Gateways (52 page)

“So?” Ardway said.

“So I made you a suit, man,” Johnson said, opening a compartment and taking out a wad of tan cloth about the size of his fist. “Instead of getting real output from out there, I’ve used your home movies to program the computer for sufficient characteristic behavior. I’m plotting the right size, shape, and motion in three points in space, which the suit will respond to.”

“So what?”

“So when you wear the suit,” Johnson said, smiling broadly, “you’ll have your own virtual cat around you. No one will be able to see it, or hear it, including you, but you’ll be able to feel it.”

Ardway let hope gleam in his eyes. “That’d save my life, Mel.”

“And our sanity,” Johnson said.

The sensor suit worked exactly as Johnson had said it would. When hooked up to the central computer, Ardway could feel subtle motions against his arms and legs. Nothing like a cat, yet, but it was promising. The program Johnson adapted needed to be debugged first, and Ardway jumped in to help. He pored over the code for days on end, motivated for the first time since he had left home. He gave Johnson his best videos and pictures, along with precise measurements of the two animals that he had made when he thought they would be coming along on the mission. Johnson devoted his spare shifts for a week helping him to fine-tune the responders so they would push against Ardway’s skin in the right sequence and at the right amount of pressure. The testing had to be done during the gravity periods
each day so the plotting for ship placement would be accurate. Not unlike the benchmarking program, Ardway thought.

“Okay,” Johnson said, kneeling at Ardway’s side to adjust the flat control box in the middle of his back. Ardway wore nothing but the suit and a pair of boxer shorts over it. The suit itself was of pale tan filaments, not all that much darker than his skin, and was so fine he felt the cold of the floor through the feet, and the breeze from the ventilation fan. “You know, you can shower in this. And should. The sensors work best when they’re kept clean. Okay, try it. The cat ought to be right about there.” Johnson stood up and pointed to a spot approximately three feet up over a white dot painted on the floor.

Ardway put out a hand in space, and was surprised as it ran into an obstruction. He couldn’t see it, but his body told him it was there. His hand insisted there was something solid in the way. He ran a hand over the form. It was shaped approximately like a cat. The soft ears bent under the pressure of his glove, but the hard round skull resisted the downward motion. Encouraged, Ardway stroked his hand down its back. The spine arched upward to meet his caress. The edges were very rough, but Johnson tweaked the programming until the sawtooth spine under his palm melted into a surface like silken fur. Ardway felt the body shift. A rough tongue, at first limp as corduroy but stiffened with a little help into wet sandpaper, occasionally licked the back of his hand.

“It’s wonderful, Mel,” Ardway said, feeling a lump rise in his throat. “I don’t know how to thank you.” Then it disappeared. Ardway felt around with both hands.

“Where did it go?” he asked.

“On the floor, man,” Johnson said, consulting the monitor. “Wait.” In a moment, the firm body reasserted itself, rubbing against Ardway’s calf. It was such a real sensation, he could almost picture himself home again.

“It’s wonderful,” Ardway said again, shaking his head in wonder. “You’re a true friend, Mel.”

Johnson stood away from his screen and stretched his long back. “I’m starved. Let’s stop for a while and get something to eat.” For the first time in weeks, Ardway felt as if he had an appetite. He followed eagerly.

The two of them headed for the mess room. Ardway walked along, feeling the occasional sensation of the pressure against his leg as the programming caused the “cat” to bump into him impatiently.

“It’s following me,” Ardway said, with delight.

“It’s yours.”

If the rest of the crew was surprised to see Ardway in his underwear,
they didn’t say anything as he and Johnson sat down to a meal. He tucked into his dinner as though he hadn’t eaten since he’d left Earth. Then, suddenly, he felt sharp pain in his knee.

“Ow! The damned suit attacked me!”

“It’s in the programming, man,” Johnson said. “It just scratched you. What’s it want?”

“It’s hungry,” Ardway said, after a moment’s thought. “That’s what Parky always does. What do I do?”

“What you would do at home. Pretend to throw him something. Or try to teach him not to beg at the table. Maybe it’ll learn. Maybe it won’t. It’s a cat. It’ll act like one.”

With an incredulous glance at his friend, Ardway reached into his plate-bowl, a clear globe with a gasket to admit his hand or fork but to keep the rest of his food from floating away in zero-gee, picked up an imaginary morsel between thumb and forefinger, and tossed it onto the floor. Instantly, the invisible presence left his side. Ardway could imagine the cat chomping and chewing at his offering, or maybe symbolically burying it in the floor the way Blivit always did. He hoped the bit had been something the cat considered good. In a moment, he felt a light touch on his kneecap, a little paw, beseeching and thanking in one soundless motion. He reached down toward the invisible presence, felt his palm stopped by a hard, round object, the cat’s head. It shifted, maneuvering his hand downward a couple of inches to a softer surface that must be its throat. Automatically, his fingers curved and began scratching lightly against the presence the glove told him was there. Incredibly, a gentle vibration came through his fingertips. The cat was
purring
. His heart melted. He looked up at Johnson. “Thank you, Mel. I owe you.”

Johnson held up his hands. “Hey, it’s a challenge. I’m enjoying it. Really. Just do us a favor and keep your clothes on over the suit.”

From that moment on Ardway was a new man. He wore his mesh of sensors under his uniform all of the time. Most of the time the invisible cat, whom he’d named Boojum, stayed in his cabin. Ardway leaped back into his work, becoming the most willing of the crew, working long shifts, never complaining, cheerful all day long, because he knew that at break times and meal times and rest periods, he could go back to his quarters and play with his very own cat. He rejoiced in the marvel as if he had never had a pet before. He could pick it up and put it on his shoulder, feeling a several-kilos weight there. He could sit and read, feeling a sprawled figure across his lap and a whiskery chin on his wrist. Boojum would even come
to him when he called. He could play fight-games using an old sock as a glove. The mesh calculated a compensation for the padding, lessening the force of the cat’s nips or scratches. The best part was sitting in the mess, or in the break room, or floating at his station feeling a small, rumbling body cuddle up against his. He pictured Boojum as a solid, mackerel-striped tabby with black mascara markings around the eyes. A bit of a bruiser, but loving and devoted. Ardway loved him back without reservation.

The crew referred to the program as Ardway’s “imaginary playmate,” but they didn’t knock something that had solved the morale problem so neatly. Ardway still enjoyed receiving his updates from his cat sitter on Earth, but he could see the cats were well and content, now that he was not reading extra angst into their responses. All that had come from him, and he was cured. Polson moved into a spare bunk room, so Ardway wouldn’t be embarrassed to talk to his cat in the middle of the night. The cat proved to be a good listener. The sensor receptors responded to the vibration of his voice, creating a response in the cat’s programming. Ardway talked, and the cat sat with him and purred. Ardway was happy.

When he had a chance, Mel Johnson made him a hood to go with the suit, for Ardway to wear in the privacy of his cabin, so he could be awakened by cheek rubbings and roundhouse paws to the ear, and so he could enjoy again for the first time in five months the sensation of a cat asleep, curled up in the hollow of his neck and shoulder.

Johnson had gotten interested in the Boojum project in spite of himself. To the captain, he’d argued that such a refinement of the retrieval-suit technology could be a useful side product of the space program, one with applications in industry as well as the military, which kept Thurston from complaining about misused resources. Johnson had incorporated plenty of Ardway’s personal stories about his cats as well as the videos into the programming. One shift while Ardway drowsed over his control board thinking in three dimensions, he fell asleep. Suddenly, he woke with a start. There was something slimy in his hand. No! He jumped up out of the seat, batting at his palm, and looked down. There was nothing there. What could it be? Gingerly, he felt for it, and read the shape with his sensor-covered fingers. With a smile, he remembered. Johnson had worked into the cat’s repertoire the actions from the time Blivit had decided to help feed her poor stupid human. She had brought him one of the goldfish from his apartment tank. Ardway reached down, knowing that Boojum was there, waiting for approval.

“Thanks, kitty,” he said, petting the hard little head that was under his
hand, whether he could see it or not. He threw the imaginary morsel toward the disposer bin, and hoped the cat wouldn’t try to go after it and retrieve it for him.

But, Johnson had done more than invest Boojum with the characteristics of either Ardway’s stories or his home videos. He’d asked other people on board for their own cat stories, and put them into the database. And he’d added random factors, with his own sense of humor. In the mesh, the program treated Ardway as though he was barefoot all the time. Early one morning, Boojum left him a “present,” just inside the door to the head. Ardway hopped around for a moment on one foot, feeling the mushy, wet coldness on the sole of his foot. He limped over and pulled a towel out of the dispenser and wiped off his ship-boot. The pressure against the receptors caused the sensation to abate.

“Thanks a lot, you silly animal,” Ardway said to the air, and caught Captain Thurston coming out of a stall. The commander gave him a strange look, and edged out of the room, giving him a wide berth.

The cat’s existence was plotted within the relative points of the spaceship for all the empty internal spaces that existed, so he was never to be found sticking half in and half out of a wall, unless there was a door or a duct, and he became more real by the day to Ardway.

The sullen, unshaven Benjamin M. was gone. In its place, the crew got to enjoy a productive, happy, whistling astrogator, who could listen to other people, and felt content enough in his own happiness not to inflict innumerable stories on anyone. They grew to like him, didn’t care about his computer-generated security blanket, so long as it worked, and they stopped noticing that he was clad in tan nylon to the neck under his orange jumpsuit. Ardway was proving the recruiters right to have brought him aboard, and whatever made him functional, so long as it didn’t cross space agency policy, was fine with them.

By month ten it became more necessary by the day for Ardway to be actively involved in the mission. Space near the Gliese system was riddled with anomalies that NASA had not detected or even suspected. Odd gravitational fields suggesting minute quantities of black matter invisible from many light-years’ distance exerted gravitational pull on the ship, yanking them slightly off course and sending the instrument readings whirling. Ardway adjusted his program as needed, and was keeping up just fine in plotting new courses, assigning benchmarks to the area of space. Data came in by the terabyte, and they hadn’t even begun the exploration of the system itself.

On the fourteenth day of month eleven, they broke out of jump and
passed within the heliopause of the Gliese 86 system, seeing it clearly for the first time. The geophysics and astrogation departments went crazy with delight. Johnson, Mackay, and Ardway took scans, analyses, visual images of the star and its attendant pair of gas giant planets. Mackay declared them the most important satellites since human beings first looked up and saw the moon. They toasted the planets with champagne and coffee, and promptly went back to work. No one could keep away from the viewscreens, drinking in the sight no other human eyes had ever beheld.

What could not be seen from Earth but merely suspected were the huge asteroid belts situated in two places within the system. While life as they knew it was unlikely to exist on either giant planet, they held out hope for some of the moons they could now see circling Gliese A, the inner planet. The xenobiologist, Carmen Hosteen, felt her palms itching every time she saw the spectrum analysis of the second largest of the moons and crowed over the large bands in the scan that showed the presence of nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen.

Every department began to hoard its supply of available memory space as their databanks started to fill up. There was a general fear that Mission Control had grossly underestimated their needs, and might leave them out there scrambling for anything that would hold programming.

Suspicion of a coming storage crunch gradually became a reality. The crew simply needed more file room than they had. By month thirteen they started blanking anything that wasn’t absolutely needed for day to day operation. First, backup system files went. The technicians complained bitterly, worrying about what to do in case of a system crash, and started arguing among themselves over room. Eventually the captain stepped in and issued a fiat: any nonunique file and swap space was sacrificed to contain the incoming images, facts, and figures pouring into their sensors from the two planets. Ardway and his colleagues reconfigured and reformed every possible hard drive, chip, crystal, and disk on the ship to make more room, including rewritables in their personal possession. All entertainment videos were taken out of the ship banks and reused. Then, as the ship went into orbit around Gliese B, audio entertainment. Everyone’s music disks went, too, because they were rerecordable. Vital files were backed up on those, and they were put into cold storage for safety. Then, around Gli A, text went. Ardway had to upload his book disks one at a time, instead of being able to leave them in memory. One at a time, he sacrificed the disks themselves to his department. Far be it from him to lose precious navigational information because he didn’t want to do without
A Tale of Two Cities
.