Barbary

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.”