"Wait, are you serious?  We have rats on the loose, now?"

There was a mix of Martian and Earthling in Building 3, and they all went silent after Liam's outburst.  Only the background hum of the agrorobots moving through their paces could be heard.

"I guess so," said Theodore eventually.

There followed another long moment of shocked silence.

"Why is that a problem?" asked Ava.  "They're small, right?  I don't think they're that dangerous."

"To us, perhaps not," said Olivia.  "But to plant life, or foodstocks of any kind, they could be a big problem."

"But they're small," said Ava.  "All of them combined wouldn't weigh as much as one of us.  How much could they eat?"

"Rats can reproduce very quickly," said Olivia.  "Exponential growth.  They're unusual for mammals in that they often get pregnant while still nursing their young.  It doubles their population growth rate, plus because they're short-lived, they have quick generations.  There are videos of rodent plagues from Australia, on Earth, that look like waves on the sea."

"We won't let it get to that point," said Theodore.

"How are we going to stop it?" asked Liam, once again barely containing his anger.  For someone normally so calm and quiet, he had been angry a lot lately, thought Olivia.  Unknown to her, it was his resentment of the Earthlings' treatment of her, that had caused his short temper.

"We can fumigate the buildings, one at a time," said Theodore, thinking out loud.  "Your medprinter can make the gas for it, if we program it to."

"But it would take a lot of gas to do every building," said Olivia.  She looked over at Helene, who was frowning, quietly looking off into the distance through the clear walls of Building 3.  Olivia realized that Helene was probably thinking about what to do, but also trying not to make eye contact, because she knew she had screwed up.

"I don't want to belabor this point too much," said Olivia, "but if we had left the rats on board the spaceship until new cages were made, this would not have happened."

It was the closest she had gotten to 'I told you so', since the Earthlings' arrival.  Ava, Noah, and several other of the adult Martians held their breath in anticipation, encouraged that Olivia had finally started to speak up.  Emma, though, did not get her hopes up.  She knew that Olivia would not bother to point out that it was Helene's decision to not wait for new enclosures to be made before bringing them to the Colony; the point had been made (albeit obliquely) that Helene's decision had been the wrong one, and no one was disputing it, so what was the point of more than a single sentence about it?  In Olivia's mind, any more said about it would be wasted time.

Emma, of course, knew that in the long-term, subtle power struggle of the sort that had been going on between Olivia and Helene since the Earthlings' arrival, there could be plenty of reasons.  Helene had been gradually grinding down Olivia's self-esteem, and in the process elevating herself as the unquestioned decision-maker.  Spending a little more time discussing the fact that Helene had screwed up, thought Emma, might be precisely what was called for.  But, Olivia was not the type to do it, and especially not unless Emma had talked to her ahead of time and prepared her to do it.

One might wonder, then, why Emma did not speak up herself, if she thought it so important that Helene's mistakes be aired publicly, and extensively.  The answer is simply that this was not how Emma worked.  She had no interest in being the center of attention, and certainly not in playing the leading role in a conflict, with Helene or anyone else.  It wasn't that Emma rejected the idea; rather, the idea never even occurred to her, so foreign was it to her disposition.

For a moment, she wished Elijah were present.  But then, she thought, perhaps it was just as well; he might have been so enthusiastic about doing it, that the Earthlings closed ranks to support Helene.  In any case, the moment was gone, and the conversation had moved on.  Theodore's idea of fumigating the buildings had been rejected as too slow (it would take weeks for the medprinter to generate enough poison to do all of the buildings), and not necessarily all that likely to work (if the rats had found a way to move between buildings, they would just move quickly out of the one being fumigated and wait for the gas to dissipate).

"Not to mention the chance of something going wrong, and we poison ourselves instead," said Olivia.  Helene and Theodore both shook their heads silently, as if this was not a realistic possibility.

They have, thought Olivia, a pathological optimism, even after something has just happened that should have cured them of that.

"We could just bring Loki into the Colony," said Ophelia.  All the adult Martians present looked at her with quizzical expressions, clearly uncertain as to what was being suggested.  The adolescents present, however, perked up with even greater interest, especially Dorothy.

"Who is Loki?" asked Liam.  "Does he know how to trap rats?"

"He's the cat," said Dorothy.  "He's still on the ship, currently."

There was a silence.

"So, like, the cat would just kill them, you're saying," said Liam, frowning and looking down.

There was a pause.

"Well, yes," said Ophelia gently, "that's what cats do."

It is true that the Martians raised chickens, and that they killed them from time to time for meat.  They were, however, psychologically in a different category, for Martians.  The rats, in addition to being mammals, were also well understood to be present on Mars as a proxy for themselves.  The experiment involving the rats, was intended to help reach conclusions about the Martians, as to whether or not they could survive living on Earth.

It was not just that having the cat kill the rats, was likely to make the experiment impossible.  Most Martians were not particularly enthused about the idea of traveling to Earth, in part because it would be almost certainly a one-way trip, part of a process of abandoning forever the Martian colony, and in part because they had no clear idea of what life they would be able to live on Earth.  They had an abundance of valuable skills, now, for running a Martian colony; essentially none of them would be considered especially valuable on Earth.

More important, psychologically, was that the nature of the experiment caused the Martians to naturally think 'those rats are us'.  It was not, in any sense, correct or rational.  But it was, for some of them, strongly felt.  The idea of having them killed and eaten by a cat, did not go down well.  Dorothy, for example, whose eyes had lit up at the idea of having the cat taken from the spaceship to the Colony, became considerably less enthusiastic.

"We could," said Dorothy, "just have the cat in Building 3, so that the rats would probably stay away from here."

"And perhaps knock over half the plants and dig up the rest," said Theodore, who had more experience with cats than Dorothy.

"We could program the robots to stop it from doing that, maybe," said Ophelia.

There was, for a moment, an atmosphere of genuine cooperative brainstorming, between Earthling and Martian.  There were no particular battle lines drawn, regarding how the rats were to be dealt with; it was a new issue, and neither Helene nor Olivia had expressed an opinion on what was to be done.  This opened up a space for the two groups to act as if they were one group, which helped them to think of themselves as one group.

"Could we just program the robots to stop the rats from coming in here?" asked Olivia.  "I think the rats would run away pretty quickly if the robot came after them."

"Yes!" said Mildred, a bit too loudly.  Everyone present looked over at her, a bit surprised at the energy with which she had agreed with this statement.

"Uh," Mildred stammered, "I just, the robots are scary when they turn towards you.  I mean I imagine they would be, if that happened.  I think the rats would run away."

There was another long pause, with everyone looking at Mildred, and she began to feel uncomfortable, but she had learned from a young age that when you were under suspicion, saying nothing is likely to be better than trying to come up with something to say on the spot, and then the conversation moved on.  Only Dorothy continued to stare at Mildred, quizzically; the adults were discussing how to get the robots to take on the extra task of chasing away any rats that made it to Building 3 somehow.

It turned out, thought Mildred, that she had been correct about the programming of the robots; it was hardwired, for the most part, and they would need to swap out some of the circuitry to introduce rodent control.  Lucas was called for, and he and Jacob had a brief conversation about what would be required.  It would be possible, but it would take a week or more.  In the meantime, the cat Loki would be moved from the spaceship to Building 3.  Liam set about trying to cat-proof the plants, with some advice from Theodore.