Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [97]
“That’s reasonable!” Mrs. Klinger said, looking imploringly at her new husband. “Oh, Philly, do it. Leaf is coming into season. I don’t want her disturbed.”
“Fine,” Klinger said at last. His voice sounded smooth, but Janina noticed that he was perspiring.
Jared’s com buzzed. He checked it and looked up. “We need to return to Galipolis now, Mr. Klinger.”
“If you’ll just step this way, sir,” Ponty said firmly.
“I can follow you in my own craft.”
“That won’t be necessary, sir, since we’re all going to the same place anyway,” Ponty replied. “I’m sure you can catch a ride back with the teams that will be dispersed to release your neighbors’ animals from impound.”
“Very well, then,” he conceded when his wife made little shooing motions at him.
Janina wasn’t sure what had passed between the councilman and his nephew on the com, but she thought it odd that the councilman had single-handedly reversed the decision to impound animals because of the supposed epidemic. Of course, according to Jared, vets and animal owners all over the galaxy had been protesting to the council that the fairy dust syndrome was just an odd side effect of the ingestion of the beetles, but no one had paid attention so far, least of all Councilman Klinger.
Her heart lightened as she strapped herself in, Jared in the seat beside her, while Ponty piloted the GHA craft Jared had commandeered.
The small ship had two compartments—the bridge and a section normally reserved for passengers. The latter had been converted into a cage for carrying suspect animals, so the councilman’s nephew sat behind a grid of heavy black wire in a hastily reinstalled passenger seat. Before take-off, Philly Klinger had grabbed his personal entertainment system and was goggled and ear plugged, his body moving slightly to music only he could hear.
“You really think this will turn things around?” Jared asked Ponty. Poor Jared looked so haggard and frazzled. Janina reached over to him and with one hand began massaging the back of his neck. He let out a grunt of sheer relief as the tension in his neck muscles was released, and let his head droop forward so her fingers could find the tight spots more easily,
“Yeah, I think so,” Ponty replied.
“It’ll be a miracle if it does,” Jared told him. “My reports to the GHA and those of every honest vet I’ve talked to have consistently failed to show any harmful side effects connected with animals ingesting the bugs. The GHA has basically called us incompetent and dangerous for ‘failing to recognize and properly contain this sinister invasive organism.’ What sinister invasive organism, I ask you?
“What I think—and others agree with me—is that the beetles are nothing more than a latent emergence of a native species from one of the terraformed planets, one that’s either lain dormant until now or that mutated and merged with some of the imported species and entered the food chain of free range animals via the grasses and grains they ingest. Very few of the impounded animals I’ve examined have any signs of illness whatsoever. And I’ve examined as many as thoroughly as I can without being invasive myself.
“The ones that are sick are mostly sick from the stress of being snatched from their homes and stuck into cages in close quarters with other unfamiliar animals. Of course, I’ve been dealing with the Barque Cats, who are exceptionally well cared for and a hearty species anyway. But if one of them were ill with something contagious, we could lose them all even without the idiocy of the GHA.”
Ponty had one hand on the controls as the other fished inside a flight bag between his seat and Janina’s. The bag moved with far more agitation than the slight twiddling of the man’s fingers seemed likely to cause. Abruptly he snatched his hand out and yelled, “Ouch, you little savage!”
Janina withdrew her hand from Jared’s neck and leaned down to look inside the bag. A grave furry face with a slanted white mustache and huge golden eyes looked up at her.
She reached down to pick