V.
Like a contracting funnel, the Solar Guard closed down on the catman ship. They crowded the catman spacer, forced him into a pocket, and then started to drive him their way.
But unlike a pocketed ship, the catman slashed back. An invisible beam came from somewhere on the craft. It slashed out, closed down upon a midsection of the nearest Solar Guard, and ripped the belly out of the ship. It was both brutal and sickening. One moment the Solarian craft was forcing the catman ship to give space or collide. The next moment the midsection had been gouged away; ripped out as with a vicious claw or a set of cruel, gigantic teeth. The crushed midsection was flung free of the stricken craft and as the ship collapsed over its open belly, and died, the catman slashed at another and another of the Solarians.
"Superdrive!" exploded Lane.
The slashing catman got one more ship before the Solar Guard went into the superdrive and raced away.
"Did you record that?" asked Lane.
"Tried to. The recorder blew."
"So did all of them. Creepers! What a nasty thing to have around."
Thompson said: "One of my techs is repairing a recorder now. He thinks he can give the wave analysis."
"How?"
"He finds that certain of the crystalline structures in the wave recorder are de-crystallized."
"Meaning what?" demanded Lane.
"Meaning that certain frequencies hit the nuclear resonance of the crystalline structures. I'll let you know."
"Let us know quick," said Downing. "If we can analyze it, we can either reproduce it or shield against it."
"Cats at seven o'clock, forty degrees!" exploded the observer in Lane's ship.
"Anywhere else?" demanded Lane.
No answer.
"Fight 'em," snapped Lane.
There were six catmen converging on Lane's command. The rest of the Solar crew flung around and headed for the local fight. Lane's dymodines flashed out and were stopped cold by barriers.
"Crash stations!" ordered Lane. "Prepare for total destruction!"
The six catmen got above Lane's ship and drove him downward with pressors and an occasional light—it must have been very light—touch of the belly-tearing beam. Above the six were the sixty-odd Solarians fighting to get through and fighting a useless battle.
"We can't damage 'em," snarled Lane. "Superdrive—right through 'em!"
He almost made it. His ship rammed up under the stellar drive, came level with the screen of catmen, and almost made it through. But four of them reached forth with the belly-tearing beams and took separate parts of his ship. The warning creak of plates caused the pilot to stop.
Lane's ship was thrust down below again.
"Superdrive—away!"
Lane's ship turned and dropped.
The action was too fast for the Solarian crew, and he left them far behind. But the catmen were right with him all the way.
"Cut it," said Lane in a tired voice. "Let 'em play. Save our strength for later when we can do something."
They went inert. No drive, no sign of fight, no objection.
A side-force hit them, slapping the ship sidewise about fifty feet. It jarred the ship's delicate mechanisms into a short fluster of unreal alarms and ringing signals, but the sturdy stuff was not permanently damaged.
Still no response from Cliff's ship.
They poked him down brutally with a pressor and then jerked him back up again.
More alarms and more nosebleed among the crew.
They caught the ship in force-zones and played catch with it from one catman to the other, poking and thrusting. They ripped off one of the turrets with the snatcher.
Then they stopped. And they waited. Quietly they hung above Lane's ship, watching, watching, watching.
A full, solid, nerve-breaking hour they waited, and the men in Lane's ship waited, wondering.
"Try it!" snapped Lane.
The ship leaped into motion, driving to one side.
Snatchers raced out and caught the fleeing ship, dragged it back, and again they went through the pushing, pulling, tossing program. And then again they stopped with a few, final perfunctory pokes and shoves.
"They're catmen, all right," snarled Lane.
The rest of the Solar Guard came up, and once more they tried to break through the screen to free Lane's ship. Lane shook his head. "Pilot. How long under superdrive before we hit the speed of light?"
"Seven minutes."
"Then drive straight down. I don't think any beam can exceed the speed of light. Once we get up there, they can't reach forward after us, at least."
Lane's ship dropped. And the catmen followed, maintaining their distance with superior balance and accuracy. A minute passed. Two. Three. Four. Five. And then at an even six, a snatcher reached forward and took Lane's ship by the empennage and shook it enough to rend a few seams.
"O.K., cut it," he said wearily. "I wonder what they want of us beside to play cat-and-mouse?"
There were three more sessions of the cat-and-mouse trick, separated by hour intervals. Then the six catmen, their nature satisfied, took hold of Lane's ship in a cluster of snatcher beams. Lane heard the plates give as the fields-of-focus closed down.
He closed his eyes, breathed a short prayer, and waited.
Stellor Downing called Thompson. "Back to One," he said.
"Giving up?"
"Can you think of anything to do?"
"No."
"Well, let's get back where we can plan."
Thompson assented. It was reluctant, however, and a day later, when they landed on One at their camp, he faced Downing. "Sort of solves your problem, doesn't it?"
"Look," snapped Stellor Downing. "I've got a few feelings and a number of nerves. Lane and I were not deeply in love with one another. Yes, it solves a lot of problems, Thompson, but don't taunt me about it, or I'll take a modine to your throat, see?"
"We might have tried again," insisted Thompson.
"We might have tried for a month. We couldn't even touch them. If you're intimating that I gave up quick—?"
"You weren't leaning over backwards."
"Quoting an old, famous fable, 'sometimes it is better to fall flat on your face.'"
"Meaning?"
"We've got whole skins. They were after captives, not meat. They wanted the same thing we do but they got 'em first."
"So?"
"So we take whatever wave analysis we have and try to figure 'em out. If we can reproduce any of that stuff, we'll go back."
"Hm-m-m."
"Look, Thompson, as far as this job is concerned, your job of keeping Lane and myself out of one another's hair is over. One head of hair is gone, see."
"And what do you intend to do about it?"
"I intend to carry on. Now forget about the fact that a personal grudge of mine has been taken out of my hands and let's get on to working out some means of fighting back. Lane is gone. I'm trying not to gloat. But you're not helping. So stop it."
Toralen Ki shook his head in a worried manner. "One is gone."
"A substitute?"
"I fear that any substitute may not be as good."
"Nonsense, Toralen. Were there a better man than either, we'd have selected him; if either had not existed, a lesser man would have sufficed."
"The right kind is so very few," complained Toralen Ki.
"We can find one. We will have to return to their planet to do so, and it will be harder for us—but it can be done. No good general has only one plan of battle."
"But so much depends—Ah well, despair is the product of the inferior intellect. We will, we must carry on."
Hotang Lu opened his large case. "I will contact our superiors immediately and ask their advice."
"Yes," nodded Toralen Ki. "Also ask them if they have the answer to the less-sensitive detector, yet."
Hotang turned the communicator on and waited for it to warm up. His hand dropped into the case and came up with another small instrument of extreme complexity.
"Once the suppressor is destroyed," he said with a smile of contemplation, "we can use this on them."
"And that means success!" breathed Toralen Ki. "From that time on, our plans—"
"Wait, the communicator is operating," said Hotang Lu, waving a hand. He reached for the communicator's controls and started to talk swiftly, pressing his head against the plate above the voice-transmitter.
Flight Commander Thompson handed Downing a sheaf of papers. "There's the wave analysis," he said with pride.
Downing looked them over. "You've got the technical crew. Can we reproduce all or any of it?"
"Only by tearing down a couple of modine directors. The boys can convert the spotting, training, and ranging circuits—they'll use the components—and rebuild the thing to generate barriers. The snatcher is easy. We'll just juggle the main modulating system of a tractor generator. That comes out so simple I feel slightly sick at not having thought of it myself."
"What is its analysis?" asked Downing.
"Couple a force beam with a tractor focus-zone generator. The tractor, you know, operates on the field-of-focus principle. A rough sphere at the end of the beam—anything in that field is drawn. The snatcher merely applies the field-of-focus idea to the side-thrust of a force beam. You raise the power several times and anchor it with a superdrive tube coupled so that the thrust is balanced against a spatial thrust instead of the ship. That tears the guts out of anything."
"I have an idea that you might be able to cut instead of tear if you include some nuclear-resonant frequencies in the field of focus generator."
"Is it necessary?"
"Might be interesting," said Downing. "They tear. If we land on them with something that quickly, precisely, quietly, and almost painlessly slices a sphere out of one of their ships, they may be impressed."
"You have something there. I'm going to tear into some of the planet-mounted jobs. We are now sixty-three ships. I can make one snatcher out of every dymodine that's planet-mounted out here. Shall I?"
"How long?"
"Ten hours each."
"Six hundred and thirty hours. Twenty-six days and six hours."
"We'll make it in twenty days. By the time the boys get to Number Ten or Twelve they'll be working shortcut and on production-line basis and the piece-time will drop."
"Twenty days is long enough, believe me. We'll toss in my gang and Lane's gang, too. They can go to work on the modine directors and make barriers out of 'em if you claim they'll work."
"They'll work."
"Then let's get going. The Little Guys are tearing their hair as it is."
Thompson nodded.
"But look," said Downing, "don't rip up any dymodines ahead. Convert slowly. If the catmen attack, we'll need all we can muster to fight 'em off."
"Right."
"And as for Cliff Lane—he isn't dead until we prove it, see? So far as I know, he might be getting an education in cat-culture right now."
Thompson looked at Downing for a long time, saying nothing. Then he turned and left, still without comment.
Cliff Lane and his ship were herded down to the ground. His ship was surrounded by the six catmen, their beams pointed at him, waiting. For an hour they waited, using all the patience of the feline. It got on the nerves of the humans, and they wanted to do something.
Their trouble was that they didn't quite know what to do.
Cliff, after the full hour had ticked off, said: "I'm thinking of the cat that got a neuropsychosis over mice because one came out of the hole and kicked him in the face."
"Think it's wise?"
"Never was very fond of cats," admitted Lane glumly. "I find them even more obnoxious when I see them employing intelligence. That makes it worse—"
"But just going out—?"
"D'ye want to sit here for months?"
"Think they would?"
"Probably. At least, long enough to have us tearing out each other's hair."
"But—"
"But nothing. Have we got the planet-analysis yet?"
The aide pawed through the delivery basket on Lane's desk and came up with a sheet of paper. He read: "Pressure sixteen point three. Temperature eight-one, humidity thirty-seven. Air: Oxy twenty-one, nitrogen all the rest—with a trace, of course, of CO2. Pollen count not too bad, bacteria count about normal, but the spore count is zero."
"No spores?"
"Nope."
"Gosh," smiled Lane. "Imagine a world where they can't smother a steak with mushrooms!"
"So what are you going to do?"
"Me? I'm going out there and tell 'em what they're missing. Imagine—no mushrooms!"
"I'm just thinking of what a nice world this would be to do tropical research. I've even seen fungus growing on steel."
"No, you haven't. Bakelite I'll buy, but when the stuff grows on steel it is growing on the dust that has collected. Well, tell the boys in the back room to cover me as I emerge."
Lane undogged the spacelock and the rams pulled it back out of the frame. Riding on the front of the automatic runway, Lane stood in an indolent attitude, the thumb of his right hand hooked over the belt just one-half inch from the butt of his modine. His other hand held a cigarette.
As the runway hit the ground, Lane took a last puff of the cigarette, stepped to the ground and dropped the glowing butt. He crushed it with his heel, and then took five forward steps, looking about himself with open curiosity.
The catman ship directly in front of him opened its spacelock and one of the catmen emerged.
Lane walked forward boldly to inspect this alien creature. He acted as though he were not a prisoner, but a visitor—and it was probably that attitude that saved him from further cat-and-mouse, for the catman seemed unsure of the next move.
The catman was more man than cat, just as the human—in the catman's nomenclature an apeman—the human was more man than ape. He stood erect. His legs were long and excellently muscled. His shoulders were broad and sloping, and his arms were well rounded. The temperature was high—to Lane's liking, being Venusite—and the scanty uniform of the catman matched the shorts, high-laced boots, shoulder straps and cape of the Solarian. The catman's hands were long and spatulate, and the fingernails were as broad as Cliff's. The retractile claws were gone—deleted in a hundred thousand years of evolution. Gone were the fur and the tail and the slitted eyes, and all of the other basic cat-characteristics. The whiskers were gone also, and the ears were no longer mobile, but on each side of the head just as the human's. They were still pointed on top and resembled, or at least reminded Cliff of a cat's ears modified in human mold.
Catman?
Well, there was something distinctly feline about the creature, humanoid though he seemed. He was lithe, and instead of walking forward, he prowled. There was a quick alertness—not visible, but felt—to the catman's every move.
Yes, this creature was definitely of feline evolution.
And Cliff Lane walked forward boldly. He smiled inwardly, gaining confidence from the fact that he was still alive and unharmed. Prisoner he might be, but he was no humble prisoner. He was proud and haughty, and he was not taking any guff.
He strode forward to hasten the first meeting between Primate and Feline on the common ground of civilization.
