Slaverexpert worked the crank a little. 'It seems articulated to follow a complex surface.'
'Potato peeler, then?' Gay said.
Slaverexpert looked at her, then at Richard. His ears were distinctly cupped, as if he were expecting ambush. He said, 'Charrgh-Captain, it may be prudent to inspect the other sections as well.'
'Very well, once we're done with this one.'
Other devices were more complex. Several were lasers, or included lasers, but would have required great modification of focus for use as weapons. Another seemed intended to take in some kind of powder and extrude solid material in any desired shape. The purpose of a few remained unclear. All the tools that required power had to be plugged in; they had no power supplies of their own.
And it was Telepath, whose drugs were wearing off, who said, 'Are there two of anything?'
Charrgh-Captain gave a startled grunt. 'He's right,' he said. 'There are no duplications. Or spare parts,' he realized. He picked up an object that had been mysterious a moment before. 'This could be used to wind wire around a rotor.' He added in Hero, 'Everyone pick up an object and examine it for signs of usage.'
His tone of command was such that the Guthlacs did so along with the rest. Richard inspected the peeler and found the blade and spike unstained. 'Clean, no wear,' he said. Similar remarks were made by others.
'These may be models,' Charrgh-Captain declared. 'Meant only to be copied. Were not the Slavers highly mercantile?'
'Charrgh-Captain, they were,' said Slaverexpert. 'These may indeed be articles of commerce. Shall I see what organic goods they stocked?'
'Certainly.'
Slaverexpert had gone from being taciturn to interested, and had now gone from interested to stiffly formal. If Richard understood kzinti reactions (and he had some reason to think he might), Slaverexpert was experiencing immense stress, about something he didn't want to discuss.
Slaverexpert's conduct while inspecting the other segments verged on bizarre. One held thirty-one bacterial- containment canisters, and he barely glanced at them. The next three held clear plastic shells, each containing seeds of different sizes and shapes, which were also virtually ignored. The fifth held larger bins, that fitted into the shell segment; he shone a light on one, then said, 'Charrgh-Captain, I have a security problem.'
'From plants?'
'Tree-of-life,' said Slaverexpert. There was a moment's silence.
Then, 'Discuss it with the humans. The rest of you withdraw and switch to a music channel. Telepath, take your sedative.'
'Thank you, sir.'
'Tree-of-life' was a term coined over seven centuries earlier by a man who had eaten some. It had been brought by a Pak protector, a sort-of-alien from the Galactic Core, and it had turned the man into an asexual killing machine with vastly increased intelligence and the single goal of ensuring his descendants' propagation-just the effect it had on the Pak. An ill-conceived attempt by the ARM to do the same thing deliberately during the First War had misfired, and had things gone even a little worse all other intelligent life in Known Space would have been methodically exterminated.
Richard was beginning to recover from the shock, but only in stages. 'This can't be tree-of-life,' he protested. 'The time is off by a factor of, of eight hundred. How the tanj do you know about tree-of-life, anyway?'
'It's in my area,' said Slaverexpert. 'The Pak were a Tnuctip bioweapon.'
Richard stared for a moment, then said, 'Impossible. In two billion years they would have evolved beyond recognition.'
'They ate their mutations,' said Slaverexpert. 'They could distinguish variation of a single codon by smell.'
'Richard, I read a monograph on that once,' Gay said. 'The author made a good case.'
'Where was this?' he exclaimed.
'Fractal Edge netzine.'
Richard sighed. 'Gay, the only people who contribute to that are conspiracy theorists.'
'You mean, like the people who used to believe in alien abductions?'
Gay was one of a large proportion of modern Wunderlanders descended from kidnapped humans that the Jotoki had engaged as mercenaries; Richard's ancestral kin had been aboard so many kzinti warships that it was practically a Guthlac family tradition. Richard opened and closed his mouth once, scowled, and stuck out his tongue.
'Don't change the subject,' Gay said primly.
As Richard was sputtering, Second Trooper, who had been idly watching him from a distance, touched helmets with First Trooper and said, 'Why would he expose his tongue?'
'From what I've read on them, humans spend most of their spare time either mating or making plans to mate. That's why there are so many of them.'
'What does that have to do with what I said?'
'Human mating rituals include grooming each other's genitals,' First Trooper replied.
Second Trooper, who like all kzinti had a tongue not unlike a wood rasp, looked at the Guthlacs with new respect. No wonder human fighters were so tough.
Richard got back on track: 'Look, two and a half million years ago the Pak colonized Earth, the root didn't grow right, the breeders stopped turning into protectors, and they wound up evolving into us. If the Pak had been around for two billion years, wouldn't that have happened somewhere else by now?'
'It likely did,' said Slaverexpert. 'Repeatedly. It may have come to your attention that humans are warlike. Certainly it has not escaped ours. It would have been easy for them to exterminate one another.'
Richard was still finding it too incredible. 'Look, the plants needed thallium to work right. Where's the thallium supply?'
'Richard Guthlac,' Slaverexpert said gently, 'did you see any tools suitable for Tnuctip use? This is a cache prepared for rebellion against the Tnuctipun. The proto-Pak would have tailored a root for themselves that was not limited by the availability of a rare-earth element, which was doubtless a feature designed by the Tnuctipun to restrict their spread.'
It was chillingly plausible.
Gay made it a little more so: 'I just realized there are no fabricators, to copy those model tools,' she said. 'A protector would build one on the spot after the stasis box was opened, rather than waste storage space that could be used for more models.'
It accounted for the potato peeler.
– Except that nothing accounted for the potato peeler: 'Why is there a potato peeler?' Richard exclaimed. 'They ate the whole things, didn't they?'
Slaverexpert thought. Then he looked at the roots and thought some more. Finally he said, 'All I can think of is flavor, which is illogical; they could surely have tailored for that as well. I shall have to analyze one for better information.'
As Slaverexpert signaled to Charrgh-Captain, Gay murmured to Richard, 'Do you think he'd have destroyed them without testing otherwise?'
'If they're tree-of-life, I'd help,' he replied in equally low tones. 'Protectors are asexual and all look ancient. I prefer to be young and dumb and…keep my hair.'
'I like your hair too.' She smiled.
Cunning Stalker's lab was a thorough one, and its safety features were appallingly practical: In an emergency, the entire lab would be ejected from the ship and into the path of the message laser, which would keep firing until the beam was unobstructed. 'No need for the calcium notch,' said Richard weakly. He had won the toss, and Gay was back in their compartment, watching by screen.
'Urr?' said Slaverexpert, as he put the sample case into the lab manipulator with one hand and began undoing his suit with the other.
'On the spectroscope next to the laser.'
'Why a spectroscope?' The kzin's Interworld was excellent.
Surprised, Richard said, 'I thought it was standard equipment. When something is blown up, the spectroscope scans the cloud, and if there's no band at the calcium frequency it was a miss or a decoy.'
