Gordon R. Dickson Read Online Free

furnished with hassocks and pillows of all size—much as the first room he had seen aboard ship, where he had met Ro. The one very large hassock, some four feet thick and eight feet in diameter, at one end of the room, he took to be the bed. At first there seemed nothing in the shape of a bathroom. But the moment this thought occurred to him a section of the wall obediently slid aside, and he found himself looking into a smaller room fitted out with a complete assortment of recognizable lavatory facilities, up to and including a swimming pool—and with several other articles of plumbing which seemed to make little sense. For example, there was one shallow, completely dry basin large enough for him to stretch out in.
    He turned back to his main room and with a corner of his eye saw the door to the bathroom slide shut behind him. He picked up his two suitcases, put them on the bedlike hassock, and opened them. No sooner had he done so than another section of the wall opened, and he found himself looking into what might have been the closet if there had been any pole or clothes hangers in it.
    Experimentally—he was beginning to get the hang of things aboard ship now—he tried to imagine his clothes as being hung up in the closet.
    Obligingly, they were suddenly there—the only unusual part of their appearance and situation being that they hung as he had imagined them, but without any visible means of support, suspended vertically in midair as if held by invisible hangers from an invisible rod.
    Jim nodded. He was about to think the closet closed again, when a second thought made him take the Scottish costume, complete with kilt and knife, from where it hung unsupported in midair, and change into it, placing his suit of lights in the closet in its place, where it hung invisibly supported with the rest of his clothes.
    The closet closed, and Jim was just turning away from it when a visitor materialized in the center of his room. But it was not Ro. Instead, it was one of the male Highborn—a man with onyx-white skin, at least seven feet tall.
    “There you are, Wolfling,” the Highborn said. “Come along. Mekon wants to see you.”
    They were suddenly in a room which Jim had not been in before. It was rectangular and long, and they stood in about the middle of it. There were no other humans in the room. But at the far end, on a sort of pillow-strewn dais, there lay curled a feline similar in every respect to the one among Ro’s pets. It lifted its horse’s head at the sight of them in the room, and its eyes fastened upon Jim.
    “Wait here,” said the Highborn who had brought him. “Mekon will be with you in just a moment.”
    The tall man vanished. Jim found himself left alone with the feline beast, which was now lazily rising to its feet, staring down the room at him.
    Jim stood still, staring back.
    The animal made a curious, whining sound—a sound almost ridiculously small to come from something obviously so physically powerful. Its short stub of a tufted tail began to jerk vertically up and down, stiffly. Its heavy head lowered until its lower jaw almost touched the floor of the dias, and its mouth gradually opened to reveal heavy, carnivorous teeth.
    Still whining, it began slowly to move. Softly, almost delicately, it put one front paw down from the dais; and then the other. Slowly it began to move toward him, crouching and whining as it did. Its teeth were fully visible now, and as it approached, its whine grew in volume, until it was a sort of singing threat.
    Jim waited, moving neither backward nor forward.
    The animal came on. About a dozen yards from him it stopped and gradually crouched. Its tail was jerking like a metronome now, and the singing whine that came from its throat was filling the whole room.
    For what seemed a long time, it crouched there, jaw hung open, whining. Then, without warning, the whining stopped, and it launched itself through the air at Jim’s throat.

Chapter 3
    The feline creature