understands, Sally,” he said finally.
“Well, if I let up with this thing,” she proposed, “he might be able to nod or something. Want to try it?”
“No thanks. You keep him under.” Cuiller turned back to the kzin and said conversationally, “Now, we need to borrow your ship, Kitty I’m going to burn you out of that armor, and you’re going to cooperate-one way or another.”
Cuiller studied the latches down the suit’s front. They were gobbed with metal and streamers of burned plastic. He placed the projector of his laser alongside the middle one and fired a short burst. The clasp flew off into the dirt. He repeated with the other two, and the clamshell halves of the belly plate sagged apart The commander then laid the rifle against the soft, reddish fur underneath.
“Slowly,” he told the kzin.
The warrior shrugged massively, withdrawing its arms from the crabbed gauntlets, vambraces, rerebraces, and pauldrons. It divided its attention between Cuiller’s aim with the rifle and Krater’s hold on the Fiddle.
Krater twisted something, and the kzin’s eyes crossed. Its hands moved sideways, too fast for Cuiller to react. He almost opened the massive chest with a burst before he understood that the Fiddle had prompted that sudden movement.
“Keep working on it,” Cuiller told her, “I think you’re getting somewhere. I hope he’s either captain or navigator of this interceptor, because that’s the only way he’ll be able to help us.”
Then inspiration struck.
“Hey, Fellah!” Cuiller called.
The tiny alien was dwarfed by the huge warcat, but he glanced up at the commander with some confidence.
“Talk to the kzin,” Cuiller told him. “Get inside his mind. See words-say words. Tell him we need his ship, need him. Take us to Margrave. Tell him Margrave. He can do it the easy way or bard. But one way or another, he’s going to rake us to Margrave.”
Fellah looked at Cuiller with his big, dark eyes gleaming out from among the white hair. The commander sensed that the alien understood what he meant. After a moment, Fellah turned to the kzin and began to growl and spit in a timbre that was no more suited to his delicate, curling tongue than Interworld was.
Through his sudden pain and the sensory confusion that the Thrintun artifact had thrust upon him, Nyawk- Captain was catching only a fraction of the humans’ speech and understanding even less. Still, the gestures with the rifle were significant. He did hear the word “Margrave,” which as the proper name for a human-dominated planet was common to both Inter-world and his own language.
Then the Whitefluff began speaking in the Hero’s Tongue.
“Thinskins take you. We-they put you… at disadvantage.”
Nyawk-Captain stopped trying to override the nerve-scrambles that imprisoned him and listened closely.
“True enough,” he growled.
“You are with… luck.”
“Be careful how you tease me, Fluff. I might still regain enough control with just one fingerpad to squash you.”
“Be silent. I-Fellah help you.”
“Why should you help a kzin when you travel with the humans?”
“They prison me, too.”
“True enough. So. What do you propose?”
“Human the Sally works the… Painstick. She does it badly, yes? You are more aware now, yes?”
Nyawk-Captain suddenly saw the opportunity before him. The alien artifact, the Painstick, impeded his actions more or less as the human woman varied the intensity and direction of its strange power. The eerie music still gave Nyawk-Captain a headache but, as the human woman fretfully twisted and fingered the device, its nerve signals were less paralyzing to him than they had been at first. Eventually he might work free of it and be able merely to simulate a body under external control. Then, if he could keep from retching, he would pretend to do what they wanted-until they were both distracted.
“I see your meaning, yes,” he told the Fluff. “What do you suggest?”
“They want you take… ship and them. Go to place called ‘Margrave.’ You know this?”
“Yes, I know Margrave. My crew and I were headed there, before we landed here.” And, with luck and at the human’s own prompting, Nyawk-Captain told himself, Cat’s Paw might still arrive there right on schedule.
“Play along,” the Whitefluff told him. “Pretend pain. Be docile. Be watchful, too.”
“Yes. Until the moment.”
“I tell you when,” the tiny alien advised.
The human male interrupted them with “[Something unintelligible] Margrave?”
The Fluff looked back and answered with “[More nonsense sounds] Margrave.”
Nyawk-Captain nodded his head vigorously in the human gesture signaling agreement. Then, still twitching his arms in random and mechanical ways, he climbed slowly out of the armor’s greaves and cuisses.
The work Navigator had been performing on the hull when he died was related only to the sensors for defensive weapons-useful but not essential systems, now. Nyawk-Captain’s mission could proceed without them.
The kzin’s stomach lurched and staggered with a change of balance as human the Sally tried a new twist with the artifact. The device was still making him do strange things and feel unusual sensations, some pleasant but most merely irritating. It was infuriating to occasionally lose control, but he could learn to live with that. He could even feel himself beginning to like the human female, just a little.
The other human went through the airlock first, keeping his rifle leveled on Nyawk-Captain’s throat. The kzin let him. When he wanted, when the time was right, he would take away that toy before the human could fire it.
Cuiller backed the kzin into the central crash-cradle and made it sit down. While he held the rifle to its forehead, Sally used the couch’s cloth straps and mechanical braces to bind the kzin. She left one forearm and paw free to work the instruments at its station. However, a brief and sweeping study of the control layout had convinced Cuiller that at least two people were needed to pilot the interceptor.
Once the kzin was secured, Krater stepped up to the main panel and fastened the Fiddle to a cleared space with a wad of stickum from her pack. She arranged it so the Fiddle’s presumed working end pointed at the captive’s forehead.
Cuiller inspected the arrangement. “I hope long-term exposure to that thing isn’t going to render him incapacitated, or dead.”
“We could do worse,” she suggested.
Fellah sat quietly on the deckplates, where Cuiller hand set him down.
“Okay, Fellah, tell him we need to start the main polarizers and lift ship. He’ll tell you how, and you translate for us. Or, I guess, you can just point at whatever controls we should attend to next.”
The alien absorbed this and began spitting in the Hero’s Tongue. Cuiller and Krater settled into the two remaining kzinti couches and tried to adapt the crash webbing to their smaller bodies.
With pantomime gestures and low growls, the kzin instructed Fellah in takeoff procedures. Then he relayed the instructions in a series that went, “Push this, pull that, turn this one until red line comes up here, do not move until this disk turns blue.”
Working one-handed, Cuiller hit switches and verniers in the indicated order. The airlock closed, the board lit up, and somewhere back of them the world stiffened and shifted as the gravity polarizers kicked in.
On one of the screens, he watched the landing site and Callisto’s battered hull dwindle and then disappear in a wash of green. In another second the green foliage was gone, dissolving in a flutter of hazy light that turned a chlorine-tinted white as the ship, still accelerating, rose above the limb of the planet.
“Good-bye, Beanstalk,” Krater called cheerfully.
“Good-bye, Daff and Hugh,” Cuiller added soberly. “They were good shipmates.”
“Amen to that.”
As they cleared atmosphere, the kzin turned back to Cuiller directly and gestured with its free paw toward controls on the panel in front of it.
The commander studied the almost-glazed eyes and the string of dribble at the corner of the kzin’s black-
