when the kzinti took the Happy Gatherer.
They all turned into white skeletons and fell in clattering heaps of bone to the floor. They disappeared.
Then I lost all rational thought. There was only darkness and fear. The pit. A sense of suffocation. Darkness visible, despair physical, a dagger of poisoned ice in my chest.
I was sitting with my head buried in my hands, shaking, thinking of suicide-the idea had a tangible shape, something that entered my mind on spider-legs and squatted there-when I heard the distant snarl of the tigripard again. I raised my head from my hands.
The zeitungers were round me in a ring on the damp, dusty floor, eyes bright. They looked like very large Earth rats. There was the. 22 where I had abandoned it. I reached out, and the feel of the weapon in my hands, even though I knew it was useless, gave my mind a moment's revival. The zeitungers seemed to sense it, and retreated a couple of paces. Then the uselessness of it overcame me and I dropped the thing. They came forward again, and I saw their mouths opening in snarls that revealed their little fangs. In a moment, I knew, they would spring. There was nothing I could do about it. My brain was in such a state I would have welcomed them, as I was meant to.
The door flew open. A human figure leapt into the room. A red sighting spot appeared on one of the creatures' heads, and an instant later a laser cooked its brain. I don't know if the scream from it and the others was a physical or mental event or both. The horror they had filled my brain with was jerked about. Some of them sprang at the human, and the beam rifle cut them to pieces in mid-air. The others made for the cellar, and a good number died on the way. Then the survivors wheeled in a mass and made for the main door and the street. Few reached either. The human leapt after them. In the dim light from the doorway I recognized the contours of a kzin infantry beam rifle. It fired again, this time on another setting. A thin, incandescent jet of plasma-gas followed them.
I leapt back, bad ankle or not, from the blast of heat on my face, and came down on that bad ankle heavily, screaming and cursing. Good honest physical pain, good honest screaming and cursing. This was real. There were flames flickering now where the beam had hit inflammable material, and thick steam and smoke, but in that light I saw that my deliverer was a woman.
She dialed another setting on the rifle, and a jet of foam from it smothered the flames-the kzinti who had made it had learnt about house-to-house fighting. She came to me and put out her hand. I took it, and for a moment could only cling to it, babbling incoherently. Her hand was real, firm and solid. Then my brain seemed to clear. I apologized. The feelings of the last-how long had it been?-suddenly seemed largely unreal, as the nausea of sea-sickness suddenly seems unreal to a passenger ashore on dry land, or as a spacer leaving hyperspace forgets the blind spot. She lit a lamp, and shone it round the corners of the room. In its light I saw her properly for the first time. I vomited, and got to my feet. Like the recently sea-sick passenger, I was very unsteady.
She was tall like nearly all Wunderlanders, and handsome, or more than handsome, in a hard sort of way. The way she handled the heavy weapon-heavy for a human even in this gravity-told me she was strong. Her clothes were plain, and in the city would have been called drab, the everyday garb of the women I had seen on the farms of Gerning. They evidently repelled the rain, though, unlike mine.
'My name is Arthur Guthlac,' I told her. 'I'm from Earth. I've hurt my leg and I'm lost.' Her face in repose looked strangely sad. Well, perhaps not strangely. On a large part of the population of Wunderland the tragic past lay heavily.
'My name is Gale. Do not be afraid. Or ashamed.' She spoke a dialect of rural Wunderland, with some slightly old-fashioned constructions. 'There were many zeitung-schreibers. I know what they can do. Now you had better come with me.'
'Must I walk far?' I remembered my manners and made some sort of speech of thanks, still finding my voice hard to control.
'You're not free of it yet,' she said. 'It takes a while. I live at the big house. Not far.'
The house with the orange light. That was the only big house and the only habitable-looking one. Well, if this woman lived there my previous thoughts about it being inhabited by kzinti were apparently groundless. Now that she had identified the zeitungers, and I realized the nature of the attack that had been made on me, I wondered if my previous fears of the place had simply been a product of their first mind-probes when they began gathering around me.
'The sooner you are warm and dry the better,' she said.
That was certainly true. We stepped out of the ruin into the spectral street. Gale swept the rifle-barrel, firing once at an errant zeitunger I did not see and blowing it apart. Then she 'broke' the butt open to replace the charge, extracting the old charge-pack.
The tigripard leapt out of the night as the lightning dribbled about us. Thunder drowned its snarl. Gale leapt sideways, a hand to her belt, something flashing in her hand. I had not seen a human move so fast. The tigripard's charge carried past her, past the spot where she had been an instant before. She struck as she leapt. It gave a scream of pain and rounded back on us, creeping towards us, belly close to the ground. Then she had the beam rifle together, one-handed, somehow, up and firing. The tigripard died in mid-spring. I saw that in her other hand she held an oversized knife, and as she wiped the tigripard's blood from it and returned it to her belt I saw it was a monomolecular-edged kzin w'tsai. I thought that I would not like her for an enemy, and I have been in some hand-to-hand combat.
She passed me the lamp and dialed the laser setting on the rifle down to provide an additional flashlight. The rain and hail were back in full force again, the visibility closing in.
I leant on her a little as I hobbled up the path to the house again. It had been, I guessed now, her silhouette I had seen crossing the window. But why that kzin-ish, murky orange light?
'How did you know I was out here?' I asked.
'I did not know that you particularly were here, but I sensed the zeitungers packing. A kind of psychic backwash reaches all minds around when that happens. Then the only thing is to go out and kill them all. Follow your thoughts, as it were, and they are easy enough to find.'
This lady was mentally as well as physically tough, I thought. I did not know if I could have done that. She opened the door with a large electronic key. It looked too modern and hi-tech for this place. It also looked as if it had been made for larger hands than hers. kzin claws. I followed her in.
'Are you alone?' I asked. A stupid, perhaps lethally tactless, thing to say at a time and in a place like that, but I was not thinking clearly.
'I am a widow,' she said. That was not remarkable. After fifty-three years of war and kzin occupation there were plenty of widows-and widowers and orphans too-on Wunderland. 'But I am not alone,' she went on. 'There is a kzin in the house.'
I was sure she was not bluffing about that as I stepped across the door. Not just the light, the smells. On Earth and in space I had been used to dwelling-spaces that cleaned themselves. On liberated Wunderland I had become used to more primitive standards. But this place smelt strange and disturbing. Not dirty, but not right. Partly it was the smell of poverty, which, once you have smelt it, you cannot mistake and cannot forget. There was also a smell like a field-hospital, a very primitive one, that did not have pleasant associations for me. But it also smelt of kzin. And that smell you cannot mistake or forget either. Perhaps, I had a wayward thought, she manufactured that smell artificially to keep human and animal intruders away more effectively than any pack of ban-dogs. But if I had had designs on her or on the house, and even if she had not been carrying the kzin weapons, absence of kzinti was not the way I would have been inclined to bet. But at that moment the absence of wind, rain and hail made up for a lot.
The entrance hall, when she operated a switch, was lit by the same ruddy orange light. The light of Kzinhome, perhaps, but dimmer. This kzin evidently did not like the lights bright. I sat down on an uncomfortable wooden seat. When the kzinti walked Wunderland as conquerors, I knew, their dwellings had been decorated with preserved bodies or parts of humans or other kzinti they had killed. There was none of that here, though there were some slightly discolored or unfaded patches on the high walls where such trophies might once have been mounted. The place was furnished with old Wunderland farmhouse furniture, too little for the room's more-than- human size, and with one of the kzin-sized couches they called fooches. There were a couple of pictures, old Wunderland rural scenes mainly, not unlike those I had seen for sale at Gerning, or in the tourist shops at Munchen. One, however, was turned to the wall.
'Wait here,' she said, and went up the stairs.
