Man-Kzin Wars III by Larry Niven (good short books TXT) 📕

said, with a slight testiness in its voice. The scene on the viewscreen disappeared, to be replaced with a view of another spaceship bridge, smaller than this, and without the angular massiveness of kzinti design. He saw two crashcouches, and vague shapes in the background that might be life-support equipment. “Yes, I’m still functional, Lieutenant Raines. We do have a bit of a problem, though.”

“What?” she said. There was a look of strain on her face, lines grooving down beside the straight nose.

“The next Identification Friend or Foe code is due in a week,” the computer said. “It isn’t in the computer; only the pilot knows it. I’ve had no luck at all convincing him to tell me; there are no interrogation-drugs in his suit’s autodoc and he seems to have a quite remarkable pain tolerance, even for a kzin. I could take you off to Catskinner, of course, but this ship would make splendid cover; you see, there’s been a . . . startling occurrence in the Swarm, and the kzinti are gathering. I’ll have to brief you.”

Harold felt the tiny hairs along his neck and spine struggle to erect themselves beneath the snug surface of his Belter coverall, as he listened to the cheerful voice drone on in upper-class Wunderlander. Trapped in here, smelling his crew rot, screaming at the walls, he thought with a shudder. There were a number of extremely nasty things you could do even with standard autodoc drugs, provided you could override the safety parameters. It was something even a kzin didn’t deserve . . . then he brought up memories of his own. Or maybe they do. Still, he didn’t talk. You had to admit it; ratcats were almost as tough as they thought they were.

“I know how to make him talk,” he said abruptly, cutting off an illustrated discourse on the Sea Statue; some ancient flatlander named Greenberg stopped in the middle of a disquisition on thrintun ethics. “I need some time to assimilate all this stuff,” he went on. “We’re humans, we can’t adjust our worldviews the minute we get new data. But I can make the ratcat cry uncle.”

Ingrid looked at him, then glanced away sharply. She had a handkerchief pressed to her nose, but he saw her grimace of distaste.

Don’t worry, kinder. Hot irons are a waste of time; ratcats are hardcases every one. “All I need is some wax, some soft cloth and some spotglue to hold his suit to that chair.”

* * *

It’s time, Harold decided.

The kzin whose suit clamped him to the forward chair had stopped trying to jerk his head loose from the padded clamps a day or so ago. Now his massive head simply quivered, and the fur seemed to have fallen in on the heavy bones somehow. Thick disks of felt and plastic made an effective blindfold, wax sealed ears and nose from all sight and scent, the improvised muzzle allowed him to breathe through clenched teeth but little else. Inside the suit was soft immobile padding and the catheters that carried away waste, fed and watered and tended and would not let the brain go catatonic.

A sentient brain needs input; it is not designed to be cut off from the exterior world. Deprived of data, the first thing that fails is the temporal sense; minutes become subjective hours, hours stretch into days. Hallucinations follow, and the personality itself begins to disintegrate . . . and kzinti are still more sensitive to sensory deprivation than humans. Compared to kzinti, humans are nearly deaf, almost completely unable to smell.

For which I am devoutly thankful, Harold decided, looking back to where Ingrid hung loose-curled in midair. They had set the interior field to zero-G; that helped with the interrogation, and she found it easier to sleep. The two dead crewkzinti were long gone, and they had cycled and flushed the cabin to the danger point, but the oily stink of death seemed to have seeped into the surfaces. Never really present, but always there at the back of your throat . . . she had lost weight, and there were bruise-like circles beneath her eyes.

“Wake up, sweetheart,” he said gently. She started, thrashed and then came to his side, stretching. “I need you to translate.” His own command of the Hero’s Tongue was fairly basic.

He reached into the batlike ear and pulled out one plug. “Ready to talk, ratcat?”

The quivering died, and the kzin’s head was completely immobile for an instant. Then it jerked against the restraints as the alien tried frantically to nod. Harold pulled at the slipknot that released the muzzle; he could always have the computer administer a sedative if he needed to re-strap it.

The kzin shrieked, an endless desolate sound. That turned into babbling:

“nono grey in the dark grey monkeys grey TOO BIG noscent noscent nome no ME no me DON’T EAT ME MOTHER NO—”

“Shut the tanjit up or you go back,” Harold shouted into its ear, feeling a slight twist in his own empty stomach.

“No!” This time the kzin seemed to be speaking rationally, at least a little. “Please! Let me hear, let me smell, please, please.” Its teeth snapped, spraying saliva as it tried to lunge, trying to sink its fangs into reality. “I must smell, I must smell!”

Harold turned his eyes aside slightly. I always wanted to hear a ratcat beg, he thought. You have to be careful what you wish for; sometimes you get it.

“Just the code, Commander. Just the code.”

It spoke, a long sentence in the snarling hiss-spit of the Hero’s Tongue, then lay panting. “It is not lying, to a probability of 98%, plus or minus two points,” the computer said. “Shall I terminate it?”

“No!” Harold snapped. To the kzin: “Hold still.”

A few swift motions removed the noseplugs and blindfold; the alien gaped its mouth and inhaled in racking gasps, hauling air across its nasal cavities. The huge eyes flickered, manic-fast, and the umbrella ears were stretched out to maximum. After a moment it slumped and closed its mouth, the pink washcloth tongue coming out to scrub