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space.”
    Afra looked up “barque cat” and the screen showed thecurrent prize-winning sire, Garfield Per Astra, a magnificent beast of tawny brown with his undercoat a tan, with black stripes, and face markings that made him look both benign and exceedingly wise. His eyes were yellow, like Afra’s, but that wasn’t what endeared him to the boy as much as his air of arrogant independence did.
    There were many holos of the unusually marked felines, long histories of their pedigrees, breeding, and nurture, their deftness in finding tiny holes in hulls and giving warning to the crew, their almost incredible talent for survival in spacewrecks. FIND THE BC! was the motto of every space salvage group. Any vessel harboring a barque cat would have BC ABOARD in huge letters in various positions on the hull.
    The next time the
Bucephalus
rocked into a Capellan cradle, Afra deserted his immediate task and was in the group hovering by the crew gangway.
    “Whatcha got, kid?” a spaceman asked, noticing Afra who was almost dancing about in his anxiety to get someone’s attention.
    “Chief Damitcha of the freighter
Zanzibar
gave me a message for your Chief Marsha Meilo.”
    The crewman vacillated between annoyance and curiosity.
    “Yeah? What’s the message?”
    “I’m to give it to her, he said.”
    “Oh, he did, huh? Didn’t know he knew . . . What’s the matter, kid?”
    For Afra had just seen the barque cat, who strolled indolently to the gangway to peer out in as supercilious a manner as the highest Methody preacher.
    “Oh, that’s Treasure Island Queen,” and the crewman’s pride in the beast was obvious.
    Afra extended his hand to the cat, for they were on a level, Treasure on the ship and Afra on the ground. The crewman kicked his hand away and Afra jumped back in alarm and hurt.
    “Sorry, kid, we don’t like our barquie picking up any planetary germs. No touchee. Just lookee. She is a beauty,ain’t she?” and the crewman, rather ashamed of his defensiveness, hunkered down to pet the cat.
    Afra, hands clasped tightly behind his back, could not tear his eyes off the sleek and elegant creature. Treasure, luxuriating in the crewman’s caresses, murmured her appreciation and turned her aristocratic face toward the wide-eyed boy.
    “Hmmmmrow!” she said, plainly addressing Afra.
    “Hey, kid, you rate. She don’t usually speak to landlubbers.”
    Afra
listened
with all his heart and
heard
the satisfaction of Treasure’s mind for the caresses she was enjoying. Delicately she sniffed, as much in Afra’s direction as in general at the atmosphere of Capella, but he took it as a personal accolade and desperately wanted to be able to stroke her, to have such a lovely creature for his own.
    You are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen
, Afra dared to say.
    Mmmmmmrow! Mmmmmrrr!
    There seemed to be no mental equivalent for that except pleasure. Abruptly she leaped away from the door and out of his sight. Just then a group of uniformed men and women emerged and quickly the crewman gestured for Afra to make himself scarce as he stood to attention, saluting those who filed out of the ship.
    Afra mulled over that incident for several days before he asked Hasardar about barque cats.
    “Them? Well, for one thing, they’re not allowed planetside. Those spacers keep them pretty much to themselves. Oh, they trade them between ships, to avoid inbreeding . . .”
    “Inbreeding?”
    “Too close a blood tie—weakens the strain, they say.”
    Afra didn’t have a chance to ask more questions. He knew without asking that his parents would not permit him to have any kind of an animal. Not in the Tower enclosure. But that didn’t keep him from checking with all the bigger ships to see if they had barque cats. Spacemen were only too happy to brag about their beasts, and if Afra couldn’ttouch, he could admire, and ’path them. Mostly they responded, which tickled him and actually improved his relations with all