The Rolling Stones (22 page)

The twins considered their grandmother’s advice and went into the grocery business, with a few general store sidelines. They decided to stock only luxury foods, things that the miners would not be likely to have and which would bring highest prices per pound. They stocked antibiotics and surgical drugs and vitamins as well, and some light-weight song-and-story projectors and a considerable quantity of spools to go with them. Pollux found a supply of pretty-girl pictures, printed on thin stock in Japan and intended for calendars on Mars, and decided to take a flyer on them, since they didn’t weigh much. He pointed out to Castor that they could not lose entirely, since they could look at them themselves.

Dr. Stone found them, ran through them, and required him to send some of them back. The rest passed her censorship; they took them along.

The last episode was speeding toward Earth; the last weld had been approved; the last pound of food and supplies was at last aboard. The
Stone
lifted gently from Phobos and dropped toward Mars. A short gravity-well maneuver around Mars at the
Stone
’s best throat temperature—which produced a spine-grinding five gravities—and she was headed out and fast to the lonely reaches of space inhabited only by the wreckage of the Ruined Planet.

They fell easily and happily back into free fall routine. More advanced mathematical texts had been obtained for the boys on Mars; they did not have to be urged to study, having grown really interested—and this time they had no bicycles to divert their minds. Fuzzy Britches took to free fall as if the creature had been born in space; if it was not being held and stroked by someone (which it usually was) it slithered over wall and bulkhead, or floated gently around the compartments, undulating happily.

Castor maintained that it could swim through the air; Pollux insisted that it could not and that its maneuvers arose entirely from the air currents of the ventilation system. They wasted considerable time, thought, and energy in trying to devise scientific tests to prove the matter, one way or the other. They were unsuccessful.

The flat cat did not care; it was warm, it was well fed, it was happy. It had numerous friends all willing to take time off to reward its tremendous and undiscriminating capacity for affection. Only one incident marred its voyage.

Roger Stone was strapped to his pilot’s chair, blocking out—so he said—a chapter in his book. If so, the snores may have helped. Fuzzy Britches was cruising along about its lawful occasions, all three eyes open and merry. It saw one of its friends; good maneuvering or a random air current enabled it to make a perfect landing—on Captain Stone’s face.

Roger came out of the chair with a yell, clutching at his face. He bounced against the safety belt, recovered, and pitched the flat cat away from him. Fuzzy Britches, offended but not hurt, flipped itself flat to its progress, air-checked and made another landing on the far wall.

Roger Stone used several other words, then shouted, “Who put that animated toupee on my face?”

But the room was otherwise empty. Dr. Stone appeared at the hatch and said, “What is it, dear?”

“Oh, nothing—nothing important. Look, dear, would you return this tail-end offspring of a dying planet to Buster? I’m trying to think.”

“Of course, dear.” She took it aft and gave it to Lowell, who promptly forgot it, being busy working out a complicated gambit against Hazel. The flat cat was not one to hold a grudge; there was not a mean bone in its body, had it had bones, which it did not. The only emotion it could feel wholeheartedly was love. It got back to Roger just as he had again fallen asleep.

It again settled on his face, purring happily.

Captain Stone proved himself a mature man. Knowing this time what it was, he detached it gently and himself returned it to Lowell. “Keep it,” he said. “Don’t let go of it.” He was careful to close the door behind him.

He was equally careful that night to close the door of the stateroom he shared with his wife. The
Rolling Stone,
being a small private ship, did not have screens guarding her ventilation ducts; they of course had to be left open at all times. The flat cat found them a broad highway. Roger Stone had a nightmare in which he was suffocating, before his wife woke him and removed Fuzzy Britches from his face. He used some more words.

“It’s all right, dear,” she answered soothingly. “Go back to sleep.” She cuddled it in her arms and Fuzzy Britches settled for that.

The ship’s normal routine was disturbed the next day while everyone who could handle a wrench or a spot welder installed screens in the ducts.

Thirty-seven days out Fuzzy Britches had eight golden little kittens, exactly like their parent but only a couple of inches across when flat, marble-sized when contracted. Everyone including Captain Stone thought they were cute; everyone enjoying petting them, stroking them with a gentle forefinger and listening carefully for the tiny purr, so high as to be almost beyond human ear range. Everyone enjoyed feeding them and they seemed to be hungry all the time.

Sixty-four days later the kittens had kittens, eight each. Sixty-four days after that, the one hundred and forty-sixth day after Phobos departure, the kittens’ kittens had kittens; that made five hundred and thirteen.

“This,” said Captain Stone, “has
got
to stop!”

“Yes, dear.”

“I mean it. At this rate we’ll run out of food before we get there, including the stuff the twins hope to sell. Besides that we’ll be suffocated under a mass of buzzing fur mats. What’s eight times five hundred and twelve? Then what’s eight times
that
?”

“Too many, I’m sure.”

“My dear, that’s the most masterly understatement since the death of Mercutio. And I don’t think I’ve figured it properly anyway; it’s an exponential expansion, not a geometric—provided we don’t all starve first.”

“Roger.”

“I think we should—Eh? What?”

“I believe there is a simple solution. These are Martian creatures; they hibernate in cold weather.”

“Yes?”

“We’ll put them in the hold—fortunately there is room.”

“I agree with all but the ‘fortunately.’”

“And we’ll keep it cold.”

“I wouldn’t want to kill the little things. I can’t manage to hate them. Drat it, they’re too cute.”

“We’ll hold it about a hundred below, about like a normal Martian winter night. Or perhaps warmer will do.”

“We certainly will. Get a shovel. Get a net. Get a barrel.” He began snagging flat cats out of the air.

“You aren’t going to freeze Fuzzy Britches!” Lowell was floating in the stateroom door behind them, clutching an adult flat cat to his small chest. It may or may not have been Fuzzy Britches; none of the others could tell the adults apart and naming had been dropped after the first litter. But Lowell was quite sure and it did not seem to matter whether or not he was right. The twins had discussed slipping in a ringer on him, while he was asleep, but they had been overheard and the project forbidden. Lowell was content and his mother did not wish him disturbed in his belief.

“Dear, we aren’t going to hurt your pet.”

“You better not! You do and I’ll—I’ll
space
you!”

“Oh, dear, he’s been helping Hazel with her serial!” Dr. Stone got face to face with her son. “Lowell, Mother has never lied to you, has she?”

“Uh, I guess not.”

“We aren’t going to hurt Fuzzy Britches. We aren’t going to hurt any of the flat kitties. But we haven’t got room for all of them. You can keep Fuzzy Britches, but the other kittens are going for a long nap. They’ll be perfectly safe; I promise.”

“By the code of the Galaxy?”

“By the code of the Galaxy.”

Lowell left, still guarding his pet. Roger said, “Edith, we’ve got to put a stop to that collaboration.”

“Don’t worry, dear; it won’t harm him.” She frowned. “But I’m afraid I will have to disappoint him on another score.”

“Such as?”

“Roger, I didn’t have much time to study the fauna of Mars—and I certainly didn’t study flat cats, beyond making sure that they were harmless.”

“Harmless!” He batted a couple of them out of the way. “Woman, I’m drowning.”

“But Martian fauna have certain definite patterns, survival adaptations. Except for the water-seekers, which probably aren’t Martian in origin anyhow, their methods are both passive and persistent. Take the flat cat—”

“You take it!” He removed one gently from his chest.

“It is defenseless. It can’t even seek its own food very well. I understand that in its native state it is a benign parasite, attaching itself to some more mobile animal—”

“If only they would quit attaching to me! And you look as if you were wearing a fur coat. Let’s put ’em in freeze!”

“Patience, dear. Probably it has somewhat the same pleasing effect on the host that it has on us; consequently the host tolerates it and lets it pick up the crumbs. But its other characteristic it shares with almost anything Martian. It can last long periods in hibernation, or if that isn’t necessary, in a state of lowered vitality and activity—say when there is no food available. But with any increase in the food supply, then at once—almost like throwing a switch—it expands, multiplies to the full extent of the food supply.”

“I’ll say it does!”

“Cut off the food supply and it simply waits for more good times. Pure theory, of course, since I am reasoning by analogy from other Martian life forms—but that’s why I’m going to have to disappoint Lowell. Fuzzy Britches will have to go on very short rations.”

Her husband frowned. “That won’t be easy; he feeds it all the time. We’ll just have to watch him—or there will be more little visitors from heaven. Honey, let’s get busy. Right now.”

“Yes, dear. I just had to get my thoughts straight.”

Roger called them all to general quarters; Operation Roundup began. They shooed them aft and into the hold; they slithered back, purring and seeking companionship. Pollux got into the hold and tried to keep them herded together while the others scavenged through the ship. His father stuck his head in; tried to make out his son in a cloud of flat cats. “How many have you got so far?”

“I can’t count them—they keep moving around. Close the door!”

“How can I keep the door closed and still send them in to you?”

“How can I keep them in here if you keep opening the door?”

Finally they all got into space suits—Lowell insisted on taking Fuzzy Britches inside with him, apparently not trusting even “the code of the Galaxy” too far. Captain Stone reduced the temperature of the entire ship down to a chilly twenty below; the flat cats, frustrated by the space suits and left on their own resources, gave up and began forming themselves into balls, like fur-covered grape fruit. They were then easy to gather in, easy to count, easy to store in the hold.

Nevertheless the Stones kept finding and incarcerating fugitives for the next several days.

“
INTER JOVEM ET MARTEM PLANETAM INTERPOSUI
”

T
HE GREAT ASTRONOMER
K
EPLER WROTE
:

“Between Mars and Jupiter I put a planet.” His successors devised a rule for planetary distances, called “Bode’s Law,” which seemed to require a planet at precisely two and eight/tenths the distance from Sun to Earth, 2.8 astro units.

On the first night of the new nineteenth century the Monk Giuseppe Piazzi discovered a new heavenly body. It was the Asteroid Ceres—just where a planet should have been. It was large for an Asteroid, the largest in fact—diameter 485 miles. In the ensuing two centuries hundreds and thousands more were discovered, down to size of rocks. “The Asteroids” proved a poor name; they were not little stars, nor were they precisely planetoids. It was early suggested that they were the remains of a once sizable planet and by the middle of the twentieth century mathematical investigation of their orbits seemed to prove it.

But it was not until the first men in the early days of the exploration of space actually went out to the lonely reaches between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and
looked
that we learned for certain that the Asteroids were indeed fragments of a greater planet—destroyed Lucifer, long dead brother of Earth.

As the
Rolling Stone
rose higher and ever higher above the Sun, she slowed, curved her path in, and approached the point where she would start to fall back toward the Sun. She was then at the orbit of Ceres and not far in front of that lady. The
Stone
had been in the region of the Asteroids for the past fifty million miles. The ruins of Lucifer are scattered over a wide belt of space; the Hallelujah node was near the middle of that belt.

The loose group of rocks, sand, random molecules, and microplanetoids known as the Hallelujah node was traveling in company around the Sun at a speed of eleven miles per second. The
Stone
’s vector was eight miles per second and in the same direction. Captain Stone speeded up his ship to match in by a series of blasts during the last two days, conning by a radar beacon deep in the swarm and thereby sneaking up on the collection of floating masses at a low relative speed. The final blast that positioned them dead with the swarm was a mere love tap; the
Stone
did but clear her throat—and she was one with the other rolling stones of space.