Space Cat and the Kittens

by Ruthven Todd

  Marty was having a wonderful time, swimming one moment with his head high above the water and the next disappearing completely as he swam under it.

  Coming up from one of his plunges, he shook his head proudly, sending off sparkling drops, and he then started swimming toward the shore.

  Flyball, standing beside Fred on the sand, could see that he was carrying something in his mouth. He walked out on to the sand and shook himself, making a brief rainbow in the sunshine, and then, stepping proudly, made his way up toward his father. On the sand he dropped a little fish. It was only about the size of a guppy, but Marty was very pleased with it. It was the first fish he had ever caught.

  To show Marty that he thought him a clever kitten, Flyball turned the fish over with a lazy paw. He had to admit to himself that Marty’s little fish was unlike any other fish he had ever seen. It was a strange darkish blue in color. Then its scales, large in proportion to its size, were an odd kind of armor, and its fins were not filmy like the fins of most of the fish Flyball had seen, but began as stumps before they became fins. The front fins were the strangest and it almost seemed as though the fish had a pair of arms sticking out of its gill-covers. Even the tail was only a fringe round the pointed end of the body.

  Fred had stooped down and was examining the guppy-sized fish, turning it this way and that with his finger.

  “I might have guessed it,” he chuckled, giving the kitten a stroke. “Marty, what you’ve caught is no ordinary fish but a coelacanth. And that’s a fish that’s not extinct on Earth! For a long time scientists knew it only from fossils, and then one turned up on the west coast of Africa. After that, once men knew that it still survived and started looking for it, others were caught. So, Marty, that’s a really interesting catch.”

  Marty purred proudly. Not only was he a good fishing cat, but he had managed to catch a fish that was out of the ordinary, at least by Earth standards. All the same, it did not look as though it was a very edible kind of fish. It looked as though it would be tough eating and, besides, there was not very much of it. So, in a way, although he would have liked his father to eat it, he was pleased when Fred took a little box from his pocket and, lifting the dwarf coelacanth with a careful finger and thumb, popped it in.

  “We’ll preserve this carefully,” he promised Marty. “There’ll be some curiosity back on Earth when they hear about our strange findings.”

  Once the coelacanth was safely in its box, Fred went down to the edge of the water and tasted it. As he had expected, it was salty.

  He then called the swimmers ashore and he and Bill, followed by the cats, started off along the beach. They had not gone very far before they came across a clear stream that bubbled over the sand to reach the sea. Fred walked a little way up this, to make sure that he was well away from any fear of brackishness and there he filled a little bottle.

  Back at the ship he would test the water to make sure that it contained no harmful minerals or anything else that might harm those who drank it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Although the sardines had been opened as a special treat for Marty, in honor of his skill as a fishing cat, all the others had their share and felt well-fed and pleased with the world.

  Fred was busy inside the Einstein, testing the sample of water, and Bill was making some final adjustments to the tail of the helicopter. Moofa and Flyball, knowing that the electric fence was switched on, were dozing in the sun, happy to think that the kittens could not possibly get into trouble.

  Marty and Tailspin were, however, of a different turn of mind. The excellent lunch had not made them the least sleepy. Indeed, if it was possible, it had made them feel more than usually energetic. They were prowling around, looking for something to do.

  Maybe, they thought, Bill would want some assistance with the nuts and bolts. However, after they had managed to upset a couple of boxes of small parts, Bill proved most ungrateful and shooed them away. They looked inside the ship, but it seemed that Fred, busy with test tubes, litmus paper and various chemicals, did not want any help either.

  After that there was nothing to do but climb all over the helicopter. This kept them occupied for a while. Then it occurred to Tailspin to try running at full speed along one of the rotor blades. When he came to a sudden stop at the end, going down on his haunches to brake his headlong dash, he felt the blade swing slightly beneath him.

  He looked cautiously over the end of the rotor blade. Something most interesting had happened. The slight swing had brought the blade over the electric fence. There was now a most convenient bridge to the outside world. As quietly as possible, being careful not to disturb Moofa and Flyball, Tailspin called to Marty to join him, telling him to move as gently as possible. Having been given the way to freedom, he did not want to see it taken away by any careless or clumsy movements on his brother’s part.

  Marty, however, managed to make his way along the rotor blade without jarring it out of its ideal position. When he joined his brother at the end, Marty did not have to be told what Tailspin had in mind. He took a quick look around. Fred was still inside the ship, Bill was struggling with a bolt that had stripped its threads, and Flyball and Moofa appeared to be sound asleep, thinking the kittens were protected against temptation by the fence.

  Then, quick as two flashes, Tailspin and Marty jumped down, outside the fence. No one had noticed their escape. Cautiously they crept to the edge of the clearing. Once among the horsetails and fern trees, they were safe.

  They looked at one another with great admiration. Who was it who had thought that a mere electric fence could hold Marty and Tailspin captive? Now they were free and could go in search of adventure. Who knew that they would not meet up with some mice? That would be a real adventure and discovery.

  The kittens did not pay much attention to the direction they took. They were real adventurers, just as their father had been, and were sure they could always find their way home when they wanted to do so. Now, however, any thought of the road back was far from their minds. With their red tails sticking perkily up into the air, they made their way deeper and deeper into the forest.

  Suddenly they heard a strange noise and flattened themselves and peered through the fronds of the fern trees. Off to one side were about half a dozen most peculiar animals. They were rather larger than an Earth squirrel and the position they occupied was somewhat the same, but the likeness stopped there. They were grayish green in color and covered all over with scales. They sat up on their hind legs, balanced by their thick tails which lay on the ground behind them. With their shorter front feet they were reaching up and tearing down bunches of fern and horsetail which they were stuffing into their large, froglike mouths.

  Although these iguanadons, busy about their vegetarian feast, did not look very fierce, they were quite bulky and there were at least six of them. So the kittens, after a momentary thought, shared by them both, about how nice it would be to break up the peaceful dinner party, went on their way as quietly as they could.

  All the time they were getting farther and farther into the forest. As a matter of fact, although they did not know it, Marty and Tailspin were already lost. They had not been paying the least attention to the way they went, and they had twisted and turned this way and that.

  Marty looked anxiously at Tailspin. His sharp ears had picked up a crashing sound behind them. Flyball must have discovered their absence and even now he and Fred would be after them. There would be trouble. All the same, they had had their adventure and had seen some animals the others did not know. By this time Tailspin had also heard the crashing sound.

  “I suppose,” Marty did not sound too sure of himself, “we might as well go back and face them. Of course, they’ll be angry, but it won’t last long. We can always be most awfully good for a while and then they’ll forget.”

  “Yes,” Tailspin was remembering the swipe he had got from Flyball when he was just about to investigate some high-tension wires. “They will be mad. All the same, no one to
ld us that we had to stay inside the fence, did they?”

  Marty agreed that they had not, in so many words, been told to stay by the ship. At the same time, he had a feeling that this was not a good excuse. They would call it quibbling. That was the trouble with the old. They would expect you to work things out for yourself. Just because there was that silly fence around the ship, they had not bothered to tell him and Tailspin not to go out. Now they were sure to say that the pair of them should have known that they were meant to stay home. After all, the fence was meant to keep things out, not to hold them in.

  They started back toward the noise, which was getting closer all the time. If they seemed to be on their way back, maybe Flyball would not be so angry.

  Then, suddenly, the noise was on top of them, and it was accompanied by a rank smell, very different from the familiar smells of either Flyball or Fred.

  Then, some eighteen inches up in the air, a terrifying face loomed over them. It was a big, broad head, greenish with a mess of brown warts. Two evil-looking eyes glared down at them. But the worst thing was the great gaping mouth, fitted with sharp yellowish teeth, and breathing out an ill-smelling breath. This horrible creature bent down and snapped at Tailspin.

  Fortunately, the kitten was fast on his feet and, by the time the mouth reached the place where he had been, he had whirled round and was running away, followed by Marty. The horrible beast let out a croaking grunt of disappointment. This was echoed by other croaks which seemed to come from all about them. Other beasts started crashing through the forest around them.

  Marty and Tailspin were completely lost. They had no idea where they were running. All they knew was that they were running away. So they ran, helter-skelter, through the forest, with the horrible beasts crashing through the ferns not only behind them but also alongside them. All they wanted to do was to get away from the beasts, but they did not know how to do so.

  It seemed to the kittens that they had been running for hours and hours and that the beasts were gaining on them. Ahead, Tailspin saw that the forest was thinning. They must have been running in a circle, he thought. There was a clearing ahead, and he knew the Einstein stood in a clearing, one she had made herself.

  Hearing the horrors panting and grunting behind and beside them, Tailspin and Marty dashed for the clearing.

  It was a clearing all right, but no spaceship towered in the center of it. Ahead a rocky hill rose steeply to a place that looked flat. The sides of this little hill were littered with rough boulders.

  It was fortunate that the planet was a small one, with low gravity. The kittens bounded up the hill with great leaps. Behind them, hopping and straddling over the rocks, came the creatures, their gaping tooth-filled mouths reaching out to bite.

  Marty thought if only we can reach that flat top we may be able to turn and fight these things off and drive them back. He managed an extra burst of speed and Tailspin kept up with him.

  At last they were within reach of the flat top. They both gave a terrific leap. There was no flat top to the little hill. Instead the kittens found themselves sprawling in a shallow bowl. They had jumped into an extinct volcano.

  There was no help for it. The kittens picked themselves up, and glared back at the brutes which were gathering round the rim of the crater, gnashing their yellow teeth and blinking their little pink eyes.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Having found that there was nothing wrong with his sample of water, Fred Stone cleaned up his mess of chemicals. He looked thoughtfully at the pterodactyl and the coelacanth in their jars of alcohol and left the cabin of the Einstein.

  Bill was standing back, looking at the helicopter and wondering whether there were any more unnecessary adjustments he could make. Moofa and Flyball were still lolling in the sun, feeling warm and comfortable.

  Fred glanced around him. Everything seemed all right. Then he took a second, longer look.

  “Where are Marty and Tailspin?” he asked.

  “They must be somewhere around,” replied Bill easily. “The current’s on in the fence, and they couldn’t get through that. The mesh is fine enough to keep out anything bigger than a cricket and even that would have to go through pretty carefully. Good jumpers though the kittens may be, the fence is too high for them.”

  When Fred had spoken, Moofa had dashed up the steps into the cabin. That, however, was properly shipshape and there was no place where the kittens could hide. Flyball had run around the ship and now they were all gathered beside Fred.

  “I wonder where on earth, or rather on this world, they can have got to.” Fred’s voice sounded worried. He was looking this way and that, searching for an opening in the fence, through which the kittens might have escaped without getting a shock. There did not seem to be one. Bill was too good a workman to allow that.

  Fred’s questing eye settled on the helicopter. He noticed the rotor blade that had swung around so that the end was over the fence. Without saying anything, he pointed.

  “It wasn’t like that before!” exclaimed Bill. “I know because I checked to see there was nothing sticking over the fence.”

  Fred reached up and took hold of the other end of the rotor blade. He swung it a little way in each direction.

  “Somehow or other,” he said, “they must have managed to move it and then there was nothing to keep them in. The question now is, which way did they go, and how are we going to find them?”

  Now that he knew that Marty and Tailspin were out on the loose, Fred did his best to hide his worry. It would not help to start a panic. At the same time, he could not forget his own warnings about the more terrible dinosaurs.

  Finally, having thought things over, he spoke. “I’ll take up the helicopter and will go look for them, taking Flyball with me.”

  Bill switched off the fence and rolled it back and he and Fred wheeled the helicopter farther out into the clearing, away from the ship. Then Fred and Flyball climbed in. It had an open cockpit and would be rather drafty. Flyball noticed that Fred checked the fact that he was still carrying the pistol and machete.

  Moofa, looking miserable, sat on the bottom step. She knew that they were doing everything they could do, as quickly as possible, but the thought did not bring her any comfort. She just had to imagine all the terrible things which could have happened to the kittens.

  Slowly at first, but soon getting faster and faster, the rotor blades of the helicopter began to turn. Fred raised his hand to Bill, and then, a moment later, he and Flyball were airborne.

  The helicopter was not only drafty, but also noisy. Flyball crouched down by Fred’s feet, doing his best to keep out of the way, and peered over the side, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bright red, mixed with gray, that would show him where the kittens were.

  First Fred took a sweep down to the shore, hoping that Marty and Tailspin might have thought it a good idea to go back for another swim. If they had been given sardines for one coelacanth, who knew what they might think they’d get for several? But there were no signs of them.

  The only thing they saw was a great creature, rather like Flyball’s diplodocus of the morning, but much heavier and with a thicker neck. This brachiosaurus, not much disturbed by the noise of the helicopter, slopped away over the marsh. Fred turned the helicopter inland.

  The trouble with the ferns and horsetails of the forest was that, even though the downdraft from the helicopter made them toss and tremble, they were so filmy that it was difficult to see through them. There was still no sign of the kittens, though they saw a strange animal rather like a rhinoceros with extra armor, a triceratops, and another, even more curious, with a curved back surmounted by sharp spikes. This was a stegosaurus, and it lifted its ugly head to snarl at the helicopter as they flew slowly overhead.

  Looking for Tailspin and Marty seemed a hopeless job. Then, away to their left, Flyball caught sight of a swarm of pterodactyls, flapping and diving. He clawed at Fred’s trouser-leg to attract his attention from the forest beneath them. Fred looke
d around and seeing the swarm, banked the helicopter and made toward it.

  Ahead of them now, under the pterodactyls, they could see a bare slate-gray hill which seemed to have a flat top. There was a lot of movement there and the pterodactyls were buzzing above it. As they drew nearer Fred could see that the top of the hill was not flat but was hollowed out as a bowl, too deep for him to see what was inside.

  Around the rim of the bowl there were gathered a hundred or so of the large-headed, sharp-toothed creatures. Fred, from his memory of pictures of the animals which he had seen in books, immediately recognized them as tyrannosauri, the most frightful of the meat-eating dinosaurs. Horrible though the pictures in the books had been, they were only the result of man’s imagining, and could not compete with the reality, slobbering from greedy mouths.

  Overhead, clacking their toothy beaks, were the whirring pterodactyls, banking and plunging. As the helicopter approached, one of them, distracted, ventured too near a tyrannosaurus. The thick neck seemed to lengthen and the gaping mouth reached up to snap the flying reptile out of the air. Several other tyrannosauri tried to grab the pterodactyl from its captor, and a small free fight followed. When this broke up, the pterodactyl had disappeared, toothy beak and all, and a tyrannosaurus was lacking one of its front feet. This did not seem to disturb it, beyond meaning that it had to watch out for its companions, who, excited by the smell of blood, would have fallen on it had they dared.

  The helicopter swooped in, right over the bowl, and there Fred Stone and Flyball could see Marty and Tailspin. The kittens were all right. They were together at the bottom of the bowl, snarling and snapping, with the fur round their necks standing out like stiff collars.

  Fred lowered the helicopter, careless of the pterodactyls which were being battered by the rotor blades and thrown off this way and that among the tyrannosauri, distracting their attention from the kittens for the moment.