I pictured the flashbomb firing up on my
right flank, getting ready for flight, and then I could feel the ship vibrating
as it made my imagination come true. I wanted it to go off just a little way
behind me so I wouldn't be blinded. It did. The ships, arrayed like a bowl in
front of me, glittered in the light.
One
of Harrison's cat-infested Machines shot past me on my left, toward the bowl of
waiting Machines. Inside the glass I could see a cat, sans gravity, sprawling
and yowling through the air. I couldn't hear it, but based on its hissing and
scratching motions, I could imagine what was going on. It wanted to get away
from the flashbomb, and so the ship was headed straight for the net we'd made.
The other cat-ships seemed to be doing the same thing.
But
then the cats saw what was coming: Between the ships were spreading large,
flashing nets made for gathering space debris.
Apparently
that was worse than a flashbomb. They turned away from the nets and shot their
tiny ships in exactly the opposite direction.
Back
toward the Snowy Belt.
I
couldn't do a thing to stop them. I watched all the little cat-ships slow, flip
around and then hurry past me toward the stroids. Inside each ship floated a furry cat, all its fur standing
on end in the lack of gravity. Of the cats I could see, some were scrambling
desperately, and others were stiff-legged in free-fall, ready to hit the ground
any second. But there wasn't any ground to hit.
The
ships were among the stroids
now. The cats were searching for a place to hide.
We
all watched helplessly. The Snowy Belt is full of tiny stroids and huge ones, hiding behind each
other and spinning around each other in unpredictable ways. They hang close
together, and any mistaken turn is death.
Harrison
groaned. "We can say good-bye to my Machines, and my cats." The rest
of us remained silent in sympathy as one by one we lost sight of the spots of
color.
Suddenly
a Machine shot out from among us, a lumpy white-and-brown blur.
Young
Jim.
Without
a pause, he sailed straight ahead into the maelstrom.
I
held my breath and waited to see an explosion when he ran into an stroid. It didn't come.
We
couldn't tear our eyes away. One moment he disappeared behind a stroid, the next he showed up again, even
smaller than before. It happened over and over. Then we waited a long, long
moment without seeing him at all.
"Jim?" I said into the group line.
"You okay, buddy?"
Silence.
"If
you're not, I don't know what we can do about it, but we're here for you.
Several miles away."
The
silence made my ears ache.
"What
on earth," Harrison finally exclaimed. "Of all the dumb people. What
is he even thinking?" Over the mic I could hear her banging her hands on
her own glass ceiling. Now his death would be on her head.
I'd
made light of it when I spoke to him over the radio, but deep regret pressed on
my chest as the others turned to head back to Harrison's.
After
a long time, I turned too.
Jim
shot straight into the cloud of stroids
- incredibly foolish, and his father would have been furious if he were still
living, but Jim couldn't resist. That crowd of snobby old fogeys (besides
Clancy, anyway) were waiting and watching, too scared to get into the thick of
the mess; and meanwhile, those sneaky cats were squirreling themselves away who
knows where.
Dad
would have been okay with Jim entering the field. It was the suddenness he
wouldn't have liked. He had been working with Jim to design the
stroid-navigation system when he died, and they both knew that eventually they
would make it work and work well. But Dad was really big on caution, and he
would always have insisted on approaching the Belt slowly, giving the nav
system a chance to work things out and finish its calculations before diving
in, as it were.
Well,
now the nav system was installed in Jim's Machine. In fact, he'd installed it
that morning. It would have been wise to test it out before joining the hunt,
but - well, this would just have to count for the test.
Jim
was several miles into the Snowy Belt before he saw a cat. He had figured out
pretty quickly that he wouldn't do any good if he zoomed right by a cat hiding
behind an asteroid, so he slowed down and did a lot of looking around. His
stroid nav identified stroids and their trajectories and navigated routes
around them toward a given destination. It also had the handy feature of
highlighting anything that wasn't rock bright yellow on his screen.
Unfortunately,
it had already marked about fifteen tiny stroids as bright yellow. Which meant
that Jim had some work to do when all of this was over. The good news was, so
far the nav system had gotten the other stroids right: Every time it was white
on his screen, it had always turned out to be a stroid.
There's
a good side to everything.
But
the down side. Jim had about four objects marked yellow on his screen at any
given moment, and he had to check out each one to see if it was a baby stroid
masquerading as a Machine, or if it was actually a Machine.
Or
a piece of trash. It could be a piece of trash.
In
fact, he wasn't sure the stroid-identification part of his system worked at all
until he finally found his first cat.
When
chasing down some yellow, he found it was around the corner of a small stroid,
only a tenth of a mile across. Its Machine was shaped like a streamlined
teardrop from Jim's angle, and the metal parts were brilliant fuchsia with
darker fuchsia edges.
When
Jim got closer he could see the cat inside the bubble of glass. It was fairly
calm, slowly pedaling its feet. It - no, she, a calico - had been out here for
several hours by now. Jim decided that she looked like she had settled down to
endure the situation.
As
soon as he got close, she began to hurry around the next corner of the stroid.
Jim
frowned. He had a cat named Gypsy. Gypsy liked to hide in small, dark places.
The closest small, dark place he could see here was the pitch-black shadow of a
jutting piece of rock on this stroid. He hoped the cat knew that Machines can't
snuggle with rock.
Suddenly
he remembered. The code! Harrison had sent each of them the code needed to nab
the Machine and bring it in for her. In a moment Calico's Machine was connected
to his brain and returning to him. He told it to follow thirty yards behind him
and started to look for the next yellow splotch.
Jim
grinned a little at nobody in particular. This hunting reminded him of the days
of looking for space trash for his dad to put in his junkyard on the edge of
the Snowy Belt or to build into some off-hand Machine. Back then they still
hadn't developed this nav system, so the hunting involved lots of flying in
rings around stroids and hoping you weren't looking at the same stroid three
times.
That
was a joke. Jim knew how to differentiate between stroids like he knew how to
differentiate between the flexuation panel and the hypo-protectorate sheet on a
Machine.
He
checked his screen. Several yellow splotches were on the other side of this
stroid. Jim figured they were fragments from a recent stroid collision, but when
he rounded the corner he was delighted to find that they were all ships in
different shades of white and brown. A crowd would make this so much easier.
That's
when he realized two things.
Calico
and her Machine were nowhere to be seen.
And
Harrison's ships were never brown or white.
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