"No! Not as a passenger. I want… I want… “
His voice trailed off. I knew what he wanted. Isolated, celibate, a square peg keeping a tight hold on normality. I knew. I was glad to break the awkward silence.
"Yes. You mentioned a skin.”
"Nothing about that here." Then he burst out: "You have your hunts to enjoy!”
There was no point in arguing with him, but how wrong he was! Someone who enjoys my work in the sense I knew he meant would be useless. In any case, the mental preparation arranged for us is thorough. What I do is a duty, and not an ignoble one. Our world has – no, our worlds, plural, have – become complicated beyond imagining. There is a phrase coming into use: 'known space'. Someone has to hold it together. It has never been a matter of the hunt for its own sake, or of searching for excitement.
Warn him off. Now. Arthur had quite a lot of museum junk littering a workbench. All there legitimately, I assumed, but among it was a small heap of brown paper, the pages of old books far gone in acid decay.
"What are these?" I asked casually.
"Sports history. It's been a hobby of mine.”
"Oh." My eye caught the bottom of one of the loose pages.
At the end of March, 1943, the thaw started on the eastern front. 'Marshal Winter' gave way to the still more masterful 'Marshal Mud', and active operations came automatically to an end. All Panzer divisions and some infantry divisions were withdrawn from the front line, and the armor in the Kharkov area was concentrated under the 48th Panzer Corps. We assumed command of the 3rd, 6th and 11th Panzer divisions, together with P.G.D. Gross Deutschland. Advantage was taken of the lull to institute a thorough training program, and exercise…
He looked over my shoulder at it. "Winter Olympics, I think," he said. "They were just starting to do things on a really big scale with team games then. The Space Age year.”
It dealt with a period before the literary era I specialized in and it didn't mean a lot to me. I didn't particularly like it, but for a low-grade ARM officer to possess a few lines of old books without specific clearance was not exactly an offense, even if it might amount to skating on thinnish ice. In any case I had other things to do now.
ARM had special facilities for deep hypnosis available for people like me, since memory and association are our most unique assets.
Certain specific parts of my childhood and juvenile memory had been blocked as a routine precaution when I joined ARM but the block was intended to be bypassed in a matter of need. It wasn't perfect recall but I did bring back a clearer picture. An old, old book in my father’s collection, Great True Stories of Adventure for Boys, with a story of a strange tiger hunt and crude black-and-white line.
Although these stacks were in Dr. Humphrey's charge, he had apparently not seen it before. That was understandable. There were miles of shelving on compactus tracks.
"It's no tiger," he said. "It's like no animal I've ever seen.”
"A freak?”
"No. No tiger so abnormal would have grown to adulthood.”
"What about these lesions?”
"I've seen them on specimens before. Gunshot wounds when it was killed. And look at this!" He gestured at the literature he had brought and then down at the thing itself. "Cranial tumor indeed!”
It took the two of us to turn the skull over. He inserted a probe. "That's all braincase. Bigger than yours or mine.”
I had a picture of a skull sent by the Angel's Pencil with me. There was no mistake about the identification: the Pencil's 'alien' skull was copied from this one. I left the British Museum's storage section and headed for the archives, still as good as any in the world.
The Vaughn family were still in Australia. They had survived what happened there in 2025 and even emerged with some of their land intact and productive: The farm near the New South Wales rain forest which the colonel had retired to on his pension when all the British Empire was practically one country. I was there a few hours later.
Arthur Vaughn-Nguyen seemed cooperative when I presented myself as a Historian. He was in late middle age, probably about a hundred and ten, unattached. There was still farming going on, but robots did the work. He had two sons (so his genes must have checked out well) but they were not there. One, I gathered, was off-planet.
Perhaps he was talkative because he was bored. How many bored people there were! Or was he being too cooperative? I felt suspicious from the start. The farm had a sense of history about it, too, and not just because it belonged to one of the Survivor families.
Too much history, I thought, as I looked at some of the books and artifacts preserved in cases and along the walls of the main hall.
It was probably just as well that Vaughn-Nguyen did not know my thoughts, as I sat in his main living room with a live dog resting its head on my feet and a glass of Bungle-Bungle rum, a local delicacy said to date from Old Australia, in my hand. The family appeared to regard it as traditional. There was a suspicious amount of tradition left at the Vaughn station.
Colonel Vaughn himself was there, an ancient larger-than-life-size portrait hanging on the wall. He was rather as my reading had led me to imagine a 'colonel' might be: crook nosed, wearing an elaborate jacket called a 'uniform', with decorations on it called 'medals'. I had seen such things before, both in books and in the military fant cults. Somehow it struck me as odd and after a little thought I saw why: The man in the picture had no hair at all. No mustache, no eyebrows. It was anachronistic. I didn't think there had been a fashion for hairlessness until modern cosmetics were developed.
Probably it didn't matter. In those days men did lose their hair involuntarily. But this continuing public display of a military fant-type uniform was a different story. ARM should have paid the Vaughn-Nguyens a visit before.
A lot of this was headed for Black Hole. I wondered what compensation it would be necessary to pay the colonel's descendant for the removal of his antiques. Not much. We had destroyed the market for this sort of gear long ago.
It reminded me of something from our first training. When what is now known as ARM began the prelude to the program, as long ago as the American and French advancements at the end of the eighteenth century, it had made one of its priorities the ridiculing and destruction of the notion of hereditary titles of honor.
It was amusing (our instructor had said) to think this had been done in the names of liberty, democracy, equality and progress, when the real purpose had been to consolidate power. Even constitutional monarchy had been destroyed by a prolonged and often subtle political and media campaign, removing the only significant institution that remained as a rival and therefore a check upon its power (apart from the churches, for which there were other plans).
Family history and traditions were dangerous. Interest in the memory of an 'ancestor' was but a short step from family pride and loyalty, and that was clearly and totally inimical to the interests of Earth's good government, or, as far as they were distinguishable, of ARM.
But if the Vaughn-Nguyens thought too much of the past, that was useful to me now.
"The old colonels tiger-man? Yes. Quite famous in its day," he said. Then he added perfectly casually, "Would you like to see the skin?”
I had not been expecting this. I looked at Arthur Vaughn-Nguyen closely. What was he really up to?
"You have it here?”
"Why, yes.”
He led me into another room. The dog followed us for a few steps, and then stopped, making a peculiar noise.
"Is he all right?" I asked.
"You've just seen a family mystery in the flesh." He said, "No animal will go into that room." He laughed. "We say it's haunted by a ghost tiger.”
Against the wall stood a large box of some dark wood, obviously very old, hand carved with decorations. It was much more elaborate than the one at the museum.
Another antique, and this time, I would have guessed, of great value. There was, I noticed, no electronic lock on it, no recording device. Impossible to prove when it had been opened last. Had any of the Angel's Pencil crew been here? I didn't fancy the time-consuming job of tracking down their movements over the last generation.