Catseye (16 page)

“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 the 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.

“Dangerous?”

To that again neither Sahiba nor Simba made a direct answer. But the urge to caution was intensified. Then Sargon and Sheba went purposefully off into the brush as if obeying some order. Troy repacked the supplies, picked up Sahiba. He studied the matted growth before him, looking for a path, or at least a thinner patch through which he might force his way.

The light from the odd roofing overhead, which had been day-bright when he had found his way into this place, was fading, and Troy did not much relish plunging into the tangle. But, sighting a space between two bushes, he pushed in resolutely.

Within seconds he was completely lost. It was impossible to keep any sort of straight course, and he had to use his knife to get free of vines and sprawling branches. The whole growth might have been intelligently planted to form a giant trap or barrier. It was Sahiba who relayed the suggestions of the scouts and Shang who roamed from bush to bush, coming back to coax him on.

Then Troy half fell through a mass of foliage, as a tough vine gave way, and was once more in the open—facing a nightmare scene.

There was an opening in the wall here, with a well-cleared, paved space before it. And in the center of that, facing the opening, was a small machine, a machine akin to his own time and culture. A cone of meta-plast was pointed with its large end toward the wall opening, and, as Troy stepped onto the pavement, he was immediately conscious of the fact that a faint vibration came from that machine. It was not only in working order—it was running!

Cat, foxes, kinkajou—the animals were lined up well to the left of the machine, facing the opening—waiting—

Troy's cry was half choked in his throat as he looked beyond the machine, along the line of that pointed cone. It must—surely it must have once been human, that thing trembling a little, spread-eagled on just such a webbing as had choked the passage from the fungus covern. Yet this was a dried rag-fashioned creature from which not only life but much of the bulk of body had vanished. The head, which still showed a thatch of dust-stiffened hair, lolled forward on the rack of bones that was the chest, and Troy was glad he could not see the features.