“But that’s not a lab rat,” Heather said.
“Of course it is,” Jeanne said.
“What else could it be?” someone else asked.
“Don’t be silly,” a third said.
Everyone sounded disgusted at the idea that it might be anything but a lab rat.
“If it isn’t a lab rat, Heather —” Jeanne said.
“You high-tech people!” Heather said. “You guys have probably never been anywhere near the lab. But I have, and I know what the lab rats look like. First of all they’re white, and they have pink eyes. Also they’re about half the size of that one. And their teeth are a lot smaller. Actually they’re kind of cute. Which that thing isn’t.”
“That’s for sure,” Mollie said. “Excuse me, I’m going to go wash my hands.”
“Somebody get a box to put it in,” Jeanne said. “We’ll take it to the lab and ask if it’s from the animal room or not.”
o0o
Chang Leigh, the chief biologist, looked at Mick with curiosity, and at the body of the rat with astonishment.
“Quite a menagerie,” she said. “What’s the story?”
“Is this one of yours?” Jeanne asked.
“Certainly not. Nor can I claim the cat, handsome fellow though he is.” She stroked Mick, and he arched his back and purred.
“Are you sure?” Jeanne asked. “There’s no way this rat could have escaped from the lab —”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Leigh said. “You caught this creature loose in the station?”
“As far as we can tell — the cat did, I mean.”
“Jeanne, we have troubles.”
“I was afraid,” Jeanne said, “that you were going to say that.”
o0o
Chang Leigh took Barbary, Jeanne, Heather, and Yoshi on a tour of the animal room, just to reassure them that the rat Mickey caught could not have been one of the lab animals, even if one of them had gotten loose. Heather was right, the lab rats were kind of cute. At first Mick pricked his ears and ruffled his whiskers at the sight of so many animated toys all together in such a convenient spot, but then he seemed to realize just how many of them there were. He huddled in the safety of Barbary’s arms.
“Okay,” Jeanne said, gazing into a cage of small and undeniably cute rats. “I’m convinced.”
They returned to Jeanne’s office. Barbary kept quiet, glad to have escaped the lab without having to leave Mick locked up and surrounded by rats. But he was tired of being carried. Barbary let him slip out of her arms. He set out exploring.
“This means the station is infested with rats,” Jeanne said.
“That could have been the only one,” Leigh said. “But I wouldn’t bet on it.
“But how —”
“It was inevitable,” Leigh said. “Rats always go along with explorers, no matter how many precautions you take. They’re sneaky little bastards. They’re perfectly capable of stowing away on a ship and getting to shore before the people do.”
“Not on a spaceship,” Jeanne said dryly.
“Metaphorically speaking. And all it takes is one.”
“Don’t you mean two?”
“Not if the one is pregnant. Which rats frequently are.”
“So what now? Poison?”
“I’m a biologist, not an exterminator,” Leigh said. “But poisons are seldom an effective long-term solution. The rats can evolve immunities faster than we can invent stronger poisons. And I’d be very uncomfortable about setting out poisons in a closed ecosystem like ours.”
Jeanne tapped her fingers on her desk.
“The quickest solution,” Leigh said, “would be to get everybody in one place, seal it off, and let the air out of the rest of the station.”
Jeanne groaned. “Quick, maybe, but complicated, even under normal conditions. Right now —!” She grimaced. “Besides, it would be terrible public relations.”
“Then your solution’s right here.” Leigh gestured toward Mickey who had curled up in the corner for a nap. “He won’t wipe them out, but he’ll keep them under control. And if he catches quite a few of them, it wouldn’t hurt to import a few more cats to keep him company. Manxes are good hunters — though I prefer Abyssinians, myself.”
Barbary could hardly believe what she heard. She glanced at Heather, who grinned.
“We’re going to have to tighten the shipping precautions,” Jeanne said. “Otherwise we’re going to end up with cockroaches, too, and who knows what. Any suggestions?”
“I’ll think about it, and let you know.”
“Thanks, Leigh.” Jeanne leaned back in her chair and smiled at Barbary. She looked almost relaxed for the first time since Barbary had met her.
“Well, Barbary,” she said. “It looks like Mickey has made up his own excuse to stay on.”
o0o
Yoshi remained silent all the way to their apartment. By the time they got home, Barbary felt like yelling, Go ahead and do whatever it is you’re going to do to punish me!
But, of course, the times she had been punished worst had never been in public.
Mick sensed her nervousness. He twisted, trying to free himself. This only made her hold him more firmly, which in turn made him growl.
Inside the apartment, Barbary let Mick down. He ran across the room, jumped over Thea’s camera contraption, and disappeared under a chair. The contraption looked almost finished, but Thea was nowhere in sight.
“Sit down, Heather, Barbary,” Yoshi said.
They sat.
“Heather, I assume you knew about Mickey from the beginning.”
“Sure I did,” Heather said.
“No, she didn’t!” Barbary said.
“Barbary!” Heather exclaimed. “I told you I’d rather get in trouble than have you try to convince people I’m so dumb that —”
“Okay, okay,” Barbary said.
“At least now I understand a lot of what’s been going on since you arrived,” Yoshi said to Barbary. “And why you were so upset at not having your own room.”
“Yeah,” Barbary said, feeling more and more glum.
Yoshi sat back in his chair, thoughtfully rubbing one finger across his mustache. It made a soft, bristly sound.
“Have you ever read a book called Catch-22?” he asked.
“No.”
“The main character is in the military, and he does something that he shouldn’t do, but it turns out well. So his bosses have to decide whether to court-martial him and send him to jail, or give him a medal. Does that sound familiar?”
“I guess,” Barbary said. “You have to decide between hitting me or not.”
“Hitting you!” Yoshi sounded both shocked and appalled. “Hitting doesn’t even come into it! No, I was trying to decide whether to send both of you to bed without any dinner... or whether to fall off my chair laughing. All in all, I think laughing is the best solution.” He grinned. “Getting your cat on board was a good trick. It reminds me — !” He stopped. “Never mind. For now —”
Just then, Thea padded in from Yoshi’s room, rubbing her eyes, her hair tousled.
“Good morning,” she said. “Or whatever it is. Anything happen while I was asleep?”
Barbary couldn’t help it. She started to laugh. Soon Heather and Yoshi joined in. Trying to talk and laugh at the same time, they managed to explain to Thea, and after a moment she was laughing, too
Chapter Ten
That night, Barbary lay in bed. Mick purred beside her. She felt peaceful and happy for the first time since she had arrived on the station.
“Barbary?” Heather said.
“I thought you were asleep,” Barbary whispered.
“Uh-uh. I feel kind of tired, but I don’t feel like going to sleep.”
“Are you sure —” She stopped. Heather would just get annoyed if Barbary asked if she were all right. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s hard to go to sleep after everything that’s happened.”
“I think we o
ught to tell Jeanne about the open panel.”
“If we do, we’ll have to tell her we were down there.”
“Yeah. But, after all — nobody ever told me I couldn’t, and it isn’t dangerous, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t, and besides, if there’s sloppy stuff like that anywhere else on the station, we all ought to look for it, because it could be dangerous.”
“If you think we ought to tell her, then I guess we ought to tell her.”
“It’s probably lucky for all of us that you brought Mickey,” Heather said. “Maybe you saved all our lives.”
Within a few minutes she was breathing slowly and regularly in the way Barbary had already learned meant she was sound asleep.
o0o
Barbary woke early. Burrowed under her covers, Heather slept. Now that Barbary did not have to worry about Mick’s whereabouts every minute, he was, of course, purring right next to her. She petted him and tickled his belly, and he play-fought with her hand.
“Today you get to go to work,” she whispered. “You get to go hunting, and if you catch anything they’ll keep on liking you. Don’t catch all the rats, though, or they won’t need us anymore.”
Bored with playing, he jumped, bounced from the bunk to the desk to the floor, and stopped to lick his paw.
“Got dirty, huh?” she said, and grinned.
She went to take a shower. In half gravity, the big droplets drifted and spread across her skin. She dressed and padded barefoot into the living room. Heather was curled up on the couch next to Mick.
“Good morning,” she said. “I called Jeanne’s office and we have an appointment with her at eight.”
The door of Yoshi’s room was closed. Thea’s contraption lay on the floor with a plastic cover thrown over it.
“It looks finished,” Heather said. “She must have put the lenses in. The plastic’s to keep it all clean.”
“Here’s something you ought to know about cats and keeping stuff clean,” Barbary said. “Cats shed.”
“Well, I know, and he pisses too, but not on the floor —”
“No, shed. His hair falls out and grows back in again. You’re always finding cat hair around. We’ll have to vacuum, or whatever you do, more often.”
Heather looked at Mick with a curious, doubtful expression.
“It’s not that bad,” Barbary said. “And I brush him, so that helps.”
“I don’t mind,” Heather said. “Only I can’t imagine what he’ll look like without any hair.”
“He doesn’t lose all his hair!” Barbary said, trying not to laugh. “Just a little at a time. You can’t even tell, except between winter and spring. Then he goes from having heavy fur to less fur. I don’t know what he’ll do here where there isn’t any winter or spring.”
“I’m glad he doesn’t lose all his fur,” Heather said. “It’s awfully pretty.”
They went for breakfast. Mick followed, delighted to be let out of their room. He bounded sideways like a kitten, slid to a stop, and scampered past them going the other direction. Barbary smiled to see him having so much fun, but the problem with letting him free was that she still worried where he would go and what might happen to him. He might end up in the elevator shaft. She could screw the panel on the shield level into place, but she had no idea how Mick had gotten out of the shaft and into the control center. Somewhere there had to be another hole, or loose panel, or something. She was glad they were going to tell Jeanne about the opening.
Everyone in the cafeteria noticed their arrival. Barbary had been novelty enough, but Mick was a wonder. Most of the people on the station had been here several years. Several said the same thing as the technician in the control center: “I don’t miss much about earth, but I do miss having a pet.” Barbary began to wonder why no one before her had smuggled one on board.
She and Heather ate toast and fruit while the adults fussed over Mick and brought him milk and bits of fish and generally fawned over him. He took it all as if he had been waiting for everyone to notice that he was completely exceptional. Barbary kept an eye on him, half expecting him to stop lapping his milk and spit and claw at one of the people stroking him.
“I don’t get it,” she said to Heather. “Back on earth he’d hardly let anybody but me get close enough to touch him. And if they did, he bit them.”
“I don’t think you need to warn people about him anymore,” Heather said. “He could get away if he wanted. I think he likes the attention. Maybe he likes being in space so much he’s just calmed down. Or maybe…”
“What?”
“Maybe he knows practically everybody likes him here. Did they, back on earth?”
“No,” Barbary said. “Not at all. Mostly they thought he was a nuisance and I ought to get rid of him.”
“There, see? Nobody thinks that up here. Even if somebody doesn’t like cats, they’d probably rather put up with Mick than have a bunch of rodents running around loose.”
“I guess you’re right.”
Just before eight o’clock, they rescued Mick from his admirers and took the elevator down to the control center. Barbary kept glancing at Heather, to be sure the gravity did not adversely affect her.
They knocked on Jeanne’s door.
“Come in.”
Inside, Jeanne gestured to chairs. The screen of her desk computer flashed with squares overlying squares, each containing its own separate message, each blinking at a different, frantic frequency. She turned her back on them to talk to Barbary and Heather.
“Hi, kids,” she said. “What’s up?”
Heather began. “We thought we ought to tell you…”
A few minutes later, Jeanne put holds on all her urgent messages. She hurried with Heather and Barbary to the shield level. In the dim light on the elevator platform, she sat on her heels and looked at the unfastened panel.
“We came down here so Mick could run around and nobody would see him,” Heather said.
“Yeah, and he thinks that’s why we’re here now, too.” Barbary had to wrap her arms around him to keep him from running off across the hillocks.
“And we think he climbed in there and that’s how he got to the control center — but we don’t know where he came out. And he couldn’t have opened it himself, could he?”
“I don’t see how. I don’t think it’s ever been closed,” Jeanne said. “It doesn’t look to me like the panel’s ever been screwed shut. I guess that’s better than if it had somehow come loose by itself, which might mean the whole station was falling apart around us.”
She gazed across the hillocks.
“Quite a place,” she said. “I’ve never been here before.”
“Barbary suggested we should plant grass and things. Wouldn’t that be neat? It’d be like the gardens, only big enough to walk in.”
“It would be quite an undertaking — but it might be possible. I’ll look into it. After all the excitement has died down. That is a good idea, Barbary.”
“Thanks,” Barbary said. “But could we go now? Mick’s getting crazy, and if I let him go I’m afraid he’ll find another hole to crawl into.”
“Sure.”
They returned to Jeanne’s office.
“I’m going to call the techs and the mechanics in off the observation platform and put them to work checking the structural integrity of the station,” Jeanne said when she had closed the door. “But we’ve got a lot of grounders here, and I don’t want them to panic.”
“So don’t tell anybody, right?” Heather said.
“Don’t go out of your way to spread it around,” Jeanne replied. “Everybody who lives here will know within a couple of hours. But even in a crisis we can’t evacuate anyone till the station’s near perigee — they knew that when they came on board. What we can do is try to maintain some normality while we check out the station. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry we caused you all this trouble,” Barbary said.
“It’s all right, Barbary,”
Jeanne said. “Honestly. Discovering that the station has rats, and that it’s had no thorough inspections in the whole time it’s been up here aren’t things I’d’ve chosen to happen. But it’s better to know about the problems and fix them. We all should be very grateful to you and Heather — and to Mickey.”
“Okay.”
“Has he caught any more rats?”
“No. But I haven’t had that much chance to let him loose. I’m kind of scared that he’ll get lost in the elevator again.”
“I’ve been thinking about how to keep track of him. Would he wear a collar, do you think?”
“He did before — he had to have a license. He didn’t seem to mind it too much.”
Jeanne gave Barbary a piece of elastic with a plastic-encased electronic chip glued to it.
“This is makeshift, but it ought to work. It’s a transmitter. We put them on servomechs, and on tools that we use outside. The computer tracks them.”
“I’ll show you,” Heather said.
“Great,” Barbary said. She would be happier knowing where Mick was, and he would be happier not being followed around all the time.
She tied the elastic around Mick’s neck. He flattened his ears, but he soon grew resigned to the light collar and ignored it.
o0o
When Barbary and Heather returned to the apartment, it was empty except for Thea’s contraption. A long tube secured a camera and several other instruments; sensor wires led from the tube to a microprocessor, which Heather said would connect to the raft’s radio and transmit data to the station.
Yoshi had left them a note on the computer — on a piece of paper taped to the terminal. His handwriting was clear and elegant.
“Lessons,” the note said. “Rest.” And finally, “I am in the library.”
Heather sighed. “Vacation’s over, I guess. Oh, well, lessons are kind of fun.”
Mick prowled around the room, pausing now and then at the door to the outside corridor, but Barbary was not quite ready to let him out into the station. She decided to wait till Heather showed her how to follow the signal on his collar.
Heather introduced Barbary to the computer. They each had a terminal which contained a great deal of built-in information, and which would also call up the station’s main library banks and look for whatever it did not have.
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