“In my room? I won’t let him loose, honest.
“But he got loose today, didn’t he?”
Barbary stared at Mick, who purred in her arms. At least he was all right. The elevator had not crushed him and the cables had not electrocuted him. Somehow he had climbed out of the shield level and escaped from the elevator shaft. Perhaps the same tech who had left the panel open at the bottom of the shaft had forgotten to close one at the top, too.
“It wasn’t —” Barbary stopped. If she defended herself against the charge of being careless with Mick, she would have to admit to being in the shield level. She would have to admit that Heather showed her how to get there. So far, Jeanne had left Heather out of this, which was some luck.
“It wasn’t what?” Jeanne said.
“Nothing.”
“You don’t strike me as being the sort of person who likes practical jokes,” Jeanne said.
“Jokes?” Barbary said, confused. She did not like feeling confused, and confused seemed to be the way she felt here most of the time.
“Jokes like smuggling a cat on board a space station.”
“It wasn’t a joke!” Barbary cried. She hid her face against Mick’s side.
“Okay, never mind, take it easy.” Jeanne patted Barbary’s shoulder awkwardly. “Mickey means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”
“Uh-huh,” Barbary said without looking up.
“I’ll try to think of a way for you to keep him. I can’t promise anything, so please don’t get your hopes up.” She hesitated. “This is hard for me, too,” she said. “I earned this job, Barbary. I worked hard for it, and I intend to keep it. But I wasn’t the only choice for it by a long shot. There are plenty of people who think someone else should have it, and plenty of people who don’t much care who has it, as long as it isn’t me, or anybody like me.”
“But that’s stupid,” Barbary said. “Why?”
“Things are better than they used to be. A lot better. But there are still people in power who don’t think women in general and women of color in particular have what it takes to run things. All I can do is keep proving myself — and keep pretending I don’t know about the people who want me to fail. Sometimes that means… I can’t do exactly what I want to do exactly when I want to do it. Do you understand what I mean?”
“I guess,” Barbary said.
“Okay. Come on. Let’s go find a place for Mickey, where he’ll be comfortable and safe.”
Jeanne put her arm around Barbary’s shoulders as they started for the door.
“Jeanne?” Barbary said.
“Hmm?”
“If you have to pretend those other people don’t exist… why did you tell me about them?”
Jeanne hesitated. “You’ve wanted to do a lot of things that everybody around you said you couldn’t possibly do, but you did them anyway. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s why.
o0o
In the control center, Yoshi waited, looking grim, and Heather seemed about to explode from nervousness.
“So this is what all the mystery was about,” Yoshi said.
“We’d better talk,” Jeanne said, and took him aside.
Barbary joined Heather.
“Was she really mad?” Heather whispered. “What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know yet,” Barbary said. “I didn’t tell her about — you know —”
“Oh, I don’t care about that! What about Mick?”
“He has to be locked up. For a while anyway. At first she said she’d have to send him back to earth. But, I don’t know, later on it seemed like maybe she might be able to figure out a way I can keep him.” She tried to overhear what Yoshi and Jeanne were saying, but they spoke too softly.
“Nobody knows you knew about him,” Barbary said to Heather. “We better let them keep thinking that.”
“They’d have to think I’m awful dumb —”
“Can I pet him again?”
Heather shut up as one of the technicians sat on his heels beside them.
“He’s not used to different people,” Barbary said. “Be careful that he doesn’t scratch you.”
The tech held out his hand for Mick to sniff, then stroked his head and scratched behind his ears.
“I used to have cats back on earth,” he said. “They’re about the only thing I miss out here.”
Mick stretched and purred and nudged Barbary to let him down. She did. To her surprise, he basked in the attention. Back on earth he ran away from anyone but her.
“I’m Charlie,” the tech said, extending his free hand for Barbary and Heather to shake. Within a few minutes, half the technicians had returned to fuss over Mick and play with him.
“I wonder if there’s any catnip in the gardens,” someone said.
“We could send for some seeds if there isn’t.”
“He doesn’t like catnip much,” Barbary said. “I gave him some when he was little and he just ignored it.”
“He’d probably like it now,” Charlie said. “Kittens hardly ever do, but he’s about the age where he’ll start to find it interesting.”
“Come on, Barbary,” Jeanne said, from beyond the group of people. “Time to go.”
“All right.” She picked Mickey up. He twisted, trying to free himself, almost as if he knew that he would not like the next place they went to.
“Oh, ugh!”
Everyone turned toward the exclamation.
One of the controllers, behind her console, put her hands on her hips and glared at the floor. She reached down and came up again with something thick and stringy pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She lifted it above the edge of the console.
The skinny tail widened out into the dangling brown body of a very large rat, its bony grayish-pink paws curled up against its fur.
Oh, no, Barbary thought. Somehow Mick got into one of the labs, and he’s killed one of the animals. He probably wrecked somebody’s experiment.
“That’s really disgusting, Mollie,” Heather said.
“Is it dead?” Charlie asked.
“It’s still warm,” Mollie said. “But it’s very dead.” She put it down.
“Barbary — ” Jeanne said.
“How was he supposed to know?” Barbary held Mick tighter. “Other places we lived, he was supposed to catch rats! He’s never been in a lab!”
Everybody in the room looked at her, hardly able to believe that anyone would live in a place where rats ran around loose.
“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.”