An elevator took us down from street level past several floors of storage to a deep subbasement. There were ancient, primitive stuffed specimens of animals standing there with their hides falling apart into ghoulish sculptures of wires and bones. There were desiccated things in the bottoms of jars and crumbling stone figures that had once been worshiped. There were even mislaid pieces of sports history, such as a tiny rudimentary flying machine with open cockpit and three stubby wings, red fabric falling off its crumbling framework. The designers had given maneuverability and a rapid climb priority over all else. Some game long out of fashion.
Beyond this were further repositories in that great ancient warren of a building. We came to a row of shut metal doors, and entered another locked vault after consulting a plan.
The air was dank. Even cleaning machines had not been there for a long time. And then to a series of locked metal cupboards, so old they were actually rusted.
We found it at last, the label almost unreadable under dust. An ancient wooden box. The lid creaked as we prized it open.
The skull was huge, gray with age, and with some of the more delicate nasal bones obviously crumbled or broken in previous handling. There were several irregular, cracked holes.
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 colonel's 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.
“It's in there?”
“We keep it here. We used it for a rug once, but it was put away, a long time ago.”
It had been a crime to keep the skins of rare animals. In the days when there was a never-ending demand for material for the organ banks, and crimes, however minor, attracted only one punishment. Those days were long gone, but the Vaughn-Nguyens must have some genes for either courage or foolhardiness for one of their ancestors to have risked keeping the thing at all. Did this point to involvement in criminal behavior today?
“I'd like to see it very much,” I said.
The chest smelled bad when it was opened, not powerful at first, but like nothing I have ever smelled before.
Like nothing I have ever smelled before? There was something about that smell, something that made me want to be away from that place. I guessed what it was after a moment, though I had never encountered it before: It must be the tiger smell. I got it under control easily enough. I heard, from the next room, a howl and a frantic scrabble of claws on flooring as the dog fled.