“A depiction of a… military ship? You wouldn’t have such things in a responsible museum, would you?”

“I don’t know if there ever were real military ships. There have been Fant stories, of course. If they did exist, they would have been much earlier. This ship is from the iron-age. The steel-age in fact… No, it’s not that.

“Anyway,” he continued in the official voice of an ARM, “it’s impossible that pirates or banditos could have had the resources to build a ship like this. It was very big engineering for its time. Only major companies or governments could have built such a thing. Besides, the Military Fantasy was about sociopathic ideas, and this doesn’t look to me like the idea, however diseased, of a military ship. Where would the war-men fire their weapons from?

“I guess this was some sort of bulk cargo-carrier. These devices here would have been to pour grain or ore or something into hoppers. This is unless they are meant to be giant ‘gun-barrel’ weapons.”

He gave a cautious, almost furtive smile and inflected his voice with mockery as if to show anyone monitoring the conversation that he was making a tasteless private joke.

He pointed to a model of a small boat attached to the main model. “That shows the scale—about 1,000:1. I’m not sure how they measured length in those days, but the real ship would have been about 35,000 tonnes. Police—the fore-runners of ARM—still carried guns then, but for these things to have been guns,”—he touched one of the three sets of triple tubes on turntables on the fo’c’sle—“they would have had to fire ‘bullets’ as big as a man! Also, see how wide the hull is. That’s for weight and volume. In any real world, of course, races that made war with each other could never advance to build machines like this.”

“That’s a—what did they call it?—a lifeboat?”

“Yes. Analogous to the boats on a Spaceship. Used for going ashore when the water was not deep enough for the main ship to go right in.