Cats in Space and Other Places Read online

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CATS The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith

  Mouse by Fredric Brown

  Ship of Shadows by Fritz Leiber

  Schrödinger's Cat by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Tales of a Starship's Cat by Judith R. Conly

  Who's There? by Arthur C. Clarke

  Bullhead by David Drake

  Ordeal in Space by Robert A. Heinlein

  Space-Time for Springers by Fritz Leiber

  The Tail by M.J. Engh

  Well Worth the Money by Jody Lynn Nye

  ALIENCATS Chanur's Homecoming by C.J. Cherryh

  Duty Calls by Anne McCaffrey

  Black Destroyer by A.E. Van Vogt

  The Pride by Todd Hamilton and P.J. Beese

  The Ballad of Lost C'mell by Cordwainer Smith

  The Man Who Would Be Kzin by Greg Bear and S.M. Stirling

  CATS IN SPACE

  And

  Other

  Places

  Edited by

  BILL FAWCETT

  Cats in Space and Other Places

  Edited by Bill Fawcett

  Space. The Feline Frontier.

  It has been said (by Mark Twain) that “If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.” In this volume we explore the many and manifest reasons why humans should voluntarily accord first place in space to their feline brethren. From Robert A. Heinlein’s “Ordeal in Space” in which the merest kitten confers the gift of courage on his human, to Cordwainer Smith’s “Ballad of Lost C’mell,” which answers the very question of what would be the outcome of the melding of human and cat, we offer here sixteen reasons why cats are Number One in our book.

  CATS IN SPACE

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1992 by Bill Fawcett & Associates

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, N.Y. 10471

  ISBN: 0-671-72118-6

  Cover art by Dean Morrissey

  First printing, May 1992

  Distributed by SIMON & SCHUSTER 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-539-7

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith, copyright © 1955 by Galaxy Publishing Corp, for Galaxy Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

  Mouse by Fredric Brown, reprinted from Thrilling Wonder Stories, copyright 1949, by Standard Magazines Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

  Ship of Shadows by Fritz Leiber, copyright © 1969 Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Richard Curtis Associates.

  Schrödinger's Cat by Ursula Le Guin, copyright © 1974, 1982 Ursula K. Le Guin. From Universe 5, (Random House). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Virginia Kidd.

  Tales of a Starship's Cat by Judith R. Conly, copyright 1991 Judith R. Conly

  Who's There? by Arthur C. Clarke, copyright © 1958 by United Newspapers Magazine Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Bullhead by David Drake, copyright © 1991 David Drake

  Ordeal in Space by Robert A. Heinlein, copyright 1948. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate and the author's agent. Spectrum Literary Agency.

  Space-Time for Springers by Fritz Leiber, copyright © 1958 by Ballantine Books, Inc. First published in Star Science Fiction Stories No. 4 (Ballantine). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Richard Curtis Associates.

  The Tail by M.J. Engh, copyright © 1988 M.J. Engh. First appeared MosConx program book. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Virginia Kidd.

  Well Worth the Money by Jody Lynn Nye, copyright © 1991 Jody Lynn Nye

  Chanur's Homecoming by C.J. Cherryh, originally appeared as chapter twelve of the novel Chanur's Homecoming published by DAW Books, copyright © 1986 C.J. Cherryh.

  Duty Calls by Anne McCaffrey, first appeared in The Fleet, edited by David Drake and Bill Fawcett, copyright © 1988 Anne McCaffrey. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Virginia Kidd.

  Black Destroyer by A.E. Van Vogt, copyright 1939 by Street and Smith Publications Inc., renewed 1967; reprinted by permission of Agent Forrest J Ackerman, 2495 Glendower Ave., Hollywood, CA 90027.

  The Pride by Todd Hamilton and P.J. Beese, copyright © 1989 Todd Hamilton and P.J. Beese

  The Ballad of Lost C'mell by Cordwainer Smith, copyright © 1962 by Galaxy Publishing Corp, for Galaxy Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

  The Man Who Would Be Kzin by Greg Bear and S.M. Stirling, originally appeared in Man-Kzin Wars IV, copyright © 1991 Greg Bear and S.M. Stirling

  CATS

  The Game of Rat and Dragon

  Cordwainer Smith

  1. The Table

  Pinlighting is a hell of a way to earn a living. Underhill was furious as he closed the door behind himself. It didn't make much sense to wear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn't appreciate what you did.

  He sat down in his chair, laid his head back in the headrest, and pulled the helmet down over his forehead.

  As he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in the outer corridor. She had looked at it, then looked at him scornfully.

  "Meow." That was all she had said. Yet it had cut him like a knife.

  What did she think he was—a fool, a loafer, a uniformed nonentity? Didn't she know that for every half-hour of pinlighting, he got a minimum of two months' recuperation in the hospital?

  By now the set was warm, He felt the squares of space around him, sensed himself at the middle of an immense grid, a cubic grid, full of nothing. Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow aching horror of space itself and could feel the terrible anxiety which his mind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of inert dust.

  As he relaxed, the comforting solidity of the Sun, the clockwork of the familiar planets and the moon rang in on him. Our own solar system was as charming and as simple as an ancient cuckoo clock filled with familiar ticking and with reassuring noises. The odd little moons of Mars swung around their planet like frantic mice, yet their regularity was itself an assurance that all was well. Far above the plane of the ecliptic, he could feel half a ton of dust more or less drifting outside the lanes of human travel.

  Here there was nothing to fight, nothing to challenge the mind, to tear the living soul out of a body with its roots dripping in effluvium as tangible as blood.

  Nothing ever moved in on the solar system. He could wear the pin-set forever and be nothing more than a sort of telepathic astronomer, a man who could feel the hot, warm protection of the sun throbbing and burning against his living mind.

  Woodley came in.

  "Same old ticking world," said Underhill. "Nothing to report. No wonder they didn't develop the pin-set until they began to planoform. Down here with the hot sun a
round us, it feels so good and so quiet. You can feel everything spinning and turning. It's nice and sharp and compact. It's sort of like sitting around home."

  Woodley grunted. He was not much given to flights of fantasy.

  Undeterred, Underhill went on. "It must have been pretty good to have been an ancient man. I wonder why they burned up their world with war. They didn't have to planoform. They didn't have to go out to earn their livings among the stars. They didn't have to dodge the rats or play the game. They couldn't have invented pinlighting because they didn't have any need of it, did they, Woodley?

  Woodley grunted, "Uh-huh." Woodley was twenty-six years old and due to retire in one more year. He already had a farm picked out. He had gotten through ten years of hard work pinlighting with the best of them. He had kept his sanity by not thinking very much about his job, meeting the strains of the task whenever he had to meet them and thinking nothing more about his duties until the next emergency arose.

  Woodley never made a point of getting popular among the partners. None of the partners liked him very much. Some of them even resented him. He was suspected of thinking ugly thoughts of the partners on occasion, but since none of the partners ever thought a complaint in articulate form, the other pinlighters and the chiefs of the Instrumentality left him alone.

  Underhill was still full of the wonder of their job. Happily he babbled on. "What does happen to us when we planoform? Do you think it's sort of like dying? Did you ever see anybody who had his soul pulled out?"

  "Pulling souls is just a way of talking about it," said Woodley. "After all these years, nobody knows whether we have souls or not."

  "But I saw one once. I saw what Dogwood looked like when he came apart. There was something funny. It looked wet and sort of sticky as if it were bleeding and it went out of him—and you know what they did to Dogwood? They took him away, up in that part of the hospital where you and I never go—way up at the top part where the others are, where the others always have to go if they are alive after the rats of the up-and-out have gotten them."

  Woodley sat down and lit an ancient pipe. He was burning something called tobacco in it. It was a dirty sort of habit, but it made him look very dashing and adventurous.

  "Look here, youngster. You don't have to worry about that stuff. Pinlighting is getting better all the time. The partners are getting better. I've seen them pinlight two rats forty-six million miles apart in one and a half milliseconds. As long as people had to try to work the pin-sets themselves, there was always the chance that with a minimum of four-hundred milliseconds for the human mind to set a pinlight, we wouldn't light the rats up fast enough to protect our planoforming ships. The partners have changed all that. Once they get going, they're faster than rats. And they always will be. I know it's not easy, letting a partner share your mind—"

  "It s not easy for them, either," said Underhill.

  "Don't worry about them. They're not human. Let them take care of themselves. I've seen more pinlighters go crazy from monkeying around with partners than I have ever seen caught by the rats. How many of them do you actually know of that got grabbed by rats?"

  Underhill looked down at his fingers, which shone green and purple in the vivid light thrown by the tuned- in pin-set, and counted ships. The thumb for the Andromeda, lost with crew and passengers, the index finger and the middle finger for Release Ships 43 and 56, found with their pin-sets burned out and every man, woman, and child on board dead or insane. The ring finger, the little finger, and the thumb of the other hand were the first three battleships to be lost to the rats—lost as people realized that there was something out there underneath space itself which was alive, capricious, and malevolent.

  Planoforming was sort of funny. It felt like—

  Like nothing much.

  Like the twinge of a mild electric shock.

  Like the ache of a sore tooth bitten on for the first time.

  Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes.

  Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earth disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a light-year or fifty light- years off.

  At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-set ready and the familiar solar system ticking around inside his head. For a second or a year (he could never tell how long it really was, subjectively), the funny little flash went through him and then he was loose in the up-and-out, the terrible open spaces between the stars, where the stars themselves felt like pimples on his telepathic mind and the planets were too far away to be sensed or read.

  Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and horror of a kind which man had never encountered until he reached out for interstellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept the Dragons away.

  Dragons. That was what people called them. To ordinary people, there was nothing, nothing except the shiver of planoforming and the hammer blow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descending into their minds.

  But to the telepaths, they were dragons.

  In the fraction of a second between the telepaths' awareness of a hostile something out in the black, hollow nothingness of space and the impact of a ferocious, ruinous psychic blow against all living things within the ship, the telepaths had sensed entities something like the dragons of ancient human lore, beasts more clever than beasts, demons more tangible than demons, hungry vortices of aliveness and hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin, tenuous matter between the stars.

  It took a surviving ship to bring back the news—a ship in which, by sheer chance, a telepath had a light-beam ready, turning it out at the innocent dust so that, within the panorama of his mind, the dragon dissolved into nothing at all and the other passengers, themselves nontelepathic, went about their way not realizing that their own immediate deaths had been averted.

  From then on, it was easy—almost.

  Planoforming ships always carried telepaths. Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind. The pin-sets in turn were electronically geared into small dirigible light bombs. Light did it.

  Light broke up the dragons, allowed the ships to reform three-dimensionally, skip, skip, skip, as they moved from star to star.

  The odds suddenly moved down from a hundred to one against mankind to sixty to forty in mankind's favor.

  This was not enough. The telepaths were trained to become ultrasensitive, trained to become aware of the dragons in less than a millisecond.

  But it was found that the dragons could move a million miles in just under two milliseconds and that this was not enough for the human mind to activate the light beams.

  Attempts had been made to sheath the ships in light at all times.

  This defense wore out.

  As mankind learned about the dragons, so too, apparently, the dragons learned about mankind. Somehow they flattened their own bulk and came in on extremely flat trajectories very quickly.

  Intense light was needed, light of sunlike intensity. This could be provided only by the light bombs. Pinlighting came into existence.

  Pinlighting consisted of the detonation of ultra-vivid miniature photonuclear bombs, which converted a few ounces of magnesium isotope into pure visible radiance.

  The odds kept coming down in mankind's favor, yet ships were being lost.

  It became so bad that people didn't even want to find the ships because the rescuers knew what they would see. It was sad to bring back to Earth three hundred bodies ready for burial and two hundred or three hundred lunatics, damaged beyond repair, to be wakened, and fed, and cleaned, and put to sleep, wakened and fed again until their lives were ended.

  Telepaths tried to reach into the minds of the psychotics who had been damaged by the dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id itself, the volcanic source of life.

&n
bsp; Then came the partners.

  Man and partner could do together what man could not do alone. Men had the intellect. Partners had the speed.

  The partners rode their tiny craft, no larger than footballs, outside the spaceships. They planoformed with the ships. They rode beside them in their six-pound craft ready to attack.

  The tiny ships of the partners were swift. Each carried a dozen pinlights, bombs no bigger than thimbles.

  The pinlighters threw the partners—quite literally threw—by means of mind-to-firing relays directly at the dragons.

  What seemed to be dragons to the human mind appeared in the form of gigantic rats in the minds of the partners.

  Out in the pitiless nothingness of space, the partners' minds responded to an instinct as old as life. The partners attacked, striking with a speed faster than man's, going from attack to attack until the rats or themselves were destroyed. Almost all the time it was the partners who won.

  With the safety of the interstellar skip, skip, skip of the ships, commerce increased immensely, the population of all the colonies went up, and the demand for trained partners increased.