The Time of The Cat 48
BREAKING IN
The transporter door opened without a sound. Some of the things made a small dinging noise; this one didn’t. Maybe the bell was broken, or they had some other reason that made sense to their thought patterns.
The transporter was empty. We looked in and saw a single activation button and no video screen. The unit was an earlier model, which made sense. It was probably the first one installed on the Earth.
None of us were anxious for the next phase of this operation. We had to make sure we knew where this door went, and doing that had a high probability of getting us killed.
“Look. You all wait here, and I’ll go through and take a look around, then I’ll come right back,” I said.
Before I could step in, the sergeant jumped into the compartment and struck the button. The door slid shut, and he was gone.
We stood there looking at each other in surprise. The breeze blew coldly down from the crest of the ridge, and the moon provided an eerie pale light that illuminated the rocks around us. It was truly a desolate place. The desolation was enhanced by the sudden sound of moaning from down-slope somewhere. There was another Pug-bear coming our way.
We could hear the stones clatter and fall as it scrabbled up the slope. The blasted thing was playing it cagey. It was making use of every available bit of cover as it passed the trees. It finally got close enough that I thought I could make out the moonlight glinting off of some shiny places on its carapace. Aiming just below the shine, I fired a brief bolt and struck it dead center.
The legs scrabbled a bit, but the entire middle of the thing had dissolved.
Liz breathed, “Will they never stop coming?”
As I lifted the eraser-gun to the ready position, I happened to notice something new about it. There was a tiny flashing yellow light on the left side of the weapon.
“Uh-oh!” I exclaimed. “I think that might mean that it’s about out of power.”
“Not good! We really need it now!” Liz answered.
Then it became obvious why Rudy’s group was so solid. Jointly, they were very resourceful, and Joe proved it. He stepped forward with something in his hand.
He explained that he’d looked at the other eraser-gun after Rudy broke it and noticed that there was one part that was detachable. He’d taken that part off before Rudy had left the gun in the Stanley Steamer.
I’d seen that there was a kind of clip-like device on the right of the receiver area of the weapon, but I hadn’t dared mess with it. Since it hadn’t blown Joe up, I felt a little more confident. It took about thirty seconds to figure out how to pull the thing off my gun and replace it with the one from Rudy’s. When we did, the flashing light went out. I gave a sigh of relief and said, “It looks like we’ve got a recharge.”
“We’ll see shortly,” said Rudy, just as the transporter door popped open again.
The sergeant was there, wild-eyed; “There’s a small room and another transporter on the other end of it. I don’t know where the small room is. I went through the second transporter, and it came out in a large, glass-enclosed dome on some other planet. I could see what looked like other domes in the distance. There were a lot of aliens there! They saw me, but I ducked back through before they could do anything.”
“They’ll be coming soon, then!” I observed. “The good news is that it sounds like you reached the link on Titan. We’ll have to go through to it and then blow the dome. Maybe that will slow the bastards down!”
The transporter door behind him started to close, and we rushed to enter the compartment before it did. It struck Colin’s arm and popped open again. We all piled in and turned to get our guns aimed at the door. Liz activated the button; we went through the disorientation, and then the door opened to a small, rectangular-shaped room.
There was another transporter door on the far wall, but between it and us was trouble!
There was a squad of Pugs waiting for our door to open with their guns aimed right at our faces. Before they could think to shoot, I triggered the eraser-gun.
The Pugs didn’t have a chance. Nothing could withstand the anti-matter. They disappeared with a crackling sound. I released the trigger and heard a gagging noise. Spinning towards the sound, I was horrified to see that Colin was on his knees with a splinter in his throat. His head was turning to mush as I watched. He gasped once and fell forward on his face.
One of the Pugs had managed to get off a shot before disintegrating. The splinter had passed above the anti-matter beam and hit Colin square in the neck. It was a hard blow to the rest of us.
Rudy turned away with his face screwed tightly, shaking his head violently in denial, while Liz simply stood there holding the cat with a very pale, taut expression.
We were too few, and some of the best of us were dying too easily. In the back of my mind, I doubted that we’d get through this.
“They probably think we won’t make it through this room, so let’s go on and make them pay!” Rudy had recovered enough to want revenge, even though there were tears sliding down his cheeks. He and Colin had been especially close. They went back farther than the rest of the team, and I knew that Rudy would be hard put to deal with the loss.
We walked forward to the transporter door on the far side of the room. There we found a serious problem. Once again, the eraser gun had proven to be a mixed blessing. I’d burned up the call button and a portion of the workings of the transporter.
I could see some kind of mechanism, but it was incomprehensible to me. I mean, I know a little about electronics, but electronics composed of gel bands connecting lumps of something that looked like silly putty? No, sorry. I couldn’t make any sense out of it.
I was figuratively scratching my head as I inspected the problem. There was no button left. There was a hole in the panel where parts had been exposed to the anti-matter beam for too long. I could see little sparkles of what appeared to be electricity but might have been some other kind of force leaking from the edges of the partially disintegrated putty lumps. Altogether, it was a huge mess.
I turned to the others with dismay on my face, “I think we’re screwed. We can’t get the door open, and I may have killed the whole unit. I don’t know what we can do now.”
Rudy said something unmentionable about the Pugs’ mothers. It was kind of nonsensical because we didn’t even know if they had mothers. He continued cursing their entire family tree back to the primordial mud from which they might have arisen.
Joe, however, had a useful suggestion.
“Now, let’s don’t go jumping to conclusions. The door may be jammed from our side, but it may be that you only burned the call unit out. If we wait, I’ll bet that the Pugs on the other side will get curious and come through. They will either think we haven’t arrived and no messenger has been sent back, or they will think that we arrived and killed the squad.”
“Which, of course, is what happened,” I added, taking up the thought. “It’s a good idea. I think you’re right. They can’t wait too long before they send someone through to check out the situation. They’ll be expecting the worst, so we need to be ready as fast as possible.”
I looked around the chamber. It was empty except for some remnants of the Pugs I’d erased. The bare metal walls were the only things there. All of a sudden, I had another brilliant flash of mental acuity. I guess that old phrase, ‘necessity is the mother of invention,’ is correct. We needed some shielding from the Pugs’ splinters, and there was nothing in the room but the metal walls.
“The metal walls!” I exclaimed. The others looked at me in surprise.
I took the eraser-gun and disintegrated a hole in the metal. There was a brief hiss of equalizing atmosphere and then nothing. Using my laser torch, I could see that there was rock behind the metal. This encouraged me, and using the anti-matter gun, I made four long, swift passes and cut a large, irregular square of metal out of the wall. It fell to the floor with a crash, revealing a basalt wall.
We levered the metal plate up; it was unusually heavy and required all of us to lift it onto one edge. Then we worked it around so that it blocked the chamber about halfway from the end.
I’d started cutting in the middle of the wall, and we were able to brace one of the metal plate’s irregular ends against the rock. The plate was thus partially supported by leaning against the edge of the initial cut in the metal wall. It wasn’t resting there very securely and had to be kind of balanced by someone holding it on the opposite corner, but it did offer a good shield that we could duck behind.
We arranged ourselves behind the barrier and settled down to wait for the Pugs to show up.