It was Roadkill who pulled him from his contemplation of mortality.
In fact, it looked as if the cat had dug up something, and was smacking it around. Space mouse? Not very likely, with no signs of plant or animal life around, excluding themselves and the puny patch of grass they occupied.
Whatever it was, RK was in love with it. Becker couldn’t hear anything, but he could see that the cat’s sides were pumping up and down with the force of his purring.
A few feet further on, something gleamed in the beam of the work light, and Becker bent to examine it. Like the object RK was mauling, the thing was long and thin, maybe had been pointed on the end at one time, but the tip was broken off. There were definite spiral markings on it, he saw as he brushed away the soil. It glistened in the light, refracting rich shades of blue and green and deep red from its white surface. It looked like a big, carved opal. Pretty thing. He tucked it in the sack and swung his beam around. It flashed on several other pieces like the one he had, all broken and sticking up through the soil. He took a couple of other specimens, and made a note of the precise coordinates of this location so he could land here again, in case this stuff was valuable. Then he grabbed RK and headed back to the ship.
He finished reloading his cargo. As usual, he left a few of the more expendable pieces behind to lighten his load. He had inventory scattered all over the galaxy now. Well, most of the sites where he’d stashed the stuff were uninhabited, so it would keep. He could reclaim it if he found a market later. Finally, after he got the cargo stowed aboard once more, Becker lugged RK, the new treasure firmly clamped in his fangs, back onto the ship.
First things first, he decided. He set their course back to Kezdet and lifted off. It wasn’t like he wanted to go to Kezdet.
He hated the damned place, but it was-unfortunately-the Condor’s home port. The ship had originally been registered to Becker’s foster father, Theophilus Becker, who bought Jonas from a labor farm to help with the business when the boy -was twelve. The old man had died ten years later, leaving the ship, the business, and his private maps of all manner of otherwise uncharted byways and shortcuts through various star systems and galaxies for his adopted son. Becker had spent every possible minute in space in the years since.
Once the ship was out of the planet’s gravity well and the course was set, Becker turned the helm of the ship over to the computer. Too exhausted to fix himself anything else to eat, he opened another can of RK’s cat food and ate that before settling down for some sleep. The cat, who had of course been fed as soon as the two returned to the ship-otherwise nothing else could have been accomplished-was already sacked out on top of the specimen bag containing the strange rocks they’d salvaged from the planet.
Becker pushed the recline button on his seat at the console and slept at the helm. His bunk was full of cargo. Besides, he couldn’t get to it for the stacks of feed sacks full of seeds he’d picked up several weeks before.
He woke up finally when a paw on his cheek told him he’d better do so if he didn’t want another pat, this time with the claws bared. He looked up into RK’s big green eyes. Something was different about that cat, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He fed both of them again, checked his course, and emptied the collection sack onto the console. Time to get a better look at what he’d acquired.
He didn’t figure he needed to use gloves with these specimens, since the cat had been carrying one around in its mouth with no ill effects since they’d found them, so he dug a couple of the spiral rocks out and ran a scanner over them. No radiation, nothing to poison, burn, freeze, or sting him. He knew that, having just picked them out of the sack with his bare hands.