Barbary

She coaxed him till he lapped at the quivering white blob. Mickey drank milk even more messily in space than he did back on earth. Droplets flew from the tip of the bulb, beading into spheres before bursting onto Barbary’s shirt or drifting like soap bubbles to the floor. She offered him some chicken, but after sniffing it, he ignored it. She tried to get him to eat a bit of the dry food from her duffel bag, but he showed no more interest in that. He snuggled against her shoulder, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.

Barbary put Mickey on her jacket and cleaned up the spilled milk. She ate a chicken sandwich and drank the other bulb of milk. Then, yawning, she had to figure out how to arrange the sleeping net. Instructions posted beside it claimed to show the way it worked, but it turned out to be much more complicated. When she finally fixed it so she thought she could get into it, she felt exhausted. Though her room was warm enough, she wished she had a blanket to wrap herself in. She remembered a little kid much younger than she, in the group home on earth. He had been inseparable from his old tattered blanket. Right now Barbary understood how he had felt; she wished she had never made fun of him.

She climbed awkwardly into the net, fastened it, and fell fast asleep. When Mickey crawled in beside her, she halfway woke, then went immediately back to sleep.

o0o

By sleeping during the ship’s daytime and only going out of her room when nearly everybody else was in bed, Barbary made it through the three days of the journey from low earth orbit to the research station without Mickey’s being discovered. Under normal circumstances, somebody would probably have noticed her weird behavior. But with all the VIPs to take care of and everybody curious and worried and wondering about the approaching alien ship, no one cared what Barbary did. She smuggled food to Mickey in the secret pocket of her jacket, then sneaked the wrappers and milk bulbs back to the recycling bins. Maybe it was a good thing that Jeanne Velory had reproved her, for without the warning, she might have clogged up the waste chute in her room. If someone came to fix it they would have discovered Mickey.

The problem she had worried most about, after keeping Mick hidden, turned out to be not much of a problem at all. The first time Mick heard the vacuum pump attached to the toilet, he bristled his fur and hissed, but after he realized it was not a big creature that would jump out and get him, he ignored the pump and used the facilities as if they were just like the ones back on earth.

When she could, Barbary explored the ship. She spent a lot of time in the observation bubble. She wanted to take Mickey there and show it to him, but she kept changing her mind about how risky that would be. She never saw anyone else inside the bubble. Maybe VIPs went into space so often that they did not care. Barbary found it impossible to imagine getting tired of the sight.

She did sometimes see people in the cafeteria, even in the middle of the night. Usually they were talking about the alien ship, speculating and supposing. Barbary listened to them, but soon realized that Jeanne had told her everything anyone knew for certain. They would have to wait till they reached Einstein, and the alien ship near it, to find out anything more.

One of the research station’s missions was to search for gravity waves. For that it had to be well away from earth and the moon. That was the reason for its long polar orbit. It reached its greatest distance from earth, its apogee, above the northern hemisphere. Since the alien ship approached on a path well above the plane of the solar system, Einstein was the best place from which to observe the ship’s passing. Or to contact it, if, as Jeanne believed, it carried living beings.

But as the alien ship drifted farther and farther into the solar system, it showed no sign of life. It continued to ignore radio signals. Many people argued that the ship must be under conscious control, for the chances of its passing so close to the solar system were otherwise terribly small. But others continued to think that the ship must have been drifting, dead, for millions for years. They thought it was only luck that brought the ship near enough to notice.

o0o

The days passed. Einstein appeared first as a large bright spot, then as a sparkly Christmas tree ornament, finally as a huge spinning double wheel growing larger each minute. A few hours before docking, Outrigger’s acceleration stopped. The transport had reached a velocity just slightly greater than the velocity of Einstein; soon it would catch up to the station. Outrigger’s steering rockets vibrated softy, orienting the transport to dock.