Locklear knew that the commander had overlooked something that could live there very comfortably, but held his tongue awhile. Then, “Permission to speak,” he said.
“Granted,” said the commander. “What do you know of this—this thing?”
“Only this: whether it is a zoo or a prison, one of those compounds seems very Earthlike. If you left me there, I might find air and food to last me indefinitely.”
“And other monkeys to help in Patriarch-knows-what,” the navigator put in quickly. “No one is answering my all-band queries, and we do not know who runs this prison. The Patriarchy has no prison on record that is even faintly like this.”
“If they are keeping heroes in a kzinti compound,” grated the commander, “this could be a planet-sized trap.”
Tzak-Navigator: “But whose?”
Grraf-Commander, with arrogant satisfaction: “It will not matter whose it is, if they set a vermin-sized trap and catch an armed lifeboat. There is no shell over these circular walls, and if there were, I would try to blast through it. Re-enable the lifeboat’s drive. Tzak-Navigator, as Executive Officer you will remain on alert in the Raptor. For the rest of us: sound planetfall!”
* * *
Caught between fright and amazement, Locklear could only hang on and wait, painfully buffeted during reentry because the kzin-sized seat harness would not retract to fit his human frame. The lifeboat, the size of a flatlander’s racing yacht, descended in a broad spiral, keeping well inside those invisible force-walls that might have damaged the craft on contact. At last the commander set his ship on a search pattern that spiraled inward while maintaining perhaps a kilometer’s height above the yellow grassy plains, the kzin-colored steaming jungle, the placid lake, the dark mountain peaks of this tiny, synthesized piece of the kzin homeworld.
Presently, the craft settled near a promontory overlooking that lake and partially protected by the rise of a stone escarpment—the landfall of a good military mind, Locklear admitted to himself. “Apprentice-Engineer: report on environmental conditions,” the commander ordered. Turning to Locklear, he added, “If this is a zoo, the zookeepers have not yet learned to capture heroes—nor any of our food animals, according to our survey. Since your metabolism is so near ours, I think this is where we shall deposit you for safekeeping.”
“But without prey, Grraf-Commander, he will soon starve,” said Apprentice Engineer.
The heavy look of the commander seemed full of ironic amusement. “No, he will not. Humans eat monkeyfood, remember? This specimen is a kshat.”
Locklear colored but tried to ignore the insult. Any creature willing to eat vegetation was, to the kzinti, kshat, an herbivore capable of eating offal. And capable of little else. “You might leave me some rations anyway,” he grumbled. “I’m in no condition to be climbing trees for food.”
“But you soon may be, and a single monkey in this place could hide very well from a search party.”
Apprentice-Engineer, performing his extra duties proudly, waved a digit toward the screen. “Grraf-Commander, the gravity constant is exactly home normal. The temperature, too; solar flux, the same; atmosphere and microorganisms as well. I suspect that the builders of this zoo planet have buried gravity polarizers with the force cylinder generators.”
“No doubt those other compounds are equally equipped to surrogate certain worlds,” the commander said. “I think, whoever they are—or were—the builders work very, very slowly.”
Locklear, entertaining his own scenario, suspected the builders worked very slowly, all right—and in ways, with motives, beyond the understanding of man or kzin. But why tell his suspicions to Scarface? Locklear had by now given his own private labels to these infuriating kzinti, after noting the commander’s face-mark, the navigator’s tremors of intent, the gunner’s brutal stupidity and the engineer’s abdominal patch: to Locklear, they had become Scarface, Brick-shitter, Goon, and Yellowbelly. Those labels gave him an emotional lift, but he knew better than to use them aloud.
Scarface made his intent clear to everyone, glancing at Locklear from time to time, as he gave his orders. Water and rations for eight duty watches were to be offloaded. Because every kzin craft has special equipment to pacify those kzinti who displayed criminal behavior, especially the Kdaptists with their treasonous leanings toward humankind, Scarface had prepared a zzrou for their human captive. The zzrou could be charged with a powerful soporific drug, or—as the commander said in this case—a poison. Affixed to a host and tuned to a transmitter, the zzrou could be set to inject its material into the host at regular intervals—or to meter it out whenever the host moved too far from that transmitter.
Scarface held the implant device, no larger than a biscuit with vicious prongs, in his hand, facing the captive. “If you try to extract this, it will kill you instantly. If you somehow found the transmitter and smashed it—again you would die instantly. Whenever you stray two steps too far from it, you will suffer. I shall set it so that you can move about far enough to feed yourself, but not far enough to make finding you a difficulty.”
Locklear chewed his lip for a moment, thinking. “Is the poison cumulative?”
“Yes. And if you do not know that honor forbids me to lie, you will soon find out to your sorrow.” He turned and handed a small device to Yellowbelly. “Take this transmitter and place it where no monkey might stumble across it. Do not wander more than eight-cubed paces from here in the process—and take a sidearm and a transceiver with you. I am not absolutely certain the place is uninhabited. Captive! Bare your back.”
Locklear, dry-mouthed, removed his jacket and shirt. He watched Yellowbelly bound back down the short passageway and, soon afterward, heard the sigh of an air lock. He turned casually, trying to catch sight of him as Goon was peering through the viewport, and then he felt a paralyzing agony as Scarface impacted the prongs of the zzrou into his back just below the left shoulder blade.
* * *
His first sensation was a chill, and his second was a painful reminder of those zzrou prongs sunk into the muscles of his back. Locklear eased to a sitting position and looked around him. Except for depressions in the yellowish grass, and a terrifyingly small pile of provisions piled atop his shirt and jacket, he could see no evidence that a kzin lifeboat had ever landed here. “For all you know, they’ll never come back,” he told himself aloud, shivering as he donned his garments. Talking to himself was an old habit born of solitary researches, and made him feel less alone.
But now that he thought on it, he couldn’t decide which he dreaded most, their return or permanent solitude. “So let’s take stock,” he said, squatting next to the provisions. A kzin’s rations would last three times as long for him, but the numbers were depressing: within three flatlander weeks he’d either find water and food, or he would starve—if he did not freeze first.
If this was really a compound designed for kzin, it would be chilly for Locklear—and it was. The water would be drinkable, and no doubt he could eat kzin game animals if he found any that did not eat him first. He had already decided to head for the edge of that lake, which lay shining at a distance that was hard to judge, when he realized that local animals might destroy what food he had.
Wincing with the effort, he removed his light jacket again. They had taken his small utility knife but Yellowbelly had not checked his grooming tool very well. He deployed its shaving blade instead of the nail pincers and used it to slit away the jacket’s epaulets, then cut carefully at the triple-folds of cloth, grateful for his accidental choice of a woven fabric. He found that when trying to break a thread, he would cut his hand before the thread parted. Good; a single thread would support all of those rations but the water bulbs.
His wristcomp told him the kzin had been gone an hour, and the position of that ersatz 61 Ursa Majoris hanging in the sky said he should have several more hours of light, unless the builders of this zoo had fudged on their timing. “Numbers,” he said. “You need better numbers.” He couldn’t eat a number, but knowing the right ones might feed his belly.
In the landing pad depressions lay several stones, some crushed by the cruel weight of the kzin lifeboat. He pocketed a few fragments, two with sharp edges, tied a third stone to a twenty-meter length of thread and tossed it clumsily over a branch of a vine-choked tree. But when he tried to pull those rations up to suspend them out of harm’s way, that thread sawed the pulpy branch in two. Sighing, he began collecting and stripping vines. Favoring his right shoulder, ignoring the pain of the zzrou as he used his left arm, he finally managed to suspend the plastic-encased bricks of leathery meat five meters above the grass. It was easier to cache the water, running slender vines through the carrying handles and suspending the water in two bundles. He kept one brick and one water bulb, which contained perhaps two gallons of the precious stuff.