Space Station Rat

Space Station Rat

Michael J. Daley

For Jessie Haas, who knew the liverwurst had to matter, and Lenore Blegvad, who knows the sound of leaves

CONTENTS

C
HAPTER
O
NE

R
AT

Rat did not know which was worse: being hungry most of the time, or being lonely all of the time.

She huddled in the shadows just inside the air vent. Through the grate she could see into the cafeteria. Alone in the large room, the boy sat at a table, eating an apple. He got it from one of the machines on the wall.

Wicked machines. They gave food to everyone, except Rat. Rat hated them.

The boy ate the apple. Rat heard every bite: the pop of skin, the crush of sweet, white flesh, the wet slurp of juice. The air was heavy with apple smell.

Rat's belly ached with wanting the apple. She bit into a nearby wire to stay calm. One … two … three tiny nips with her long, very sharp front teeth. She did not allow herself any more. She did not bite deep. She only grazed the toothsome outer cover.

On a space station, every wire mattered.

A space station was a serious place. It was a clean place. It was no place for Rat.

Rat wondered again at her bad luck. When she escaped from the cage, with the scientists and machines hunting her, there was no time to read labels. She'd hidden in the first crate she found. And so she got blasted into space. A dodge right instead of left, and she might still be on Earth. She might be living outdoors with her wild-rat cousins. She might have interesting-smelling dirt between her toes. She might be nibbling corn in a giant field.

Closer and closer the boy came to the part of the apple he would not eat. Rat did not understand. People never ate that part. A mystery, but lucky for Rat. Sometimes they left that part on the table and went away, the boy more often than anyone else. He was untidy, and left crumbs and toys where they should not be. The boy was often in trouble for these bad habits. Lucky for Rat—sometimes.

Closer and closer. The wire was getting too thin to bite. Rat danced an impatient dance—left paw, right paw, swish of tail.

The boy put the apple on the table.

Rat stopped dancing.

The boy just sat.

Go! Rat could see the white on the apple turning brown. Go! Go!

Nanny came into the cafeteria. Rat cringed into the shadow. Silent. Still.

Nanny was nearly as tall as the boy and shaped like a barrel in the middle. Stuck on top of the barrel section like the lid of a pot was the black disc-shaped head with its one green eye. Pink foam padding—held in place with duct tape—covered the two gripper arms. This robot was not perfect like the others on the space station. It looked unfinished, like one of the scientists' experiments. The gray tape made it seem that way. They used a lot of that tape in the lab.

The robot's glowing green eye swiveled to stare at the boy.

“Tsk tsk tsk tsk,” Nanny chirped. “You are five minutes late for family time.”

“So?” The boy shrugged.

“You will make your parents unhappy.”

“No I won't. I could be an hour late, and they wouldn't care. They'd be glad. More time to talk sunspots!”

“Tut tut. That is no way for a little boy to speak of his parents.”

“It's true!” the boy shouted. He stood up so fast the chair tipped over. “Spots spots spots!!”

He ran out of the cafeteria.

The apple lay forgotten on the table.

Though every muscle tensed for action, Rat dared not move while Nanny remained. The robot might look dumpy, but its senses were much more like Rat's. They were
better
than Rat's.

The glowing green eye surveyed the mess.

“Tsk tsk tsk,” Nanny chirped, then whizzed off after the boy.

Hurry!
Or she might not beat the gobbler.

But Rat forced herself to stay still a bit longer. Listen. She heard the
scritch-rip
of the boy's Velcro boots fading as he ran. She heard the whir of Nanny's motor grow faint as it followed the boy. That was all. Rat
loved
those boots! Everyone on the space station wore them. Everyone made noise when they moved. Rat could never be caught by surprise. Not, at least, by a human.

The vent was hinged on top. Two plastic clips held the bottom shut. Even though Rat used this vent often, she always put the clips back on. She did not want the fix-it robots to get suspicious. She grasped the first clip with both front paws, and braced her back legs against the sidewall. She pushed. The first clip slid off, then the second. Lucky for Rat: no screws.

Rat lowered herself onto a pipe on the wall below the vent. The grate slid heavy against her back. She held it open with her hind foot. She flicked her tail out so that it would not get pinched. Just as the grate clacked shut, a door opened in the ceiling above the table and a thick hose dropped down. Chompers and slurpers were on the end of it.

Rat made a wild slide to the floor and dashed across. She jumped to the tabletop.

Bite!

Snap!
The gobbler's steely jaw got the other end of the apple core. Rat looked into the black hole of its dark mouth. She pulled and twisted and gulped for air.

The apple core broke. With a mushy slurp, part of it was vacuumed up by the gobbler. But Rat got the biggest piece. She ran. The gobbler snuffled and sponged at the sticky places, then set the chair back on its legs. Safe in the air vent, Rat devoured her prize. But it wasn't enough. It was never enough.

Rat put the clips back on the bottom of the vent. She stared at the empty, spotlessly clean cafeteria. Not even a bread crumb in a corner.

Itch.

Rat licked the scab on her right shoulder. She tasted more new skin, less crusty scab. Almost healed. Just before escaping her cage, Rat did that to herself. She chewed through her own skin. She bit out the rice-sized SeekChip tracker the scientists put into every lab animal.

Wicked scientists!

They taught Rat about skyscrapers and security alarms and ventilation systems; how to find computer rooms and vaults and executive boardrooms. But nothing about space stations. Nothing about food machines. She was supposed to carry food in a body pack when on missions, along with spy tools and weapons. The pea-sized food pellets tasted terrible, but each one was crammed with a whole day's nutritional needs.

Rat had planned carefully. She had made sure she could steal a body pack when she escaped. She had torn the communications gear from the body pack. Even without the SeekChip in her shoulder, without the radio, one of the terrible wheeled jaws had found her.

Lucky for Rat, the sniffer's teeth had sunk into the body pack instead of her. She'd popped the catches, slipped out of the pack, and gotten away. Fleeing the bewildered robot, she had turned the wrong way.…

Rat looked through the grate at the sealed metal faces of the food machines. She needed her tools in this place, but all she'd escaped with was her life and her wits.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

J
EFF

Scritch-rip! Scritch-rip!

Running drove the bad thoughts from Jeff's head.

Scritch-rip! Scritch-rip!

Running almost pushed the bad feelings from his heart.

Scritch-rip! Scritch-rip!

Run, and the trying-to-be-good got left behind.

Running on a space station was not easy. To run without getting dizzy, or staggering, required all his attention. That's why Jeff did it so much.

Just walking around on a space station was hard enough for most people. It felt like walking on a moving train—an odd sense, as you lifted your foot, that your body was not going to go where you wanted it to. It made some people sick. But not Jeff. He loved the feeling. He spent hours mastering it.

Too-big boots made it even harder. Mom hadn't forgotten a single thing for the project, but she'd left Jeff's special boots sitting side by side in the front hall.

He zigzagged a little as that bitter, disappointed thought spiked into his head. With that loss of concentration came a loss of balance. The tangled maze of rainbow-colored piping on the curved walls blurred. Dizziness threatened. Jeff pushed through it, seeking the sweet spot of no thought and perfect balance.

His vision cleared. There was the captain, dead ahead, his fat body nearly blocking the corridor. He bellowed, “Stop that running at once!”