“We’re going to have to transmit a message to the aliens anyway,” Barbary said. “To tell them we don’t mean to bother them, but Mick is in the first raft and we’re coming out to rescue him. When we do that, they’ll hear us back in Atlantis.”
“Uh-huh.” Heather gazed into the scanner. “I wonder why they don’t want us to come near them? I wonder what they do when somebody does?”
“I guess they could blow us up with death-rays,” Barbary said. “But that doesn’t seem too civilized.”
“And how are we going to explain cats to them? I wonder if they have pets? I wonder what they look like?”
“Maybe they’re big cats themselves, like the aliens in Jenny and the Spaceship,” Barbary said. “Did you read that?”
“Big cats?” Heather said. “That’s silly, Barbary. The aliens come from some other star system. They evolved on a whole different planet. They probably don’t even have the same chemistry we do. They might breathe cyanide or methane or something. Big cats?”
“Okay, okay, forget it,” Barbary said. “It was just a book.”
The radio light continued to glow. To Barbary, it seemed to be getting brighter and brighter, more and more insistent.
Heather finally put on the headset. When she turned on the radio, she spoke before a transmission from Atlantis could come through.
“Raft to alien ship, raft to alien ship. Um… hi. My sister Barbary and I — I’m Heather — are trying to rescue a… a sort of friend of ours who got stuck in the first raft by mistake. Now we can’t make the raft turn around, so we have to catch up to it to get him.” She hesitated. “Please don’t be mad or anything. Over and out.”
In the instant between the time Heather stopped transmitting and turned off the radio, the receiver burst into noise.
“— do you hear me? You girls get back here right now, or —”
Barbary recognized the voice of the vice president.
Heather clicked off the radio.
“He sounded pretty mad,” she said. “I guess now they’ll tell Yoshi where we are.”
“Heather, what if the aliens try to call us? We won’t be able to hear them, if we don’t leave the radio turned on.”
Heather raised one eyebrow and flicked the switch again.
“— return immediately, and you won’t be punished. But if you —”
She turned it off.
She shrugged cheerfully. “We wouldn’t be able to hear the aliens anyway, with Atlantis broadcasting nonstop at us, unless the aliens just blasted through their signal. I’ll try later — maybe the vice president will get tired of yelling at us.”
“What do we do now?”
“We just wait,” Heather said. “I’ll keep looking for Mickey’s raft. When we find it we’ll know better what we need to do and how long it’ll take.”
“Let me help look,” Barbary said.
“Okay.”
Heather showed her how to search the star-field for anomalies. At first glance, they looked like stars. But if one looked at an anomaly at two different times, the bright speck would have moved in relation to the real stars. The scanner could save an image and display it alternately with a later view of the same area. An anomaly would blink from one place on the image to another, and the human eye could see the difference. A computer could, too, but it took processing time or a lot of memory, or both, to do what a person could do in an instant.
“Astronomers used to discover new planets and comets and things this way,” Heather said. “You can also search by turning up the magnification, but that means you can only see a little bit of space at once. So unless you got really lucky, you’d spend days and days trying to find what you were looking for.”
Barbary scanned for the alien ship. When she finally found it she felt pleased with herself, until she remembered how easily Heather had done the same thing.
“Shouldn’t Mick’s raft be right in between us and the alien ship?” Barbary asked.
“It could be,” Heather said. “But it isn’t. Nothing moves in straight lines in space, not when there are gravity fields to affect your course. Besides, I’m sure Thea didn’t send her camera on a direct line to where the ship is now. She probably planned to arc around it. I mean, she wouldn’t want to run into it. There’s no way to tell exactly what course she chose. We could call and ask her —”
“As if she’d tell us —”
“She would. But I don’t think the VIPs would let her.”
“So we just keep looking?”
“Yeah.”
Barbary let Heather have the scanner. She knew Heather could find Mick about a hundred times faster than she could.
“What’s it like, back on earth?” Heather said abruptly, without looking up. “What’s it like to visit a farm, or camp out in the wilderness?” She waited quite a while, as Barbary tried to figure out how to answer her. Finally Heather said in a small voice, “Never mind. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“It’s okay,” Barbary said. “It isn’t that. It’s just a hard question to answer. There are so many different places and different things to see — only I haven’t seen most of them. It’s hard to get a permit to go out in the wilderness, and you need a lot of equipment, and that costs money. Nobody I knew ever did it.”
“What about farms? Did you see cows and horses and stuff?”
“I’ve never been on a farm, either. There weren’t any near where I lived, and they aren’t like in movies. They’re all automated. Big machines run them. Some of them are covered with plastic to keep the water and the heat in. A couple years ago I snuck off to a zoo. I saw a cow then. It looked kind of bored and dumb. Horses are prettier, but hardly anybody on farms has them anymore. Mostly, rich people keep them to ride.”
“How about an ocean?”
“I never saw that, either.”
“Oh.”
“I wish I could tell you.”
“That’s all right. I’ve talked to other people about it, and I’ve seen pictures and tapes. But I can’t figure out what it would be like to see it myself.”
“You know, Heather,” Barbary said, “an awful lot of people talk about going to the mountains, or going to the ocean, but hardly anybody ever did it. Not anybody I knew, anyway.”
“But they could have gone if they wanted.”
“Yeah. They could have.”
“I usually don’t care. But sometimes I wish I could go see the mountains or the ocean, or blue sky.”
“Your sky is prettier.”
“I bet a blue one would be easier to find a raft in.” Heather raised her head from the scanner. She looked exhausted. She had dark circles under her eyes. Barbary felt afraid for her.
“Want me to look?” Barbary asked.
“I’ll do it a while longer, then it’ll be your turn,” Heather said. She stretched, and hunched and relaxed her shoulders a couple of times. “I don’t suppose you brought along any sandwiches or anything, did you?”
“No,” Barbary said. “I didn’t even think of it.”
“Oh, well. There are some rations in the survival ball. But they’re pretty boring. Probably we should wait till we’re really hungry before we use them.”
Barbary thought she would get sick if she tried to eat. She felt empty and scared.
Heather bent over the scanner once more. “Hey! Look at this!”
Barbary peered into the scanner.
“I just see stars.”
“Keep looking.” Heather touched the blink control.
In the center of the picture, one of the bright points jumped.
“Is that Mick?”
“Has to be,” Heather said.
Barbary flashed the control again; again the image jumped.
“Now zoom in.”
Barbary did so. The raft appeared. The airless distance of space transmitted details sharp and clear, but all she could find was the silver and plastic shape of the raft, and the shadows of Thea’s contraption inside. Nothing moved.