Free Stairway to Forever by Robert Adams Page A

the city, Fitz fretted and tossed and turned for some hours on his bed before he finally gave over trying to sleep. He arose, showered, dressed, burdened him-

    self with another weighty, bulky load and made his way into the sand world. In the relatively commodius, rearmost cabin-cum-bedroom-cum-workshop, he spent the next couple of sand world hours in first assembling, then in fitting onto the bigger, more powerful, faster, more rugged and longer-ranging trail bike he had bought and brought in three weeks before, the steel and fiberglass cargo sidecar he had had custom-made for it. Then, exhausted, he got some sleep.
    A half day was required to reach the near edge of the coarse-grassed, sandy-soiled plain. To cross it and continue on inland would necessitate an overnight trip and probably several days, was he to even approach a full exploration of those dark, mysterious, but ever beckoning hills beyond.
    He had discovered in a hard, painful way that a full pack, a sleeping bag, air mattress and weapons not only made his bike top-heavy, but dangerously hampered his general agility on it . . . and a broken leg or worse, here in the sand world, could only presage a certain death by way of loss of blood, shock, thirst or all three in a deadly combination.
    Not until he had sufficiently mastered the attachment and disattachment procedures to quickly accomplish both blindfolded, on the bike and off, did he finally disassemble the arrangement and stow it all away in the side cabin.
    Bone-weary by then, he sacked out on the cot and drifted quickly into sleep, despite a very strong return of that tingly sense of some unseen presence, some something there in the cabin with him, regarding him.
    At some time during that night, Fitz thought he awoke and opened his eyes. Silvery moonbeams, slanting down through a break in the high, surrounding dunes, thence through the centermost of the trio

    of stern openings, made the cabin of the ancient, beached warship almost as bright as would one of the now-extinguished gas lanterns, though the moonlight was softer, easier on the eyes.
    The sensation of a warm, once-familiar weight and of a soft, also once-familiar sound brought his wandering, sleepy gaze from the wooden beams that supported the deck above, down to his own supine body as it lay on the folding cot. There, on his chest and abdomen, lay a very large, grey, domestic cat The cat's broad head rested on his big forepaws, around which paws and his chin was wrapped the last few inches of his thick tail. His notched and somewhat tattered ears were cocked forward and his eyes regarded Fitz's face, returning his startled look with an unwinking, but obviously nonmalignant stare.
    "Tom?" Fitz thought that he then croaked, aloud. But then he thought that he thought, "But . . . but Tom is dead. I know, I buried him.
    "Puss . . .? Good puss."
    But just how the hell had a cat gotten into the cabin, anyway? A quick, sidelong glance showed him that the wire-mesh screen across the stern ports were all intact and screwed solidly in place. Both of the inner doors were locked and barred, as too were the outer doors and the trapdoor in the ceiling that let onto the quarter-deck, above.
    At the sound of his voice, his spoken words, the cat's deep-throated purring became louder and, lifting his head and twitching aside his tail, he extended his left, black-padded forepaw to lightly stroke Fitz's bristly chin, then let the paw just rest on the cleft of the chin, while he slowly extended and retracted the claws in obvious contentment.
    And Fitz felt a cold prickling along his spine, felt gooseflesh rising on his forearms. Of all the many

    cats with whom he had shared his life and his fortunes over the years, only Tom—old, now dead and months-buried Tom—had had that particular, very peculiar habit of displaying his affection for his human companions. Fitz had accepted, more or less blindly, many a certain and patent impossibility from the very beginning,