Catseye (6 page)

When the flitter set down in the court of Kyger's establishment, the kinkajou moved to the cabin door, patted it with front paws, and looked to Troy entreatingly, every line of its rounded body expressing eagerness to be free. He caught at the prehensile tail, having no wish to see the creature escape by one of its spectacular leaps. Leaving the flyer and grasping his indignant captive firmly, Troy went toward his employer's office.

Kyger appeared at the corridor door, and when he saw the squirming animal in Troy's hold, he halted nearly in mid-step. Again Troy caught that spark of unease which he had detected in the meeting between the ex-spacer and Rerne.

“What happened?” Kyger's tone was as usual. He stepped back into his office and Troy accepted the tacit invitation to enter. The escape attempts of the kinkajou were at an end again. Once more the animal pushed against Horan's chest as if in mute plea for protection. But the mental contact had utterly ceased.

Swiftly and tersely, as a serviceman giving a report to a superior officer, Troy outlined what had happened at the Di villa. But he made no mention of the odd contact with the kinkajou. He had early learned in the hard school of the Dipple that knowledge could be both a weapon and a defense, and something as nebulous and beyond reason as his odd mental meeting with two different species of Terran life he preferred to keep to himself—at least until he knew Kyger better.

Kyger made no move to separate the clinging animal from Horan but sat down in the eazi-rest. His fingers rubbed up and down the scar seam before his ear.

“That's a valuable specimen,” he remarked mildly when Troy had done. “You were right to bring it back here. Curious as a ffolth sand borer. There was no reason for the law to upset it to the point of hysteria! Put it in the empty end cage in the animal room, give it some water and a few quagger nuts, and leave it alone.”

Troy followed orders, but once at the cage he had some difficulty in detaching the kinkajou. The animal appeared to accept Horan as a refuge in the midst of a chancy world, and he had to pry paws and tail loose from their hold on him. As he closed the cage door, the captive rolled itself into a tight ball in the corner farthest from the light, presenting only a stubborn hump of furred back to the world.

During the few days he had been at Kyger's, Troy had come to look forward to the early hours of the night when he was left alone in the interior of the main buildings. He made two watch rounds according to his orders. But each night before he napped, he had his own visiting pattern. The fussel hawk, the blue-feathered cubs that always greeted him with reaching paws and joyous squeaks, and several other favorites were then his alone. Tonight he came also to the kinkajou cage. From the appearance of that furred ball still wedged into the far corner, the creature had not moved from the position it had assumed when he first put it there.

Deliberately Troy tried mental contact, suggesting friendship, a desire for better understanding. But if the kinkajou received those suggestions, it neither acknowledged nor reacted to them. Disappointed, Troy left the room after setting the com broadcaster.

When he stretched out on his bunk, he tried to fit one event of the day to another. But when he remembered Rerne and the other's request for his services in testing the fussel in the Wild, Troy drifted into a daydream, which, in a very short interval, became a real dream.

Troy rolled over, his shoulder bringing up against the wall with a smart rap, his head turning fretfully. There was a thickness behind his eyes, which was not quite a pressure of pain, only a dull throb. He opened his eyes. The dial of the time-keeper faced him, and the hour marked there was well past the middle of the night—though not quite time for his round. But as long as he was now thoroughly awake, he might as well make it.

He sat up, pulled on his half boots. Then he pressed his fingertips gently to his temples. The dull feeling in his head persisted, and it was not normal. In fact—

Troy's hand flashed to the niche above the head of his bunk, scooping up the weapon that lay waiting there.

Though he had never experienced that particular form of attack before, his wits were now alert enough to supply him with one possible explanation. With the stunner in his hand, he walked as noiselessly as he could to the doorway, peered out into the subdued lighting of the corridor.

To his right was Kyger's office, thumb-sealed as usual. And there had been no betraying sound from the com. No betraying
sound!
But a lack of normal sounds can be as enlightening! Troy had become accustomed to the small twitters, clicks, chattering subcomplaints of the night hours—a myriad of sounds that issued normally from the cage rooms.

The dull pressure in his own head, together with the absence of those same twitters, clicks, chatters, spelled only one thing. There was a “sleeper” in operation somewhere on the premises—the illegal gadget that could lull into unconsciousness living things not shielded from its effect on the middle ear. And a sleeper was not the tool of a man who had any legitimate business here. It must be turned low enough to handle the animals but not to stun Horan himself into unconsciousness—why?

Troy tested Kyger's sealed office doorway with one hand, the stunner ready in the other. The panel refused to move, so at least that lock had not been forced. He slipped along the wall, paused by the tank room. The gurgle of flowing water, the plop of an aquarium inhabitant—nothing else. The marine things appeared not to have succumbed to the sleeper either.

Horan crossed to the animal room. Again no sound at all—which was doubly suspicious. Inside that door was the alert signal, which would arouse the yardmen and ring straight through to Kyger's quarters. Troy edged about the mesh door, his back against the wall, his free hand going to that knob, ready to push it flat.

“Danger!”

Again that word burst in his brain with the force of a full-lunged scream in his ear. He half turned, and a blast of pure, flaming energy cut so close that he cried out involuntarily at the searing bite of its edge against the line of his chin. Half blinded by the recent glare, Troy snapped the stunner beam at the dark shape arising from the floor and threw himself in a roll halfway across the room.

Troy shot another beam at a black blot in the doorway. But the paralyzing ray seemed to have no effect in even slowing up his attacker. Before Troy could find his feet, the other had made the corridor, and then Troy heard the metallic clang of the outer door. Horan stumbled across the room, slammed his hand upon the alarm signal, heard the clamor tear the unnatural silence of the cage room to shreds. Perhaps the aroused yard guard would be able to catch the fugitive now in the open.

FIVE

The fact that there was no corresponding uproar from the cage rooms confirmed Troy's belief that a sleeper had been set within the shop walls. He turned up the light power to full strength and began a careful search of the room. This was where the intruder had been occupied; what he had sought must lie here.

In the cages the occupants were balled, or sprawled, in deep, beam-induced slumber, save for that corner cage where the kinkajou had been put. Bright beads of eyes peered out at Troy, small paws rested against the netting. Troy gained an impression of excitement rather than fear. The signal of danger had been meant as a warning to him, not a cry for assistance such as the animal had made in the villa garden.

Troy ran his finger down the netting, looked into those round eyes. “If you could just tell me what is behind all this,” he half whispered.

“Someone comes—”

The kinkajou retreated. Before Troy's eyes it rolled quickly into its chosen ball-in-the-corner position once again. Troy's boot struck against some object on the floor, sent it to rebound from the wall with a metallic “ping.” He wriggled halfway under the rack of cages and picked up a dull-green cube—the sleeper.

He glanced once more at the kinkajou. To all appearances that animal was now as deeply under the influence of the gadget he held as all the other beasts in the room.

But if the stock of Kyger's establishment had been so subdued, the human inhabitants of the building were not. Two yardmen, stunners in fist, came through into the corridor. And Kyger ran in their wake, his chosen weapon a far more deadly hand blaster, which must be a relic of his service days.

Troy held out the sleeper cube, told his story of the assailant who had appeared so totally immune to the direct fire of a stunner.

“Wearing a person-protect, probably,” Kyger snapped impatiently. “Anything gone here—or disturbed—?”

He passed down the line of cages, but as he reached the end one, he paused and gave a searching glance at the ball of sleeping kinkajou. Troy made no mention of the fact that the animal had been able to defy the wave of the sleeper, had saved his own life by its warning. In spite of Kyger's treatment of him, some deep-buried and undefinable emotion kept him from warming to the merchant as he had to Rerne. He had no idea what could lie behind the invasion of the shop, but he wanted to know more of what was going on here.

“I could not see anything wrong,” he reported.

Kyger had turned, was walking back along the cages, and his fingers rasped across the netting of the one that held the kinkajou. The ball of fur remained unstirring. As the merchant joined Troy once more, he caught the younger man's chin, turning his head directly to the light.

“You have a flash burn there.” His tone was almost accusing.

“He was armed with a blaster,” Troy explained.

“What is going on here?”

The yardmen in the doorway were elbowed aside; a patroller came in, blaster ready. Kyger answered with a bite in his voice.

“We had a visitor, who brought this—” He nodded to the sleeper cube on the top of a cage. The patroller scooped it up, his eyes cold.

“What is the damage?”

Kyger's hand fell from Troy's chin to his shoulder. He held that grip, propelling the younger man before him down the corridor.

“So far none, except a flash burn—too close for comfort. Mangy! Tansvel!” The yardmen snapped to attention. “Check out the rest of the rooms; report to me in the office. This officer”—Kyger nodded to the patroller—“will help you.”

Troy stood quietly as his employer patted cov-aid dressing along the line of the burn. “Just grazed you.” Kyger retopped the container. “You were lucky.”

“It was dark and he was off orbit.”

But Kyger was watching him with an intent stare as if he could see straight into Troy's memory and pick out the events as they had really happened—the incredible fact that a wanting had struck from an animal's mind to his.

“He must have been badly jigged,” Kyger commented. “So much so that I wonder. A sleeper makes this a Guild job—and I have one or two unfriends around here who might just employ such means to make trouble for me.” He was frowning a little. “Only Guild men do not get jigged—”

“A novice might.”

Kyger spread both hands on the top of his desk. “A novice? What do
you
know about this, Horan?”

“I noticed a new buy-in man at the warehouse before they tried to lift us on the street.” Troy trusted now to Kyger's own background. To a merchant-born he would not have made such an admission, unless the matter had proved far more serious than it was. But to a spacer who had himself lived by a more flexible code of ethics—or rather, a different code of ethics—he could confess that much.

“A proving job for a novice.” Kyger considered that. “Might fit this flight pattern, at that. This buy-in man knows you?”

“He saw me at the warehouse—just as I saw him.”

“Any challenge between you two?”

“If you mean was this personal—no. He was Dipple and I knew him by name, but we never messed together.”

“Silly jig, hitting here. Unless it was just for nuisance value. There is nothing he could pick up to trot to the pass-boys.”

Troy wondered about that himself. Portable property was to be had for the ingenious lifts of the Guild anywhere in Tikil, where theft had become both a business and a fine art. Why would anyone try to lift living creatures, most of which required special food and attention? There was only one possibility.

“Some one-of-a-kind already promised?” he hazarded, knowing Kyger's promises to his elite customers. A unique pet, certified to be the only one of its kind on Korwar, might be an inducement.

“No profit in that. It would have to be kept under cover.” Kyger put his finger on the weakness in that. Yes, the value of such a pet to the vain owner would be largely in its display before the envious.

“To keep someone else from having it?”

Again that disconcerting stare from Kyger. Troy thought he had found another small piece in this match puzzle. That had hit, if not straight to the heart of the target, reasonably near.

“Might be. That makes a spot more sense. You can bunk in. I will cover the rest of the night watch.”

That was straight dismissal. Troy went back to his bunk, this time easing out of his clothes. The dressing had taken most of the smart out of his burn. But his mind was active and he did not feel in the least inclined to sleep. He closed his eyes, trying to will relaxation.

Instead, as if some tenuous circle of thought had coiled out into the air—as Lang Horan's tupan rope had done so accurately years before to catch and hold a twisting, bucking quarry—Troy's heightened sensitivity touched and held something never intended to join more than one pair of minds under that roof this night.

“He died quick. No time to see the report before put away—”

“Must return!” That was an order, final and harsh.

“Not so. No good. Man saw Shang look for report. Was suspicious!”

“There must be no suspicion!” Again the harshness.

And now there was no more protest in words, rather a thread of fear, a thread that grew into a choking rope. Troy's eyes opened. He sat up on the bunk, alive and vibrating to that fear as if its force raged in him also.