“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.”