Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [70]
What they needed, she said, was a story. The GG doing something unpopular wasn’t news, but maybe a group of people whose beloved animals had been impounded trying to save them—or at least trying to make sure they weren’t unnecessarily sacrificed—was more the kind of thing the press would latch onto. They would report it to Galipolitans at large, and either the movement—and the pressure on the GG to do the right thing—would gather momentum, or the city people would sneer at the unsophisticated critter lovers. But there’d be attention paid in either case.
Janina and her crewmates had gone to rally crews from other nongovernment-affiliated ships. They were all meeting back at the fountain in two more hours, and Beulah would alert some of her old friends at the networks about their cause.
Meanwhile, Jubal and Sosi trailed an impound team from one of the ships to the quarantine area inside what looked like a large office building. Nobody paid any attention to a couple of kids. Why should they care if the officers in the florries were carrying containers full of beetles and a couple of squalling cats?
“You kids looking for something?” a uniformed security guard asked them.
“Who? Us?” Jubal and Sosi said, each opening their eyes as widely as they could to look innocent and harmless and much too young to cause any problem.
The guard nodded curtly.
“We’re looking for my dad—stepdad, actually,” Jubal said. “Dr. Mbele?”
“The epidemiologist?”
“Yeah, I think that’s what they call it,” Jubal said, in case it was a trick question.
“You think he’d want you bothering him at work?”
“No, sir, but it’s mighty important. My mama said I was to tell him personal.”
“Couldn’t she com him?”
“No sir, she—”
“She lost her voice,” Sosi said. “She took sick with a sore throat and lost her voice.”
The guard grunted and picked up the com behind his desk.
“Get ready to run,” Jubal told Sosi from behind his hand. But meanwhile he was watching the lift, trying to tell where it was depositing the impound team and their cargo, looking to see if there was a map of the building on display to help people find the right department.
The guard said, “Dr. Mbele hasn’t returned from his mission. I can tell him you kids were here and have him call home.”
“Can’t we wait?” Jubal asked.
“Not allowed,” the guard said. “They’re bringing diseased animals in here from all over the galaxy. You kids might catch something worse than a sore throat.”
“What’s wrong with the animals?” Sosi asked.
“They don’t know, but whatever it is, it spreads fast and is hard to detect. That’s all I was told about it.”
“That’s too bad,” Jubal said. “What are they going to do?”
“Test ’em.”
“Like ask them questions?” Sosi asked in her brightest little-girl voice.
“No, honey,” the man said. “Take samples, see what’s making them sick.”
“Oh. Does Daddy do that?”
“Yes, he does.”
“Where? Here?”
The man sighed a deep put-upon sigh. “Of course not. Up in the lab.”
“Where’s that?” Jubal asked.
The man looked trapped. He didn’t want to be mean to the kids of one of the scientists, but he probably wasn’t supposed to be chitchatting with them either. “If I show you on my computer, will you go back home and wait like I told you?”
“You can do that?” Sosi asked, clapping her hands.
“I’m not supposed to, but of course I can. You’ll see it if you come in at a better time, career day maybe, when your daddy can bring you to work with him.”
He was going to get fired for this for sure, Jubal thought, feeling sorry for the man, who kindly showed them a layout of the building, pinpointed Mbele’s laboratory, then showed them the scientists at work in the lab on his security camera. He shut it off when it picked up the yowls of the cats and the protests of the other animals.
“Are the kitties sick?” Sosi asked, overdoing it now.
The guard, having