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“Where is he?” Sosi asked.

“Not you too!” Beulah said.

“Hadley came. I felt him jump up on my bed,” Sosi said.

“It was Chester,” Jubal told her. “He came looking for me.”

“I don’t think so. Where is he? I’m sure it was Hadley.”

“He went back to his spaceship.” Jubal pointed. The ship was nearer their position now.

“How?”

Jubal shrugged. “I was telling Beulah I need to go get him or at least take him more food.”

“I’m going too.”

By now Captain Loloma had awakened too, and he waved his hands for them to calm down.“Whoa. I’ll have no mutiny aboard this vessel. Understood?”

“Daddy, look. There’s a Cat on Board sign.”

“Honey, we’d just have to give that cat up too if we rescued it.”

“But we can’t just let it starve, Daddy. It’s already isolated on its ship. Can’t we just take it some food and water?”

“It may have run out of oxygen,” her father said, not unkindly. “It would just upset you again. No more cats.”

“Captain, the cat came to the kids in a dream,” Beulah said. “Jubal thinks the cat he lost is on board. There is some corroborative evidence from the Molly Daise’s CP, Janina.”

“A dream?” To Jubal’s surprise, the captain did not dismiss this as nonsense. He rubbed his chin with one hand, considering, and gave his daughter a look Jubal didn’t understand but that seemed to indicate that the two of them placed more than the ordinary emphasis on dreams.

Sosi nodded gravely and put her hand on his sleeve.

“Yes, sir,” Jubal said, backing her up. “We both felt paws land on our bed. And in the dream Chester had me follow him to the bridge to show me the ship, then he jumped through the viewscreen and back aboard the derelict.”

“Well, you could just go see if the cats are all right, I guess,” the captain said. “Beulah, you go.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but he’s my cat,” Jubal said. “I need to go too.”

“Me too,” Sosi said. “I’m the Cat Person. It’s my job.”

“I cannot ask my com officer to babysit you two on an away mission.”

“It’s okay, sir. They’ll be a lot more trouble if we don’t let them go,” Beulah said. “I’ll take responsibility. Besides, Jubal will come in handy if I have any difficulty. He’s very good with repair and maintenance.”

The captain waved his assent with a couple of back flips of his fingers, then woke up the navigator to have her alter the course to intercept the derelict and capture it in the tractor beam.

Meanwhile, Beulah, Sosi, and Jubal, after scouring the stores for unopened bags of Hadley’s favorite kibble, some treats, and sippy containers of water, plus an extra tank of it, scrambled to the shuttle and into their survival suits and grav boots. Hauling the cat provisions on board, they awaited the command from the bridge.

For Jubal, except for the dream and the fact that there were three of them instead of just Janina and Chester, so far the whole incident echoed what Janina had told him about her mission to the ship.

“It looks normal on the outside,” he told Beulah, “but Janina says that once you leave the shuttle bay, it’s a lot smaller than it looks, and funny shaped.”

It was different taking the shuttle from the ship to the derelict, scarier, blacker, the stars more distant than simply going from a space station to a planet and back again. Beulah avoided the tractor beam on the way out, entering it only to access the hatch to the docking bay.

“Normally we would bring the derelict in close and use accordion tube to connect the hatches,” she told Sosi and Jubal, “since we’d worry that the bay on the other ship might be damaged. But according to what Janina told you kids, it’s safe enough. Besides, the captain doesn’t want us recontaminated. It’s going to take several good trips as it is to repay the cost of that hosing down they gave us in Galipolis.”

“They took my cat and we have to pay them?” Sosi demanded indignantly.

Jubal quelled his excitement at the prospect of seeing Chester again long enough to flash on what would be happening to his neighbors—and Mom too—back on Sherwood. “Oh, that’s not the worst of it. On Sherwood they’ll be impounding