The Zero Stone
Andre Norton
221 pages
published in 1968

You can't accuse Andre Norton from starting her stories slowly. When The Zero Stone opens, its protagonist, Murdoc Jern is fleeing through a primitive town on an alien planet, barely one step ahead of a mob of religious fanatics wanting to kill him. They already killed his boss when the priests of a local cult indicated the both of them for their next ritual victims, but Murdoc managed to escape. He finally manages to reach the dubious safety of a free trader ship, where his only friend is the ship's cat, but when it falls pregnant after ingesting a strange stone on the traders' first stopover and he himself falls ill of a strange plague once the cat gives birth, he learns not only that the trader's crew plan to abandon him on an airless moon, but also that they had been hired to kidnap him. Luckily for him, the cat's mutant offspring turns out to be a mysterious and powerful alien intelligence who calls himself Eet and who sets out to save Murdoc from his predicament.

The reason for Murdoc's continuing bad luck turns out to be the old memento that was the only thing he'd taken from his adopted father's home, who had been not just a gem trader but also a retired crime Guild boss. This memento is a ring too large to be worn and containing a dull, lifeless stone; it was found on a corpse drifting in space but Murdoc's father could never find out anything more about it, which is why he called it the zero stone. As you'd expect in a story like this, his son has more success in finding out at least some of the story behind the stone, if only by being dragged behind it in a series of increasingly desparate escapes from danger, aided and abetted by his alien companion.

Escaping from the free trader ship doesn't get Murdoc out of trouble. First he manages to get to a derelict alien ship, dead for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, which confirms his suspicions that the ring is a Forerunner artifact, something an ancient civilisation left behind long before mankind entered the scene. Then he gets stuck on a forest planet where he finds out he's just a tool in the struggle between the crime Guild and the Patrol, the first wanting to use the stone to get them to a source of incredible power, the latter wanting to destroy it or at least make sure this doesn't end up in the wrong hands. The telepathic, highly intelligent and annoyingly mysterious Eet meanwhile, whom the cover actually depicts remarkably well as a sort cross of cat, seal and monkey, says he has the best interests of both himself and Murdoc at heart, but that doesn't stop him from using Murdoc too.

That relationship between Murdoc and Eet is the heart of the book and it's a relief to have a telepathic space cat who isn't incredibly cute and sweet but downright obnoxious and irritated at times. It's somewhat of a Archie Goodwin/Nero Wolfe relationship, with Eet providing the brain for Murdoc's brawn. They start out allies but end up sort of reluctant friends, being the only ones each of them can rely upon on.

What's struck me about Murdoc and indeed about many of Norton's boy heroes, is how often they are in over their heads, largely ignorant of what's really going on and basically trying to survive rather than having the fate of the universe in their hands. It makes me wonder how much of influence she had on C. J. Cherryh, who after all specialises in this sort of protagonist and takes great delight in keeping them off balance and on the verge of exhaustion. Like Cherryh, Norton's heroes are just trying to survive in a vast, ancient and hostile universe, only she's nicer about it.

The Zero Stone is pure space opera with little hard science in it. It therefore aged remarkably well, some nonsense about navigation tapes notwithstanding. Instead, where it is dated is in its gender assumptions. This is literally a novel without any women in it, or females of any kind other than the ship cat. Not even the aliens are female. This is something that even in 1968, with second wave feminism starting to make noises, must've seen natural. No room for women in science fiction; that only distracts. So obvious a fact of life that this absence doesn't even need to be noted, let alone explained. Half a century on though it stands out like a sore thumb.

From the various novels of her I've read it seems that Norton never had much time to include romance in her stories, perhas judging that her young, largely boyish audience would not put up with it. Yet she's had female protagonists before, e.g. in Ordeal in Otherwhere. It's therefore not so much malice than that leaves The Zero Stone womanless, rather it was just "natural" for a science fiction adventure story to be a sausagefest.

To sum up The Zero Stone was an enjoyable romp even if the lack of women looks really odd. I liked the universe Norton build and the fact Murdoc was never a superhero, just an ordinary guy caught up in forces beyond his control.