“We’ll have to try a longer hike,” I told the Lady Raire. “There may be an oasis just one ridge farther than I’ve gone.”
“As you wish, Billy Danger,” she said, and gave me that smile, like sunrise after a long night.
We packed up the food and water and a few extras. I slung a Z-gun over my shoulder, and started off at twilight, after the worst of the day’s heat.
It was monotonous country, just hilly enough to give us a long pull up to one low crest after another and an ankle-turning slog down the far side. I steered due west, not because the prospects looked any better in that direction, but just because it was easier to steer straight toward the setting sun.
We did about twenty miles before dark, another forty in two marches before the sun rose. I worried about the Lady Raire, but there was nothing I could do that I wasn’t already doing. We slogged on toward the next ridge, hoping for a miracle on the other side. And always the next side looked the same.
We rested in the heat of the long day, then marched on, into the glare of the sun. And about an hour before sunset, we saw the cat.
5
He was standing on a rock on the crest of a rise, whipping his tail from side to side in a slow, graceful motion. He made a graceful leap to a lower rock and was just a dark shadow moving against the slope ahead. I unlimbered my rifle and watched him close. At thirty feet, he paused and sat down on his haunches and wrinkled his face and began licking his chest. He finished and stuck out a long tongue and yawned, and then rose and went loping off into the dusk, the way he’d come.
All the while, we stood there and watched him, not saying a word. As soon as he was gone, I went to where he’d been sitting. His paw-prints were plain in the powdery dust. I started believing in him, then. I might see imaginary cats, but never imaginary cat tracks. We set off following them as fast as we could in the failing light.
6
The water hole was in a hollow in the rock, hidden behind a wall of black-green foliage growing on the brink of a ravine. The Lady Raire stopped to gaze at it, but I stumbled down the slope and fell full-length in the water and drank in big gulps and luckily choked and had a coughing fit before I could drink myself to death.
There was a steep jumble of rock rising behind the pool, with the dark mouths of caves showing. I picked my way around the pond in the near-dark with my gun ready in my hand. There was a smell of cat in the air. I was grateful to tabby for leading me to water, but I didn’t want him jumping on our backs now that it looked like we might live another few days.
The caves weren’t much, just holes about ten feet deep, not quite high enough to stand up in, with enough dirt drifted in them to make a more or less level floor.
The Lady Raire picked out one for herself, and I helped her clean out the dead leaves and cat droppings and fix up a stone that could be rolled into the opening to block it, in case anything bigger than a woodchuck wanted in. Then she picked out another one and told me it was mine and started in on it. It was dark when we finished. I saw her to her den, then sat down outside it with the pistol in my hand and went to sleep. . . .
—and woke hungry, clear-headed, and wondering how a cat happened to be here, in this super-Mojave. I thought about the dire-beasts and the meat-shredding leeches that had killed Lord Desroy and Sir Orfeo. The cat was no relative of theirs. He had been a regulation-type, black and gray and tan striped feline, complete with vertical-slitted pupils and retractable claws. He looked like anybody’s house-cat, except that he was the size of a collie dog. I’d heard about parallel evolution, and I hadn’t been too surprised when Sir Orfeo had told me about how many four-legged, one-headed creatures there were in the Universe—but a copy this perfect wasn’t possible.
That meant one of two things: Either I had dreamed the whole thing—which was kind of unlikely, inasmuch as when I looked down I saw two more cats, just like the other one, in the bright moonlight down by the water—or our yacht wasn’t the first human-owned ship to land on Gar 28.
7
In the morning light, the water looked clear and inviting. The Lady Raire studied it for a while, then called to me. “Billy Danger, watch thee well the while I lave me. Methinks t’will be safe enow . . .” She glanced my way, and I realized she was talking about going for a swim. I just stared at her.
“How now, art stricken dumb?” she called.
“The pond may be full of poison snakes, crocodiles, quicksand and undertows,” I said.
“I’d as lief be devoured as go longer unwashed.” She proceeded to unzip the front of the tunic she’d changed into from the temperature suit, and stepped out of it. And for the second time in one minute, I was struck dumb. She stood there in front of me, as naked as a goddess, and as beautiful, and said, “I charge thee, Billy Danger, take not thine eyes from me,” and turned and waded down into the water. It was the easiest order to follow I ever heard of.
She stayed in for half an hour, stroking up and down as unconcerned as if she were in the pool at some high-priced resort at Miami Beach. Once or twice she ducked under and stayed so long I found myself wading in to look for her. After the second time I complained and she laughed and promised to stay on top.
“Verily, hast thou found a garden in the wilderness, Billy Danger,” she said after she had her clothes back on. “‘Tis so peaceful—and in its rude way, so fair.”
“Not much like home, though, I guess, Milady,” I said; but she changed the subject, as she always did when the conversation brought back too many memories.
In the next few days, I made two trips back to the car, brought in everything that looked as if it might be useful; then we settled down to what I might describe as a very quiet routine. She strolled around, climbed the rocks, brought home small green shrubs and flowers that she planted around the caves and along the path and watered constantly, using a pot made of clay from the poolside cooked by a Z-gun on wide-beam. I spent my time exploring to the west and north, and trying to make friends with the cats.
There were plenty of them; at certain times of the day, there’d be as many as ten in sight at one time, around the water hole. They didn’t pay much attention to us; just watched us when we came toward them and at about fifteen feet, rose casually and moved off into the thick growth along the ravine. They were well fed and lazy, just nice hearthside tabbies, a little larger than usual.
There was one with a few streaks of orange in among the black and tan that I concentrated on, mainly because I could identify him easily. Every time I saw him I’d go out and move up as close as I could without spooking him, sit down, and start to play with a ball of string from the car. He sat and watched. I’d roll it toward him, then pull it back. He moved in closer. I let him get a paw on it, then jerked it. He went after it and cuffed it, and I pulled it in and tossed it out again.
In a week, the game was a regular routine. In two, he had a name—Eureka—and was letting me scratch him between the ears. In three, he had taken to lying across the mouth of my cave, not even moving when I stepped over him going out.
The Lady Raire watched all this with a sort of indulgent smile. According to her, cats were pets on most of the human-inhabited world she knew of. She wasn’t sure where they had originated, but she smiled when I said they were a native of Earth.
“In sooth, Billy Danger, ’tis a truism that each unschooled mind fancies itself the center of the Universe. But the stars were seeded by Man long ago, and by his chattels with him.”
At first, the Lady Raire didn’t pay much attention to my pet, but one day he showed up limping, and she spent half an hour carefully removing a splinter from his foot. The next day she gave him a bath, and brushed his fur to a high gloss. After that, he took to following her on her walks. And it wasn’t long before he took to sleeping at the mouth of her cubbyhole. He got more petting that way.