“We’re not Earth people,” said C’mell. “We’re underpeople. I’m a cat-person and he’s made from apes. Don’t call us people. It’s not decent.”
“Fudgel” said Rod. “I was just asking a question about Earth, not pestering your feelings when—”
He stopped short.
They all three spun around.
Out of the ramp there came something like a mowing machine. A human voice, a man’s voice screamed from within it, expressing rage and fear.
Rod started to move forward.
C’mell started to move forward.
C’mell held his arm, dragging back with all her weight.
“No! Rod, no! No!”
A’gentur slowed him down better by jumping into his face, so that Rod suddenly saw nothing but a universe of brown belly-fur and felt tiny hands gripping his hair and pulling it. He stopped and reached for the monkey. A’gentur anticipated him and dropped to the ground before Rod could hit him.
The machine was racing up the outside of the steeple and almost disappearing into the sky above. The voice had become thin.
Rod looked at C’mell, “All right. What was it? What’s happening?”
“That’s a spider, a giant spider. It’s kidnapping or killing Rod McBan.”
“Me?” keened Rod. “It’d better not touch me. I’ll tear it apart.”
“Sh-h-hl” said C’mell.
“Quiet!” said the monkey.
“Don’t ‘sh-sh-sh’ me and don’t ‘quiet’ me,” said Rod. “I’m not going to let that poor blighter suffer on my account. Tell that thing to come down. What is it, anyhow, this spider? A robot?”
“No,” said C’mell, “an insect.”
Rod was narrowing his eyes, watching the mowing machine which hung on the outside of the tower. He could barely see the man within its grip. When C’mell said “insect,” it triggered something in his mind. Hate. Revulsion. Resistance to dirt. Insects on Old North Australia were small, serially numbered and licensed. Even at that, he felt them to be his hereditary enemies. (Somebody had told him that Earth insects had done terrible things to the Norstrilians when they lived on Paradise VII.) Rod yelled at the spider, making his voice as loud as possible,
“You — come — down!”
The filthy thing on the tower quivered with sheer smugness and seemed to bring its machine-like legs closer together, settling down to be comfortable.
Rod forgot he was supposed to be a cat.
He gasped for air. Earth air was wet but thin. He closed his eyes for a moment or two. He thought hate, hate, hate for the insect. Then he shrieked telepathically, louder than he had ever shrieked at home:
hate-spit-spit-vomit!
dirt, dirt, dirt,
explode!
crush:
ruin:
stink, collapse, putrefy, disappear!
hate-hate-hate!
The fierce red roar of his inarticulate spieking hurt even him. He saw the little monkey fall to the ground in a dead faint. C’mell was pale and looked as though she might throw up her food.
He looked away from them and up at the “spider.” Had he reached it?
He had.
Slowly, slowly, the long legs moved out in spasms, releasing the man, whose body flashed downward. Rod’s eyes followed the movement of “Rod McBan” and he cringed when a wet crunch let him know that the duplicate of his own body had been splashed all over the hard deck of the tower, a hundred meters away. He glanced back up at the “spider.” It scrabbled for purchase of the tower and then cartwheeled downward. It too hit the deck hard and lay there dying, its legs twitching as its personality slipped into its private, everlasting night.
Rod gasped. “Eleanor. Oh, maybe that’s Eleanor!” His voice wailed. He started to run to the facsimile of his human body, forgetting that he was a cat-man.
C’mell’s voice was as sharp as a howl, though low in tone. “Shut up! Shut up! Stand still! Close your mind! Shut up! We’re dead if you don’t shut up!”
He stopped, stared at her stupidly. Then he saw she was in mortal earnest. He complied. He stopped moving. He did not try to talk. He capped his mind, closing himself against telepathy until his brainbox began to ache. The little monkey, A’gentur, was crawling up off the floor, looking shaken and sick. C’mell was still pale.
Men came running up the ramp, saw them and headed toward them.
There was the beat of wings in the air.
An enormous bird — no, it was an ornithopter — landed with its claws scratching the deck. A uniformed man jumped out and cried,
“Where is he?”
“He jumped over!” C’mell shouted.
The man started to follow the direction of her gesture and then cut sharply back to her.
“Fool!” he said. “People can’t jump off here. The barrier would hold ships in place. What did you see?”
C’mell was a good actress. She pretended to be getting over shock and gasping for words. The uniformed man looked at her haughtily,
“Cats,” he said, “and a monkey. What are you doing here? Who are you?”
“Name C’mell, profession, girlygirl, Earthport staff, commanded by Commissioner Teadrinker. This — boyfriend, no status, name C’roderick, cashier in night bank down below. Him?” She nodded at A’gentur. “I don’t know much about him.”
“Name A’gentur. Profession, supplementary surgeon. Status, animal. I’m not an underperson. Just an animal. I came in on the ship from Mars with the dead man there and some other true men who looked like him, and they went down first—”
“Shut up,” said the uniformed man. He turned to the approaching men and said, “Honored subchief, Sergeant 387 reporting. The user of the telepathic weapon has disappeared. The only things here are these two cat people, not very bright, and a small monkey. They can talk. The girl says she saw somebody get off the tower.”
The subchief was a tall redhead with a uniform even handsomer than the sergeant’s. He snapped at C’mell, “How did he do it?”
Rod knew C’mell well enough by now to recognize the artfulness of her becoming confused, feminine and incoherent — in appearance. Actually, she was in full control of the situation. Said she, babbling:
“He jumped, I think. I don’t know how.”
“That’s impossible,” said the subchief. “Did you see where he went?” he barked at Rod McBan.
Rod gasped at the suddenness of the question: besides, C’mell had told him to keep quiet. Between these two peremptories, he said, “Er — ah — oh — you see—”
The little monkey-surgeon interrupted drily, “Sir and Master Subchief, that cat-man is not very bright. I do not think you will get much out of him. Handsome but stupid. Strictly breeding stock—”
Rod gagged and turned a little red at these remarks, but he could tell from the hooded quick glare which C’mell shot him that she wanted him to go on being quiet.
She cut in. “I did notice one thing, Master. It might matter.”
“By the Bell and Bank, animal! Tell me,” cried the subchief. “Stop deciding what I ought to know!”
“The strange man’s skin was lightly tinged with blue.”
The subchief took a step back. His soldiers and the sergeant stared at him. In a serious, direct way he said to C’mell, “Are you sure?”
“No, my Master. I just thought so.”
“You saw just one?” barked the subchief.
Rod, overacting the stupidity, held up four fingers.
“That idiot,” cried the subchief, “thinks he saw four of them. Can he count?” he asked C’mell.
C’mell looked at Rod as though he were a handsome beast with not a brain in his head. Rod looked back at her, deliberately letting himself feel stupid. This was something which he did very well, since by neither hiering nor spieking at home, he had had to sit through interminable hours of other people’s conversation when he was little, never getting the faintest idea of what it was all about. He had discovered very early that if he sat still and looked stupid, people did not bother him by trying to bring him into the conversation, turning their voices on and braying at him as though he were deaf. He tried to simulate the familiar old posture and was rather pleased that he could make such a good showing with C’mell watching him. Even when she was seriously fighting for their freedom and playing girl all at once, her corona of blazing hair made her shine forth like the sun of Earth itself; among all these people on the platform, her beauty and her intelligence made her stand out, cat though she was. Rod was not at all surprised that he was overlooked, with such a vivid personality next to him; he just wished that he could be overlooked a little more, so that he could wander over idly and see whether the body was Eleanor’s or one of the robots’. If Eleanor had already died for him, in her first few minutes of the big treat of seeing Earth, he felt that he would never forgive himself as long as he lived.