"Andre Norton - Star Ka'at 01 - Star Ka'at" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

Jim edged nearer to peer down into the smelly hole. There was part of a
crumbling stair not too far away. He wondered if he dared trust it to hold
his weight. The girl was already heading in that direction. She looked over
her shoulder.

"I'm Elly, Elly Mae Brown," she announced. "And I live in Cock Alley."

"Where's that?" Jim was watching her go down the remains of the
stairs. She jumped from one to the next, and did not seem to think they
would slip or give way.

"Back there!" Elly waved one hand, but Jim could not be sure just
which direction she was pointing toward. It did not really matter. He
started down the stairs at a slower and more careful pace.

As Elly and Jim were engrossed in their hunting out in the jumble of
discarded brick, junk and weed tangles, a shadow shifted. Tiro raised his
black head to look coolly and critically in that direction.

Immediately the shadow froze, so quickly that one had to have very
good eyes, cat eyes, in fact, to make out what sat there. It was a second
cat.

"Fool!" Tiro's silent thought warning sped to the other's mind. "This is
not the time nor the place to show yourself. I have made contact with the
'boy'. He is not to see the~two of us together here! They have not our ease
of thought, but neither are they to be underestimated."

"They seem harmless," answered the second cat.

Tiro held up his head, licking at the fur on his chest. "You have seen the
history rolls! Harmless!—They are the most cruel and least logical species
we have ever encountered."

He waited a little uneasily for the other to comment on his own
sympathy with the boy. Such liking for any human, unless it was used to
make that human help them, was not a part of scout training. At least Mer
had sense enough not to remind him of that particular point in the
manual. After all, Tiro was the senior Ka'at field operative on this mission.
This was Mer's first field trip; therefore, a certain rashness might be
expected.

The black cat surveyed his companion critically. He himself was the
necessary one-quarter Terran breed demanded for field operatives on this
world, but his magnificent appearance was more that of the pure Ka'at
type. Mer's body was longer legged in proportion to her thin body. Her tail
was slender as a whip lash, and her face narrowed to a more pointed
muzzle. Her color was a greyish white, not much different from the drifts
of dirty plaster on the ground, save that her head, legs and tail were
several shades darker than the rest. She looked like one who had gone