Third Watch by Anne McCaffrey Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t see how that was any of his affair now. Even if it was, his girl should not be put at further risk to fix things. She was much too young to save universes yet. And someone needed to sit on that sister of hers until the wretched child was halfway socialized and safe to move among decent people and cats.
    Elviiz now, Elviiz would be the ideal sort of fellow to help solve this glitch in the cosmic harmony to which Grimalkin was so uniquely and sensitively attuned. But Elviiz was incapacitated. A crono could fix that, too. All Grimalkin needed to do was fetch a future Elviiz, a fixed one, pull him back on a different time line and the two of them could go troubleshooting, with Elviiz doing the heavy lifting and the data compilation, analysis, and manipulation while Grimalkin operated on the more intuitive plane—or multiple intuitive planes, his particular area of expertise. It was vastly underrated and trivialized, but he was used to that. So few appreciated him. Tragic, but it seemed to be his lot. No matter. Once he saved the universe, he could return to the unicorn herd and Halili, for a while at least.
    If he timed it right, he wouldn’t even have to explain to her why he left without so much as a horn touch.
    Paws and mind control were all he needed to operate the time device. Even tail brushes could shift the time lines of the sensitive machine. The best course of action would be to search for himself at an earlier time, use the time device to reunite his selves and acquire the crono, fetch Elviiz, save the universe, then collect the girls.
    Of course, that was assuming there were no hitches in his plan, and even he had to admit that there always were. So, no, he really needed to secure the girls, get his crono back from Ariin, return the youngsters to safety, not that they’d stay there, then collect Elviiz, who would no doubt be more cooperative, knowing his sisters were safe.
    Find Ariin and the crono, that was his first priority. Only, maybe it would be better to collect Khorii first, and they could both use the device to find Ariin and the crono. There was always the little problem that when he returned the girls and went to fetch Elviiz, the form-freeze would once more trap him in small cat form, which would be highly inconvenient.
    Hmmm. Even if he found himself and his own crono, he wondered if he could outsmart himself long enough to get control of the device—or would his two forms meld? Ah, the much-vaunted time-space continuum conundrum. But, if anyone would understand his motives, he would.
    He scanned the screen, searching for the deceptively insignificant dot that represented his own two-legged self. During this time period, his interests had included romantic dinners and long walks on the beach with any female he could interest in pursuing those activities and the ones he wished to follow them. His own kind were a bit indiscriminate that way, since all of the actual breeding they did was in the laboratory. No combination of themselves had actually produced offspring since he was born.
    Perhaps the females of his species were sterile. He knew beyond a doubt that he was fully capable of reproduction. His activities in other times on other planets had proved that.
    Where was he, anyway? He saw the avatar of his cat self sitting in front of the machine in the time building, blinking as the individual dots did when one sought them out. Was the machine refusing to acknowledge that there might be two of him during the same time? How limited!
    He framed a protest to the technicians’ guild in which he complained about the lack of individual freedom implied by such shortsightedness on the part of the device. Why should there not be two of someone as dynamic and large-spirited as he was? Who made up these silly rules anyway?
    He lashed his tail in irritation and groomed his whiskers to calm himself. When he looked back up at the wall screen, he was gratified to see that his complaint had already been