Barbary

“He’d probably like it now,” Charlie said. “Kittens hardly ever do, but he’s about the age where he’ll start to find it interesting.”

“Come on, Barbary,” Jeanne said, from beyond the group of people. “Time to go.”

“All right.” She picked Mickey up. He twisted, trying to free himself, almost as if he knew that he would not like the next place they went to.

“Oh, ugh!”

Everyone turned toward the exclamation.

One of the controllers, behind her console, put her hands on her hips and glared at the floor. She reached down and came up again with something thick and stringy pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She lifted it above the edge of the console.

The skinny tail widened out into the dangling brown body of a very large rat, its bony grayish-pink paws curled up against its fur.

Oh, no, Barbary thought. Somehow Mick got into one of the labs, and he’s killed one of the animals. He probably wrecked somebody’s experiment.

“That’s really disgusting, Mollie,” Heather said.

“Is it dead?” Charlie asked.

“It’s still warm,” Mollie said. “But it’s very dead.” She put it down.

“Barbary — ” Jeanne said.

“How was he supposed to know?” Barbary held Mick tighter. “Other places we lived, he was supposed to catch rats! He’s never been in a lab!”

Everybody in the room looked at her, hardly able to believe that anyone would live in a place where rats ran around loose.

“But that’s not a lab rat,” Heather said.

“Of course it is,” Jeanne said.

“What else could it be?” someone else asked.

“Don’t be silly,” a third said.

Everyone sounded disgusted at the idea that it might be anything but a lab rat.

“If it isn’t a lab rat, Heather —” Jeanne said.

“You high-tech people!” Heather said. “You guys have probably never been anywhere near the lab. But I have, and I know what the lab rats look like. First of all they’re white, and they have pink eyes. Also they’re about half the size of that one. And their teeth are a lot smaller. Actually they’re kind of cute. Which that thing isn’t.”

“That’s for sure,” Mollie said. “Excuse me, I’m going to go wash my hands.”

“Somebody get a box to put it in,” Jeanne said. “We’ll take it to the lab and ask if it’s from the animal room or not.”

o0o

Chang Leigh, the chief biologist, looked at Mick with curiosity, and at the body of the rat with astonishment.

“Quite a menagerie,” she said. “What’s the story?”

“Is this one of yours?” Jeanne asked.

“Certainly not. Nor can I claim the cat, handsome fellow though he is.” She stroked Mick, and he arched his back and purred.

“Are you sure?” Jeanne asked. “There’s no way this rat could have escaped from the lab —”

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Leigh said. “You caught this creature loose in the station?”

“As far as we can tell — the cat did, I mean.”

“Jeanne, we have troubles.”

“I was afraid,” Jeanne said, “that you were going to say that.”

o0o

Chang Leigh took Barbary, Jeanne, Heather, and Yoshi on a tour of the animal room, just to reassure them that the rat Mickey caught could not have been one of the lab animals, even if one of them had gotten loose. Heather was right, the lab rats were kind of cute. At first Mick pricked his ears and ruffled his whiskers at the sight of so many animated toys all together in such a convenient spot, but then he seemed to realize just how many of them there were. He huddled in the safety of Barbary’s arms.

“Okay,” Jeanne said, gazing into a cage of small and undeniably cute rats. “I’m convinced.”

They returned to Jeanne’s office. Barbary kept quiet, glad to have escaped the lab without having to leave Mick locked up and surrounded by rats. But he was tired of being carried. Barbary let him slip out of her arms. He set out exploring.

“This means the station is infested with rats,” Jeanne said.

“That could have been the only one,” Leigh said. “But I wouldn’t bet on it.

“But how —”

“It was inevitable,” Leigh said. “Rats always go along with explorers, no matter how many precautions you take. They’re sneaky little bastards. They’re perfectly capable of stowing away on a ship and getting to shore before the people do.”

“Not on a spaceship,” Jeanne said dryly.

“Metaphorically speaking. And all it takes is one.”

“Don’t you mean two?”

“Not if the one is pregnant. Which rats frequently are.”

“So what now? Poison?”

“I’m a biologist, not an exterminator,” Leigh said. “But poisons are seldom an effective long-term solution. The rats can evolve immunities faster than we can invent stronger poisons. And I’d be very uncomfortable about setting out poisons in a closed ecosystem like ours.”

Jeanne tapped her fingers on her desk.

“The quickest solution,” Leigh said, “would be to get everybody in one place, seal it off, and let the air out of the rest of the station.”

Jeanne groaned. “Quick, maybe, but complicated, even under normal conditions. Right now —!” She grimaced. “Besides, it would be terrible public relations.”