Cats Triumphant (10 page)

Barry walked into his room to get a fresh handkerchief. For some reason his allergies seemed to react worse in his room than in any other part of the house. In fact, it was as if a cat was right there with him. Only half believing it, he looked under the bed to make sure there wasn’t one there. No, not a trace.

His clean handkerchiefs were in a neat stack on the dresser. Karen must have been too busy to put them away. Here, look, there was cat hair floating in the air when he picked one up. What carelessness! She hadn’t even washed her hands before doing laundry after coming back from the animal hospital.

He made his way into the bathroom and plucked a handful of tissues out of the box and plunged his nose into them. His allergy attack was in full swing. He could feel his chest tightening up. His medicine should be right in the front of the cabinet, just in the middle of the bottom shelf. He felt for it, not trusting his eyes, which were swollen almost shut.

The bottle was empty.

He shook it, unwilling to believe that he had gone through the entire prescription in such a short time. A mental countup of all the pills he had taken over the last week didn’t total half of the allotted number. Karen? Had Karen taken them? Is that why she had been acting so strangely? She was taking drugs to soothe the guilt feelings? No, that didn’t seem to be likely. She was a goody-two-shoes, had antisocial behavior beaten out of her at an early age by her brute of a father. That was one of the reasons Barry and Phoebe refused to have much to do with her family. He felt around for the other antihistamines. Every box, every bottle, every blister pack, was empty. There wasn’t even a cold remedy left. Karen must have dumped them out. Why?

Barry felt his way back into his room with the box of tissues. He was faint from lack of oxygen, and the sinus headache was increasing from canteloupe to honeydew size, straining at the inside of his skull. He sneezed into the kleenex, and another pinch of cat hair flew into the air.

“She blames me,” he coughed. “Silly girl ... Need help. Telephone ... the phone ... phone ... ”

Gasping, Barry reached for the telephone on the bedside, got the receiver off the hook. His fingers fumbled for the buttons, fumbled, splayed, and slid off the face of the instrument.

“Need help,” he told the receiver. “I’m alone. Allergic reaction ...” It slid out of his hands and banged on the table. His skull refused to contain his headache any longer. He clutched at his throat. “No air ...”

“Barry?” the phone demanded. The voice was his sister-in-law Pat. “Barry? Why are you alone? Where is Karen? Barry? Answer me. Barry, hang on. I’m coming over ... ”

Pat’s voice faded out in a black numbness as Barry fell to the floor. No air.

* * *

“They say gray cats are lucky, Clyde. You sure are. You could have been killed.” The kitten looked up at Karen from her lap, and then stretched its head up to her hand, asking for a scratch under the chin. For me, too. I took a chance on saving you, didn’t I? And I ended up with this neat job.”

Dr. Vaughan came into the boarding room then, and heard the girl’s words. “Oh, you won’t think it’s so neat in a few weeks. Anyone with any brain at all gets tired of cleaning out catboxes pretty quickly, and I think you’ve got a good brain.” Timidly, Karen smiled up at her.

“Oh, thank you, but I’m sure you’re wrong. I’ve wanted a cat for so long I’m willing to do all the dirty work. Really.”

“A few weeks,” Dr. Vaughan teased. “That’s all I give you, dear. There isn’t a cat’s chance, you should excuse the expression, that your gratitude will last longer. It’s a chore, like any other.”

“Maybe. That reminds me. I have to get going pretty soon,” said Karen, fluffing up the fur at the back of Clyde’s head. “I’ve got to vacuum as soon as I get home. I can’t let my uncle think that I neglect things that need to be done. I’m very good at details.”

The burly male technician loomed over the smaller man in engineer’s orange coveralls as if by sheer size he would drive home his message.

“I swear, Ardway, if you tell me one more cat story, I’m going to kayo you and put you out the airlock!”

“I thought you liked hearing them, Callan,” Benny Ardway said, wondering if he could wriggle his skinny frame any farther into the bulkhead of the forward engineering compartment to escape his shipmate’s wrath. He lifted apologetic, round blue eyes to the engineer. “You laughed. I thought you enjoyed hearing about Parky and Blivit.”

“Once, on the way out of orbit, was okay. Twice, while we were waiting for the calculations to jumpspace. But you have to have told the same damned stories a million times since we broke atmosphere,” Callan said, sticking a furious finger in his shipmate’s face, “and enough’s enough!”

“All right,” Ardway said, meekly. Callan gave him one more glower, then kicked off the wall to continue replacing modules in the astrogation console. Ardway handed himself down to his keyboard and looked out at the blackness of nonspace, wishing he could swim all the way back to Earth. He felt bereft. No one on board the ship felt the way he did about cats. No one understood what it was costing him to make this long trip, knowing that back on Earth his pets were missing him. No, not his pets: his
family
.

When he’d been assigned to the
Calliope
, the station quartermaster had told him that he was entitled to bring with him 20 kg. of personal gear. Perfect, he had thought. Both of his cats together didn’t weigh more than ten. Add to that their food dishes, maybe one more kilo. The corps supplied his uniforms, his tools, dishes, food, and bunk space. He could use a discarded cabinet casing for the cats’ litter pan. That left him nine kilograms for bookcubes and personal items. The cats would sleep with him. No bunk had ever been too small to contain all three of them. He had even asked his assigned bunkmate, the communications officer named Polson, if he liked cats, and Polson had said he did. It was going to be great.

Ardway had weighed everything several times to make certain everything he was bringing fell under the allowable limit. He even had half a kilo to spare. He had been devastated when, upon reaching the launch center with his luggage, he learned that his cats wouldn’t be allowed to come with him.

“We can’t be have animals in deep space,” the mission commander said, as if shocked that Ardway would even consider such a thing. He regarded the cats in their carrier with horror. Ardway recalled having moved between Captain Thurston and the cats to protect them in case the officer went crazy. The way his nostrils puffed out reminded Ardway of Parky about to have a fit. “They could panic! Destroy precious equipment! Er, soil, er, the environment.”

“Sir, they’re very clean animals,” Ardway had protested. “They’re both neutered shorthairs. They won’t cause any kind of fuss.”

“You must be out of your mind!” Captain Thurston said, crossing his arms. He was the poster-boy type for the deep space program, tall, handsome, muscular, and crew-cut, the physical opposite of Ardway, who was hollow-chested and mousy-haired. “Get those animals out of here, and I mean
stat
!”

There was nothing Ardway could do. He’d signed an ironclad contract, and he really did want to be in on this project. Who wouldn’t want a crack at being astronavigator on the first team to use the new jump technology for a long-range jaunt outside the solar system? NASA had wanted him, too. He was the lead software designer who had come up with the format for the benchmark system that kept the ship on beam. The program ran like a top, but NASA thought it would be better to have him out there with them in case something went wrong on a long test, after the 18
th
century custom of sending the engineer to sea with the ship he’d designed. Ardway thought he could leverage his desirability into making them agree to let the cats come, but they waved his signature in front of him, and told him to get over it. He’d only be gone two years. Two years! Ardway felt as if his heart would be torn apart.

The only way Ardway could cope was to have lots of reminders of the cats with him. With ten kilos of his personal allowance freed up, he was able to pack in a personal viewer and hundreds of videos of the cats playing and sleeping. He enlisted a trusted friend to watch over his pets, set up a mail account between his apartment and the communication station at Canaveral so he could get updates on his pets, and shared stories about Parky and Blivit with his new shipmates. Alas, the first wasn’t satisfying enough, and the last endured only as long as the patience of the final person on board the
Calliope
who would listen to him. That had been Callan.

Ardway watched the technician’s orange-clad legs floating weightlessly under the console. The flutter kick Callan made to keep himself in place reminded him of his orange tiger cat, Parky, lying on his side in the sun batting idly at a ribbon. He opened his mouth to say so, and very quickly closed it again. Callan might really put him outside in nonspace. Ardway glanced at the clock and decided to take a break. The program didn’t need him at that moment. No one did. His job had really been done the day he finished debugging the system, more than a month ago, and wouldn’t begin again unless something went wrong. In the meantime, he was useless baggage. He slid out of his chair, nodded to the helm officer, Frida Lawes, and handwalked out of the forward engineering compartment and made for the break room.

The
Calliope
had been designed to support up to fifteen crew members for a period of at least three years for her mission to Gliese 86. The ship’s complement was ten crew members, and the mission was intended to run only twenty-two months. If the bounce technology worked as planned, they would break space periodically, once just outside Sol’s heliopause, then enter the tunnel under normal space for approximately five months, surfacing occasionally to make sure they were still on beam, and emerge on the edge of the heliopause of Gliese, counting on Ardway’s program and his skill to get them there safely. The crew would undertake as much exploration of the star system as they could manage in their time frame, followed by the turnaround journey. All the crew cabins except the mission commander’s were doubles. The break room, the mess hall, and the exercise center were common areas. Six private one-man carrels were available when the pressures of the mission and communal living got to be too much for human nature. That wasn’t Ardway’s problem. He wanted company. They just didn’t want him.

“Coffee,” he told the wall in the breakroom. A hatch slid open in the mural, and Ardway took the insulated bulb. The food service system made pretty good coffee, scrambled eggs, oatmeal, and spaghetti sauce—anything soft. Any food with texture kind of suffered in processing. He floated over to an outer bulkhead where he secured himself on a loop to watch the entertainment hologram in the center of the room. It showed a couple of earnest men in surgical greens leaning over a patient and calling for tests. Reruns already? Who cared? He wondered if he had time to go back to his cabin and watch one of his personal tapes. Maybe the one of black and white Blivit washing herself.

“Hey, Benny!” Cora Handley, the ship’s blue-suited medical officer, swung into the room and noticed him hanging there all by himself. The oldest member of the crew, she’d been on more long-range flights than anyone else in the service. She was only around fifty, but her hair was almost pure white. Except for that and the ‘spaceman’s squint’, she looked thirty. “What’s the word from your cat sitter? How are the Terrible Two?”

Ardway perked up. “You won’t believe it, Doc,” he said, delighted to expand upon his favorite subject. “Melanie said that she showed them my message tape, and they both sat in front of the screen watching me. She said Blivit reached up to touch me through the screen. She couldn’t, of course,” Ardway said, sinking into depression again. If only it was that simple. His hands ached for the stroke of fur, to feel that soft vibration of a deep, throaty purr. “She said they are eating well, but I had to remind her to give Parky his vitamins where Blivit can’t see it, because she thinks they’re a treat, and she gets jealous ... ”

“Later, honey,” Handley said, hastily, her pleasant face contorting. “I’m running a stress test on the commander. Look, twenty-two months isn’t that long a time. You’ll be back there before you notice.” Handley ordered herself a coffee, and somersaulted out of the room with the bulb bobbing beside her.

Ardway appreciated her kind words. She was very sweet, but she was a hundred percent wrong. He noticed, all right. He noticed at the beginning of every sleep shift when no firm, furry bodies snuggled in with him, pushing him away from his pillow. He noticed at every mealtime when there were no sets of green or gold eyes looking up at him, hoping for the choicest morsels. He noticed when no friendly shoulders bumped into his legs while he sat at his console. And the worst was that no one wanted to hear about his troubles. Ardway blamed the space program for being shortsighted. If they’d let him have his little friends, he wouldn’t have to talk about them all the time. They’d even be good for crew morale. He drank his coffee and went back to his station. Just like the state of warp, the outlook for him looked black.

* * *

The
Calliope
broke space on schedule, and exactly where Ardway’s computer told them they’d be: on the very edge of the Sol system, in among the junk in the Oort cloud that surrounded the open space. The sun was a tiny dot at the edge of the astrogation screen. Ardway’s loneliness was put on hold for a time while the ship went on manual helm to explore the belt. Everyone got excited, as they were able to employ their specialities for the first time in the mission.

Spinning frozen boulders the size of small moons danced in the giant circle that surrounded his home system like a ring of mountains. Ardway enjoyed the narrow squeaks as he steered the ship close to chunks of space debris, fascinated by the largest amount of solid matter that existed anywhere but a planet. The geophysics team, Johnson and Mackay, gathered samples using both the ship’s grappling arms, and a short-range small retrieval unit that, like Ardway’s nav system, was on its shakedown cruise. The retrieval unit was nothing more or less than an empty spacesuit that went on tethered spacewalks by itself. Unmanned spacewalks were another of the service’s bright ideas to protect the fragile human beings in the crew from being exposed to radiation or accidents. The retrieval suit went out the airlock and acted as a kind of waldo while someone in the ship wearing the corresponding receptor-motivator unit felt everything the suit did, and saw everything the camera in the helmet did. The system was terrifically flexible and adaptable. When the suit successfully collected an interesting chunk of rock, Johnson made it do an end-zone disco boogie as the crew cheered.

The fun was short-lived. Once they reentered the blackness of warp space, an idled Ardway became morose, and simply didn’t talk to people for a while. He holed up in the privacy cubicles with his collection of home videos and his thoughts. Unable actually to be with his precious cats he spent a lot of time imagining himself home with them, in his personal heaven-on-earth. All right, so his bachelor flat was small and about twenty floors up with an unreliable lift; it had a great view to the south that allowed his pets to have sunlight all day, most suitable for naps and stretching. He had had so many happy days, playing with Parky and Blivit, reading with them on his lap, talking to them, and just enjoying the companionship.

He knew the others in the crew watched him and worried. Every so often he’d leave the privacy cubicle grinning over a particularly cute video or picture and catch the eye of one or another of his fellows, who would hastily look away. Ardway wondered if he could be dropped out of the service for cat addiction. But it’d be worth it. The cats were his companions, his friends, his comfort. Life like this wasn’t the life he wanted to lead. It was great during the big moments, the discoveries, but enduring the long stretches without his little friends was devastating. The view out the ports was an unchanging black, but he knew, intellectually as well as emotionally, that he was flying farther and farther away from his cats. He lived for the moments when they broke out of jump and received beamed messages from Earth. New video from Melanie of Parky and Blivit lifted his spirits like nothing else. He ached for them, and the longing got worse and worse as time went by. No one on the ship understood. No one wanted to hear about it.

With little to do and an indifferent company to keep, Ardway began to be lax about shift times, showing up when he felt like it. Who cared? Not the other people in the crew. His program didn’t need him. He started to go without shaving, and occasionally without bathing. By the twelfth week he sometimes wouldn’t even bother to get out of his bunk unless he was hungry or had to use the head. Ardway knew his behavior was unhealthy, but he simply could not motivate himself. He began to spend his break times in his privacy cubicle, screening videos, and coming out only when he was called. No one seemed to miss him. Except his cats.