There was more, an incredible infinity of animal horizons. But imagination reels back, and description falters. What words can catalog the fringes of morphology!
Ferris focused his interest on the girl. Teucrete. A strange name, and as strange a being as these she lived among. He wondered idly about her racial background. Her father's origin was a mystery, and who could say what mate he had found on fecund Venus? Was his daughter one of those half-human mutants, or was she just what she seemed, a willful and badly raised human girl? Ferris could only guess, and await further evidence of her intentions toward him.
But he liked the way she walked. Tall, straight, slender as a spear, and as poised. Pride was in her, and a hint of warped character in her frigid disdain of weakness or fear. Physically—but Ferris was no authority on feminine beauty. On the reservation women had been scarce, most of them neurotic virgins, or old. He had known women since, but mostly the hard, cynical opportunists of the planetary frontier boom-towns. None to share a life with.
Vast perspectives of cages and tanks and pressure vats went off in all directions. He would not have imagined so much area covered by the establishment. It seemed limitless, and all its dimensions were oddly confusing. Intentionally so, since it was laid out in labyrinthine fashion. Unguided, a stranger could lose himself in a matter of minutes. It defied belief that a zoo of such colossal proportions could exist within the precincts of a city, even such a sprawling megalopolis as Castarona. But at last they were through the cage areas, which lined the periphery of the compound, and Teucrete led the men into a building of dazzling white stone.
"My father's laboratory," she explained. "Here we synthesize foods for the animals, and try with all our ingenuity to provide an approximate environment for them."
Her voice brought Ferris back to the present. "It won't work," he said. "Security squads will never wait for a warrant. Even if they do, what good is half an hour? They'll break down your gate and swarm through here like hunting bees."
Teucrete laughed scornfully. "Afraid, gamma-man?"
"If I were I wouldn't be here. But only a fool refuses to recognize danger."
"Relax," she advised. "They will break in, true. But there may be a little difficulty finding their way among the cages. It is a maze, as you saw. And the animals will give them some trouble. I am not forgetting the tracker, but the moondogs and wireflies can confuse anything that operates on electronics. All we need is a slight delaying action. We can count on that."