Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [32]
“Poorly?” Janina’s heart dropped. Was she to regain her friend only to lose her again? She hurried to the examining room door and popped her head in. “It’s her! Someone found Chessie but she’s sick. Jared, she’s light as a feather. I can feel her bones.”
“Take her in exam room two. I’ll be right there,” he said, and he sounded happier and more excited than he had since the disaster.
“Even if she doesn’t make it, I still get the reward, right?” the woman asked anxiously, following Janina into the exam room, the boy trailing reluctantly behind them.
“If you had her and you knew she was sick, why didn’t you say when I met you before?”
“She didn’t know about it till my dad and me had it out when he tried to take Chester with him,” the boy blurted out. “Dad found your cat and kept her in the barn. He said not to tell Mom because she doesn’t like cats and wouldn’t let me keep her.”
“But I tried and tried her locator signal and got no response.”
“I reckon it must not work out our way, honey,” the woman said. “Jubal didn’t know she was yours. Don’t take it out on him. He saved her last kitten. I didn’t know a thing about it till I heard them carrying on and saw your cat. I recognized her right away.”
While the woman explained, Janina laid her bundle down on the exam table, a rather rickety metal folding table of the sort set up in meeting halls and at fairs. Chessie was indeed much thinner than she had been. Her nipples were still distended.
“She had a really hard time when she birthed the last kitten,” the boy said. “It died, but Pop wouldn’t let me call Dr. Vlast. He said she’d make it or not, and she did.”
“She only had the one other kitten?”
Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes. “No, ma’am. There were more but they got caught out when they were learning to hunt …” he said, his voice quivering. Janina wanted to cry herself. Poor Chessie! Poor baby kittens.
Jared entered the room and examined Chessie thoroughly. “She’ll need some repair,” he told Janina. “I can’t be sure but I’m rather afraid her breeding days may be over. However, she should be able to return to her other duties before long, as long as she has her able assistant.” He nodded toward the kitten, who was batting a string the boy dangled for it. “I’ll tend to her now.”
He carried Chessie from the exam room back toward the operating theater, and Janina, who couldn’t bear to be separated from her—having finally found her—started to follow.
But the voice of the boy’s mother stopped her in her tracks. “So, how do we collect the reward?”
CHAPTER 8
CHESTER
I clung to Jubal as if he were Mother, since she was otherwise occupied and in the hands of others. I did not like the woman, Jubal’s mom, and I knew she did not like me or Mother either. But she liked Jubal and vice versa, so I seemed to be stuck with her. By my mother’s joyous mew, I knew that the girl who first greeted us at the clinic was Kibble, her friend from the ship. She seemed harmless enough, and Mother was so happy to see her I’d have been jealous except that Jubal was there. Everything was fine as long as Jubal and I were together.
On the man’s last trip home, when he tried to carry me away with him, Jubal fought with him, yelling and clinging to his legs to prevent him from carrying me to the shuttle in the little bag that smelled like my brothers and sisters. Jubal had been afraid he might try something like that, and smuggled me into the house with him.
But the man had crept into Jubal’s room at night and plucked me from the pillow.
It took Jubal a few moments to respond to my entreaties for his assistance in fighting off his father who was stuffing me into a bag. When I finally clawed through the boy’s dreams to wake him, he thudded through the house after us, his bare feet on the floorboards. When the man left the house and carried me toward the shuttle, Jubal chased him, banging the screen door after him as he tackled