THE ONE THAT CAME BACK by CATHRL RATED FRC

It all began with a perfectly ordinary shopping trip.

Mrs Tracy and I had flown to the mainland for our once-a-month expedition. Alan doesn't understand why we would do it - he is perfectly content to buy everything he needs over the internet. But he gets to go on rescues. I would be happy to do the shopping remotely, but sometimes I do feel the need to talk to someone other than the Tracy family. Although I would never admit it to them, only interacting with people who I know and care for can be stifling at times.

So we were coming to the end of our day, and the shopping was being loaded into the rear of the plane by two of the helpful young men who seem to materialise from nowhere whenever the name of Tracy is mentioned. Bags of non-perishable food, chilled containers of meat and those fruit and vegetables which we are unable to grow successfully on the island. Boxes labelled with the names of those who had ordered their contents. Three crates for Brains, presumably containing laboratory supplies and machine components which he was unable to produce himself. I recognised the sender's name on another box as a supplier of condiments favoured by my father. A strangely shaped parcel wrapped in brown paper and tape for Gordon. It is quite extraordinary just how much the ten people on the island need to import every month, and only about a quarter of it had been loaded when I realised that I had forgotten something.

The alligator requires vitamin supplements, since we are unable to provide it with the diet of fresh and varied raw meat which it would eat in the wild. The pet store is conveniently located adjacent to the airfield, but I had met up with Mrs Tracy as I walked past it and, engrossed in discussing her clothing purchases, I had forgotten to go in. I rectified that now, hurrying the hundred yards or so back to the small shop.

And there he was, on the counter, in a basket. A perfect bundle of smoke-grey fluff. As I put out a hand to stroke him, he opened huge grey eyes and mewed at me, and I was captivated.

"Gorgeous, isn't he?" the proprietor said. "A lady bought him for her daughter, but it turns out the kid's allergic. I don't normally take them back, but this one...I just had to --"

"I'll take him," I interrupted. "Please, Mr Bostrup. I will be a good owner, I promise! I don't know a great deal about cats, and I know you have a policy on impulse buying, but --"

"Miss Kyrano," the man said with a smile, "any household which can look after an alligator should have no difficulty with a kitten. Provided that the two are kept apart, of course. There is one condition, though. The little girl made me promise that the new owner would keep his name the same."

"What is the name?" I asked with some trepidation. Surely, named by a child, it could not be anything too unsuitable?

"You bought a kitten, and his name is Fluffy?" Alan extended a long finger towards the appropriately named ball of fluff, which sniffed it cautiously and then sneezed.

I laughed. "The previous owner turned out to be allergic to cats. It would be unfortunate if the converse were to be true here."

"Unlikely," said Alan grandly. "But really, Tin-Tin -- a kitten? What's it going to do? Apart from leave hair everywhere and puke in your bed?"

I refused to rise to so crude a comment, despite the fact that Fluffy had already had one nervous little accident on the carpet. "Cats are excellent at catching vermin. Mice, for instance."

"We don't have vermin on Tracy Island. Now, a dog...that might have been useful. Dogs fetch things. And they can swim."

"I told you that you should practice further from the sea. Especially since the boomerang was not yours."

"Yeah, I know. It was all my own fault, and now I owe Gordon. Again." Alan sighed dramatically. "Maybe Algernon here can be the world's first fetching kitten."

"His name is Fluffy," I said with as much dignity as I could muster. "I promised."

Alan's eyes abruptly widened as he looked beyond me, out of the door onto my balcony. "World's first tightrope-walking kitten. Hey there, buddy, that's not such a good idea..."

I turned at the alarm in his voice, and froze at what I saw. Fluffy must have snuck out of the open door while we talked, and had climbed up the vine onto the railing round the balcony. Normally this vine clings around the window and dangles from Scott's balcony above, but this year I had been quite remiss in my pruning. Long strands trailed over the edge of the railing, and at high tide, as it was now, a couple of them reached right down to the water. Fluffy was sitting on the railing, fascinated by the motion in one of these strands as the waves rose and fell. Even as I shrieked in horror, even as Alan leapt to the rescue, the little cat reached out one batting paw too far, flailed uselessly for balance, and was gone.

Alan was over the rail in an instant, and as I shrieked again, other people appeared. Gordon and Scott, on the next balcony along, and a moment later Virgil who has the room next to me on the other side.

"Tin-Tin, what's wrong?" Scott demanded.

"Fluffy fell in!" I gasped.

The look of bemused disbelief on Scott's face made no sense to me until I realised that Alan had surfaced. The soggy grey scrap which he was holding up triumphantly bore no resemblance to my beautiful pet. Nevertheless I held my hands out, leaning as far over the rail as I could, and he tossed his prize back up to me with great accuracy. And now Scott believed that I had called his brother 'Fluffy'...but there was no time for explanations. I had a handful of chilled, sodden kitten spewing seawater over my fingers, and his rescuer was treading water in a narrow, rocky inlet, with no way to climb back up to the balcony.

The second of these was, thankfully, easy to solve. Gordon was lowering a rope ladder which I rather thought had already been attached to his balcony. Alan, however, shook his head when Gordon indicated that it was ready for use.

"Just a minute, Gordo. There's something wedged in the rocks under here. I saw it, now..."

He disappeared back under the water, and returned triumphantly barely five seconds later.

"Jammed in good, it was. I wonder how long it had been there? It looks old."

It was some kind of bottle, and at that point I lost interest. I had a sad, bedraggled little scrap of kitten to look after.

Fluffy did not enjoy his shower, and I gained two or three rather deep scratches in my hands to prove it. It was, however, better than coping with a salty, uncombable kitten. Once properly rinsed, Fluffy was merely wet without being tangled, and I set to work with the hairdryer.

By the time Alan knocked on my door, Fluffy was once again the irresistibly strokeable bundle of delight which had attracted me to him in the first place. Alan was himself showered and dried, and quite as attractive to me as the kitten. Although in an entirely different way, of course.

He came in and presented me with a bottle. "What do you think?"

I examined it closely, assuming that it was the bottle he had pulled from the rocks below Gordon's balcony. It was some ten inches high and made from a cloudy greenish-blue glass with a few tiny bubbles visible in it. Clearly hand-made, and yet not a decorative item. There were a few recent chips on the edges, but also some much older ones, worn smooth by the action of the waves.

"This looks old," I told him. "How long is it since the development of factory-made glass?"

"I'm not sure." Alan handed me a roll of paper. "Maybe this will tell us."

I squeaked. "This was in the bottle? Oh, Alan, how exciting!"

"Yeah. Most likely someone's last cry for help." He sounded dispirited - what rescuer wouldn't, receiving a request for assistance far too late to be of any use - and I put my arm around him.

"Or maybe they sent out many bottles, and were rescued. Let's find out, at least?" I examined the roll more closely, and discovered that it was not the paper I had presumed, but instead some kind of cloth. "Have you looked at it yet?"

Alan shook his head. "I opened the bottle, and there was this weird musty smell, chemical, almost. So I figured it was best done scientifically."

I was strongly tempted to unroll it there and then, but the scientist in me won out. "You are quite correct. We will go to the lab, and take every precaution."

With Fluffy safely shut in my room, fast asleep in his little basket, Alan and I headed for the lab. I would have asked Brains' opinion, of course, but he was away giving a series of lectures at Harvard that week. Fortunately, I was confident that I knew what to do. Had I not been, I would have waited for his return. The bottle had been in the sea for a great many years. It could have waited a little longer.

However, while at college I had made a number of studies into the problem of revealing writing and images which had faded with time - it had been somewhat outside my area of study, but I had always found it fascinating. I'd always hoped to have the chance to be the first person for many years to see a message, and now it seemed that my dreams might come true! With a trembling hand I poured the required chemicals into a small tray, stirred them to ensure full mixing, and then immersed the roll of material and allowed it to become fully soaked. Then, wearing gloves, I carefully teased the layers apart.

It was not a large piece - a mere four inches by six. But it was intact, and to my excitement it showed unmistakeable signs of writing. An old-fashioned italic script, small and crabbed, and tantalisingly patchy in where the words were revealed.

"Abandoned," read Alan over my shoulder. "Brother...taken...deserted...Tin-Tin, can you make the rest of this appear?"

I removed the cloth from the solution, and rinsed it in a second chemical to fix what we had already seen. "I will try, later. It must dry fully first. Alan, this is dreadful! That poor man! I do hope we can determine what his name was and find out whether he survived."

Alan did appear very shaken, and I judged it best to try to calm him. "It is old history, Alan. We will find out later, but to hurry things now could destroy the message entirely."

He seemed unconvinced, but I shooed him out of the lab and locked the door behind me. An old habit, gained at college, unnecessary here. Still, I was as uncomfortable leaving a room full of dangerous chemicals unlocked as I would have been riding a bicycle without a helmet, or driving a car without a seatbelt. And besides, it would prevent Alan from deciding, in one of his hot-headed moods, that one of his experiments would be a quicker solution than my careful, logical methods. Alan's experimental techniques were, on occasion, brilliant. In general they were merely useless. It was the remaining two per cent of the time which had me in fear for the house.

As we approached the pool, I discovered that my concerns had been justified. Virgil greeted his brother with a delighted "Hi there, Fluffy!" and Scott tried so hard not to laugh that I feared he would do himself an injury. An introduction was clearly required. So, leaving Alan to the mercy of his brothers, I made a quick detour back to my room.

Fluffy had rejected his basket, and was curled up asleep on my bed. I sniffed gingerly at a couple of damp spots on the carpet, but they were only water, presumably dripped by my soggy pet during his frantic attempts to avoid the hairdryer. The litter tray appeared to have been used, though, and I smiled lovingly at the little cat, before scooping up a still sleeping furry handful to show to the family.

"Well, I suppose he's harmless enough," said Scott dubiously. "So how did you come to name him 'Fluffy', Tin-Tin? It doesn't seem quite...you, somehow."

I recounted the tale of the kitten, the shopkeeper, and the allergic owner, and Scott nodded.

"Figures. I guess he can't do any harm, though maybe you should keep your balcony door shut. It's all very well diving in there at high tide on a calm day, but not so safe when the water's low or rough." He spoke to me, but I knew his words were aimed both at Alan, who had dived in today, and Gordon, who possessed a rope ladder clearly intended to facilitate doing precisely that.

"And the bottle?" Virgil asked. "Is there a message?"

"Oh yes!" Alan told him enthusiastically, and we were treated to a blow-by-blow account of every word's appearance on the cloth, how large the spaces between the words were, and what Alan thought the final text might be, several variants with their probabilities. I suspect Virgil wished he had never asked. Alan can be extraordinarily detailed in his explanations when he puts his mind to it.

The following morning, I was up bright and early. Fluffy's miaow is particularly loud when he is hungry, and I suspected he was suffering from jet-lag. He certainly thought that it was breakfast time long before I would naturally have woken up. Having filled himself with kitten food washed down with warm milk, he decided it was time for another nap. Since I was by now fully awake, I headed in search of my own breakfast.

To my great surprise, Alan was there before me, eating toast with marmalade and drinking coffee. He was fully dressed. I felt immediately embarrassed by my dressing-gown and slippers. I had not expected to encounter anyone this early in the morning.

"Couldn't sleep either?" Alan didn't wait for my answer. "Can we try that other technique you mentioned yet?"

I restrained my urge to laugh at his eagerness. "I think it would be safe now. First, is there any more coffee in the pot?"

There was, and once I had diluted it with half a mugful of hot milk, it was even of a reasonable strength. I normally like to savour my coffee, taking my time to drink it, but this morning Alan's enthusiasm was infectious. That, and his impatient hovering was annoying. Barely five minutes later I was heading back to my bedroom to dress, having promised to meet Alan at the lab in a further ten.

He wasn't quite pawing at the door when I arrived, but he seemed ready to start. I unlocked it and let him in, and his longer legs took him in a couple of hurried strides to the drying material, clipped to a string hung across the lab table. I was still closing the door when he swore.

I looked round to find him staring at the cloth. His eyes were wide in total disbelief, and his jaw was set hard. I decided against reprimanding him for his language.

"Alan, what is wrong?" I asked him, and he spat out one single word.

"Gordon."

He snatched the cloth from the clip with no care for its fragility, and stormed out.

I returned to my room. It seemed like the only thing to do. Even through the thick walls I could hear shouting from the bedroom to my left. Alan was certainly very angry.

Ten minutes later there was a final slam of a door, and then silence. Five minutes after that I was sitting on the floor watching Fluffy play with my slipper when there was a tap on my door. I expected Alan, but my call of "Come in!" admitted Gordon.

I frowned at him. "This is between you and Alan, Gordon. I do not want to get involved."

"That was the idea." Gordon gestured towards the chair at my desk. "Can I come in and explain?"

I nodded, trying to do more than just frown, and Gordon closed the door behind him and sat down, hooking his feet over the wheeled arms of the chair base.

"Alan tells me you have an interest in old documents. That you've always wanted to find something that nobody else has read since it was lost."

I nodded. "Yes."

"I didn't know that. So when I was looking for a way to pay Alan back for losing my boomerang, and I found an old bottle on the seabed while I was testing out Brains' new scuba mask, it seemed ideal. Brains helped me with the cloth and the invisible ink, and I left the bottle jammed in the rocks under my balcony until the cork looked a bit older. I hadn't figured out how he was going to find it, but it just happened. It never occurred to me that he'd do anything but open it himself. But he asked you, because it was something you'd always wanted to do."

He looked at the floor. "I'm really sorry, Tin-Tin. It was just supposed to be a prank. Alan would unroll the thing, the ink would react with the air, and the words would appear while he looked at it. I guess your chemicals slowed things down."

"The words...?" I prompted.

His face went a shade to match his hair. "The sad tale of Alan Tracy, who lost all his brothers' belongings and was abandoned by them forever on a tropical island."

"I see." I shook my head. "Gordon, I am not upset - but I do think Alan is. He thought we were reading the last words of some abandoned mariner. And it was an old bottle. You found it on the sea bed, you say?"

"I did. Stopped up with a cork so old it had disintegrated, and full of murky water." He blanched. "I poured it away. It couldn't have been...?"

I laughed. "Even Brains and I cannot recover a message from murky water. But still...do you remember where you found the bottle? Exactly?"

"I sure do."

"And the currents in this area are particularly constant, are they not? Could we work out where it had come from?"

"Not exactly." It was Gordon's turn to frown. "But we could rule out a lot of places. Figure out when the glass was made, what ship it might have been on. This wasn't on a standard trade route, not that early." He grinned at me, and his face lit up. "Maybe we can get something from this whole mess after all."

"Maybe we can." I stood up, earning an annoyed mew from Fluffy, and brushed cat hairs from my legs. It was amazing how many he had shed on the carpet already. "Ocean currents. Do you have charts?"

"Oh, yeah."

"And should I fetch Alan?"

Gordon sighed. "I guess so. Just...how about letting him stew for half an hour longer? It was a particularly good boomerang he lost. Perfectly balanced..."

I laughed, checked that Fluffy had everything he might need, and followed Gordon out.