Catseye

 

By Andre Norton

Troy Horan is a war refugee. His family was evacuated from their home planet to another planet and never were able to return home. Now Troy is alone, everyone else in his family died in an epidemic that swept the ghetto, called the Dipple, were they all lived. Troy is just a teenager and every day he goes to the labor center in the hopes of snagging a job as a laborer. This day he gets a job working for a pet store.

He feels lucky to get this job and tries to do his best. But something fishy is going on at the pet store and it seems to center around the five animals from Terra (Earth): two house cats, two foxes, and a kinkajou. Troy discovers that the animals are telepathic and that he can communicate mentally with them. He feels connected to the five creatures. 

One terrible night, Troy, returning to the pet shop, finds a door that should be locked isn't. Entering the premises, he also finds the door to the owner's apartment open and his boss is inside and dead. He also finds the five Terran animals on the loose. But then Troy is found with the dead man by one of the employees who jumps to the conclusion that Troy killed him. Troy flees, accompanied by the animals. They escape in a vehicle. 

But where can they go where they will be safe? Troy thinks of one place, the Wild. On this planet, much of it is preserved in its natural state where no cities or roads exist. This might give Troy and the animals a chance to survive. But instead the vehicle crashes in a forbidden zone, Ruhkarv. Ruhkarv is an ancient ruin, mostly underground with a very bad reputation. A few years before, an exploration party there went insane and killed each other and themselves. Since then, the place has been sealed off by force fields. But when Troy's stolen vehicle went down, it skipped over the force field and landed inside the boundaries of Ruhkarv. Now he and his five animal companions are stuck in a frightening and puzzling alien underground city and are being pursued by the authorities, by the local forest rangers and by the dead man's henchmen.  

I first read this book a long time ago, when I was just a kid. I remember liking it a lot them. But the only thing I really remembered about the story was the time the main character spent in the underground city. So reading decades later was almost like reading it for the first time. It was a pretty good read but I think I liked it better when I was young.