“Is that possible?” Mather demanded. “And have you let them see the cats?”
“No to both questions, sir. I wasn’t about to let them in with weapons, and they wouldn’t disarm before coming in. The cats are fine, though. They’re still making a lot of noise, of course, but—what’s going on, sir?”
“I’ll explain when I get there,” Mather replied, glancing at the others again. “In the meantime, I want you and Wing or somebody to go over the security tapes, working backward from right now. Look for anything, anything out of the ordinary. Have you got that?”
“Well, yes, sir, but—what about the security men?”
“They’ll just have to wait until I get there. I’m on my way.”
As he slapped off the intercom and headed for the door again, Shannon started after him.
“But—wait a minute! Are you trying to say that your cats aren’t responsible? That’s ridiculous. Any idiot—”
“Any idiot can jump to conclusions based on circumstantial evidence, Doctor,” Mather said, stopping her with a glance. “Why don’t you get started on the autopsy, while I go and do what I do best? Wallis, give her a hand. And you—” He turned on the anxious security guard with a finger pointed like a pistol. “If you intend to come with me, don’t even think about pulling a weapon or trying to arrest me. I have the authority to place this ship under martial law, if I have to, and I’ll place you under arrest if you interfere.”
“He’d do it, too,” Wallis told the man, who hesitated to follow the retreating Mather. “But go ahead after him,” she went on. “He knows you have a job to do. Just don’t try to keep him from doing his.”
Shannon, still agape at the entire exchange, dismissed the med tech with a gesture and tried to collect her wits.
“What does he mean, circumstantial evidence?” she blurted when the door had closed behind the technician. “And who’s the idiot?” She gestured angrily at the mutilated body. “Look at the man, Doctor Hamilton!”
Wallis let out a slow sigh. “I know. And I did. I admit that it looks fairly clear-cut. But you and I are scientists. Let’s look at the facts. If the cats really are responsible, I want to know as much as you do.”
“The facts speak for themselves, Doctor.”
“But, these aren’t the only facts,” Wallis argued. “Look, will you humor me for a few minutes? Let’s think about this.”
With a look of extreme cynicism, Shannon set the medical sensors to scanning for data and pulled a disposable lab gown from a shelf, tossing another to Wallis before putting hers on.
“Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“All right. Let’s suppose—just suppose—that we’ve never heard of Lehr cats.”
“I wish I hadn’t,” Shannon muttered under her breath as she pulled on surgical gloves.
“I know. Just suppose. We’re provincial doctors. We’ve never been off-planet, we’ve never heard of Lehr cats, we’ve never seen them—we have no idea that such creatures might exist.”
“Oh, they exist, all right,” Shannon said, rolling a cart with surgical instruments closer. “Just ask Gustav Fabrial.”
Wallis ignored the younger physician’s comment as she, too, gloved and resumed her inspection of the body.
“Now,” she continued, “this man, this Fabrial, is brought in dead, and you, as chief medical officer, are asked to perform the autopsy and form a hypothesis as to cause of death. Remember, you’ve never heard of a Lehr cat. Fabrial could have been the victim of anyone or anything.” She gestured toward Shannon with a probe. “Now, who killed Fabrial?”
Shannon, cutting away the dead man’s jacket with a pair of surgical scissors, only shook her head. “This is pointless.”
“No, don’t quit on me already. Who killed Fabrial? What was the physical cause of death?”
Shannon gave a stubborn smile. “All right, just offhand, I’d say he died of shock, contingent upon massive loss of blood induced by trauma.…”
“Good. Go on.”
“He has multiple lacerations of the chest and forearms”—she looked shrewdly at Wallis—“perhaps from claws—”
“We don’t know that yet.”
“Very well, then, Doctor—not necessarily claws, then. Let’s say multiple parallel lacerations, approximately six to ten centimeters apart, in groups of four to five.” She threw down her scissors. “Oh, come on, Doctor! From claws! What else could make wounds like that?”
Wallis bowed her head and worried her lower lip briefly with her teeth.
“All right, I’ll accept that for now, if you insist. Go on.”
“And multiple throat lacerations, especially along the lateral aspects,” Shannon continued sourly. “From teeth, Doctor Hamilton! Long teeth, sharp teeth—fangs, if you will!”
Wallis leaned both hands against the edge of the table and nodded slowly. “I know. And long blue hairs clenched in his fist, presumably from the murderer. Ergo, something with long blue hair, fangs, and claws killed Fabrial. And that something could only have been a Lehr cat. I have to admit, it looks bad.”
Shannon’s jaw dropped and she stared at her colleague dumbly for a few seconds. “You mean,” she finally managed to reply, “you’re still not convinced? You still maintain that your cats didn’t do it?”
“Do you want me to assert that I think the cats broke through plasteel, a force lock, and the regular door of the hold, evaded regular ship’s security on three decks, and then killed Fabrial and got back without anyone being the wiser?” Wallis countered.
“The screamers-in-the-night can do thus,” said a familiar voice.
They turned to see Muon and Bana standing in the doorway, swathed in their fur-lined robes and shaking with cold and dread.
“I know that the demons were responsible,” Muon continued, walking farther into the room and staring expressionlessly at the bloody body on the table. “Did I not tell you that the demons would devour us all? And now it has begun.”
The cats were screaming even worse than the night before when Mather reached Deck Six and headed toward their hold. Four confused ship’s security guards came to attention as he approached: two Mather recognized from the night before, and two he had never seen.
“Commodore Seton, just what is going on?” one of the familiar guards demanded as. Mather pushed his way between them and thumbed the intercom button on the panel outside the door. “When Burton and Lewis, here, came and asked to see the cats a little while ago, your Rangers chucked us all out. Burton says someone was murdered by one of the cats.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Mather said tersely, “and my men were just following their orders.” He glanced back at the door as the upper half transluced. Behind it, Perelli came to attention as he saw Mather. He had a heavy-duty stun carbine slung over his shoulder at the ready and was wearing a strange headset arrangement that completely covered his ears.
“Ah, Commodore Seton, am I glad to see you.”
Two more Rangers with headsets backed up the first as the outer door sphinctered open just far enough for Mather to duck into the security lock, but their stun carbines discouraged the remaining security men from trying to follow. Unlike a needler, whose darts could kill if too many struck a victim, a stun weapon would disable a living target with five to ten minutes of excruciating, paralyzing pain but leave no lasting effect or damage beyond sore muscles for a few days, making it an ideal defensive weapon for use aboard a spacecraft—and one with which the civilian-trained security guards had no desire to contend.
“What’s happened, Perelli?” Mather asked, as the Ranger took a fourth headset off a hook on the wall and handed it to him, and the other two took over at the door monitor. “Did ship’s security give you any trouble? And what is this thing?”
“It helps filter out the cats’ screaming, sir,” Perelli replied. “Wing put the first one together last night, after you left, and engineering made up several more for us. They don’t help a lot, but they’re better than nothing. And y
ou don’t really think those security guys wanted to mess with us, do you, sir?” he added with a grin. “They obviously don’t know what they’re talking about, if they think the cats got past us.”
“I hope not,” Mather murmured, glancing beyond Perelli at the cat cages and their vocal occupants. “Where is Wing?”
“Reviewing the tapes, sir, just as you ordered. And I’d really advise using the headset, sir.”
With a nod, Mather put the device over his ears and turned it on. He concluded, as he began moving closer to the cages, that any benefit to be derived from the device was as much psychological as anything else. He slipped it off and let it hang loosely around his neck as he continued around the cages, for he wanted no interference with natural perceptions.
To all outward appearances, however, nothing had changed since the night before. The cages were still joined end to end, the four units forming a long, plasteel-meshed run in which the animals were pacing restlessly. As Mather passed one end, the female they called Matilda stopped to glare at him; she raised one velvet-sheathed forepaw as if to strike at him through the mesh, her tail lashing hard against the side of the cage. But he ignored her.
He was looking, first, for physical evidence: for blood, for missing chunks of fur, for any sign of an altercation—but there was none. Visual inspection revealed nothing at all untoward about the cats’ appearance. However, desultory readings with a pocket scanner did seem to indicate some registration of pain. He flipped on the big cage scanners and checked those, too.
Now, that was unusual. Something was wrong. Granted, no one really knew very much about Lehr cats, and Mather himself claimed no particular medical expertise, but no seemingly healthy creature ought to be radiating that kind of pain without some accompanying injury or illness.
But there was more to the wrongness than that. It had nothing to do with anything he could see, but Mather was increasingly aware that something was not quite right about the area itself—the cages, or perhaps even the hold.
Puzzled, he tried extending his senses slightly, to see whether he could detect anything psychically unusual. Something was out there to be read, but he could not seem to zero in on it. The sheer decibel level in the hold made it hard to concentrate. He slipped the headset back over his ears, but that only seemed to make matters worse, so far as his sketchily reliable psi abilities were concerned.
Very well. He shut down mentally and sighed. He was simply going to have to do this the hard way.
Casually he glanced over his shoulder at the Rangers. Perelli was busy logging something in his shift report, his two partners were watching the security guards still waiting outside, and the rest must be ensconced with Wing and Webb in the security room. He could see the dark green lump of someone lying in one of the hammocks the Rangers had strung at one end of the room so they could sleep during off-duty hours without leaving the premises. If Mather was careful, he should have things over and done before anyone was the wiser.
Slowly he made his way around the cages again, this time studying the room, rather than the cats, until he found a place he liked, where he could stand in the window of a stanchion without being closely observed, from either the door or the office. He pulled the headset around his neck again—he would simply have to put up with the auditory distraction until he could block it out—then leaned his shoulders and back against the bulkhead and let his head tip back, locking his knees to brace himself against the bulkhead. His hands fell loosely to his sides as he cleared his mind and took the three deep breaths that would—he hoped—trigger deep psi sensitivity. It would have been easier with the right medication to ease the transition, but he had done it cold before. (He had also come up blind, under the best of circumstances.) He never knew for certain whether it would work, but this time it did.
Slowly the sounds of the cats’ screaming, the tiny vibrations of the ship, and even the pressure and chill of the bulkhead at his back began to fade from awareness. He let his eyes drift shut as he turned all his attention inward. After several moments of mental quieting, he gradually began to see though his mind’s eyes.
He did not like what he saw. He was aware of the cats pacing in their cage, each of them radiating fear and the pain the scanners had detected earlier. In fact, he could distinguish among the cats in a way he had never been able to do before—not that he had ever tried to read an animal’s mind. The level of pain varied from cat to cat, with the larger of the two females being most distressed by the sensation.
But the cats’ discomfiture was not the sum total of pain around him. As Mather pushed his awareness farther to include other life forms in the hold, he was startled to realize that the pain extended to himself and the Rangers as well—though theirs was not nearly as intense as the cats’ and registered only as mild but persistent headaches.
More than a little curious at that, and able to block his own pain now that he had become aware of it, Mather broadened his sensitivity to read the inanimate structure of the hold itself, sweeping his attention over the cages, the equipment, even the bulkheads, searching for something, anything out of the ordinary that might account for the pain he was reading from both cats and men.
He missed it the first time around. He almost missed it the second. But just before he was about to try a third sweep, he detected a blur of psychic noise to his right that grated like a fingernail on stone.
Slowly he slit his eyes open, visually inspecting the suspect bulkhead and integrating optical input with psychic. Another stanchion rose directly across from him, similar to the one whose shadow camouflaged him. The psychic static he had finally brought into focus seemed to be coming from that direction.
Still psychically open, Mather roused his body and forced it to move cautiously toward the place in question, bracing one hand against the bulkheads at his right, blocking the screams of the cats at his left, each careful step a conscious act. Bending to peer behind the bulk of the stanchion, he hesitated only briefly before extending his hand tentatively toward a flat, featureless gray box the size of his open palm; it clung to the back of the metal support. Though he did not touch it, he knew instantly that somehow the box was the source of the pain he had been reading.
With a blink, he was back in normal consciousness, the cats’ screams reverberating at his back. He took a deep breath as he straightened and glanced toward the door and the security station. Most of the Rangers were still engrossed in their own duties and probably had not even noticed his silence or his stealth, but Perelli was watching him curiously.
“Perelli, would you come here, please?”
Perelli said something to the two Rangers at the door, then came on the run. Mather took out his pocket medscanner and made an adjustment as the man approached; then he dropped down on his hunkers to point behind the stanchion with bland detachment.
“Ever seen that before?”
Perelli looked, then gestured for one of the other Rangers by the door and shook his head as the other man came and gave a similarly negative response.
“And you’re sure that no one has been around the cats?” Mather insisted, running his scanner close above the box’s gray crackle finish and studying the readouts.
“Only authorized personnel, sir,” Perelli replied, puzzled. “Webb and Wing are still going over the tapes, but—you don’t think it’s a bomb, do you, sir?”
“No. Nor does it appear to be booby-trapped to prevent what I’m about to do.”
He handed the scanner to Perelli, then touched the box gingerly with a fingertip before using both hands to slide it sideways and pry loose the limpet seal holding it in place. The device was featureless but for two slightly sunken screw heads on the underside, both faintly glowing red.
“Well, well,” Mather muttered to himself, reaching into an inner jacket pocket for a flat, narrow case as the two Rangers looked on with interest.
Balancing the case on one knee, he extracted a slender, nonmetallic probe, the blade of which he fitted delicately to t
he right-hand screw and gave a minute turn to the left.
The result was far more dramatic than he had expected. As the screw moved, the cats immediately stopped screaming; but the watching Rangers gasped and clutched at their heads in pain so intense that they could not even cry out. Casey, Perelli’s partner, even fell to his knees.
Quickly Mather turned the screw in the opposite direction, relieving the Rangers and momentarily enraging the cats again—and then, nothing. The screw stopped glowing, the cats stopped screaming, and the Rangers could finally blurt out a few dazed words of inquiry as to what had happened.
Ignoring their questions for just a moment longer, Mather tightened down the other screw until it, too, ceased glowing—fortunately, without further ill effect on those around him. He did not bother to speculate as to why he had not been affected, but it was fortunate he had not—for, judging by the Rangers’ reactions, he doubted he could have functioned coherently enough to neutralize the device if he had been.
Wing and a shaken-looking Webb came running from the adjoining security room. They were followed by the Rangers who had been sleeping and Perelli’s other partner from the door. Casey’s voice finally began to cut through Mather’s concentration.
“Commodore! Commodore Seton! What did you do?”
“What’s going on, Commodore?” Wing echoed. “We were running the last of the tapes, and I thought the top of my head was going to come off!”
“Mine, too,” said Casey. “I’ve never felt anything like that in my life! What was it, sir?”
Mather replaced his probe in its case and got ponderously to his feet, controlling the tendency of his knees to go a little wobbly in after-reaction. “Apparently, someone has left us a not-so-friendly gift,” he said, hefting the box in his hand as he slipped the instrument case back inside his jacket. “As nearly as I can tell without further analysis, it’s a psychic irritator of some sort, designed to focus random psychotronic energy and then disperse it on specific frequencies. In this case, it was tuned to enrage the cats and to hover just at the edge of human awareness—which would account for the cats’ behavior and for the headaches and general irritability experienced by almost everyone who’s had to work near the cats for any length of time since we came aboard. Call it a psychic itch, if that’s a good image for you.”
The Legacy of Lehr Page 7