"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
