Catalyst

by Anne McCaffrey

  She used the pocket torch in her utility kit to find the hole where the cats had disappeared, and leaned forward, calling directly into it. She could hear the sound of cat treats being daintily crunched between rows of sharp white teeth, but no answering mew from either cat or the sound of paws coming toward her. She reached up into the hole, putting her arm in up to the shoulder, thinking she might feel a furry hide she could yank out, a measure she would never take under ordinary circumstances, partially from fear she might injure the cat, but more realistically that even the gentlest cat, cornered and grabbed like that, would lash out at her hand.

  But her fingers touched no fur, just a bend in the corridor. Then something prickly crawled over them, and another thing and another. Hard nubby little things. She withdrew her arm as if she’d been burned and found the suit sleeve coated with the iridescent shiny beetles like the one Chester had caught in Jared’s office.

  She shook her arm, but as she did so, she heard something snap and looked back at the hole. She didn’t see it. The wall looked completely solid again. Only the beetles scrambling up and around her testified that there had been a door, or a cat.

  She had a small laser saw in her kit but her classes had not covered this sort of situation. “Molly Daise, Chester and the victim have disappeared inside the cat hole and somehow it has closed solid. Chester did not respond to my calls and I cannot reach him where he is. Request a team to demolish the bulkhead and retrieve him.”

  “Request denied, CP. Return to base at once.” Indu’s voice was one of impersonal command that Janina had seldom heard before, and never directed at her.

  “But Chester—”

  “Abandon feline per-personnel,” Indu continued, her voice faltering.

  “Janina,” Captain Vesey’s voice answered. “Leave him.”

  “Then I’m staying too!” she said. Abandoning her charge was unthinkable to her.

  “Consider this, Jannie,” the captain said, using the name Janina had sometimes been called when much, much smaller, and before she had gone to CP school. “You say there is plenty of oxygen, the stranded cat is in no distress that you can see. Leave them the food and water on board the shuttle and come away. We have the derelict’s identity code and position. Until the government’s order is lifted, both cats may be better off there than here. Now do as you’re told. Every second you are breathing the oxygen in that ship may deprive the cats of it later on.”

  That finally convinced her. Janina replaced her helmet and used the suit’s oxygen, her tears steaming up the faceplate of her helmet as she returned to the shuttle, leaving the hatch open while she unloaded the emergency bags of cat food, which floated like lumpy clouds, rising to the ceiling. The packaging, though airtight, could be easily ruptured by a cat’s standard equipment. The water situation was a bit trickier, but long ago someone had devised a large bottle with a nipple that cats could use in free-fall to quench their thirst.

  There were also the beetles, which she saw everywhere now, it seemed. There were even some inside the shuttle. The cats seemed to like those, so they would be additional food for Chester and the other ship’s cat. She looked back one last time to where she thought the hole had been, then reboarded the shuttle and returned to the Molly Daise, leaving the cats, at least temporarily, to their fate.

  Chessie ran to Janina, looking for Chester. When she realized he was gone, she cried and cried for him, making Janina cry again too.

  But the import of Jared’s message was even worse than she’d thought.

  Jared had not been specific in the brief transmission she’d received on board the seeming derelict, but Captain Vesey had since received further orders from the GG and the GHA elaborating on the state of the perceived emergency.

  The glittering matter in the mucosal secretions of the wild pintos shipped off planet had been deemed to be a harbinger of a possible galaxywide epidemic that threatened all livestock and pets aboard ships. All animals exhibiting the symptoms and any they had come in contact with were to be impounded for quarantine and possibly destroyed, depending on further findings.

  “But the glittery spit is just a by-product of them eating those shiny beetles!” Janina protested after reading the full edict.

  Captain Vesey shrugged. “They apparently think the beetles carry some disease.”

  “They can’t kill Chessie and all the other ships’ cats based on an unsubstantiated theory!” Janina said. “They can’t!”

  “Of course they can,” Indu said. “And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Jubal scarcely believed what he was seeing as the Ranzo threaded its way into the traffic jam over the city that was called the Hub of the Universe.

  The skies of Galipolis were almost hidden from the ground by the fleets of ships, shuttles, trackers, and aircars taking off, landing, hovering while waiting to land, coming and going. The Ranzo was required to wait an entire week to enter orbit, and then had to orbit an additional two weeks before it was given permission to dock.

  All of this was because of the horrible impound order. Too late, they had received the notice that ships would not be permitted to come and go as usual from Galipolis. Each one had to submit to a search. Its animals were to be impounded before any ship underwent a thorough sterile cleaning. Only then would the ship be able to go about its business.

  It was taking a perilously long time. Adding to the general confusion, fuel transports were often dispatched from the city and its space stations—also overrun with traffic—to supply ships, so they could continue their wait. Jubal did not envy the transport skippers, who had to pick through the traffic between them and their target vessels.

  When the Ranzo finally did dock, while the crew waited to disembark, the port authorities boarded the ship. The first thing they did was to snatch Hadley from his favorite nap place on Sosi’s bunk and stuff him into a carrier. Then one of them took off with him. Hadley mewed plaintively from the carrier and Sosi ran after him. The hazmat-suited woman carrying him looked down at Sosi through her face screen, and gave her a piece of paper. “This is the receipt for your cat. Don’t lose it. It has his number on it so he can be returned to you when the time comes, or, in the event that we are unable to return him, you’ll be reimbursed for loss of his services.”

  Sosi clutched the paper and gulped back sobs to tell the woman, “He’s not used to carriers. He’s a good cat and likes to be held in your arms when he goes somewhere.” But she was talking to the back of the hazmat suit, and another suit stepped between her and Hadley’s captor.

  “What’s going to happen to him out there?” she asked, and turned to Jubal, who had left his other duties when he heard Hadley’s meow and Sosi’s wail. “Jubal, what if they’re mean to him? Nobody has ever been mean to him. He won’t know what’s happening!”

  Even though Sosi hadn’t been especially friendly or nice to him before, Jubal’s heart went out to her, because her grief and fear for Hadley was so much what he felt for Chester.

  He put his arm around her as he had so often done with Mom when she was upset over something Dad had done, and said staunchly, “We won’t let them.”

  “They’re from the government, Jubal,” she said, shaking off his arm. “Just what do you think a couple of kids can do?”

  That was a good question. He said, “I dunno, but my folks always say the squeaky wheel gets the grease. We’re going to be in port awhile, right?”

  “A little while.”

  “It must say on the receipt where they’re taking him. For all I know, Chester will be there too. So we go and watch them.”

  “They might run us off.”

  “They can try. But we’re just a couple of little kids. They can’t shoot us or anything. If we play it right, they’ll end up letting us see what’s happening to shut us up. And we won’t be the only ones watching. Cats like Hadley and Chester are worth a lot of credits, and their crews are going to be really worried about them. I’m going to t
alk to Beulah and see if she can help.”

  Beulah had by then gleaned more information about the massive impound and had a roster of ships in port. A guy in a hazmat suit was buzzing around her com station, supposedly looking for beetles, but the way she was smiling at him and the flirtatious gleam off his faceplate made Jubal think he was maybe taking a little longer than necessary at this part of the task. Beulah was kind of pretty, for an older woman, with curly red hair in a ponytail, dark brown eyes, and freckles. He guessed she might be a little younger than his mom, but then, Mom sometimes complained when she was trying to look nice before Pop came home, that life on the farm had messed up her looks.

  “Hey, hotshot,” Beulah said to Jubal. “Hi, Sosi.”

  “We need to talk to you about something,” Jubal told her.

  “Yeah, I thought you would. Dr. Mbele here and I have just been discussing Hadley and Chester. He said he’d try to look out for them.”

  Sosi glowered but Jubal gave him a tremulous smile and said, “Gosh, thanks, Dr. Mbele, sir. Hadley is a wonderful cat and Sosi’s had him since he was a kitten. I helped Chester get born and took him back to his ship. Please don’t let anything happen to them, please.”

  “I cannot promise,” Mbele said. “But this lady has given me her personal link, and I will do all I can to make sure that your Hadley is given every chance.” He gave Beulah a little salute and left.

  “I have some news about Chester’s ship, Jubal,” his friend said. “I guess you could say it’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Chester didn’t get impounded when the ship docked, although they did take his mother the Duchess. The crew is up in arms over that.”

  “So he wasn’t infected?” Jubal asked. Odd, since this supposed contagious disease thing seemed to be all about the beetles, and he knew Chester loved to eat the shiny bugs.

  “Chester, uh, left the ship, voluntarily.”

  “He spaced himself?” Jubal had a momentary vision of his poor kitten in despair over their separation stepping out the airlock. No, that was nuts. Cats didn’t do that kind of thing. Chester might have gone looking for him and made a mistake, of course …

  “No, he and the CP went on a rescue mission, and both Chester and the cat stranded aboard the derelict evidently decided to stay there. Apparently the cats had lots of food, water, and air, and they got locked in a special cat hatch that kept the Cat Person away from the animals. Since Chester likes to eat the beetles, and the derelict was full of them, he’s not likely to go hungry.

  “The GHA is blaming the beetles for this so-called epidemic. Chester’s captain figured the little guy probably had a better chance of surviving staying where he was. As long as GHA doesn’t pick up the derelict, the cats can take their chances with the bugs. And even though the Molly Daise had the derelict in its tractor beam and marked its coordinates and registration code, once they released it, they couldn’t locate it again.”

  Jubal didn’t know what to think. Chester hadn’t been impounded. Good. Chessie had. Bad. Chester was on a mysterious ship with some stray cat. Bad. The ship had some life support for the cats. Good. Nobody could find the ship. Bad and good, depending on how the plague thing turned out.

  “You think you could patch me through to my cousin?” he asked Beulah more calmly than he meant to. “I’d like to hear about it myself.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Beulah said, and hailed the Molly Daise.

  It was a simple fact that you couldn’t say anything the GG might consider “subversive” on the com channels, and Jubal had a feeling that the GG wouldn’t like what he had in mind.

  He would tell Janina he wanted to meet with her to hear more about how she’d lost Chester. That was the main reason, of course, but he actually hoped to convince her to give him the coordinates and registration number of the ship Chester was on. Then if he could contrive somehow for the Ranzo to come anywhere near that ship, Chester would know it and they’d get back together again. If that happened, he wasn’t going to let the GG or anybody else take Chester away again.

  The whole deal with the beetles sounded as phony as something his dad would dream up. Jubal didn’t see how the bugs could do any more harm than beetles usually did. All the cats and kittens ate them, and except for the glittery residue, seemed unaffected.

  When Janina came on the com screen, her eyes were red and her face a little puffy. She blinked a lot when she looked at him. “I’m surprised to see you here, young man,” she said.

  He bit his tongue against an angry retort. Chessie had been impounded and Janina was upset as it was. He knew too well what she was feeling to yell at her now, even if he hadn’t wanted something from her.

  “I had to try to find you,” he said in a rush. “I thought maybe you’d let me help you take care of Chester and his mom.”

  “Your timing isn’t very good,” she said. “Is your mother with you?”

  “No,” Jubal admitted. “My father brought me to the station. He was trying to help me get in touch with you. But something happened to him and he didn’t board before we took off.”

  “It’s all kind of pointless now, isn’t it?” she said glumly. “You heard what happened to Chester?”

  “Some of it. I want to talk to you about it. Is there somewhere in Galipolis we can meet in person?”

  “There’s a fountain in the center of the city,” Beulah offered. “It’s famous. Anyone can direct you to it.”

  “That will do,” Janina said, but seemed uncertain.

  “Look, if you want to, you can bring a friend. This is Sosi,” he said, pulling the girl forward. “She’s Captain Loloma’s daughter. They just took her cat Hadley. She’s, uh, she’s the CP on the Ranzo. She’s coming too.”

  He looked at Sosi, half expecting that she would ruin it by disagreeing since it wasn’t her idea, but she nodded gravely. She still hoped there was something they could do, even if she didn’t quite believe it.

  “I will speak to Captain Vesey and the others,” Janina promised.

  As soon as the Ranzo’s crew was cleared to disembark, with Captain Loloma’s permission, he and Sosi set out for the fountain. It was a good thing Sosi was with him, because she’d been to Galipolis several times before and was used to its size, its crowded marketplaces, its glittering shop windows and crowded walkways, the artificial light the people needed during the day because the ground was so overshadowed by the air traffic.

  Although six space stations serviced the planet, the dirtside port was still a favorite destination for space travelers.

  Sosi pointed out the fountain from five blocks away, as tall as many of the surrounding buildings. Its central geyser shot into the air so high it threatened to wash the underside of the lowest-flying shuttlecraft, then the waters cascaded down the central structure, tumbling from one shining precipice to the next. Smaller geysers danced and glittered around it.

  Janina and three crewmates, one woman and two men, looked tiny beside the massive fountain. All of them still wore their ship-suits, as did he and Sosi.

  Jubal gave them a short wave as he and Sosi approached. Janina’s crewmates wore sad expressions that turned hard when they saw him. He said, “This is Sosi. Her ship’s cat Hadley was impounded too.” The other crew members—the slender sandy-haired woman, the tall white-haired and bearded man, and the shorter red-haired man—regarded his shipmate with more sympathetic expressions.

  “What did you need from Janina, son?” the white-haired man asked.

  Jubal hesitated, gulped, and cleared his throat. He wanted to talk to her alone about Chester, but for the rest of his plan, he figured they’d need all the allies they could get. He decided to start with that part. “I couldn’t say this on the com,” he said, “but I think this whole thing with taking our cats and other animals stinks and we need to do something. I have an idea. I was hoping you would all know other people who would help too.”

  He explained his plan, and to his surprise the adults all seemed to think it was a
reasonable thing to do and agreed to help. When they’d talked it over a little, Janina gave him the information about Chester, her voice threatening to break when she described how it had happened. Janina’s crewmates seemed a lot more sympathetic now than over the com screen at the vet clinic when they’d made him let Chester go.

  He didn’t know what to make of what she’d told him about Chester and the derelict. He chewed on it as he and Sosi headed back toward the ship. Her mood had improved a lot since the meeting, and she pulled him toward the marketplace, a skip in her step. “Look at that blue material, Jube!” she cried. “See the silver on the edge?”

  “What would you do with something like that?” he asked, genuinely puzzled. Crew members rarely dressed up or wore anything but shipsuits.

  “I’d make a princess drape over my bunk,” she said. “It would be gorgeous!”

  He shrugged. She wound her way through the crowd toward the coveted cloth, and he was following her, when through the babble of the crowd he heard a familiar voice haggling in the booth directly behind him.

  “Pop?”

  CHAPTER 16

  When the Grania received the impound notice, Ponty’s stock actually went up. “Get your test tubes bubbling, boyo,” Mavis told him. “Once the government gets through with the galaxy’s livestock, there’s going to be a big market for uninfected cats with blue bloodlines.”

  Doc followed her into the room and hopped up on the console, pretending to use it for a washstand as he carefully groomed his long luxurious gray-striped coat.

  First his chest, then his paws, then his ears and whiskers, his shoulders.

  “What’s this all about, Mavis?”

  “Making us rich, mostly,” she said, stroking Doc’s head, which messed up his bathing schedule so that he had to wash that part next. “Every ship docking at Galport has to surrender its critters to be tested.”

  Doc’s ears flicked forward a fraction.