Fsha-fsha and a Rishian crewman hauled me aboard the ship; Srat's corpse was left on the ramp. Other species aren't as sentimental about such things as Man is. There were a few angry objections from Drath Traffic Control as we lifted, but the Drathians had long since given up Deep Space travel, and the loss of a couple of runaway slaves wasn't sufficient reason to alienate the Rishians. They were one of the few worlds that still sent tramps into Fringe Space.
Once away, Fsha-fsha told me all that had happened since I was sent to the rafts:
"Once you'd planted the idea of escape, I had to go ahead with it," he said. "The next chance was three months later, two of us this time, just one overseer. I had a fancy plan worked out for decoying him into a side alley, but I had a freak piece of luck. It was a loading job, and a net broke and scattered cargo all over the wharf. The other slave got the whole load on his head—and a nice-sized iron casting clipped the guard and laid him out cold. He had the controllers strapped to his arm, in plain sight, but getting to them was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. I used a metal bar from the spilled cargo on them and fainted at the same time.
"I came out of it just in time. The Load-master and a couple of Rule-keepers were just arriving. I got up and ran for it. They wasted a little time discovering my controller was out of action, and by then I had a good start. I headed for a hideaway I'd staked out earlier, and laid up there until dark.
"That night I came out and took a chance on a drinking-house that was run by a non-Drathian. I thought maybe he'd have a little sympathy for a fellow alien. I was wrong, but I strapped him to the bed and filled both my stomachs with high-lipid food, enough to keep me going for two weeks, and took what cash he had in the place and got clear.
"With money to spend, things were a little easier. I found a dive where I could lie low, no questions asked, and sent out feelers for information on where you'd been sent. The next day the little guy showed up: Srat.
"He'd been hanging around, waiting for a chance to talk to someone from the Triarch's stable. I don't know what he'd been eating, but it wasn't much; and he slept in the street.
"I told him what I knew; between us, we got you located. Then the Rish ship showed up."
The Rishian captain was sitting with us, listening. He wrinkled his face at me.
"The H'eeaq, Srat, spoke to me in my own tongue, greatly to my astonishment. Long ago, at Rish, I'd heard the tale of the One-Eyed Man who'd bartered half of the light of his world for the lives of his fellows. The symmetry of the matter demanded that I give such a one the help he asked."
"The little guy didn't look like much," Fsha-fsha said. "But he had all the guts there were."
"You may take pleasure in the memory of that rarest of creatures," the Rishian said. "A loyal slave."
"He was something rarer than that," I said. "A friend."
Fsha-fsha and I stayed with the freighter for three months; we left her on a world called Gloy. We could have ridden her all the way to Rish, but my destination was in the opposite direction: Zeridajh. Fsha-fsha stayed with me. One world was like another to him, he said. As for the ancestral Tree, having cut the ties, like a man recovered from an infatuation, he wasn't eager to retie them. The Rish captain paid us off for our services aboard his vessel—we had rebuilt his standby power section, as well as pulling regular shifts with the crew. That gave us enough cash to re-outfit ourselves with respectable clothes and take rooms at a decent inn near the port, while we looked for a Center-bound berth.
We had a long wait, but it could have been worse. There were shops and taverns and apartments built among the towering ruins of a vast city ten thousand years dead; but the ruins were overgrown and softened by time, so that the town seemed to be built among forested hills, unless you saw it from the air and realized that the mountains were vine-grown structures.
There was work for us on Gloy; by living frugally and saving what we earned, we accumulated enough for passenger berths inward to Tanix, a crossroads world where the volume of in-Galaxy shipping was more encouraging. After a few days' wait, we signed on a mile-long super-liner. It was a four months' cruise; at the end of it we stepped off on the soil of a busy trading planet, and looked up at the blaze of sky that meant Center was close.
"It's still three thousand lights run to Zeridajh," the Second Officer for Power told me as he paid me off. "Why not sign on for another cruise? Good powermen are hard to find; I can offer you a nice bonus."
"It's useless, Second," Fsha-fsha answered for me. "Danger is searching for a magic flower that only grows in one special garden, at the hub of the Galaxy."
After a couple of weeks of job-hunting, we signed on as scrapers on a Center-bound tub crewed by small, damp dandies from the edge of Center. That was the only berth a highbrow Center skipper would consider handing a barbarian from what they called the Outworlds. It was a long cruise, and as far as I could tell, the jobs that fell to a scraper on a Center ship were just as dirty as on any Outworld tub.
On our next cruise, we found ourselves stranded on a backwater world by a broken-down guidance system on the rotting hulk we had shipped in on. We waited for a berth outbound for a month, then took service under a local constabulary boss as mercenaries. We did a lot of jumping around the planet, marching in ragged jungle and eating inedible rations, and in the end barely got clear with our hides intact when the constabulary turned out to be a dacoit force. I made one interesting discovery; my sorting skill came in handy in using the bill-hook machetes issued to the troops. After one or two small run-ins, I had keyed-in a whole set of reflex responses that made me as good as the battalion champion.
Usually, though, we didn't see much of the planets we visited. It was normal practice, all across the Galaxy, for a world to channel all its space-faring commerce and traffic through a single port, for economy of facilities and ease of control. The ports I saw were like ports in all times and climes: cities without personality, reduced to the lowest common denominator of the thousand breeds of being they served.
After that, we found another slot, and another after that, on a small, fast lugger from Thlinthor; and on that jump we had a change in luck.
I was sound asleep in the off-watch cubbyhole I rated as a scraper when the alarm sirens went off. It took me thirty seconds to roll out and get across the deck to the screens where Fsha-fsha and half a dozen other on-watch crewmen were gaping at a sight that you only see once in a lifetime in Deep Space: a derelict hulk, adrift among the stars. This one was vast—and you could tell at one glance that she was old. . . .
We were five hundred miles apart, closing on courses that were only slightly skew; that made two miracles. We hove-to ten miles from her and took a good look, while the power officer conferred with Command Deck. Then the word came through to resume course.
"Huh?" Both Fsha-fsha and I swiveled on him. From the instant I'd seen the hulk, visions of prize-money had been dancing in my head like sugarplums. "He's not going to salvage her?" Fsha-fsha came as close to yelling as his mild nature would let him.
The power officer gave him a fishy look from fishy eyes in a fishy face. Like the rest of the crew, he was an amphibian who slept in a tank of salty water for three hours at a stretch—and like all his tribe, he was an agoraphobe to the last feathery scale on his rudimentary rudder fin. "It ith not practical," he said coldly.
"That tub's fifty thousand years old if she's a day," Fsha-fsha protested. "And I'm a mud-puppy if she's not a Riv Surveyor! She'll be loaded with Pre-collapse star maps! There'll be data aboard her that's been lost since before Thlinthor lofted her first satellite!"
"How would you propoth that we acthelerate thuch a math as that to interthtellar velothity?" he put the question to us. "The hulk outweigth uth a million to one. Our engines were not dethigned for thuch threthes."
"She looks intact," I said. "Maybe her engines are still in working order."
"Tho?"
"We can put a prize crew aboard her and bring her in under her own power."
The Thlinthorian tucked his head down between his shoulder plates, his version of a shudder.
"We Thlinthorians have no tathte for thuch exthploiths," he said. "Our mithion is the thafe delivery of conthigned cargo—"
"You don't have to go out on the hull," Fsha-fsha said. "Danger and I will volunteer."
The power officer goggled his eyes at us and conferred with Command Deck. After a few minutes of talk word came through that his Excellency the Captain was agreeable.
"One stipulation," I said. "We'll do the dirty work; but we take a quarter-share between us."
The captain made a counter-offer of a twentieth share each. We compromised on a tenth.
"I don't like it," Fsha-fsha told me. "He gave in too easily."
We suited up and took a small boat across to the old ship. She was a glossy brown ovoid about half a mile in diameter. Matching up with her was like landing on a planetoid. We found a hatch and a set of outside controls that let us into a dusty, cavernous hold. From there we went on through passenger quarters, recreation areas, technical labs and program rooms. In what looked like an armory, Fsha-fsha and I looked over a treasure-house of sophisticated personal offense and defense devices. Everything was in perfect order; and nowhere, then or later, did we ever find a bone of her crew, or any hint of what had happened to her.
A call from the captain on the portable communicator reminded us sharply that we had a job to do.
We followed a passage big enough to drive a moving van through, found the engine room, about the size of Grand Central Station. The generators ranged down the center of it were as massive as four-story apartment buildings. I whistled when I saw them, but Fsha-fsha took it in stride.
"I've seen bigger," he said. "Let's check out the system."
It took us four hours to work out the meaning of the oversized controls ranged in a circular console around a swiveled chair the size of a bank vault. But the old power plant started up with as sweet a rumble as if it had been in use every day.
After a little experimental jockeying, I got the big hull aligned on course coordinates and fed the power to the generators. As soon as we were up to cruise velocity, His Excellency the Captain ordered us back aboard. "Who are you sending over to relieve us?" I asked him.
"You may leave that detail to my discrethion," he told me in a no-argument tone.
"I can't leave this power section unmanned," I said.
He bugged his eyes at me on the four-inch screen of the pocket communicator and repeated his order, louder, with quotations from the Universal Code.
"I don't like it," Fsha-fsha said. "But I'm afraid we haven't got much choice."
Back aboard the mother-ship, our reception was definitely cool. Word had gotten around that we'd pigged an extra share of the goodies. That suited me all right. The Thlinthorians weren't the kind who inspired much in the way of affection.
When we were well inside the Thlinthorian system the power officer called Fsha-fsha and me in and showed us what was probably a smile.
"I confeth I entertained a thertain thuthpithion of you both," he confided. "But now that we have arrived in the Home Thystem with our thuperb prize thafely in the thlave orbit, I thee that my cauthion was exthethive. Gentlemen, join me in a drink!"
We accepted the invitation, and he poured out nice-sized tumblers of wine. I was just reaching for mine when Fsha-fsha jostled the table and sloshed wine from the glasses. The power officer waved aside his apologies and turned to ring for a mess-boy to mop up the puddle. In the instant his back was turned, Fsha-fsha dropped a small pellet in our host's drink, where it dissolved instantly. We all sat smiling benignly at each other while the small Thlinthorian servant mopped up, then lifted our glasses and swallowed. Fsha-fsha gulped his down whole. I took a nice swallow of mine, nodded my appreciation and took another. Our host chugalugged and poured another round. We sipped this one; he watched us and we watched him. I saw his eyes wander to the time-scale on the wall. Fsha-fsha looked at it, too.
"How long does it take your stuff to work?" he inquired pleasantly of the Thlinthorian. The latter goggled his eyes, made small choking noises, then, in a strangled voice said: "A quarter of an hour."
Fsha-fsha nodded. "I can feel it, a little," he said. "We both belted a couple of null-pills before we came up, just in case you had any funny stuff you wanted to try. How do you feel?"
"Not well," the fish-mouth swallowed air. "I cannot control my . . . thpeech!"
"Right. Now, tell us all about everything. Take your time. It'll be an hour or two before we hit Planetary Control. . . ."
Fsha-fsha and I reached the port less than ten minutes behind the boat we had trailed in from where our ship and the Riv vessel were parked, a hundred thousand miles out. We found the captain already at the mutual-congratulation stage with the portmaster. His already prominent eyes nearly rolled down his scaled cheeks when he saw us.
"Perhaps the captain forgot to mention that he owes Captain Danger and myself a tenth-share in the prize," Fsha-fsha said, after the introductions were over.
"That's a prepothterouth falthhood!" the officer started, but Fsha-fsha cut him off by producing a pocket recorder of a type allowable in every law court in the Bar. The scene that followed lacked that sense of close comradeship so desirable in captain-crew relationships, but there was nothing our former commander could do but go along.
Afterward, in the four-room suite we treated ourselves to to rest up in, Fsha-fsha said, "Ah, by the way, Danger, I happened to pick up a little souvenir aboard that Riv tub—" He did something complicated with the groont-hide valise he carried his personal gear in and took out a small packet which opened out into a crisscross of flat, black straps with a round pillbox in the center.
"I checked it out," he said, sounding like a kid with a new bike. "This baby is something. A personal body shield. Wear it under your tunic. Sets up a field nothing gets through!"
"Nifty," I agreed, and worked the slides on the bottom of my kit bag. "I took a fancy to this little jewel." I held up my memento. It was a very handsome jeweled wristlet, which just fit around my neck.
"Uh-huh, pretty," Fsha-fsha said. "This harness of mine is so light you don't know you're wearing it—"
"It's not only pretty, it's a sense-booster," I interrupted his paean. "It lowers the stimulus-response threshold for sight, hearing and touch."
"I guess we out-traded old Slinth-face after all," Fsha-fsha said, after we'd each checked out the other's keepsake. "This squares the little finesse he tried with the sleepy-pills."
The salvage authorities made us wait around for almost a month, but since they were keeping forty Thlinthorian crew members waiting, too, in the end they had to publish the valuation and pay off all hands. Between us, Fsha-fsha and I netted more cash than the lifetime earnings of a spacer.
We shipped out the same day, a short hop to Hrix, a human-occupied world in a big twenty-seven-planet system only half a light from Thlinthor. It seemed like a good idea not to linger around town after the payoff. On Hrix, we shopped for a vessel of our own; something small, and superfast. We still had over two thousand lights to cover.
Hrix was a good place to ship-hunt. It had been a major shipbuilding world for a hundred thousand years, since before the era known as the Collapse when the original Central Empire folded—and incidentally gave the upstart tribe called Man its chance to spread out over the Galaxy.
For two weeks we looked at brand-new ships, good-as-new second- and third- and tenth-hand jobs, crawled over hulls, poked into power sections, kicked figurative tires in every shipyard in town, and were no further along than the day we started. The last evening, Fsha-fsha and I were at a table under the lanterns swinging from the low branches of the Heo trees in the drinking garden attached to our inn, taking over the day's frustrations.
"These new hulls we've been looking at," Fsha-fsha said; "mass-produced junk; not like the good old days—"
"The old stuff isn't much, either," I countered. "They were built to last, and at those crawl-speeds, they had to."
"Anything we can afford, we don't want," Fsha-fsha summed it up. "And anything we want, costs too much."
The landlord who was refilling our wine jug spoke up. "If you gentlebeings are looking for something a little out of the usual line, I have an old grand-uncle—fine old chap, full of lore about the old times—he's over three hundred you know—who still dabbles in buying and selling. There's a hull in his yard that might be just what the sirs are looking for, with a little fixing up—"
We managed to break into the pitch long enough to find out where the ship was, and after emptying our jug, took a walk down there. It looked like every junkyard I've ever seen. The place was grown with weeds taller than I was, and the sales office was a salvaged escape blister, with flowers growing in little clay pots in the old jet orifices. There was a light on, though, and we pounded until an old crookbacked fellow with a few wisps of pink hair and a jaw like a snapping turtle poked his head out. We explained what we wanted, and who had sent us. He cackled and rubbed his hands and allowed as how we'd come to the right place. By this time we were both thinking we'd made a mistake. There was nothing here but junk so old that even the permalloy was beginning to corrode. But we followed him back between towering stacks of obsolete parts and assemblies, over heaps of warped hull-plates, through a maze of stacked atmosphere fittings to what looked like a thicket dense enough for Bre'r Rabbit to hide in.
"If you sirs'll just pull aside a few tendrils of that danged wire vine," the old boy suggested. Fsha-fsha had his mouth open to decline, but out of curiosity, I started stripping away a finger-thick creeper, and back in the green-black gloom I saw a curve of dull-polished metal. Fsha-fsha joined in, and in five minutes we had uncovered the stern of what had once been elegance personified.
"She was built by Sanjio," the oldster told us. "See there?" he pointed at an ornate emblem, still jewel-bright against the tarnished metal. Fsha-fsha ran his hand over curve of the boat's flank, peered along the slim-lined hull. Our eyes met.
"How much?" he asked.
"You'll put her in shape, restore her," the old man said. "You wouldn't cut her up for the heavy metal in her jump fields, or convert her for rock-prospecting." It was a question. We both yelled no loud enough to satisfy him.
The old man nodded. "I like you boys' looks," he said. "I wouldn't sell her to just anybody. She's yours."
It took us a day to cut the boat free of the growth that had been crawling over her for eighty years. The old man, whose name was Knoute, managed, with curses and pleas and some help from a half-witted lad named Dune, to start up a long-defunct yard-tug and move the boat into a cleared space big enough to give us access to her. Fsha-fsha and I went through her from stem to stern. She was complete, original right down to the old logbook still lying in the chart table. It gave us some data to do further research on. I spent an afternoon in the shipping archives in the city, and that evening at dinner read the boat's history to Fsha-fsha:
"Gleerim, fifty-five feet, one hundred and nine tons. Built by Sanjio, master builder to Prince Ahax, as color-bearer to the Great House, in the year Qon. . . ."
"That would be just over four thousand years ago," Knoute put in.
"In her maiden year, the Prince Ahax raced her at Poylon, and at Gael, and led a field of thirty-two to win at Fonteraine. In her fortieth year, with a long record of brilliant victories affixed to her crestplate, the boat was sold at auction by the hard-pressed and aged prince. Purchased by a Vidian dealer, she was passed on to the Solarch of Trie, whose chief of staff, recognizing the patrician lines of the vessel, refitted her as his personal scout. Captured nineteen years later in a surprise raid by the Alzethi, the boat was mounted on a wooden-wheeled platform and hauled by chained dire-beasts in a triumphal procession through the streets of Alz. Thereafter, for more than a century, the boat lay abandoned on her rotting cart at the edge of the noisome town.
"Greu of Balgreu found the forgotten boat, and set a crew to cutting her out of her bed of tangled wildwood. Fancying the vessel's classic lines, the invading chieftain removed her to a field depot, where his shipfitters hammered in vain at her locked port. Greu himself hacked in at her crestplate, desiring it as an ornament, but succeeded only in shattering his favorite dress short-sword. In his rage, he ordered flammable rubble to be heaped on the boat, soaked with volatiles, and fired. After he razed the city and departed with his troops, the boat again lay in neglect for two centuries. Found by the Imperial Survey Team of His Effulgent Majesty, Lleon the fortieth, she was returned to Ahax, where she was refitted and returned to service as color-bearer to the Imperial House."
"That was just her first days," Knoute said. "She's been many places since then, seen many sights. And the vessel doesn't exist to this day that can outrun her."
It took us three months to repair, refit, clean, polish, tune and equip the boat to suit ourselves and old Knoute. But in the end even he had to admit that the Prince Ahax himself couldn't have done her more proud. And when the time came to pay him, he waved the money aside.
"I won't live to spend it," he said. "And you boys have bled yourselves white, doing her up. You'll need what you've got left to cruise her as she should be cruised, wanting nothing. Take her, and see that the lines you add to her log don't shame her history."
Two thousand light-years is a goodly distance, even when you're riding the ravening stream of raw power that Jongo III ripped out of the fabric of the continuum and converted to acceleration that flung us inward at ten, a hundred, a thousand times the velocity of propagation of radiation. We covered the distance in jumps of a month or more, while the blaze of stars thickened across the skies ahead like clotting cream. We saw worlds where intelligent life had existed for thousands of centuries, planets that were the graveyards of cultures older than the dinosaurs of Earth. When our funds ran low, we made the discovery that even here at the heart of the Galaxy, there were people who would pay us a premium for fast delivery of passengers and freight.
Along the way we encountered life-forms that ranged from intelligent gnat-swarms to the titanic slumbering swamp-minds of Buroom. We found men on a hundred worlds, some rugged pioneers barely holding their own against hostile environments of ice or desert or competing flora and fauna, others the polished and refined products of millenia-old empires that had evolved cultural machinery as formal and complex as a lifelong ballet. There were worlds where we were welcomed to cities made of jade and crystal, and worlds where sharpers with faces like Neapolitan street-urchins plotted to rob and kill us; but our Riv souvenirs served us well, and a certain instinct for survival got us through.
And the day came when Zeridajh swam into our forward screens, a misty green world with two big moons.
The Port of Radaj was a multilevel composition of gardens, pools, trees, glass-smooth paving, sculpture-clean facades, with the transient shipping parked on dispersed pads like big toys set out for play. Fsha-fsha and I dressed up in our best shore-going clothes and rode a toy train in to a country-club style terminal.
The landing formalities were minimal; a gray-haired smoothie who reminded me of an older Sir Orfeo welcomed us to the planet, handed us illuminated handmaps that showed us our position as a moving point of green light, and asked how he could be of service.
"I'd like to get news of someone," I told him. "A Lady—the Lady Raire."
"Of what house?"
"I don't know; but she was traveling in the company of Lord Desroy."
He directed us to an information center that turned out to be manned by a computer. After a few minutes of close questioning and a display of triograms, the machine voice advised me that the lady I sought was of the House of Ancinet-Chanore, and that an interview with the head of the house would be my best bet for further information.
"But is she here?" I pressed the point. "Did she get back home safely?"
The computer repeated its advice and added that transportation was available outside gate twelve.
We crossed the wide floor of the terminal and came out on a platform where a gorgeous scarlet and silver inlaid porcelain car waited. We climbed in, and a discreet voice whispered an inquiry as to our destination.
"The Ancinet-Chanore estate," I told it, and it clicked and whooshed away along a curving, soaring avenue that lofted us high above wooded hills and rolling acres of lawn with glass-smooth towers in pastel colors pushing up among the crowns of multi-thousand-year-old Heo trees. After a fast half-hour run, the car swooped down an exit ramp and pulled up in front of an imposing gate. A gray-liveried man on duty there asked us a few questions, played with a console inside his glass-walled cubicle, and advised us that the Lord Pastaine was at leisure and would be happy to grant us an interview.
"Sounds like a real VIP," Fsha-fsha commented as the car tooled up the drive and deposited us at the edge of a terrace fronting a sculptured facade.
"Maybe it's just a civilized world," I suggested.
Another servitor in gray greeted us and ushered us inside, through a wide hall where sunlight slanting down through a faceted ceiling shed a rosy glow on luminous wood and brocaded hangings, winked from polished sculptures perched in shadowy recesses. And I thought of the Lady Raire, coming from this, living in a cave grubbed out of a dirt-bank, singing to herself as she planted wild flowers along the paths. . . .
We came out into a patio, crossed that and went along a colonnaded arcade, emerged at the edge of a stretch of blue-violet grass as smooth as a billiard table, running down across a wide slope to a line of trees with the sheen of water beyond them. We followed a tiled path beside flowering shrubs, rounded a shallow pool where a fountain jetted liquid sunshine into the air, arrived at a small covered terrace, where a vast, elderly man with a face like a clean-shaven Moses rested in an elaborately padded chair.
"The Lord Pastaine," the servant said casually and stepped to adjust the angle of the old gentleman's chair to a more conversational position. Its occupant looked us over impassively, said, "Thank you, Dos," and indicated a pair of benches next to him. I introduced myself and Fsha-fsha and we sat. Dos murmured an offer of refreshment and we asked for a light wine. He went away and Lord Pastaine gave me a keen glance.
"A Man from a very distant world," he said. "A Man who is no stranger to violence." His look turned to Fsha-fsha. "And a being equally far from his home-world, tested also in the crucible of adversity." He pushed his lips out and looked thoughtful. "And what brings such adventurers here, to ancient Zeridajh, a world in the twilight of its greatness, to call upon an aged idler, dozing away the long afternoon of his life?"
"I met a lady, once, Milord," I said. "She was a long way from home—as far as I am, now, from mine. I tried to help her get home, but . . . things went wrong." I took a deep breath. "I'd like to know, sir, if the Lady Raire is here, safe, on Zeridajh."
His face changed, turned to wood. "The Lady Raire?" His voice had a thin, strained quality. "What do you know of her?"
"I was hired by Sir Orfeo," I said. "To help on the hunt. There was an accident. . . ." I gave him a brief account of the rest of the story. "I tried to find a lead to the H'eeaq," I finished. "But with no luck." It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him the rest, about Huvile and the glimpse I'd gotten of her, three years before, on Drath; but for some reason I didn't say it. The old man watched me all the while I talked. Then he shook his head.
"I am sorry, sir," he said, "that I have no good tidings for you."
"She never came back, then?"
His mouth worked. He started to speak, twice, then said, "No! The devoted child whom I knew was spirited away by stealth, by those whom I trusted, and never returned!"
I let that sink in. The golden light across the wide lawn seemed to fade suddenly to a tawdry glare. The vision of the empty years rose up in front of me.
" . . . send out a search expedition," Fsha-fsha was saying. "It might be possible—"
"The Lady Raire is dead!" the old man raised his voice. "Dead! Let us speak of other matters!"
The servant brought the wine, and I tried to sip mine and make small talk, but it wasn't a success. Across the lawn a servant in neat gray livery was walking a leashed animal along a path that sparkled blood-red in the afternoon sun. The animal didn't seem to like the idea of a stroll. He planted all four feet and pulled backward. The man stopped and mopped at his forehead while the reluctant pet sat on his haunches and yawned. When he did that, I was sure. I hadn't seen a cat for almost three years, but I knew this one. His name was Eureka.