Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. Copyright on this publication was renewed. The Game of Rat and Dragon By CORDWAINER SMITH _Only partners could fight this deadliest of wars--and the one way to dissolve the partnership was to be personally dissolved!_ Illustrated by HUNTER * * * * * THE TABLE [Illustration] Pinlighting is a hell of a way to earn a living. Underhill was furiousas he closed the door behind himself. It didn't make much sense towear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn't appreciatewhat you did. He sat down in his chair, laid his head back in the headrest andpulled the helmet down over his forehead. As he waited for the pin-set to warm up, he remembered the girl in theouter 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 aminimum 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, fullof nothing. Out in that nothingness, he could sense the hollow achinghorror of space itself and could feel the terrible anxiety which hismind encountered whenever it met the faintest trace of inert dust. As he relaxed, the comforting solidity of the Sun, the clock-work ofthe familiar planets and the Moon rang in on him. Our own solar systemwas as charming and as simple as an ancient cuckoo clock filled withfamiliar ticking and with reassuring noises. The odd little moons ofMars swung around their planet like frantic mice, yet their regularitywas itself an assurance that all was well. Far above the plane of theecliptic, he could feel half a ton of dust more or less driftingoutside the lanes of human travel. Here there was nothing to fight, nothing to challenge the mind, totear the living soul out of a body with its roots dripping ineffluvium as tangible as blood. Nothing ever moved in on the Solar System. He could wear the pin-setforever and be nothing more than a sort of telepathic astronomer, aman who could feel the hot, warm protection of the Sun throbbing andburning against his living mind. * * * * * Woodley came in. "Same old ticking world, " said Underhill. "Nothing to report. Nowonder they didn't develop the pin-set until they began to planoform. Down here with the hot Sun around us, it feels so good and so quiet. You can feel everything spinning and turning. It's nice and sharp andcompact. 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 havebeen 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 earntheir livings among the stars. They didn't have to dodge the Rats orplay the Game. They couldn't have invented pinlighting because theydidn't have any need of it, did they, Woodley?" Woodley grunted, "Uh-huh. " Woodley was twenty-six years old and due toretire in one more year. He already had a farm picked out. He hadgotten through ten years of hard work pinlighting with the best ofthem. 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 andthinking 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 resentedhim. He was suspected of thinking ugly thoughts of the Partners onoccasion, but since none of the Partners ever thought a complaint inarticulate form, the other pinlighters and the Chiefs of theInstrumentality left him alone. Underhill was still full of the wonder of their job. Happily hebabbled on, "What does happen to us when we planoform? Do you thinkit's sort of like dying? Did you ever see anybody who had his soulpulled 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 cameapart. There was something funny. It looked wet and sort of sticky asif it were bleeding and it went out of him--and you know what they didto Dogwood? They took him away, up in that part of the hospital whereyou and I never go--way up at the top part where the others are, wherethe others always have to go if they are alive after the Rats of theUp-and-Out have gotten them. " Woodley sat down and lit an ancient pipe. He was burning somethingcalled tobacco in it. It was a dirty sort of habit, but it made himlook 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 gettingbetter. I've seen them pinlight two Rats forty-six million miles apartin one and a half milliseconds. As long as people had to try to workthe pin-sets themselves, there was always the chance that with aminimum of four hundred milliseconds for the human mind to set apinlight, we wouldn't light the Rats up fast enough to protect ourplanoforming ships. The Partners have changed all that. Once they getgoing, they're faster than Rats. And they always will be. I know it'snot 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 ofthemselves. I've seen more pinlighters go crazy from monkeying aroundwith Partners than I have ever seen caught by the Rats. How many doyou actually know of them that got grabbed by Rats?" * * * * * Underhill looked down at his fingers, which shone green and purple inthe vivid light thrown by the tuned-in pin-set, and counted ships. The thumb for the _Andromeda_, lost with crew and passengers, theindex finger and the middle finger for _Release Ships_ 43 and 56, found with their pin-sets burned out and every man, woman, and childon board dead or insane. The ring finger, the little finger, and thethumb of the other hand were the first three battleships to be lost tothe 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-- 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 Earthdisappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half alight-year or fifty light-years off. At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-setready 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 wasloose in the Up-and-Out, the terrible open spaces between the stars, where the stars themselves felt like pimples on his telepathic mindand the planets were too far away to be sensed or read. Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death andhorror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached outfor inter-stellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns keptthe Dragons away. * * * * * Dragons. That was what people called them. To ordinary people, therewas nothing, nothing except the shiver of planoforming and the hammerblow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descendinginto their minds. But to the telepaths, they were Dragons. In the fraction of a second between the telepaths' awareness of ahostile something out in the black, hollow nothingness of space andthe impact of a ferocious, ruinous psychic blow against all livingthings within the ship, the telepaths had sensed entities somethinglike the Dragons of ancient human lore, beasts more clever thanbeasts, demons more tangible than demons, hungry vortices of alivenessand hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin tenuous matterbetween the stars. It took a surviving ship to bring back the news--a ship in which, bysheer chance, a telepath had a light beam ready, turning it out at theinnocent dust so that, within the panorama of his mind, the Dragondissolved into nothing at all and the other passengers, themselvesnon-telepathic, went about their way not realizing that their ownimmediate deaths had been averted. From then on, it was easy--almost. * * * * * Planoforming ships always carried telepaths. Telepaths had theirsensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which weretelepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind. The pin-sets in turnwere electronically geared into small dirigible light bombs. Light didit. Light broke up the Dragons, allowed the ships to reformthree-dimensionally, skip, skip, skip, as they moved from star tostar. The odds suddenly moved down from a hundred to one against mankind tosixty to forty in mankind's favor. This was not enough. The telepaths were trained to becomeultrasensitive, trained to become aware of the Dragons in less than amillisecond. But it was found that the Dragons could move a million miles in justunder two milliseconds and that this was not enough for the human mindto 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 Dragonslearned about mankind. Somehow they flattened their own bulk and camein on extremely flat trajectories very quickly. Intense light was needed, light of sunlike intensity. This could beprovided only by light bombs. Pinlighting came into existence. Pinlighting consisted of the detonation of ultra-vivid miniaturephotonuclear bombs, which converted a few ounces of a magnesiumisotope into pure visible radiance. The odds kept coming down in mankind's favor, yet ships were beinglost. It became so bad that people didn't even want to find the shipsbecause the rescuers knew what they would see. It was sad to bringback to Earth three hundred bodies ready for burial and two hundred orthree hundred lunatics, damaged beyond repair, to be wakened, and fed, and cleaned, and put to sleep, wakened and fed again until their liveswere ended. [Illustration] Telepaths tried to reach into the minds of the psychotics who had beendamaged by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vividspouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial iditself, the volcanic source of life. Then came the Partners. Man and Partner could do together what Man could not do alone. Men hadthe intellect. Partners had the speed. The Partners rode their tiny craft, no larger than footballs, outsidethe spaceships. They planoformed with the ships. They rode beside themin their six-pound craft ready to attack. The tiny ships of the Partners were swift. Each carried a dozenpinlights, bombs no bigger than thimbles. The pinlighters threw the Partners--quite literally threw--by means ofmind-to-firing relays direct at the Dragons. What seemed to be Dragons to the human mind appeared in the form ofgigantic Rats in the minds of the Partners. Out in the pitiless nothingness of space, the Partners' mindsresponded to an instinct as old as life. The Partners attacked, striking with a speed faster than Man's, going from attack to attackuntil the Rats or themselves were destroyed. Almost all the time, itwas the Partners who won. With the safety of the inter-stellar skip, skip, skip of the ships, commerce increased immensely, the population of all the colonies wentup, and the demand for trained Partners increased. Underhill and Woodley were a part of the third generation ofpinlighters and yet, to them, it seemed as though their craft hadendured forever. [Illustration] Gearing space into minds by means of the pin-set, adding the Partnersto those minds, keying up the mind for the tension of a fight on whichall depended--this was more than human synapses could stand for long. Underhill needed his two months' rest after half an hour of fighting. Woodley needed his retirement after ten years of service. They wereyoung. They were good. But they had limitations. So much depended on the choice of Partners, so much on the sheer luckof who drew whom. THE SHUFFLE Father Moontree and the little girl named West entered the room. Theywere the other two pinlighters. The human complement of the FightingRoom was now complete. Father Moontree was a red-faced man of forty-five who had lived thepeaceful life of a farmer until he reached his fortieth year. Onlythen, belatedly, did the authorities find he was telepathic and agreeto let him late in life enter upon the career of pinlighter. He didwell at it, but he was fantastically old for this kind of business. Father Moontree looked at the glum Woodley and the musing Underhill. "How're the youngsters today? Ready for a good fight?" "Father always wants a fight, " giggled the little girl named West. Shewas such a little little girl. Her giggle was high and childish. Shelooked like the last person in the world one would expect to find inthe rough, sharp dueling of pinlighting. Underhill had been amused one time when he found one of the mostsluggish of the Partners coming away happy from contact with the mindof the girl named West. Usually the Partners didn't care much about the human minds with whichthey were paired for the journey. The Partners seemed to take theattitude that human minds were complex and fouled up beyond belief, anyhow. No Partner ever questioned the superiority of the human mind, though very few of the Partners were much impressed by thatsuperiority. The Partners liked people. They were willing to fight with them. Theywere even willing to die for them. But when a Partner liked anindividual the way, for example, that Captain Wow or the Lady Mayliked Underhill, the liking had nothing to do with intellect. It was amatter of temperament, of feel. Underhill knew perfectly well that Captain Wow regarded his, Underhill's, brains as silly. What Captain Wow liked was Underhill'sfriendly emotional structure, the cheerfulness and glint of wickedamusement that shot through Underhill's unconscious thought patterns, and the gaiety with which Underhill faced danger. The words, thehistory books, the ideas, the science--Underhill could sense all thatin his own mind, reflected back from Captain Wow's mind, as so muchrubbish. Miss West looked at Underhill. "I bet you've put stickum on thestones. " "I did not!" Underhill felt his ears grow red with embarrassment. During hisnovitiate, he had tried to cheat in the lottery because he gotparticularly fond of a special Partner, a lovely young mother namedMurr. It was so much easier to operate with Murr and she was soaffectionate toward him that he forgot pinlighting was hard work andthat he was not instructed to have a good time with his Partner. Theywere both designed and prepared to go into deadly battle together. One cheating had been enough. They had found him out and he had beenlaughed at for years. Father Moontree picked up the imitation-leather cup and shook thestone dice which assigned them their Partners for the trip. By seniorrights, he took first draw. * * * * * He grimaced. He had drawn a greedy old character, a tough old malewhose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceansfull of half-spoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that heburped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon hismind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. Hehad killed sixty-three Dragons, more than any other Partner in theservice, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold. The little girl West came next. She drew Captain Wow. When she saw whoit was, she smiled. "I _like_ him, " she said. "He's such fun to fight with. He feels sonice and cuddly in my mind. " "Cuddly, hell, " said Woodley. "I've been in his mind, too. It's themost leering mind in this ship, bar none. " "Nasty man, " said the little girl. She said it declaratively, withoutreproach. Underhill, looking at her, shivered. He didn't see how she could take Captain Wow so calmly. Captain Wow'smind _did_ leer. When Captain Wow got excited in the middle of abattle, confused images of Dragons, deadly Rats, luscious beds, thesmell of fish, and the shock of space all scrambled together in hismind as he and Captain Wow, their consciousnesses linked togetherthrough the pin-set, became a fantastic composite of human being andPersian cat. That's the trouble with working with cats, thought Underhill. It's apity that nothing else anywhere will serve as Partner. Cats were allright once you got in touch with them telepathically. They were smartenough to meet the needs of the fight, but their motives and desireswere certainly different from those of humans. They were companionable enough as long as you thought tangible imagesat them, but their minds just closed up and went to sleep when yourecited Shakespeare or Colegrove, or if you tried to tell them whatspace was. It was sort of funny realizing that the Partners who were so grim andmature out here in space were the same cute little animals that peoplehad used as pets for thousands of years back on Earth. He hadembarrassed himself more than once while on the ground salutingperfectly ordinary non-telepathic cats because he had forgotten forthe moment that they were not Partners. He picked up the cup and shook out his stone dice. He was lucky--he drew the Lady May. * * * * * The Lady May was the most thoughtful Partner he had ever met. In her, the finely bred pedigree mind of a Persian cat had reached one of itshighest peaks of development. She was more complex than any humanwoman, but the complexity was all one of emotions, memory, hope anddiscriminated experience--experience sorted through without benefit ofwords. When he had first come into contact with her mind, he was astonished atits clarity. With her he remembered her kittenhood. He remembered everymating experience she had ever had. He saw in a half-recognizablegallery all the other pinlighters with whom she had been paired for thefight. And he saw himself radiant, cheerful and desirable. He even thought he caught the edge of a longing-- A very flattering and yearning thought: _What a pity he is not a cat. _ Woodley picked up the last stone. He drew what he deserved--a sullen, scared old tomcat with none of the verve of Captain Wow. Woodley'sPartner was the most animal of all the cats on the ship, a low, brutish type with a dull mind. Even telepathy had not refined hischaracter. His ears were half chewed off from the first fights inwhich he had engaged. He was a serviceable fighter, nothing more. Woodley grunted. Underhill glanced at him oddly. Didn't Woodley ever do anything butgrunt? Father Moontree looked at the other three. "You might as well get yourPartners now. I'll let the Scanner know we're ready to go into theUp-and-Out. " THE DEAL Underhill spun the combination lock on the Lady May's cage. He wokeher gently and took her into his arms. She humped her backluxuriously, stretched her claws, started to purr, thought better ofit, and licked him on the wrist instead. He did not have the pin-seton, so their minds were closed to each other, but in the angle of hermustache and in the movement of her ears, he caught some sense ofgratification she experienced in finding him as her Partner. He talked to her in human speech, even though speech meant nothing toa cat when the pin-set was not on. "It's a damn shame, sending a sweet little thing like you whirlingaround in the coldness of nothing to hunt for Rats that are bigger anddeadlier than all of us put together. You didn't ask for this kind offight, did you?" For answer, she licked his hand, purred, tickled his cheek with herlong fluffy tail, turned around and faced him, golden eyes shining. For a moment, they stared at each other, man squatting, cat standingerect on her hind legs, front claws digging into his knee. Human eyesand cat eyes looked across an immensity which no words could meet, butwhich affection spanned in a single glance. "Time to get in, " he said. She walked docilely into her spheroid carrier. She climbed in. He sawto it that her miniature pin-set rested firmly and comfortably againstthe base of her brain. He made sure that her claws were padded so thatshe could not tear herself in the excitement of battle. Softly he said to her, "Ready?" For answer, she preened her back as much as her harness would permitand purred softly within the confines of the frame that held her. He slapped down the lid and watched the sealant ooze around the seam. For a few hours, she was welded into her projectile until a workmanwith a short cutting arc would remove her after she had done her duty. * * * * * He picked up the entire projectile and slipped it into the ejectiontube. He closed the door of the tube, spun the lock, seated himself inhis chair, and put his own pin-set on. Once again he flung the switch. He sat in a small room, _small_, _small_, _warm_, _warm_, the bodiesof the other three people moving close around him, the tangible lightsin the ceiling bright and heavy against his closed eyelids. As the pin-set warmed, the room fell away. The other people ceased tobe people and became small glowing heaps of fire, embers, dark redfire, with the consciousness of life burning like old red coals in acountry fireplace. As the pin-set warmed a little more, he felt Earth just below him, felt the ship slipping away, felt the turning Moon as it swung on thefar side of the world, felt the planets and the hot, clear goodness ofthe Sun which kept the Dragons so far from mankind's native ground. Finally, he reached complete awareness. He was telepathically alive to a range of millions of miles. He feltthe dust which he had noticed earlier high above the ecliptic. With athrill of warmth and tenderness, he felt the consciousness of the LadyMay pouring over into his own. Her consciousness was as gentle andclear and yet sharp to the taste of his mind as if it were scentedoil. It felt relaxing and reassuring. He could sense her welcome ofhim. It was scarcely a thought, just a raw emotion of greeting. At last they were one again. In a tiny remote corner of his mind, as tiny as the smallest toy hehad ever seen in his childhood, he was still aware of the room and theship, and of Father Moontree picking up a telephone and speaking to aScanner captain in charge of the ship. His telepathic mind caught the idea long before his ears could framethe words. The actual sound followed the idea the way that thunder onan ocean beach follows the lightning inward from far out over theseas. "The Fighting Room is ready. Clear to planoform, sir. " THE PLAY Underhill was always a little exasperated the way that Lady Mayexperienced things before he did. He was braced for the quick vinegar thrill of planoforming, but hecaught her report of it before his own nerves could register whathappened. Earth had fallen so far away that he groped for several millisecondsbefore he found the Sun in the upper rear right-hand corner of histelepathic mind. That was a good jump, he thought. This way we'll get there in four orfive skips. A few hundred miles outside the ship, the Lady May thought back athim, "O warm, O generous, O gigantic man! O brave, O friendly, Otender 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 clearamiable babble of her cat intellect and translated it into imageswhich his own thinking could record and understand. Neither one of them was absorbed in the game of mutual greetings. Hereached out far beyond her range of perception to see if there wasanything near the ship. It was funny how it was possible to do twothings at once. He could scan space with his pin-set mind and yet atthe same time catch a vagrant thought of hers, a lovely, affectionatethought about a son who had had a golden face and a chest covered withsoft, 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 starswere different. The Sun was immeasurably far behind. Even the neareststars were barely in contact. This was good Dragon country, this open, nasty, hollow kind of space. He reached farther, faster, sensing andlooking for danger, ready to fling the Lady May at danger wherever hefound it. Terror blazed up in his mind, so sharp, so clear, that it came throughas 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 shoutedtelepathically at the others, trying to move the Lady May around. At one corner of the battle, he felt the lustful rage of Captain Wowas the big Persian tomcat detonated lights while he approached thestreak 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 intothe shape of a spear. Not three milliseconds had elapsed. * * * * * Father Moontree was talking human words and was saying in a voice thatmoved 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 gotthrough talking. Now, fractions of a millisecond later, the Lady May was directly inline. Here was where the skill and speed of the Partners came in. She couldreact faster than he. She could see the threat as an immense Ratcoming direct at her. She could fire the light-bombs with a discrimination which he mightmiss. He was connected with her mind, but he could not follow it. His consciousness absorbed the tearing wound inflicted by the alienenemy. It was like no wound on Earth--raw, crazy pain which startedlike 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 Maystruck back at their enemy. Five evenly spaced photonuclear bombs blazed out across a hundredthousand miles. The pain in his mind and body vanished. [Illustration] He felt a moment of fierce, terrible, feral elation running throughthe mind of the Lady May as she finished her kill. It was alwaysdisappointing to the cats to find out that their enemies whom theysensed as gigantic space Rats disappeared at the moment ofdestruction. Then he felt her hurt, the pain and the fear that swept over both ofthem as the battle, quicker than the movement of an eyelid, had comeand gone. In the same instant, there came the sharp and acid twingeof 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 spaceboard shone below. [Illustration] With a weariness that lay almost beyond the limits of thought, hethrew his mind back into rapport with the pin-set, fixing the LadyMay's projectile gently and neatly in its launching tube. She was half dead with fatigue, but he could feel the beat of herheart, could listen to her panting, and he grasped the grateful edgeof a thanks reaching from her mind to his. THE SCORE They put him in the hospital at Caledonia. The doctor was friendly but firm. "You actually got touched by thatDragon. That's as close a shave as I've ever seen. It's all so quickthat it'll be a long time before we know what happened scientifically, but I suppose you'd be ready for the insane asylum now if the contacthad lasted several tenths of a millisecond longer. What kind of catdid you have out in front of you?" Underhill felt the words coming out of him slowly. Words were such alot of trouble compared with the speed and the joy of thinking, fastand sharp and clear, mind to mind! But words were all that could reachordinary people like this doctor. His mouth moved heavily as he articulated words, "Don't call ourPartners cats. The right thing to call them is Partners. They fightfor us in a team. You ought to know we call them Partners, not cats. How is mine?" "I don't know, " said the doctor contritely. "We'll find out for you. Meanwhile, old man, you take it easy. There's nothing but rest thatcan help you. Can you make yourself sleep, or would you like us togive you some kind of sedative?" "I can sleep, " said Underhill. "I just want to know about the LadyMay. " The nurse joined in. She was a little antagonistic. "Don't you want toknow about the other people?" "They're okay, " said Underhill. "I knew that before I came in here. " He stretched his arms and sighed and grinned at them. He could seethey were relaxing and were beginning to treat him as a person insteadof a patient. "I'm all right, " he said. "Just let me know when I can go see myPartner. " A new thought struck him. He looked wildly at the doctor. "They didn'tsend her off with the ship, did they?" "I'll find out right away, " said the doctor. He gave Underhill areassuring squeeze of the shoulder and left the room. The nurse took a napkin off a goblet of chilled fruit juice. * * * * * Underhill tried to smile at her. There seemed to be something wrongwith the girl. He wished she would go away. First she had started tobe friendly and now she was distant again. It's a nuisance beingtelepathic, he thought. You keep trying to reach even when you are notmaking contact. Suddenly she swung around on him. "You pinlighters! You and your damn cats!" Just as she stamped out, he burst into her mind. He saw himself aradiant hero, clad in his smooth suede uniform, the pin-set crownshining like ancient royal jewels around his head. He saw his ownface, handsome and masculine, shining out of her mind. He saw himselfvery far away and he saw himself as she hated him. She hated him in the secrecy of her own mind. She hated him because hewas--she thought--proud, and strange, and rich, better and morebeautiful than people like her. He cut off the sight of her mind and, as he buried his face in thepillow, he caught an image of the Lady May. "She _is_ a cat, " he thought. "That's all she is--a _cat_!" But that was not how his mind saw her--quick beyond all dreams ofspeed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, wordless andundemanding. Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her? --CORDWAINER SMITH [Illustration] * * * * *