The news flash came during the slack time at
the shop. Those visitors who favored the afternoon had gone, and
the evening strollers were not yet abroad. Kyger had retreated to
his office; his employees gathered for their evening meal. Troy
balanced a plate on his knee in the courtyard. Through the window
vent over his head he could hear the mechanical recitation of the
day’s events over Kyger’s com.
“—the so-far unexplainable and sudden death of
Sattor Commander Varan Di.”
Troy stopped chewing. Two feet away stood the flitter, and right
now there was a box resting in it intended for the hillside villa
of Sattor Commander Varan Di, a special shipment of food for the
Commander’s pet.
“—resigned from the overlordship of the Council
during the previous year,” continued the drone from within.
“But his years of experience led him to agree to continue as
consultant on special problems. It is rumored that he was acting at
present as adviser on the terms of the Treaty of Panarc Five. This
has been neither confirmed nor denied by government spokesmen.
Statement issued by the Council: ‘It is with deep
regret—’ ”
The monotone of the com snapped into a silence, the more
noticeable because of that sudden break. Troy went on eating. The
death, “unexplainable and sudden” as the com had it, of
a retired military leader and former Council lord now had very
little to do with Troy Horan. Ten years ago—again
Troy’s hand paused on its way to his mouth—ten years
ago matters might have been different. It had been Varan Di who had
arbitrarily decided to make a military depot for Sattor-class ships
out of Norden. Not that that made any difference now.
“Horan!” Kyger came to the courtyard entrance.
Troy put down his plate, noting small signs of irritation in his
employer.
“Take the flitter up to the Di villa and deliver
that package.”
Well, Troy supposed, eating, even for a pet, went on when the
master was dead. But why the rush to send him now—and why him
at all? The yardman usually took the flitter out on such errands.
But this was no time to ask questions. He folded his long legs into
the driver’s seat, made a creditable lift from the
courtyard.
The journey tape had already been set for the trip; he had
nothing to do but take off and land, and be ready to assume manual
control if any remote emergency arose. In the meantime he settled
back in the cramped seat to enjoy this small time of privacy and
ease.
The golden haze, which was Korwar’s fair-weather sky,
somehow reminded him of Rerne and the promised trip into the Wild.
Troy had taken time twice that afternoon, after the Hunter had
left, to visit the fussel. And on the second inspection the big
bird had stirred on his perch and stretched his wings, which was a
very encouraging sign. The fussel was male, perhaps two years old,
so just entering the best training age.
Wild as he had been when loosed from the traveling cage, he had
not struck at Troy, as he had attempted to do at both Kyger and the
assisting yardman, which could—or might—mean that the
bird would be willing to ride with Horan.
“Lane warning—lane warning!” The words spat
from the mike on the control board, a light flashing in additional
emphasis.
Troy looked up. A patroller hung poised, as the fussel might
poise, over the flitter, ready to swoop for the kill.
“Identify yourself!” came the order Troy expected.
He pushed the button that would report to the law the destination
and reason for the errand as it appeared on his journey tape,
expecting instructions to take manuals and sheer off. If the
patrollers were investigating a suspicious death, they would not
allow him to set down at the Di villa.
But surprisingly enough he was told to proceed. Nor was he
challenged again as the flitter settled before the service quarters
of the late Sattor Commander’s mountainside retreat.
Like all Korwar aristocrats, Varan Di had constructed a dwelling
on a plan native to another world, choosing for a model the stark
simplicity of the Pa-ta-du of the sea mountains of Qwan. Even a
growth of pink-gray lace bushes could not disguise the rugged wall
posts, though their softening color was reflected by the sheets of
barmush shell that formed the wall surfaces between those posts.
Troy tried to estimate the number of credits that must have been
spent to import posts, shell sheets, and doubtless all the rest
from across stellar space. And he doubted if it all could have been
done on the legal pay of either a sattor commander or a Council
lord’s post.
He pulled the case of food out of the flitter, shouldered it,
and turned toward the delivery port of the villa. Men were moving
in the garden, patrollers’ uniforms very much in evidence.
Their attention appeared to be centered on a small structure half
hidden by an artificial grouping of plume trees, a structure as
architecturally different from the villa it accompanied as the
fussel was from a bob-chit. In place of shell-post walls,
translucent, this was a solid block of stone, cut and set with
precision, but also giving the impression of a primitive erection
from some prespace-flight civilization thousands of years removed
in time from the larger house.
A man came out of its doorway, and Troy stopped short. Just as
the invisible touch of exploration had alerted him in the
warehouse, so now did a feeling within him answer a new, voiceless
cry for help. The sensation of terror and, beyond that terror, the
breathless need to convey some vital information struck into his
mind almost as a physical blow. And without conscious thinking he
answered that plea with an unvoiced query in return:
“What—where—how—?”
The man who had come from the stone-walled garden house twisted
and made a grab into the air as something wriggled from his clutch
and sprang into the nearest plume tree. Only an agitation of
foliage marked its path from there to the villa—or was it
toward Troy? A tree branch bobbed and from it a small body flung
itself in a crazy leap through the air.
Troy put down the box just in time to take the shock of that
weight landing on his shoulder. A prehensile tail curled about his
neck, small legs clutched him frenziedly, and he put up an arm to
enfold a small, trembling, softly furred animal. A round, broad
head butted against him, as if the creature were trying to ball
into a refuge. Troy stroked the thick yellow-brown fur
soothingly.
“Kill—” No one had spoken that word aloud; it
flashed into his mind, and with it a wavering, oddly shaped picture
of a man crumpled in a chair. Troy shook his head and the picture
was gone. But the fear in the animal in his arms remained alive and
strong.
“Danger—” Yes, that got across. Danger not
only for the creature he held, but for others—men—
The man who had lost this animal was hurrying forward, and two
of the patrollers also made their way purposefully toward Troy. In
that same moment he knew that he intended to protect the thing he
held, even against the weight of Korwar’s law.
“Sooooo—” He made the same soothing sound
Kyger had used with the cats, stroking the furred back gently. The
butting of the head against his chest was now not so violent. And
Troy tried to establish a contact promising protection and aid.
What he was doing, or why and how he could do it, did not matter
now—that he was able to establish the contact did.
“Who are you?”
Troy settled the still-shivering animal more firmly into the
hollow between shoulder and arm and looked with very little favor
at his questioner. “Horan.” He pointed with his chin at
the flitter, with the shop name clearly lettered on its body.
“From Kyger’s.”
One of the patrollers cleared his throat and then spoke with a
deferential note that suggested the importance of the civilian
interrogating Troy. “That’s the animal and bird
importer, Gentle Homo. I believe that the Sattor Commander
purchased this thing there—”
The man he addressed was harsh-faced, flat-eyed. He stared at
Troy as if he presented some very elemental problem that could be
speedily solved—not particularly to the problem’s
advantage.
“What are you doing here?”
Troy touched with the toe of his boot the box he had just set
down. “Delivery, Gentle Homo. Special food for the
Commander’s pet.”
The flat-eyed man looked to the second patroller and that
individual nodded. “It was referenced for today, Gentle Homo.
Special imported food for the—the—” He hesitated
over the unfamiliar name before he offered it. “The
kinkajou.”
“The what?” his superior demanded. “What kind
of an outlandish, other-sun thing—?”
“It is Terran, Gentle Homo,” his second underling
answered with a small flash of importance. “Very rare. The
Sattor Commander was quite excited about it.”
“Kinkajou—Terran—” The officer advanced
a step or two as he tried to see more of the animal clinging to
Troy. “But what was it doing rummaging through the Sattor
Commander’s desk if it is just an animal? Do you have an
answer for that?”
“Danger!” Troy did not need that flash of warning
from the creature in his arms. It was plain to read in the whole
stance of the man before him.
“Many animals are very curious, Gentle Homo.” Troy
sought to divert the officer. “Do not Korwarian kattans open
any package they can lay claws upon?”
The voluble patroller was nodding assent to that. And Troy
pushed a little further. “Animals also imitate the actions of
men with whom they are closely associated, Gentle Homo. The
kinkajou may have been following the routine of the Sattor
Commander. What else could it be? Surely it would not be doing so
for a purpose—” But, Troy guessed now, that must have
been what the creature was doing when caught. Did this officer have
more exact knowledge of that fact?
“Possible,” the other conceded. “Just to make
sure that there shall be no more such mischief, you will take this
kinkajou with you and return it to Kyger. He shall be responsible
for it until the investigation into the Sattor Commander’s
death is completed. Tell him the Commandant of the West Sector
orders it.”
“It is done, Gentle Homo.”
Troy tried to put the kinkajou into the flitter first, before he
replaced the box. But the animal refused to loose its hold upon
him. In addition, rising above the fear it conveyed to him, there
was again that urgency, an urgency that was clearly connected with
the stone house in the garden. The kinkajou wanted him to return it
to that building until it finished some task, protecting it
meanwhile from his own kind. But to that he dared not agree. For
the first time the animal gave tongue, uttering sharp, chittering
cries, as if so it could enforce the volume of their silent
communication.
“Get aloft!”
The Commandant had gone back to the garden house, and the
patrollers moved in on Troy. He had no wish to have them turn ugly.
Somehow he managed to tip the box back into the flitter, the
kinkajou protesting the retreat bitterly—though Troy noted it
made no attempt to leave him.
Once they were aloft again, the animal quieted down, apparently
accepting defeat. Seated in Troy’s lap, its tail curled about
one of his arms as if for reassurance and support, it surveyed the
world of the sky through which they flew with what might have been
taken for intelligent interest. But it made no more attempts to
reason with him.
When the flitter set down in the court of Kyger’s
establishment, the kinkajou moved to the cabin door, patted it with
front paws, and looked to Troy entreatingly, every line of its
rounded body expressing eagerness to be free. He caught at the
prehensile tail, having no wish to see the creature escape by one
of its spectacular leaps. Leaving the flyer and grasping his
indignant captive firmly, Troy went toward his employer’s
office.
Kyger appeared at the corridor door, and when he saw the
squirming animal in Troy’s hold, he halted nearly in
midstep. Again Troy caught that spark of unease which he had
detected in the meeting between the ex-spacer and Rerne.
“What happened?” Kyger’s tone was as usual. He
stepped back into his office and Troy accepted the tacit invitation
to enter. The escape attempts of the kinkajou were at an end again.
Once more the animal pushed against Horan’s chest as if in
mute plea for protection. But the mental contact had utterly
ceased.
Swiftly and tersely, as a serviceman giving a report to a
superior officer, Troy outlined what had happened at the Di villa.
But he made no mention of the odd contact with the kinkajou. He had
early learned in the hard school of the Dipple that knowledge could
be both a weapon and a defense, and something a nebulous and beyond
reason as his odd mental meeting with two different species of
Terran life he preferred to keep to himself—at least until he
knew Kyger better.
Kyger made no move to separate the clinging animal from Horan
but sat down in the eazi-rest. His fingers rubbed up and down the
scar seam from his ear.
“That’s a valuable specimen,” he remarked
mildly when Troy had done. “You were right to bring it back
here. Curious as a ffolth sand borer. There was no reason for the
law to upset it to the point of hysteria! Put it in the empty end
cage in the animal room, give it some water and a few quagger nuts,
and leave it alone.”
Troy followed orders, but once at the cage he had some
difficulty in detaching the kinkajou. The animal appeared to accept
Horan as a refuge in the midst of a chancy world, and he had to pry
paws and tail loose from their hold on him. As he closed the cage
door, the captive rolled itself into a tight ball in the corner
farthest from the light, presenting only a stubborn hump of furred
back to the world.
During the few days he had been at Kyger’s, Troy had come
to look forward to the early hours of the night when he was left
alone in the interior of the main buildings. He made two watch
rounds according to his orders. But each night before he napped, he
had his own visiting pattern. The fussel hawk, the blue-feathered
cubs that always greeted him with reaching paws and joyous squeaks,
and several other favorites were then his alone. Tonight he came
also to the kinkajou cage. From the appearance of that furred ball
still wedged into the corner, the creature had not moved from the
position it had assumed when he first put it there.
Deliberately Troy tried mental contact, suggesting friendship, a
desire for better understanding. But if the kinkajou received those
suggestions, it neither acknowledged nor reacted to them.
Disappointed, Troy left the room after setting the com
broadcaster.
When he stretched out on his bunk, he tried to fit one event of
the day to another. But when he remembered Rerne and the
other’s request for his services in testing the fussel in the
Wild, Troy drifted into a daydream, which, in a very short
interval, became a real dream.
Troy rolled over, his shoulder bringing up against the wall with
a smart rap, his head turning fretfully. There was a thickness
behind his eyes, which was not quite a pressure of pain, only a
dull throb. He opened his eyes. The dial of the timekeeper faced
him, and the hour marked there was well past the middle of the
night—though not quite time for his round. But as long as he
was now thoroughly awake, he might as well make it.
He sat up, pulled on his half boots. Then he pressed his
fingertips gently to his temples. The dull feeling in his head
persisted, and it was not normal. In fact—
Troy’s hand flashed to the niche above the head of his
bunk, scooping up the weapon that lay waiting there.
Though he had never experienced that particular form of attack
before, his wits were now alert enough to supply him with one
possible explanation. With the stunner in his hand, he walked as
noiselessly as he could to the doorway, peered out into the subdued
lighting of the corridor.
To his right was Kyger’s office, thumb-sealed as usual.
And there had been no betraying sound from the com. No betraying
sound! But a lack of normal sounds can be as enlightening. Troy had
become accustomed to the small twitters, clicks, chattering
subcomplaints of the night hours—a myriad of sounds, that
issued normally from the cage rooms.
The dull pressure in his own head, together with the absence of
those same twitters, clicks, chatters, spelled only one thing.
There was a “sleeper” in operation somewhere on the
premises—the illegal gadget that could lull into
unconsciousness living things not shielded from its effect on the
middle ear. And a sleeper was not the tool of a man who had any
legitimate business here. It must be turned low enough to handle
the animals but not to stun Horan himself into
unconsciousness—why?
Troy tested Kyger’s sealed office doorway with one hand,
the stunner ready in the other. The panel refused to move, so at
least that lock had not been forced. He slipped along the wall,
paused by the tank room. The gurgle of flowing water, the plop of
an aquarium inhabitant—nothing else. The marine things
appeared not to have succumbed to the sleeper either.
Horan crossed to the animal room. Again no sound at
all—which was doubly suspicious. Inside that door was the
alert signal, which would arouse the yardmen and ring straight
through to Kyger’s quarters. Troy edged about the mesh door,
his back against the wall, his free hand going to that knob, ready
to push it flat.
“Danger!”
Again that word burst in his brain with the force of a
full-lunged scream in his ear. He half turned, and a blast of pure,
flaming energy cut so close that he cried out involuntarily at the
searing bite of its edge against the line of his chin. Half blinded
by the recent glare, Troy snapped the stunner beam at the dark
shape arising from the floor and threw himself in a roll halfway
across the room.
Troy shot another beam at a black blot in the doorway. But the
paralyzing ray seemed to have no effect in even slowing up his
attacker. Before Troy could find his feet, the other had made the
corridor, and Troy heard the metallic clang of the outer door.
Horan stumbled across the room, slammed his hand upon the alarm
signal, heard the clamor tear the unnatural silence of the cage
room to shreds. Perhaps the aroused yard guard would be able to
catch the fugitive now in the open.
The news flash came during the slack time at
the shop. Those visitors who favored the afternoon had gone, and
the evening strollers were not yet abroad. Kyger had retreated to
his office; his employees gathered for their evening meal. Troy
balanced a plate on his knee in the courtyard. Through the window
vent over his head he could hear the mechanical recitation of the
day’s events over Kyger’s com.
“—the so-far unexplainable and sudden death of
Sattor Commander Varan Di.”
Troy stopped chewing. Two feet away stood the flitter, and right
now there was a box resting in it intended for the hillside villa
of Sattor Commander Varan Di, a special shipment of food for the
Commander’s pet.
“—resigned from the overlordship of the Council
during the previous year,” continued the drone from within.
“But his years of experience led him to agree to continue as
consultant on special problems. It is rumored that he was acting at
present as adviser on the terms of the Treaty of Panarc Five. This
has been neither confirmed nor denied by government spokesmen.
Statement issued by the Council: ‘It is with deep
regret—’ ”
The monotone of the com snapped into a silence, the more
noticeable because of that sudden break. Troy went on eating. The
death, “unexplainable and sudden” as the com had it, of
a retired military leader and former Council lord now had very
little to do with Troy Horan. Ten years ago—again
Troy’s hand paused on its way to his mouth—ten years
ago matters might have been different. It had been Varan Di who had
arbitrarily decided to make a military depot for Sattor-class ships
out of Norden. Not that that made any difference now.
“Horan!” Kyger came to the courtyard entrance.
Troy put down his plate, noting small signs of irritation in his
employer.
“Take the flitter up to the Di villa and deliver
that package.”
Well, Troy supposed, eating, even for a pet, went on when the
master was dead. But why the rush to send him now—and why him
at all? The yardman usually took the flitter out on such errands.
But this was no time to ask questions. He folded his long legs into
the driver’s seat, made a creditable lift from the
courtyard.
The journey tape had already been set for the trip; he had
nothing to do but take off and land, and be ready to assume manual
control if any remote emergency arose. In the meantime he settled
back in the cramped seat to enjoy this small time of privacy and
ease.
The golden haze, which was Korwar’s fair-weather sky,
somehow reminded him of Rerne and the promised trip into the Wild.
Troy had taken time twice that afternoon, after the Hunter had
left, to visit the fussel. And on the second inspection the big
bird had stirred on his perch and stretched his wings, which was a
very encouraging sign. The fussel was male, perhaps two years old,
so just entering the best training age.
Wild as he had been when loosed from the traveling cage, he had
not struck at Troy, as he had attempted to do at both Kyger and the
assisting yardman, which could—or might—mean that the
bird would be willing to ride with Horan.
“Lane warning—lane warning!” The words spat
from the mike on the control board, a light flashing in additional
emphasis.
Troy looked up. A patroller hung poised, as the fussel might
poise, over the flitter, ready to swoop for the kill.
“Identify yourself!” came the order Troy expected.
He pushed the button that would report to the law the destination
and reason for the errand as it appeared on his journey tape,
expecting instructions to take manuals and sheer off. If the
patrollers were investigating a suspicious death, they would not
allow him to set down at the Di villa.
But surprisingly enough he was told to proceed. Nor was he
challenged again as the flitter settled before the service quarters
of the late Sattor Commander’s mountainside retreat.
Like all Korwar aristocrats, Varan Di had constructed a dwelling
on a plan native to another world, choosing for a model the stark
simplicity of the Pa-ta-du of the sea mountains of Qwan. Even a
growth of pink-gray lace bushes could not disguise the rugged wall
posts, though their softening color was reflected by the sheets of
barmush shell that formed the wall surfaces between those posts.
Troy tried to estimate the number of credits that must have been
spent to import posts, shell sheets, and doubtless all the rest
from across stellar space. And he doubted if it all could have been
done on the legal pay of either a sattor commander or a Council
lord’s post.
He pulled the case of food out of the flitter, shouldered it,
and turned toward the delivery port of the villa. Men were moving
in the garden, patrollers’ uniforms very much in evidence.
Their attention appeared to be centered on a small structure half
hidden by an artificial grouping of plume trees, a structure as
architecturally different from the villa it accompanied as the
fussel was from a bob-chit. In place of shell-post walls,
translucent, this was a solid block of stone, cut and set with
precision, but also giving the impression of a primitive erection
from some prespace-flight civilization thousands of years removed
in time from the larger house.
A man came out of its doorway, and Troy stopped short. Just as
the invisible touch of exploration had alerted him in the
warehouse, so now did a feeling within him answer a new, voiceless
cry for help. The sensation of terror and, beyond that terror, the
breathless need to convey some vital information struck into his
mind almost as a physical blow. And without conscious thinking he
answered that plea with an unvoiced query in return:
“What—where—how—?”
The man who had come from the stone-walled garden house twisted
and made a grab into the air as something wriggled from his clutch
and sprang into the nearest plume tree. Only an agitation of
foliage marked its path from there to the villa—or was it
toward Troy? A tree branch bobbed and from it a small body flung
itself in a crazy leap through the air.
Troy put down the box just in time to take the shock of that
weight landing on his shoulder. A prehensile tail curled about his
neck, small legs clutched him frenziedly, and he put up an arm to
enfold a small, trembling, softly furred animal. A round, broad
head butted against him, as if the creature were trying to ball
into a refuge. Troy stroked the thick yellow-brown fur
soothingly.
“Kill—” No one had spoken that word aloud; it
flashed into his mind, and with it a wavering, oddly shaped picture
of a man crumpled in a chair. Troy shook his head and the picture
was gone. But the fear in the animal in his arms remained alive and
strong.
“Danger—” Yes, that got across. Danger not
only for the creature he held, but for others—men—
The man who had lost this animal was hurrying forward, and two
of the patrollers also made their way purposefully toward Troy. In
that same moment he knew that he intended to protect the thing he
held, even against the weight of Korwar’s law.
“Sooooo—” He made the same soothing sound
Kyger had used with the cats, stroking the furred back gently. The
butting of the head against his chest was now not so violent. And
Troy tried to establish a contact promising protection and aid.
What he was doing, or why and how he could do it, did not matter
now—that he was able to establish the contact did.
“Who are you?”
Troy settled the still-shivering animal more firmly into the
hollow between shoulder and arm and looked with very little favor
at his questioner. “Horan.” He pointed with his chin at
the flitter, with the shop name clearly lettered on its body.
“From Kyger’s.”
One of the patrollers cleared his throat and then spoke with a
deferential note that suggested the importance of the civilian
interrogating Troy. “That’s the animal and bird
importer, Gentle Homo. I believe that the Sattor Commander
purchased this thing there—”
The man he addressed was harsh-faced, flat-eyed. He stared at
Troy as if he presented some very elemental problem that could be
speedily solved—not particularly to the problem’s
advantage.
“What are you doing here?”
Troy touched with the toe of his boot the box he had just set
down. “Delivery, Gentle Homo. Special food for the
Commander’s pet.”
The flat-eyed man looked to the second patroller and that
individual nodded. “It was referenced for today, Gentle Homo.
Special imported food for the—the—” He hesitated
over the unfamiliar name before he offered it. “The
kinkajou.”
“The what?” his superior demanded. “What kind
of an outlandish, other-sun thing—?”
“It is Terran, Gentle Homo,” his second underling
answered with a small flash of importance. “Very rare. The
Sattor Commander was quite excited about it.”
“Kinkajou—Terran—” The officer advanced
a step or two as he tried to see more of the animal clinging to
Troy. “But what was it doing rummaging through the Sattor
Commander’s desk if it is just an animal? Do you have an
answer for that?”
“Danger!” Troy did not need that flash of warning
from the creature in his arms. It was plain to read in the whole
stance of the man before him.
“Many animals are very curious, Gentle Homo.” Troy
sought to divert the officer. “Do not Korwarian kattans open
any package they can lay claws upon?”
The voluble patroller was nodding assent to that. And Troy
pushed a little further. “Animals also imitate the actions of
men with whom they are closely associated, Gentle Homo. The
kinkajou may have been following the routine of the Sattor
Commander. What else could it be? Surely it would not be doing so
for a purpose—” But, Troy guessed now, that must have
been what the creature was doing when caught. Did this officer have
more exact knowledge of that fact?
“Possible,” the other conceded. “Just to make
sure that there shall be no more such mischief, you will take this
kinkajou with you and return it to Kyger. He shall be responsible
for it until the investigation into the Sattor Commander’s
death is completed. Tell him the Commandant of the West Sector
orders it.”
“It is done, Gentle Homo.”
Troy tried to put the kinkajou into the flitter first, before he
replaced the box. But the animal refused to loose its hold upon
him. In addition, rising above the fear it conveyed to him, there
was again that urgency, an urgency that was clearly connected with
the stone house in the garden. The kinkajou wanted him to return it
to that building until it finished some task, protecting it
meanwhile from his own kind. But to that he dared not agree. For
the first time the animal gave tongue, uttering sharp, chittering
cries, as if so it could enforce the volume of their silent
communication.
“Get aloft!”
The Commandant had gone back to the garden house, and the
patrollers moved in on Troy. He had no wish to have them turn ugly.
Somehow he managed to tip the box back into the flitter, the
kinkajou protesting the retreat bitterly—though Troy noted it
made no attempt to leave him.
Once they were aloft again, the animal quieted down, apparently
accepting defeat. Seated in Troy’s lap, its tail curled about
one of his arms as if for reassurance and support, it surveyed the
world of the sky through which they flew with what might have been
taken for intelligent interest. But it made no more attempts to
reason with him.
When the flitter set down in the court of Kyger’s
establishment, the kinkajou moved to the cabin door, patted it with
front paws, and looked to Troy entreatingly, every line of its
rounded body expressing eagerness to be free. He caught at the
prehensile tail, having no wish to see the creature escape by one
of its spectacular leaps. Leaving the flyer and grasping his
indignant captive firmly, Troy went toward his employer’s
office.
Kyger appeared at the corridor door, and when he saw the
squirming animal in Troy’s hold, he halted nearly in
midstep. Again Troy caught that spark of unease which he had
detected in the meeting between the ex-spacer and Rerne.
“What happened?” Kyger’s tone was as usual. He
stepped back into his office and Troy accepted the tacit invitation
to enter. The escape attempts of the kinkajou were at an end again.
Once more the animal pushed against Horan’s chest as if in
mute plea for protection. But the mental contact had utterly
ceased.
Swiftly and tersely, as a serviceman giving a report to a
superior officer, Troy outlined what had happened at the Di villa.
But he made no mention of the odd contact with the kinkajou. He had
early learned in the hard school of the Dipple that knowledge could
be both a weapon and a defense, and something a nebulous and beyond
reason as his odd mental meeting with two different species of
Terran life he preferred to keep to himself—at least until he
knew Kyger better.
Kyger made no move to separate the clinging animal from Horan
but sat down in the eazi-rest. His fingers rubbed up and down the
scar seam from his ear.
“That’s a valuable specimen,” he remarked
mildly when Troy had done. “You were right to bring it back
here. Curious as a ffolth sand borer. There was no reason for the
law to upset it to the point of hysteria! Put it in the empty end
cage in the animal room, give it some water and a few quagger nuts,
and leave it alone.”
Troy followed orders, but once at the cage he had some
difficulty in detaching the kinkajou. The animal appeared to accept
Horan as a refuge in the midst of a chancy world, and he had to pry
paws and tail loose from their hold on him. As he closed the cage
door, the captive rolled itself into a tight ball in the corner
farthest from the light, presenting only a stubborn hump of furred
back to the world.
During the few days he had been at Kyger’s, Troy had come
to look forward to the early hours of the night when he was left
alone in the interior of the main buildings. He made two watch
rounds according to his orders. But each night before he napped, he
had his own visiting pattern. The fussel hawk, the blue-feathered
cubs that always greeted him with reaching paws and joyous squeaks,
and several other favorites were then his alone. Tonight he came
also to the kinkajou cage. From the appearance of that furred ball
still wedged into the corner, the creature had not moved from the
position it had assumed when he first put it there.
Deliberately Troy tried mental contact, suggesting friendship, a
desire for better understanding. But if the kinkajou received those
suggestions, it neither acknowledged nor reacted to them.
Disappointed, Troy left the room after setting the com
broadcaster.
When he stretched out on his bunk, he tried to fit one event of
the day to another. But when he remembered Rerne and the
other’s request for his services in testing the fussel in the
Wild, Troy drifted into a daydream, which, in a very short
interval, became a real dream.
Troy rolled over, his shoulder bringing up against the wall with
a smart rap, his head turning fretfully. There was a thickness
behind his eyes, which was not quite a pressure of pain, only a
dull throb. He opened his eyes. The dial of the timekeeper faced
him, and the hour marked there was well past the middle of the
night—though not quite time for his round. But as long as he
was now thoroughly awake, he might as well make it.
He sat up, pulled on his half boots. Then he pressed his
fingertips gently to his temples. The dull feeling in his head
persisted, and it was not normal. In fact—
Troy’s hand flashed to the niche above the head of his
bunk, scooping up the weapon that lay waiting there.
Though he had never experienced that particular form of attack
before, his wits were now alert enough to supply him with one
possible explanation. With the stunner in his hand, he walked as
noiselessly as he could to the doorway, peered out into the subdued
lighting of the corridor.
To his right was Kyger’s office, thumb-sealed as usual.
And there had been no betraying sound from the com. No betraying
sound! But a lack of normal sounds can be as enlightening. Troy had
become accustomed to the small twitters, clicks, chattering
subcomplaints of the night hours—a myriad of sounds, that
issued normally from the cage rooms.
The dull pressure in his own head, together with the absence of
those same twitters, clicks, chatters, spelled only one thing.
There was a “sleeper” in operation somewhere on the
premises—the illegal gadget that could lull into
unconsciousness living things not shielded from its effect on the
middle ear. And a sleeper was not the tool of a man who had any
legitimate business here. It must be turned low enough to handle
the animals but not to stun Horan himself into
unconsciousness—why?
Troy tested Kyger’s sealed office doorway with one hand,
the stunner ready in the other. The panel refused to move, so at
least that lock had not been forced. He slipped along the wall,
paused by the tank room. The gurgle of flowing water, the plop of
an aquarium inhabitant—nothing else. The marine things
appeared not to have succumbed to the sleeper either.
Horan crossed to the animal room. Again no sound at
all—which was doubly suspicious. Inside that door was the
alert signal, which would arouse the yardmen and ring straight
through to Kyger’s quarters. Troy edged about the mesh door,
his back against the wall, his free hand going to that knob, ready
to push it flat.
“Danger!”
Again that word burst in his brain with the force of a
full-lunged scream in his ear. He half turned, and a blast of pure,
flaming energy cut so close that he cried out involuntarily at the
searing bite of its edge against the line of his chin. Half blinded
by the recent glare, Troy snapped the stunner beam at the dark
shape arising from the floor and threw himself in a roll halfway
across the room.
Troy shot another beam at a black blot in the doorway. But the
paralyzing ray seemed to have no effect in even slowing up his
attacker. Before Troy could find his feet, the other had made the
corridor, and Troy heard the metallic clang of the outer door.
Horan stumbled across the room, slammed his hand upon the alarm
signal, heard the clamor tear the unnatural silence of the cage
room to shreds. Perhaps the aroused yard guard would be able to
catch the fugitive now in the open.