“It’s ancient Babylonian or something like that,” Alyson told him. “He was kind of a god; there’s a whole long story about him. I just liked the name, and he looked so scraggly and helpless when he adopted us, I thought maybe he could use a fancy name. But most of the time I just call him Gil anyway.”
“Is George short for anything?” the boy asked. George was her other cat, a placid Siamese. George was in some other part of the house.
“No, he’s just George. He looks so elegant, I didn’t think he needed a very special name.”
“Gilgamesh, you ought to pay more attention to George,” the boy said. “He’s a real cat; he acts like a cat would really act. You don’t see him sitting on top of horror shows and acting weird.”
“George gets up on the television set too, but he just goes to sleep,” Alyson said.
The cat, Gilgamesh, blinked at them and slowly lay down again, spreading himself carefully across the top of the TV set. He didn’t look at them.
“Do you mean Gil could be just hypnotizing us to think he’s a cat?” Alyson asked. “Or do you suppose he took over the body of a real cat when he arrived here on Earth?”
“Either way,” Freddie said. “It’s how he acts that’s the tip-off. He doesn’t act like a cat would. Hey, Gil, you really ought to study George—he knows what it’s all about.”
Gilgamesh lay still, eyes closed. They watched the movie, and after it, the late news. An announcer jokingly reported that strange lights had been seen in the skies over Watsonville, and he asked the TV weatherman if he could explain them. The weatherman said, “We may have a new wave of flying saucers moving in from the Pacific.” Everybody in the studio laughed.
Gilgamesh jumped off the television set and left the room.
Freddie’s Saturday morning began at eight o’clock with the “World News Roundup of the Week.” He opened one eye cautiously and saw an on-the-spot reporter interviewing the families of three sky divers whose parachutes had failed to open.
Freddie was about to go downstairs for breakfast when the one woman reporter in the group smilingly announced that Friday night, at 11:45 P.M., forty-two people had called the studio to report a flying-saucer sighting. One man, the owner of a fish store, referred to “a school of saucers.” The news team laughed, but Freddie’s heartbeat quickened.
It took him twenty minutes to get through to Alyson, and when she picked up the phone, he was caught unprepared, with a mouthful of English muffin.”
“Hello? Hello?”
“Mmgfghmf.”
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Chrglfmhph.”
“Oh, my goodness! Mom! I think it’s one of those obscene calls!” She sounded deliriously happy. But she hung up. Freddie swallowed and dialed again.
“Boy, am I glad it’s you,” Alyson said. “Listen, you’ve got to come right over—it’s been one incredible thing after another ever since you left last night. First, the saucers—did you hear about them?—and then Gil freaking out, then a real creepy obscene telephone call.”
“Hold it, hold it,” Freddie said. “I’ll meet you back of the house in five minutes.”
When he got there, Alyson was lying stomach down on the lawn, chewing a blade of grass. She looked only slightly more calm than she sounded.
“Freddie,” she said almost tragically. “How much do you know?”
“About as much as the next guy.”
“No, seriously—I mean about the saucers last night. Did you see them?”
“I was asleep. Did you?”
“See them! I practically touched them.” She looked deep into his eyes. “But Freddie, that’s not the important part.”
“What is? What?”
“Gilgamesh. I seriously believe he’s having a nervous breakdown. I hate to think of what else it could be.” She got up. ‘Wait right here. I want you to see this.”
Freddie waited, a collage of living-color images dancing in his head: enemy sky divers, a massacred school of flying saucers, shape-changing spies from Arcturus… .
Alyson came back holding a limp Gilgamesh over her arm.
“He was in the litter pan,” she said significantly. “He was covering it up.”
“Covering what up?”
“His doo-doo, silly.”
Freddie winced. There were moments when he wished Alyson were a bit more liberated.
Gilgamesh settled down on Alyson’s lap and purred frantically.
“He has never, not once before, covered it up,” she insisted. “He always gets out of the box when he’s finished and scratches on the floor near it. George comes along eventually and does it for him.”
Gilgamesh licked one paw and applied it to his right ear. It was a highly adorable action, one that never failed to please. He did it twice more—lick, tilt head, rub; lick, tilt head, rub —then stopped and looked at Freddie out of the corner of his eye.
“You see what I mean?” Alyson said. “Do you know what that look means?”
“He’s asking for approval,” said Freddie. “No doubt about it. He wants to know if he did it right.”
“Exactly!”
Gilgamesh tucked his head between his white paws and closed his eyes.
“He feels that he’s a failure,” Alyson interpreted.
“Right.”
Gilgamesh turned over on his back, let his legs flop, and began to purr. His body trembled like a lawn mower standing still.
Freddie nodded. “Overdone. Everything he does is self-conscious.”
“And you know when he’s not self-conscious? When he’s staring. But he doesn’t look like a cat then, either.” “What did he do last night, when the saucers were here?”
Alyson sat up straight; Gilgamesh looked at her suspiciously.
“He positively freaked,” she said. “He took one look and his tail bushed out and he arched his back… .”
“That’s not so freaky. Any kind of cat would do that.”
“I know … it’s what comes next.” She paused dramatically. “In the middle of this bushy-tailed fit, he stopped dead in his tracks, shook his head, and trotted into the house to find George. Gil woke him up and chased him onto the porch. Then you know what he did? He put a paw on George’s shoulder, like they were old buddies. And you know how George is—he just went along with it; he’ll groove on anything. But it was so weird. George wanted to leave, but Gil kept him there by washing him. George can’t resist a wash—he’s too busy grooving to do it himself—so he stayed till the saucers took off.”
Freddie picked up Alyson’s half-chewed blade of grass and put it in his mouth. “You think that Gil, for reasons of his own, manipulated George into watching saucers with him?”
Gilgamesh stopped being a lawn mower long enough to bat listlessly at a bumblebee. Then he looked at Alyson slyly and resumed his purring.
“That’s exactly what I think. What do you think?” Freddie thought about it for a while, gazing idly at Gilgamesh. The cat avoided his eyes.
“Why would he want George to watch flying saucers with him?” Freddie asked.
Alyson shrugged elaborately, tossing her hair and looking at the clear blue of the sky. “I don’t know. Flying saucers are spaceships, aren’t they? Maybe Gilgamesh came here in one of them.”
“But why would he want George to look at one?”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Alyson. “Why don’t you ask Gilgamesh about that?”
Freddie glanced again at the cat; Gilgamesh was lying preternaturally still, as though asleep, yet too rigid to be truly asleep. Playing ‘possum, Freddie thought. Listening.
“Hey, Gil,” he said softly. “Why did you want George to see the flying saucers?”
Gilgamesh made no acknowledgment that he had heard. But Freddie noticed that his tail twitched.
“Come on, Gil, you can tell me,” he coaxed. “I’m from Procyon, myself.”