The Time of The Cat 14

FOURTEEN

EXTENT OF THE THREAT

Carrying the cat, we got back in the Mercedes SUV, drove down the street a block, and then parked again.

Liz was playing with the radio and suddenly stopped it at a news station. The announcer was saying something about a possible earthquake or sinkhole. He wasn’t clear which it was, but he was very excited. Apparently, a large section of farmland in Virginia had suddenly dropped out of sight, and there was only a large hole there now. The local residents had heard a loud sound that they thought was a thunderclap. The military was cordoning the area off, and a research team was on the way.

Liz and I looked at each other. The little grenade was actually not so little after all.

I thought about it a bit and then it hit me, “Anti-matter! The eraser gun and the grenade are anti-matter weapons.”

“I’d always thought that there was supposed to be a huge explosion when matter and anti-matter came together,” she ruminated. “It doesn’t sound like a blast zone, according to the news.”

“No one’s really done the experiment before, but maybe the thing works like the eraser gun and simply erases the matter. The loud noise the reporter mentioned might have just been air filling the suddenly vacated space. I wonder why the chair didn’t make much of a sound besides that crackle. Maybe the gun creates anti-matter at a rate slow enough to dissolve the target rather than to cause it to vaporize instantly.”

“Oh, by the way,” Liz said. “I found something else while you were busy with the map.”

“What was it?” I asked, looking at her appreciatively. I seemed to be making more and more of an effort to look at Liz. It was a worthwhile view.

“Only this little book,” she said. “It’s not in English, but it does have pictures.” She leafed through the pages slowly.

“Look at this! This must represent interstellar travel,” she said, pointing at a page. “Why, it’s a kind of directory and it shows planets connected by the transporter system!”

The opened booklet showed what was obviously a solar system with planets. The symbol for transporter on the pages was the same as on the wall map. That symbol was superimposed on each planet. There was a line linking each planet with a transporter to some of the other planets or moons in each system.

There was no linking line between solar systems. Instead, there was a picture apparently representing some kind of space ship imposed on a dotted line moving from star to star.

“I know what it means,” Liz said excitedly. “The transmitters must be limited in some way, and they’ve got to use a space ship to move from star to star. That’s got to slow their expansion.”

“Yeah, but who knows how long they’ve been at this expansion game,” I grumbled. Then I added, “And, besides, their space ships might be really fast.”

She looked serious and commented, “They’d have to be faster than light. Anything slower wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket when it came to interstellar distances. They must have FTL ships.”

“Well, if they don’t, they must take a really long-range view in their planning.”

We looked through the book and found that each page had a different solar system diagram along with side notations that we couldn’t read. By some of the planets, there also were small but life-like drawings of what must be the inhabitants. The pictures showed Pugs and a few other creatures.

We found our system on the twenty-fourth page. We both recognized it at the same time. It was easy to tell it was ours because the drawing showed a man and a woman by the third planet out from the sun.

“This is Us,” she exclaimed and then pointed, “Look here!”

The dotted space-ship line was going to one of the moons of Saturn. There was a transporter there, and it was linked to one on Earth. I opened the map, and the connection shown in the book was obviously to the transporter in Colorado. There was an identical squiggly symbol by both diagrams.

I tried to joke. “I guess they have a hard time spelling ‘Colorado’.”

Liz looked like she was trying to ignore my attempt at humor, but she nodded in agreement. Then paging through the rest of the book, she said, “There are thirty-six total solar systems in here, and we’re on the twenty-fourth page.”

I grabbed the book out of her hand in sudden speculation. Leafing through the first twenty-three pages, I noted that most of them showed drawings of Pugs and some other creatures. The fifteenth system had a fierce-looking creature that was reminiscent of a tiger, and the line drawing was in a bright yellow. There were no Pugs showing on that page. It looked like the spaceship line went to a moon or something beside the planet, but there wasn’t a transporter link from the moon to the surface.

There was another clue also; some of the solar systems were illustrated in a dull gray, while the rest were blue. The Pugs were only to be found on the blue ones. The gray ones had other forms of life but none of our invaders.

There were some other pages in the back with diagrams, but I ignored them in my excitement.

“Look at this! Most of the first twenty-three pages show Pugs along with some other creatures that may be associated with them, but only the fifteenth and the gray ones have some other kind of life with no Pugs.”

I flipped to the Earth page. Our planet wasn’t gray, but it was a faded-out blue compared to the ones that the Pugs seemed to favor. I wondered if that indicated their incompatibility with our atmosphere.

Continuing to turn the pages rapidly, I said, “Ours and all of the ones after us show other creatures. It looks like they are moving through the systems in this book one after another.”

I continued, “The gray ones aren’t compatible with them for some reason! The yellow creature? Well, we put dangerous things in the color of our blood by a kind of convention. Their blood is yellow, so, assuming that I’m correct...”

My voice trailed off as Liz smirked at me.

“I know, I know. Assume makes an ASS out of U and ME,” I sighed. “But, if I am correct, that thing on the fifteenth page is too much for them to handle. If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, we might do worse than contact those creatures.”

Liz said acerbically, “We might also do better. Did you look closely at that picture? Those things might easily be worse than the Pugs. How do we know they’d work with us and – ”

“OK, OK, it was just an idea,” I interrupted, “Anyway, I think we understand from this book that we’re next on the list to be invaded and extinguished.”

I shook my head and then asked, rather rhetorically, “You think they’ve been transporting our people off the planet to some moon or someplace, but what’s been happening to the people when they get there?”

“You know, I don’t know the answer to that,” she responded. “But, I’ll bet that whatever is happening to them isn’t good.”

We looked at each other, and it was obvious that we were both pretty much ready to lose hope. The situation hadn’t really changed for the better. In fact, despite the mess we’d made of one of their facilities and the Pugs we’d killed, they were now actively looking for us. We, on the other hand, were only starting to suspect the extent of their occupation and capabilities.

Our enemies were far advanced past our human technology. While we might know about such things as anti-matter, matter transmission, and space ships, even making a voyage back to the Moon was currently beyond our capabilities. And, there was no way we were close to creating something like the eraser gun or the bomb.

All-in-all, it seemed like humankind was suddenly faced with an existential threat. If Liz and I didn’t come up with a rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick soon, we agreed that things were going to get out of control very quickly. The Pugs knew that there were rats running around in their system, and that might force them to accelerate their plans. Plans that had some final goal that was unknown to us.

The question that was in the back of both of our minds was, “Were we up to the task?”

I didn’t know the answer.