"It sure is. How come you know about the 4th?" "We know what we need to know. Let us rest now." Sparkson tried everything, even "I'm lonely!" But rest it was.
He had slept, getting up to check gauges and read some incredibly garbled messages—conversations having nothing to do with him that the Translator apparently couldn't begin to handle.
Now, with the coming of night, he stayed by the Translator. After an hour of darkness a short slip of paper appeared.
"Goodnight, NAME."
Then another. "(Sweet) (Pleasant) (Gentle) dreams of mother, NAME."
They were going to sleep. He sat sweating, staring at the slot, with his hands on each side of the gold-braided uniform cap on his head.
After a while some papers slid out of the Translator. Drowsily the aliens were communicating, like girls whispering secret, in bed.
"NAME—"
"It is (odd) (strange) (perplexing)."
"I am thinking of Sparkie's mind ... NAME!" "I am awake!"
"Sparkie is so (small) (weak) (defenseless)."
"(Hm) (Mm) (Mmm)."
"His mind is like a (piece) (sheet) of GARBLE. We think on the (bases) (conditions) (roots) of our experience, our perceptions which arc multiplied by (objects) (things) (forms of matter) which we have sensed. Sparkie must think with the (toys) (playthings) of his earth only. How can he understand us? What does he know of GARBLE, GARBLE or GARBLE for example, this (small) (weak) (defenseless) being? NAME!"
"! Go to sleep."
That was all. He waited another hour. Then he read the bits of paper, in order. He read them over and over again, while the starless biblical darkness, one thing by God that was not among the forms of matter, offered him freedom.
So he was "(small) (weak) (defenseless)"?
He would show them.
He reviewed the gravity and atmospheric tables beside the suit, strapped nuclearms on each side, brought it closed around his body.
As he staggered, arms up and legs bent under the weight, he was made suddenly angry by an insistent tension at the back of his throat.
The "(toys) (playthings)" of his earth indeed! He opened the hatch.
He jumped to the surface of the ... the ... Planet?
This?
Some hours later the Translator in the cold metal hum of the ship began to spit papers, violently.
Waves of magnetism, pulses of electric desire, like startled schools of fish in coral, swept the corridors.
A great rocking bellowing sound and a smell of sorrow spread skyward.
FRITZ LEIBER
Space-time for Springers
Before Fritz Leiber sat down to tell us what lay in the heart and mind of a kitten named Gummitch, he had already behind him a considerable career as writer ("Gather, Darkness!", the award-winning "The Big Time," and scores of other memorable stories), editor (of a popular scientific magazine) and, of all things, Shakespearean actor (following in the footsteps of the older Fritz Leiber, his father). Surely he has at least as much before him; and it is with confidence and glee that we contemplate the fact that the future may hold many more stories from his as moving and insighted as—
Gummitch was a superkitten, as he knew very well, with an I.Q. of about 160. Of course, he didn't talk. But everybody knows that I.Q. tests based on language ability are very one-sided. Besides, he would talk as soon as they started setting a place for him at table and pouring him coffee. Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra ate horsemeat from pans on the floor and they didn't talk. Baby dined in his crib on milk from a bottle and he didn't talk. Sissy sat at table but they didn't pour her coffee and she didn't talk—not one word. Father and Mother (whom Gummitch had nicknamed Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here) sat at table and poured each other coffee and they did talk. Q.E.D.
Meanwhile, he would get by very well on thought projection and intuitive understanding of all human speech—not even to mention cat patois, which almost any civilized animal could olav by ear. The dramatic monologues and Socratic dialogues, the quiz and panel-show appearances, the felidological expedition to darkest Africa (where he would uncover the real truth behind lions and tigers), the exploration of the outer planets—all these could wait. The same went for the books for which he was ceaselessly accumulating materiaclass="underline" The Encyclopedia of Odors, Anthropofeline Psychology, Invisible Signs and Secret Wonders, Space-Time for Springers, Slit Eyes Look at Life, et cetera. For the present it was enough to live existence to the hilt and soak up knowledge, missing no experience proper to his age level—to rush about with tail aflame.
So to all outward appearances Gummitch was just a vividly normal kitten, as shown by the succession of nicknames he bore along the magic path that led from blue-eyed infancy toward puberty: Little One, Squawker, Portly, Bumble (for purring not clumsiness), Old Starved-to-Death, Fierso, Loverboy (affection not sex), Spook and Catnik. Of these only the last perhaps requires further explanation: the Russians had just sent Muttnik up after Sputnik, so that when one evening Gummitch streaked three times across the firmament of the living room floor in the same direction, past the fixed stars of the humans and the comparatively slow-moving heavenly bodies of the two older cats, and Kitty-Come-Here quoted the line from Keats:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; it was inevitable that Old Horsemeat would say, "Ah—Catnik!"
The new name lasted all of three days, to be replaced by Gummitch, which showed signs of becoming permanent.
The little cat was on the verge of truly growing up, at least so Gummitch overheard Old Horsemeat comment to Kitty-Come-Here. A few short weeks, Old Horsemeat said, and Gummitch's fiery flesh would harden, his slim neck thicken, the electricity vanish from everything but his fur, and all his delightful kittenish qualities rapidly give way to the earth-bound singlemindness of a tom. They'd be lucky, Old Horsemeat concluded, if he didn't turn completely surly like Ashurbanipal.
Gummitch listened to these predictions with gay unconcern and with secret amusement from his vantage point of superior knowledge, in the same spirit that he accepted so many phases of his outwardly conventional existence: the murderous sidelong looks he got from Ashurbanipal and Cleopatra as he devoured his own horsemeat from his own little tin pan, because they sometimes were given canned catfood but he never; the stark idiocy of Baby, who didn't know the difference between a live cat and a stuffed teddy bear and who tried to cover up his ignorance by making goo-goo noises and poking indiscriminately at all eyes; the far more serious—because cleverly hidden—maliciousness of Sissy, who had to be watched out for warily—especially when you were alone—and whose retarded—even warped —development, Gummitch knew, was Old Horsemeat and Kitty-Come-Here's deepest, most secret, worry (more of Sissy and her evil ways soon); the limited intellect of Kitty-Come-Here, who despite the amounts of coffee she drank was quite as featherbrained as kittens are supposed to be and who firmly believed, for example, that kittens operated in the same space-time as other beings—that to get from here to there they had to cross the space between —and similar fallacies; the mental stodginess of even Old Horsemeat, who although he understood quite a bit of the secret doctrine and talked intelligently to Gummitch when they were alone, nevertheless suffered from the limitations of his status—a rather nice old god but a maddeningly slow-witted one.