Catseye

by Andre Norton

  Somehow he forced up his left arm, worked at the catch of the cabin door, lunging against that stubborn barrier with the strength of his shoulder. The panel gave, tumbling him out, and small paws thudded on him as their owners raced into the open.

  Troy pulled himself up and tried to see where they had come to earth. Under him the surface of the ground seemed singularly smooth. His hand, questing over it, scraped up the grit of sand that lay in a drifted skim on stone or rock, very level stone or rock. As he twisted fully around, he could see the shaft of moonlight better. Behind—yes—the flitter had in some incredible way fitted itself nose first into a crevice where an arch of roof shut off the sky.

  Troy worked his way around the wreckage to the light. But it was after he had crawled those few feet that he realized what had happened and how chance, the protective device of the Clans, and his own last-moment attempt to control the flitter had landed them in an unusual hiding place. Those rounded domes and crumbling walls, blind of any window or door opening were set deep in the sand of a desert waste. He had crashed straight into the heart of Ruhkarv itself!

  “Where—?” He tried to summon the animals—and since he had no names to call, he pictured them mentally. The cats, black and gray-blue, the foxes, russet and cream, the kinkajou, where were they? Hurt? Still about?

  “Come—come back!” He called softly aloud, heard odd echoes reply from the ruins about. Outside now, he could look around, see how the flyer had nosed into a dome that had a crumbled opening in one side.

  A shadow leaped from one of the broken arches, pattered to him. The kinkajou had answered his call. It leaped to his shoulder, coiling its flexible tail about his upper arm in a grip tight enough to pinch. Troy reached up his other hand, caressed the round head butting against his cheek.

  Then the foxes returned in a swift lope, stopping before him, their pointed noses up, testing the wind, their eyes agleam.

  “Come,” Troy coaxed the cats. When there was no answer, he detached the kinkajou, started back into the dome cave to explore the wreck. In the pocket of the door he had wrenched open he found an atom torch and thumbed its button. The cone of light made clear the nose of the flyer embedded in the space of the dome as a too thick thread might have been forced into the eye of a needle.

  Troy flashed the light into the machine and then stood very still as he saw a small limp body. Blue eyes wide with pain were raised to his. The gray-blue cat lay flat, its mouth open, panting. Now and again it licked a foreleg that was clamped tight between two buckled pieces of metal. Above it crouched its black mate, who, upon seeing Troy, uttered a series of sharp, demanding cries.

  Setting down the torch, Troy went to work to free the delicate leg. Then he carried the cat into the open, placing it on the ground until he could salvage the aid kit of the flyer.

  By the time the first thin streaks of false dawn were in the sky, he had done what he could. The leg had been set and treated. He had dragged out of the flitter the food bag, the stunner, and some of the kit tools, which he festooned from his own belt. As time had passed and no one had invaded the forbidden area of the ruins to gather them up prisoners, Troy began to believe that they had been brought down by some automatic guard device and that on foot they still had a chance to escape capture. But whether the Clans had set other guards about Ruhkarv, which might now keep them inside, he did not know.

  The foxes and the black cat melted into the shadows, leaving Troy to his collection of equipment. Only the kinkajou remained to watch and at last to come to his aid, dragging small objects from the wrecked flyer to pile by the dome. Troy sat back on his heels. He had been so busy that he had not had time to consider the future further than the next job to be done, for he had been driven by a sense of working against time.

  “Wall—wall that cannot be seen—” The black cat stepped out from a neighboring dome and came directly to the man.

  “Wall around here?” Troy’s hand swept in a gesture to indicate the ruins.

  “Yes. We have tried to cross many places.”

  One of Troy’s fears had materialized. The Clans must have set a barrier about Ruhkarv. Intended to bar interlopers, it would make him and the animals prisoners within. How he had managed to pierce it with the flitter was a mystery.

  “There are many dens—maybe hunting in them—” One of the foxes drifted into the open. The cat had gone to its injured mate, was licking its head caressingly.

  “Danger underground here.” Troy countered that half suggestion from the prick-eared scout.

  “Not now.” The report was emphatic and Troy wondered. Before Fauklow’s expedition with the recaller had turned the name of Ruhkarv into a synonym for nightmare, the upper galleries of the strange city or structure had been explored with impunity by a handful of the curious. If it had been only the action of the recaller that had damned the place—well, the rangers had put an end to the machine’s broadcasts, according to Rerne, and the undersurface passages might give the fugitives shelter for a time. He would have to have some rest, Troy knew, and perhaps here in the heart of a forbidden territory they had found temporary safety after all.

  “We go then—to a safe den.”

  With the food bag over his shoulder, the injured cat held as comfortably as he could manage against his chest, and the stunner ready in his free hand, Troy moved out. The kinkajou rode on his shoulder, making small twittering noises and now and then patting its two-legged steed with a fore-paw as if to make Troy continually aware of its presence. The foxes and the black cat guided him to another dome, in which a large segment of wall had been cut through in the past, either by one of the early treasure seekers or by the ill-fated Fauklow men.

  All the fantastic tales that had been told of this place were peopling the dusk Troy faced with a myriad of nightmares, but the readiness of the animals to explore was his insurance. Troy knew that their senses were far keener and more to be relied upon than his own, and that they would give warning of any trouble ahead. He snapped on the atom torch he had slung from his belt, watched the cone of light bob and wave across flooring and walls as it swung to the rhythm of his walk.

  There was nothing to be seen but walls and a pavement of blocks, fitted together with precision and skill. At the far side of the dome was the dark mouth of a ramp leading down into the real Ruhkarv. That murk had a quality close to fog, Troy thought—as if the dark itself swirled about with independent motion. And even the atom light was sapped, weakened by it. Yet the lead fox had already padded down into those depths, and its mate and the cat were waiting for Troy almost impatiently.

  “This is a place where there has been great danger,” Troy warned, combining words with the mental reach.

  “Nothing here—” He was sure that impatient overtone came from the black cat.

  “Nothing here,” Troy repeated even as his boots clicked on that sloping length of stone, “but perhaps farther on—”

  “There is water.”

  Troy was startled at that confident interruption. They had the supplies from the flitter, but the problem of water had nagged at him. If somewhere within this maze the animals had located water, they were even better provided for than he had dared to hope.

  “Where?”

  “We go—”

  The ramp carried him down through three levels of side corridors, all empty as far as the beams of the atom light could disclose, all exactly alike, so that Troy began to think a man might well become lost in such a place without a guide. And he tried to set his own entrance path in his head, memorizing each corridor by counting.

  Somewhere there must be an unseen air system, for the atmosphere, though dry and acrid, remained breathable, and he was sure that now and then from one of the offshoot corridors he scented a whiff of some fresh import from the surface.

  At the fourth level, though the ramp continued on to Korwarian depths, Troy found the three scouts waiting for him. And now, unless his sense of direction was completely bemused, they took a way that head
ed directly east. For a moment he dared to wonder if some one of these long hallways might not take them outside the range of the blocking-wave wall so that they could emerge free in the Wild.

  Stark walls of red-gray stone, paved footing—nothing else, save the fine sifting of centuries of dust, which arose almost ankle-high and muffled the sounds of his own footfalls. Twice only were those walls broken by round openings, but when he swung the beam of the torch in, he saw nothing save a bare, circular cell hardly large enough for a man to crouch in, without any other opening. The purpose of such rooms—if rooms they could be called—remained another of the Ruhkarv mysteries.

  But their journey was not to continue so easily. The eastern corridor ended in a huge well, and again a descending ramp faced them, curving about the side of that opening, narrow enough to make Troy thoughtful, though the slope was not too steep as far as he could sight with the torch’s aid. Again the scouts moved ahead, and there was nothing to do except follow.

  As he went down, there was a change in the air—not a freshness, but a rise of moisture. As the wall against which he steadied himself from time to time began to grow clammy under his fingers, he knew that the fox had been right. Somewhere below was a source of water—a large one, if he could judge by the present evidence.

  As the moisture content grew, he was aware of a fetid under scent—not exactly the stagnant stench of an undrained and unrenewed pond under the sun, but the hint of something ill about that water. However, there were trickles of damp on the walls and his thirst grew.

  Around and around—the coiled spring of the ramp inside the well began to form a dizzying pattern. There was no break here made by side corridors. Troy lost track of time; his legs ached, and every bruise on his body added to his punishment. He was sure now that if he should try to reverse his path and reach the surface—or even the last corridor from which this drop had issued, he would not be able to summon up strength enough to finish. There was only the need to get to the bottom of the well, out on the level somewhere where he could drop down and rest.

  And finally the torch did show him a pavement. Troy reached it in a long stride and flashed the light about the bottom of the well. There was water right enough, but—as dry as his mouth now was, as much as his body cried out for a drink—he could not bring himself to approach closely that sullenly flowing runnel.

  The water was a ribbon of oily black, looking as thick and turgid as if the substance were more than half slime, and it moved with sluggish ripples on its surface from one side of the pit to the other, filling to within a few inches of the pavement surface a stone trough that had been constructed to carry it.

  The inlet and outlet for that yard-wide flow were large circular openings—the inlet situated under the rise of the ramp from the floor. And except for those there was no other way out—save the ramp down which he had just come. But the black cat and the foxes were at the mouth of the inflow tunnel, and when Troy walked to that point, he saw that the tunnel was larger than the stream of floor level, leaving a narrow path to the right of the water.

  “Out?” he asked, and that single word echoed hollowly until the boom hurt his ears. The kinkajou chattered angrily, and the cat in Troy’s hold pressed the good foreleg hard against his chest and added a protesting wail. But the three animals before him glanced up and then away again, into the tunnel, telling him as plainly as with words or the mind touch that this was indeed the proper exit.

  The ripples on the water, as Troy passed along so close to it, began to take on a rather ominous and sinister significance, and he wondered just how deep that trough really was, for some of the ripples went against the current, suggesting action under the dark surface of the flood—something or things moving independently against the flow of the water. For an anxious while one such V of ripples accompanied Troy at his own pace. Time and time again he paused to flash the torch directly on that disturbance—to sight nothing in the inky liquid.

  That slight fetid odor was growing stronger, yet again he felt a puff of renewing air, though through what channel in the walls he could not guess. But the gleam of his torch began to pick up small answering sparks of light along the walls. From pinpricks scattered without apparent pattern they grew thicker, set in clusters. And once, when he turned his head to watch a particularly large and suspicious line of ripples, Troy saw that those sparks of light behind him, awakened by the torchlight, did not lose their gleam but continued as small patches with a bluish glow. He tried the experiment of snapping the torch off for a moment and looked about him. Where the atom light had touched, that blue glow remained. But ahead the way was still dark. Whatever those flecks might be, they needed the radiance from the light to set them actually working.

  The patches of such light grew larger, and now he thought he could trace a kind of design—like a sharply peaked zigzag—in their general setting, which argued that they were not native to the rock blocks of which these walls were fashioned but placed there with a purpose by the unknown builders. At last he was backed by an eerie glow walling in the stream along which he walked.

  His torch found an opening in the wall ahead. The cat awaited him there, but the foxes were not to be seen. Troy pushed on, eager to be out of the tunnel and its attendant water channel.

  When he came out, he was not in another corridor or room—but he stepped into what might have once been some vast underground cavern adapted by the unknown builders of Ruhkarv to their own peculiar uses. His torch beam was swallowed up by the vastness of the open expanse and he halted, a little daunted by what faced him. Here was a city in miniature, open ways running between walls of separate, roofless enclosures. And yet the substance of those walls—! It was from here that the fetid odor had come. He could not be sure, yet somehow he shrank from putting his guess to the test of actually laying his hand upon one of those slimily moist surfaces—but it looked at first, and even after a more careful examination, as if those walls grew out of the ground, that they were giant slabs of an unknown fungus.

  There was an open space of white-gray soil, neither sand nor gravel but possessing a granular appearance, between the mouth of the water tunnel and the beginning of the first of those structures, and Troy was in no hurry to cross it.

  “A road around—”

  One or all of his guides had picked his feelings of repugnance out of his mind, and he knew then that they shared it in a measure.

  “Come!” The last was urgent and Troy broke into a clumsy trot, not sure now just how long he could keep moving at all. He rounded an outthrust suburb of the fungus town and saw something else—a shaft of brightness that was so clean, so much of the world that he knew, that he threw himself toward it, his trot lengthening into a run.

  There was an island of sanity in the midst of what was not of his world, nor, he suspected, of any human world. From some break in the arch overhead, through what unknown trick of nature—or of the architects of this place—he would never know, a shaft of sun struck here. And there was water, a small pool of it fed by a runnel through the sand. Clear water with none of the turgid rolling of the stream that had led them here. Troy put down the injured cat where it could lap beside its mate, scooped up a palmful to wet lips and chin as he sucked avidly.

  Two, three tiny plants, frail as lace, grew on the bank of that pool. Troy drank again blissfully and then opened the supply bag, sharing its contents among his band, taking himself the concentrates that would give him days of energy.

  Was there any other way out of this dead, fungoid world? At the moment he was too tired to care. With his head pillowed on the food bag, Troy curled up, weak with exhaustion, aware that the animals were gathering in about him, as if they, too, distrusted what lay beyond the circle of sunlight.

  Did anything live here? The ripples in the water had been suggestive. And there might be other creatures to whom the fungus-walled streets were home. But Troy could no longer summon the strength to stand guard. He felt the warmth of small furred bodies pressed against his
, and that was the last he remembered.

  TWELVE

  He might have been asleep only for a moment, Troy thought when he roused. The sun patch still lit the pool. There had been no change in his surroundings, save that the animals, except for the injured cat, were gone. The cat raised its head from licking the splinted leg and made an inquiring noise deep in its throat as Horan sat up, rubbing his arm across his eyes. He shook his head, still a little bemused, wondering vaguely if he had slept the clock around.

  Then out of the murk of the fungus growth trotted the black cat, its head held high as it dragged the body of a limp thing across the coarse earth. Paying no attention to Troy, it brought the weird underground dweller to its mate.

  The dead creature was in its way as hideous as the hur-hur, a nightmare combination of many legs, stalked eyes, segmented, plated body. But apparently to both felines it was a very acceptable form of food and they dined amiably together.

  If the Terran animals were able to forage for themselves even in this hole in the ground, Troy had proof of another of Kyger’s secrets. They had not needed the special food that had been so ceremoniously delivered at a suitably high price to the quondam owners in Tikil.

  “Good hunting?” he asked the black casually.

  The cat was engaged in a meticulous toilet with tongue and paw.

  “Good hunting,” it agreed.

  “The others also have good hunting?” Troy wondered where in that unwholesome fungoid growth the missing three hunted and what they pursued.

  “They eat,” the cat answered with finality.

  Troy stood up, stretched the cramps out of his sore body. He had no intention of remaining in this cavern, or underground city, or whatever it might be.

  “There is a way out?” he asked the cat, and received the odd mental equivalent of what might have been a shrug. It was plain that hunting had been of more importance than exploration for another passage as far as that independent animal was concerned.