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  Rerne’s Clan lived to the north. And this man, because of his youth, must be one of the two brothers whose discovery of the ill-fated Fauklow expedition was still something of a saga in the port city. Troy fingered the belt from which no knife hung. Even a subcitizen could seldom hope for a chance to penetrate the Wild. The trackers, foresters, woodsmen themselves all came of lesser families allied by old ties to the Clans. Yet he was going with Rerne in two days’ time!

  FOUR

  The news flash came during the slack time at the shop. Those visitors who favored the afternoon had gone, and the evening strollers were not yet abroad. Kyger had retreated to his office; his employees gathered for their evening meal. Troy balanced a plate on his knee in the courtyard. Through the window vent over his head he could hear the mechanical recitation of the day’s events over Kyger’s com.

  “—the so-far unexplainable and sudden death of Sattor Commander Varan Di.”

  Troy stopped chewing. Two feet away stood the flitter, and right now there was a box resting in it intended for the hillside villa of Sattor Commander Varan Di, a special shipment of food for the Commander’s pet.

  “—resigned from the overlordship of the Council during the previous year,” continued the drone from within. “But his years of experience led him to agree to continue as consultant on special problems. It is rumored that he was acting at present as adviser on the terms of the Treaty of Panarc Five. This has been neither confirmed nor denied by government spokesmen. Statement issued by the Council: ‘It is with deep regret—’”

  The monotone of the com snapped into a silence, the more noticeable because of that sudden break. Troy went on eating. The death, “unexplainable and sudden” as the com had it, of a retired military leader and former Council lord now had very little to do with Troy Horan. Ten years ago—again Troy’s hand paused on its way to his mouth—ten years ago matters might have been different. It had been Varan Di who had arbitrarily decided to make a military depot for Sattor-class ships out of Norden. Not that that made any difference now.

  “Horan!” Kyger came to the courtyard entrance. Troy put down his plate, noting small signs of irritation in his employer. “Take the flitter up to the Di villa and deliver that package.”

  Well, Troy supposed, eating, even for a pet, went on when the master was dead. But why the rush to send him now—and why him at all? The yardman usually took the flitter out on such errands. But this was no time to ask questions. He folded his long legs into the driver’s seat, made a creditable lift from the courtyard.

  The journey tape had already been set for the trip; he had nothing to do but take off and land, and be ready to assume manual control if any remote emergency arose. In the meantime he settled back in the cramped seat to enjoy this small time of privacy and ease.

  The golden haze, which was Korwar’s fair-weather sky, somehow reminded him of Rerne and the promised trip into the Wild. Troy had taken time twice that afternoon, after the Hunter had left, to visit the fussel. And on the second inspection the big bird had stirred on his perch and stretched his wings, which was a very encouraging sign. The fussel was male, perhaps two years old, so just entering the best training age. Wild as he had been when loosed from the traveling cage, he had not struck at Troy, as he had attempted to do at both Kyger and the assisting yardman, which could—or might—mean that the bird would be willing to ride with Horan.

  “Lane warning—lane warning!” The words spat from the mike on the control board, a light flashing in additional emphasis.

  Troy looked up. A patroller hung poised, as the fussel might poise, over the flitter, ready to swoop for the kill.

  “Identify yourself!” came the order Troy expected.

  He pushed the button that would report to the law the destination and reason for the errand as it appeared on his journey tape, expecting instructions to take manuals and sheer off. If the patrollers were investigating a suspicious death, they would not allow him to set down at the Di villa.

  But surprisingly enough he was told to proceed. Nor was he challenged again as the flitter settled before the service quarters of the late Sattor Commander’s mountainside retreat.

  Like all Korwar aristocrats, Varan Di had constructed a dwelling on a plan native to another world, choosing for a model the stark simplicity of the Pa-ta-du of the sea mountains of Qwan. Even a growth of pink-gray lace bushes could not disguise the rugged wall posts, though their softening color was reflected by the sheets of barmush shell that formed the wall surfaces between those posts. Troy tried to estimate the number of credits that must have been spent to import posts, shell sheets, and doubtless all the rest from across stellar space. And he doubted if it all could have been done on the legal pay of either a sattor commander or a Council lord’s post.

  He pulled the case of food out of the flitter, shouldered it, and turned toward the delivery port of the villa. Men were moving in the garden, patrollers’ uniforms very much in evdence. Their attention appeared to be centered on a small structure half hidden by an artificial grouping of plume trees, a structure as architecturally different from the villa it accompanied as the fussel was from a bob-chit. In place of shell-post walls, translucent, this was a solid block of stone, cut and set with precision, but also giving the impression of a primitive erection from some prespace-flight civilization thousands of years removed in time from the larger house.

  A man came out of its doorway, and Troy stopped short. Just as the invisible touch of exploration had alerted him in the warehouse, so now did a feeling within him answer a new, voiceless cry for help. The sensation of terror and, beyond that terror, the breathless need to convey some vital information struck into his mind almost as a physical blow. And without conscious thinking he answered that plea with an unvoiced query in return: “What—where—how—?”

  The man who had come from the stone-walled garden house twisted and made a grab into the air as something wriggled from his clutch and sprang into the nearest plume tree. Only an agitation of foliage marked its path from there to the villa—or was it toward Troy? A tree branch bobbed and from it a small body flung itself in a crazy leap through the air.

  Troy put down the box just in time to take the shock of that weight landing on his shoulder. A prehensile tail curled about his neck, small legs clutched him frenziedly, and he put up an arm to enfold a small, trembling, softly furred animal. A round, broad head butted against him, as if the creature were trying to ball into a refuge. Troy stroked the thick yellow-brown fur soothingly.

  “Kill—” No one had spoken that word aloud; it flashed into his mind, and with it a wavering, oddly shaped picture of a man crumpled in a chair. Troy shook his head and the picture was gone. But the fear in the animal in his arms remained alive and strong.

  “Danger—” Yes, that got across. Danger not only for the creature he held, but for others—men—

  The man who had lost this animal was hurrying forward, and two of the patrollers also made their way purposefully toward Troy. In that same moment he knew that he intended to protect the thing he held, even against the weight of Korwar’s law.

  “Sooooo—” He made the same soothing sound Kyger had used with the cats, stroking the furred back gently. The butting of the head against his chest was now not so violent. And Troy tried to establish a contact promising protection and aid. What he was doing, or why and how he could do it, did not matter now—that he was able to establish the contact did.

  “Who are you?”

  Troy settled the still-shivering animal more firmly into the hollow between shoulder and arm and looked with very little favor at his questioner. “Horan.” He pointed with his chin at the flitter, with the shop name clearly lettered on its body. “From Kyger’s.”

  One of the patrollers cleared his throat and then spoke with a deferential note that suggested the importance of the civilian interrogating Troy. “That’s the animal and bird importer, Gentle Homo. I believe that the Sattor Commander purchased this thing there—”<
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  The man he addressed was harsh-faced, flat-eyed. He stared at Troy as if he presented some very elemental problem that could be speedily solved—not particularly to the problem’s advantage.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Troy touched with the toe of his boot the box he had just set down. “Delivery, Gentle Homo. Special food for the Commander’s pet.”

  The flat-eyed man looked to the second patroller and that individual nodded. “It was referenced for today, Gentle Homo. Special imported food for the—the—” He hesitated over the unfamiliar name before he offered it. “The kinkajou.”

  “The what?” his superior demanded. “What kind of an outlandish, other-sun thing—?”

  “It is Terran, Gentle Homo,” his second underling answered with a small flash of importance. “Very rare. The Sattor Commander was quite excited about it.”

  “Kinkajou—Terran—” The officer advanced a step or two as he tried to see more of the animal clinging to Troy. “But what was it doing rummaging through the Sattor Commander’s desk if it is just an animal? Do you have an answer for that?”

  “Danger!” Troy did not need that flash of warning from the creature in his arms. It was plain to read in the whole stance of the man before him.

  “Many animals are very curious, Gentle Homo.” Troy sought to divert the officer. “Do not Korwarian kattans open any package they can lay claws upon?”

  The voluble patroller was nodding assent to that. And Troy pushed a little further. “Animals also imitate the actions of men with whom they are closely associated, Gentle Homo. The kinkajou may have been following the routine of the Sattor Commander. What else could it be? Surely it would not be doing so for a purpose—” But, Troy guessed now, that must have been what the creature was doing when caught. Did this officer have more exact knowledge of that fact?

  “Possible,” the other conceded. “Just to make sure that there shall be no more such mischief, you will take this kinkajou with you and return it to Kyger. He shall be responsible for it until the investigation into the Sattor Commander’s death is completed. Tell him the Commandant of the West Sector orders it.”

  “It is done, Gentle Homo.”

  Troy tried to put the kinkajou into the flitter first, before he replaced the box. But the animal refused to loose its hold upon him. In addition, rising above the fear it conveyed to him, there was again that urgency, an urgency that was clearly connected with the stone house in the garden. The kinkajou wanted him to return it to that building until it finished some task, protecting it meanwhile from his own kind. But to that he dared not agree. For the first time the animal gave tongue, uttering sharp, chittering cries, as if so it could enforce the volume of their silent communication.

  “Get aloft!”

  The Commandant had gone back to the garden house, and the patrollers moved in on Troy. He had no wish to have them turn ugly. Somehow he managed to tip the box back into the flitter, the kinkajou protesting the retreat bitterly—though Troy noted it made no attempt to leave him.

  Once they were aloft again, the animal quieted down, apparently accepting defeat. Seated in Troy’s lap, its tail curled about one of his arms as if for reassurance and support, it surveyed the world of the sky through which they flew with what might have been taken for intelligent interest. But it made no more attempts to reason with him.

  When the flitter set down in the court of Kyger’s establishment, the kinkajou moved to the cabin door, patted it with front paws, and looked to Troy entreatingly, every line of its rounded body expressing eagerness to be free. He caught at the prehensile tail, having no wish to see the creature escape by one of its spectacular leaps. Leaving the flyer and grasping his indignant captive firmly, Troy went toward his employer’s office.

  Kyger appeared at the corridor door, and when he saw the squirming animal in Troy’s hold, he halted nearly in mid-step. Again Troy caught that spark of unease which he had detected in the meeting between the ex-spacer and Rerne.

  “What happened?” Kyger’s tone was as usual. He stepped back into his office and Troy accepted the tacit invitation to enter. The escape attempts of the kinkajou were at an end again. Once more the animal pushed against Horan’s chest as if in mute plea for protection. But the mental contact had utterly ceased.

  Swiftly and tersely, as a serviceman giving a report to a superior officer, Troy outlined what had happened at the Di villa. But he made no mention of the odd contact with the kinkajou. He had early learned in the hard school of the Dipple that knowledge could be both a weapon and a defense, and something as nebulous and beyond reason as his odd mental meeting with two different species of Terran life he preferred to keep to himself—at least until he knew Kyger better.

  Kyger made no move to separate the clinging animal from Horan but sat down in the eazi-rest. His fingers rubbed up and down the scar seam before his ear.

  “That’s a valuable specimen,” he remarked mildly when Troy had done. “You were right to bring it back here. Curious as a ffolth sand borer. There was no reason for the law to upset it to the point of hysteria! Put it in the empty end cage in the animal room, give it some water and a few quagger nuts, and leave it alone.”

  Troy followed orders, but once at the cage he had some difficulty in detaching the kinkajou. The animal appeared to accept Horan as a refuge in the midst of a chancy world, and he had to pry paws and tail loose from their hold on him. As he closed the cage door, the captive rolled itself into a tight ball in the corner farthest from the light, presenting only a stubborn hump of furred back to the world.

  During the few days he had been at Kyger’s, Troy had come to look forward to the early hours of the night when he was left alone in the interior of the main buildings. He made two watch rounds according to his orders. But each night before he napped, he had his own visiting pattern. The fussel hawk, the blue-feathered cubs that always greeted him with reaching paws and joyous squeaks, and several other favorites were then his alone. Tonight he came also to the kinkajou cage. From the appearance of that furred ball still wedged into the far corner, the creature had not moved from the position it had assumed when he first put it there.

  Deliberately Troy tried mental contact, suggesting friendship, a desire for better understanding. But if the kinkajou received those suggestions, it neither acknowledged nor reacted to them. Disappointed, Troy left the room after setting the com broadcaster.

  When he stretched out on his bunk, he tried to fit one event of the day to another. But when he remembered Rerne and the other’s request for his services in testing the fussel in the Wild, Troy drifted into a daydream, which, in a very short interval, became a real dream.

  Troy rolled over, his shoulder bringing up against the wall with a smart rap, his head turning fretfully. There was a thickness behind his eyes, which was not quite a pressure of pain, only a dull throb. He opened his eyes. The dial of the time-keeper faced him, and the hour marked there was well past the middle of the night—though not quite time for his round. But as long as he was now thoroughly awake, he might as well make it.

  He sat up, pulled on his half boots. Then he pressed his fingertips gently to his temples. The dull feeling in his head persisted, and it was not normal. In fact—

  Troy’s hand flashed to the niche above the head of his bunk, scooping up the weapon that lay waiting there.

  Though he had never experienced that particular form of attack before, his wits were now alert enough to supply him with one possible explanation. With the stunner in his hand, he walked as noiselessly as he could to the doorway, peered out into the subdued lighting of the corridor.

  To his right was Kyger’s office, thumb-sealed as usual. And there had been no betraying sound from the com. No betraying sound! But a lack of normal sounds can be as enlightening! Troy had become accustomed to the small twitters, clicks, chattering subcomplaints of the night hours—a myriad of sounds that issued normally from the cage rooms.

  The dull pressure in his own hea
d, together with the absence of those same twitters, clicks, chatters, spelled only one thing. There was a “sleeper” in operation somewhere on the premises—the illegal gadget that could lull into unconsciousness living things not shielded from its effect on the middle ear. And a sleeper was not the tool of a man who had any legitimate business here. It must be turned low enough to handle the animals but not to stun Horan himself into unconsciousness—why?

  Troy tested Kyger’s sealed office doorway with one hand, the stunner ready in the other. The panel refused to move, so at least that lock had not been forced. He slipped along the wall, paused by the tank room. The gurgle of flowing water, the plop of an aquarium inhabitant—nothing else. The marine things appeared not to have succumbed to the sleeper either.

  Horan crossed to the animal room. Again no sound at all—which was doubly suspicious. Inside that door was the alert signal, which would arouse the yardmen and ring straight through to Kyger’s quarters. Troy edged about the mesh door, his back against the wall, his free hand going to that knob, ready to push it flat.

  “Danger!”

  Again that word burst in his brain with the force of a full-lunged scream in his ear. He half turned, and a blast of pure, flaming energy cut so close that he cried out involuntarily at the searing bite of its edge against the line of his chin. Half blinded by the recent glare, Troy snapped the stunner beam at the dark shape arising from the floor and threw himself in a roll halfway across the room.

  Troy shot another beam at a black blot in the doorway. But the paralyzing ray seemed to have no effect in even slowing up his attacker. Before Troy could find his feet, the other had made the corridor, and then Troy heard the metallic clang of the outer door. Horan stumbled across the room, slammed his hand upon the alarm signal, heard the clamor tear the unnatural silence of the cage room to shreds. Perhaps the aroused yard guard would be able to catch the fugitive now in the open.