Barbary

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.”

In the instant between the time Heather stopped transmitting and turned off the radio, the receiver burst into noise.

“— do you hear me? You girls get back here right now, or —”

Barbary recognized the voice of the vice president.

Heather clicked off the radio.

“He sounded pretty mad,” she said. “I guess now they’ll tell Yoshi where we are.”

“Heather, what if the aliens try to call us? We won’t be able to hear them, if we don’t leave the radio turned on.”

Heather raised one eyebrow and flicked the switch again.

“— return immediately, and you won’t be punished. But if you —”

She turned it off.

She shrugged cheerfully. “We wouldn’t be able to hear the aliens anyway, with Atlantis broadcasting nonstop at us, unless the aliens just blasted through their signal. I’ll try later — maybe the vice president will get tired of yelling at us.”

“What do we do now?”

“We just wait,” Heather said. “I’ll keep looking for Mickey’s raft. When we find it we’ll know better what we need to do and how long it’ll take.”

“Let me help look,” Barbary said.

“Okay.”

Heather showed her how to search the star-field for anomalies. At first glance, they looked like stars. But if one looked at an anomaly at two different times, the bright speck would have moved in relation to the real stars. The scanner could save an image and display it alternately with a later view of the same area. An anomaly would blink from one place on the image to another, and the human eye could see the difference. A computer could, too, but it took processing time or a lot of memory, or both, to do what a person could do in an instant.

“Astronomers used to discover new planets and comets and things this way,” Heather said. “You can also search by turning up the magnification, but that means you can only see a little bit of space at once. So unless you got really lucky, you’d spend days and days trying to find what you were looking for.”

Barbary scanned for the alien ship. When she finally found it she felt pleased with herself, until she remembered how easily Heather had done the same thing.

“Shouldn’t Mick’s raft be right in between us and the alien ship?” Barbary asked.

“It could be,” Heather said. “But it isn’t. Nothing moves in straight lines in space, not when there are gravity fields to affect your course. Besides, I’m sure Thea didn’t send her camera on a direct line to where the ship is now. She probably planned to arc around it. I mean, she wouldn’t want to run into it. There’s no way to tell exactly what course she chose. We could call and ask her —”

“As if she’d tell us —”

“She would. But I don’t think the VIPs would let her.”

“So we just keep looking?”

“Yeah.”

Barbary let Heather have the scanner. She knew Heather could find Mick about a hundred times faster than she could.

“What’s it like, back on earth?” Heather said abruptly, without looking up. “What’s it like to visit a farm, or camp out in the wilderness?” She waited quite a while, as Barbary tried to figure out how to answer her. Finally Heather said in a small voice, “Never mind. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“It’s okay,” Barbary said. “It isn’t that. It’s just a hard question to answer. There are so many different places and different things to see — only I haven’t seen most of them. It’s hard to get a permit to go out in the wilderness, and you need a lot of equipment, and that costs money. Nobody I knew ever did it.”

“What about farms? Did you see cows and horses and stuff?”

“I’ve never been on a farm, either. There weren’t any near where I lived, and they aren’t like in movies. They’re all automated. Big machines run them. Some of them are covered with plastic to keep the water and the heat in. A couple years ago I snuck off to a zoo. I saw a cow then. It looked kind of bored and dumb. Horses are prettier, but hardly anybody on farms has them anymore. Mostly, rich people keep them to ride.”

“How about an ocean?”

“I never saw that, either.”

“Oh.”

“I wish I could tell you.”

“That’s all right. I’ve talked to other people about it, and I’ve seen pictures and tapes. But I can’t figure out what it would be like to see it myself.”

“You know, Heather,” Barbary said, “an awful lot of people talk about going to the mountains, or going to the ocean, but hardly anybody ever did it. Not anybody I knew, anyway.”

“But they could have gone if they wanted.”

“Yeah. They could have.”

“I usually don’t care. But sometimes I wish I could go see the mountains or the ocean, or blue sky.”

“Your sky is prettier.”

“I bet a blue one would be easier to find a raft in.” Heather raised her head from the scanner. She looked exhausted. She had dark circles under her eyes. Barbary felt afraid for her.

“Want me to look?” Barbary asked.

“I’ll do it a while longer, then it’ll be your turn,” Heather said. She stretched, and hunched and relaxed her shoulders a couple of times. “I don’t suppose you brought along any sandwiches or anything, did you?”

“No,” Barbary said. “I didn’t even think of it.”

“Oh, well. There are some rations in the survival ball. But they’re pretty boring. Probably we should wait till we’re really hungry before we use them.”

Barbary thought she would get sick if she tried to eat. She felt empty and scared.

Heather bent over the scanner once more. “Hey! Look at this!”

Barbary peered into the scanner.

“I just see stars.”

“Keep looking.” Heather touched the blink control.

In the center of the picture, one of the bright points jumped.

“Is that Mick?”

“Has to be,” Heather said.

Barbary flashed the control again; again the image jumped.

“Now zoom in.”

Barbary did so. The raft appeared. The airless distance of space transmitted details sharp and clear, but all she could find was the silver and plastic shape of the raft, and the shadows of Thea’s contraption inside. Nothing moved.

“There it is!” she said. She magnified it even more. “I don’t see Mick, though.”

“Let me look.”

Heather teased the scanner controls.

“Can you see him?”

“Umm… no,” Heather said. “I can’t. But there’s a lot of stuff in there. He’d practically have to sit on top of it for me to find him.”

“He’s probably sitting under it,” Barbary said. “Yowling. Or growling like a wildcat.”

Heather laughed. “I bet you’re right.”

Barbary felt both overjoyed and, terrified. Heather had found Mick — but Barbary would not be able to stop worrying till she saw for herself that he was all right.

“Where is he?” she asked. “Right in front of us?” “No, he’s kind of over to the side.” Heather pointed. “Thea must have planned to circle all the way around the alien ship, then follow it as far as she could. I’m going to have to turn us pretty hard. Are you strapped in?”

“Uh-huh. How long will it take to get there?”

“A couple of hours, maybe. I’m just guessing, though.”

“How do we get him when we get there?”

“We can’t. There’s no safe way to open a raft in space unless everybody inside is in a space suit or a survival ball, and Mick couldn’t get in one by himself. So we’ll stick out our claws and grab his raft and turn us both around, and go back.”

“Oh,” Barbary said. She had been hoping there was some way of getting from one raft to another. But at least she would be able to look inside and see Mick.

“Hang on.”

The raft plunged into free fall as Heather cut the acceleration. Barbary flung her hands out before her, for it really did feel as if she were falling. The steering rocket flared on, the stars swung, and the rocket on the other side counteracted their spin. Now, Barbary knew, they were traveling in the same direction as before, but Heather had turned the raft a few degrees to the left.

Heather applied some thrust to the raft. The new acceleration would add to their previous velocity, changing their direction and speed so they would be heading more nearly toward Mickey.

Getting to the right spot in space took a lot of care and calculation. It would have been much easier if they could have flown the raft like an airplane, or like a spaceship in a movie, banking into turns and swooshing from place to place. But in a vacuum, without any air, ships could not bank into turns or swoosh.

“I don’t want to kill any more velocity than I have to,” Heather said. “It takes too much fuel. So I’ll probably have to correct our course a bunch of times. But for now we’re sort of heading for where Mick ought to be when we get there.”

Barbary tried to figure out how that worked. It sounded suspiciously like a math word problem, which she had never been very good at. She had never seen the point of figuring out when two trains would pass each other when the only trains left were tourist attractions that she had never ridden anyway. But being able to figure out in her head how to meet another raft in space would be useful. She wished she had paid more attention to word problems in school, and she wondered if it was too late for her to learn how to do what Heather could do.

“Hey, Heather — Heather!”

Heather jerked up from the scanner, blinking and confused.

“Huh? What? I’m awake!” She stopped, abashed.

“No, you’re not,” Barbary said. “You fell asleep sitting up! Heather... look... maybe…” With a shock, she realized how much danger she and Mick had put Heather in,

“Oh, no!” Heather said. “Don’t even say it! We’re not turning around and going back like we just came out here to make trouble and then lost our nerve!”

Barbary hunched in her seat. She felt miserable. “I’m afraid you’re going to get sick,” she said.

“I’m okay! I’m just a little tired!” Heather snapped. Her expression softened. “Look,” she said. “I don’t have to do anything for a while. I could take a nap, and you could keep an eye on the scanner. I’ll set it so the image of Mick’s raft will get closer and closer to the center till we intercept it. If it goes past the center of the focus, wake me up to correct the course.” She showed Barbary the faint band of color outlining a square in the center of the scanner. The other raft lay at the left edge of the screen; it moved, almost imperceptibly, centerward.

“That sounds easy enough,” Barbary said.

Heather grinned. “It’s a lot easier than trying to sleep in a raft, that’s for sure.” She squirmed around, trying to get comfortable.

“Lie down crosswise and put your head in my lap,” Barbary said. “I’ll try not to bonk you with the scanner.”

“Okay.”

Barbary took off her jacket and tucked it around Heather’s shoulders. Heather curled up under it, hiding her eyes from the light of the control panel. Her position still did not look very comfortable, but within a few minutes she was fast asleep.

Barbary looked around.

Far behind her, spinning, lit from behind, the station grew smaller. The earth and the moon each showed only a slender crescent of light, for Barbary was on their night sides. The raft’s automatic shield hid the sun and prevented it from blinding her.

Even in the observation bubble of the transport ship, she had never felt so alone and so remote. Beauty surrounded her, a beauty too distant and too enormous for her ever to reach or comprehend. She gazed out at the stars for a very long time, till she realized how long she had been staring. She quickly grabbed the scanner. To her relief, the other raft still lay within the field, halfway to the center of the focus.

Barbary increased the magnification, but that sent the raft all the way off the screen. If she moved the focus, she might not get it back to the place where Heather had aimed it. That also meant she could not use the scanner to find the alien ship, to see if it was doing anything threatening or even simply different.

Heather slept on. The radio receiver’s light never flickered from its brilliant red. Trying to keep her attention on the scanner, Barbary forced herself to remain calm. But worry raced through her mind. She began to wonder if perhaps the aliens, and not the space station, might be trying to call the raft: to tell her they understood, everything was all right; to tell her they did not understand, please try to explain more clearly; or to tell her they understood, but they did not believe her and did not trust her and did not care anyway, and were going to shoot both rafts with death-rays.

She put on the headset and turned on the radio and the transmitter.

“This is the second raft calling, in case you didn’t hear us before.” She whispered, trying not to wake Heather. “We’re coming out to rescue the first raft so it won’t bother you. It’s a mistake that it’s out here, and we’re really sorry. We’re trying to fix things.” She turned off the transmitter, leaving the channel open for just a moment.

“Barbary!” Yoshi said. “Is Heather all right?”

“You two turn around and —”

The vice president’s voice faded as Barbary cut the power to the radio without replying. She would have liked to reassure Yoshi, but she was afraid to get into a fight with any of the adults, especially Yoshi, or Jeanne if she were there, which she probably was. Jeanne or Yoshi could say things that would make her want to turn around and go back, so they would not be so disappointed with her.

She glanced behind the raft. The science station was a bright turning toy, part lit, part shadowed, spinning between the more distant crescents of the earth and the moon.

Before her, space lay beautiful but still. Somehow the stars reminded her of snow early in the morning, before dawn, in a quiet, windless winter. She peered into the scanner to reassure herself that the other raft was still there. She squinted, searching for any sign of Mick. But his raft drifted onward, showing no signs of life.

She yawned, then shook her head to wake herself up. She could not go to sleep, though Heather’s steady breathing in the silence of the little ship had a hypnotic effect. She yawned again. She pinched herself, hard.

A glimmer of light on metal caught her gaze.

Off to the left, far away but as clear as a close-up model, Mick’s raft crept along. Now that she had found it, Barbary did not understand how she could have failed to see it for so long. She could tell it was in motion; she could tell her own raft was approaching it, slowly and at a tangent. In the scanner, the image had touched the outer edge of the focus square.

She started to touch Heather’s shoulder, but decided against waking her yet. They still had quite a way to go before their raft intercepted Mick’s, and Heather needed the rest.

Still careful not to change the direction of the scanner, Barbary increased the magnification. Now she could see part of the raft in the center of the frame. But the transparent roof had not yet come into view. Barbary stared at the image, willing it to move faster so she could look inside. It crept onto the screen, appearing to move sideways because of its orientation and because she was approaching it from behind and to one side. She wished she could see its front. Often, when Mick had ridden in a car, he crouched up front looking through the windshield. But she supposed he would have trouble crouching on the dashboard of a raft, without any gravity.

Something glided through the picture.

Her heart pounding with excitement, Barbary bent closer over the scanner.

“Mick,” she whispered, “hey, come past again, okay?” The portion of the image taken up by transparent raft roof increased. She held her breath.

As if he knew she was coming after him, Mick brought himself up short against the plastic and peered directly at her. He opened his mouth wide. If they had not been separated by the vacuum of space, she would have heard his plaintive yowl.

“Okay,” she said, laughing with relief. “I’m coming to get you, you dumb cat.” The scanner grew foggy. She had come so close to crying that she had misted up the mask. She sat up and reached into it to rub away the condensation with her sleeve. She glanced outside to check the position of Mick’s raft.

To her shock, it — and Mick, looking at her — lay no more than twenty meters away. She was gaining on it.

“Heather!” she cried.

She pushed the scanner out of the way and pulled her jacket off Heather’s shoulders. She shook her, but Heather remained sound asleep.

“Heather, come on!”

Barbary did not intend to come this far and lose Mick. She did not know if they could turn around and come back for him if they passed his raft. She jammed her hands into the grasps of the claw controls. She reached out; the grapples extended from beneath the raft. She opened her fingers and closed them; the claws followed her motion.

The distance between the rafts diminished to ten meters, then to five.

Barbary reminded herself again and again that the key to doing anything in space was to do it calmly and smoothly. She did not feel calm. She felt terrified and ignorant. Sweat rolled into her eyes. She could not take her hands from the grasps, and she was afraid to take her gaze off the other raft long enough to lean down and rub her forehead on her sleeve.

“Heather!”

Even if Heather woke now, there was no time for her to take over the controls. As her raft approached Mick’s, so much faster than it had seemed to be moving when they were far away, Barbary grabbed for it.

As she clenched her fingers in the grappler controls, the two rafts came together with a tremendous, wrenching clang. Barbary gasped, fearing she had rammed hard enough to breach the hull of Mick’s raft or her own. The ships began a slow tumble. Around them, the stars spun. Barbary squeezed her eyes tight shut. That was even worse. She opened her eyes again. The claws kept the two vehicles clamped tight together. She could no longer see Mick, for he was underneath her. But as the reverberations of the crash faded, she heard, transmitted through the hulls, Mick’s angry, objecting howl.

She laughed with relief. The motion of the rafts was beginning to make her dizzy, though, and the rafts would continue to tumble till someone used the steering rockets to counteract the spiraling twist. Heather would know how to do it.

“Hey, Heather.”

Usually when Heather wanted to sleep some more, she muttered and pulled her blanket over her head. This time, she lay still.

“Heather?”

Heather’s hands felt cold as ice and her skin was very pale. Frightened, Barbary leaned down and put her ear to her sister’s chest. Her heartbeat sounded weak and irregular. Barbary wished she knew what it was supposed to sound like, or what it usually sounded like.

Afraid to try to wake her again, Barbary covered her with her jacket and pillowed Heather’s head in her lap.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I got Mick, I can get us back.” She studied the controls. She would have to figure out how to make the ship stop tumbling, then turn it around. She wished she did not feel so dizzy —

Then she thought, You dummy! If you turn on the radio and the computer, back at Atlantis they’ll send out the signal to bring us back. It’s what they’ve wanted all along!

She threw the two switches, and got ready to be bawled out.

The radio remained silent.

As the raft rotated, an enormous shape slid past the roof.

The rotation of the raft slowed, though Barbary felt no vibration from the steering rockets.

The huge shape slid into view again, the rotation stopped, and Barbary found herself gazing through the roof at the looming alien ship.

Barbary put her arms across Heather as if she could protect her.

Slowly, the raft moved toward the irregular, multicolored hull.