Earth and Air

The Fifth Element

In the slow dusk typical of the planet David carried the body back towards the camp. He was thinking not about its death, but about its name. Cat. Except for being roughly the right size it was nothing like a cat—a plump body covered with coarse gingery hair too sparse to conceal the folds and dewlaps of indigo flesh which sagged in a variety of curves according to the attitude the creature chose to lounge in. It was a not-quite-biped, with long forelimbs, three-fingered, and short hind limbs. It had no visible neck, but a hackle of black fur ran from its shoulders over the almost perfect sphere of its skull, stopping abruptly at the line which would have joined the centres of its round yellow eyes, whose double lids closed inwards from the sides. Its mouth was round too. It had no nose and no sense of smell, which made it one of the rare exceptions to the galactic norm of five senses for all higher creatures. (Not all had the same five, of course—the crew of David’s ship disposed of nine, between them.) But then Cat was hardly a crew member, only a pet or mascot, really. David had never heard of a ship that didn’t carry a Cat—that was odd, because he had never heard either of a Cat doing anything useful for a crew, and ships didn’t normally lug waste weight round the galaxy, even the odd four kilos of Cat’s body. It wasn’t a normal kind of superstition either, half-mocked and half-revered. You didn’t blame the Cat for a luckless voyage. You just took it along with you, and barely noticed it. By the time he reached the camp David was beginning to think that he should have noticed these oddities before. After all, it was his function to notice and remember facts and then to fit them into patterns.

He found a Bandicoot by the fire, curled asleep like an ammonoid fossil, but twitching violently with its dreams. Hippo was by the ship, rubbing her back against a support strut, like a cow scratching at a post.

“Hey, careful!” said David. “That strut’s designed for most shocks, but not for that.”

“Ooh, isn’t it?” said Hippo, vaguely. “Sorry. I forgot. I’m itchy.”

She trundled towards the fire and stood gazing pathetically at David with her large-fringed eyes, pinker than ever in the light of the flames. Hippo was better named than Cat. Coming from a large planet which was mostly glutinous swamp her species had evolved to a shape something like a terrestrial hippopotamus, only larger. Her head was different, with its big braincase and short prehensile trunk, but her eyes lay on its upper surface so that she tended to lower her head, as if shy, when talking to one. She was a lot of weight to ferry around, but less than her equivalent in tractors and carrying-machines; and she could seal off her huge lungs and work in vacuum conditions, or in noxious gases, for several hours at a time. Hippos came in a wide variety of colours. This one was pale yellow.

“Do you think I’m pregnant, Man?” she said. “That would be most inconvenient.”

The lowered head made her look as though she should have been blushing as she spoke. David snorted with suppressed laughter.

“I don’t think it’s likely, darling,” he said. “I know you go in for delayed implantation, but it must be a couple of years since you last went to a dance, isn’t it?”

“But it would be inconvenient, all the same?”

“Understatement of the century.”

Hippos were the kindest, gentlest, most lovable creatures David knew. This made their lifecycle seem even more horrifying than it was. At certain seasons on their native planet they would meet for a “dance”, a massive sexual thresh-about in the sludge, with all the males impregnating all the females, if possible. Then nothing happened till the wind was right and the weather was right, when the females would go through their incredibly brief pregnancy, which would end with their backs erupting into a series of vents and releasing a cloud of seedlike objects, each consisting of a hard little nut at the core which contained the foetus and a fluffy ball of sticky filaments surrounding it, the whole thing light enough to float on the wind like thistledown. These “seeds” seemed to have some instinct that drew them towards living flesh; those that failed to find any perished, but those that landed on a warm-blooded animal stuck there and burrowed in, completing their foetal development inside the host, supplying themselves with all their physical and chemical needs from the host’s organs. The host did not survive the process. The variety of possible hosts accounted for the different colours of Hippos.

David thought it extremely unlikely that this one was pregnant. For some reason he couldn’t at the moment recall the maximum known period between fertilization and birth, but it couldn’t possibly be two years. Surely not. But just supposing . . . the idea of surveying a planet in which Hippo spores might still be drifting on the wind made him shudder. And Hippo herself wouldn’t be much use till her back had healed. He decided to change the subject.

“I’m afraid Cat’s dead,” he said.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Hippo. “Where did you find him?”

“Out among the rocks over there. He must have been scrambling about and fallen, or something.”

“Are you sure he’s dead? Couldn’t Doc do anything?”

“I doubt it. He feels very dead to me.”

“Do go and fetch Doc, Man. Please”

“All right.”

Doc was in a bad mood. As David lifted his bucket off its gimbals he put a hooter out of the water and said, “I thought you told me this wasn’t an earthquake planet.”

“Nor it is.”

“Whole ship’s been jumping around like a . . . Hi! Careful! You’re going to spill me, you dry slob.”

David ignored him, but carried the bucket rapidly through the shuddering ship till he reached the entry port.

“Hippo” he yelled. “Stop that! You’ll have the ship over!”

Apologetically she moved away from the strut.

“Oh, I am sorry, Man,” she lowed. “The Bandy should have told me.”

“Didn’t notice,” squeaked the Bandicoot, awake now. “Why should I?”

“Where are the others, Bandy?” called David.

“Coming, coming,” shrilled the Bandicoot.

Bandicoots were a four-sexed species, deriving from a planet so harsh that it took many square miles to support a single specimen. They had evolved great telepathic powers in order to achieve occasional meetings of all four sexes, and this made them an ideal communications network on the many planets where mechanical systems were swamped by local radio stars. David had no idea why they were called Bandicoots—they looked more like armadillos on stilts—and even after years of companionship he couldn’t tell one from another. They could, of course, because the network only functioned at full strength when all four sexes took part. Their normal voices were far above David’s hearing-range; the twittering he could just hear was for them the deepest of basses.

“Here’s your patient, Doc,” he said, settling the bucket by Cat’s body.

Doc extended a pseudopod, shimmering orange with the firelight and green with its own luminescence, and made it flow up Cat’s spine. His hooter emerged from the water.

“Blunt instrument,” he said.

“Sure it wasn’t a fall?” said David.

“Course I am, you idiot. It takes more than a fall to kill a Cat. You have to know exactly how and where to hit. Somebody did.”

“Somebody?” said Hippo. “I thought there wasn’t anybody on this planet. Skunk said so.”

“How long ago, Doc?” said David. “Sure he’s dead?”

“I’m still looking. H’m.”

David had never much cared for Doc’s bedside manner, but had always trusted him totally, as all the crew had to trust each other. Now he wondered how, that time he was infested with green-fever larvae out round Delta Orion, he could have lain so calmly and let Doc extend his filaments all through his body, locating and destroying the little wrigglers and modifying David’s autoimmune system to produce antibodies against the bacteria they had carried. Doc was a sea anemone. The pseudopod he was using to explore Cat’s body was a specialized section of his digestive organs, and the filament tips were capable of recognizing at a touch the identity of all the microscopic particles which he needed for the endless process of renewing every cell in his body once a week. Almost all Doc’s life was taken up with the process of self-renewal, but he said it was worth the trouble because it made him immortal. It also made him a good doctor, when he could spare the time.

“Tsk, tsk,” he said. “Yes, dead as nails, whatever they are. About twenty minutes ago.”

“That’s not long,” said Hippo. “Can’t you patch him up?”

“I’d have a go if it was you, darling,” said Doc. “It’s not worth the effort for a Cat.”

“But you spent so much time looking after it,” said Hippo, pleadingly.

“It was a lousy hypochondriac.” said Doc. “I’ve got better things to do.”

“Coming, coming,” shrilled the Bandicoot.

“Hippo, get away from that strut,” said David. “Find a tree or something.”

“Trees on this planet are so feeble,” said Hippo. “I’ve used up all that lot.”

Through the remains of dusk David could see that the grove of primitive palms by which they had set up camp had considerably altered in outline. He remembered hearing a certain amount of splintering and crashing as he was walking back to camp.

“You’d better get Doc to have a look at you,” he said. “Doc, poor Hippo’s got an itchy back.”

“Never get through that ugly thick hide,” mumbled Doc “Got better things to do.”

“I know it’s nonsense, but I can’t help thinking I’m pregnant,” said Hippo.

“Get yourself an obstet . . . an obstet . . .” said Doc as he withdrew all but the limb of his pseudopod beneath the surface.

“Doc!” said David. “You aren’t eating Cat!”

“Oh, no!” said Hippo, with all the revulsion, normally suppressed in her case, of herbivores for meat eaters.

“Doc!” shouted David.

The hooter came an inch out of the water.

“Lot of good stuff in there,” said Doc, slurring the syllables until he was barely comprehensible. “No point wasting it. All these months, living on chemical soup.”

“What about the Hippocratic oath!” said David.

“Coming, coming!” shrieked the Bandicoot, rising and jigging like a sandhopper on its spindly legs. Its cry was answered by another from the sky, and a moment later, with the usual blur and buzz of wings, Bird settled at the edge of the ring of darkness. The second Bandicoot dropped from her back and jigged across to join the first.

“Bandy said to skim home,” said Bird in the metallic voice produced by moving one wing-case to make a flow of air and then modifying the flow with the sensitive leading edge of the wing itself.

“What’s up, Man?” she added. “The Bandy told you about the wreck?”

“No. And I didn’t say anything about bringing you home. The last my Bandy told me was about a seam of Sperrylite you thought you’d spotted. What kind of wreck? How old?”

Bird raised a wing-case and let it fall back, producing a sharp explosion like a mining blast. This was her form of swearing.

“I’ll chop him up and feed him to my husband,” she rasped.

She had met her “husband” in the larval stage, when they were both about three inches long, and after a brief, blind courtship had incorporated him in her body, where he now lay, like an extra gland, somewhere near the back of her four-foot thorax. Doc had once paid him a visit, out of curiosity, and said that there was still an intelligence there, of a sort, but that it spent all its time dreaming. He guessed that the dreams were nonrepresentational, but had never been able to interest Skunk or the Bandicoots in finding out. Bird was not merely a flying scout. She had evolved from a migratory species whose guidance system depended on their ability to sense the magnetic field of their planet with great accuracy; so now she was able, skimming on her gauzy wings above the surface of a strange planet, to map the irregularities where different metallic ores showed up. And in deep space she was like an old sailor with a weather eye, able to sense long before it registered on the instruments the coming of one of the particle-storms that could rush like a cyclone out of the apparently blank spaces between the stars.

“Yup, space wreck,” she said. “More than a month old, less than a year. Real mess. Didn’t go in, but my Bandy said he couldn’t feel anybody thinking down there. I was just going to skim in close when he told me to hurry home. I was coming, anyway, but what made him do that?”

“Nothing, except Cat’s dead.”

“Somebody killed him,” said Hippo.

“With a blunt instrument,” said David.

Bird made a contemptuous rustle with her wing-cases, and before the sound had ended Mole came snouting out of the earth beyond the fire, shaking soil from his pelt like a dog shaking off water. As the flurry of pellets pattered down, the third Bandicoot scrambled out of the capsule which Mole trailed behind him on his subterranean journeys and skittered off to join the other two. Now all three were hopping like hailstones on paving, and shrilling at each other in and out of the limits of David’s hearing range.

“What’s up?” growled Mole.

“Cat’s dead and I’m pregnant,” said Hippo.

“I don’t know why I bother,” said Mole. “Soon as this trip’s over I’m paying off and going home.”

He would have trouble finding it, thought David. Home for Mole was somewhere in the Ophiucus area, a planet—or rather an ex-planet—which had become detached from its sun and all of whose life-forms had evolved in a belt between the surface permafrost and the central fires.

“Home?” said Bird. “Yup. Good thinking. Count me in on payday.”

She clicked and tocked in a thoughtful way. Doc put his hooter up, sighed “Ho-o-o-o-ome,” and plopped back under.

Home. Why not? Earth. Clothed, soft-skinned bipeds. David was a rich man, in theory, by now. He could afford to retire, buy four or five young wives and a mother-in-law, and a nice little island . . .

The Whizzers cut the reverie short by slithering into the camp, bringing the last of the Bandicoots. At once all thought and talk were impossible in the frenzy of jigging and shrilling, until Bird turned on the four of them and drove them, with a series of fierce explosions, round to the far side of the ship. Meanwhile Skunk crawled down from the Whizzer he had been riding. The Whizzers were legless reptiles from a planet of crushing gravity. They were about seven feet long and three feet wide, but less than a foot high, and on planets less massive than their own they could carry reasonable weights over almost any surface at speeds of up to sixty miles an hour. They flowed. David seldom got the chance to ride one, because his function was to stay at base and coordinate information with his own stored knowledge; but sometimes, when he needed to see something with his own eyes, a Whizzer had taken him and he had found the ride as much fun as surf boarding. Despite being hermaphrodites, Whizzers paired for life. They were deeply religious.

Skunk was also a hermaphrodite and legless, but otherwise nothing like a Whizzer—slow, sightless, a nude blob, corrugated with scent glands. He could synthesize and aim a jet of any odour he wished. He could stun even Hippo with a stink, provided her nostril was unsealed. On the anniversary of David’s first joining the crew Skunk had presented him with a smell which was all the pleasures of his life, remembered and forgotten, linked into ten minutes of ecstasy. Skunk knew what odours to produce because he was a telepath, not in the style of the Bandicoots, but able to sense the minutest variations of emotion: thus he could attract or repel, numb or excite, at will. David had seen him organize the slaves of a fully functioning mine in Altair to load the ship with jade while their trance-held guards watched impotent. That had been a rich trip, if risky. Pity they’d had to trade the loot for fuel at a way station . . . Skunk had almost total power except over creatures such as Cats, which had no sense of smell. He could be any colour he chose. He could feel danger long before David could analyse it. Surface-scouting on a new planet was always done by a team of two Whizzers, one Bandicoot, and Skunk.

“The Bandicoot said we were to return,” hissed one of the Whizzers. “What new providence has the Lord effected?”

“I don’t know,” said David. “I think that the Bandicoots just wanted to get together.”

“Listen to them,” said Mole.

“Disgusting,” said the Whizzers.

“A very untidy relationship,” said Bird, smugly.

“Dear little things,” said Hippo.

“Hippo, get away from that strut,” said David.

“Sorry,” said Hippo. “You know, I really am pregnant.”

“You and who else?” said Bird. “You aren’t the only female in these parts, remember. There’s me, too, and several halves and quarters.”

“But it’s important,” said Hippo.

“It’s hysterical,” snapped Bird. “Get Doc to check. He’ll tell you.”

“Doc’s drunk,” said David. “He’s found some substance in Cat’s body . . . But if Hippo does give birth it means she’ll produce a cloud of seeds which float about until they stick to a living body—then they burrow in and eat it out from the inside.”

“Charming,” said Bird. “What happens if they land on another Hippo?”

“Why do you think they’ve evolved that hide, and the ability to seal off?” said David.

“Well, we’ll just have to copy her,” said Bird. “Get inside the ship, seal off, and wait till the happy event is over.”

“But you can’t do that,” said Hippo. “What about my babies? What will they eat?”

“Oh, they’ll find something,” said Bird.

“But was it not revealed to Brother/Sister Skunk that the Lord has not yet seen fit to bring forth warm-blooded creatures upon this planet?” said one Whizzer.

“Infinite is His mercy. Strange are His ways,” said the other.

David started trying to work out whether Hippo could bust her way into the ship. His analysis wouldn’t cohere. He didn’t know how much extra strength to allow for the desperation of maternal feelings, and all the other constants seemed to be slithering around. Then, in the middle of this mess, a wholly irrelevant point struck him. He ought to have seen it before.

“That means one of us killed Cat,” he said.

There was a sudden silence, apart from the climax of shrilling beyond the ship. Strange are His ways, thought David.

“Yes. Man,” said Skunk in his laboriously produced groan. “Something. Odd . . . Cat. Dead . . . Must. Know. How . . . Why?”

“Sorry, I can’t help,” said David. “I don’t know.”

“Come off it,” snapped Bird. “You’ve got to know. That’s what you’re there for, to classify and analyse information. That’s why we bother to cart you around with us—it’s your function.”

“I’m afraid I’m not functioning very well today,” said David.

“Feeling all right?” hooted Doc. “Like me to have a squint inside you?”

“Not on your life,” said David. “I’m fine. Only . . .”

“Only you’re not kissing well going to bother,” said Bird.

“Sister Bird,” hissed the Whizzers. “You must modify your language or we desert.”

There was a moment of shock. Nobody ever deserted. Nobody ever joked about it. By the same token Bird always remembered not to swear in front of the Whizzers.

“Yet the Lord has revealed to Brother/Sister Skunk that the duty has fallen on us to discover how and why Brother Cat was called to his Maker,” said one Whizzer.

“Blessed is His name,” said the other.

“All right,” said Mole, “let’s go along with that. We can all analyse a bit, I suppose. We don’t have Men around at home, do we? Doc, sober up and pay attention. Bird, go and see if the Bandies have finished whatever it is they do . . .”

David withdrew into himself. He was not Man, he was David. He felt enormous reluctance to take part in analytic processes. It didn’t matter who had killed Cat, or why, and the others were only discussing it because Skunk said it was important—they were accepting Skunk’s dictum out of habit, because they were used to the idea of Skunk being right about that sort of thing, just as they were used to the idea of Bird being right about the threat of a particle-storm. Those were part of their functions but it didn’t mean that Skunk was in command—no one was, or they all were. They collected information through their nine senses, relayed it if necessary through the Bandicoots, and David collated it with what he knew and interpreted the resulting probabilities. Then, always till now, it had become clear what they should do next, and there had been no point on taking a vote, or even discussing the issue. They were a crew, a unit like a beehive or a termite nest. They had lost their previous Hippo because they’d landed on a quaking planet and the only way to take off from its jellylike surface was for that Hippo (a young one, male, mauve) to hold the ship upright from the outside while they blasted clear. At the time it had seemed sad, but not strange, to leave poor Hippo roasted there, and Hippo seemed to think so too. The Whizzers had sung a hymn as they’d blasted off, he remembered. But now . . .

Now he sat in the ring of creatures round the campfire and felt no oneness with them. They were aliens. They squeaked and boomed and lowed and rasped in words he could scarcely understand, though they were all speaking standard English. The fire reflected itself from the facets of Bird’s eyes: her mandibles clashed like punctuation marks in the flapping talk from her wing-cases. Doc had withdrawn his pseudopod from Cat’s drained body and the surface of his water was frothy with the by-products of his feast. The Bandicoots had joined the circle and were engrossed in the talk, all four heads perking this way and that as if joined by a crank-rod. The Whizzers lay half folded together, like a pair of clasped hands. Mole had absentmindedly dug himself down and was listening with his elbows at ground level and his snout resting on his little pink palms with their iron-coloured claws Skunk, too, had forgotten himself enough to be producing vague whiffs and stinks, as if trying to supplement the difficult business of speech with the communication system he used among his own kind.

I belong on Earth, thought David. What am I doing here? Being part of a crew, that’s what. But what is the crew doing here? Prospecting, with a bit of piracy when the chance offers, that’s what. But why? Why any longer? He was rich—they all were, enormously rich in the currency of their home planets. Or were they? All those claims. Were they valid? Had anyone exploited them? That jade, hijacked in Altair—a share of that would have been enough to buy David twenty wives and islands for all of them, but without argument they had traded it for less than a thousandth of its value in fuel—to what end? More exploration, more claims . . .

David knew all this quite well. It was part of his memory—of all their memories—and there had seemed to be quite good reasons for it at the time. None of them had been the real reason, the need to stay together as a crew . . . And now the knowledge and the memory were strange, as strange as the ring of aliens who had fallen silent and were staring at him—those that had eyes to stare with.

“Man,” groaned Skunk. “Why. You. Kill. Cat?”

David barely understood the blurred syllables.

“Me?” he said. “Oh, rubbish. And my name’s David.”

“Come off it,” clattered Bird. “It’s got to be you. Doc was in his bucket, with no transport. Hippo was with the base-camp Bandy.”

“The base-camp Bandy was asleep,” said David. “Hippo could have done it.”

“Do you really think so?” said Hippo.

“No. Go on, Bird.”

“The rest of us were scouting, none alone. You were alone. You left the camp. Why?”

“I wanted to go over to the rocks. I can’t remember why.”

“Not functioning again?”

“I suppose so.”

“Two possibilities suggest themselves. Either you are suffering brain damage, which would account for your failure to function, and your killing Cat, and your not remembering that you had done so or why you went to the rocks. Or you are functioning, killed Cat for your own reasons and are concealing this by pretending not to function.”

“That’s easy to check,” said David. “Ask the Bandies. Am I functioning, Bandies?”

The eight eyes swivelled towards him on short stalks.

“Yesyesyesyes,” shrilled the Bandicoots. “Man’s functioning fine.”

It was true. The hesitation, the slither, the blur of thought of the last two hours had been sucked away like mist sucked off autumn meadows by the sun, leaving the normal clarity of instant connections, of each detail of knowledge and experience available at the merest whisper of a wish. Except that in this shadowless illumination David could see for the first time that the state was not normal. It was what he was used to, yes; but for a member of the genus homo sapiens it was abnormal. The sapience had been distorted into grotesque growth, like the udder of a dairy cow.

“OK, I’m functioning now,” he said. “But was I functioning when you got back to camp, Bandies?”

“Don’t remember,” they said. “Busybusybusy.”

“Are we sure it matters?” said Hippo. “We’ve only lost a Cat, and look, we’ve got another one,”

David saw their heads turn, but himself, caught in the rapture of returned illumination, barely glanced at the newcomer crouching at the fringe of the circle of firelight. A large Cat, almost twice the size of the old one, sidled towards Doc’s bucket, trailing one hind leg. It had a fresh wound in its shoulder. As Doc’s glimmering pseudopod rose and attached itself to the wound, David placed these new facts in their exact locations on the harsh-lit landscape of his knowledge.

“Yes, it matters,” he said. “Skunk was right. It matters immensely to all of us. Look at me. Did I kill Cat?”

He willed their attentions away from the wounded Cat and onto him.

“All right,” he said. “You be the jury. You decide, You aren’t my peers, any of you, because we’re all so different, but we’ve got one thing in common which is more important than any difference. Now, listen. Think. There isn’t much time. What’s happened since sunset? Up to then we were all functioning normally. The survey parties were out. The reports were coming in, everything as usual. Then, just as it began to get dark, Bird found a wreck, and her Bandy didn’t report it. Instead all three Bandies told their parties to come home. About the same time I got an urge to visit the rocks, where I found Cat’s body. 1 got back and found Hippo scratching herself on a support strut and saying that she was pregnant. If that was true, it meant that she had delayed implantation for an incredible length of time. Next, Doc started eating Cat, instead of trying to restore him to life; he also complained about his hypochondria. Hippo was shocked, though she normally manages not to worry about the carnivores in the crew. As soon as Mole got back he started saying he wanted to go home, and Bird and Doc said the same, and the Bandicoots went into their mating behaviour, which they’ve never done before when we’ve been landed—though it’s only natural that they should—the presence of a four is immensely stimulating to Bandies—and Bird swore in front of the Whizzers and the Whizzers complained, and I realized I’d stopped functioning . . . How are you feeling, Hippo?”

“How kind of you to ask,” said Hippo, incapable of irony. “Yes, I’m afraid I may have been a wee bit careless and let myself get . . .

you know what. I think I’ll probably pop later tonight, but if you all get aboard and close the ports and I go downwind you’ll be quite safe. My poor darlings will just have to take their chance.”

“Remember what she was saying twenty minutes ago?” said David.

“The Lord has changed her heart,” said a Whizzer.

“Infinite is His mercy,” said the other one.

“Do you still want to go home, Bird?” said David.

“Come off it. I notice you don’t ask old Mole. Just because I’m female you pick on me for a moment of nostalgia, as if I was a brainless ninny all the time.”

“But you’re back to normal now? You too, Mole? And the Bandies? And me. But it isn’t normal. We’re all behaving in ways which are unnatural for our species. We’re suppressing some parts of our behaviour and exaggerating other parts. It isn’t normal for me to act like a fault-free computer. My brain has computer like abilities, but in order to function as a crew member I’ve had to adapt them. It isn’t normal for Bandies not to mate whenever four of them meet, but they’ve suppressed that side of their behaviour. It’s the same with all of us. Now think of the order of events: Cat dies; we stop being a crew and become individuals; a new Cat turns up and we start being something like a crew again; only this new Cat is badly wounded and not paying proper attention, which is why we have still got a little time left.”

David glanced towards the bucket. The water level, which had at first perceptibly sunk was steady now. As soon as it started to rise it would mean that Doc was beginning to withdraw his substance from the Cat’s body.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you remember that load of jade we hijacked round Altair? We could all have retired on that, but we didn’t. Instead we got rid of it at the first opportunity, for a ludicrous price. Why? Because it would have broken us up as a crew, and we’ve got to stay as a crew, not for our own sake but for Cat’s. The Cat is a parasitic species. I don’t know anything about natural Cat behaviour, which is interesting, considering that I’ve got all your details stored away, but my bet is that on their own planet Cats are parasitic on lower animals. When the first explorers reached their planet they simply adapted them into the system, and now the function of a space crew is to provide a safe environment for a Cat.”

“It wasn’t safe for our Cat,” said Mole.

“It was almost safe. Between us we could control any normal dangers, except one. You missed a point in your analysis, you know. Doc said that if you’re going to kill a Cat you have to know exactly where to hit. The only crew members who might have known were Doc and myself. Doc couldn’t have got to the rocks, and I’ve already told you I don’t know much about Cats, because our Cat never allowed me to. But there’s one other creature who would have known, one creature whom neither Skunk nor the Bandies would have detected when they were feeling for traces of higher life on this planet. That’s another Cat which survived the space wreck. A Cat large enough to ambush and kill our Cat despite a broken leg. Our Cat must have fought and wounded it, in the shoulder: our Cat must also somehow have mentally sent for me as the fight began, which was why I went out to the rocks, but I was too late.”

David glanced at the bucket again. The water level had risen halfway to its normal level and the strange Cat was stirring.

“We’ve got to be quick,” he said. “There’s no time left. In a moment this new Cat will take us over. But we don’t have to give in. Cats don’t have total control. This one had to hang around and wait for the Bandies to finish their mating pattern, because that was an urge too powerful to be interrupted once it had begun. I don’t think Cats are very intelligent—they don’t have to be, because we do their thinking for them. But now we are aware what they do to us, I believe that we’ve got the will power and intelligence to resist the control, long enough to get clear. We can go home, find out if any of our claims are valid, and if they are we can retire. Surely we can cooperate that long, without being forced to by a Cat? You’ve got to make up your minds. Now, at once. That is part of the analysis. What’s your verdict?”

The new Cat quivered, shook itself, and stood up by the bucket. Fresh scar tissue showed on its shoulder—so Doc had done a rushed job. The Cat took a pace towards the fire. If only it had a sense of smell, Skunk could have controlled it, But it hadn’t. That too was part of the analysis.

“Quick. What’s your verdict?” hissed David.

He felt the pressure of their attentions focused on him.

“Guilty,” groaned Skunk. “Man. Guilty. Of. Mutiny.”

David was only for an instant conscious of the blast of odour that laid him out.

He woke some time after midnight. The embers were dim, but gave just enough light for him to see that the ship’s port was closed. Hippo was crashing around in the remains of the ruined grove. David rose, intending to go and say good-bye, but his legs walked him away from her—just as, a few hours back, they had walked him for no good reason towards the rocks. He was ceasing to function, but his normal intelligence was sound enough to tell him that he could never rejoin the crew, any crew, because his knowledge of the behaviour of Cats would henceforth be part of his memory and thus part of his function. He would not be able to perform his tasks without being aware of why he was doing so.

As the harsh clarity of thought faded into softer textures, full of vaguenesses and shadows, David became conscious of the planet around him, of the sweetness of its air, of the rustle of primitive leathery leaves, of the ticking insect life that might one day evolve towards a creature like Bird. He had known all these things, of course, soon after the ship had landed, but known them merely as facts—the chemical composition of the air, the level of evolution of plant and insect—and not as sensations, accepted and relished through channels other than those of the intellect.

Behind him the sound of splintering timber ceased. From vast lungs came a strange whinnying noise, dying into a long sigh. David realized he had been walking downwind from Hippo. His legs continued to do so. Breeze at, say, six kph—at any rate a little faster than he had been walking. He had about a kilometer start, so the seed cloud should reach him in . . . His mind refused to tackle even that simple sum, because it kept slithering off into irrelevancies, such as the sudden thought that Cats had five senses after all; and that they were more intelligent that he had guessed; and, to judge by their revenges, more catlike.