“‘Tis passing strange,” she said. “These stems rise not from soil, but rather burgeon from the bowels of the vessel. And meseemeth they want likeness to the other flora of this world.”
I pulled one of the big, leathery leaves over to me. It was heart-shaped, about eight inches wide, strongly ribbed.
“It looks like an ordinary pea to me,” I said. “Just overgrown—like the cats.”
“We’ll trace these to their beginnings, their mystery to resolve.” The Lady Raire pointed. “An’ mine eyes deceive me not, they rise through yonder hatch.”
There was just room to squeeze through between the thigh-thick trunks, into a narrow service shaft. I flashed my light along it, and saw bones.
“Just a cat,” I said, more to reassure me than Milady. We went on, ducking under festoons of thick vine. We passed another cat skeleton, well scattered. There was a strange smell, something like crushed almonds with an under-taint of decay. The vines led fifty feet along the passage, then in through a door that had been forced outward off its hinges. The room beyond was a dark mass of coiled white roots. On its far side, faint twilight shone in through a break in the hull. There was a soft clink, like water dripping into a still pond, a faint rustling. I flashed my light down. The floor of the big room slanted off sharply. Down among the snarled roots, a million tiny points of amber light glowed. The Lady Raire took a step back.
“Come, Billy Danger! I like this not—” That was as far as she got before the mass of vine roots in front of me trembled and bulged and all the devils in Hell came swarming out.
3
Something dirty white, the size of a football, jittering on six spindly legs rushed at me, clicking a pair of jaws that opened sideways in a face like an imp in one of those medieval paintings. I jumped back and swung a kick and its biters clamped onto my boot toe like a steel trap. Another one bounced high enough to rip at my knee; the tough coverall held, but the hide under it tore. Something zapp’ed from behind my right ear and a flash of blue fire winked and two of the things skittered away and a stink of burnt horn hit me in the face. All this in the first half-second. I had my pistol up then, squeezing the firing lever, playing it over them like a hose. They curled and jumped and died and more came swarming over the dead ones.
“We’re losing,” I yelled. “We’ve got to bottle them up!” The big vine stem was on fire, and sap was bubbling out and spitting in the flames. I ducked down and grabbed up a dead one and threw him into the opening, and beamed another one that poked his snout through and took a step and tripped and went flat on my face. I threw my hands up to protect my head and heard a yowl and something dark bounded across me and there was a snap and a thud and I sat up and saw Eureka, whirling and pouncing, batting with both paws. Behind him the Lady Raire, splashed to the knee with brown, a smear of blood on her cheek, was aiming and firing as steadily as if she were shooting at clay pipes at the county fair. And then Eureka was sitting on his haunches, making a face at me, and the Lady Raire was turning toward me, and there was a last awkward scuffling sound and then silence.
“Well, that answers one question,” I said. “Now we know what the cats eat.”
4
It was a hard climb back down along the lift shaft, out through the hold, and up to the last of the sunlight. She got out her belt medikit and started dabbing liquid fire into the cuts on my legs, back, arms and thighs. While she doctored, I talked.
“That was the hydroponics room. When the ship crashed, or fell in the ravine, or got caught in an earthquake, the hull was opened there—or near enough that the plants could sense sunlight. They went for it. Either the equipment that watered them and provided the chemicals they needed was still working, or they found water and soil at the bottom of the ravine; or maybe both. They liked it here; plenty of sunshine, anyway. They adapted and grew and with no competition from other plant life, they developed into what we found.”
“There may be truth in thy imaginings, Billy Danger,” Milady said. “The vessel’s of a very ancient type; ’tis like to those in use on Zeridajh some seven thousand years since.”
“That might be long enough for a plant to evolve giant size,” I said. “Especially if the local sun puts out a lot of hard radiation. Same for the cats. I guess there were a couple of them aboard—or maybe just one pregnant female. She survived the crash and found water and food—”
“Nay, Billy Danger. Thy Eureka may sup on such dainties as those he slew in thy defense—but they’d make two snaps of any house-born puss.”
“I didn’t mean that; a cat can live on beans, if it has to. Anyway, the critters weren’t as big, then.”
“How now? Knowest thou the history of Gar’s creatures as well as of more familiar kinds?”
“They aren’t natives, any more than the cats and the peas. They came along on the ship; to be specific, on the cat.”
“Dost rave? Art feverish?”
“I’m ashamed to admit it,” I said. “But I know a flea when I see one.”
5
We waited until daylight to go into the ship again. The location of the cat bones gave us a pretty good idea of where the boundaries of flea territory were. Apparently they kept to their dark hold and lived long, happy lives sucking juice from the vines, or an occasional lone cat who meandered over the line. Population pressure drove enough of them upstairs to keep the cats supplied; and the cat droppings and their bodies when they died wound up at the bottom of the ravine, to keep the cycle going.
The Lady Raire had the idea of trying to locate the ship’s communication section; she finally did—in the smashed nose section.
I crawled in beside her to look at the ruins of what had once been a message center that could bounce words and music across interstellar distances at a speed that was a complicated multiple of the speed of light. Now it looked like a junkman’s nightmare.
“Alack, I deemed I might find here a signaler, intact. ‘Twere folly—and yet . . .”
She sounded so downhearted that I had to say something to cheer her up.
“There’s an awful lot of gear lying around in there,” I said. “Maybe we could salvage something. . . .”
“Dost know aught of these matters, Billy Danger?” she asked in a lofty tone.
“Not much,” I said. “I know my way around the inside of an ordinary radio. I’m not talking about sending three-D pictures in glorious color; but maybe a simple signal. . . .”
She wanted to know more. I explained all I’d learned from ICS one summer when I had the idea of Getting Into Radio Now. I felt like an unspoiled native of Borneo explaining flint-chipping techniques to a designer of H-bombs.
It took us a week to assemble a transmitter capable of putting out a simple signal that Milady Raire assured me would show up as a burst of static on any screen within a couple of light-years. We led a big cable from the energy cells that powered the standby lighting system, rigged it so that what juice was in them would drain in one final burst. The ship itself would act as an antenna, once we’d wired our rig to the hull. We climbed out of her, dragging a length of coaxial cable, got back a couple of hundred yards in case of miscalculation with the power core, and touched her off. For a couple of seconds, nothing happened; then I felt a tremor run through the ground and a moment later a dull ka-whoom! rumbled up from the chasm, followed by a rapid exodus of cats. For the next hour, there was a lot of activity: cats chasing fleas, fleas bouncing around looking for cover, and the Lady Raire and me trying to stay out of the way of both parties. Then the smoke faded away, the fleas scuttled for cover, the cats went back down to lie under the leaves or wandered off in the direction of the water hole, and Milady and I settled down to wait.
6
I made the discovery that by cutting into a vine just below a leaf, I could get a trickle of cool water. The Lady Raire had the idea of hauling a stem out and getting it growing in the direction of the caves; we did, and it grew enthusiastically. By the time we’d been in residence for another month, we had shade and running water on tap right outside the door.