Louis sat down. It seemed that he would live. He said, "I wouldn't have your job for anything."
"Obviously not, if you would fight a kzin barehanded. But the Patriarch judges me useless for any other purpose. My intelligence is low, my health is bad, my coordination terrible. How else can I keep my name?"
Louis sipped at his drink and wished for someone to change the subject. He found the humble kzin embarrassing.
"Let us eat," said the one called Speaker-To-Animals. "Unless our mission is urgent, Nessus."
"Not at all. Our crew is not yet complete. My colleagues will call me when they have located a qualified fourth crewman. By all means let us eat."
Speaker-To-Animals said one thing more before he turned back to his table. "Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap."
"You scream and you leap," said Louis. "Great."
CHAPTER 2 — And His Motley Crew
Louis Wu knew people who closed their eyes when they used a transfer booth. The jump in scenery gave them vertigo. To Louis this was nonsense; but then, some of his friends were much odder than that.
He kept his eyes open as he dialed. The watching aliens vanished. Someone called, "Hi! He's back!"
A mob formed around the door. Louis forced it open against them. "Finagle fool you all! Didn't any of you go home?" He spread his arms to engulf them, then pushed forward like a snowplow, forcing them back. "Clear the door, you boors! I've more guests coming."
"Great!" a voice shouted in his ear. Anonymous hands took his hand and forced the fingers around a drinking bulb. Louis hugged the seven or eight of his invited guests within the circle of his arms and smiled at his welcome.
Louis Wu. From a distance he was an oriental, with pale yellow skin and flowing white hair. His rich blue robe was carelessly draped, so that it should have hampered his movements; but it didn't.
Close up, it was all a fraud. His skin was not pale yellow-brown, but a smooth chrome yellow, the color of a comic-book Fu Manchu. His queue was too thick; it was not the white of age, but sheer clean white with a subliminal touch of blue, the color of dwarf star sunlight. As with all flatlanders, cosmetic dyes were the colors of Louis Wu.
A flatlander. You could tell at a glance. His features were neither Caucasian nor Mongoloid nor Negroid, though there were traces of all three: a uniform blend which must have required centuries. In a gravitational pull of 9.98 meters/second, his stance was unconsciously natural. He gripped a drinking bulb and smiled around at his guests.
As it happened, he was smiling into a pair of reflective silver eyes an inch from his own.
One Teela Brown had somehow ended up nose to nose and breast to breast with him. Her skin was blue with a netting of silver threads; her coiffure was streaming bonfire flames; her eyes were convex mirrors. She was twenty years old. Louis had talked to her earlier. Her conversation was shallow, full of cliches and easy enthusiasms; but she was very pretty.
"I had to ask you," she said breathlessly. "How did you get a Trinoc to come?"
"Don't tell me he's'still here."
"Oh, no. His air was running out and he had to go home."
"A little white lie," Louis informed her. "A Trinoc airmaker lasts for weeks. Well, if you really want to know, that particular Trinoc was once my guest and prisoner for a couple of weeks. His ship and crew got themselves killed at the edge of known space, and I had to ferry him to Margrave so they could set up an environment box for him."
The girl's eyes registered delighted wonder. Louis found it pleasantly strange that they were on a level with his own eyes; for Teela Brown's fragile beauty made her look smaller than she really was. Her eyes shifted over Louis's shoulder and widened even further. Louis grinned as he turned.
Nessus the puppeteer trotted out of the transfer booth.
Louis had thought of this as they were leaving Krushenko's. He had been trying to persuade Nessus to tell them something of their proposed destination. But the puppeteer was afraid of spy beams.
"Then come to my place," Louis had suggested.
"But your guests!"
"Not in my office. And my office is absolutely bugproof. Besides, think of the hit you'll make at the party! Assuming everyone hasn't gone home by now."
The impact was all Louis could have desired. The tap-tap-tap of the puppeteer's hooves was suddenly the only sound in the room. Behind him, Speaker-To-Animals flickered into existence. The kzin considered the sea of human faces surrounding the booth. Then, slowly, he bared his teeth.
Someone poured half his drink into a potted palm. The grand gesture. From one of the branches a Gummidgy orchid-thing chattered angrily. People edged away from the transfer booth. There were comments: "You're okay. I see them too." "Sober pills? Let me look in my sporan." "Throws a hell of a party, doesn't he?" "Good old Louis." "What did you call that thing?"
They didn't know what to make of Nessus. Mostly they ignored the puppeteer; they were afraid to comment on him, afraid of sounding like fools. They reacted even more curiously to Speaker-To-Animals. Once mankind's most dangerous enemy, the kzin was being treated with awed deference, like some kind of hero.
"Follow me," Louis told the puppeteer. With luck the kzin would follow them both. "Excuse us," he bellowed, and pushed his way into the throng. In response to various excited and/or puzzled questions he merely grinned secretively.
Safely in his office, Louis barred the door and turned on the bugproofing set. "Okay. Who needs refreshment?"
"If you can heat some bourbon, I can drink it," said the kzin. "If you cannot heat it, I can still drink it."
"Nessus?"
"Any kind of vegetable juice will serve. Have you warm carrot juice?"
"Gah," said Louis; but he instructed the bar, which produced bulbs of warm carrot juice.
While Nessus rested on its folded hind leg, the kzin dropped heavily onto an inflated hassock. Under his weight it should have exploded like any lesser balloon. Man's second oldest enemy looked curious and ridiculous balanced on a hassock too small for him.
The Man-Kzin wars had been numerous and terrible. Had the kzinti won the first of these, mankind would have been a slave and a meat animal for the rest of eternity. But the kzinti had suffered in the wars which followed. They tended to attack before they were ready. They had little concept of patience, and no concept of mercy or of limited war. Each war had cost them a respectable chunk of population and the punitive confiscation of a couple of kzinti worlds.
For two hundred and fifty years the kzinti had not attacked human space. They had nothing to attack with. For two hundred and fifty years men had not attacked the kzinti worlds; and no kzin could understand it. Men confused them terribly.
They were rough and they were tough, and Nessus, an avowed coward, had insulted four fully-grown kzinti in a public restaurant.
"Tell me again," said Louis, "about a puppeteer's proverbial caution. I forget."
"Perhaps I was not strictly fair with you, Louis. My species judges me mad."
"Oh, fine." Louis sucked at the bulb an anonymous donor had handed him. It held vodka and droobleberry juice and shaved ice.