended from the ceiling.
"There's the Shame Gallery, too, the displays of creatures we exterminated, like the trusting dodo bird. But the truth of the matter is I like working in the museum because we have an excellent library here. I'd still like to do something in the field of prehistory. Somehow.”
The main doors of the great building whispered shut. On Arthur's computer a pattern of green lights appeared, as surveillance monitors locked into a nighttime control center. Security was light, a precaution against accident more than crime.
A holo showed an outline of the complex, secured sections turning green, the last departing visitors white flashing dots of light. A few red dots for the skeleton human staff who would monitor the surveillance screens and occasionally patrol the corridors during the night. Cleaning and maintenance machines began to stir:
"I'm off duty now. I'm glad you made this visit, Karl,”
"Its been a long time. I thought it would be a good idea if we caught up with each other.”
"Well, we're closing down now. Would you like to come home for a while?”
"Would your family mind an uninvited guest?”
"I live alone. I thought you knew.”
"Well, I've no engagements tonight. The little savages are having their tapes played to them by now. Yes, all right. Thank you.”
We stepped into a transit-tube. Arthur Guthlac's quarters, I guessed from the near-instantaneous passage, were somewhere in the museum complex itself.
Psychologically the rooms were easy to read. There were high-detail models of spaceships, a deep-space exploration vessel dominating them, and a flat map of the interstellar colonies.
Arthur was ARM, of course, with some clearances. Most of the museum personnel, certainly all the general staff, were under the organizations wing, even if they had no idea of what its real size and ramifications were (for that matter, I was well aware that I knew very little of that myself). They came in contact with too much history for any other arrangement to be conceivable.