She had forgotten the computer could speak — that it always spoke unless the user turned off the sound.
“My cat — Mick — was in the apartment but now he isn’t. He had on a collar with a radio in it. Jeanne said it would tell me where he is in the station.”
“I do not understand ‘cat,’ ‘Mick,’ or ‘collar,’ but I do understand ‘radio.’ Please wait while I obtain more information.”
The screen blinked into fancy patterns that changed like a kaleidoscope. After a minute the voice returned.
“I now understand ‘cat’ and ‘collar,’” she said — Barbary thought the voice sounded like a she — “but I cannot discover the meaning of ‘Mick.’”
“Mick is the cat’s name. It’s short for Mickey. Can you find him?”
“The transmitter has not yet been registered, so I am not currently tracking a frequency for Mick, a cat. However, finding an unregistered transmitter is possible. Please wait.”
Again the kaleidoscopes appeared. At first the pictures had been beautiful, but now Barbary wished she could make them stop and just get an answer to her question.
Several minutes passed, as the patterns became more colorful, before the voice returned.
“The unregistered transmitter is not in the station.”
“But it has to be! Maybe he got out of his collar somehow…?”
She stopped, realizing that the transmitter would still transmit, even if it were not still attached to Mick.
For a minute Barbary thought she was going to cry. All she could think was that Mick must have gotten himself in such a bad place that his collar had been destroyed.
“Did you look everywhere?” she asked.
“Yes,” the computer said. “And I find no unregistered transmitter on the station.”
“But you have to!”
“It is outside the station.”
“Outside? How could it be outside? Where?”
“The transmission corresponds to the position of a raft that is heading away from the station.”
Then Barbary knew what had happened.
o0o
Barbary ran down the hall and punched at the controls of the elevator. By the time it arrived, she was about to go looking for the stairs, despite the distance to the hub. When the doors slid open, she plunged inside, still panting. She hit the control for top level, the nearest to the center, the hub, and grabbed a handhold to steady herself against the tilt.
The elevator halted and she rushed out.
She propelled herself off the floor and into the air. Tumbling and struggling, she managed to grab a strap. She thudded against the wall and bounced to a halt. Here she had no weight, but she still had momentum, and ramming into the wall hurt. When her balance returned, she grabbed the next handhold, and the next, and crawled toward the launch chamber. However much she wanted to run, she would have to move — to sly — smoothly and carefully. As she was about to enter the raft chamber, she heard voices, arguing. She stopped herself and listened, too desperate even to be embarrassed about eavesdropping.
“I tell you I didn’t know about the message!” Thea shouted. “If you’d announced it when it first came in — if it weren’t for this infernal secrecy —”
“You should have known better,” the vice president replied.
“This is a research station, I’m an astronomer. I’m supposed to be doing research.”
“It’s quite possible that you’ve committed a diplomatic faux pas in the most important meeting since… since… the beginning of history!”
“All right, dammit,” Thea said. “I’ve already turned it around. What more do you want?”
Barbary peeked around the doorjamb. The vice president sat in one of the skating chairs that transported novices in free fall. His two bodyguards clung to straps. Thea and Yukiko floated nearby, studying a display.
“Besides,” Thea said, grumbling, “‘Please do not approach us’? What the hell does that mean? We aren’t approaching them. It’s just a drone with a camera. If they’re so advanced, they can tell it doesn’t have any artificial intelligence, and there’s nobody in it.”
But there is! Barbary thought. Mick’s in there — he’s got to be!
He must have climbed into Thea’s contraption, into the central pipe that formed the basic frame. And he either liked it there too much to leave, or he was too scared or too interested to jump out while Thea carried the contraption to the raft.
“I see you’re willing to risk the possibility that the aliens will consider your ‘experiment’ hostile,” the vice president said. “I’m sure your colleagues will be happy to know you’re so cavalier about their lives.”
“I told you I’m bringing it back!”
Barbary let out her breath. Maybe it would be all right. The raft would turn before the aliens decided to shoot it, and Mick would be in the station again long before the raft ran out of air.
“We’ll have to broadcast an explanation and an apology,” the vice president said. “And you’d better prepare yourself for a disciplinary hearing.”
“You can’t discipline me!” Thea said. “I’m a citizen.”
“We’ll see.” He paused. “How long before the craft returns to the station?”
“It’s only been out forty-five minutes,” Thea said. “It’ll take about an hour to decelerate, turn, and come back. Since I don’t have to conserve its fuel anymore.”
“Thea,” Yukiko said, “it isn’t responding.”
“What?”
Barbary clenched her fists around the handhold.
It has to come back! she thought. It has to!
“It has to be responding,” Thea said, with equal desperation.
“It isn’t. It’s still accelerating.”
After a long silence, during which Barbary was afraid to sneak a look inside the launch chamber, Thea said, “You’re right.”
In the intense quiet, Barbary could hear her own heart pounding. She bit her lip.
“I’m going to the control chamber,” the vice president said. “The military attaché will have to know what’s happened. He’ll be able to deal with the logistics of destroying the probe.”
Barbary froze. The vice president’s chair buzzed toward her. If she jumped out in front of him and asked him not to shoot Mickey —
He would probably laugh at her.
If his bodyguards did not shoot her for jumping out at him.
She hid in a nearby corridor till he, his bodyguards, and Thea and Yukiko entered the elevator, still arguing.
After they were out of sight, Barbary entered the launch chamber. Heather’s raft sat on its tracks, waiting to go out again. Barbary floated to it, opened its door, and slid into the seat.
She stared at the controls. She thought she remembered what Heather had done, but she was not certain. She was not even sure she could figure out in which direction to go to find the alien ship, and Mick’s raft. Away from the sun, she guessed. But there was an awful lot of nothing out there, and rafts were awfully small.
Heather said the computer could drive the raft
She turned it on.
“Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“Do you know where the raft with the transmitter is?”
“Yes.”
“I want to go there.”
“Please wait.”
The kaleidoscope patterns appeared. Barbary gritted her teeth. Computers were supposed to know everything instantly.
But if it knew the location of Mick’s raft, why was it making her wait? The only reason she could think of was that it was reporting her.
She slapped the switch that turned off the computer. She did not know if that would keep it from reporting her — if that was what it was doing — but it was the only thing she could think of. She would have to find Mick herself. She pulled down the door and sealed it and tried to remember what control Heather had used first.
“Open up!”
Barbary s
tarted at the muffled voice and the rap on the transparent roof.
Heather stared in at her. She looked furious.
Barbary opened the hatch.
“Move over!”
“Heather, they’re going to shoot Thea’s contraption, and Mick’s inside it. I have to stop them.”
“Move over!”
Barbary obeyed.
Heather swung in, slammed the hatch shut, and fastened her seat belt.
“Your computer told me part of it, and I figured out the rest.” She took over the controls.
“Thea tried to make her camera come back, but it wouldn’t.”
“Mick probably knocked loose some of the connections.”
Their raft slid into the airlock. The hatch closed.
“I just hope I got here soon enough to get us out,” Heather said. “I bet they’ll freeze all the hatches in about two seconds, if they haven’t already.”
The outer door slid open.
Heather made a sound of triumph and slammed on the power. The acceleration pushed them both back into their seats.
With the raft accelerating and the station growing smaller behind them, Heather glared at Barbary.
“Now,” she said. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“There wasn’t time,” Barbary said.
“Oh.” Heather’s scowl softened. “That’s a good point.”
Barbary squinted into starry space. “How do you know where to go?”
“It’s not that hard. From where the station is now, and the direction and speed the ship’s approaching, it has to be lined up with Betelgeuse, if Atlantis is directly behind us.”
Barbary tried to imagine the geometry of the arrangement Heather described, with all the elements moving independently of one another, and came to the conclusion that it was hard, even if Heather was so used to it that she didn’t know it.
She peered into the blackness, unable to make out anything but the bright multicolored points of stars.
Heather drew a piece of equipment from the control panel.
It looked like a face mask attached to a corrugated rubber pipe. Heather fiddled with a control.
“Here,” she said, and pushed the mask toward Barbary. “You can focus with this knob if you need to.”
The image of the alien ship floated before her, a sharp, clear three-dimensional miniature, a jumble of spheres and cylinders, panels, struts’ and irregularities, some with the hard-edged gleam of metal, some with the softer gloss of plastic, some with a rough and organic appearance, like tree bark. But for all Barbary knew, alien plastic looked like tree bark and their trees looked like steel. If they had trees, or plastic, or steel.
“Can you make it show Mick’s raft?”
“That’s harder,” Heather said, “since I don’t know what course Thea used. But I’ll try.” She bent over the mask, fiddling.
“Hey, Barbary,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Were you really going to come out here all by yourself?”
“I guess so. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
“That was brave.”
“Dumb, though,” Barbary said. She never would have remembered the right controls, and she would have headed off in the wrong direction. “I guess you would have had to come out and get me and Mick both.”
“Still, it was brave.”
“Did you find Mick yet?” Barbary asked, embarrassed.
“Uh-uh, not yet.”
“Can we use his transmitter?”
Heather glanced up, frowning.
“We could,” she said, “but we can’t, if you see what I mean. We’d have to use the computer, and if we turn it on it would probably lock our controls and take us home. But we’ll find him, don’t worry.”
“Okay,” Barbary said. “How long before we catch up to him, do you think?”
“It sort of depends on how fast the raft went out and how rapidly it was accelerating. Which I don’t know. But it couldn’t have been too fast, or it would use up all its fuel before it got to the ship. Then it wouldn’t be able to maneuver, so it would just fly by very fast. Without much time to take pictures. So it has to be going slowly, instead. Anyway, we ought to catch up within a couple of hours. I don’t want us to run out of fuel — and I don’t want to get going so fast that we go right past without seeing Mick.”
Chapter Twelve
The raft hummed through silent space. Barbary kept expecting the stars to change, to appear to grow closer as the raft traveled toward them. But the stars were so distant that she would have to travel for years and years before even a few of them looked any closer or appeared to move, and even then they would still be an enormous distance away.
“Heather?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for coming with me,” she said.
“Hey,” Heather said, her cheerfulness touched with bravado. “What are sisters for?”
A red light on the control panel blinked on.
“Uh-oh,” Heather said.
“What is it?”
“Radio transmission. Somebody from the station calling us. With orders to come back, probably.”
They stared at the light. Heather reached for the radio headset.
Barbary grabbed Heather’s hand. “If you answer them, they’ll just try to persuade us to turn around.”
“But we ought to at least tell them that it’s us out here,” Heather said.
“They probably already know. If they don’t, maybe we ought to wait until they figure it out.”
“Yoshi will be worried,” Heather said sadly, “when he comes home, and he can’t find us.”
“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.
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