A little black pavement ant (Tetramorium caespitum) scurried over the hardwood floor. Chanting "gotta... gotta... gotta," she was determined to carry out her mission: find morsels and bring them back to the hive, make the sisters happy, please the queen.

Pausing in a pool of sunlight to warm her joints, still stiff from the night before, she waggled her antennae to pick up scents. Something greasy? Sugary? Donuts a thousand clicks to the northeast? No, nothing like that. But there was something else, a faint aroma of... bad things.

Something really bad was nearby, of the sort about which they used to whisper in the larval nursery. It made her abdomen quake. She hunkered, gripping her claws into the wood cracks, waiting for whatever it was to pass. With luck, the bad thing would not see her and go away. But she was not so lucky.

The light dimmed suddenly. Her brain clicked into fear mode. Legs pumping at full speed, she ran toward the wall where hiding places would be. "Gotta! Gotta! Gotta!" her mind screamed. She ran straight into a dark obstruction. Her antennae gingerly tapped the object, trying to figure out what it was. It was warm and furry, which instinct told her was bad. She spun around and sprinted in the other direction.

The next few minutes seemed like an eternity. Every way she ran, a wall of dark fuzz would slam down on the ground. The vibrations churned her insides and clicked her mandibles terribly. She tried running back along her scent trail, but that was blocked too. She felt deep despair and alarm, but did not know what else to do but run, run, run. Would this ever end?

"Why do you have to play with everything?" said a bird on the windowsill. "Just step on it. Or eat it. But no, you cats have to waste time on pointless... hunting practice."

The cat who had been playing with the ant stopped and looked up. "And who are you?"

The bird was a handsome male specimen of the species Pyrrhus pictura, commonly known as the painted conure. His feathers transitioned smoothly from his irridescent green on his back to red on his belly, maroon on the tail, blue on the wings, and a ring of gray chevrons around the neck. Dark eyes, wide and round like black pearls, set in patches of white on the sides of his head, to either side of a clean and well-polished black beak. His speech, clipped and precise, betrayed only a very slight rainforest accent that other birds might detect.

Since leaving his family estate deep in the rain forest of central Venezuela, he had spent many long years refining his cultural training. First was the exclusive finishing school in the Andes Avian Academy, where he finished at the top of his class. Then rigorous training at the Chilean Raptor Institute prepared him for a life of civil service and politics. His recent induction to the Antarctic Ministry was an honor among birds, though he started at the bottom like every young avian bureaucrat, and was forced to accept rather unsavory projects, like those involving the Cats.

His role in this particular mission was to organize the logistics and staffing. Birds are meticulous planners, though in their impatience they may sometimes overlook a few details. They can be austere and arrogant. But it can never be said that they are irresponsible or reckless. Indeed, the precautions they take to avoid danger are legendary; such as building a tremendous city-sized spacecraft in the heart of the Antarctic continent to be ready to whisk away all birds on the planet in the event of a calamity.

Reaching his beak into the space under his wing he retrieved a brightly-painted chip of bark. He dropped it to the floor, where it rolled to a stop in front of the cat.

"My card."

The cat looked at the bark chip. With a sigh, she inserted the point of her claw into the chip and dragged it closer for inspection. She already knew who the bird was, and couldn't read the card anyway, but she looked at it just to humor the little bird.

"Mwrrr." She tried to remember the name from the dossier. "You are Tweikl Tw'quee Quatwa T--"

"It is forty three syllables and spans five octaves. You cannot hope to pronounce it. But since we are fated to work together, you may call me 'Twake'. You, I presume, are the cat called ... Bee's Mark?"

"Bismarck, actually," corrected the cat.

She was a British Blue shorthair cat, middle-aged and in excellent condition. It was fashionable in the feline world for parents not to name their children, preferring to let them choose their own monickers. Being fascinated with human history, she chose to use the name of one of its fiercest creations, a German battleship from the Second World War. She liked to think of herself as being like that ship: moving slowly and deliberately, her eyes swiveling like turrets, ears sweeping like radar dishes.

She was a member of the "handler" caste, assigned as such because As a kitten she had shown unusual interest in human affairs in her studies. The purpose of her life was to live among the humans, observe them, learn their idiosyncracies, and if necessary adjust their behavior. Her role in the mission which brought the bird and cat together, and just might save the world from calamity, was to select a human with the right characteristics for a very dangerous task.

As she continued to bat the ant around, Twake grew impatient for the sign of deference he was expecting. He had long ago decided that his training and background ranked him higher than this cat and he deserved some kind of recognition of the fact. Something like "it is the utmost honor to be working for you" would suffice. After a minute of continued silence, he would have settled for just "hello".

Had he paid more attention in Feline Studies, he might have recognised the silence as an a meaningful gesture in its own right. The first rule of Cat behavior is that the lack of reaction from a cat is not to be taken as a lack of regard. Silence has many meanings to cats, depending on the context and parties involved. In a debate it might signal agreement, as in "I have nothing to say that would contradict you." Or, at the arrival of a guest, it could mean, "I will not oppose your taking food and drink from my pantry". In the present case, of course, the silence meant simply "your presence is acceptible, for I am showing neither fear nor anger."

Twake was ready to fly away, back to his office, where he would have his underlings draft a scathing letter of complaint, the envelope sealed with his droppings. But he stopped himself, for it would be a sign of failure on his clean record to have aborted a mission on the basis of a personality conflict. He decided he would give the cat one more chance.

"Erm, so..." Twake cocked his head to one side to watch. "What are you doing there?"

"This," said Bismarck without taking her eyes off the ant, "is our enemy."

"Yes, I can see that. But why are you still playing with it and not looking at me?"

He fluttered down to the floor and walked toward the cat until he was in her field of view.

"Look!" said the cat, letting the ant get a few feet away before pouncing in front of it. "You can learn from its movement. You can almost see how it thinks."

"It's an ant," said Twake with irritation. "It doesn't think. It just repeats one word over and over."

But Bismarck kept staring, fascinated.

Twake trotted over to the ant and swallowed it.

"There. Now play time is over. Do I have your attention now?"

Bismarck's huge yellow eyes eyes swivelled onto him. Feeling the force of her stare almost made him regret the ploy, but he managed to keep his composure. Squinting hard at the cat, he adopted his most condescending tone.

"I suppose you think this hunting 'skill' will be useful someday. You, the fearsome predator stalking insects on wooden floors like a hunter on a safari? Will you have it stuffed and mounted on a little placque? Or perhaps you will cook it on a barbecue and have a shish kebob of its little body parts? Cat, there are trillions of ants out there. That is a very large number, do you understand? We need to use brains, not brawn. But perhaps you have a special plan to take on all the ants of the world by yourself?"

"No," she growl-purred. "I just plan to catch just a few hundred and sprinkle them on your feathers, after coating you with maple syrup."

The next few seconds were very tense. Bizmarck calculated several ways to bite off the bird's head in a quarter of a second. (This is something cats do idly and without effort, so it should not be taken as any kind of threat. Except now.) Likewise, Twake considered how satisfying it would feel to clamp his sharp beak on the soft flesh of the cat's nose. The shriek would be louder than a quartet of banshees.

These meetings between cats and birds were always tense. Officially, the races were the very best of friends, two species working together to survive in a hostile universe. But the last time they met in a diplomatic setting was back in 1871, to decide whether humans should be allowed to "invent" electric lightbulbs. The proceedings broke down into a tirade of insults, and then an all-out fight, ultimately causing the Great Conflagration of Chicago.

Suddenly, both the cat and the bird remembered protocol. The bird's feathers smoothed down. The cat's fur flattened. Both had been reminded by their own kind to behave well. Each was exemplary in their own circles for their intelligence and maturity, yet the ease with which they had slipped into the old beastial animosity disturbed them both.

"I'm sorry," said Bismarck. "I forget myself. All the stress, you know."

"Not at all. It was I who was impertinent. Ahem. Well, everything is on schedule. If the human passes the test, we will perform the on-switching tomorrow as he proceeds toward his night-structure. Good luck."

Twake fluttered out the window and away. Halfway across the yard, he felt a sudden onset of indigestion and coughed up the ant, who fell thirty feet to the ground, miraculously still alive.

Bismarck closed her eyes and did what most cats do to pass the time: solve difficult math problems in their heads. She had nearly finished a 3-dimensional, base-25 Sudoku puzzle when the doorknob rattled.

"Ah," she said, opening her eyes, "That will be Clifford Puck returning from his labor assignment."

She trotted down the stairs in time to see him close the door and set down his briefcase.

For a human he was not a bad specimen, she thought. True, his musculature was below average and his physical fitness was in the low percentile, with softness in the midsection, but this just made him a better surface on which to nap. Though they required corrective optics, his eyes were alert and mirthful with a nice shade of blue. His balding head with short-cropped, brown fur was not unkempt. He kept his odors under control and chose tasteful skin coverings. Why the females of his species did not seek him for company she could not explain.

To a trained human handler like herself, it was easy to recognize the moods of humans. They gave away more and with much less subtlety than a cat. The way his face twitched, the shuffling gait, and his contorted face told her that he did not derive pleasure from the events of this day.

That he was not happy did not surprise her. She knew his occupation was tremendously difficult. As the public relations and complaints manager for a national furniture manufacturing company legendary for its defective and often dangerous products, his job was not the least bit enviable.

She had sifted though the contents of his briefcase and learned of startling cases in which a bookshelf had collapsed in a cloud of sawdust under the weight of a few tomes, or a chair with nails sticking through the seat that had poked its owner in a vulnerable location. He was even faced with the ire of a large downtown company whose desks had come pre-populated with termites. Clearly, his caseload was enormous and stressful, and the very existance of the company relied on him.

It is this peculiar situation that brought him to the attention of the Cats. They had been searching for a human with right combination of resourcefulness and resistance to stress. Bismarck had never seen an individual carry so much of a burden without succumbing to insanity. Like a camel drinking water, he seemed to soak up stress and carry it around inside himself without any problem.

A more important skill in which he excelled was arbitration. This man had some kind of magic ability to smooth ruffled feathers and stroke fur the right way. He could take a call that began with a death threat, and by the end of it, be hearing praises and get invited to a barbecue. By virtue of his soothing nature and imaginative ways to appease, he mad angry customers peaceful and contented. This was exactly what the Cats were looking for.

Bismarck just had to perform a few tests to be sure he was the one. She needed to get inside his head, push the buttons to bring him to the brink of madness, and see if he would fall apart or keep ticking. Like the gorilla-and-suitcase commercials of human television, he would be tested quite thoroughly.

With the subject ready for observation, she prepared her mental logbook for recording his behavior:

Subject has returned from labor assignment laden with adrenalin and stress hormones as usual. I expect him to engage in therapeutic relaxation process, beginning with consumption of intoxicating grain beverages.

He was the very image of exhaustion, shambling across the carpet for what must have seemed to him like miles in a parched valley. He went past the cat without seeing her, into the kitchen, where he leaned against the wall and opened the refrigerator. There, bathed in light, were the sparkling bottles of beer. He grasped a bottle, lifted it to his forhead, and smiled. Its coolness was the first pleasure he had felt all day.

Bismarck sprang to the countertop to see better, startling him and eliciting a shriek. "Oh sweet goblins! It's you." He clutched his chest as if to slow down his racing heart.

To cats it is a mystery how humans can function in the world while most of the time ignoring it. Things in plain view go unnoticed unless they are practically jumping up and down. "Indeed," she thought, "they would have failed as a species had we not switched them from hunting prey to tending captive herds and planting crops. A stalk of corn cannot run away from you." She squinted with amusement.

He opened the cupboard. "Guess you'll be wanting some food." He poured dry brown pellets into a bowl and set it on the floor. "There you go."

She jumped down to have a sniff. Ug! Better to eat brown grass than this. Later, when he slept, she would pour the contents into the garbage disposal and dine on compressed fish cubes she had hidden in the house.

As he retreated to the livingroom, she followed, noting every action. He removed his jacket and tie and switched on the television for background noise. He fetched an item from the bookshelf and sat in his recliner (manufactured by a company other than his own, of course). As his body settled into the cool leather, forcing out the air like a deep sigh, he popped the cap off his beer and took a long, slow sip.

Now he opened up the item from the bookshelf. It was a volume of his beloved stamp collection. She understood the contents were very precious to him, perhaps for their pretty colors, or for the memories he had as a child doting on them with the help of his grandfather. She entertainined a pet theory that they represented a bit of the universe that he could control, while outside raged a chaotic world of unpredictable threats and sources of pain. As he grasped the tiny postage squares in tweezers and studied their ink patterns through a magnifying lens, all the stress inside him drifted away. The electrodes she had secretly implanted in his chair told her that even now his blood pressure was descending rapidly.

In body support structure, human has activated the soothing light-and-sound box and acquired the postal remuneration tome. This activity of arranging delicate objects into an organized system relaxes his mind, gives him a feeling of control over his universe. The tiny pictures are like a microcosm of the vast world, something he can handle much more easily than real life. This, along with the beer he produces himself, appears to accelerate his stress removal.

After a while, he put the album back into the shelf and eased the recliner to a lower angle. He switched the station on TV to a news program and tried to pay attention.

With its illusion of relevence, the packaged information gives him the belief that he is connected with what was 'going on' in the world. In a short time, he will tire of the chatter and enter a soporific phase.

She waited and watched. Sure enough, he was unconscious before the science segment started. At the first snore, she nodded knowlingly.

It was almost time to set up the experiment. But first, she allowed herself the luxury of watching a story about recent seismic disturbances in Antarctica. A group of humans in puffy red suits tottered around the icy wastes to set up their instruments. The voice-over speculated that the rumbles could could have something to do with a previously-dormant volcano coming to life again. Bismarck knew what was really causing the vibrations: the Avian city-spaceship under the ice was preparing for departure. How prudent of them.

"Human scientists!" her eyes shimmered with laughter. "I wonder if I will ever get used to that."