"You sent Earth a message a couple of years ago, asking us if a consignment of radioactives or biological weapons had been sent to Wunderland at a certain time during the war," said Brigadier Arthur Guthlac. "Why?" He spoke with the indefinable awkwardness of a friend suddenly turned official.
"Two years ago?" Rykermann frowned. "Yes, of course I did. But why bring that up now? I assume it's been dealt with."
"No. Thanks to our bureaucracy it has only reached the relevant desk recently. And that by chance. One of Early's subordinates with a long memory happened to see it on its way to the files. It was, of course a secret job, and very few ever knew about it. Normally we, or the Wunderland Government, would have sent out a team to clean it up in due course—when a mountain of higher priorities had been disposed of."
"So?"
"Why did you send it?" Guthlac repeated. "When you did?"
"A routine part of tidying up," Rykermann told him. "We buried some stuff during the war, stuff we were told had been sent from Earth, and I thought the UNSN should remove it. It was obviously something secret and military. Therefore something dangerous. I won't apologize that it took us a long time to get round to it. We've also had one or two other things on our hands, you know."
"You're sure it was stuff sent from Earth."
"That was what we were told," said Rykermann. "From Earth via the Serpent Swarm belt. The courier who delivered it to us was killed. I don't know any more than that."
"When did it happen?"
"It was about a year before the kzinti captured me in the caves. About fourteen Earth-years before liberation."
"So it got through," Guthlac said. "We thought it had been lost in space."
"What was it? . . . Don't pull that stone face on me. We took risks for it," Rykermann told him. "A number of people died for it. Answer my question, please, Arthur. Also, I happen to be not only the chief biologist for the cave complexes, I'm very close to the Minister for Environmental Protection. Do you want me to tell him there's an unknown bioweapon from Earth at large and Earth won't tell us anything about it? That is my duty as a Wunderlander and a member of the Government. And there was nuclear stuff, too."
"Nils, I know well enough you are a politician," said Guthlac. "In any case I suppose you'll need to know. It's Pak tree-of-life. And, Nils, I'm ordering you to say nothing about it."
Rykermann drew in his breath sharply. He looked as if he was about to burst out with something, but then said only: "Why?"
"I'll tell you. But I'll trade you information. Tell me more. Everything that happened then."
"We were in the wild country beyond the Hohe Kalkstein. There was a fight." Rykermann told him the story.
"We hid the stuff and cleared out," he concluded. "After that we had plenty of other things to do, beginning with getting away. If I thought about it at all later, I wondered if it might be a radioactive agent we were meant to smuggle into kzin ships or areas and then open. Enriched uranium for detonators, perhaps. Initiators for simple fission bombs. Plutonium. Caesium. Or some biological plague that the Sol Laboratories had developed to use on ratcats. But I had other things on my mind. We'd done as Sol instructed, at big risk all along the way. In the day-to-day matters of staying alive I didn't give it too much thought.
"The resistance was getting into a bad way then. Not just because attrition was wearing us down and more and more humans were either giving up and accepting their lot or just dead. Chuut-Riit had begun studying humans and that was making life harder for us all. Some kzinti were investigating monkey stuff—it had been beneath their dignity before—and some were also getting all too interested in what they found. They were learning more about us and it was getting harder to hide.
"Then I was captured by the kzinti," Rykermann went on. "Thanks to Raargh-Sergeant and because we'd fought together against the Morlocks, and Leonie had soft-heartedly saved his life, I was awarded fighters' privileges and paroled. That changed my lifestyle. I wouldn't risk front-fighting and then falling into kzin claws again after breaking my word to them—there are some things you can't ask of a man and that's one of them. I was exhausted anyway. Plus they had a zzrou implant in me, not being overly trusting of any monkey. I became more a back-room boy for a long time. There was plenty for a backroom boy to do."
Guthlac nodded. Rykermann went on.
"Time passed. We did what we could, growing a little weaker and more hopeless each year. Then came other things, it seemed on top of one another, hard and fast: the ramscoop raid and the death of Chuut-Riit, followed by the kzinti's civil war and the Liberation. That didn't mean the end of work for us. In many ways we were busier than ever.
"I thought the zzrou would kill me come Liberation. But a human doctor managed to hack it out. He died instead of me when it exploded. Thanks to Leonie, some of my people found me in the wreckage just before I bled to death. But without fancy surgery I spent the Liberation with a hole the size of your fist where my right scapula had been, and not, as you can imagine, taking a very active part. Finally they got me to the UNSN forces and one of the military regeneration tanks. Other wounded had to make do with organ banks. I was fortunate enough to be spared that."
Rykermann was telling Guthlac things he knew already, but Guthlac let him speak on. He knew one terrible thing Rykermann might be referring to when he spoke of organ banks and apparently it still helped him to talk.
"Later, when things had settled down, and I was generally tidying up loose ends, I asked the authorities if they had sent us any dangerous radioactive material. I didn't hear anything more. That was the last I thought about it until now. I love my biological work and that's what I'd rather concentrate on. And . . . well, there were other things on my mind, too."
"Dangerous, to leave radioactives around."
"Cleaning up Wunderland will be a long job, Arthur," Rykermann said. "There are lots of crashed ships, lots of spilled radioactives, lots of munitions, half-made experimental bioweapons, lots of hot dumps still. Our granite's generally a lot hotter than Earth's as well, which can make detection more difficult. I guess we'll have to wait till the war's over in space before we can even think of seeing the resources to do the job properly. But now you say . . ." Again he stopped as if biting off words.
"Anyway, you were right," Guthlac said. "There were some nukes in it, along with triggers—bombs ready to go. Some of them very dirty and with a big bang for their size."
"That's not very nice to have loose on Wunderland," said Rykermann. "There are still kzin revanchists around, not to mention some humans who could be even more dangerous. Apart from—the other thing. We must bring it in now. I suppose you have the signatures of the nukes?"
"Yes. Here." Guthlac gestured to a computer-brick. "They shouldn't be too hard to find—in fact they were designed to leave signatures so they could be retrieved from hiding-places easily. We also had transmitters broadcasting those signatures. They are so miniaturized they aren't very effective, but they might help. We also have triggering codes. But you want the full story?"
"To Hell with the nukes! Pak tree-of-life. Why?"
"One of the greatest services Markham and the Alpha Centauri resistance did for humanity was to set up a maser facility on Nifelheim," Guthlac said. "They were able to send Sol a lot of information about the kzinti and in particular their fleets.
"Markham? He knocked down a lot of the kzin surveillance satellites," said Rykermann. "And his people jinxed others to send misleading information. The resistance would never have survived otherwise. That's what we owe him for. But what's Markham got to do with tree-of-life?"
"For us it was the intelligence he sent that mattered. Keeping that secret channel open was priceless. We were also masering them, but at both ends we kept our messages short and few. For the kzinti to have intercepted them would have been disastrous. But as you say, until Chuut-Riit settled firmly into command they didn't take much interest in what monkeys did so long as they were decorous slaves. We, like you, took advantage of that.
"The message we sent with the special consignment was deliberately cryptic. Decoded it said only: 'Hide it. You'll get further instructions if and when the time comes.'
"When things were going from bad to worse in the war, about the time of the third big kzin fleet attack on Sol," Guthlac went on, "Early's people launched Operation Cherubim."
"I've never heard of it."
"Very few did. By that time we were beginning to fear sabotage of the war effort by pacifists and would-be quislings in Sol system. Thanks to Markham's masers we knew that in the Centauri system humans had not been exterminated but were living under a collaborationist government. We made that public knowledge, thinking it might be good for morale—Sol people would have grounds to hope their families and so forth here might still be alive. Anyway, we only rediscovered the need for any censorship slowly. It was a mistake. It meant there was a temptation to some Sol people, when they knew they might go on living under the kzinti, to settle for something like the same, rather than endless, grinding, hopeless war and increasing poverty, hardship and coercion for all."
"If you can call it living," said Rykermann. "The worst that Sol people endured was paradise beyond dreams compared to what we had here."
"I know. But the possibility of a negotiated surrender for Sol was an inducement to defeatists and others: People worked out that those who did services for the kzinti—assisted them in their conquest—might expect to be rewarded by them. They worked out there were probably people like that on Wunderland."
"There were," said Rykermann. "Since I was out of things at the Liberation I missed seeing most of what was done to them then."
"At first we hadn't bothered with security much, discounting any possibility of kzin spies or agents," said Guthlac. "No human would spy or do sabotage for the kzinti, we assumed. But we learnt better as time went on. Humanity wasn't united. Secrets did matter. Operation Cherubim was deadly secret: To send a ship to Alpha Centauri with human volunteers—childless, of course—who would be converted into Pak Protectors. They carried tree-of-life agent in a sealed compartment. Something went wrong. They never arrived. Perhaps they ran into kzin ships. Perhaps just one of the accidents of spaceflight.
"But there was another operation on the same lines: To send tree-of-life agent in an unmanned ship."
"Why?"
"It was the emergency backup. There were many advantages from the covert operation point of view: simpler, quicker, a ship able to accelerate and decelerate faster and, without life-systems, smaller, harder to detect or intercept. Plus, we weren't over-supplied with suitable Protector volunteers. The resistance had instructions to pick it up at the edge of the system and smuggle it to Wunderland."
"As geriatric drugs and trace elements."
"Yes. Not a complete lie, of course. It is a geriatric drug—and how! Always make your cover story as close to the truth as possible. The idea was, even if someone at the Alpha Centauri end who had an idea of what it was fell into kzin hands and was probed by a telepath, he or she could fix on the idea of a geriatric drug and medicine, just possibly the telepath would not detect an actual lie. That was the idea, anyway. Whether or not it would have worked is another matter. But anyway nothing was said in our maser as to what it really was. Then, of course, when it arrived it was to be hidden.
"If Sol system had been plainly falling, instructions would have been masered to open the containers and make Protectors. From there it would, we hoped, go as Operation Cherubim had been meant to go. Of course, we would give instructions then to try to ensure that the Protectors created would be suitable individuals—volunteers, with high ethical standards and records—good people, in short—and childless. We would have wanted trained scientists and fighters, of course, so they'd have as big a start as possible in knowledge and experience.
"We would do the same on Earth. The kzinti would find themselves attacked by Protectors in both systems simultaneously. We sent the nukes as well so the Protectors would have powerful weapons ready to hand right away, either as bombs or pumps for lasers. Even Protectors couldn't build nuclear processing-plants and factories in a kzin-occupied system overnight. But it was a desperate ploy, only to be used if all else was lost. We wouldn't have control over the process, or over who the human Protectors in this system would be. You know Protectors, once they are used to their state, are more or less indestructible, smarter than human geniuses, and unless they're killed they live for thousands of years. One can't imagine they would ever have handed power back to breeders, or even agreed not to make more Protectors. They could produce their own tree-of-life, given time. There was fear that we were exchanging one demonic enemy for a worse. But even if they had been universally benevolent, even if they defeated the kzinti, it would have changed our society utterly and probably forever . . .
"Anyway, the plan never had to be used, for which we may give thanks. The ramscoop raid and the death of Chuut-Riit gave us a breathing space, and instead of Protectors the hyperdrive saved us. We were lucky.
"As for Operation Cherubim, it seems that all those in the need-to-know circle in the Centauri system died. The kzinti found the maser transceiver in due course and they didn't stop at half-measures in blasting Nifelheim out of the sky with all its personnel. Also, quite a lot of ARM intelligence people from Sol died in the war, you know. We had gaps in our own records and knowledge. We didn't keep a lot of things electronically at all, for fear of kzinti or their agents hacking into our files. We lost both hard copy and computers when the kzin hit assets on Earth, which happened more often than most people know. Anyway ARM decided the consignment had never arrived and wrote it off . . . And you say the containers were hit in the fight."
"Yes."
"Well, at least they can't have been breached," Guthlac said. "If any tree-of-life agent had escaped you'd have known all about it at the time. How old are you, Nils?"
"A hundred and one last birthday."
"Even twenty-six years ago, you would have been too old to make the change. Exposure to tree-of-life would have killed you. But you're still here. And none of the rest of your party was affected either. I think—I hope—we can assume the integrity of the containers. They were made strong, after all . . . Although no stronger than the ordinary hospital containers they were supposed to be. We expected them to be inspected and x-rayed by the collabos at least, and we didn't want to arouse suspicion by making them anything special."
"They may have been damaged, though," said Rykermann. "I remember seeing them take hits. And twenty-six years buried wouldn't have improved them. There can be some powerful microorganisms and compounds in Wunderland soil, in the caves in particular. I'd suggest they be removed at once."
"Obviously. That's why I sent for you as soon as I realized what your report was about. Can you find them?"
"With deep-radar it should be easy enough," Rykermann said. "I remember the locality."
"We want to be discreet about this," Guthlac said. "We also don't want humans being put at risk of exposure to tree-of-life. Trustworthy—very trustworthy—kzinti would be useful on a job like this. The stuff's no danger and no value to them. I say that because I think of Vaemar. Can Vaemar destroy them?"
"He's still up at the caves. He's due to return in the next day or two. You know why."
"This is tricky," said Guthlac. "We don't want humans approaching those containers, not given the state they might be in, but I'm not happy about any kzinti, not even your young paragon of virtue, finding out too much about them. It might be best to simply clear the whole area and nuke it."
"It might be best," said Rykermann, "to make sure the containers are still there first."
"Why shouldn't they be?"
"There were several people in our own party—the party that met the couriers when they were buried—who survived. I've lost touch with some of them. I'm not saying any of them would necessarily steal such things or have any motive to, but who knows who they might have talked to since then? The fighting's been over on this planet for thirteen years. Barroom reminiscences about some buried containers of weapons might have tempted some crook or adventurer to go on a private treasure-hunt for all we know."
"If such a crook had opened them he or she would have had a surprise. And I think we would have known about it by now."
"Even so, surely they should be counted and inventoried before they're destroyed?"
"I take your point. Can Vaemar do that?"
"Yes."
"Get him onto it then. I don't need to tell you to stay well away from the area yourself. It shouldn't be too dangerous for him."
"May I tell Vaemar what he's doing? He knows about the Pak, by the way. He searched old Earth records for another project."
"I didn't know that. Act at your discretion. If he knows about the Pak there doesn't seem much point in concealing this from him. It'll give him an incentive, in fact."