Underhill was always a little exasperated the way that Lady May
experienced things before he did.
He was braced for the quick vinegar thrill of planoforming, but he
caught her report of it before his own nerves could register what
happened.
Earth had fallen so far away that he groped for several milliseconds
before he found the Sun in the upper rear right-hand corner of his
telepathic mind.
That was a good jump, he thought. This way we'll get there in four or
five skips.
A few hundred miles outside the ship, the Lady May thought back at
him, "O warm, O generous, O gigantic man! O brave, O friendly, O
tender and huge Partner! O wonderful with you, with you so good, good,
good, warm, warm, now to fight, now to go, good with you...."
He knew that she was not thinking words, that his mind took the clear
amiable babble of her cat intellect and translated it into images
which his own thinking could record and understand.
Neither one of them was absorbed in the game of mutual greetings. He
reached out far beyond her range of perception to see if there was
anything near the ship. It was funny how it was possible to do two
things at once. He could scan space with his pin-set mind and yet at
the same time catch a vagrant thought of hers, a lovely, affectionate
thought about a son who had had a golden face and a chest covered with
soft, incredibly downy white fur.
While he was still searching, he caught the warning from her.
_We jump again!_
And so they had. The ship had moved to a second planoform. The stars
were different. The Sun was immeasurably far behind. Even the nearest
stars were barely in contact. This was good Dragon country, this open,
nasty, hollow kind of space. He reached farther, faster, sensing and
looking for danger, ready to fling the Lady May at danger wherever he
found it.
Terror blazed up in his mind, so sharp, so clear, that it came through
as a physical wrench.
The little girl named West had found something--something immense,
long, black, sharp, greedy, horrific. She flung Captain Wow at it.
Underhill tried to keep his own mind clear. "Watch out!" he shouted
telepathically at the others, trying to move the Lady May around.
At one corner of the battle, he felt the lustful rage of Captain Wow
as the big Persian tomcat detonated lights while he approached the
streak of dust which threatened the ship and the people within.
The lights scored near-misses.
The dust flattened itself, changing from the shape of a sting-ray into
the shape of a spear.
Not three milliseconds had elapsed.
* * * * *
Father Moontree was talking human words and was saying in a voice that
moved like cold molasses out of a heavy jar, "C-A-P-T-A-I-N."
Underhill knew that the sentence was going to be "Captain, move fast!"
The battle would be fought and finished before Father Moontree got
through talking.
Now, fractions of a millisecond later, the Lady May was directly in
line.
Here was where the skill and speed of the Partners came in. She could
react faster than he. She could see the threat as an immense Rat
coming direct at her.
She could fire the light-bombs with a discrimination which he might
miss.
He was connected with her mind, but he could not follow it.
His consciousness absorbed the tearing wound inflicted by the alien
enemy. It was like no wound on Earth--raw, crazy pain which started
like a burn at his navel. He began to writhe in his chair.
Actually he had not yet had time to move a muscle when the Lady May
struck back at their enemy.
Five evenly spaced photonuclear bombs blazed out across a hundred
thousand miles.
The pain in his mind and body vanished.
[Illustration]
He felt a moment of fierce, terrible, feral elation running through
the mind of the Lady May as she finished her kill. It was always
disappointing to the cats to find out that their enemies whom they
sensed as gigantic space Rats disappeared at the moment of
destruction.
Then he felt her hurt, the pain and the fear that swept over both of
them as the battle, quicker than the movement of an eyelid, had come
and gone. In the same instant, there came the sharp and acid twinge
of planoform.
Once more the ship went skip.
He could hear Woodley thinking at him. "You don't have to bother much.
This old son of a gun and I will take over for a while."
Twice again the twinge, the skip.
He had no idea where he was until the lights of the Caledonia space
board shone below.
[Illustration]
With a weariness that lay almost beyond the limits of thought, he
threw his mind back into rapport with the pin-set, fixing the Lady
May's projectile gently and neatly in its launching tube.
She was half dead with fatigue, but he could feel the beat of her
heart, could listen to her panting, and he grasped the grateful edge
of a thanks reaching from her mind to his.