“Everybody in the astronomy department knows about it — but if the muck-de-mucks knew, they’d probably forbid it. Saying no is easier than saying okay. They’ve already taken over all the information from the other probe I sent out — the one that detected the alien ship in the first place.” She gestured toward the series of comet photos Barbary had noticed the previous evening. This was the first chance Barbary had had to look at them.
The first two photos showed an ordinary comet, a blurry streak against the stars. But in the third photo, the spot of light had become clearer and sharper. A real comet grew fuzzier with vaporized ice as it approached the sun.
Barbary stared at the last two photos.
The images Thea had captured could not be mistaken for a chunk of rock or ice, even less for a human creation. The alien ship sprawled in all dimensions, flowing out in angles and curves that no one on earth ever imagined for a spacecraft. It was exquisitely beautiful and exquisitely alien.
“I’m supposed to be an astronomer and this is supposed to be a research station,” Thea said. “But now that we have something to research, the politicians are getting all nervous.”
“That’s crummy,” Barbary said.
“That’s what I thought. So it’s guerrilla time.”
“Gorilla time?”
“Guerrilla, as in warfare. That’s when you go around behind somebody else’s rules, especially if the rules don’t make sense.”
“I hope it works.”
“So do I. By the time the ship gets in visual range close enough to see details, I mean — the VIPs will probably try to lock up all the light telescopes as well as the probe data. I don’t see how they can, though. It’d be like trying to take away every computer in the station. Practically everybody has one.”
“Why would they try, then?”
“Fear.”
“It seems like they’d want to know all they can find out before the ship gets here.”
“They have tame scientists to tell them what they want to know. They can’t figure the rest of us out, and they’re afraid we might tell them something that doesn’t fit in with their pet theories.”
“Like what?”
Thea paused, then shrugged and gestured to her camera. “When I get a transmission from this bird, I’ll let you know.”
The look on Thea’s face reminded Barbary of Jeanne, when Jeanne had said, “A lot of people think the alien ship is a derelict. I don’t believe it, myself.”
o0o
Heather sat on the top bunk, skritching Mick behind the ears.
“But it would be too suspicious to tell Thea to stay out of our room, Barbary. Besides, what would she think? I’d hurt her feelings.”
“But she shouldn’t just walk in. What would she say, if you walked right into her room?”
“Probably, ‘Hi, sit down, have a cup of coffee.’”
“Oh.”
“Honest, Barbary, she hardly ever comes in here. She never has before and she probably won’t ever again. It was just a fluke. Mick will be okay.”
“I guess.” She tired to persuade herself that Heather was right.
“If you’re worried about him, why don’t you bring him with us?”
“I can’t, he’d never sit still for it.”
“But you could put him in your jacket, in the hidden pocket.”
“He wouldn’t stay. He only stayed before because I drugged him.”
“Oh.” Heather rested her chin on her fist and frowned. “How about a briefcase?”
“What’s a briefcase?”
“It’s a big leather satchel people used to carry papers around in.”
“Why’d they do that?”
“They didn’t have computers. They had to write everything down. In this novel I read, the hero carried his cat around in a briefcase.”
“Maybe you could train some cats to do that,” Barbary said, “but I don’t think Mick would like it. And where would we get a briefcase, anyway?”
“It’s the principle of the thing. We could use a box.”
“We’d look pretty stupid walking around the station carrying a box with airholes punched in the side.”
“Maybe so,” Heather said. “But I can’t think of anything else.”
“He’s fed and everything. He’ll probably just sleep all morning anyway. He’ll be okay. It’s just…”
“What?”
“After a while he’s going to get bored with this one room. He’ll want to run around. If he could do that, someplace where nobody else would see…”
“There’s lots of places nobody ever goes but me. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who even knows about them. I’ll show them to you. But first I want to take you for a ride.”
Barbary skritched Mick behind the ears. He barely raised his head, his eyes closed, then he put one paw over his face and fell asleep.
o0o
As the elevator rose toward the zero-gravity hub, Barbary and Heather watched the stars through the clear wall of the elevator.
“They’re even prettier when you get outside the station and you’re just in a suit or a raft,” Heather said. “Sometimes I think it ought to be possible to go outside without a suit, and see them without anything at all in the way.”
Barbary glanced at her sister, trying to figure out if Heather was making a joke. If she was, it was not a very good one. Barbary had never felt scared for another person before. She felt scared for Heather.
“It’d be kind of cold out there, without a space suit,” she said.
Heather grinned. “Or really hot. Depends on where you’re standing.”
The elevator stopped and opened. Heather grabbed Barbary and pushed off, soaring across the room. She slyed around the hub. On one side, a number of small spacecraft sat on rails, facing closed hatches in the wall.
“Yukiko, hi, can I take one of the rafts?”
Yukiko straightened from her inspection of a raft’s engines. She carried a torqueless wrench in one hand; a bunch of other tools hung from a sort of apron tied around her waist. She was tiny, only a bit taller than Heather.
“Hi, Heather,” she said. “Yukiko, this is Barbary.”
“Hello, Barbary. I heard you were coming. Welcome to Atlantis.”
“Thanks.” Being recognized everywhere she went felt weird. She supposed she would get used to it.
“I’ll just take my regular raft, okay?” Heather headed toward a blue-gray ship.
“Sure,” Yukiko said. “Have fun. Oh — want to do an errand?”
“Okay. What goes where, and who to?”
Yukiko unfastened a great netted bundle of equipment from the wall and floated it to Heather’s raft. She reached inside the passenger compartment and manipulated some controls. Crab-clawed arms reached out from the raft’s belly and clasped the bundle close.
“Sasha needs it, out on the platform.”
Heather slid into the raft and showed Barbary how to strap in.
“See you later.”
Heather sealed the clear canopy.
“Let’s go,” she said.
The raft glided forward on its rails. The hatch opened, let them pass, and shut behind them. The raft stopped before a second closed hatch. Air hissed loudly as the air lock emptied. The sound diminished to silence.
“Is it like the light switch?” Barbary said. “You work it by talking to it?”
“Right,” Heather said. “You can use hand controls, too, I’ll show you. And you should keep an eye on the gauges, too, just in case something goes wrong.” She pointed to a lighted display. “This one’s for air pressure, so you know the canopy’s properly sealed. And if anything does happen, there’s a survival sack right there.” She pointed to a silvered package in easy reach. “You open it and seal it around you. It’s got its own air supply and an emergency transmitter, and even a window.”
“Is there time to get into it? I mean, if a meteor hits the raft, or something?”
Heather laughed. “If a meteor hit us we’d be vaporized. You wouldn’t have time to get in the sack, but you wouldn’t have time to care, either. The chances of getting hit by a meteor are real low. Around here we’re more likely to run into a loose wrench.”