A Home for the Old Ones

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WHEN the guy came in, bold as brass, we were busy aversion training a leopard cub, and it was taking all our attention. The cub was a healthy little male, no more than a week old. That's a little bit young to begin the aversion training, but we'd been tracking the mother since she gave birth. When we spotted the mother this day, she had dropped off to sleep in a convenient place—at the edge of a patch of brush that wasn't large enough to conceal any other leopards. So we jumped the gun a little, doped the mother with an air gun and borrowed her cub.

It's a job that takes all three of us. Shelly was the one who picked up the baby, completely covered, and sweating, in a gasproof isolation suit so it wouldn't get any ideas about a friendly human smell. Brudy kept an eye on the mother so we wouldn't have any unpleasant surprises. The mother had had her own aversion training, but if she had woken and seen us messing with her cub she might have broken through it. I was the head ranger, which meant that I was the boss. (Did I mention that my name is Grace Nkroma? Well, it is.) And, as boss, I was the one who manipulated the images—3-D simulations of an Old One, a human, a Heechee, one after another—with a cocktail of smells of each released as we displayed the images, and a sharp little electric shock each time that made the kit yowl and struggle feebly in Shelly's arms.

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