Johnson held up his hands. “Hey, it’s a challenge. I’m enjoying it. Really. Just do us a favor and keep your clothes on over the suit.”
From that moment on Ardway was a new man. He wore his mesh of sensors under his uniform all of the time. Most of the time the invisible cat, whom he’d named Boojum, stayed in his cabin. Ardway leaped back into his work, becoming the most willing of the crew, working long shifts, never complaining, cheerful all day long, because he knew that at break times and meal times and rest periods, he could go back to his quarters and play with his very own cat. He rejoiced in the marvel as if he had never had a pet before. He could pick it up and put it on his shoulder, feeling a several-kilos weight there. He could sit and read, feeling a sprawled figure across his lap and a whiskery chin on his wrist. Boojum would even come to him when he called. He could play fight-games using an old sock as a glove. The mesh calculated a compensation for the padding, lessening the force of the cat’s nips or scratches. The best part was sitting in the mess, or in the break room, or floating at his station feeling a small, rumbling body cuddle up against his. He pictured Boojum as a solid, mackerel-striped tabby with black mascara markings around the eyes. A bit of a bruiser, but loving and devoted. Ardway loved him back without reservation.
The crew referred to the program as Ardway’s ‘imaginary playmate,’ but they didn’t knock something that had solved the morale problem so neatly. Ardway still enjoyed receiving his updates from his cat sitter on Earth, but he could see the cats were well and content, now that he was not reading extra angst into their responses. All that had come from him, and he was cured. Polson moved into a spare bunk room, so Ardway wouldn’t be embarrassed to talk to his cat in the middle of the night. The cat proved to be a good listener. The sensor receptors responded to the vibration of his voice, creating a response in the cat’s programming. Ardway talked, and the cat sat with him and purred. Ardway was happy.
When he had a chance, Mel Johnson made him a hood to go with the suit, for Ardway to wear in the privacy of his cabin, so he could be awakened by cheek rubbings and roundhouse paws to the ear, and so he could enjoy again for the first time in five months the sensation of a cat asleep curled up in the hollow of his neck and shoulder.
Johnson had gotten interested in the Boojum project in spite of himself. To the captain, he’d argued that such a refinement of the retrieval-suit technology could be a useful side product of the space program, one with applications in industry as well as the military, which kept Thurston from complaining about misused resources. Johnson had incorporated plenty of Ardway’s personal stories about his cats as well as the videos into the programming. One shift while Ardway drowsed over his control board, thinking in three dimensions, he fell asleep. Suddenly, he woke with a start. There was something slimy in his hand. No! He jumped up out of the seat, batting at his palm, and looked down. There was nothing there. What could it be? Gingerly, he felt for it, and read the shape with his sensor-covered fingers. With a smile, he remembered. Johnson had worked into the cat’s repertoire the actions from the time Blivit had decided to help feed her poor stupid human. She had brought him one of the goldfish from his apartment tank. Ardway reached down, knowing that Boojum was there, waiting for approval.
“Thanks, kitty,” he said, petting the hard little head that was under his hand, whether he could see it or not. He threw the imaginary morsel toward the disposer bin, and hoped the cat wouldn’t try to go after it and retrieve it for him.
But, Johnson had done more than invest Boojum with the characteristics of either Ardway’s stories or his home videos. He’d asked other people on board for their own cat stories, and put them into the database. And he’d added random factors, with his own sense of humor. In the mesh, the program treated Ardway as though he was barefoot all the time. Early one morning, Boojum left him a ‘present,’ just inside the door to the head. Ardway hopped around for a moment on one foot, feeling the mushy, wet coldness on the sole of his foot. He limped over and pulled a towel out of the dispenser and wiped off his ship-boot. The pressure against the receptors caused the sensation to abate.
“Thanks a lot, you silly animal,” Ardway said to the air, and caught Captain Thurston coming out of a stall. The commander gave him a strange look, and edged out of the room, giving him a wide berth.
The cat’s existence was plotted within the relative points of the spaceship for all the empty internal spaces that existed, so he was never to be found sticking half in and half out of a wall, unless there was a door or a duct, and he became more real by the day to Ardway.
The sullen, unshaven Benjamin M. was gone. In its place, the crew got to enjoy a productive, happy, whistling astrogator, who could listen to other people, and felt content enough in his own happiness not to inflict innumerable stories on anyone. They grew to like him, didn’t care about his computer-generated security blanket, so long as it worked, and they stopped noticing that he was clad in tan nylon to the neck under his orange jumpsuit. Ardway was proving the recruiters right to have brought him aboard, and whatever made him functional, so long as it didn’t cross space agency policy, was fine with them.
By month ten it became more necessary by the day for Ardway to be actively involved in the mission. Space near the Gliese system was riddled with anomalies that NASA had not detected or even suspected. Odd gravitational fields suggesting minute quantities of black matter invisible from many light-years’ distance exerted gravitational pull on the ship, yanking them slightly off course and sending the instrument readings whirling. Ardway adjusted his program as needed, and was keeping up just fine in plotting new courses, assigning benchmarks to the area of space. Data came in by the terabyte, and they hadn’t even begun the exploration of the system itself.
On the fourteenth day of month eleven, they broke out of jump and passed within the heliopause of the Gliese 86 system, seeing it clearly for the first time. The geophysics and astrogation departments went crazy with delight. Johnson, Mackay and Ardway took scans, analyses, visual images of the star and its attendant pair of gas giant planets. Mackay declared them the most important satellites since human beings first looked up and saw the Moon. They toasted the planets with champagne and coffee, and promptly went back to work. No one could keep away from the viewscreens, drinking in the sight no other human eyes had ever beheld.
What could not be seen from Earth but merely suspected were the huge asteroid belts situated in two places within the system. While life as they knew it was unlikely to exist on either giant planet, they held out hope for some of the moons they could now see circling Gliese A, the inner planet. The xenobiologist, Carmen Hosteen, felt her palms itching every time she saw the spectrum analysis of the second largest of the moons and crowed over the large bands in the scan that showed the presence of nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen.
Every department began to hoard its supply of available memory space as their databanks started to fill up. There was a general fear that Mission Control had grossly underestimated the their needs, and might leave them out there scrambling for anything that would hold programming.
Suspicion of a coming storage crunch gradually became a reality. The crew simply needed more file room than they had. By month thirteen they started blanking anything that wasn’t absolutely needed for day to day operation. First, backup system files went. The techicians complained bitterly, worrying about what to do in case of a system crash, and started arguing among themselves over room. Eventually the captain stepped in and issued a fiat: any non-unique file and swap space was sacrificed to contain the incoming images, facts and figures pouring into their sensors from the two planets. Ardway and his colleagues reconfigured and reformed every possible hard drive, chip, crystal and disk on the ship to make more room, including rewritables in their personal possession. All entertainment videos were taken out of the ship banks and reused. Then, as the ship went into orbit around Gliese B, audio entertainment. Everyone’s music
disks went, too, because they were rerecordable. Vital files were backed up on those, and they were put into cold storage for safety. Then, around Gli A, text went. Ardway had to upload his book disks one at a time, instead of being able to leave them in memory. One at a time, he sacrificed the disks themselves to his department. Far be it from him to lose precious navigational information because he didn’t want to do without “A Tale of Two Cities.”
Next went personal correspondence. The crew was given one shift to download all personal mail onto primitive cold cubes before that compartment of ship storage went, too. There was a lot of protest. The crew went in a body to confront the captain in the mess room.
“With respect, sir,” Callan said, “we don’t need all this crap. I’ve checked the files. We have hundreds of identical scans of the system! Plenty of them are redundant copies.”
“We can do without a lot of stuff, lieutenant,” the captain said imperturbably. “I don’t want to ditch my letters from home, either, but it’s a sacrifice for the job. Should I write home and tell them we’re coming back early because you want to keep your photo collection? Put what you can on datacubes, and I promise you when we get within sending distance of home I’ll notify NASA to instruct the server to resend all of it. We’ll triage the raw information later, people. For now, we can’t be discriminatory. We need all the space there is!”
Callan, Ardway, and the others went along with the program, however reluctantly. Ardway felt he could cope without letters from home, or even his precious videos. Then, nine days before they were to depart the system, the evil day came.
Ardway, coming out a self-induced fog at the beginning of his shift, realized that Boojum wasn’t at his knee begging for an imaginary scrap from his breakfast. No little paw touched his knee; no back rubbed against his calf. He looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. Long ago, he’d stopped thinking of the cat as a programming construct, and felt as though other people could see him. Ardway unhooked himself from the grapples holding him to the table, and felt around the floor area, wondering if the cat was lying on his side, waiting to trap his hand when he reached for him.
“Boojum,” he called softly. “Where are you, baby?”
“What’s the matter, Benny?” asked Cora Handley, the medic.
“My cat is gone,” he said, now beginning to panic. He got down on hands and knees and felt out further. “Maybe my power pack is out of whack. Will you check it?” He undid the zipper on his coverall and pulled it down to show her the middle of his back. She swam over through the air.
“Nope,” she said, unhooking the flat box to show him. “It’s on green. How many bytes did the program take?”
“What program?” Ardway asked.
“Your cat,” said Handley. “Everything nonessential has been yanked out of the system. I guess they finally had to reach for everybody’s personal files. I’m really sorry about that. We’d all given up a little of our per areas for you. In a way, seeing you so happy lifted everybody’s morale.”
Ardway was touched by the crew’s generosity, even as he felt dismay rising in him. “He’s gone?”
“Until we hit sending distance of home again, it looks that way,” Handley said, with real sympathy in her blue eyes. “Don’t worry. I’m sure Johnson put it on a disk somewhere. He wasn’t about to lose all the complicated programming the two of you have done on Boojum. He even thinks he’d like to market it when he gets home. You couldn’t be an isolated case, though I’m thankful you’re the only one on this mission. No offense, honey.” She tilted her head toward her office. “Come and see me if you need to talk. I promise I’ll listen.”
Ardway felt like mourning, even though Boojum wasn’t really dead. He had come to enjoy it, to believe in it as if it was real. The loss twisted his heart until he could hardly breathe. Cats helped provide him with a sense of identity, and he had almost nothing left. He had given up the vids he’d taken of his cats to store navigational data. Oh, the videos were just copies, but the originals, like the cats, were trillions of miles away. Home. On Earth. Boojum had made the separation bearable, and now he was backed up on disk somewhere, just as if he wasn’t real.
Of course he wasn’t real, Ardway scolded himself. But it’d felt that way. The complex programming Johnson had given him had taken on a personality so he was virtually a real cat.
“I can handle this,” Ardway said, firmly. He went about his shifts, ate his meals, and did his job, but all the time half hoping that the loss of the cat was a glitch, and that he would be back soon. He started to get edgy and snappish again. The techs on caffeine or alcohol rations or nicotine patches were starting to give him dirty looks. He was an addict of a different kind, and his fix had been withdrawn from him. He missed Boojum. He went to appeal to Captain Thurston.
“No, you can’t have your cat back. The damned thing isn’t real!” the captain roared.
“He’s real to me, sir,” Ardway said humbly. “Please. I’ll sacrifice any of my personal files you want.”
“They’re all gone anyhow, lieutenant,” the captain said impatiently. “So are all of mine.”
It was true, but Ardway was desperate. “There must be something, sir. I’m begging you!”
Thurston snapped, and stood up, glaring. Rumor had it he was wearing a sedative patch, too. “There’s nothing, dammit. This project must be accomplished. Go back to your station. Now, spaceman!”
Glumly, Ardway went back to his station. His hands kept doing the work, but neither his mind nor his heart were in it.
Without his program he started to withdraw into himself again. It wasn’t the sight of cats he missed. He had permanent three-dee images of Parky and Blivit. Those couldn’t be re-recorded, so they’d been spared in the data crunch. It was the physical contact, the constant checking-in that cats did, the ‘hi, how are you?’ touches that he missed. Captain Thurston avoided him, and rumor had it that he would cheerfully have spaced him if he could have found an excuse. Ardway didn’t care about his own well-being any more. He took to shutting himself in the cubicles again.
But he was not alone in isolating himself. Other members of the crew were now suffering from detachment as much as he was. Without entertainment media to keep their minds busy, they were becoming touchy and sniping at one another. He hadn’t realized it had gone so far until the day he saw the unflappable Cora Handley haul herself into the carrel next to his and slam the door.
Benny Ardway was grateful for all the kindness his crewmates had shown him over the past months. At that moment he determined to pay it back as much as he could.
He floated over to bang on the cubicle door.
“Hey, Handley!” he shouted. “Did you ever hear the one about the computer programmer and the cow?”
* * *
From that decisive moment onward, Ardway became everyone’s court jester. Whenever he had an audience of even a single person in the mess hall or the break room, he sang songs, told every joke he knew, and made up silly games to involve the bored crew. He even oversaw a card tournament.
“The first card party in space,” he insisted. Neither he nor anyone else on board knew how to play bridge, and no books remained to teach them how, so he taught them Crazy Eights. He told stories.
“And not one word about a cat,” Callan marveled at the end of an evening. It was praise, however offhand, and Ardway glowed. In hopes of soothing everyone else’s misery, he had forgotten about his own. Though the mesh suit no longer worked he continued to wear it. He slept in it, showered in it, did his shifts in it. He considered it a kind of amulet. It was his physical contact, as much as anything else, to help keep him sane. With that to bolster him, he gave all he had to planning entertainment for his companions.
Three months passed that felt like three years. Half the crew was overweight from eating out of boredom; the other half was musclebound from intensive bodybuildin
g for the same reason. But they were all in better spirits than might have been expected, thanks to Ardway’s evening antics.
Having something else to concentrate on also kept him more alert at his job. As the ship’s navigator he was the first to know the moment they arrived back within hailing distance of Earth. Ardway saw the readings come up on the astrogation console. He looked up at the viewscreen. There was nothing to see, but the computers confirmed the good news. Yes! He bounced up, straining against the straps holding him in his seat during zero-gee. Whirling his arms he spun around to face the center seat, where Thurston sat rotating a couple of ball-bearings in his palm. “Captain, we’ve just entered line of sight to Earth!”
“Thank God,” the captain said, showing animation for the first time in weeks. His smile wrapped clear around his handsome, strong-jawed face. “Helm!”
“Sir!” Lawes exclaimed, the force of her salute throwing her to the end of her restraint straps.
“Drop us out of warp. Communications, send a tachyon squirt to Mission Control, my dictation, begins now. This is Captain Thurston on the Calliope. We’re about halfway home from Gliese. We’ve got data for you beyond your wildest dreams, folks. We’re going to start sending you digital squirts on this beam. In return, we need a few things. Attached to this transmission is a list of personal comm numbers for my crew. Do me a favor: check those out and send whatever’s in the servers. There’s a lot of lonely people here who need a word from home.” Ardway and the others in the control room broke into cheers. The captain raised his voice over the din. “Plus some good music. And a few new vids wouldn’t hurt. We’ve been reduced to watching Attack of the Killer Tomatoes almost every night after chow.”
Cats Triumphant Page 10
