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All during the watch, however, I kept recalling my dream and wondering about the cat whose consciousness I’d shared. He was alone in a ship somewhere, that much I knew, and his own dreams remained vivid in my mind. But where was he now and what did he want? Rescue was the obvious answer, but somehow I felt that lurking behind his implied plea for help was another motive, one I could not understand until the time, if ever, I met him.

CHAPTER 14

As it happened, Beulah was also, if not exactly Jubal’s and Sosi’s teacher, their supervisor when they did their lessons on the ship’s computer. In addition to the basics, they took a very broad course called Galactic Studies that gave them an overview of the history, population distributions, and geographies of the known settled worlds and moons.

Sosi was bored with the whole thing, but not Jubal. Now that it looked like he was going to have a chance to see some of these places, at least from a distance, he scanned the charts with new interest.

He recalled the lessons he’d already had on the subject when he was back home on Sherwood. The galaxy had been settled in waves by the governments and companies from old Earth. The six main reasons the Founders began their Intergalactic Expansion program were:

1. Exploration, the “Bear Went Over the Mountain” syndrome, as it was called, although bears had gone extinct long before the first successful colony was settled, back in fairly ancient times.

2. Overpopulation, especially in certain regions where there were no restrictions on the number of children people could have.

3. Depletion of resources on old Earth, including oxygen, as pollution and global warming destroyed much of the essential atmosphere existing populations needed to survive.

4. Economic expansion. As more and more governments found it necessary to develop their own colonies on other worlds, the megacompanies of Earth were the only ones for whom it was profitable or even possible to supply the transport, life support systems, terraforming, and the necessities and amenities the settlers required to live. Not all of these colonies were successful. It took the companies’ big global boo-boos on some of the planets and cost quite a few lives before they got a system down. Once everybody was settled, the profits fell off, so the companies ventured off to new worlds and did what they did better, making the new worlds lusher, more comfortable, self-replenishing, and generally desirable, supplying them with well-equipped and-staffed space stations to monitor their needs and see that they were met, and generally oversee their welfare (this was the official version, anyway). Then they sold people on moving from those original, more primitive colonies to the new ones. Most of the old colonized worlds, settled by the same people who had ruined their original homeworld, were pretty well trashed by the time the new ones were ready. Deemed unworthy of refurbishment, the early colony worlds were abandoned by their creators.

5. Resettling refugees from the unceasing wars among people of different persuasions on old Earth. For a time, the entire planet was threatened by governments carrying their quarrels into the space around the Earth. Eventually, wars were avoided or stopped by sending compatible refugees to the less luxuriously appointed worlds, where they were deprived of the resources and equipment necessary to continue their animosities with refugees on neighboring worlds.

6. The nuclear holocaust that finally happened in spite of all of the above measures, finally making Earth totally uninhabitable for human beings. The survivors were also resettled on other worlds, or their moons, inherited by those with whom they had no previous quarrels.

The Galactic Government, or GG, controlled all of the planets, moons, and space stations in the galaxy. Galipolis, the most galipolitan world of them all, was the hub of company and governmental affairs. Everyone said you could find fantastic stuff in Galipolis