‘If only they would quit attaching to me! And you look as if you were wearing a fur coat Let’s put ’em in freeze!’
‘Patience, dear. Probably it has somewhat the same pleasing effect on the host that it has on us; consequently the host tolerates it and lets it pick up the crumbs. But its other characteristic it shares with almost anything Martian. It can last long periods in hibernation, or if that isn’t necessary, in a state of lowered vitality and activity — say when there is no food available. But with any increase in the food supply, then at once — almost like throwing a switch — it expands, multiplies to the full extent of the food supply.’
‘I’ll say it does!’
‘Cut off the food supply and it simply waits for more good times. Pure theory, of course, since I am reasoning by analogy from other Martian life forms — but that’s why I’m going to have to disappoint Lowell — Fuzzy Britches will have to go on very short rations.’
Her husband frowned. ‘That won’t be easy; he feeds it all the time. We’ll just have to watch him — or there will be more little visitors from heaven. Honey, let’s get busy. Right now.’
‘Yes, dear. I just had to get my thoughts straight’
Roger called them all to general quarters; Operation Round-up began. They shooed them aft and into the hold; they slithered back, purring and seeking companionship. Pollux got into the hold and tried to keep them herded together while the others scavenged through the ship. His father stuck his head in; tried to make out his son in a cloud of flat cats; ‘How many have you got so far?’
‘I can’t count them — they keep moving around. Close the door!’
‘How can I keep the door closed and still send them in to you?’
‘How can I keep them in here if you keep opening the door?’
Finally they all got into space suits — Lowell insisted on taking Fuzzy Britches inside with him, apparently not trusting even ‘the code of the Galaxy’ too far. Captain Stone reduced the temperature of the entire ship down to a chilly twenty below; the flat cats, frustrated by the space suits and left on their own resources, gave up and began forming themselves into balls, like fur-covered grape fruit. They were then easy to gather in, easy to count, easy to store in the hold.
Nevertheless the Stones kept finding and incarcerating fugitives for the next several days.
XV — ‘INTER JOVEM ET MARTEM PLANETAM INTERPOSUI’
The great astronomer Kepler wrote: ‘Between Mars and Jupiter I put a planet.’ His successors devised a rule for planetary distances, called ‘Bode’s Law,’ which seemed to require a planet at precisely two and eight/tenths the distance from Sun to Earth, 2.8 astro units.
On the first night of the new nineteenth century the Monk Giuseppe Piazzi discovered a new heavenly body. It was the Asteroid Ceres — just where a planet should have been. It was large for an Asteroid, the largest in fact — diameter 485 miles. In the ensuing two centuries hundreds and thousands more were discovered, down to size of rocks. ‘The Asteroids’ proved a poor name; they were not little stars, nor were they precisely planetoids. It was early suggested that they were the remains of a once sizable planet and by the middle of the twentieth century mathematical investigation of their orbits seemed to prove it.
But it was not until the first men in the early days of the exploration of space actually went out to the lonely reaches between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and looked that we learned for certain that the Asteroids were indeed fragments of a greater planet — destroyed Lucifer, long dead brother of Earth.
As the Rolling Stone rose higher and ever higher above the Sun, she slowed, curved her path in, and approached the point where she would start to fall back toward the Sun. She was then at the orbit of Ceres and not far in front of that lady. The Stone had been in the region of the Asteroids for the past fifty million miles. The ruins of Lucifer are scattered over a wide belt of space; the Hallelujah Node was near the middle of that belt.