“Now you’re being teleological. You’re trying to tell me that the aim of camouflage is invisibility.”
“It must be! Consider—”
“To hell with it,” Gregor said wearily. “I’m not even sure what teleology is. We’ve been here ten days and we’ve captured some fifty rats, out of a population of several millions. Nothing works. Where do we go from here?”
They sat in silence. Outside, they could hear the scream of a flying hang as it dipped low over the fields.
“If only the slegs’ natural enemies had some guts,” Arnold said sadly.
“They’re visual hunters. If they were—”
He stopped abruptly and stared at Arnold. Arnold looked puzzled for a moment. Then a slow light of comprehension dawned on his face.
“Of course!” he said.
Gregor lunged for the telephone and called Galactic Rapid Express. “Hello! Listen, this is a rush order . . .”
GALACTIC Rapid Express outdid themselves. Within two days, they deposited ten small boxes on the pocked lawn at Barney Spirit.
Gregor and Arnold brought the boxes inside and opened one. Out stepped a large, sleek, proud, yellow-eyed cat. She was of Earth stock, but her hunting capabilities had been improved with a Lyraxian strain.
She stared somberly at the two men and sniffed the air.
“Don’t get your hopes too high,” Gregor told Arnold as the cat stalked across the room. “This is outside all normal cat experience.”
“Shh,” Arnold said. “Don’t distract her.”
The cat stood, her head cocked delicately to one side, listening to several hundred invisible slegs amble disdainfully past her.
She wrinkled her nose and blinked several times.
“She doesn’t like the setup,” Gregor whispered.
“Who does?” Arnold whispered back.
The cat took a cautious step forward. She raised a forepaw, then lowered it again.
“She isn’t catching on,” Gregor said regretfully. “Maybe if we tried terriers—”
The cat suddenly lunged. There was a wild squealing and she was gripping something invisible between her forepaws. She mewed angrily and bit. The squealing stopped.
But other squeals took its place and ratlike shrieks and rodent cries of terror. Gregor released four more cats, keeping the remaining five as his second team. Within minutes, the room sounded like a miniature abattoir. He and Arnold had to leave. The noise was nerve-shattering.
“Time for a celebration,” Arnold said, opening one of the brandy bottles he had packed.
“Well,” said Gregor, “it’s a little early—”
“Not at all. The cats are at work, all’s well with the world. By the way, remind me to order a few hundred more cats.”
“Sure. But what if the slegs turn cautious again?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Arnold said, pouting two stiff shots. “As long as the slegs are this way, they’re meat for the cats. But if they revert to their old habits—if they become truly ratlike—we can use the Morganizer.”
Gregor could find no argument. The slegs were caught between the cats and the Morganizer. Either way, the place should be back to normal in another week, in plenty of time for a sizable bonus.
“A toast to the Earth cat,” Arnold proposed.
“I’ll drink to that,” Gregor said. “To the staunch, down-to-Earth, common-sense Earth cat.”
“Invisible rats can’t faze her.”
“She eats ’em if they’re there or not,” Gregor said, listening to the sweet music of carnage going on throughout the farmhouse.
THEY drank quite a number of toasts to the various attributes of the Earth cat. Then they drank a solemn toast to Earth. After that, it seemed only proper to toast all the Earth-type suns, starting with Abaco.
Their brandy gave out when they reached Glostrea. Fortunately, the Seerian had a cellar well stocked with local wines.
Arnold passed out while proposing a toast to Wanlix. Gregor managed to last through Xechia. Then he laid his head on his arms and went to sleep.
They awoke late the next day with matching headaches, upset stomachs and flashing pains in the joints. And just to make matters worse, not one of their staunch, down-to-Earth, common-sense Earth cats was to be found.
They searched the farmhouse. They looked in the barns, through the meadows, across the fields. They dug up sleg holes and peered into an abandoned well.
There was no sign of a cat—not even a wisp of fur.
On all sides, the slegs scampered merrily by, secure in their cloak of invisibility.
“Just when the cats were doing so well,” Arnold mourned. “Do you suppose the slegs ganged up on them?”
“Not a chance,” Gregor said. “It would be contrary to all sleg behavior. It’s more reasonable to assume that the cats just wandered off.”
“With all this food here?” Arnold asked. “Not a chance. It would be contrary to all cat behavior.”
“Here, kitty, kitty!” Gregor called, for the last time. There was no answering meow, only the complacent squeals of a million careless slegs.
“We must find out what happened,” Arnold said, walking to the boxes that housed their remaining five cats. “We’ll try again. But this time we’ll introduce a control element.”
He removed a cat and fastened a belled collar around her neck. Gregor closed the outer doors of the farmhouse and they turned her loose.
SHE went to work with a vengeance and soon the chewed corpses of slegs began to appear, life—and invisibility—drained from them.
“This doesn’t tell us anything,” Arnold said.
“Keep on watching,” Gregor told him.
After a while, the cat took a short nap, a sip of water and began again. Arnold started to doze off. Gregor watched, thinking dire thoughts.
Half of their month was now over, Gregor realized, and the sleg population was untouched. Cats could do the job; but if they gave up after a few hours, they would be too expensive to utilize. Would terriers do any better? Or would this happen to any—
He gaped suddenly and nudged Arnold. “Hey,” Arnold awoke with a groan and looked.
A moment ago, there had been an extremely busy cat. Now, abruptly, there was only a collar, suspended half a foot above the floor, its little bell tinkling merrily.
“She’s become invisible!” Arnold crier. “But how? Why?”
“It must be something she ate,” Gregor said wildly, watching the collar dart across the floor.
“All she’s eaten is sleg.”
They looked at each other with sudden comprehension.
“Then sleg invisibility is not mutational!” Gregor said. “I told you so all along. Not if it can be transmitted that way. The slegs must have eaten something, too!”
Arnold nodded. “I suspected it. I suppose, after the cat digests a certain amount of sleg, the stuff takes hold. The cat becomes invisible.”
From the bedlam in the room, they could tell that the invisible cat was still devouring-invisible slegs.
“They must all still be here,” Gregor said. “But why didn’t they answer when we called them?”
“Cats are pretty independent,” Arnold suggested.
The bell tinkled. The collar, miraculously suspended half a foot above the floor, continued to dart back and forth among the ranks of sleg. Gregor realized that it didn’t really matter if the cats couldn’t be seen, as long as they continued working.
But while he watched, the tinkle of the bell stopped. The collar was motionless in the middle of the floor for a moment; then it disappeared.
Gregor continued staring at the spot where the collar had been. He was saying, very softly, “It didn’t happen. It just didn’t happen.”
Unfortunately, he knew it had. The cat hadn’t jumped, moved, advanced or retreated.
The invisible cat had disappeared.
ALTHOUGH time was drawing short, they knew they would have to start at the beginning and find what wa
s producing the invisibility. Arnold settled into his makeshift laboratory and began to test all substances around the farm. His eyes became red-rimmed and haggard from long hours of peering into a microscope and he jumped at the slightest sound.
Gregor continued to experiment with the cats. Before releasing number seven, he fitted a tiny radar reflector and radio signal emitter to her collar. She followed the identical pattern of cat number six—after several hours of hunting, she became invisible; shortly after that, she disappeared. Radar showed no trace of her and the radio signal had stopped abruptly.
He tried a more carefully controlled experiment. This time, he put cats eight and nine into separate cages and fed them weighed samples of sleg. They became invisible. He stopped feeding number eight, but continued with nine. Cat number nine disappeared like all the others, leaving no trace. Eight was still invisible, but present.
Gregor had a long argument with the Seerian over the interstellar telephone. The Seerian wanted AAA Ace to forfeit now, at only a small loss, and let one of the bigger companies move in. Gregor refused.
But after the talk, he wondered if he had done the right thing. The secrets at Barney Spirit were deep and involved, and might take him a lifetime to solve. Invisibility was bad enough. But the vanishing was much worse. It left so little to go on.
He was mulling this over when Arnold came in. His partner had a wild look in his eyes and his grin seemed almost demented.
“Look,” he said to Gregor, holding out one hand, palm up.
Gregor looked. Arnold’s hand was empty.
“What is it?” Gregor asked.
“Only the secret of invisibility, that’s all it is,” Arnold said with a cackle of triumph.
“But I can’t see anything,” Gregor answered cautiously, wondering how best to deal with a madman.
“Of course you can’t. It’s invisible.” He laughed again.
Gregor moved back until he had put a table between them. Soothingly, he said, “Good work, old man. That hand of yours will go down in history. Now suppose you tell me all about it.”
“Stop humoring me, you idiot,” Arnold snapped, still holding out his open hand. “It’s invisible, but it’s there. Feel it.”
GREGOR reached out gingerly.
In Arnold’s hand was what felt like a bunch of coarse leaves.
“An invisible plant!” Gregor said.
“Exactly. This is the culprit.” Arnold had examined every substance on the farm without results. One day, he had been walking in front of the house. He had looked again at the bald spots on the pocked lawn. For the first time, it struck him how regularly they were spaced.
He bent down and examined one. It was bare, all right. The dirt showed through.
He touched the spot—and found that he was touching an invisible plant.
“As far as I can tell,” Arnold said, “there’s an invisible plant of no known species growing in each of those spots.”
“But where did they come from?”
“Somewhere Man has never been,” Arnold said positively. “I suppose that the progenitor of this species was floating in space, a microscopic spore. Finally it was drawn into the atmospheric orbit of Seer. It fell on the lawn at Barney Spirit, took root, blossomed, threw out seeds—and there we are. We know that slegs eat grasses and their sense of smell is relatively well developed. They probably found this stuff very tasty.”
“But it’s invisible!”
“That wouldn’t bother a sleg. Invisibility is too sophisticated a concept for them.”
“And you think all of them ate it?”
“No, not all. But those who did stood the best chance for survival. They were the ones the hangs and drigs didn’t pick off. And they transmitted the taste to the next generation.”
“And then the cats came in, ate the slegs and got enough of the substance to turn invisible. Fine. But why did they completely vanish?”
“That’s obvious,” Arnold said. “The slegs ate this plant as just a part of their normal diet. But the cats ate only sleg. They got an overdose.”
“Why should an overdose make anything vanish? Vanish to where?”
“Maybe some day we’ll find out. Right now, we have a job to do. We’ll burn out all the plants. Once the slegs work the stuff out of their systems, they’ll become visible again. Then the cats can go to work.”
“I just hope it does the job,” Gregor said dubiously.
THEY went to work with portable flamethrowers. The invisible plants were easy to spot, since they formed bare spots in the lush green lawns of Barney Spirit. In this instance, invisibility gave them an exceedingly low survival value.
By evening, Gregor and Arnold had burned every one of the plants into ashes.
The next morning, they examined the lawn and were disconcerted to find a new pattern of pock marks. New plants were growing in them, as copiously as before.
“No cause for alarm,” Arnold said. “The first bunch must have seeded just before we destroyed them. This crop will be the last.”
They spent another day destroying the plants, scorching the entire lawn for good measure. At dusk, a new shipment of cats arrived from Galactic Rapid Express. They kept them caged, waiting for the slegs to return to visibility.
In the morning, more invisible plants were growing on the scorched soil at Barney Spirit. AAA Ace held an emergency conference.
“It’s a ridiculous idea,” Gregor said.
“But it’s the only way left,” Arnold insisted.
Gregor shook his head stubbornly.
“What else can we do?” Arnold asked. “Do you have any ideas?”
“No.”
“We’re only a week from deadline. We’ll probably lose part of our profits anyhow. But if we don’t complete the job, we’re out of business.”
ARNOLD set a bowl of invisible plants on the table. “We have to find out where the cats go when they get an overdose.”
Gregor stood up and began to pace the floor. “They might show up inside a sun, for all we know.”
“That’s a risk we have to take,” Arnold said sternly.
“All right,” Gregor sighed. “Go ahead.”
“What?”
“I said go ahead.”
“Me?”
“Who else? I’m not going to eat that stuff. This was your idea.”
“But I can’t,” Arnold said, perspiring. “I’m the research end of this team. I have to stay here and—uh—collate data. Besides, I’m allergic to greens.”
“I’ll collate the data this time.”
“But you don’t know how! I have to work up a few new stains. My flow sheets are all messed up. I’ve got several solutions cooking in the stove. I’m running a pollenation test on—”
“You’re breaking my heart,” Gregor said wearily. “All right, I’ll go. But this is absolutely the very last time.”
“Right you are.” Arnold quickly pulled a handful of invisible leaves from the bowl. “Here, eat this. That’s it, take some more. What does it taste like?”
“Cabbage,” Gregor mumbled, munching.
“I’m sure of one thing,” Arnold said. “The effects can’t last very long on a creature of your size. Your system should throw off the drug in a matter of hours. You’ll reappear almost immediately.”
GREGOR suddenly became invisible except for his clothes. “How do you feel?” Arnold asked.
“No different.”
“Eat some more.”
Gregor ate another double handful of leaves. And, suddenly, he was gone. Clothes and all, he had vanished.
“Gregor?” Arnold called anxiously.
“Are you anywhere around?” Arnold asked.
There was still no answer. “He’s gone,” Arnold said out loud. “I didn’t even wish him luck.”
Arnold turned to his solutions boiling on the stove and lowered the flame under them. He worked for fifteen minutes, then stopped and stared around the room.
“Not that he should need a
ny luck,” Arnold said. “There can’t be any real danger.”
He prepared his dinner. Halfway through it, with a forkful of food poised in front of his mouth, he added, “I should have said good-by.”
Resolutely, he put all dark thoughts out of his mind and turned to his experiments. He labored all night and fell exhausted into bed at dawn. In the afternoon, after a hurried breakfast, he continued working.
Gregor had been gone over twenty-four hours.
The Seerian telephoned that evening and Arnold had to assure him that the slegs were nearly under control. It was just a matter of time.
After that, he read through his rodent manuals, straightened his equipment, rewired an armature in the Morganizer, played with a new idea for a sleg trap, burned a new crop of invisible plants and slept again.
When he awoke, he realized that Gregor had been gone over seventy-two hours. His partner might never return.
“He was a martyr to science,” Arnold said. “I’ll raise a statue to him.” But it seemed a very meager thing to do. He should have eaten the plant himself. Gregor wasn’t much good in unusual situations. He had courage—no one could deny that—but not much adaptability.
Still, all the adaptability in the world wouldn’t help you inside a sun, or in the vacuum of space, or—
He heard a noise behind him, and whirled eagerly, shouting, “Gregor!”
But it was not Gregor.
THE creature who stood before Arnold was about four feet tall and had entirely too many limbs. His skin color appeared to be a grayish-pink, under a heavy layer of dirt. He was carrying a heavy sack. He wore a high peaked hat on his high peaked head, and not much else.
“You aren’t Gregor, are you?” Arnold asked, too stunned to react properly.
“Of course not,” the creature replied. “I’m Hem.”
“Oh . . . Have you seen my partner, by any chance? His name is Richard Gregor. He’s about a foot taller than I, thin and—”
“Of course I’ve seen him,” Hem said. “Isn’t he here?”
“No.”
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