The twins considered their grandmother’s advice and went into the grocery business, with a few general store sidelines. They decided to stock only luxury foods, things that the miners would not be likely to have and which would bring highest prices per pound. They stocked antibiotics and surgical drugs and vitamins as well, and some lightweight song-and-story projectors and a considerable quantity of spools to go with them. Pollux found a supply of pretty-girl pictures, printed on thin stock in Japan and intended for calendars on Mars, and decided to take a flyer on them, since they didn’t weigh much. He pointed out to Castor that they could not lose entirely, since they could look at them themselves.
Dr Stone found them, ran through them, and required him to send some of them back. The rest passed her censorship; they took them along.
The last episode was speeding toward Earth; the last weld had been approved; the last pound of food and supplies was at last aboard. The Stone lifted gently from Phobos and dropped toward Mars. A short gravity-well maneuver around Mars at the Stone’s best throat temperature — which produced a spine-grinding five gravities — and she was headed out and fast to the lonely reaches of space inhabited only by the wreckage of the Ruined Planet.
They fell easily and happily back into free fall routine. More advanced mathematical texts had been obtained for the boys on Mars; they did not have to be urged to study, having grown really interested — and this time they had no bicycles to divert their minds. Fuzzy Britches took to free fall if the creature had been born in space; if it was not being held and stroked by someone (which it usually was) it slithered over wall and bulkhead, or floated gently around the compartments, undulating happily.
Castor maintained that it could swim through the air; Pollux insisted that it could not and that its maneuvers arose entirely from the air currents of the ventilation system. They wasted considerable time, thought, and energy in trying to devise scientific tests to prove the matter, one way or the other. They were unsuccessful.
The flat cat did not care; it was warm, it was well fed, it was happy. It had numerous friends all willing to take time off to reward its tremendous and undiscriminating capacity for affection. Only one incident marred its voyage.
Roger Stone was strapped to his pilot’s chair, blocking out — so he said — a chapter in his book. If so, the snores may have helped. Fuzzy Britches was cruising along about its lawful occasions, all three eyes open and merry. It saw one of its friends; good maneuvering or a random air current enabled it to make a perfect landing — on Captain Stone’s face.
Roger came out of the chair with a yell, clutching at his face. He bounced against the safety belt, recovered, and pitched the flat cat away from him. Fuzzy Britches, offended but not hurt, flipped itself flat to its progress, air-checked and made another landing on the far wall.
Roger Stone used several other words, then shouted, ‘Who put that animated toupee on my face?’
But the room was otherwise empty. Dr Stone appeared at the hatch and said, ‘What is it, dear?’
‘Oh, nothing — nothing important. Look, dear, would you return this tailend offspring of a dying planet to Buster? I’m trying to think.’
‘Of course, dear.’ She took it aft and gave it to Lowell, who promptly forgot it, being busy working out a complicated gambit against Hazel. The flat cat was not one to hold a grudge; there was not a mean bone in its body, had it had bones, which it did not. The only emotion it could feel wholeheartedly was love. It got back to Roger just as he had again fallen asleep.
It again settled on his face, purring happily.
Captain Stone proved himself a mature man. Knowing this time what it was, he detached it gently and himself returned it to Lowell. ‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘Don’t let go of it’ He was careful to close the door behind him.
He was equally careful that night to close the door of the stateroom he shared with his wife. The Rolling Stone, being a small private ship, did not have screens guarding her ventilation ducts; they of course had to be left open at all times. The flat cat found them a broad highway. Roger Stone had a nightmare in which he was suffocating, before his wife woke him and removed Fuzzy Britches from his face. He used some more words.