The primus stove was fired with charcoal. Water was heated on it for the powdered coffee. They made supper of that and the milk and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from the bus.
Margo thought she wouldn’t be able to stomach such sweet, gooey child’s fodder, but found herself ravenous after the first bite and disposed of three, along with a pint of cafe au lait. She felt lightheadedly drunk, her mind from time to time happily jumping with visions of the red-hooded sadists being swept by her pistol to their deaths, and she said what she felt to everyone she met.
Catching the Ramrod behind the bus, she asked him point-blank: “Mr. Fulby, is it true you’re married to both Ida and Wanda?”
He, quite unoffended, nodded his narrow, grizzled head and replied: **Yes indeed, in our eyes they are both my wives, and I their breadwinner. It’s been an enriching relationship, on the whole. I originally married Wanda for the body’s glory — she was a Baby Wampas star — and Ida for the spirit’s exaltation. Of course, things are a bit different now…”
The scowly old bus driver heard most of that speech and turned away with a snort.
“Jealous, Pop?” Margo asked him with a friendly sort of maliciousness.
Tigerishka finished feeding Miaow for a third time and glanced at Paul. Then, with what he surmised was a deliberately human and mocking shrug of those lovely violet-barred green shoulders that had more play and stretch in them than any tennis star’s or Hindu dancer’s, she returned to the Food Panel, then swam over to him with a small kit in one paw and two narrow tubes trailing behind her. She hovered by him, eying him up and down, as if momentarily uncertain whether to force-feed him down the throat, or through a vein, or perhaps rectally.
His throat now ached with thirst, matching his general muscle ache, and he had begun to feel very lightheaded, though more likely from experience-fatigue than hunger. What he was mostly conscious of was unhappy irritation at the change in Tigerishka. While Miaow fed, the large cat had been dancing — a wonderfully swift, rhythmic pirouetting and somersaulting and cartwheeling between ceiling and floor of the saucer, pushing off from each in turn. Simultaneously, strange music had filled the saucer, and its mysterious sunlight had pulsed in time.
Tigerishka, Paul realized now, was a toe-dancer by anatomy, her feet being all toe — digitigrade, not plantigrade — and her heel the leg-joint above them, corresponding to the lower elbow in her forearm.
The dance had enthralled him completely, taking his mind off all his pains and anxieties.
Now the lovely ballerina had become again the impersonally sadistic nurse — a hateful transformation.
So in spite of his thirst he sadly shook his head and tried to press his numb, thick-feeling lips together tight. Then he pushed up his eyebrows and solemnly lifted his face toward hers in the only expression of appeal his mind could devise — though he was very conscious of how exquisitely like a gagged and pinioned monkey begging for freedom he must be making himself look.
She grinned at him without parting her long lips — another mocking imitation of a human sign, he felt sure, and continued to contemplate him.
It was night again, he knew, and he had been in the saucer a full twelve hours, for the last observation had been another unmistakable one — of San Francisco sinking into evening, but showing’the black stains and smokings of fires put out by rains, and also a crowding of ships in the Golden Gate. Then the saucer had tilted, and he had seen the Wanderer rising in the east in its mandala-face with an asymmetric glittering ring around it that a few seconds of frantic thought convinced him was most likely the crushed moon.
Tigerishka reached out and brushed his right wrist with the back of a green paw, then sat back again. He realized with rather incredulous wonder that his right arm was free. He worked the fingers, bent and unbent the elbow with less pain than he’d anticipated, then started to lift his fingers to his lips, but stopped them midway.
If he simply touched his lips, she might interpret it as meaning he wished to be tube-fed that way.
He brought his fingers to his forehead, then in one smooth movement dropped them to his lips and out toward her pointed ears. Inspiration continuing, he dropped them toward her muzzle, then swept them back to his own ear.
“Yes, want talk,” she interpreted. “Monkey cat have great gossip, eh?” She slowly shook her green-masked face from side to side. “No! Be all chatter-questions — one, ten, five thousands! I know apes.”
His expectations crumbled. At the same time it was occurring to him, with curious certainty, that she could have said that in grammatically perfect English, but deliberately chose not to — very much as a brilliant European quite capable of speaking any language flawlessly will hang onto his accent and his first, makeshift constructions to emphasize his exotic individuality, and also as a subtle criticism of the arbitrary English pronunciations and of its swarms of silly little auxiliary words.
“Still—” Tigerishka temporized — “are things I will tell.” Then, at court-stenographer speed, and a little singsong, as if it were very boring to her: “I come superior galactic culture. Read minds, throw thoughts, sail hyperspace, live forever if want, blow up suns — all that sort stuff. Look like animal — resume ancestral shapes. Make brains small but really huge — (psychophysiosubmicrominiaturization! We stay superior.) You not believe? So listen. Plants eat inorganic: they superior! Animals eat plants: they superior. Cats eat fresh meat: we most superior! Monkeys try eat everything: a mess!”
Then without pause: “Wanderer sail hyperspace. Yes, star photos, I know. Need fuel — much matter for converters. Your moon good woodpile. Smash, pulverize, dredge. We fuel up, then go. No need you monkeys get hot and bothered.”
After she broke off, Paul continued to seethe for all of five seconds, utterly enraged at her heartless oversimplifications. Then it occurred to him that there was nothing whatever he could do about it. He took a deep, slow breath and calmed his features, hoping they were growing less red. Then he held his hand tightly over his mouth and suddenly threw it out, as if to say: “Away with the gag.”
It also occurred to him that there was really no point to this gesture game, since she must know his thoughts, but immediately on the heels of that came the realization that the point simply was that it was a game. Cats like games; they like to play with helpless victims; and here Tigerishka seemed no exception.
She confirmed this by smiling as she slowly shook her head — smiling and wrinkling her upper lips so that her five-bristle mustaches made little circles.
He took another tack. He repeated the “Away with the gag” gesture, but immediately followed it by bringing his hand to his mouth as if holding a glass, and tipping it as if drinking. Finally he laid his forefinger across the center of his lips.
Tigerishka’s star-shaped pupils narrowed to points as she stared at his eyes. “I let you drink mouth, you no talk? No say single word?”
Paul nodded solemnly.
She took from her kit a limp white flask of what looked like half-pint capacity and held it against his lips. “I squeeze gently, you suck,” she said, and brushed the back of her other forepaw across his cheek and chin. Sensation flashed back into them and at the same time a cool seeping was solacing his dry and aching throat. After a bit the taste came: milk. Milk with a faint musky tone. He wondered if it were feline or synthetic, humanly assimilable or not, but decided he must trust Tigerishka’s judgment.
When the first edge of his thirst was quenched, he reached up his hand to take over the job of squeezing. She neither rebuffed this gesture nor immediately relinquished her hold on the flask, so for a few moments he felt, through the edges of his fingers and hand, the velvet of her pads and the resilient silk of her fur and, through the latter, the hard curve of a sheathed claw. Then she withdrew her paw, saying only: “Gently, remember.”