Death Match - Diane Duane [34]
“Oh,” George said, and threw Mike a look. “See that? There’s your one in a hundred. You owe me a nickel.”
Mike flipped over the menu to look at the other side. “I’ll have it transferred to your account,” he said, grinning.
George turned back to Catie with a chuckle. “You can guess how often I hear a different question. Never mind. The name’s a compliment.”
“Oh?” Catie said. She was now completely bemused.
“It’s an in-joke,” George said. “You know how it was when they finally got the International Space Station built, or the first phase of it anyway, before the private finance came in to double the thing’s cubic? Very official, very military and shipshape. Well, they’d brought some animals up for testing on and off, but there was a ‘no pets’ policy for a long time. Understandable, I guess. At that point they didn’t have the recycling system in, or that much space for spare food and water; and besides, with animals there were some elimination problems in micro-gravity….” He smiled a little. “Then the Selective Spin module was added on for the crystal-growth and metallurgical research and the manufacturing pilot project; and people started playing spat in the main sphere before it was populated. While that was happening, one of the project biologists set up this convoluted research project that had to do with magnetic field orientation in birds, and it called for birds to be brought up to the station and reared in microgravity to see how it affected their flight characteristics and directional sense and so on.” George gave Catie an amused look. “And he made a big case that the birds brought up for this should be highly intelligent, and used to confinement. So what do you think the experiment wound up using?”
“Uh…Parakeets.”
“Close. Parrots. But more to the point, gray parrots…and most specifically, a pair of breeding parrots that belonged to the biologist. George and Gracie, they were called. African greys, very intelligent, very long-lived, everyone agreed with that…but they were also his pets.”
Catie snickered. At that point Wendy arrived again to take Mike’s order, for a minute steak and fries, and paused to bat her eyelashes at George before going off again. Mike watched her go, impressed. “I’ve never seen that technique outside of old cartoons,” he said. “A new one for the collection.”
“Yeah,” George said. “Well…anyway…the parrots. There was some noise about them, but the project had been approved by some NASA suits who didn’t know they were being scammed, and the project managers for the station had the choice of either letting the project go through, or giving the money back. And no one on the station wanted to do that. It was hard enough to get sponsorship for any kind of research at all at that point, unless it was specifically commercial. And giving research money back unused is always a bad move. It makes the people who gave it to you think maybe they should routinely give you less. So…anyway…the parrots came up on the shuttle and lived there for about five years, and they did fine. They bred, too, which was a good thing, otherwise the project biologist would have been in a lot of trouble. But what was really terrific was how the young parrots took to life in space. All the little Georges and Gracies evolved a whole new way of flying. Spatball players still study the films that Harry—that was the biologist—made of his birds and their offspring. So do astronauts. The chicks found out things about maneuvering in microgravity within their first few weeks of life that even trained astronauts took a lot longer to work out for themselves. And obviously the parents learned, too…but their learning curve was a lot like the human astronauts’; they made the same kind of mistakes at the same kind of speed.”
George leaned back and took a drag of his iced tea. “Now the moral of the story,” he said, “is that among the other things Harry the biologist used to do, was play spat-ball. In fact, he