Becker massaged his hip. He’d banged it against one of the packing crates of cat food he had unloaded from RK’s original home ship. The cat, always interested in those particular crates, rubbed himself between it and Becker. As usual, Becker was surprised at how soft the cat’s coat was in comparison to his personality. Becker had lost the little finger of his right hand while trying to salvage Roadkill. The cat had then been nameless, of course, the spitting, hissing, clawing sole survivor left aboard a derelict Makahomian spacecraft along with the corpses of his former shipmates.
Becker didn’t like to talk about the loss of his second finger, but it had to do with what he referred to as “RK’s adjustment period,” the time when the cat had recovered enough from his injuries to start feeling at home. When Becker went to sell a couple of choice bits from the inventory soon after he’d acquired Roadkill, he’d found them slick with yellowish liquid and stinking worse than a musk otter in heat. The cause was obvious-and so was the need for a solution.
Becker consulted the library he had rescued from a landfill on Clackamass 2. He was a sucker for information in any form: hard copy, chip, what have you. It came in handy when he wanted to identity or figure out how to operate some of the inventory.
He dug through quite a few moldy, torn books before he found the copy o^ How to Care for Your Kith/cat he’d stashed in the stall of the spare head. The book advised that when a male cat began “marking his territory” by spraying it, the only way to stop the behavior was to have the cat neutered. Beckers business kept him a long way from a veterinarian, but back when he was a kid on the labor farm on Kezdet, he’d helped with the calves and goats. He’d figured a cat couldn’t be that much different, so he attempted a little home surgery on RK. Turned out he’d figured wrong. The attempt ended with them both having surgeries of a sort RK was now one nut short and Becker had another stump in place of his right ring finger next to the stump of the little finger the cat had shredded during the original rescue. You had to love an animal like that.
“That’s okay, man,” he told the cat, scratching it behind the right ear, which, like his own, was only partially there. The cat’s purr increased in volume until it sounded like a whole pride of lions right there in the cabin. “Those gravity systems are worthless anyway.”
He knew he had a replacement system someplace among his cargo, probably a better one than the one he’d installed six months ago. Only problem was he couldn’t do these particular repairs in space. To the best of his recollection, the piece that he needed was buried so deep he’d have to unload the cargo hold to find it. As usual, the ship was packed too tightly to have any room inside to conveniently shift the cargo while he looked. He could maneuver around and manage it in a pinch, of course, but why bother?
“So, cat, looks like it’s dirtside for us again. I was going to pass up this next trashed-out planet and head back for civilization, but it looks like we need another pit stop first. The way I figure it, with this one, we’ve pretty much replaced the whole ship since we last headed back to Kezdet-we’ll basically have a brand new Condor by the time we dock there again.”
This wasn’t unusual. On the average, he replaced most of the Condor about three times a year. This was an occupational hazard, or maybe a hazard of the kind of personality that occupied Backer’s occupation. He hated to pay full price for anything when there was so much good stuff, only a little used, laying around for the taking. He was an expert at improvisation, refitting, retooling, and emergency landings on remote hunks of rock in the middle of space. He could do mid-space repairs, too, but it was so much easier to land somewhere -with a bit of gravity where he could suit up, toss stuff he didn’t need out the hatch while uncovering what he did need, close the hatch, pressurize the ship, make his repair, then retrieve and reload his previously discarded cargo.