CHAPTER 25

Jubal breathed a sigh of relief as Chester, Pshaw-Ra, and Bat dashed into the stairwell to join the reverse cataract of felines flowing up the steps to the roof. Chester didn’t follow the other two stragglers, but with a graceful leap and a rather painful last minute drag of claws, landed on Jubal’s shoulder. Beulah guarded the stairs leading down, deflecting any confused cats away from it. Sosi and Hadley had returned to the roof and Pshaw-Ra’s vessel.

The cats were free of the lab, but how would they escape the roof? Jubal had no idea. Earlier Sosi had asked, “Can cats count? Do you think the skinny cat—”

“Pshaw-Ra,” Jubal said. “That’s his name.”

She’d wrinkled her nose. “Funny name. Do you think he has room in his little ship for all of the kitties? Maybe once we get the shuttle out?”

“I think if we packed his ship and the shuttle both with all these cats, there’d be no room to navigate and nothing to breathe or eat. I don’t know what he has in mind.”

Chester, exhausted from his exertions, was content to sleep wrapped around Jubal’s neck as he climbed to the roof. It was covered in cats.

“Clear a path, Jubal,” Beulah told him. “I’m going to fly the shuttle out of the docking bay.”

But before she did, Sosi came scuttling out, looking very much like a cat who had swallowed a particularly tasty canary.

“What?” Jubal asked. He knew she was dying for him to ask.

She knelt down and stroked the coat of the nearest cat, who happened to be Bat. “Don’t worry, kitty. I called Daddy to come and get us. They were already entering orbit. They followed the tracking sensor in our shuttle.”

“But, Sosi, they’ll just make us give the cats back again,” Jubal said. “There’s no place we can go or way to hide them.”

Chester stretched and yawned, kneaded Jubal’s shoulder and said, Pshaw-Ra says he has a master plan. I think I believe him now.

Cats leaped over each other to escape the path of the shuttle Beulah was very carefully flying out of the open hatch. She hovered overhead. Cats scattered beneath her and she set the craft down beside the pyramid vessel.

In a moment more Beulah appeared at the shuttle’s hatch, calling, “Here, kitty kitty.” Some were reluctant, but most, raised on ships and having ridden in shuttles all of their lives until recently, were heartened by the familiar smells.

Hadley was the first one in, even though Sosi remained on the roof shooing cats toward the shuttle. Soon furry, whiskered faces were peering through all the viewports.

“I think we have a load now,” Beulah said.

Jubal glanced nervously at the door from the lower part of the building. Any minute now the security guard, at least, or maybe a whole squad of the Galactic goons, would come thundering up with weapons ready to recapture the cats and drag him, Sosi, and Beulah off to jail.

When he looked back at the shuttle, he saw that Beulah was no longer at its entrance and the shuttle was now several feet off the rooftop, ascending slowly at first, then more quickly.

Another shuttle swiftly replaced it. Captain Loloma himself stepped out onto the roof, narrowly avoiding crunching six tails and two sets of front paws beneath his boots.

“Daddy!” Sosi called, and hopped across cats, saying, “’Scuse me, kitty, ’scuse me, kitty,” causing furry pile-ups in her wake as the cats jumped on top of each other to escape her feet.

“Come on, kiddo. You too, Jubal. We’re going back to the Ranzo.”

“The kitties too, Dad?”

“He can’t take them, I’m afraid, Sosi,” Jubal told her, saying it before Captain Loloma had to say what he surely must. “He’ll get in trouble.”

But the captain surprised him. “I’ve been in trouble before, son,” he said. “How do you think I met your father? What they’ve tried to do to these animals is wrong. Beulah told me this entire epidemic scare was manufactured to enrich some politician’s family.”

Jubal started to ask how the captain intended for them to escape—where would he take the cats and his ship to be safe from the Galactic goons?

Pshaw-Ra stepped away from his vessel and the furry bodies packed inside. With his tawny tail waving majestically, he daintily stepped forward and looked up at Captain Loloma, fixing him with that brilliant golden gaze of his.

Chester sat up on Jubal’s shoulder and interpreted what the sand-colored cat seemed to be trying to laser directly into the captain’s brain. Pshaw-Ra needs you to tell the captain about his master plan, Chester told him.

The one for universal domination? Jubal asked.

The one where we all escape to his world, Chester said. He will lead the ship. But we have to make our leap now.

Bat jumped over several other cats to slap at Jubal’s pant leg. Chester interpreted. Weeks has let Bat know that the goons have arrived below and are sending copters. We have to go now.

Jubal relayed all of this to the captain so fast his words got tangled, but the argument and questions he expected didn’t come.

“We’d better get a move on,” Captain Loloma said, but even before he spoke, the rest of the cats were filing into the open hatches of the shuttle as if recalling the shipboard discipline of their lives as Barque Cats.

Sosi entered the Ranzo’s shuttle and took a seat. Hadley had to share her lap with three or four other cats, while two more sat on the chair back above her shoulders.

When every cat was packed into a vessel and Pshaw-Ra had returned to his own bridge, Captain Loloma asked, “You coming with us, Jubal?”

But Chester purred into his ear and Jubal shook his head. “No, sir. Pshaw-Ra is saving a berth for me on his ship. He wants someone with thumbs to help the passengers.”

Since the communications equipment the pyramid ship contained was available only for someone cat-sized, Jubal had no way of maintaining contact with the Ranzo’s captain once they were airborne.

True to his word, Pshaw-Ra had somehow managed to convince the other cats to leave a Jubal-sized space nearest the hatch leading into the docking bay where the boy could sit during the journey.

He was crowded into his seat so tightly there was no need for the strap, but he wore it anyway, though cats crouched on his lap, his knees, legs, and feet, huddled against his neck and shoulders, and a kitten perched on his head. Chester allowed this, busying himself on the bridge with Pshaw-Ra.

Although Jubal was sweating under his living cat coat, the feline passengers, bred for space, were well-behaved and calm now that they were on board something with the kind of noises, smells, and air pressures they were used to. Jubal wore his arms out trying to pet everyone.

He was glad of the strap as the ship zigzagged, dodged, and wove as it tried to reach open space beyond the orbiting traffic jam. He was also glad of the sturdy fabric of his shipsuit as cat claws dug into him for support when the ship tilted, climbed, and dived. The kitten flew off his head and landed in the middle of another cat, taking ten strips of Jubal’s scalp with him. Blood dripped down his neck and into his eyes, but after the first pain from the raking his head took, he didn’t notice.

Because while his body was encased in fur, most of his mind was joined with Chester’s as he and Pshaw-Ra guided the ship through the intricacies of the space jam, outmaneuvering and outdistancing the GG attrackers that were hot on their trail moments after they left the empty roof behind.