pointed in the right direction. The ghost light, therefore, could be registered by either human or artificial eyes… but only from outer space.
There had to be some significance to that detail, but whatever it was, it was too subtle for anyone to deduce.
New crew members aboard Skycan, when they asked why there were cats on the station, were frequently told that they had been brought aboard to control the cockroaches that stowed away in the food containers. The food—which was supplied to Skycorp by a distributor of airline in-flight meals—was bad enough to give that story some credibility, but that was not the reason why a half-dozen felines now wandered through the station’s modules.
The fact was that Doc Felapolous’ assistant, a University of Tennessee med student named Lou Maynard, who was completing his degree in space medicine aboard Skycan, had brought the first two cats up as test animals. Originally called OST One-A and OST One-B, the cats were respectively a young male and a young female, and it had been young Dr. Maynard’s intention to study their reactions and degrees of adaptation to reduced and near-nonexistent degrees of gravity. His initial hypothesis had been that even though the cats’ instinctive ability to right themselves while falling would be disturbed under such conditions, their nervous systems would eventually adapt and the cats would learn to regain their sense of balance.
The hypothesis, alas, was a bust. Neither cat ever became completely adapted to Olympus Station’s various degrees of gravitational pull. In the hub they yowled and flopped about crazily, clawing madly for anything, or anyone, that represented to their eyes a fixed point, and in the rim modules the Coriolis effect made them perpetually clumsy, missing jumps and crashing into things when they ran. At least Maynard was able to collect enough new observations to publish his results in The New England Journal of Medicine and in Science , but the real advances that the experiment made were unintentional. Sometimes, as Doc Felapolous later observed, this is the way scientific inquiry works.
Although OST One-A and OST One-B were at first kept in cages in sickbay, it is impossible to keep cats locked up for very long—as any cat owner knows. Sooner or later, they will get loose. When the cats did manage to escape, they found themselves welcomed by most of the station’s crew, who fed them and pampered them and played with them and hid them in bunks and in lockers when the distraught Dr. Maynard came searching for them. They would get locked away in their cages again and again, only to be set loose by a beamjack who was a born-again cat fancier. Once the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, that there were pets aboard Skycan—no one except Maynard and Felapolous referred to them as lab animals—OST One-A and OST One-B were adopted as crew mascots. They were given names: OST One-A became Spoker, for his tendency to escape under a ladder into the bottom level of one of the hub spokes, and OST One-B was named ZeeGee, for the amusing (albeit dangerous) antics she performed while in the microgravitational conditions of the hub.
This caught Doc Felapolous’ interest as an unlettered psychologist of the armchair variety. When H.G. Wallace became upset about the cats’ presence on his space station—“There’s no place for house pets aboard a space station,” he said to Felapolous sternly—Felapolous was able to reply, “Oh, but there is!” He pointed out the subtle role which pets play in people’s lives, as familiar living objects who will accept people no matter what they are like, who can be talked to, stroked, played with, confessed to, loved and admired. Felapolous pointed out that clinical psychologists had known for decades that pet therapy was an important tool in dealing with depressed patients, and that some prisons had successfully experimented with allowing long-term inmates to keep pets.
“The men are
There had to be some significance to that detail, but whatever it was, it was too subtle for anyone to deduce.
New crew members aboard Skycan, when they asked why there were cats on the station, were frequently told that they had been brought aboard to control the cockroaches that stowed away in the food containers. The food—which was supplied to Skycorp by a distributor of airline in-flight meals—was bad enough to give that story some credibility, but that was not the reason why a half-dozen felines now wandered through the station’s modules.
The fact was that Doc Felapolous’ assistant, a University of Tennessee med student named Lou Maynard, who was completing his degree in space medicine aboard Skycan, had brought the first two cats up as test animals. Originally called OST One-A and OST One-B, the cats were respectively a young male and a young female, and it had been young Dr. Maynard’s intention to study their reactions and degrees of adaptation to reduced and near-nonexistent degrees of gravity. His initial hypothesis had been that even though the cats’ instinctive ability to right themselves while falling would be disturbed under such conditions, their nervous systems would eventually adapt and the cats would learn to regain their sense of balance.
The hypothesis, alas, was a bust. Neither cat ever became completely adapted to Olympus Station’s various degrees of gravitational pull. In the hub they yowled and flopped about crazily, clawing madly for anything, or anyone, that represented to their eyes a fixed point, and in the rim modules the Coriolis effect made them perpetually clumsy, missing jumps and crashing into things when they ran. At least Maynard was able to collect enough new observations to publish his results in The New England Journal of Medicine and in Science , but the real advances that the experiment made were unintentional. Sometimes, as Doc Felapolous later observed, this is the way scientific inquiry works.
Although OST One-A and OST One-B were at first kept in cages in sickbay, it is impossible to keep cats locked up for very long—as any cat owner knows. Sooner or later, they will get loose. When the cats did manage to escape, they found themselves welcomed by most of the station’s crew, who fed them and pampered them and played with them and hid them in bunks and in lockers when the distraught Dr. Maynard came searching for them. They would get locked away in their cages again and again, only to be set loose by a beamjack who was a born-again cat fancier. Once the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, that there were pets aboard Skycan—no one except Maynard and Felapolous referred to them as lab animals—OST One-A and OST One-B were adopted as crew mascots. They were given names: OST One-A became Spoker, for his tendency to escape under a ladder into the bottom level of one of the hub spokes, and OST One-B was named ZeeGee, for the amusing (albeit dangerous) antics she performed while in the microgravitational conditions of the hub.
This caught Doc Felapolous’ interest as an unlettered psychologist of the armchair variety. When H.G. Wallace became upset about the cats’ presence on his space station—“There’s no place for house pets aboard a space station,” he said to Felapolous sternly—Felapolous was able to reply, “Oh, but there is!” He pointed out the subtle role which pets play in people’s lives, as familiar living objects who will accept people no matter what they are like, who can be talked to, stroked, played with, confessed to, loved and admired. Felapolous pointed out that clinical psychologists had known for decades that pet therapy was an important tool in dealing with depressed patients, and that some prisons had successfully experimented with allowing long-term inmates to keep pets.
“The men are
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