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.'
