Galactic Odyssey

by Keith Laumer

  He was standing on a rock on the crest of a rise, whipping his tail from side to side in a slow, graceful motion. He made a graceful leap to a lower rock and was just a dark shadow moving against the slope ahead. I unlimbered my rifle and watched him close. At thirty feet, he paused and sat down on his haunches and wrinkled his face and began licking his chest. He finished and stuck out a long tongue and yawned, and then rose and went loping off into the dusk, the way he’d come.

  All the while, we stood there and watched him, not saying a word. As soon as he was gone, I went to where he’d been sitting. His paw-prints were plain in the powdery dust. I started believing in him, then. I might see imaginary cats, but never imaginary cat tracks. We set off following them as fast as we could in the failing light.

  The water hole was in a hollow in the rock, hidden behind a wall of black-green foliage growing on the brink of a ravine. The Lady Raire stopped to gaze at it, but I stumbled down the slope and fell full-length in the water and drank in big gulps and luckily choked and had a coughing fit before I could drink myself to death.

  There was a steep jumble of rock rising behind the pool, with the dark mouths of caves showing. I picked my way around the pond in the near-dark with my gun ready in my hand. There was a smell of cat in the air. I was grateful to tabby for leading me to water, but I didn’t want him jumping on our backs now that it looked like we might live another few days.

  The caves weren’t much, just holes about ten feet deep, not quite high enough to stand up in, with enough dirt drifted in them to make a more or less level floor.

  The Lady Raire picked out one for herself, and I helped her clean out the dead leaves and cat droppings and fix up a stone that could be rolled into the opening to block it, in case anything bigger than a woodchuck wanted in. Then she picked out another one and told me it was mine and started in on it. It was dark when we finished. I saw her to her den, then sat down outside it with the pistol in my hand and went to sleep. . . . and woke hungry, clear-headed, and wondering how a cat happened to be here, in this super-Mojave. I thought about the dire-beasts and the meat—shredding leeches that had killed Lord Desroy and Sir Orfeo. The cat was no relative of theirs. He had been a regulation-type, black and gray and tan striped feline, complete with vertical-slitted pupils and retractable claws. He looked like anybody’s house-cat, except that he was the size of a collie dog. I’d heard about parallel evolution, and I hadn’t been too surprised when Sir Orfeo had told me about how many four-legged, one-headed creatures there were in the Universe-but a copy this perfect wasn’t possible.

  That meant one of two things: Either I had dreamed the whole thing-which was kind of unlikely, inasmuch as when I looked down I saw two more cats, just like the other one, in the bright moonlight down by the water-or our yacht wasn’t the first human-owned ship to land on Gar 28.

  In the morning light, the water looked clear and inviting. The Lady Raire studied it for a while, then called to me. “Billy Danger, watch thee well the while I lave me. Methinks t’will be safe enow . . .” She glanced my way, and I realized she was talking about going for a swim. I just stared at her.

  “How now, art stricken dumb?” she called.

  “The pond may be full of poison snakes, crocodiles, quicksand and undertows,” I said.

  “I’d as lief be devoured as go longer unwashed.” She proceeded to unzip the front of the tunic she’d changed into from the temperature suit, and stepped out of it. And for the second time in one minute, I was struck dumb. She stood there in front of me, as naked as a goddess, and as beautiful, and said, “I charge thee, Billy Danger, take not thine eyes from me,” and turned and waded down into the water. It was the easiest order to follow I ever heard of.

  She stayed in for half an hour, stroking up and down as unconcerned as if she were in the pool at some high-priced resort at Miami Beach. Once or twice she ducked under and stayed so long I found myself wading in to look for her. After the second time I complained and she laughed and promised to stay on top.

  “Verily, hast thou found a garden in the wilderness, Billy Danger,” she said after she had her clothes back on. “’Tis so peaceful-and in its rude way, so fair.”

  “Not much like home, though, I guess, Milady,” I said; but she changed the subject, as she always did when the conversation brought back too many memories.

  In the next few days, I made two trips back to the car, brought in everything that looked as if it might be useful; then we settled down to what I might describe as a very quiet routine. She strolled around, climbed the rocks, brought home small green shrubs and flowers that she planted around the caves and along the path and watered constantly, using a pot made of clay from the poolside cooked by a Z-gun on wide-beam. I spent my time exploring to the west and north, and trying to make friends with the cats.

  There were plenty of them; at certain times of the day, there’d be as many as ten in sight at one time, around the water hole. They didn’t pay much attention to us; just watched us when we came toward them and at about fifteen feet, rose casually and moved off into the thick growth along the ravine. They were well fed and lazy, just nice hearthside tabbies, a little larger than usual.

  There was one with a few streaks of orange in among the black and tan that I concentrated on, mainly because I could identify him easily. Every time I saw him I’d go out and move up as close as I could without spooking him, sit down, and start to play with a ball of string from the car. He sat and watched. I’d roll it toward him, then pull it back. He moved in closer. I let him get a paw on it, then jerked it. He went after it and cuffed it, and I pulled it in and tossed it out again.

  In a week, the game was a regular routine. In two, he had a name-Eureka-and was letting me scratch him between the ears. In three, he had taken to lying across the mouth of my cave, not even moving when I stepped over him going out.

  The Lady Raire watched all this with a sort of indulgent smile. According to her, cats were pets on most of the human-inhabited world she knew of. She wasn’t sure where they had originated, but she smiled when I said they were a native of Earth.

  “In sooth, Billy Danger, ’tis a truism that each unschooled mind fancies itself the center of the Universe. But the stars were seeded by Man long ago, and by his chattels with him.”

  At first, the Lady Raire didn’t pay much attention to my pet, but one day he showed up limping, and she spent half an hour carefully removing a splinter from his foot. The next day she gave him a bath, and brushed his fur to a high gloss. After that, he took to following her on her walks. And it wasn’t long before he took to sleeping at the mouth of her cubbyhole. He got more petting that way.

  I watched the cats, trying to see what it was they fed on, on the theory that whatever they ate, we could eat, too. Our concentrates wouldn’t last forever. But I never saw them pounce on anything. They came to the water hole to drink and lie around in the shade; then they wandered off again into the undergrowth. One day I decided to follow Eureka.

  “As thou wilt,” the Lady Raire said, smiling at me. “Tho’ I trow thy cat o’

  mountain lives on naught but moonbeams.”

  “Baked moonbeam for dinner coming up,” I said.

  The cat led me up the rocks and through the screen of alien foliage at the north side of the hollow, then struck out along the edge of the ravine, which was filled from edge to edge by a mass of deep-green vines. The chasm was about three hundred yards long, fifty yards wide; I couldn’t see the bottom under the tangle of green, but I could make out the big stems, as thick as my leg, snaking down into the deep shadows for at least a hundred feet. And I could see the cats. They lay in crotches of the big vine, walked delicately along the thick stems, peered out of shadows with green eyes. There were a few up on the rim, sitting on their haunches, watching me watching them. Eureka yawned and switched his tail against my thigh, then made a sudden leap, and disappeared into the green gloom. By getting down on all fours and shading my eyes, I could see the broad branch he’
d jumped to. I could have followed, but the idea of going down into that maze full of cats lacked appeal. I got up and started off along the rim. I noticed that it was scattered with what looked like chips of thick eggshell.

  The ravine shallowed out to nothing at the far end. The vines were less dense here, and I could see rock strata slanting down into the depths. There were strange knobs and shafts of blackish rock embedded in the lighter stone. I found one protruding near the surface and saw that it was a fossilized bone. The rock was full of them. That would be a matter of deep interest to a paleontologlst specializing in the fauna of Gar 28, but it was no help to me. I needed live meat. If there was any around-excepting the cats, and I didn’t like the idea of eating them, for six or eight reasons I could think of offhand-it had to be down below, in the shade of the greenery. The descent looked pretty easy, here at the end of the cut. I hitched my gun around front for quick access, and started down. The rock slanted off under me at an angle of about thirty degrees. The big vines bending up over my head were tough, woody, scaled with dead-looking bark. Only a few green tendrils curled up here, reaching for sunlight. The air was fresh and cool in the shade of the big leaves; there was a sharp, pungent odor of green life, mixed with the rank smell of cat. Fifty feet down the broken slope the growth got too thick to be ignored; it was switch over to limb-climbing or go back. I went on. It was easy going at first. The stems weren’t too close together to push between, and there was still plenty of light to see by. I could hear the cats moving around, back deeper in the growth. I reached a major stem, as big as my torso, and started down it. There were plenty of handholds here. Big seedpods hung in clusters near me. A lot of them had been gnawed, either by the cats or by what the cats ate. So far I hadn’t seen any signs of the latter. I broke off one of the pods. It was about a foot long, knobby and pale green. It broke open easily and half a dozen beans as big as egg yolks rolled out. I took a nibble of one. It tasted like raw beans. After a couple of weeks on concentrates, even that was good-if it didn’t kill me. I went down. The light was deep green now; a luminous dusk filtered through a hundred feet of foliage. The trunk I was following curved sharply, and I worked my way around to the up side, descended another ten feet, and my feet thunked solidly against something hard. I had to get down on all fours to see that I was on a smooth, curving surface of tarnished metal.

  Something thumped beside me like a dropped blanket; it was Eureka, coming over to check on me. He sat and washed his face while I rooted around the base of the big vine, saw that it was growing out through a fracture in the metal. The wood had bulged and spread and shaped itself to conform to the opening. I had the impression that it was the vine that had burst the metal.

  By crawling, I was able to explore an oval area about fifteen feet long by ten wide before the vines slanted in too close to let me move. All of it was the same iodine-colored metal, with no seams, no variations in contour, with the exception of the bulge around the break. If I wanted to see more, I’d have to do a little land-clearance. I got out the pistol and set it on needle-beam, cut enough wood away to get a look into a room the size of a walk-in freezer, almost filled with an impacted growth of wood. I backed out then, wormed my way over to the big trunk, and climbed back to the surface. There was a lot more to see, but what I wanted to do now was get back in a hurry and tell the Lady Raire that under the vines in the ravine, I’d found a full-sized spaceship.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fifteen minutes later, she stood on the rim of the ravine with me. I could dimly make out the whole three-hundred-foot length of the ship, now that I knew what to look for. It was lying at an angle of about fifteen degrees from the horizontal, the high end to the south.

  “It must have been caught by an earthquake,” I said. “Or a Garquake.”

  “I ween full likely she toppled thither,” the Lady Raire said. “During a tempest, mayhap. Look thee, where a great fragment has fallen from the rim of the abyss-and see yon broken stones, crushed as she fell.”

  We found an access route near the south end, well worn by cats, and made an easier approach than my first climb. I led her to the hatch and we spent the next hour burning the wood away from it, climbed through onto a floor that slanted down under a tangle of vine stem to a drift of broken objects half buried in black dirt at the low end. The air was cool and damp, and there was a sour smell of rotted vegetation and stagnant water. We waded knee-deep in foul-smelling muck to a railed stair lying on its side, crawled along it to another open door. I stepped through into a narrow corridor, and a faint, greenish light sprang up. I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

  “I misdoubt me not ’tis but an automatic system,” Milady said calmly.

  “Still working, after all this time?”

  “Why not? ’Twas built to endure.” She pointed to a dark opening in a wall.

  “Yon shaft should lead us to the upper decks.” She went past me, and I followed, feeling like a very small kid in a very large haunted castle.

  The shaft led us to a grim-looking place full of broken piping and big dark shapes the size of moving vans that Milady said were primitive ion-pulse engines. There was plenty of breakage visible, but only a few dead tendrils of vine. We climbed on forward, found a storeroom, a plotting room full of still-shiny equipment, and a lounge where built-in furniture stuck out from what was now the wall. The living quarters were on the other side of the lounge and beyond there was a room with a ring of dark TV screens arching up overhead around a central podium that had snapped off at the base and was hanging by a snarl of conduits. Beyond that point, the nose of the ship was too badly crushed to get into. There were no signs of the original owners, with the possible exception of a few scraps that might have been human bone.

  “What do you think, Milady?” I asked her. “Is there anything here we can use?”

  “If so, ’twere wonderful, Billy Danger; yet would I see more ere I abandon hope.”

  Back in the hold, she spent some time crawling over the big vines that came coiling up from somewhere down below.

  “’Tis passing strange,” she said. “These stems rise not from soil, but rather burgeon from the bowels of the vessel. And meseemeth they want likeness to the other flora of this world.”

  I pulled one of the big, leathery leaves over to me. It was heart-shaped, about eight inches wide, strongly ribbed.

  “It looks like an ordinary pea to me,” I said. “Just overgrown-like the cats.”

  “We’ll trace these to their beginnings, their mystery to resolve.” The Lady Raire pointed. “An’ mine eyes deceive me not, they rise through yonder hatch.”

  There was just room to squeeze through between the thigh-thick trunks, into a narrow service shaft. I flashed my light along it, and saw bones.

  “Just a cat,” I said, more to reassure me than Milady. We went on, ducking under festoons of thick vine. We passed another cat skeleton, well scattered. There was a strange smell, something like crushed almonds with an under-taint of decay. The vines led fifty feet along the passage, then in through a door that had been forced outward off its hinges. The room beyond was a dark mass of coiled white roots. On its far side, faint twilight shone in through a break in the hull. There was a soft clink, like water dripping into a still pond, a faint rustling. I flashed my light down. The floor of the big room slanted off sharply. Down among the snarled roots, a million tiny points of amber light glowed. The Lady Raire took a step back.

  “Come, Billy Danger! I like this not-” That was as far as she got before the mass of vine roots in front of me trembled and bulged and all the devils in Hell came swarming out.

  Something dirty white, the size of a football, jittering on six spindly legs rushed at me, clicking a pair of jaws that opened sideways in a face like an imp in one of those medieval paintings. I jumped back and swung a kick and its biters clamped onto my boot toe like a steel trap. Another one bounced high enough to rip at my knee; the tough coverall held, but the hide under it tore. Something zapp’
ed from behind my right ear and a flash of blue fire winked and two of the things skittered away and a stink of burnt horn hit me in the face. All this in the first half-second. I had my pistol up then, squeezing the firing lever, playing it over them like a hose. They curled and jumped and died and more came swarming over the dead ones.

  “We’re losing,” I yelled. “We’ve got to bottle them up!” The big vine stem was on fire, and sap was bubbling out and spitting in the flames. I ducked down and grabbed up a dead one and threw him into the opening, and beamed another one that poked his snout through and took a step and tripped and went flat on my face. I threw my hands up to protect my head and heard a yowl and something dark bounded across me and there was a snap and a thud and I sat up and saw Eureka, whirling and pouncing, batting with both paws. Behind him the Lady Raire, splashed to the knee with brown, a smear of blood on her cheek, was aiming and firing as steadily as if she were shooting at clay pipes at the county fair. And then Eureka was sitting on his haunches, making a face at me, and the Lady Raire was turning toward me, and there was a last awkward scuffling sound and then silence.

  “Well, that answers one question,” I said. “Now we know what the cats eat.”

  It was a hard climb back down along the lift shaft, out through the hold, and up to the last of the sunlight. She got out her belt medikit and started dabbing liquid fire into the cuts on my legs, back, arms and thighs. While she doctored, I talked.

  “That was the hydroponics room. When the ship crashed, or fell in the ravine, or got caught in an earthquake, the hull was opened there-or near enough that the plants could sense sunlight. They went for it. Either the equipment that watered them and provided the chemicals they needed was still working, or they found water and soil at the bottom of the ravine; or maybe both. They liked it here; plenty of sunshine, anyway. They adapted and grew and with no competition from other plant life, they developed into what we found.”