activity. There was nothing on the cave floor, not even the normally ubiquitous vermiform scavengers.
There was little, without major surgery, which they disliked, that could be done to kzinti's eyes to make them more efficient light collectors, but Vaemar did carry a pair of goggles that extended his visual range further. Such simple and lightweight aids were quite new, and humans had reason to be thankful that the kzinti had not possessed them during the war.
There, as Rykermann had described it, was the embankment of earth that covered the containers. Deep layers of mynock droppings showed it had been undisturbed for a long time. Evidently the transitory creatures did not remain long enough for the radiation to affect them.
He set up a motion detector focused into the cave beyond, unfolded a small robot digging tool, and stepped well back as it went to work.
The robot struck solid material after only a few moments. Vaemar deactivated it and stepped forward. One glance was really enough, but he pushed more earth aside to be sure. Beneath the earth was rock. Not only had the containers been removed, the removal had been disguised. The Geiger counter whirred merrily.
Vaemar searched the immediate area thoroughly, but there was no other reasonably possible hiding place. Weapon at the ready, he ventured down the tunnel a long way, out of sight of the daylit mouth and into the beginning of a branching labyrinth of chambers, but again without result. He had compasses, motion detectors and miniaturized sensory devices, all specially developed for such expeditions. Infrared beams in his helmet gradually created a three-dimensional picture of the cave that could be retrieved in several ways, including a hologram.
He found and killed a couple of Morlocks, pausing to note with scientific detachment their body weights and general state of nutrition. He knew better than to try eating the foul-smelling, foul-tasting things. Each tunnel ended at last either in a blank wall, a stream diving under rock, or some passage too small for a kzin to easily enter, though plainly Morlocks had ways of coming and going from the bigger cave systems. The radiation level was falling now. Making a really comprehensive map would take some time. Vaemar felt it would be foolish to go further, especially when he had hardly room to move. His instincts screamed for him to press on, but he had become used to disciplining those instincts. Placing himself in a situation where enemies might come upon him at total disadvantage was not Heroic behavior. He returned to the car, and sent Rykermann and Arthur Guthlac a report, along with a copy of his recorded data. He searched some other small caves in the limestone glens and valleys nearby, without result. He surveyed the whole area with instruments from the air, recording radiation traces and signatures. Then he headed for home.
Below Vaemar's car were the fields and buildings of a human farm. His eye flickered across the instrument console. Since Cumpston's warning of trouble with the feral gangs, most farms in the area had gone onto at least a minimal state of defense alert, which included transmitting a signal identifying themselves and indicating their electronics were functioning normally. This one was not transmitting.
Vaemar made a leisurely pass low over the farm, sending out an interrogatory. He saw the movement of some animals. Nothing else. He decided that an examination of the situation was within the ambit of his task, and landed outside the main building.
No one greeted him, and the wandering animals fled. He saw many human footprints on the ground, some bare. There was not much smell, which was in itself suspicious-it suggested scent-deadening Rarctha fat. The main door was open. The human height of it did not bother Vaemar-kzinti were comfortable going on all fours and preferred to do so when stalking or running any distance-but it was hardly wide enough to admit his shoulders. Looking in, he could see some brightly colored toys of human children scattered about. He called out, but there was no answer. His Ziirgah sense told him nothing apart from confirming that the place was empty, but it picked up desperate hunger from somewhere else.
A white object like an oversized fluffy ball with blue eyes bounced up from the ground and through the air towards him. He hurled himself backwards, almost faster than a human eye could have followed, w'tsai flashing. The Beam's Beast fell in two pieces, fangs squirting venom. Further evidence that the place had been deserted for some time.
Stepping back into the courtyard, he noticed a limestone outcrop that had been fenced off for no obvious reason. Examining it more closely, he discovered a sink-hole at its center, covered by a metal grating, with no bottom to be seen. He tied a light to a fine cable and lowered it through the bars into the hole. It twirled around, showing blackness and stalactites. His sensitive nose and whiskers tasted the air from it. He could hear the cave- sounds of dripping and running water. So, the great caves touched the surface here, as they did in many places.
He sensed game animals watching him fearfully from the cover of the trees. I would like to bring Orlando hunting here, he thought. And then, remembering the new state of things: And Tabitha, too, and Karan. Make it what the humans call a family picnic. Dimity, too, perhaps.
Looking further at the main farm building, he saw indeed that stairs at one side led down to an underground cellar, where wooden containers were kept. Further on, the artificially shaped and lined walls gave way to living rock with cave formations, that seemed to go on down into darkness. 'Monkey-daffy, monkey-lucky' was an old kzin maxim on Wunderland, but he could hardly believe anyone capable of such mad folly. There was certainly a stout steel-barred gate at the end of the cellar, but that, he saw had been opened. There were also footprints on the damp floor. Vaemar was a good tracker, but the prints were too confused and overlaid for him to make much out, save that several were human-sized and had five toes. They did not seem quite human shaped. There was a smell of blood, not new.
He returned to the surface and moved on to another building. Opening the door of this he stepped into a considerably hotter climate. Vegetation grew thickly. It smelt of death. No Rarctha fat here.
A couple of small bodies lay dead at his feet. Lemurs. Under the kzin occupation there had been a minor human industry-evidently there still was-growing them as playthings for very young kzin kittens, who loved them. They had no fighting abilities when caught, but like all primates they tasted good and chasing them through trees was a good exercise in training kittens to judge the strength of branches. A nursery game. The next step for the kits had been chasing baboons, which were much more dangerous, and then the real thing, which was much more dangerous again. These appeared to have starved. He saw the sharp faces of other lemurs peering at him from above. There were feeding-trays without food. Vaemar thought of releasing the lemurs, but did not know if they would survive in such a climate and with strange vegetable matter to eat. He had seen some food containers outside, and scattered some of the vegetable matter from one on the ground. The lemurs, starvation evidently overcoming even their terror of the kzin, leapt down to it.
No humans anywhere. What was the human term? Deja vu. This had happened before, in Grossgeister Swamp, when his small expedition had found human and kzin dwellings deserted.
His detector showed no trace of the missing radioactives. A check with deep radar showed nothing moving underground in the immediate vicinity. He made a report and flew on. He passed over several more farms. Some responded to his interrogatories, a couple did not. There were also some plainly long deserted.
Vaemar had rooms at the University, but he also had another residence, a considerable distance from most human habitation: a few buildings on the wooded lower slopes of the Valkyrieheim Hills, smaller sisters of the Jotun Mountains, northeast of the Hohe Kalkstein. It was not far from the country where he had grown up with Raargh in the years immediately after the Liberation, the country which he still to some extent regarded as his home territory.
During the occupation the largest of these buildings had been a small palace for a kzin noble with, like almost all kzinti, a consuming love of hunting. Post-war, as was frequently the case on Wunderland, the original human owners of the land were no longer around. Normally the estate would have been redistributed back to other humans, but ARM and others had quietly decided that Vaemar-Riit, potential leader of what were coming to be more widely called the 'Wunderkzin,' should be housed in some dignity.
Unlike many surviving kzin buildings, the high outer walls were intact. What had once been an eight-fold hedgehog of concentric defenses was much reduced, though not eliminated. Vaemar the postgraduate student did
