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  Judith nodded, swallowed, and got out, "Very much so. Do you have anything a cat can eat?"

  He chuckled again. "Several things," he said.

  After all the explanations that could be made had been made, and Silk and the people had returned to their domiciles, after the blizzard had blown itself out, and Judith had removed the screws and hinges from the rear door of the bus so that it could be moved, Judith sat on the bus steps with Feathers and the kittens on her lap. Either the grass or the seats in the Bookmobile would have been more comfortable, but she felt in transition, neither here nor there, neither real nor not-real. She grinned. "Halfway down the stairs is a stair where I sit," she quoted Milne to the uninterested cat. "There isn't any other stair quite like it."

  No, there wasn't. Never would be. Shouldn't have been. Shouldn't be. The poor bus was taking an enormous strain. If she didn't move it one way or the other—if she could bring it into this world—it would disintegrate, possibly lethally. She had to make a decision now. Back to books and not-real as the only worth? Or forward to maybe?

  Judith was no child. She knew that the maybe was ninety-five percent likely to be identical to the other world's reality. Was five percent chance worth hoping for when one might have toothache and sinus trouble and infections that, back there, were solvable?

  Feathers stood up on her lap, looked at Judith as if she had suddenly become a week-old dead fish, and picked up a kitten in her mouth. As well as possible, considering the circumstances, she climbed down and stalked into the tall grass growling in a tone that clearly indicated her complete contempt.

  Judith felt bereft, lost, dismayed, deserted. She cuddled the other kitten to her cheek and stood up. How could she possibly feel as if she were losing her only friend? She had several close friends back there through the snow. All she needed to do was to go back.

  But she followed the cat.

  "Wait a minute," she called. "I want to get a lot of things from the bus. Don't go. I'm coming. I'm going to stay."

  You idiot! she condemned herself. Talking to a cat us if it understood!

  It did, and she knew it would. It came back and waited while she got her backpack and her sleeping bag, her towels and her swimming suit, her harmonica and her guitar, her twenty-seven favorite books (for which she wrote a note indicating they could use her uncollected salary to pay) and any number of other things of possible usefulness in her new situation.

  The cat sat behind the big stone and purred. "Okay. Wait for me. I'll be right back."

  For the last time, Judy turned the key in the Bookmobile's ignition. The motor had great difficulty starting. "Come on, old friend." Judith patted the dash. "Don't fail me now."

  She shook her head. Now I'm talking to machines, she thought. But that was nothing new. She always had.

  Encouraged, the motor caught and, coughing in protest, came to life. Judy shifted into reverse and backed the vehicle carefully. When the front bumper was just inside the edge of the marking stones, she turned off the ignition, but she did not set the brakes.

  She climbed up onto the roof, lay flat, and slid forward feet first. Her body barely fit under the top stone. She wiggled her legs free and down, slithered over, and dropped off. Then she got up, set her back against the front of the bus, and pushed.

  When it moved back, she ran as hard as she could run and threw herself flat behind the stone block. The Gate closed.

  Things were most unusual for a considerable period of time. Judy lay curled around the cat and the kittens until things settled back to normal—if this was what was to be normal for them from now on.

  She stood up. Feathers left the kittens for a moment and leaped onto the stone to sit beside her.

  They saw three stones, not four. Two stood upright, one flay here to shelter them. What had happened to the lintel-stone would never be explained, Judy felt sure, but she wasn't interested. What did interest her was that between the two upright stones she could see grass and sunshine and wildflowers and hear birdsong and smell water. The anomaly had been removed, and the Gate …

  " `Gate of the Puma,' faff!" she stated, remembering Simon's explanation. "The Puma had nothing to do with it." She stroked the feathery fur on the cat's head and neck. Feathers purred so loudly that Judith wondered what people on the other side of the Gate would believe the rumble to be.

  The cat looked up at her, then jumped down and sat by her kittens.

  Judith's gaze shifted from the living kittens to the three white shapes on the stone. A signature, she thought: Deliberately, she refused to think what had caused the slick black soot that rain wouldn't wash off.

  "The Gate of the Kittens," she said softly.

  She put everything she didn't plan to carry on the stone, covered it with her poncho and tucked the ends in securely. Then she put the living kittens on her towel in the top of the backpack and held it open for their mother. She sat.

  "Hmm," Judith murmured. "You'd rather see where you're going than where you've been?"

  Feathers nodded.

  "Let's see what I can do."

  Judy slung on the pack, then covered her left shoulder with the folded beach towel and leaned down. The cat jumped up and crouched beside her ear. "Good girl." Judy rubbed her head against the cat's feathery side. "On we go," she said. They started off in the direction of the blue-green light, Judith laying out a path that would allow them safely to avoid the areas where the red-orange and sick yellow-green flared. She supposed it should bother her that she'd been told few other … inhabitants … of this reality could see the lights, but it didn't. Aside from having one-sided conversations with cats—and Bookmobiles—she had to have some reason for being the one they said was "called." Somewhere on the route between here and the light, she'd been told, would be food and shelter and whatever else she was going to earn or be granted by this world. She hoped that the five percent maybe would be worth it.

  She sighed, a long, anticipatory sigh. It really doesn't matter, she thought. She'd made existing in reality but living in fantasy enough back in her old world. She could make herself believe it to be enough here, if she had to.

  Feathers spat.

  Judy smiled. "Nope, it's already better," she agreed, leaning her head into the black-and-gray fur. It has to be, she thought. Her mind brought back the sight of the three little bodies whose deaths had paid her way, and their mother's, safe, into their world. Not for me. For them.

  The cat purred loudly against her left ear.

  The Damcat

  by Clare Bell

  The young folks don't think much of dams these days. I mean the big dams—Grand Coulee, Shasta, Hoover—the ones that went up in the first half of this century. Back in the thirties, when I was an engineer on the Black Canyon project, we were heroes. Our dams provided the water and power needed to feed a growing West. Now all you hear about is silt backup that may turn the big dams into waterfalls in less than a century. Why, there's even talk of tearing them down and letting nature reclaim the flooded lands. Maybe it's a good idea and maybe it isn't. We did push the dam-building too far and we overlooked things we should have paid attention to. But, as for tearing down the dams, well, they better not try it with Black Canyon. Tell 'em that from old Dale Curtis.

  You think I'm just a sentimental, senile cuss who can't forget that he worked on one of the greatest dams in the world. Well, there's some of that feeling there, I'll admit. But, like it or not, that dam is here to stay. She won't be knocked down. The fellows with the dynamite and the bulldozers will find out if they try.

  Hell, yes, it's a good dam. We built 'em strong back then. But that's not the reason Black Canyon will never fall. You know why? Because that dam is protected and I do mean with a capital "P." Magic.

  Now I know you want to find out why, so just have yourself a sit over there and mind the splinters. It's a strange story about some Indians and some queer things that happened while we were building Black Canyon. And the bobcat….

  People say the dam
would never have been completed without that cat. The truth is, not only would Black Canyon have remained incomplete, it would have broken when the reservoir was still filling. There's a plaque at the dam site telling about Tonochpa and the cable she pulled through a conduit too small far a man to crawl through. That's what it says on the brass inscription, but I know better. What that little wildcat hauled through the tunnel was more than a bundle of wires.

  The reason I got involved in the whole thing was because the government contract said that the dam would not be considered technically complete unless it was instrumented. The Feds wanted all kinds of measurement devices such as strain gauges, contraction joint meters, thermometers and so forth installed in the dam and monitored during construction. Now all these instruments had to be wired to a power source and remote chart recorder. In the hustle and bustle to build the dam (Black Canyon went up in record time), certain details got overlooked. The concrete jockeys were pouring so fast that they didn't think about laying access tunnels or conduits for instrumentation wiring.

  A few weeks after I got hired and figured out the situation, I swore at them under my breath and laid temporary cables along the downstream face of the dam to my monitoring shack. We had to have the output from those instruments to tell whether the dam was undergoing any unusual stress or strain that might foretell a collapse. My arrangement worked, but I knew that it would never satisfy the federal inspectors. Those guys had a tendency to follow the letter of the law, not the intent. The contract specified that the monitoring installation had to be permanently installed in conduits that ran inside the dam. I was tearing out what remained of my hair over this problem when I met Mike and Tonochpa.

  Actually I met Tonochpa before I met Mike. About a minute before. I don't think either she or I will ever forget that introduction. And neither will a certain pair of pants, though I kept them as a memento of the occasion.

  It was the summer of '34, a few months after I had been hired. At that time the crews had finished most of the blasting, but high-scalers still worked the canyon walls upriver from the dam itself. Some days it seemed as though more dust than air hung above the construction site. The deep canyon blocked any breeze from the surrounding desert country and the black basalt sucked up the sun until it was hot as a griddle and you could literally fry flapjacks on the boulders if you didn't mind grit.

  To get from the trailer that housed the company field office (all plastered over with the blue NRA eagle like everything else in sight) to the chart-recorder shack, I had to cross an open area in front of the cement mixing plant.

  Back in those days, we didn't have the kind of cement trucks with the rotary mixers you see now. We used flatbed diesels with eight-foot wheels, equipped with huge bins bolted to their flatbeds. Those trucks were built like huge hay wagons, with a buckboard seat and no cab over the top. The wet cement would start hardening when it hit the bins so the trucks lined up to load and go as fast as they could. This encouraged some unique driving styles.

  One fellow used to stand up on the seat, facing backward so he could watch his bins fill from the overhead hopper. The stream of wet portland cement shot out so fast that he didn't have to stop his truck. The monster ground forward at low throttle while he steered by way of one muddy boot on the wheel. Others soon picked up that cowboy trick from him and the loading area soon resembled a rodeo arena.

  With my hard hat banging my glasses down on the bridge of my nose and my clipboard tucked underneath my arm, I played the daily game of dodging the cement haulers. I was nearly in the clear when I saw something shooting up the slope that led to the construction site. I caught a glimpse of blurred legs and long ears. We often spook jackrabbits on the site, so I didn't think much of it until I spotted another animal pelting along behind the rabbit. It moved so fast and churned up so much dust that I couldn't tell what it was. A rope or leash whipped back and forth in the dirt behind the animal. I could tell the critter was after the jackrabbit and not paying attention to much else. Trouble was that the jackrabbit was making a run for the trucks.

  I knew the rabbit would make it; I've seen them dash right between those rolling tires. But its pursuer looked like someone's pet and with the handicap of a dragging leash….

  I can't say I'm much of an animal lover, but I hate the job of peeling flattened carcasses out of the dirt. As the rattling diesel of the nearest truck battered my ears, I lunged and stamped hard on the trailing rope as the creature shot past me.

  I nearly lost my footing as something heavy and furry rebounded against my shins. I heard a strangled caterwaul, then claws began shredding my pants leg so fast I didn't even feel the pain. Twelve pounds of desert bobcat raked my knee and was heading up for strategic territory by the time I unfroze and tried to grab the beast.

  "Tonochpa, no!"

  The Indian's voice was a lilting tenor and his accent different from that of the Navajo workers. His hands got to the bobcat before mine and I'm probably lucky they did, since I might not have kept all my fingers. I doubted that he would keep all his either, but the bobcat didn't put one scratch on those dark-skinned hands. He spoke a few words of a language I didn't understand, but the bobcat did. She loosed her hold on me and climbed into his arms. I stood up and found myself facing a short stocky young man dressed in Ben Davis overalls, no shirt, and a dented hard hat.

  The cement truck added insult to injury with a derisive blat from its power horn that sent the young Indian scrambling downslope toward the construction site, clutching his bobcat. Not knowing what I intended to do, I followed him. My knee stung like it had been dragged through a patch of mesquite, my pants had two-foot long rents in the left leg and my disposition was out of joint.

  When I caught up with the guy, I saw him cradling the bobcat. Something seemed to be wrong with her; she gulped and her breathing sounded wheezy. I felt a pang of guilt for stamping on the rope even though it probably saved her life. I could see the worry in the young man's face as he tried to soothe the animal. I tapped the Indian's bare shoulder and pointed to the recorder shack on the other side of the canyon bottom.

  When we reached the shack, he put his pet on a rough-hewn workbench and felt in the fur around her neck. She balanced on her long legs with her little tail flicking up and down, leaning against him and watching me warily. She coughed once or twice, shook her wiry fur, then seemed okay. I imagine that yank on the collar gave her a whack on the windpipe and she just needed a little time to recover.

  Which gave me time to wonder what the hell she was doing here in the first place. A stinging and tickling sensation on my left leg reminded me that she was not the only casualty of the incident. I caught her master's eye and inflated myself, ready to act the part of the aggrieved white, irritated by the careless ways of the Indian worker. But somehow he and I didn't fit those roles. Perhaps the reason was the bobcat.

  She was small for a bobcat, judging from the size of the skins I'd seen tacked on plyboard after some friends of mine had been out varmint-hunting. Her build was heavier than a housecat's, her head larger in proportion to her body. That and her legginess gave her a kittenish look.

  The Indian bent over her and whispered a few words of his language. She lifted her nose and prrruped back at him.

  "She gives you apology," he said in a soft sandy voice that seemed to match the tone of his skin and hair. "I, too. My name here is Mike. I call her Tonochpa."

  "Curtis," I said, trying to keep my voice gruff, but without much success. "Dale Curtis. Pleased to meetcha both, I guess."

  Tonochpa swiveled her head, pricking black-tufted ears toward me. Tiger-stripes marked her face, with black bands running out into wide muttonchop whiskers. The rest of her was tawny with black spots that smeared out into bands encircling her legs.

  When I moved closer and she didn't spit or hump her back in cat-fashion, I decided she might be in a good mood. She pivoted to face me, leaning forward and hunching up her shoulders. I felt Mike's hand on my elbow, drawing me back.
/>   "What's wrong?" I asked. "She didn't give me the Halloween cat treatment."

  Mike shook his head. "Bobcats aren't like your pet cats, Mr. Curtis. Tonochpa won't arch her back to warn you. Instead she'll face you and hump her shoulders to make herself look bigger." He clucked to get the bobcat's attention, then stroked her. "I have learned her language. She is saying that she will get used to you, but she needs time."

  He smiled shyly, then looked solemn. "Bobcat scratches can fester, Mr. Curtis. Sit and I will heal the wounds."

  I was already reaching for my battered, metal first aid kit. I sat down on a nearby orange crate with the kit on my lap. Mike dug in the side pouch of a knapsack he carried.

  "Don't you need anything from here? Alcohol? Iodine? Merthiolate?"

  He shook his head. The only items he would accept were a clean rag and the little bottle of alcohol. Once he had rolled up my pants leg and dabbed the wounds clean, he took what looked like the fleshy leaf of an agave, broke it, dusted the gel oozing from the leaf with powder and smeared the resulting concoction on the gashes. I stiffened, expecting the fierce burning you get with iodine or other antiseptics, but all I felt was a soothing coolness that gradually subdued the pain.

  I expected him to bind up the wound with the rag, but he only smeared more of the agave on my leg and told me to keep still until it dried, forming a thick film.

  "Indian bandage," he said. "Sticks by itself until scab forms, then falls off."

  I eyed him. Somehow, in that gentle way of his, the young Indian had dissolved the barrier of class and color that should have separated him from me. I felt almost as if I should try to reestablish it. But I had no pigeonholes, no places to put him; since I knew almost nothing about him. Two things were obvious; he was trained as a healer, but for some reason, he was working construction.