How much more did Staunton guess? He’d definitely suspected something, even before he’d left the house, to have set that telltale trap with the flour. Alone in the house and wandering around to explore, he’d not known that he was walking in the thin film of flour until the sensitive pads of his feet had told him he was walking in something, and he’d looked down, too late. How hard he’d tried to think of a way of obliterating those paw prints, or of cleaning up the flour and spreading fresh flour! It was simply impossible, in this tiny body he now occupied. Not the cleaning up of the flour; he could have licked it up, but the problem of spreading fresh flour and doing it evenly and neatly was insuperable. He might have been able to open the cupboard door to get at the flour sifter but, small as he was and without hands, there was no way at all of his using it as the man had done. No way at all.
His real panic had come when Staunton, returning, had called him, addressing him as one intelligent being speaking to another. Had Staunton determined by logic or by intuition that a cat trapped in his house wasn’t really a cat at all? It seemed incredible that he had worked it out from such slender evidence.
But it could be. Staunton, he must remember, was a scientist. The mind thing’s contact, from inside, with human minds had been with the mind of a boy not yet out of high school and the mind of a stupid and barely literate old man. Perhaps there were things, many things, on this world that neither Tommy nor Gross knew or even suspected, but that would be elementary to Staunton. Perhaps there were species here on Earth which were capable of taking over and using hosts, as his species did. Perhaps some human beings could, with special abilities or special training, take over lesser creatures. Well, he’d find the answer to that in Staunton’s mind if and when he could take it over.
The immediate problem was escape, getting out of this house. Suicide was definitely out, even if he could find the means of accomplishing it here. It had been the unexplained series of suicides of men, animals, and birds that had roused Staunton’s scientific curiosity in the first place. Having one happen right here in his own house, and under these circumstances, might be just the final evidence that would convince him completely of what he now—the mind thing hoped—only suspected.
There was, he realized now, only one thing he could possibly do, and that was to come out of hiding in the morning, let Staunton see him, and try to the utmost of his ability to act like a cat, an ordinary cat. It would be dangerous, but there was no alternative. The danger was not that for any reason Staunton might kill him; that would free him immediately—and if Staunton knew about hosts, killing him was the last thing he’d do. He’d know that killing the host would free the being controlling it. The danger was that Staunton, knowing this, would catch him and keep him caged for study. If nothing worse, that would waste time; maybe he wouldn’t be able to escape until the cat died a natural death, and cats lived for years. The danger was even greater that Staunton would know the psychological tests that could distinguish a controlled creature from a free one.
And if Staunton could prove that—? There’d been some vague knowledge in Tommy Hoffman’s mind that something called truth serum existed. If Staunton injected that and forced him to communicate under its influence, he was through. He’d be forced to communicate the location of his own body, helpless at the Gross farm, and they’d have him.
Even, he realized in sudden despair, Staunton’s caging the cat for study and keeping it caged indefinitely, would cause his death if the cat lived long enough. In less than the natural length of a cat’s life his own body would perish for lack of nourishment. The immersion in nutrient solution he’d had Gross give it was enough to last for months, but not for as much as a year. Being imprisoned indefinitely in the body of any host unable to feed him would be fatal for his own body.
He spent the whole night thinking, weighing odds. He considered leaping against a window in the hope that the glass would break and let him through—but the objection to that was the same as that to an attempt at suicide. Even if successful, either would confirm his captor’s suspicions.
He could only hope that they were only suspicions and not certainties, and that Staunton would let him go in the morning. He could only hope so, and do his best to make the man think that he was only an ordinary cat, after all.
Doc Staunton hadn’t got to bed until one o’clock, and hadn’t gone to sleep until a good hour after that, so he slept later than he usually did, even on vacation. A little after ten in the morning he woke from a confused dream in which he was trying to design a metering device for a satellite but couldn’t remember, or find out from anyone, just what it was supposed to meter. He lay a moment trying to recapture the earlier part of the dream, which still evaded him, and then suddenly remembered the matter of the cat in this house; he forgot about the dream and lay thinking about the cat.
But the matter didn’t seem nearly so sinister now, in the light of day, as it had last night. Hadn’t he been exaggerating the possibility of any connection between having a stray cat in his house and the strange deaths that had happened during the previous ten days?
Well… probably. But still there was something that needed explanation. It wasn’t strange that a cat might enter a house out of curiosity, or out of hunger, through a door or window that had been left open. He doubted that many cats did, at least ones that had homes; but it was not too odd that one should do so. The strange thing was its method of entry.
Yet even that could be explained—if the cat was a homeless one, and hungry. Perhaps it had climbed the tree because it had seen a bird sleeping there and thought it might catch the bird. And then, once out on that particular branch and losing its quarry, the sight of an open window just might tempt it. Any cat, even a stray one, would know that there was food in houses.
But then it had hidden in the hall, near the kitchen doorway, almost as though spying on them, listening to their conversation. And hiding ever since…
Still, if it was a cat that had never had a home and, possibly because boys or a farmer had once thrown stones at it, was afraid of human beings…
He got out of bed and started dressing, deciding that he’d find the cat first, no matter how much searching he’d have to do, and then make up his mind.
He remembered there was a pair of fairly heavy leather gloves in a drawer of the dresser; he got them and put them in a pocket. If he was forced to corner the cat and catch it, and if it was a cat that was wild and might fight against being picked up—and even domestic cats sometimes did that with strangers—those gloves would come in handy. With them on, he should be able to handle it. From the size of the paw prints it had left in the flour, it certainly wasn’t very large. And wild though it might be, it definitely wasn’t a wildcat; his brief study of the prints had convinced him of that. He’d seen prints of a wildcat and they were quite different.
When he left the room he’d slept in he closed the door behind him. Might as well be systematic about his hunting, take the upstairs rooms before he went downstairs, and close the door of each after he’d searched it. He took the bathroom first, since he had to go there anyway, and then the other two bedrooms.
The cat wasn’t upstairs.
He saw it when he was halfway down the steps. It was sitting calmly at the front door, as a cat or dog does when it wants to be let out.
It didn’t look dangerous in the slightest. It was a small gray cat, perfectly ordinary-looking. It didn’t look at all starved and it didn’t seem frightened of him. In fact, it looked up at him as though quite friendly. It miaouwed and scratched lightly against the door.