“A bad thing has happened,” said Nessus.
The Kzin who had opened the box seemed terribly excited. He turned the preserved hand over and over, yowrling in Kzinti. Then he put it down and picked up the sphere-with-a-handle.
“Let me guess,” said Jason. “That’s not a Slaver box. It’s a tnuctipun box.”
“Yes. The first to be found. The handle on the bubble tool is admirably designed to fit a tnuctipun hand. The preserved Slaver hand must be a trophy—I am quoting the student of Slavers. Jason, this may be a disaster. The tnuctipun were master technologists.”
The “student of Slavers” was running his padded, retractile-clawed hands over the sphere-with-a-handle. No detail at all showed on the sphere; it was the same mirror color as the stasis field that had disgorged it. The handle was bronzy metal. There were grooves for six fingers and two long, opposed thumbs; there was a button set in an awkward position. A deep, straight groove ran down the side, with a guide and nine notched settings.
Anne-Marie spoke in a low voice. “It looks like the handle of a gun.”
“We need information,” said Jason. “Nessus, is that bigger Kzin the boss? The one who speaks Interworld?”
“Yes. The one with the bubble tool is a student of the Slaver Empire. The one with the white stripe is the pilot. The mind reader is resting. We need not fear him for several hours.”
“But the boss Kzin understands Interworld. Do the others?”
“I think not. Your inaptly named Interworld is difficult for nonhumans to learn and to pronounce.”
“Good. Anne, how are you doing?”
“I’m scared. We’re in big trouble, aren’t we, Jay?”
“We are. No sense fooling ourselves. Any ideas?”
“You know me, Jay. In a pinch I usually know who to call for help. The integrator if the house stops, the taxi company when a transfer booth doesn’t work. Step into an autodoc when you feel sick. If your lift belt fails, you dial E for Emergency on your pocket phone. If someone answers before you hit the ground, scream.” She tried a smile. “Jay? Who do we call about Kzinti kidnapings?”
He smiled back. “You write a forceful note to the Patriarch of Kzin. Right, Nessus?”
“Also you threaten to cut off trade. Do not worry too much, Anne-Marie. My species is expert at staying alive.”
“Undoubtedly a weapon,” said Slaverstudent. “We had best try it outside.”
“Later,” said Chuft-Captain.
Again Slaverstudent dipped into the cylindrical box. He removed small containers half filled with two kinds of small-arms projectiles, a colored cap that might easily have fitted a standard bowling ball, a transparent bulb of clear fluid, and a small metal widget that might have been anything. “I see no openings for bullets.”
“Nor do I. Flyer, take a sample of this meat and find out what it is made of. Do the same with this trophy and this bulb. Telepath, are you awake?”
“Chuft-Captain, I am.”
“When can you again read the—”
“Chuft-Captain, please don’t make—”
“At ease, Telepath. Take time to recover. But I intend to keep the prisoners present while we investigate this find. They may notice some detail we miss. Eventually I will need you.”
“Yes, Chuft-Captain.”
“Test that small implement for radio or hyperwave emissions. Do nothing else to it. It has the look of a subminiature communicator, but it might be anything: a camera, even an explosive.
“Slaverstudent, you will come with me. We are going outside.”
It took several minutes for the Kzinti to get the prisoners into their suits, adjust their radios so that everybody could hear everybody else, and move them through the double-door airlock.
To Jason, the airlock was further proof that this was a warship. A pressure curtain was generally more convenient than an airlock; but if power failed during a battle, all the air could leave the ship in one whoof. Warships carried double doors.
Two stunners followed them up the sloping ice tunnel. Jason had thought there would be four. He’d need to fight only the boss Kzin and one other. But both carried stunners and both seemed alert.
He took too much time deciding. The boss made Nessus stand on a flexible wire grid, then did the same with Anne-Marie and Jason. The grid was a portable police web, and it was as inflexibly restraining as the built-in web in the ship.
The Kzinti returned down the sloping tunnel, leaving Jason, Anne-Marie, and Nessus to enjoy the view. It was a lonely view. The blue and yellow stars were rising, invisibly. They showed only as a brighter spot at one foot of the red-smoke arch of hydrogen. Stars showed space-bright in curdled patterns across the sky; they all glowed red near the arch. The land was cold rock-hard ice, rippling in long, low undulations that might have been seasonal snowdrifts millions of years ago, when the Lyrae twins were bigger and brighter. Black-faceted rock poked through some of the high spots.
Several yards away was the Court Jester. A thick, round-edged, flat-bottomed disk, she sat on the ice like a painted concrete building. Apparently she intended to stay.
Jason stood at parade rest on the police web. Anne-Marie was six inches to his right, facing him. For all of his urge to touch her, she might have been miles away.
Two days ago she had carefully painted her eyelids with semipermanent tattoo. They showed as two tiny black-and-white-checked racing victory flags, rippling when she blinked. Their gaiety mocked her drawn face.
“I wonder why we’re still alive,” she said.
Nessus’ accentless voice was tinny in the earphones. “The captain wants our opinions on the putative weapon. He will not ask for them, but will take them through the telepath.”
“That doesn’t apply to you, does it?”
“No. No Kzin would read my mind. Perhaps no Kzin would kill me; my race holds strong policies on the safety of individual members. In any case we have some time.”
“Time for what?”
“Anne-Marie, we must wait. If the artifact is a weapon, we must recover it. If not, we must survive to warn your people that the Kzinti are searching out Slaver stasis boxes. We must wait until we know which.”
“Then what?”
“We will find a way.”
“We?” said Jason.
“Yes. Our motives coincide here. I cannot explain why at this time.”
But why should a puppeteer risk his life, his life, for Earth? Jason wondered.
The boss Kzin emerged from the airlock carrying the sphere-with-a-handle. He stood before Jason and held it before his eyes. “Examine this,” he commanded, and turned it slowly and invitingly in his four-fingered hands.
There was the reflecting sphere, and there was the bronzy-metal gun handle with its deeply scored groove and its alien sculpturing. The groove had nine notched settings running from top to bottom, with a guide in the top notch. Squiggles that must have been tnuctip numbers corresponded to the notches.
Jason prayed for the police web to fail. If he could snatch the artifact—
The Kzin moved away, walking uphill to a rise of icy ground. A second Kzin emerged from the pressure curtain carrying an unfamiliar gadget of Kzinti make. The two Kzinti spat phrases at each other. Kzinti language always sounds like insults.
Nessus spoke quietly. “The meat was protoplasmic, protein, and highly poisonous. The small, complex tnuctip implement does operate in hyperspace but uses no known method of communication. The fluid in the clear bulb is forty percent hydrogen peroxide, sixty percent hydrogen oxide, purpose unknown.”
“What’s the Slaver expert carrying?”
“That is an energy-output sensor.”
The puppeteer seemed calm enough. Did he know of some way to interrupt a police web?
Jason couldn’t ask, not when the boss Kzin could hear every word. But he had little hope. A police web belonged to the same family as a pilot’s crash field, triggered to enfold the pilot when signaled by excessive pressure on his crash webbing
. A crash web was as deliberately foolproof as any last-ditch failsafe device. So was a police web.
Probably the puppeteer was slipping back into the manic state and was now convinced that nothing in the universe could harm him. Somehow that made Jason’s failure worse. “One thing you should know, Jason, is that my species judges me insane.” It was one of the first things the puppeteer had told him. Unable to trust his own judgment, Nessus had warned him by implication that he would have to trust Jason’s.
They’d both trusted him.
“I had to show you Beta Lyrae,” he said bitterly.
“It was a nice idea, Jay, really it was.”
If he’d been free, he’d have found a wall and tried to punch it down.
Chuft-Captain stood on a rise of permafrost and let his eyes scan the horizon. Those points of dark rock would make good targets.
The weapon was uncomfortable in his hand, but he managed to get one finger on the presumed trigger button. He aimed at the horizon and fired.
Nothing happened.
He aimed at a closer point, first pressing and releasing the trigger button repeatedly, then holding it down. Still nothing.
“Chuft-Captain, there is no energy release.”
“The power may be gone.”
“Chuft-Captain, it may. But the notches in the handle may control intensity. The guide is now set on ‘nil.’”
Chuft-Captain moved the guide one notch down. A moment later he had to resist the panicky urge to throw the thing as far as possible. The mirror-faced sphere was twisting and turning like something alive, changing shape like a drug nightmare. It changed and flowed and became…a long slender cylinder with a red knob at the end and a toggle near the handle. The handle had not changed at all.
“Chuft-Captain, there was an energy discharge. Eek! What happened?”
“It turned into this. What do I do next?”
Slaverstudent took the artifact and examined it. He would have liked to fire it himself, but that was the leader’s privilege and right. And risk. He said, “Try the toggle.”
At a forward motion of the toggle the red knob lit up and leapt away across the ice. Chuft-Captain wiggled the handle experimentally. The red knob, still receding, bobbed and weaved in response to stay in line with the cylindrical barrel. When the knob was a red point sixty yards distant, Chuft-Captain stopped it with the toggle.
“Variable-sword,” he muttered. He looked for a target. His eyes lit on a nearby tilted spire of dark rock or dirty ice.
Chuft-Captain gripped the artifact in both furry hands, like a big-game fishing pole, and swung the red light behind the spire. The artifact fought his pressure, then gave way. The top half of the spire toppled, kicking up a spray of chipped ice.
“A variable-sword,” he repeated. “But not of Slaver design. Slaverstudent, have you ever heard of a weapon that changes shape?”
“No, Chuft-Captain, neither of the past nor of the present.”
“Then we’ve found something new.”
“Yes!” The word was a snarl of satisfaction.
“That tears it,” said Anne-Marie. “It’s a weapon.”
Jason tried to nod. The police web held him fast.
The other Kzinti came outside and moved up the rise. Four Kzinti stood spitting at each other, looking like four fat men, sounding like a catfight. Nessus said, “The first notch must have been neutral. They intend to find out what the other notches do.”
“It changes shape,” said Anne-Marie. “That’s bad enough.”
“Quite right,” said the puppeteer. “The artifact is now our prime target.”
Jason grinned suddenly. The puppeteer reminded him of a cartoon: Two bearded, dirty convicts hanging three feet off the ground by iron chains. One convict saying, “Now here’s my plan…”
First we wish away the police web. Then…
Again the Kzinti captain moved the guide. The gun reverted to sphere-and-handle, then flowed into something hard to see at a distance. The boss Kzin must have realized it. He came down the hill, followed by the others. One at a time the Kzinti moved them to the top of the rise, so that they stood several yards behind the firing line, but still in the police web.
The boss Kzin resumed his firing stance.
Position number two was a parabolic mirror with a silvery knob at the center. It did nothing at all to the rock Chuft-Captain was using for a target, though Slaverstudent reported an energy discharge. Chuft-Captain considered, then turned the weapon on the puppeteer.
The puppeteer spoke in the human tongue. “I can hear a faint high-pitched whine.”
“Another control dial has formed,” Slaverstudent pointed out. “Four settings.”
Chuft-Captain nodded and tried the second setting. It did not affect the puppeteer. Neither did the third and fourth.
“Chuft-Captain, will you hold down the trigger?” Slaverstudent cautiously peeped over the lip of the parabolic mirror. “Urrrr. I was right. The knob is vibrating rapidly. Setting number two is a sonic projector—and a powerful one—if the puppeteer can hear it through near-vacuum and the thickness of its suit.”
“But it didn’t knock him out or anything.”
“Chuft-Captain, we must assume that it was designed to affect the Slaver nervous system.”
“Yes.” Chuft-Captain moved the guide to setting number three. As the gun changed and flowed, he said, “We have found nothing new. Sonics and variable-swords are Common.”
“Mutable weapons are not.”
“Mutable weapons could not win a war, though they might help. Urrrr. This seems to be a projectile weapon. Have you the small-arms projectiles from the stasis box?”
“Chuft-Captain, I do.”
The magazine under the barrel swung out for loading. It took both kinds of projectiles. Chuft-Captain again sighted on the rock, using the newly formed telescopic sight.
His first shot put a nick exactly where he aimed it.
His second, with the second-variety projectile, blew the rock to flying shards. Everybody ducked but Chuft-Captain.
“Should I empty the magazine before moving the guide?”
“Chuft-Captain, I do not think it matters. The bullets should certainly be removed, but the tnuctipun must have known that occasionally they would not be. Will you indulge my curiosity?”
“Since your curiosity is a trained one, I will.” Chuft-Captain moved the guide. The projectiles still in the gun popped out through the shifting surface. The artifact became a sphere-with-handle, and then … a sphere-with-handle. The new sphere was smaller than the neutral setting. It had a rosy hue and a smooth, oily texture unmarred by gunsights or secondary controls.
The trigger button did nothing at all.
“I tire rapidly of these duds.”
“Chuft-Captain, there is energy release.”
“Very well.” Chuft-Captain fired at the puppeteer, using his marksman’s instinct in the absence of a gunsight. The puppeteer showed no ill effects.
Neither did the female human.
In momentary irritation Chuft-Captain thought of firing the dud at Telepath, who was standing nearby looking harmless and useless. But nothing would happen; he would only upset Telepath. He moved the guide to the fifth setting.
The artifact writhed, became a short cylinder with an aperture in the nose and two wide, flat metallic projections at the sides. Chuft-Captain’s lips drew back from neatly filed feline teeth. This looked promising.
He drew aim on what was left of the target rock—a dark blot on the ice.
The gun slammed back against his hand. Chuft-Captain was whirled half around, trying to keep his feet and fighting the sudden pressure as a fireman fights a fire hose. Releasing the trigger didn’t shut off the incandescent stream of plasma gas. Pressing the trigger again did. Chuft-Captain blinked his relief and looked around to assess damages.
He saw a twisting trail of melted ice like the path of an earthworm hooked on LSD. Telepath was screaming into his helmet mike. An omi
nously diminishing scream. The other Kzinti were carrying him toward the airlock at a dead run. From the trail of thin, icy fog his suit left on the air, the weapon’s firestream must have washed across his body, burning holes in nearly heatproof fabric.
The human female was running toward her ship.
A glance told him that the other prisoners were still in the police web. Telepath must have knocked the female spinning out of the force field while trying to escape the firestream. She was plainly visible, running across flat ice.
Chuft-Captain shot her with the stunner, then trudged away to pick her up. He had her back in the web when Flyer and Slaverstudent returned.
Telepath was still alive but in critical shape. They had dumped him in the freeze box for treatment on Kzin.
As for position five on the tnuctip relic:
“It’s a rocket motor,” said Slaverstudent. “As a short-range weapon it could be useful, but primarily it is a one-Kzin reaction pistol. One-tnuctip, that is. I doubt it would lift one of us against respectable gravity. The flat projections at the sides may be holds for feet. The tnuctipun were small.”
“Pity you didn’t think of this earlier.”
“Chuft-Captain, I acknowledge my failure.”
Chuft-Captain dropped it. Privately he too acknowledged a failure: he had not considered the female dangerous. Humans were sentient, male and female both. He would not forget it again.
Position six was a laser. It too was more than a weapon. A telescopic sight ran along the side, and there was a microphone grid at the back. Focus it on the proper target, and you could talk voice-to-voice.
“This will be useful,” said Slaverstudent. “We can find the voice and hearing ranges for tnuctipun from this microphone.”
“Will that make it a better weapon?”
“Chuft-Captain, it will not.”
“Then keep your passion for useless knowledge to yourself.” Chuft-Captain moved the guide to the seventh setting.
“Darling?”
Anne-Marie didn’t move. The police web held her in a slumped sitting position. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breathing. Her eyes were closed, her face relaxed.