Troy sat down again to study both cats. The injured one was still eating, with neatness, but hungrily. He was sure that it was not unaware of the exchange between its mate and himself.
Horan had no control over the five Terran animals, and he knew it. By some freak of chance he was able to communicate with them after a disjointed fashion. But he was very sure that their communication with Kyger had been much clearer and fuller—perhaps through the aid of that odd summoning device he had seen in the dead man’s hands.
They had accompanied him in the flight from Tikil because that had suited their purpose also, just as they had guided him to this particular hole. Yet he knew well that if they wished they would leave him as readily, unless he could establish some closer tie with them. The position was changed—in Tikil he had been in command because that was man’s place. Here the animals had found their own; they no longer needed him.
It was disquieting to face the fact that his somewhat rosy dreams of cooperation between man and animal might be just that—dreams. He could fly the fussel to his will and that bird would know the pleasure of the hunt and still return on call. But these hunters had wills and minds of their own, and if they gave companionship, it would be by free will. The age-old balance of man and animal had tipped. There would be a cool examination from the other side, no surrender but perhaps an alliance.
And such thoughts could lead Troy now to understand Zul’s demand that the animals be killed. Few men were going to accept readily a copartnership with creatures they had always considered property. There would lurk a threat to the supremacy man believed in.
Yet Troy knew that he could not have left any of the animals in Tikil, nor yielded to Zul’s demands. Why? Why did he feel that way about them? He was uneasy now, almost unhappy, as he realized that he was not dealing with pets, that he must put aside his conception of these five as playthings to be owned and ordered about. Neither were they humans whose thinking processes and reactions he could in a manner anticipate.
The black cat ceased its toilet, sat upright, the tip of its tail folded neatly over its paws, its blue eyes regarding Troy. And the man stirred uneasily under that unwinking stare.
“You wish a way out?”
“Yes.” Troy answered that simply. With this new humbleness he was willing to accept what the other would give.
“This place—not man’s—not ours—”
Troy nodded. “Before man—something like man but different.”
“There is danger—old danger here.” That was a new touch of thought like a new voice. The gray-blue cat had finished its meal and was looking over the good paw, raised to its mouth for a tonguing, at Troy.
“There was a bad thing happened here to men—some years ago.”
Both cats appeared to consider that. Perhaps their minds linked in a thread of communication he could not reach.
“You are not of those we know.” That was the black cat. Troy discovered that he could now distinguish one’s thought touch from another’s. The animals had come to be definite and separate personalities to him and closer in companionship because of that very fact. Sometimes he was so certain of a comrade at hand that it was a shock to realize that the mind he could touch was outwardly clothed in fur and was borne by four feet, not two.
“No.”
“Few men know our speech—and those must use the caller. Yet from the first you could contact us without that. You are a different kind of man.” That was the gray-blue cat.
“I do not know. You mean that you cannot “talk” to everyone?”
“True. To the big man we talked—because that was set upon us—just as we had to obey the caller when he used it. But it was not set upon us to talk to you—yet you heard. And you are not one-who-is-to-be-obeyed.”
Set upon them—did they mean that they had been conditioned to obey orders and “talk” with certain humans?
“No,” Troy agreed. “I do not know why I hear you ‘talk,’ but I do.”
“Now that the big man is gone, we are hunted.”
“That is so.”
“It is as was told us. We should be hunted if we tried to be free.”
“We are free,” the black cat interrupted. “We might leave you, man, and you could not find us here unless we willed it so.”
“That is true.”
Again the pause, those unblinking stares. The black cat moved. It came to him, its tail erect. Then it sat upon its hind legs. Horan put out his hand diffidently, felt the quick rasp of a rough tongue for an instant on his thumb.
“There will be a way out.”
The cat’s head turned toward the fungus town. It stared as intently in that direction as it had toward Troy a moment earlier. And the man was not surprised when out of that unwholesome maze trotted the fox pair, followed by the kinkajou. They came to stand before Troy, the black cat a little to one side, and the man caught little flickers of their unheard speech.
“Not one-to-be-obeyed—hunts in our paths—will let us walk free—”
It was the black cat who continued as spokesman. “We shall hunt your way for you now, man. But we are free to go.”
“You are free to go. I share my path; I do not order you to walk upon it also.” He searched for phrases to express his acceptance of the bargain they offered and his willingness to be bound by their conditions.
“A way out—” The cat turned to the others. The foxes lapped at the pool and then loped away. The kinkajou dabbled its front paws in the water. Troy offered it a pressed-food biscuit and it ate with noisy crunchings. Then it turned to the cavern wall at their back and frisked away along its foot.
“We shall go this way.” The cat nodded to the right of the pool, along that clean strip of ground between the fungoid growth and the cavern wall.
Troy emptied two of the containers of dry food, rinsed them, and filled them with water as a reserve supply. Both cats drank slowly. Then Troy picked up the injured one, who settled comfortably in the crook of his arm. The black darted away.
Horan walked at a reasonable pace, studying his surroundings as he went. To the glance there was no alteration in either the fungus walls or the rock barrier to his right. But as he drew farther away from the splotch of sunlight, he switched on his atom torch.
The cat stirred in his hold, its head—with ears sharply pointed—swung to face the fungus.
“There is something there—alive?” Troy’s hand went to the stunner in a belt loop.
“Old thing—not alive,” the thought answer came readily. “Sargon finds—”
“Sargon?”
The wavering picture of the male fox crossed his mind. “You are named?” he asked eagerly. Somehow names made them seem less aloof and untouchable, closer to his own kind.
“Man’s names!” There was disdain in that, hinting that there were other forms of identification more subtle and intelligent, beyond the reach of a mere human. And Troy, reading that into the cat’s reply, smiled.
“But I am a man. May I not use man’s names?”
The logic of that appealed to the dainty lady he carried. “Sargon and Sheba.” Fleeing fox faces flashed into his mind. “Shang”—that was the kinkajou. “Simba, Sahiba,” her mate and herself.
“Troy Horan,” he answered gravely aloud, to complete the round of introduction. Then he came back to her report. “This old thing—it was made—or did it once live?”
“It once lived.” Sahiba relayed the fox’s report promptly. “It was not man—not we—different.”
Troy’s curiosity was aroused, not enough, however, to draw him into the paths threading the forbidding fungoid town. But as they passed that point he wondered if the remains of one of the original inhabitants of Ruhkarv could lie there.
“An opening—” Sahiba relayed a new message. “Shang has discovered an opening—up—” She pointed with her good paw to the cavern wall.
Troy altered course, came up a slight slope, and found the kinkajou chattering excitedly and clinging head
down to a knob that overhung a crevice in the wall. Troy flashed the torch into that dark pocket. There was no rear barrier; it was a narrow passage. Yet it did not have any facing of worked stone as had the other corridor entrances, and it might not lead far.
The foxes and Simba came from different directions and stood sniffing the air in the rocky slit. Troy was conscious of that too—a faint, fresh current, stirring the fetid breath of the fungus, hinting of another and cleaner place. This must be a way out.
Yet the waiting animals did not seem in any hurry to take that path.
“Danger?” asked Troy, willing to accept their hesitation as a warning.
Simba, advanced to the overhang of the opening, his head held high, his whiskers quivering a little, as he investigated by scent.
“Something waiting—for a long time waiting—”
“Man? Animal?”
But Simba appeared baffled. “A long time waiting,” he repeated. “Maybe no longer alive—but still waiting.”
Troy tried to sift some coherent meaning out of that. The kinkajou made him start as it leaped from the rock perch to his shoulder.
“It is quiet.” Shang broke in over Simba’s caution. “We go outside—this way outside—”
But Troy asked Simba for the final verdict. “Do we go?”
The cat glanced up at him, and there was a flash of something warm upon the meeting of their eyes, as if Troy in his deference to the other’s judgment had advanced another step on the narrow road of understanding between them.
“We go—taking care. This thing I do not understand.”
The foxes were apparently content to follow Simba’s lead. And the three trotted into the crevice, while Troy came behind, the atom torch showing that this way was indeed a slit in the rock wall and no worked passage.
Though the break was higher than his head by several feet, it was none too wide, and Troy hoped that it would not narrow past his using. Now that he was well inside and away from the cavern, the freshness of the air current blowing softly against his face was all the more noticeable. He was sure that in that breeze was the scent of natural growing things and not just the mustiness of the Ruhkarv paths.
They had not gone far before the pathway began to slope upward, confirming his belief that it connected somehow with the outside world. At first, that slope was easy, and then it became steeper, until at last Troy was forced to transfer Sahiba to the ration bag on his back and use both hands to climb some sections. His less sensitive nose registered more than just fresh air now. There was an unusual fragrance, which was certainly not normal in this slit of rock, more appropriate to a garden under a sun hot enough to draw perfume from aromatic plants and flowers. Yet beneath that almost cloying scent lay a hint of another odor, a far less pleasant one—the flowers of his imagining might be rooted in a slime of decay.
The torch showed him another climb. Luckily the surface was rough and furnished handholds. Shang and Simba went up it fluidly, the foxes in a more scrambling fashion. Then Troy reached the top and was greeted by a glow of daylight. He snapped off the torch and advanced eagerly.
“No!” That warning came emphatically from more than one of the animals. Troy stiffened, studied the path ahead, saw now that between him and the open was a grating or mesh of netting.
He stood still. The cat and the foxes were outlined clearly against that mesh.
“Gone—”
A flicker of thought, which was permission for him to come on. There was a meshwork over the way into the open. And through it he could see vegetation and a brightness that could only be daylight. The mesh itself was of a sickly white color and was formed in concentric rings with a thick blob like a knob in the center.
Troy approached it gingerly, noting that the cat and the foxes did not get within touching distance. Now he noticed something else—that along the rings of the netting were the remains of numerous insects, ragged tatters of wings, scraps of carcasses, all clinging to the surface of those thick cords. He drew the knife from his belt and sliced down with a quick slash, only to have the cord give very slightly beneath his blow. Then the blade rebounded as if he had struck at some indestructible elastic substance.
The cord stuck to the blade so that it was carried upward on the rebound, and he had to give a hard jerk to free it. A second such experiment nearly pulled the knife out of his grasp. Not only was the stuff elastic and incredibly tough, but it was coated with something like glue, and he did not think it was any product of man—or of man’s remote star-born cousins.
There was clearly no cutting through it. But there was another weapon he could use. Troy set down the bag in which Sahiba rode and investigated the loot he had brought with him from the wrecked flitter. There was a small tube, meant originally for a distress flare, but with another possible use.
Troy examined the webbing as well as he could without touching it. The strands were coated with thick beads of dust. It had been in place there for a long time. Unscrewing the head of the flare and holding the other end of the tube, he aimed it at the center of the web.
Violent red flame thrust like a spear at the net. There was an answering flower of fire running from the point of impact along the cords to their fastening points on the rock about the opening, a stench that set Troy to coughing. Then—there was nothing at all fronting them but the open path and some trails of smoke wreathing from the stone.
They waited for those to clear before Simba took a running leap to cross the fire-blackened space, the foxes following him eagerly. Troy, again carrying Sahiba and Shang, brought up the rear.
He was well away from the cliff before he realized that they might have made their escape from the cavern of the fungus town, but they were not yet on the open surface of Korwar. There was vegetation here, growing rankly in an approximation of sunlight, a light that filtered down from a vast expanse of roof crossed and crisscrossed with bars or beams set in zigzag patterns like those formed by the light spark in the water tunnel. Between that patching of bars was a cream-white surface, which, seen from ground level, could have been sand held up by some invisible means.
As Troy studied that, he saw a puff of golden vapor exhaled from a section of crosshatched bars. The tiny cloud floated softly down until it was midway between the roof and earth, and then it discharged its bulk in a small shower, spattering big drops of liquid on the leaves of the plants immediately below.
And now Troy could see radical differences between those plants and the ordinary vegetation of the surface. Not far away a huge four-petaled flower—the petals a vivid cream, its heart a striking orange-red—hung without any stem Troy could detect, in a rounded opening among shaggy bushes.
The heavy, almost oppressive fragrance he had first noted in the passage came from that. Simba, nose extended, stalked toward the blossom. Then the cat arched its back and spat, its ears flattened to its skull. Troy, coming in answer to the wave of disgust and warning from the animal, found his boots crunching the husks of small bodies, charnel house debris. His sickened reaction made him slice at the horrible flower—to discover it was not a flower but a cunning weave of sticky threads. And, as his knife blade tore through them, the orange-red heart came to life, leaping from the trap, darting straight at him.
Troy had a confused impression of a many-legged thing with a gaping mouth, a thorned tail ready to sting. But Simba struck with a heavy clawed paw, throwing the creature up into the air. As it smashed to the ground, Sargon pounded it into the earth in a flattened smear. The fox sniffed and then drew back, his head down, his paws rubbing frantically at his nose.
Simba, tail moving in angry sweeps from side to side, sat half crouched as if awaiting a second attack.
“This is a bad place,” Sahiba stated flatly. And Troy was ready to agree with her.
Oddly enough it was Shang, the kinkajou, who took the lead. He leaped from Troy’s shoulder to the top of the nearest tall bush, and in a moment was only to be marked by a thrashing of branches as he headed into th
e miniature wilds. Troy dodged another made-to-order rain cloud and sat down to share out supplies with his oddly assorted company. They would need food and water before they tried to solve this latest riddle.
THIRTEEN
The same wild waving of leafed branches that had marked Shang’s departure heralded his return. He made a flying leap from a nearby bush top to the ground, raising small spurts of dust as he raced toward Troy.
“Man thing!” There was excitement in that report, enough to make Troy set down a water container hastily, not quite sure whether Shang meant an animate or inanimate find.
“Where?” Troy asked, and then added quickly, “What?”
Shang raised a front paw and gestured to the miniature wilderness. He seemed unable to define the “what” at all. Troy looked to the cats; he had come to accept their superior judgment in such matters.
Simba faced the screen of vegetation, and Horan, alert now to the slight changes he might not have noted hours earlier, marked that twitch of whiskered muzzle. Sahiba, limping clumsily, left his side, joined her mate, and sat in the same listening attitude.
“Call thing—” It was Simba who reported.
Troy experienced a flicker of uneasiness. There had been a “call thing” associated with Ruhkarv, and he did not want to have any close connection with that, certainly not with what rumor and legend suggested that it had called.
“Old?” He did not know how Simba could pick the answer to that out of the air, or out of Shang and the messages the air brought feline senses.
“Not old.”
“A man with it?”
Simba’s blue eyes, with their unreadable depths, lifted from the foliage wall to Troy’s. He caught the cat’s puzzlement, as if Simba was able to pluck a confused series of impressions from channels closed to the man, but as if important sequences in that series were lacking.
“Man thing—” Shang was fairly dancing up and down with eagerness, running a few steps toward the wilderness, retreating to peer at Troy, plainly urging that his find be examined by Horan. But the man continued to wait for the cats’ verdict.