The autochef chimed and a handmeal popped out of the dispenser. But more important, a mug of steaming coffee accompanied it. I was ravenous as I bit into the handmeal. Then I stopped. A bacon, lettuce and tomato handmeal without the bacon? I had expected this but was still annoyed.
The meal took the edge off my discomfort but I was frustrated because right after eating was when I most missed my pipe. It had always helped me to relax and focus my thoughts. But the limited medical resources of a colony world could not be spared for the preventive doctoring that such a nonessential vice required. I had been forced either to give up my pipe or give up the stars. I chose the stars.
Then I remembered just what it was we had found out in the stars. Not our dreams but nightmares from our violent past. Contact with the kzinti had taken all the dreams of my youth, all the hopes of what we might find out in the stars, and made them a bitter taste in my mouth. What was the value of dreams, if reality was nothing but a nightmare?
I wanted to lash out and give back to the kzinti some of the pain that they had given me when they stole my dreams. But I couldn’t. Generations of socialization and chemical adjustment by psychists and autodocs had removed the violent streak from humanity. So I did the one thing I could do. I reviewed the data file from our first meeting with the kzinti. Feeding my anger, feeding my hate and looking for a way to solve our problem.
As I reached for the “on” button of the data display unit I noticed my vial of medicine. I couldn’t remember if I had taken them the last time my timer had chimed. What the hell, they were making me feel good. Taking more couldn’t hurt. I swallowed five of the pills with a coffee chaser while the memory plastic desk and chair extruded themselves from the wall, then I settled down to study the kzinti and the forgotten art of war.
I watched in numb horror as the now familiar images ran before my eyes. I fast forwarded through the initial confusion of the arrival of the kzinti, then slowed the pace of the images to focus on what they did and how they had done it. I studied how they aimed their weapons, carefully, not indiscriminately, making sure that each shot killed its target. I saw how they were confused by freefall. Some quickly learned to brace themselves when firing their weapons, while others never learned and went tumbling away in dramatic proof of Newton’s law of action and reaction.
I carefully studied their actions when the kzinti entered the Command Deck of the Paradox. I could recognize each and every one of their ugly faces. It was the largest one, Churl-Captain, who was first into the Command Deck. He was the one who had killed Jennifer. And just behind him came Slave Master, who disemboweled Chi Lin and then shot Joel Peltron through the face as his hands danced over the navigation board.
No matter what form my revenge took, I knew I would find something special for Slave Master. For the fear he had made me live under for the past week and for what he had done to my friends on that fateful day. I would be sure that whatever I did to him would be painful and very final. I trembled—either from fear or anticipation, I didn’t know which—as I envisioned killing that tiger that dared to walk like a man.
The violence of my thoughts frightened me. I knew if I got in an autodoc now I’d be out cold for weeks as its systems filled my blood with chemical agents designed to bring my violent impulses under control, to make me a safe and well balanced member of society But right now I didn’t want to be balanced, well or otherwise. I didn’t want to be nonviolent. Right now I wanted to take back my ship and my future from those star-stalking tigers. By any means necessary.
I didn’t want to watch the aftermath of the slaughter on the Command Deck, so I switched to an exterior view of our ship on that fateful day. There was the kzinti boarding craft, sticking to Obler’s Paradox like an obscene growth. Hovering a few hundred feet away was another similar craft. I watched in delight as the magnetic fields from the Bussard generators grabbed that second ship and flung it away from the crew section. I knew that the kzinti craft was being drawn into our field generators but I didn’t care. I knew that the magnetic fields were killing the rat-cat crew of that ship and watched in perverse fascination as that ship slammed into the Bussard field generators at the rear of Obler’s Paradox. The destruction to a part of our ship was a small price to pay for the death of those damned invaders. The kzinti in that ship were dead and the damage of their passing was already fixed. Yes, it was a small price to pay.
Watching these images reinforced the unfamiliar feelings of anger and revenge that were racing through my mind. My body quivered with the unspent energy of my desire to strike back at the kzinti. I had never experienced anything like these feelings. I was surprised by my lack of fear over my unchecked desire to strike out at the kzinti. My mind knew that the smallest kzinti outweighed me by over two hundred fifty pounds. But my body didn’t care.
I felt myself tremble with frustration because try as
