Barbary

“Quite a place,” she said. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Barbary suggested we should plant grass and things. Wouldn’t that be neat? It’d be like the gardens, only big enough to walk in.”

“It would be quite an undertaking — but it might be possible. I’ll look into it. After all the excitement has died down. That is a good idea, Barbary.”

“Thanks,” Barbary said. “But could we go now? Mick’s getting crazy, and if I let him go I’m afraid he’ll find another hole to crawl into.”

“Sure.”

They returned to Jeanne’s office.

“I’m going to call the techs and the mechanics in off the observation platform and put them to work checking the structural integrity of the station,” Jeanne said when she had closed the door. “But we’ve got a lot of grounders here, and I don’t want them to panic.”

“So don’t tell anybody, right?” Heather said.

“Don’t go out of your way to spread it around,” Jeanne replied. “Everybody who lives here will know within a couple of hours. But even in a crisis we can’t evacuate anyone till the station’s near perigee — they knew that when they came on board. What we can do is try to maintain some normality while we check out the station. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry we caused you all this trouble,” Barbary said.

“It’s all right, Barbary,” Jeanne said. “Honestly. Discovering that the station has rats, and that it’s had no thorough inspections in the whole time it’s been up here aren’t things I’d’ve chosen to happen. But it’s better to know about the problems and fix them. We all should be very grateful to you and Heather — and to Mickey.”

“Okay.”

“Has he caught any more rats?”

“No. But I haven’t had that much chance to let him loose. I’m kind of scared that he’ll get lost in the elevator again.”

“I’ve been thinking about how to keep track of him. Would he wear a collar, do you think?”

“He did before — he had to have a license. He didn’t seem to mind it too much.”

Jeanne gave Barbary a piece of elastic with a plastic-encased electronic chip glued to it.

“This is makeshift, but it ought to work. It’s a transmitter. We put them on servomechs, and on tools that we use outside. The computer tracks them.”

“I’ll show you,” Heather said.

“Great,” Barbary said. She would be happier knowing where Mick was, and he would be happier not being followed around all the time.

She tied the elastic around Mick’s neck. He flattened his ears, but he soon grew resigned to the light collar and ignored it.

o0o

When Barbary and Heather returned to the apartment, it was empty except for Thea’s contraption. A long tube secured a camera and several other instruments; sensor wires led from the tube to a microprocessor, which Heather said would connect to the raft’s radio and transmit data to the station.

Yoshi had left them a note on the computer — on a piece of paper taped to the terminal. His handwriting was clear and elegant.

“Lessons,” the note said. “Rest.” And finally, “I am in the library.”

Heather sighed. “Vacation’s over, I guess. Oh, well, lessons are kind of fun.”

Mick prowled around the room, pausing now and then at the door to the outside corridor, but Barbary was not quite ready to let him out into the station. She decided to wait till Heather showed her how to follow the signal on his collar.

Heather introduced Barbary to the computer. They each had a terminal which contained a great deal of built-in information, and which would also call up the station’s main library banks and look for whatever it did not have.

“If you can get all that right here,” Barbary asked, why did Yoshi go to the library?”

“To write,” Heather said. “He went to the book library, not the computer library. A lot of people brought books from earth because they like to read that way instead of on the computer. I don’t understand why myself. But that’s how it is. Some of them got together and put their books all in one place so they’d have a library. Anybody can borrow the books. Yoshi likes to work up there.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a poet.”

“Oh. I mean what does he really do?”

“He really is a poet!” Heather said. “People are, you know.”

“Okay, okay, I just never heard of a poet on a space station before.”

“I guess maybe you haven’t heard of everything in the whole universe yet, then, have you?”

“What are you so mad about?”

“How would you feel if you did something important something nobody else could do — and somebody said, ‘Oh, that’s nice, but what do you really do?’”

“I’d be mad,” Barbary admitted.

“Well.”

“Um, I’m sorry,” Barbary said. “Can anybody read one of his poems?”

“You can read everything he’s published. It’s in the library.”

“The computer library?”

“No, the book library.”

“Why isn’t it in the computer?”

“Yoshi doesn’t like computers much.”