Chapter 5 SMILO

 

 

But we did not remain in Kraine. Once we had set the reforms in motion and assigned the top personnel, we left it to them to follow through. This might seem careless, but the fact is that once I have selected competent and honest personnel, and once Spirit has organized a system for them, very little further attention is required. A competently managed hierarchical system can take care of itself. In fact, even an incompetent bureaucracy can hang on tenaciously, as the nomenklatura showed, or the prior “good-old-boy” network I had rousted from Jupiter. We went on to the industrial sector, which was almost as fouled up as the farm sector. Saturn had raw resources that rivaled those of Jupiter, but squandered them through inefficiency and corruption. Having shown how to realign the farm, we now had to do the same for the shop.

We hit the research tapes again. Theoretically the capacity of the mind does not diminish with age, but I felt my years here as I wrestled with metric equivalents I had not used since my youth. The metric system is superior to the hodgepodge used in Jupiter, but one remains most comfortable with what one is most familiar with. We reviewed the dossiers on the top personnel, looking not so much at the nomenklatura, whom we knew had to be removed, but at the ranking technicians and engineers, who knew their fields but could not make policy. This promised to be a tougher challenge than the farm had been.

We traveled a lot, for key elements of industry were spread across the planet, and a number were in orbit in space. Saturn had an excellent ferrous base, with many iron mines in the turbulent atmosphere of the Ural current, and iron-processing plants in that vicinity. Unlike Jupiter, Saturn was self-sufficient in this vital resource, but managed it so poorly that it was on the verge of becoming a net importer. That caused Khukov to grind his teeth, as I could readily understand. The situation was similar with the nonferrous metals; a great deal of gold was processed, and this was vital for the purchase of supplies such as wheat, but the gold mines were mostly in the inhospitable Siberian bands, where few people settled voluntarily. We would try to motivate these workers as we had the farmers, but our chance of success was smaller.

Actually, this assignment was a compliment. Khukov had said he would handle the scientific matters if I handled the political ones, but with the evident success of Kraine, he decided that the two should not be separated. He concentrated on holding his power, and provided me the maximum support. This might seem like a strange arrangement, but Khukov and I understood each other. I was becoming very like his executive officer-and of course Spirit was mine.

Meanwhile, there were other problems. One of them was Tasha: I still wanted her. My message to Megan had been acknowledged, but action on that would take months, if only because of the travel time between Jupiter and Saturn, and I was not geared to wait that long. As I explained, I have always preferred known women to unknown ones; when I was in the Jupiter Navy I got myself qualified for a female roommate at my earliest opportunity, so as not to be dependent on the anonymous Tail. I maintained continuing relationships with my Navy wives long after our sexual contact had abated. Perhaps it is a function of my talent: I learn to know women well, and I need to know them well. I say it as shouldn’t: Women are more than sexual objects.

I worked with Tasha every day, and she was a good secretary and a good woman. She didn’t know she was a mole. She continued to flash her anatomy at me in off moments, never realizing that her buried alternate personality made a mockery of such inclination. How I wished I could oblige her, without invoking the assassin!

But I knew I could not. Therefore my fascination with her was idiocy-yet it remained.

“What am I to do?” I asked Spirit privately. “I desire that woman, and have no acceptable alternative. I do not want to rape her, yet if I approach her normally . . .”

Spirit sighed. “Then you will have to get into bondage. Tell her it’s a game. Maybe she will go along.”

“Bondage,” I repeated, exploring the implications. “Maybe it would work.”

“Oh, it will work, if you’re careful. But you may not enjoy it.”

“That is a risk I’ll have to take. But I want you on hand, in case-“

“I understand.” Indeed she did.

So, when Spirit was nominally out but actually nearby, I approached Tasha again. “I desire you,” I told her directly.

“And I desire you, Tyrant,” she replied. “I thought you would never notice.”

“But my tastes are perhaps not what you would consider normal. I have hesitated, for that reason. I would not want to cause you distress.”

“Oh? How would that be?”

“It is a matter of fantasy,” I explained. “I have in my days possessed many women, but each is unique to herself. I must be with a given woman the way I see her- and I see you as a ravished captive princess.”

“That does not sound bad,” she protested. “But the princess is bound. She is helpless to resist her captor, however much she might wish to.”

“But I would not resist you, Tyrant! I think you are still more of a man than those young ones.”

I enjoy such flattery, however insincere-but actually she was not insincere. It was part of her job description to try to seduce me, but she had indeed come to appreciate my qualities.

“Then you would not object to-?” She held out her two hands. “Bind me,” she said. I took her at her word. I put her hands up behind her head and tied them so that she could not free them. Then I stripped her as well as I could-some apparel simply hung up near her head and had to be left-and put her on the bed. I tied her two feet to the posts, so that her legs were apart. “Can you break free of that?” I inquired.

She struggled briefly. “No. The cord hurts when I try.”

“Then the monster shall have at you, wench!” I exclaimed, tearing off my own clothing. Indeed, this business had excited me; perhaps I had more of a taste for bondage than I had suspected. But I think it was mostly that she was a lovely young woman whom I did desire, and she was now exposed quite effectively. Any attractive woman, laid out like that, would turn on any normal man; bondage did not have to be an aspect of it. At least, so I prefer to believe.

I got on her and into her-and abruptly her personality changed. I was watching for it this time, fascinated by this as much as by the sex itself. She tried to reach for my neck, but could not, and tried to bring up her knees, but could not. “What’s this?” she spat.

“This is known as consenting sex,” I replied, thrusting deeply.

“I’m tied!” she exclaimed indignantly. Evidently she had no memory of the activities of her normal self.

“Why, so you are,” I agreed, changing my position enough to nuzzle her right breast.

Her torso bucked. The breast slammed into my face, but of course a weapon like that could do no harm. “I’m glad to have you responding so well,” I said, licking her nipple.

She made a sound like an attacking pig, an ugly squeal, and wrenched her nether section violently about. This had the effect of hastening my climax. “Thank you!” I gasped amidst it.

She snapped at my face, but, alert for this, I held my head away and completed my enjoyment of her body.

“I’ll kill you!” she hissed.

“With kindness, perhaps,” I said, pausing to savor her breast one last time. Then I dismounted. “Thank you for a unique experience.”

She spat at me, literally, but even that missed.

The irony was that I really had enjoyed it, more than I felt comfortable with. I do not like to think that there is any significant sadistic component to my enjoyment of a woman’s body, but perhaps there is. At any rate, I had possessed Tasha again, in the only way I safely could.

I cleaned up and dressed, uncertain when it was safe to untie her. But when she saw me clothed, her nature changed; I could read it immediately. “Aren’t you going to do it?” she asked.

I doubted that I was capable of doing it again at this time, to my regret; age had slowed my performance more than my desire. But before I released her, I experimented. I sat beside her on the bed and ran my hands over her body, savoring its charms. I kissed her bosom. She did not change; apparently only penetration itself invoked her demon identity. That was good to know; it should be safe to kiss her in the future, and to indulge myself in other ways with her, so long as I avoided that particular action. I would have to verify that, in due course.

“I think I am older than I believed,” I said regretfully. “You are beautiful, but perhaps another day?”

She shrugged as well as she could in her bonds. “I am disappointed, of course. But I understand.”

Certainly I hoped that was untrue! I wondered what she would conclude when she cleaned up and discovered that more had occurred than she remembered. Probably that, too, would be blotted out of her consciousness, as it had been before.

“Perhaps if I tied you instead?” she suggested.

“Not while I live!” I said, smiling, as I untied her. For surely I would not survive the experience. Why, then, did that, too, tempt me?

This project entailed a lot of traveling. We rode the Trans-Berian Railroad from.Skva to Vostok, stopping at the industrial cities along the way, surveying a situation that was an ongoing disaster. Spirit developed a competent staff of Saturnians I had interviewed and cleared; many of them spoke English, but she labored to learn Russian so as not to have to depend on translators for sensitive or complex arrangements. Tasha was increasingly useful to her, serving as a language teacher, and I was glad we had elected to keep her. I think, in her normal state, Tasha was even developing some enthusiasm for the job we were doing; it was clear that we were instituting reforms whose time was long overdue.

I have described our general approach in the Kraine episode, so will bypass the details of our subsequent campaigns. What stand out in my memory are the personal events. But they do relate to the larger mission, so perhaps they are not irrelevant. As with the programs on Jupiter, they tended to assume lives of their own after we initiated them, and my direct participation became unnecessary.

We had skunked the nomenklatura in Kraine, but the power of that class was by no means broken, or even seriously compromised. The nomens had seen me as a threat and had tried to assassinate me twice: in space as I approached Saturn, and through my secretary Tasha. My action in Kraine had, in a manner, been my counter-strike. Now they understood my power and realized that I was much more of a threat than they had supposed. What had been an incidental effort to eliminate me now became more determined. I was fortunate that they did not control the more effective mechanisms of Saturnian policy, such as the Spetsnaz; otherwise I would have been in far more direct peril.

They still could not be obvious, because any direct opposition to Khukov’s directives-which included the whole of my own efforts-could result in their elimination as a subversive element. Thus there were no direct laser-shots taken at me, or bombs planted in my luggage. But the subtle approach turned out to be just about as deadly, and for a time we were in doubt about survival.

The first occurred near the bubble-city of Lovsk, in the heart of the iron region. I had taken a bubble car to drive out to one of the steelworks, with a reliable driver. Spirit was busy with the paperwork; I was really on a spot fact-finding mission for her.

The currents can be rough around the mountains. The Urals are not the fiercest obstructions on Saturn, despite the deep metals churned up there; the ranges near the swift equator are far worse. But they were quite enough for me in the tiny car! I had to fight to avoid becoming motion-sick. My driver, evidently acclimatized to this, navigated the throes of the highway with a certain grim enjoyment, almost as if waiting for me to demonstrate my inferiority by grabbing for the barf bag. Give me a nice, straightforward battle in space, any day!

Then the driver frowned, glancing at his instruments. “Pressure rising,” he muttered in Russian. I felt a claustrophobic chill. “Routine?”

“Nyet.”

He hit the Mayday button, and our distress signal was broadcast. The Saturn bubbles were sturdy, for the ambient pressure was over eight bars, or eight times Earth-normal. But that sturdiness went for nothing if there was a leak.

Now I felt the increase, or imagined I did. “Can we make it to shelter in time?”

“Have to,” he grunted. But he did not look at all certain.

“Pinhole leak?” I asked.

He nodded a grim affirmative. That was about all it could be, to account for the slow increase. Bubblene was tough stuff, about as tough as existed, but sometimes it was flawed, and a leak could develop. Once started, the leak would inevitably increase. The increase could become explosive-or more properly, implosive. Then we would be crushed by the horrendous external pressure. “Must plug it,” I said.

“Can’t hold out eight bars!” he muttered fatalistically. I suppose he was a typical Saturnine, resigned to the outrages of fortune. I was not. “Can if we spot the leak in time,” I said.

I cast about for a mechanism. Here the driver helped. “Got a pipe,” he said. “A what?”

He brought it out. “Bacco. Smoke it sometimes.” Oh-one of the containers of pseudo tobacco. Some folk still used the stuff, igniting it and sucking in the vapors through a tube below the container. This habit had once been quite widespread, but the deleterious effects it had on the human body caused it to be outlawed several centuries ago. Today the only remnant of it was the harmless imitation. But this had one immediate advantage, in this crisis: It generated a minute quantity of smoke.

He filled and lit his pipe, puffed on it, and held it before him. A curl of smoke wafted up from it.

He moved it slowly about, the smoke following. The process was infuriatingly slow, in the fractional gee used to make the car float, but this was all we had.

When he held the pipe low, we got a deviation. “Draft,” he said.

“You trace it down; I’ll get a tool!” I said. I cast about for something suitable. If this had been space, there would have been a repair kit with hull patches. But this was not space, and no ordinary hull patch could withstand eight bars.

“Toolkit in back,” the man said as he oriented on the slight draft.

I scrambled back and found it. It was a shoemaker’s outfit, with a hammer and stapler and awl. Evidently the folk here were strong on hand trades, as perhaps they had to be to make up for the interminable delays and inordinate expense of necessary articles. But this car was no shoe!

“Found it,” the driver said. He was down on the floor now, and the pipe smoke was swirling violently. There was a leak, all right.

If only I had something to plug it! But shoe cement would never hold, and I couldn’t hammer in a staple.

Then I perceived the obvious. The awl! It was a slender rod of metal, almost needle-thin, with a rounded plastic ball on the end. That was exactly what I needed!

I grabbed it and joined the driver on the floor. Now I could hear it: the faint hiss of atmosphere pressuring in. Eight bars outside, one bar inside; it would keep coming until the pressure equalized. But an awl, normally used to punch holes in leather, could put a lot of pressure on a small point. More than eight bars’ worth.

I set the point, then pressed it into the tiny hole. If this worked, we would have it plugged; if instead it aggravated the leak, we would be dead that much sooner.

It worked. The leak stopped. I had, as it were, my finger in the dike.

“Drive on,” I said, with affected casualness. He hastened to oblige.

We made it to the steelworks. Then I was able to relax, my hands shaking. It was a little thing I had done, but if it hadn’t worked my life would have been forfeit.

The personnel of the steelworks inspected the bubble, using their equipment. The leak appeared to be artificial: a tiny hole drilled to intersect a natural flaw, so that the stress of travel could cause the flaw to give way and amplify the leak. Had I not plugged it, the aggravation of the leak could have eliminated the traces of the tampering. My death would have been judged to be an accident, an act of fate.

I proceeded with the tour of inspection, asking questions, making notes, interviewing personnel. But my mind was distracted by the event of the leak: It had been another effort to assassinate me. I don’t think a person ever becomes completely inured to such efforts.

A few days later, without warning, I suffered stomach cramps. “Poison!” I exclaimed, then wondered if I was being paranoid. It was probably only a bout of indigestion.

But Tasha insisted on rushing me to the hospital, and I was too sick to protest. The doctor checked me, ran a quick test, and nodded. “Contaminated yeast,” he said. “Medication will nullify it.”

“This happens often?” I asked.

“The spores mutate, in the uncontrolled conditions of the atmosphere; our quality control is not as apt as Jupiter’s,” he said. Saturn, of course, was using the supplementary yeast-farming system I had helped develop on Jupiter, in which the spores were cultivated in the atmosphere itself and harvested as convenient. This had solved Jupiter’s food problem, and presumably would solve Saturn’s, once the special problems of its environment were dealt with. Obviously those problems had not yet yielded!

I took the initial dose of medication at the hospital and was given supplementary pills of another kind to take at regular intervals. It seemed that the contamination was active, and tough, as it had to be to survive the radical exterior environment, so that an extended period of medication was necessary to make certain it was expunged from the human system. Fortunately the Saturn medical establishment was competent; I should be in no further trouble.

Except that I did have further trouble. My cramps returned worse than ever after I started on the refill prescription. I was promptly back at the hospital for treatment.

“What’s this?” the doctor demanded, appalled. “This is not the prescription!”

He had it analyzed, and it turned out to be concentrated contamination of exactly the kind I had suffered from before.

The pills had been exchanged for more poison. It turned out that the pharmacy was not at fault; its product had been eliminated, and the poison substituted, somewhere between the filling of the prescription and its delivery to me. Conditions were crowded: a number of people could have had access to the collected prescriptions in the interim. The culprit could not be identified.

But we knew. The nomenklatura had struck again. Like a nebulous ghost, it had waited and watched, and found a way to make another attempt on me that would, if successful, seem like a mere flare-up of the original malady. Inadequate medication would be blamed. But thanks to the promptness of Tasha’s reaction, and the competence of the doctor, that had been foiled. There was nothing inadequate about the socialized medicine of Saturn!

Nevertheless, I had had a bad double dose of an extremely ornery contaminant, and harm had been done. It was, the doctor warned, too early to be sure of the full extent of it, but certainly I had suffered some liver and kidney damage. Since the liver could regenerate, and the kidneys had enormous overcapacity, I was probably all right, but he urged me to report back regularly for re-testing. I, however, was developing an aversion to hospitals and intended to ignore this advice. And so I did. In retrospect I see this as one of the major follies of my life.

I suppose I thought the Tyrant was indestructible. Nature has her way of educating idiots like me.

We remained on guard, but already there had been too many close calls. We had to abolish the nomenklatura before it abolished us! But we had to proceed in proper order, or all would be for nothing.

So we proceeded, warily. We were assembling a comprehensive list of personnel to be eliminated, and a similar list of those to be promoted. Under competent and motivated management, Saturn’s industry would improve; I was sure of that. But it had a long way to go, for aside from the military complex, it was in an abysmal state. I wished we could import a few thousand technical supervisors from Jupiter.

One problem was theft, and another was sabotage. Much of this might be because of disaffected workers. Proper motivation should help, but until we could set our program in motion, key installations had to be protected. But even the police were not to be completely trusted; some crimes were evidently committed despite the knowledge of the guards. How could we eliminate this complication?

In Jupiter we would have gone to technology, setting up laser perimeters that would detect and foil any unauthorized intrusions. But Saturn lacked that kind of technology in the civilian sector. We needed something considerably more primitive, but just as effective.

“Animals,” Spirit said.

As it happened, Saturn had been doing research on animals. In Sibirsk there was a massive project dedicated to the reconstitution of primitive species. We were sure this would not be altruistic; there was bound to be some militaristic motive. So we inquired, and in due course managed to cut through the bureaucratic resistance and arrange an inspection.

We visited. The complex was in its own bubble, separate from the city and restricted; even the local residents hardly knew what went on there.

It turned out that they meant the appellation “primitive” literally. They were using gene-splicing techniques to breed back extinct species, some of which were prime prospects for guard duty.

They had, it seemed, made progress toward the recovery of Earth’s Pleistocene mammals. Equus, the ancestral horse, had a range within this bubble; Spirit, with a woman’s fascination with horses, wanted to see that. I wanted to see Amphicyon, the huge ancestral dog. It was an irony that contemporary horses and dogs were rare today, because of the wasteful expense of maintaining them in space, but the more primitive variants were being bred in the name of research and defense.

We had the tour. The interior of the bubble was like a monstrous zoo, with many layers of exhibits and many more of laboratories and storage facilities. The outer levels had vast fields planted with special high-gee-tolerant grasses and shrubs, to be grown and harvested for the grazers. The ceilings were huge day-glow panels, emulating the course of natural sunlight, cloud, and night.

“But I thought the stress was on guard animals,” I said innocently. “Surely hay-eaters aren’t-?”

The guide smiled. “Some of the grazers are quite competent guards,” he said. “There are aggressive horned species that can stand up to almost any predator, such as Bison crassiocornis. But it is true they are not the best guard animals, because of their need for constant grazing, and their manure. Our herbivores are grown mainly as prey for the carnivores.”

“Oh,” I said, disgruntled. Of course the true predators would need food, and if they were to be truly lean and vicious, they had to hunt it for themselves. Survival of the fittest: never a pretty business.

We went to the upper levels, where the gee reduced toward Earth-norm. We did indeed see the primitive horses, right back to Merychippes and Mesohippus, the dog-sized, three-toed version of the Oligocene epoch. It was strange to see such a horselike creature so small.

And we saw the canines I had come for. There was Canis dirus, a primitive wolf, and of course Amphicyon, the primitive dog that surely was the wolf’s match. There was the Eocene’s Mesonyx, perhaps the earliest canine, though the line can be hard to draw. “How are they for guard duty?” I inquired.

“There are some problems,” the guide confessed. “The primitives are less intelligent than the moderns, and their pack instincts less developed, which means that they are slower to accept the principle of mastery. The truth is, the modern breeds remain the best guards.”

“But you don’t breed superior modern canines?” I asked.

“We breed only the types specified,” he said.

I exchanged a glance with Spirit. Here too, the nomenklatura dominated, seeing to it that no project become too efficient in the pursuit of its objective. That would shortly change.

We continued to the upper reaches, where gee was less. Here there were enormous and high chambers, reaching to the center of the bubble. These were for the flying creatures.

We gaped, for there in the air was an impossibly monstrous bird, reminiscent of the fabled roc. “Teratornis,” the guide said. “The largest flying bird ever to exist. It has a wingspan of twelve feet. But it is a carrion-eater, not a hunter, and cannot operate in confined quarters; it remains a novelty.”

“Flying bird,” Spirit said. “There were larger land-bound birds?”

“Oh, certainly.” The guide showed us to a closed-off chamber, where a bird taller than a man stood. “Diatryma, seven feet tall when he stands up straight, a ferocious predator on small mammals.” We looked at the massively muscled legs and the huge claws and monstrous beak, and agreed that small mammals would have been in trouble, and perhaps some larger ones. “But the birds, as a general rule, aren’t smart,” the guide continued. “They can be trained only marginally-and again, the modern ones are superior to the primitives.”

We started down, to the far sides of levels we had ascended before. We saw the huge Miocene pig Dinohyus, as tall as a man and almost as massive as a hippopotamus, the largest of land-dwelling swine. “Now, pigs,” I said. “They are relatively intelligent, aren’t they? And with tusks-“

“They may be our best prospect,” the guide agreed. “The appropriate breeds can be tamed and housebroken, yet remain effective fighters. Of course, again-“

“The moderns are better than the ancients,” I concluded. We certainly knew the direction to encourage future research.

We came to the section devoted to the felines. “In many respects, the cats are our most effective present product,” the guide said. “They are unmatched as individual predators, on a pound-for-pound basis, and their natural preference for lurking and pouncing enables them to surprise intruders that would avoid running dogs.” He smiled faintly, for the term “running dogs” remained a popular disparagement in Saturnine circles. “However, they have a tendency to revert to wild behavior, and that can be awkward for the proprietors as well as the intruders.”

I nodded. Even small cats could be wild, and large ones could be savage. The felines were more independent than the canines, a quality I respected, but an organized society had diminishing use for independence. The Saturn philosophy found it easier to embrace the somewhat slavish, lick-master’s-hand attitude of the dogs than the bug-me-and-I’ll-scratch one of cats.

“Don’t you have ways to differentiate the friends from the enemies?” Spirit asked. “A cat doesn’t have to be friendly, if it knows whom to obey and whom to attack.”

“We are working with smell,” the guide said. “The cats tend to go into a killing frenzy when they detect certain odors, while other smells tend to pacify them.” He stopped at a box mounted on the wall and opened it. “Here, for example, is the pacification odor. We keep it strategically placed, in case of emergency. Unfortunately, it has an unpredictable effect on some felines, and of course intruders could use it also. So we prefer to seek other mechanisms.” He handed me a sample tube. “You can test this on one of the caged animals, if you wish.”

I took the tube. “Let’s complete the formal tour first.”

“However, we do have some prospects with the weasels and ferrets,” the guide said, showing the way to the next complex of chambers.

Suddenly an alarm sounded. The guide glanced nervously about. “That means an emergency,” he said. “An animal must have escaped. We had better get to a safety chamber. There’s one in the ferret complex.”

But before we could get there, the chamber door behind us burst open and a monster appeared. It was catlike, but larger than any tiger, with two six-inch fangs.

“Smilodon!” the guide cried in horror. “That one was due to be destroyed!”

Indeed, it was the dread saber-toothed tiger-right in the hall with us. It paused, recovering its balance, orienting on us. It growled with a certain anticipation.

We were too far from the exit to reach it before the horrendous cat could catch us. Someone was bound to become its prey. It was clear that a single stab with those fangs could kill a man.

“This chamber is empty,” the guard whispered, grasping the handle of a door behind us. “We can shut it in the hall-“

He opened the door, and we scrambled through: Spirit, the guide, Tasha, and me. But before the guide could secure the door, the tiger smashed into it. The guide was knocked aside, stunned. Tasha screamed.

Spirit’s laser pistol was in her hand, bearing on the tiger. “Don’t fire,” I protested. “We have the pacifier!”

Spirit held her fire. This was a combat situation, and she and I were versed in combat. We never acted carelessly when lives were at stake.

I opened the tube and quickly smeared its foam on me. Now I was protected. I had no weapon, but hoped I needed none.

I approached the tiger, trying to put myself between him and the other three people. “Take it easy, Smilodon,” I said, extending my odor-covered hand.

The tiger sniffed. Then he sneezed. Then he growled.

“He’s reacting wrongly,” the guide exclaimed. “He’s one of the exceptions! It’s maddening him!”

Evidently so! But it was too late for me to unsmear myself. I backed away-and the tiger strode forward. He opened his mouth, and his jaws gaped to almost a full right-angle aperture. Those tusks now pointed right at me!

I knew I could not escape this beast; the cat seemed to weigh close to a thousand pounds, and was hugely muscled, with stout yet sharp claws. The supreme predator! How on Earth had it ever come to be extinct? Perhaps it had consumed all its prey and had none left!

I knew I was in extreme peril, but I didn’t want to kill that animal. I had never seen such a superb example of survival fitness, and that appealed to me on a special level. But if the tiger sprang, Spirit’s laser would catch it before it landed; she would not let me be killed, and her aim had always been perfect. I had to find some other way to pacify this creature.

The odd thing was, I thought I understood him. I felt almost an empathy with the tiger, who had broken from his cage or confinement before being killed in the name of a failed experiment. I was the Tyrant, another type of failed experiment. Lord of the jungle, lord of a planet, deposed-what was the essential distinction? Smilodon was alive beyond his time, and so was I.

I focused my talent, trying to comprehend the reality of this superb creature, not merely the illusion. Did the tiger really want prey-or did he want freedom?

He wanted, I decided, neither. He wanted acceptance. That would encompass freedom. This was not his world, and he understood that; he could not survive alone, here. The only place he could hunt naturally was in a bubble chamber, when some frightened animal was loosed to him. A stupid tiger might settle for that, but not a smart one.

A smart tiger-that was what made this one adverse. He rebelled against the confinement of plastic walls, but also against that of tailored odors. He knew that the smell was not the essence. Since his brain was wired into smell far more than was a man’s, that was a considerable revelation, but he had accomplished it.

“Tiger, tiger,” I breathed. “I know you. I respect you. Come to me as friend, not as prey.” My words were not what counted; rather it was the sound of my voice, and the motion of my body. I had no remaining fear of this creature, and not because of Spirit’s laser; I understood Tyrants of any stripe. My talent was working, causing me to react in subtle ways that few other people comprehended, returning encouraging signals to the tiger.

The Smilodon was perplexed, discovering in me something unanticipated. I continued to respond to his reactions, reinforcing those I deemed desirable, dissipating those I did not approve. It was the same way I interacted with human beings, that enabled me to judge them and trust them. It was more difficult with this animal, because I was not attuned to animals, especially not prehistoric tigers, but the principle was the same. I could come to know a person well enough in just a few minutes to account for a certainty that others might require years to master. That was why I always interviewed the key personnel of a new enterprise, and why my enterprises always worked well. So now I was relating to this magnificent animal in the same way, and if I were successful I would have a rather special friend.

The tiger stood and watched me, his ire turning to curiosity and then to interest. Slowly I approached him, doing what I supposed could be called a kind of dance, though there was no set footwork or body motion to it. It was all response and counterresponse, body signal built on signal, hint and suggestion and agreement. The tiger could have bashed me to the ground with one swipe of his massive paw, or chomped me before Spirit’s laser could be effective, but the developing understanding that I offered prevented him from doing so. It was as though he had spent his lifetime among those who spoke an incomprehensible foreign language, and abruptly had discovered someone who spoke his own, however haltingly. Naturally he listened!

I cannot properly describe all that passed between us, for that was in archaic tiger signals, while this is in contemporary English, with much of the dialogue translated from Russian. The language of animals relates far more to odor and nuance of body expression than to sound, and our written languages are but renditions of sound. But in essence I reassured the tiger that, though I was a puny man, I had some notion what it was like to be a powerful tiger, and understood his condition. Further, I could intercede with my kind for a measured freedom for him, and respectful treatment. These are poor approximations of concepts that are not complex, merely different from human notions.

The essence was that the tiger came to accept me as his representative among my kind, and I accepted him as my representative among his kind. There were not many of his kind at the moment, but that was not important; the understanding was valid. And so, by certain definitions, we were tame.

I gave him a hug, and he licked the side of my head with his rasp of a tongue. We turned to face the others. “My friend will be coming with me,” I said.

The three just stared. My words evidently weren’t registering.

“You,” I said to the guide. “Go get in touch with your supervisor. Tell him that the Tyrant is assuming responsibility for the rogue Smilodon. He may not be the ideal guard for others, but he will do for me.”

Somewhat numbly, the guide departed.

“Now, if the two of you will approach, singly, slowly, I will introduce you,” I said. “It is better that he realize that you are friends of mine, because he is not really tame.”

Spirit, knowing that I was serious, approached. “Hello, Smilo,” she said. I realized that she had named him. The tiger sniffed her, twitched his whiskers, and turned away.

“He recognizes you now,” I said.

Spirit retreated, and Tasha came forward. She looked as if she were about to faint. “Be at ease, Tasha,” I said. “Smilo only attacks strangers.”

She nerved herself and stood for the tiger’s sniff. He growled, deep inside, and she jumped. “Yes, I know,” I murmured to him, my hand on his shoulder reassuringly. “But she is bound.”

Tasha turned a frightened, perplexed gaze on me. “Why-?”

“You are a mole, programmed to kill me when I try to make love to you,” I told her. “Smilo smells that trap.”

In her fear of the tiger, she did not question my statement. “Why did you not have me killed?”

“Tigers have their uses,” I said. “So do moles.” Indeed it was so.