Catalyst

by Anne McCaffrey

  The captain waved his assent with a couple of back flips of his fingers, then woke up the navigator to have her alter the course to intercept the derelict and capture it in the tractor beam.

  Meanwhile, Beulah, Sosi, and Jubal, after scouring the stores for unopened bags of Hadley’s favorite kibble, some treats, and sippy containers of water, plus an extra tank of it, scrambled to the shuttle and into their survival suits and grav boots. Hauling the cat provisions on board, they awaited the command from the bridge.

  For Jubal, except for the dream and the fact that there were three of them instead of just Janina and Chester, so far the whole incident echoed what Janina had told him about her mission to the ship.

  “It looks normal on the outside,” he told Beulah, “but Janina says that once you leave the shuttle bay, it’s a lot smaller than it looks, and funny shaped.”

  It was different taking the shuttle from the ship to the derelict, scarier, blacker, the stars more distant than simply going from a space station to a planet and back again. Beulah avoided the tractor beam on the way out, entering it only to access the hatch to the docking bay.

  “Normally we would bring the derelict in close and use accordion tube to connect the hatches,” she told Sosi and Jubal, “since we’d worry that the bay on the other ship might be damaged. But according to what Janina told you kids, it’s safe enough. Besides, the captain doesn’t want us recontaminated. It’s going to take several good trips as it is to repay the cost of that hosing down they gave us in Galipolis.”

  “They took my cat and we have to pay them?” Sosi demanded indignantly.

  Jubal quelled his excitement at the prospect of seeing Chester again long enough to flash on what would be happening to his neighbors—and Mom too—back on Sherwood. “Oh, that’s not the worst of it. On Sherwood they’ll be impounding or killing outright all the animals the farmers and ranchers need to make a living—trillions of credits worth, and maybe burning the crops as well. And expecting the owners to pay for being ruined.”

  “That’s so not fair!” Sosi protested as the derelict’s hatch opened smoothly and the shuttle settled down in the darkness with a bump. The running lights illuminated the smallest docking bay Jubal had seen on what had appeared to be a full-sized ship. One other shuttle was docked there, small and triangular-shaped, gleaming like gold in their lights. Beulah tested the air quality outside. “We don’t need the helmets. There’s plenty of O2 so your Chester is probably still alive, Jubal.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, surprised that she’d doubted it when he and Sosi had both told her they’d just seen him—sort of.

  Beulah had them wrap the cat supplies in a cargo net and they pushed the bundle out ahead of them, where it floated like a bubble while they clumped onto the deck in their gravity boots. Jubal kept back a packet of treats for Chester, to show him how glad he was to see him.

  Jubal was the first one out. Grabbing the net with one finger of his glove, he pulled it behind him and up the corridor until, as Janina had said, he met a blank wall. “Chester?” he asked, and mentally called, Hey, buddy, it’s me. Where are you?

  CHESTER ABOARD THE PYRAMID SHIP

  I knew it was him, of course. I’d drawn him to us, hadn’t I? But I couldn’t answer just then. It didn’t suit my scheme for domination, not of the universe, but of the cat door.

  I pretended to sleep. Pshaw-Ra hissed at me, “Silly catling, the boy and his friends are here. With food. Will you not greet them?”

  I yawned. “Not right now. He abandoned me to the vet. Let him stew. I’m sleeping. It’s your ship. You go get the food.”

  He waved his sinuous tail with a purr of satisfaction. “My teachings have already taken root in a mind fertilized with betrayal and disappointment.”

  I opened one eye and looked annoyed. “Look, I lured them here to replenish our supplies but it was hard work and I’m tired, so could you please do what you must do quietly?”

  He finally did what I was waiting for. Pretending to stretch, he placed his front paws among the hieroglyphics. One pressed the symbol for cat, the other a triangular-shaped symbol, probably signifying the ship, I guessed. From down the corridor came a slight hiss, one I heard only because I was sleeping with my ear on the deck.

  Pshaw-Ra sauntered down the corridor until he was out of view, around one of the twists, then he picked up speed. I heard the patty-pat of his paws turn to thuds as he galloped toward the opening and the food. The old faker was more worried than he’d appeared when fresh supplies hadn’t been forthcoming from passing ships. Although I had not been able to go back into the hold through the cat hatch since I joined Pshaw-Ra, my host had apparently made raids while I was sleeping to avail himself of the supplies Kibble had brought. That was the only explanation I could think of, because when I awakened from my naps and dreams, the food dishes had been filled—though I had no idea how Pshaw-Ra could have done it—and a little fountain trickled fresh water down into a trough along one wall. It tasted like the water on the Molly Daise. For fresher food we had the kefer-ka. I was not witness to any of his supply trips, so this was the first time I observed him making his exit. Before, he’d been as quiet as a mouse. Oh, a mouse! I could have really gone for one right then, but this ship had none, and besides, I had a more urgent mission.

  Pshaw-Ra would be close to the opening now. I crept into the corridor, slinking down it as if stalking prey. When I beheld my host’s lean shanks and twitching tail as he teased my boy from the opening in the wall, I flung myself forward, knocked him away from the hatch, tail over ears, and leaped straight through until I floated over Jubal’s head.

  He reached up and pulled me down. “Chester!”

  It took you long enough, I said, my whole being vibrating with the force of my purrs. He started to pull off his gloves to pet me, but he was not alone. A woman and a girl were there too, the girl stamping her gravity boots with frustration as Pshaw-Ra eluded her grasp.

  “Jubal, no,” the woman said. “I know you want to pet him, but decontaminating your suit will be easier than decontaminating you. If we do this smart, Captain Loloma may let us return to bring them more supplies. He might even agree to tow their vessel out of the way of the GG, somewhere we can find them again and check on them. But we can’t cause trouble.”

  “No trouble,” my boy told her. “Sorry, Beulah, but if Chester can’t come with us, I’ll stay here with him and his friend. I’m not leaving him again.”

  “You can’t do that!” the woman said. “You’d exhaust their oxygen and water supplies and there’s no food for you here.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to go back where they treat anybody with four legs like they’re disposable. As valuable as Chessie is, they took her, and Hadley too. And it’s all a big lie!”

  Mother? They were going to kill Mother? The whole situation, as I read it in Jubal’s mind, was wrong. Just wrong. My mother and our kind had worked in partnership with humans, and now were to be destroyed for no more than a convenient ruse to assure the dominance of one human over another.

  “Come back, kitty!” the girl—Sosi, according to Jubal—cried. I looked away from Jubal’s face as Pshaw-Ra’s tail disappeared through the cat hatch.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Can’t you just release them when nobody’s looking?” Janina pleaded with Jared. He looked tired and as ill as the healthy animals in his charge were supposed to be. She knew he was under tremendous stress from the conflict between his duty and his inclinations. He and a vet tech were on duty that night in the central laboratory, where the Barque Cats as well as the dogs of some of the more prominent citizens were kept. The farm animals had gone to a separate facility, the house pets who were not valuable working animals to another. Jared broke security by meeting her outside the building again while the guard slept at his station.

  Jared shook his head. “It would do no good. They’d only round them up again and maybe kill them on sight as health hazards to the general populace.” He r
an a hand through his hair, which was in need of washing and cutting. “By the government’s definition, all of the animals in custody are contaminated by this terrible threat they’ve invented. They just haven’t decided how much of a threat it’s supposed to be. Every minute, I’m afraid some overly cautious pencil pusher will decide to destroy the animals just to be on the ‘safe’ side. I’m arguing against it and so are many others, because after all, so far no one has found anything to indicate the fairy dust effect is harmful to anyone.

  “Of course, the more aggressively scientific among us want to sacrifice a few animals for further analysis, but I’ve been able to keep them from doing it since I’ve been here, so far, at least, and some of my colleagues have done the same thing at their new duty stations. I have a few allies here, but there are also some who are very eager to please the officials who started this mess. I can only hope that there are other officials who depend on their animals for a living or just love them and don’t want them threatened. Someone has to come to their senses and expose the rotten root of this madness and end it.”

  Janina was silent, clinging to his arm, conveying her support through her touch.

  After a long moment Jared added, “Chessie is fine. I think she exerts a calming influence on the other cats, in fact—at least when I’m around—because she knows me and trusts me. I talk to her and she rubs against the wire of her cage.”

  “Cage?” Janina asked, her voice breaking to think of her beautiful, intelligent, resourceful friend caged.

  “Banks and banks of them, I’m afraid,” Jared said. “I’m sorry, Jannie.”

  They parted, and Janina walked away. The sidewalks had little traffic at this hour, since Galipolis theoretically had a proper night and day, though you could hardly tell with the sky so full of traffic all the time. The buildings were all connected by sky bridges, and had docking bays for flitters on their upper levels, so mostly only heavier, more industrial traffic used the roads, especially at night. The swooping, circling, orbiting lights from ships and shuttles waiting to dock was so heavy that it obscured the real stars and cast writhing shadows, black against darkened surfaces of streets, buildings, and alleyways. This time of night, before the street sweeping sucker-trucks began their morning rounds, the gutters were full of debris. Hard to understand how it got there since notices against littering were posted everywhere and the penalties were heavy. On previous trips she had sometimes encountered people walking a dog, or an entire pack of dogs, and in residential districts cats had often watched at the windows or from the tops of fences, or darted across roads. Now there were no animals in evidence, of course. They would all be in cages somewhere.

  She continued her walk, though her feet were sore from the un-carpeted sidewalks and streets, which were much harder to walk on than the plusher amenities of the Molly Daise. Indu’s cousin Chandra had agreed to put Janina up in her tiny fourth-floor flat. It was a walk-up because the lift was broken. The arrangement was only intended to be temporary. Jared had suggested that he speak to his superiors about hiring her to help in the lab. But her position as a ship’s CP, and the fact that she had been spotted during the protests, was against her.

  There was no work for an “animal handler” elsewhere at the moment either. Should worse come to worst, she’d need to start over, find some other low-paying job here in the city or be out on the streets. Galipolis was not Sherwood. For that matter, by now Sherwood wouldn’t be much like Sherwood either, with no animals and all of the farms and ranches closed down.

  Formerly prosperous or at least surviving landowners and agricultural workers would be packing their own bags, looking for unaccustomed work elsewhere.

  She did not think she could bear it, that Chessie and the other glorious, useful, beautiful ships’ cats, and all of the gentle, trusting animals who had been reared in love and friendship, should be destroyed, murdered. The way things looked, the GHA might as well put her down too, along with a lot of other people.

  Suddenly, as she passed a darkened alleyway, someone grabbed her arm, yanked hard and pulled her off balance. She tried to resist but was taken too much by surprise to remember any of the self-defense moves she’d been taught by the Molly’s senior crew members. Her assailant twirled her around, and she ended up with her back against the tall front of the man whose arm held her slight form firmly in place.

  “Psst, look sharp, Kibble,” he whispered into her ear. “If I were as bad as some of the company I keep, I’d say you would make a good victim about now, what with that hangdog expression and slumping posture.”

  She twisted, kicked, and tried to fight, expecting at any time he would pull a knife or a gun and beat, rob, or rape her—probably all three—when her flailing hands sent her elbow back to his chest.

  “Meyeh!” came a protest from the vicinity of his chest.

  “Hey, careful there, lady,” the man said, releasing her. She started to run, but two things stopped her. One, she recognized him as the man who had accosted her at Hood Station just before Chessie was kidnapped. And two, he had stopped paying any attention to her at all. He’d opened his robe, and a pair of golden eyes peered up at him.

  “You okay, little buddy?” the man asked in a soft husky voice as his big finger stroked between the shining eyes.

  “Meep,” the kitten replied, and began rumbling loudly enough to be heard above the traffic circling the city.

  “You’re the catnapper!” she accused him. “How come everyone else had to give up their cats and you were able to keep this poor kitten?”

  He shrugged. “Other people play by the rules or aren’t as good at breaking them as I am. And you gotta agree this little guy is better off with me than he would be in that lab with your boyfriend.”

  “What?”

  “Jubal is my kid. He told me what your sweetie told you about this whole fiasco.”

  “But the kitten?”

  “Never mind him. He and I are pals and none of your concern. But what I want to know, lady, is what are you and that vet going to do now to end this before this little guy’s mother and—”

  “His what?”

  “Oops,” the man said, tucking the kitten back inside his robe. “What I meant to say was, with all the cats in the blinkin’ universe locked up there, this guy’s mother must be among them.”

  “She is!” Janina accused. “That’s one of Chessie’s kittens, isn’t it?”

  The man hesitated only slightly before saying, “You caught me. If I help you help Chessie and the others, you won’t try to take him back, will you?”

  Suddenly finding a worthy target for her pent-up frustration, fear, and anger, Janina said, “I’m not promising you anything! You started this whole thing by burning down Jared’s clinic and stealing Chessie. You nearly killed her, and now she can’t have any more kittens. I think you stole the entire litter, including the one you have now. If you can help Chessie, and me and Jared, you will anyway because otherwise you and the little one will be caught and he’ll be killed with the others. So stop wasting time and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “You’re not as dumb as you look, Kibble, though you don’t know the half of it,” he said. “Glad to know you’re on the ball. I need you to be smart and look lively. I also need you to help me talk to your boyfriend.”

  Jubal stood his ground, watching truculently as Beulah herded Sosi back to the shuttle.

  But suddenly Chester’s full weight settled onto his shoulder, just before they both fell to the deck as the ship accelerated. So much for the Ranzo’s tractor beam, he thought. They were on their own.

  Chester bounded up the carpeted ramp to the cat hole. Jubal felt elated when he realized he could see, through Chester’s eyes, into the dark corridor, all the way up the twisted passage to the tiny cabin where the skinny, short-haired, tawny-colored cat—Pshaw-Ra, Chester supplied the name—pawed at the controls. They looked like raised carvings of ancient hieroglyphics. The skinny cat dabbed them with his paws and bumped them
with his nose in a methodical manner.

  Chester asked, “What are you doing, Pshaw-Ra?”

  “Leaving, of course,” the other cat replied without looking at him.

  “But why?”

  “The humans are attempting to foil my plot for universal domination,” Pshaw-Ra replied. “I must intervene before all is lost to their ignorance and superstition.”

  Jubal asked Chester, What plot? Who’s he calling ignorant and superstitious?

  Chester didn’t answer, but instead asked Pshaw-Ra, “How do you plan to do that, exactly?”

  “By stopping the foolish two-leggeds from destroying our kind and the kefer-ka. Tell our guests to make themselves comfortable. They’ll be with us until I have need of them.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to like that,” Chester told him, but Jubal, who had despaired that anything could be done to help the impound situation, gathered that Pshaw-Ra intended to do something about it. Furthermore, both Pshaw-Ra and Chester seemed to believe he actually could.

  It’s about time someone tried to do something to stop this horse manure, Jubal told Chester. I think I’ve got it figured out, Chester. Pshaw-Ra is a superior alien being in cat form, isn’t he? But he’s a cat too and he doesn’t like what’s happening to the other cats?

  He thinks he’s superior, Chester agreed. But he’s not exactly an alien. He’s got a ship he can fly himself and does some cool telepathic tricks. But he says all cats could be like him—as if that would be a good thing.

  You think he can pull it off? Can he save Chessie and the other cats?

  I have no idea. He thinks so. But then, he thinks a lot of himself. Did you bring any fishie treats with you, perchance?

  Chester left Pshaw-Ra still working the controls of the ship with all four paws, his nose, and certain impossible maneuvers with his tail. The ship’s cat-tain made no attempt to stop him from rejoining his boy.