by Larry Niven
Listening hard, he could hear twanging and huffing noises, with the clatter of leaves closing around solid bodies. Nyawk-Captain froze. But the noises were fading, he decided, moving off into the forest. Whatever lived up here perhaps had more to fear from a kzin than he from it.
Instead of stepping off on the lower branches, as he had before, this time Nyawk-Captain kept close to the main trunk of his tree. He intended to climb as high as he could, until the width of the bole was insufficient to support his weight.
He was still climbing on firm wood when he saw a burn mark in the tree. His head came up level with a hole big enough for a newborn kzitten to curl up inside. He touched the edges of the scar, crumbling the charcoal that coated them. It was still warm. He tasted his fingerpads. Fresh soot, with the scent of smoke still in it. As he watched, a tear of yellow sap rolled down and across the curve of the hole, confirming his suspicion.
He drew his locator from its belt clip and aimed down along his leg.
No return image.
He aimed up, past his helmet.
No image, either.
He aimed to the four cardinal points, in one case reaching around the tree trunk to aim for it.
East by the sun, he got a hard return, but nowhere as close to him as the bloom had been a few minutes ago.
The artifact was on the move—and going fast.
Nyawk-Captain did not think a Whitefood would have come to take it. He did not think a sudden burst of lightning had burned this hole. And he could think of no animal living in this world of green vines which might have control of such fire. Unless it was a form of superior monkey…the sons of Hanuman.
Certainly they had come here in the Leaf-Eater hull. They had not died with it. And, considering its present condition, they could not leave in it.
He began the long climb down to the forest floor. As he went, he sent a call to Cat’s Paw. It was time to get Weaponsmaster started on a wide-area sweep with those sensors they still possessed.
Daff Gambiel rested in the fork of a large branch, balancing the Slaver stasis-box on his knee. He and Krater had traveled eastward five kilometers by his own dead reckoning.
Now they were in disagreement about which way they had actually gone. So Krater had climbed higher into the overgrowth, to take bearings by the setting sun. Fine in theory—if she could keep her sense of direction while moving around in this leaf maze.
Gambiel was willing to bet she would get lost just coming down.
While he waited, he studied the stasis-box. One side had a flattened place with a dull-gray disk etched onto the mirrored surface. It was the only feature in an otherwise featureless object. It had to be the field actuator switch.
Gambiel considered it carefully. He knew he should wait on opening the box until the other team members could be present. They would all want to inventory the contents together. That way they could examine anything inside that might be fragile or valuable, offer witness of anything that might fall apart or evaporate, or try to protect each other against anything that might suddenly leap out and attack them.
But Cuiller and Jook might also have been captured by now. Or he and Krater might be captured anytime soon. Better to open the box now and know what it contained. Besides, even though it massed only ten kilos, the thing was too awkward to keep carrying around. Gambiel was tired of working his launcher one-handed, and no sling or belt he could rig would hold on to the box’s slick, mirrored surface. More to the point, if the kzinti were using deep radar—or any radar at this distance—the box was a sure signal of his and Krater’s location. So it made most sense to abandon it, unload and abandon it, now.
Without more thinking, he pressed down on the disk.
The box changed, its surface slowly becoming a cloudy gray. It was like watching a time-lapse video of silver tarnishing. When the transformation was complete, a crack appeared along the keg’s length and down each end-face.
Gambiel forced the crack open with his hands and found himself blinking into a pair of wide-set, liquid eyes. They belonged to a face that was part of a rounded body covered in soft, white hair that was trimmed in intersecting globes of fluff. He was reminded of pictures he once had seen of Earth dogs—useless, yapping, brainless pets. This animal, however, studied him with a wary expression and made no move to climb out of the stasis-box.
Gently, in case the animal should suddenly display teeth and snap at him, Gambiel felt around inside the box He quickly found the remaining contents: a long tubular device that had a fretwork of keys and finger-holes, like a flute, but no mouth-hole for blowing; and three patties of wrinkled, brownish material that looked like freeze-dried meat, each wrapped in a tight plastic sheath. Gambiel assumed the meat was some kind of food ration for the “dog.”
He set the stasis-box, with the animal still sitting patiently inside it, down among the interwoven vines of the canopy. It was the “flute” that drew his attention.
He held it up with the end pointing at his mouth, like a clarinet or recorder, and tried to fit his fingers to the keys and holes. It didn’t work for eight fingers and two thumbs. He frowned and looked down along the flute’s length, counting. Yes, it did have more than ten positions—thirteen, in fact—but the spacing was wrong for human hands. Not surprising, considering that a billion years ago humans had not evolved on Earth, nor much else, other than bacteria and blue-green algae.
He raised the flute again, and—
Yip!
The dog had barked at him. Gambiel looked down. The animal’s eyes had grown big and it was trying to shy away from him.
Daff shrugged and began pressing keys at random, still looking for a hole to blow through. He heard a faint and almost familiar strain of music. He stopped fingering. Instead of breaking off in the middle, the tune wandered away from the notes and faded in a burble of sound. If this was a flute, Gambiel decided, it was a defective one.
He set it aside and looked at the dog, which seemed to be going to sleep on him.
“Come here, Fellah.”
The dog immediately straightened up and jumped out of the case. It came directly to Gambiel, sure-footing its way across the vines, and rested its chin on his knee. It looked up at him with an attitude of rapt attention.
“Yeah, you’re a good Fellah, aren’t you? Bright little guy, too. You know I won’t hurt you…It’s a good thing we found you first, instead of those kzinti…They probably hate dogs—would if they had any in their Patriarchy, that is…And they’re big enough to do something about it, too…I figure they’d take you for a snack. You’re just about one bite to them.”
As he talked, the animal’s eyes slowly closed…falling asleep.
The darkness was beginning to grow around them, seeping in between the leaves, and Gambiel expected Krater to come down soon.
“Are you hungry, Fellah?” He picked up one of the meat patties and looked it over. No kind of heat tab or peel point in the wrapper. He drew his knife and slit around the edge.
The dog never lifted its head from his knee.
He pulled the plastic back and sniffed the patty. It smelled vaguely unpleasant, like dried meat saturated with chemical preservatives.
“You eat this stuff?” He offered it to the dog.
Fellah slid his chin off Gambiel’s leg and backed away. His eyes were still half closed and his head down between his shoulders. Gambiel knew very little about dogs, because they didn’t fare well in Jinx’s high gravity. But he decided the animal’s reaction was purely negative, a cross between “guilt” and “disgust.”
Gambiel shrugged and broke off a piece of the meat for himself He put it in his mouth, let his saliva soak it for a moment, and began chewing. It had no flavor, like chewing on wood pulp. He rewrapped the patty, putting it and the others in his pocket.
“What the hell are you doing?” Krater asked as she brushed aside a branch and climbed the last few meters down to his level.
“Trying one of these meat pies.” He took them out and sh
owed her.
“You opened the box!”
“Well, we can’t keep carrying it. The stasis-field makes us sitting ducks for the kzinti.”
“But you should have—”
“Asked your permission? Well, would you have agreed?”
“Of course not.”
“So why would I ask?” He shrugged.
“You should have thought it through, Daff. That’s an artifact from an ancient xeno-civilization, older than life on Earth. You have no way of understanding what’s inside there.”
“Sure I do. A little dog, a flute-thing that doesn’t work, and some rations that don’t have much taste. I tried them on the dog, but it doesn’t—”
“You tried them on the dog!”
“And ate some myself. But why does that upset you so?”
Krater ignored his question. She turned to Fellah and was peering at the little animal, which had crawled backwards in among the leaves. Only its eyes and nose, three shiny black marbles among the fluffy white fur, peered out at her.
“It does look like a dog,” she said. “How big is it?”
“About five kilos.”
“Does it have four legs, a tail, all that?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen holos of dogs before.”
“And friendly?”
“Real friendly. I call him Fellah.”
Krater reached out a hand to it. “Come here, Fellah!”
The animal’s eyes grew wider and it backed farther into the foliage.
“Not that friendly,” Krater said.
“Well, he came to me.”
“Then you take care of him, because we have get moving. Our course is more—” She looked around their bubble of clearing, swung her arm off to the right. “—that way.”
Gambiel stood and stuck the flute into his belt, taking care not to bend the keys. “Hey, Fellah!”
The dog came out of its leaf hole and jumped into his arms.
“He does seem to like you,” Krater admitted.
Gambiel reached down for the dull-gray box, forced it shut—but with the field off—and juggled it under his left arm. “Going to be awkward,” he said, hitching the dog around into the crook of his right arm. “Would you…?”
Krater shook her head. “I’m having enough trouble moving myself through these vines. Put the dog and the other stuff back in the box, why don’t you?”
“He’ll suffocate.”
“Then turn the field back on.”
“And let the kzinti use it to track us?”
“Then we have to leave the box,” she said.
“The Navy will pay a high ransom for an operating stasis mechanism. Could be worth your pension and mine together.”
“Then leave the dog”
“No, he’ll die up here. Starve to death, fall through to the forest floor, or get eaten by the kzinti. Besides, he could be valuable.”
“Well, you’re the one who opened the box in the first place.”
“We can leave the box,” Gambiel decided, setting it down on the vine mat. “Do you think you could find this place again?”
“No.”
“If I left it with the stasis-field turned on, we could locate it again, easily.”
“So could the kzinti.”
“Yeah. And that might distract them.”
“Then leave it,” she agreed.
“Is that the right decision, hey, Fellah?” he asked, hugging the little dog tighter under his arm.
It looked up at him with those big eyes, seeming to understand the question. It made a sound halfway between a chirp and a whine.
“Err-yupp!”
“Oh, brother!” Krater sighed.
He bent down and activated the flat disk. The cloudy surface of the box cleared to a hard, silvery shine in the fading light.
“Let’s get out of here,” Krater said.
It was too dark, really, to go swinging thought the trees. But with the box set like a beacon behind them, Gambiel could see no alternative. He readied the grapple in its launcher and aimed left-handed.
Chuff!
“I need better field accuracy than this,” Nyawk-Captain said, handing his jury-built locator to Weaponsmaster.
The kzin took it and inspected the pirated missile circuitry. “Perhaps I can tune—”
“Is the ship’s radar back in commission yet?”
“Navigator and I were just making the final adjustments.”
“Give me a sweep of the area.”
“Yes, sir.”
While they fired up the repaired systems, Nyawk-Captain stretched, scratched, and got himself something to eat. He had learned it was easier to shed the armor outside the ship and work the airlock unencumbered. Bad policy if a ground force attacked while all of them were inside, but he didn’t think anything would come against the ship, except more Whitefoods. And Nyawk-Captain had made reconstruction of the short-range armaments a priority.
Munching a haunch of Mystery Meat—a Fleet ration consisting of amalgamated proteins and vitamins, pressed around a synthetic bone and inadequately rehydrated—he looked out through the open hatch. The armor stood sentinel there, and in more than just a symbolic sense. Before stepping out of it, he had keyed the enhancers for sound and scent, slaving them by radio circuit back into the ship’s sensors.
“Ready now, sir” Navigator called.
“Locate the Thrintun box.”
“Two kilometers distant but at a new bearing—uhn, different from the one you took.”
“Which way?”
“North and east of here.”
“Weaponsmaster, get armor. We will go together to find it this time.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Ouch!” came a low sound in the utter blackness.
“What was that?”
“I hit my head on a branch.”
“Again?”
“Can’t we slow down?”
“Still three kzinti out there. Behind us.”
“One, you mean.”
“One that we saw.”
“The others are working on their ship.”
“Yes—last time we looked.”
“We’ll kill ourselves, swinging through these trees in the dark.”
“You want to walk? And put both feet through a hole?”
“We could stop for the night.”
“The kzinti would find us.”
“In this jungle, I couldn’t find us.”
“You don’t have their sense of smell.”
“Ow!”
“What now?”
“I barked my shin.”
“Well, do it quietly. They have ears, too.”
Nyawk-Captain aimed the locator up into the trees. The refinements Weaponsmaster had made in its circuits were amazing: they reduced the light bloom of any hardened return to a pinpoint, while stepping up the return image from woody branches and trunks into a ghost map of the tree world.
“I detuned everything else and made it selective for carbon,” Weaponsmaster had explained, the first time his captain had used it. “Carbon is a component in cellulose,” the kzin added.
“Very creative,” Nyawk-Captain had said.
Now, two kilometers from the ship, he aimed into the treetops again and took a reading. The artifact was right above them, almost aligned with the tree by which they were standing.
Nyawk-Captain turned his helmet light up the side of the tree. “The artifact is approximately ten cubits out from this trunk in—” He oriented himself against it and pointed. “—that direction.”
“Shall I climb for it?”
“Do so.”
In five minutes, the kzin returned with the storage box under his arm.
“It feels light, sir.”
“We’ll open it at the ship.”
“When they find it’s empty, what do you think they’ll do?”
“Come after us.”
“They’re already doing that”
“So? Did you expect them to stop?”
>
“No, I guess not.”
Excitement overcame Nyawk-Captain. Rather than shed his armor and climb into the ship, he called on Navigator to come out with a strong worklight.
“Should not someone stay inside, sir? To guard against—”
“Come out here!”
Before Navigator could negotiate the airlock, Nyawk-Captain had the box on the ground and, in the light of their helmet lamps, had found the actuator stud.
The box turned from flashing mirror-brightness to a simple, luminous gray. A crack appeared along its top. Nyawk-Captain forced it apart with his hands. Navigator brought up the light and angled it down inside.
Nothing.
In all the records collected by the Patriarchy concerning Thrintun boxes, none had mentioned an empty box. Preserving fresh air was not a priority with any species.
Nyawk-Captain put the beak of his helmet into the space and inhaled deeply, with suit enhancers at full power His own nose told him that some animal had once—briefly and forever—inhabited this space. The suit’s flicker display began cataloging a long list of organic chemicals: oils, hormones, enzymes, pheromones.
He inspected the interior with optical enhancers, and found three hairs—finer than those on any kzin’s pelt—and all without pigment. In daylight, they would be white.
“Is this a billion-year-old joke?” Navigator asked.
“No. The box was inhabited by a live animal,” Nyawk-Captain replied. “Too small to be a Thrint. Unlikely to be a Tnuctip.”
“But now we have nothing to show for our effort…and for the delay.”
“Do you have a problem with that?” Nyawk-Captain asked pointedly.
“No, sir. But now we should give full attention to repairing Cat’s Paw and resuming our flight to attack Margrave. The mission has not yet become problematical.”
“We still have time to find the contents of the box—and the humans who stole it.”
“Not with the sensory equipment we have at hand.”
“Then use your skills as Navigator. Plot me a course. Use the Leaf-Eaters’ stripped hull as a starting point. One vector is defined by our first sighting of this box, now a burned-out hole in a tree. The second sighting point, where we actually found the box, yields another vector. Assume, to begin with, that the humans have no means of transport nor any logical destination other than the hull. Then give me their probable locus within those limits.”