“Shadow? Eliza?” She did a quick check under the tail. “Clyde.”
The front door of the house banged closed. “Karen?” Uncle Barry called.
“Dinnertime,” said Karen. She tossed Clyde into the yellow-painted bathroom and shut the door on him. “I’ll bring you something to eat in a while, kitty. Be quiet.”
Barry hung up his jacket in the hall and peered into the kitchen. Karen ran in, and snatched a casserole out of the refrigerator.
“Hi,” she said, looking up at him timidly. Barry was a big man, but Karen seemed unusually thin and small. She took after his late wife’s side of the family. They all reminded him of mice.
“This’ll be ready in a few minutes,” she said. “I made it this morning. It just needs to be microwaved. It’s Irish stew.”
“Fine. How is your work going? Your rent is due in a few days.” He smiled at her, obviously making a joke. She shivered. “What’s wrong?” he demanded. Karen sat down, not meeting his eyes.
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. I’ve got just a little left to do on this program. There weren’t too many bugs.”
“Good.”
They sat down to eat in silence. Karen never talked at the table. Barry regarded her with concern. No social talents at all in her family. No family feeling to speak of. At nineteen she still couldn’t understand the consequences of her actions – or inaction. It was as if she was brought up in a sterile carton and released only to go to school. Her mother was a nincompoop. Karen could be quite a person if there was anything to her. He attacked his food, taking out his frustration on a chunk of meat.
“Do you like animals, Uncle Barry?”
He put down his knife and fork, and stared up at her. “What brought that on?”
“Do you? Did you ever have a pet?” Karen persisted.
“Yes, I like animals. At a distance. Why?”
Karen took a deep breath. “Well, someone threw a kitten into the backyard tonight, and I’d like to keep it.”
“What?”
“I’d ... like to keep it.” Karen swallowed, visibly.
“Well, you can’t,” Barry said, flatly. “After dinner you can put it out.”
“I’d just keep it in my room. You’d never see it.”
“I’d smell it.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Karen protested. “I’m very thorough at cleaning. You know how good I am with details. I’ll scoop out its box day and night. I’ll vacuum every day.”
“I am allergic to cats, Karen. You can’t keep it.”
“I want to!”
Barry stared. By God, she said something positive and direct for once. If only he could have obliged her.
“I’m sorry, Karen. I have a violent allergy to cats. You can get a cat when you get an apartment of your own.”
“I want to keep this one,” she insisted, leaning close. She almost put a hand on his arm. “Please. He’ll die if I don’t take care of him. I can make it work. Troubleshooting is what I’m good at, remember?” She was pleading. The whine in her voice annoyed her uncle.
“That’s enough!” Barry threw back his chair so it hit the wall, and stood up. “Where is it? Come on! We’ll get rid of it right now.” He stood over Karen threateningly until she flinched back into her seat.
“In my bathroom,” she mumbled. The assertive woman was gone, and the little girl was back.
Barry strode down the hall to the back of the house. He pushed open the door to the bathroom and looked in. With a glad chirp, Clyde, starved for attention, threw himself upon the nearest representative of humankind. He made it about halfway up Barry’s arm.
“Whachoo!” He brushed the kitten off. Clyde landed on the round yellow rug. Immediately, he flung his little body against Barry’s ankles in supplication.
“Get him out of here!” Barry yelled, his eyes streaming. He sneezed again and again.
Karen pushed past him and knelt to pick up the kitten. It crawled up her shoulder and hung around her neck, rumbling happily.
Barry backed out and ran for his own bathroom. He fumbled in the medicine cabinet for his prescription allergy tablets. He gulped two down without water, and popped a third into his mouth to make sure the attack wouldn’t progress further. He sniffed and peered into the mirror. No spots yet, but his eyes were red already and swelling fast. He dabbed at them with a handful of tissues. He could feel his throat closing. Glancing over his reflection’s shoulder, he noticed Karen in the doorway, protectively clutching the gray cat.
“He’s so friendly,” she said, meekly. “And he likes you; you saw how he rubbed against your legs. He’s got a beautiful face. Cats are such beautiful animals. I’m calling him Clyde ... ”
Barry sneezed again, from the bottom of his feet. He threw down the wad of sodden tissues, snatched the kitten off Karen’s arm and made for the front door.
“No!” Karen shrilled, running after him. “Please! He’ll starve out there. He’ll get killed.”
“Get hold of yourself. He’s an alley cat. He’ll get along.” Barry bent to set the kitten down on the pavement. It purred at him trustingly. He sighed.
“Stop!” Karen shrieked. “Please! Give him to me.”
Karen pitched herself at his back, trying to get Clyde away from him. Barry, surprised, lost his grip, and Clyde shot out of his hands like a pool ball, over the curb and into the street. A van with only its fog lights on rolled past them in the twilight. There was a hideous shriek.
The van drove on without stopping.
Karen and Barry hesitated, shocked.
“Murderer,” Karen hissed, and ran for the curb.
But it was Barry who picked up the limp little scrap of fur from the street. “Look, honey. He’s not dead. One of his paws was crushed, and he’s unconscious. He was lucky. Why don’t you take him to the vet? I’ll call ahead for you.”
* * *
Clyde came to, whimpering and terrified, about halfway to the animal hospital. He was obviously in too much pain to get down off his towel on the car seat and hide, but he hissed weakly at Karen when she tried to pick him up. The vet, a brisk blonde woman of fifty, met her at the door of the hospital.
“Your uncle told me to expect you, dear. I’m Dr. Vaughan. We close at 6:00. My service caught me just before I went out. Very lucky.”
“Yes. Thank you, ma’am,” Karen whispered.
“Let’s see the patient. Mmm. Nasty. What do you want to play in the traffic for, eh, kitty-baby? Why don’t you sit down? I’ll just take him in here.” The doctor disappeared with Clyde behind a swinging stainless steel door.
“He didn’t want to play in the traffic,” Karen told the creaking door. “He was pushed. My uncle tried to kill him.”
Dr. Vaughan emerged into the waiting room, drying her hands on a paper towel. “Well, dear, your kitty-baby will have to stay with us for a while. He’s all right. He’s shocky, but you’d expect that. I had to remove part of his back left foot, but he’ll never miss it. Cats adapt very well. He had a narrow escape, you know. Most traffic accidents are deaths.”
“Yes,” Karen said, mechanically. “I know. Thank you. How much do I owe you?”
“Forty dollars. No extra charge for the emergency call.”
Karen paid her and walked out. On her way across the parking lot, she stopped, possessed with an idea. She turned back to the animal hospital. The doctor came out after her and locked the waiting room door.
“Doctor? Can a person die from an allergy?”
* * *
Barry was upset. If Karen had been antisocial before, she was an automaton now. She expressed more emotion toward her computer than she did toward him. Whatever was wrong with her, she did manage to go on with her chores, paid her rent, and kept up with her schooling. The sulk couldn’t last forever.
He sniffled, and reached for
a handkerchief. Much as he hated to, he was going to have to tell her to vacuum more carefully. Barry hated to criticize people for tasks he himself disliked, but he was still reacting to the cat, even though it had been gone more than a week. His eyes felt constantly as though there was grit in them, and he had a continually expanding headache situated just behind his sinuses. Right now it was the size of a grapefruit, but it was growing by leaps and . . . ACHOO!
His eyes were too watery to read comfortably, and television gave him a headache. His skin felt irritated under his clothing. Every nerve felt itchy. He found that he was pacing all over the living room, and he was angry at everything. He was just as happy that Karen wasn’t home that evening. She flinched if he said boo.
During the last week, Karen had been spending a lot of time out. She said she’d found she had quite a bit in common with the veterinarian. She was doing volunteer work at the animal hospital. Well, he considered it to be an acceptable substitute for owning a pet, under the circumstances. So must she, he hoped. He was just getting to be lonely without her. Still, Karen probably needed to work out some guilt feelings for nearly getting that cat killed.
Barry walked into his room to get a fresh handkerchief. For some reason his allergies seemed to react worse in his room than in any other part of the house. In fact, it was as if a cat was right there with him. Only half believing it, he looked under the bed to make sure there wasn’t one there. No, not a trace.
His clean handkerchiefs were in a neat stack on the dresser. Karen must have been too busy to put them away. Here, look, there was cat hair floating in the air when he picked one up. What carelessness! She hadn’t even washed her hands before doing laundry after coming back from the animal hospital.
He made his way into the bathroom and plucked a handful of tissues out of the box and plunged his nose into them. His allergy attack was in full swing. He could feel his chest tightening up. His medicine should be right in the front of the cabinet, just in the middle of the bottom shelf. He felt for it, not trusting his eyes, which were swollen almost shut.
The bottle was empty.
He shook it, unwilling to believe that he had gone through the entire prescription in such a short time. A mental countup of all the pills he had taken over the last week didn’t total half of the allotted number. Karen? Had Karen taken them? Is that why she had been acting so strangely? She was taking drugs to soothe the guilt feelings? No, that didn’t seem to be likely. She was a goody-two-shoes, had antisocial behavior beaten out of her at an early age by her brute of a father. That was one of the reasons Barry and Phoebe refused to have much to do with her family. He felt around for the other antihistamines. Every box, every bottle, every blister pack, was empty. There wasn’t even a cold remedy left. Karen must have dumped them out. Why?
Barry felt his way back into his room with the box of tissues. He was faint from lack of oxygen, and the sinus headache was increasing from canteloupe to honeydew size, straining at the inside of his skull. He sneezed into the kleenex, and another pinch of cat hair flew into the air.
“She blames me,” he coughed. “Silly girl ... Need help. Telephone ... the phone ... phone ... ”
Gasping, Barry reached for the telephone on the bedside, got the receiver off the hook. His fingers fumbled for the buttons, fumbled, splayed, and slid off the face of the instrument.
“Need help,” he told the receiver. “I’m alone. Allergic reaction ...” It slid out of his hands and banged on the table. His skull refused to contain his headache any longer. He clutched at his throat. “No air ...”
“Barry?” the phone demanded. The voice was his sister-in-law Pat. “Barry? Why are you alone? Where is Karen? Barry? Answer me. Barry, hang on. I’m coming over ... ”
Pat’s voice faded out in a black numbness as Barry fell to the floor. No air.
* * *
“They say gray cats are lucky, Clyde. You sure are. You could have been killed.” The kitten looked up at Karen from her lap, and then stretched its head up to her hand, asking for a scratch under the chin. For me, too. I took a chance on saving you, didn’t I? And I ended up with this neat job.”
Dr. Vaughan came into the boarding room then, and heard the girl’s words. “Oh, you won’t think it’s so neat in a few weeks. Anyone with any brain at all gets tired of cleaning out catboxes pretty quickly, and I think you’ve got a good brain.” Timidly, Karen smiled up at her.
“Oh, thank you, but I’m sure you’re wrong. I’ve wanted a cat for so long I’m willing to do all the dirty work. Really.”
“A few weeks,” Dr. Vaughan teased. “That’s all I give you, dear. There isn’t a cat’s chance, you should excuse the expression, that your gratitude will last longer. It’s a chore, like any other.”
“Maybe. That reminds me. I have to get going pretty soon,” said Karen, fluffing up the fur at the back of Clyde’s head. “I’ve got to vacuum as soon as I get home. I can’t let my uncle think that I neglect things that need to be done. I’m very good at details.”
The burly male technician loomed over the smaller man in engineer’s orange coveralls as if by sheer size he would drive home his message.
“I swear, Ardway, if you tell me one more cat story, I’m going to kayo you and put you out the airlock!”
“I thought you liked hearing them, Callan,” Benny Ardway said, wondering if he could wriggle his skinny frame any farther into the bulkhead of the forward engineering compartment to escape his shipmate’s wrath. He lifted apologetic, round blue eyes to the engineer. “You laughed. I thought you enjoyed hearing about Parky and Blivit.”
“Once, on the way out of orbit, was okay. Twice, while we were waiting for the calculations to jumpspace. But you have to have told the same damned stories a million times since we broke atmosphere,” Callan said, sticking a furious finger in his shipmate’s face, “and enough’s enough!”
“All right,” Ardway said, meekly. Callan gave him one more glower, then kicked off the wall to continue replacing modules in the astrogation console. Ardway handed himself down to his keyboard and looked out at the blackness of nonspace, wishing he could swim all the way back to Earth. He felt bereft. No one on board the ship felt the way he did about cats. No one understood what it was costing him to make this long trip, knowing that back on Earth his pets were missing him. No, not his pets: his family.
When he’d been assigned to the Calliope, the station quartermaster had told him that he was entitled to bring with him 20 kg. of personal gear. Perfect, he had thought. Both of his cats together didn’t weigh more than ten. Add to that their food dishes, maybe one more kilo. The corps supplied his uniforms, his tools, dishes, food, and bunk space. He could use a discarded cabinet casing for the cats’ litter pan. That left him nine kilograms for bookcubes and personal items. The cats would sleep with him. No bunk had ever been too small to contain all three of them. He had even asked his assigned bunkmate, the communications officer named Polson, if he liked cats, and Polson had said he did. It was going to be great.
Ardway had weighed everything several times to make certain everything he was bringing fell under the allowable limit. He even had half a kilo to spare. He had been devastated when, upon reaching the launch center with his luggage, he learned that his cats wouldn’t be allowed to come with him.
“We can’t be have animals in deep space,” the mission commander said, as if shocked that Ardway would even consider such a thing. He regarded the cats in their carrier with horror. Ardway recalled having moved between Captain Thurston and the cats to protect them in case the officer went crazy. The way his nostrils puffed out reminded Ardway of Parky about to have a fit. “They could panic! Destroy precious equipment! Er, soil, er, the environment.”
“Sir, they’re very clean animals,” Ardway had protested. “They’re both neutered shorthairs. They won’t cause any kind of fuss.”
“You must be out of your mind!” Capt
ain Thurston said, crossing his arms. He was the poster-boy type for the deep space program, tall, handsome, muscular, and crew-cut, the physical opposite of Ardway, who was hollow-chested and mousy-haired. “Get those animals out of here, and I mean stat!”
There was nothing Ardway could do. He’d signed an ironclad contract, and he really did want to be in on this project. Who wouldn’t want a crack at being astronavigator on the first team to use the new jump technology for a long-range jaunt outside the solar system? NASA had wanted him, too. He was the lead software designer who had come up with the format for the benchmark system that kept the ship on beam. The program ran like a top, but NASA thought it would be better to have him out there with them in case something went wrong on a long test, after the 18th century custom of sending the engineer to sea with the ship he’d designed. Ardway thought he could leverage his desirability into making them agree to let the cats come, but they waved his signature in front of him, and told him to get over it. He’d only be gone two years. Two years! Ardway felt as if his heart would be torn apart.
The only way Ardway could cope was to have lots of reminders of the cats with him. With ten kilos of his personal allowance freed up, he was able to pack in a personal viewer and hundreds of videos of the cats playing and sleeping. He enlisted a trusted friend to watch over his pets, set up a mail account between his apartment and the communication station at Canaveral so he could get updates on his pets, and shared stories about Parky and Blivit with his new shipmates. Alas, the first wasn’t satisfying enough, and the last endured only as long as the patience of the final person on board the Calliope who would listen to him. That had been Callan.
Ardway watched the technician’s orange-clad legs floating weightlessly under the console. The flutter kick Callan made to keep himself in place reminded him of his orange tiger cat, Parky, lying on his side in the sun batting idly at a ribbon. He opened his mouth to say so, and very quickly closed it again. Callan might really put him outside in nonspace. Ardway glanced at the clock and decided to take a break. The program didn’t need him at that moment. No one did. His job had really been done the day he finished debugging the system, more than a month ago, and wouldn’t begin again unless something went wrong. In the meantime, he was useless baggage. He slid out of his chair, nodded to the helm officer, Frida Lawes, and handwalked out of the forward engineering compartment and made for the break room.
Cats Triumphant Page 8
