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Franklin’s door was still shut, but Back thought he heard muffled noises coming from within. In a rage, he threw open the door.

The sight of Back caused Franklin’s heart to thrill with horror; Back seemed part human, part beast, and part demon. He burst into Franklin’s chamber with a hideous countenance; his lips seemed to have gnawed away.¹

Franklin recoiled, frantically moving away from Back. But in his haste, he accidentally kicked one of the cabinets built into the space beneath the bunk. The cabinet was so filled with plastic-wrapped packages of cat feces, that the door popped open with some force.

Franklin had been hiding Trim in his sleeping chamber all this time. I like to believe he did this because of a familial feeling of loyalty to his late cousin, Flinders. Others have suggested that the cat wielded over Franklin the same strange power it had once exerted over Flinders. Maybe he just liked cats.

Franklin had gone to some lengths sheltering the animal. At first he had tried to feed it with bits of his own rations, but he quickly realized that neither he, nor Trim would survive in such a manner. Considering that Trim had more or less been allowed to eat Flinders’ dead body, it wasn’t too much of an intellectual leap for Franklin to see the bodies of Lu and Akaitcho as cat food, too. But he would have been completely stuck if he didn’t have the knife Flinders gave him for his wedding. He butchered the bodies bit by bit, so as not to attract any notice, letting the cat clean up after him. Franklin in turn, cleaned up after the cat.

The explosion of cat feces blinded Back. A number of the plastic wrappings had torn, either by the force of bursting out of the cabinet or accidentally by Franklin at an earlier point when he was trying to cram them in. He had been prevented from opening his door to Greenstockings earlier, because he couldn’t fit several recent cat feces packages into the cabinet.

Some of the free-floating excreta got right in Back’s eyes, so that he did not see the formidable cat as it piloted its mechanical diaper toward him.² Back was caught entirely off guard when Trim slashed at the side of his neck, opening an ugly wound. He screamed, and, still blinded, cut wildly at the air with his knife. Trim circled him, clawing whatever side Back left unguarded as he flailed. And then, in a fatal moment, as Back’s eyes were finally clearing, and he thought he saw the cat above him, Trim caught him about the neck and bit deeply into Back’s exposed jugular. In his dying paroxysms, Back clutched the cat and repeatedly stabbed it with his knife.

So, Franklin was left, cowering against his bunk, but alive—and alone—aboard the Investigator.