Mehitobel here, reporting for a missing G. Nat URL. I have no idea what's happened! I haven't heard a word from Nat since he was about to hitchhike a ride to Denver for a big Microsoft TV meeting with AT&T, and I fear the worst.

We've marshaled all of our forces to try to find him, but I don't have much hope they'll be successful. One housefly looks pretty much like another, and if Nat were free and able to be found, he'd also be able to communicate with us. I've told archie to hatch out Agent 008 and start his training, and meanwhile, we can only hope and pray that Nat is OK and has just been locked up somewhere away from the phone or PC.

I was preoccupied with our latest arrival, so it took several days before I began to realize that Nat was 'way overdue in his reporting. archie was out checking out the dumpster for dinner -- our current financial situation has us back to eating whatever we can find, rather than ordering from Home Grocer as we did in our halcyon days last year. Of course, Home Grocer disappeared, too, merged into WebVan, which then began to shut down service areas as it ran short of cash. Times are tough all over, but our local dumpster is behind a coffee shop that doesn't have any business from the high-tech world, so at least it's still full of half-eaten hash browns and fried chicken.

archie came running in all excited. "'bel, there's another cat foraging in the dumpster!" he told me. "i told him that this was our territory and he told me to get lost or he'd turn me into a roachburger."

I immediately puffed my fur up and rumbled a growl. "An intruder!" I hissed. "I'll teach him to respect another cat's turf!"

I stalked out to the dumpster with archie tagging along a safe distance behind. At first, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary, but then there was a rummaging noise and a plastic garbage bag tipped over the side and fell on the ground, bursting open. A big orange tabby with even bigger paws appeared at the edge of the dumpster and then leaped down and began to paw through the contents of the bag.

He noticed me. "Well, hello," he said. "You're a pretty thing. Like to join me for dinner? There's plenty here."

I puffed up even further and snarled. "This is my dumpster!" I hissed at him. "My assistant already told you that, so get going. Go find your own place to eat."

He looked at me and twitched his tail with amusement. "Oh, was that cockroach your assistant?" he laughed. "Yes, he said that it belonged to 'us,' but he didn't mention that the 'us' included a pretty thing like you. Are you foxy?"

"I have NO interest in flirting with you," I growled, "and no, I am NOT foxy. That's one thing I don't have to worry about any more."

He laughed. "Then I guess it's not your dumpster after all," he said. He pointed to the outside of the dumpster. "It says 'Foxy's Coffee Shop,' so I guess I can stay and eat until somebody foxy shows up to claim it."

"Don't bandy words with me, boy!" I hissed. "I'll rip you to shreds!" I swatted at him, just to give him a taste. He jumped back out of reach.

"You don't want to fight with me," he warned. "I'm a desperate fugitive, and I've got more claws than you have." He held up a paw, and I saw why they were so large -- he had an extra toe, and an extra claw, on each paw.

"'bel! pssst 'bel!" archie ran over, being careful to keep me between himself and the orange tabby. "'bel, i think that's the cat i saw on the news. he is a fugitive, and there's a reward, too. we could turn him in and collect the reward. that would get rid of him and also give us some money!"

"Yahhh, a measly two hundred bucks," spat the cat. "If you'd sell out a fellow feline in trouble for that amount of money, then you're not only rats, you're cheap ones, too! Go ahead -- make the call! I'll be long gone before anyone gets here, and I'll spread the word about your dumpster, too. You'll have a lot more to worry about than just one freedom-loving escapee looking for a quick bite before he moves on."

I lashed my tail. "No, I'm not going to report you," I told him, "and if you'd asked nicely, rather than threatening my assistant, I might have even asked you to dinner. What's your story? How come there's a price on your head? If there's a reward, I'd think that you have a human that misses you and wants you to come home. Then you wouldn't have to eat out of dumpsters."

"Misses me? Not hardly," he said, ripping some meat off a half-eaten drumstick and stuffing it into his mouth. "Embarrassed is more like it. I was gone for weeks before my human even knew about it. He'd shipped me off across the country to get rid of me, but I didn't like the place he sent me, so I split. Then some reporter asked about me, and then there was all this fake shock and distress that I'd disappeared. That's how I came to have a price on my head."

"you're ernie! i knew it!" archie danced a little jog of satisfaction. "you're the president's cat!"

"The president's ex-cat, the son of a bitch," snarled Ernie. "He used me during the campaign to appeal to the cat-lovers' vote, but did he remember who got him in the White House? Did it ever occur to him that all it took was a few cat lovers in Florida to make the difference? Not hardly -- he won, and it immediately went to his head, and then all he wanted was that damned dog that sucks up to him and tells him he's perfect."

"I read about you," I told him. "He sent you out here to a friend in California."

"Yeah, he told the press that it was because I would scratch the furniture in the White House, the lying ...." he searched for a word, and then spat "... politician! The real reason was that I wouldn't act like a dog, and that's what he wants -- someone to worship him, not a cat that knows he's a just another human, flawed like all of them. And his friends didn't want a cat, they just wanted to be able to show off to their friends that they were important because the president had sent me to them. I got out of there as soon as I saw an open door."

"Yes, the same thing happened to Socks," I told him. "He got to live in the White House, though, and was shown off as 'First Cat,' but he got dumped off for a dog, too, as soon as the photo opportunities ended. So now you're a hunted fugitive." I thought for a moment. "You could stay with us for awhile, if you need a place to lie low. We're eating out of the dumpster these days, but we do have a dry place to sleep."

Just then it started to rain. We go for months without a drop in southern California, but when the winter storms start, we can catch up on what we've missed in just a few hours. "I'll take you up on that!" he shouted as the patter of drops turned into a roar, and he followed as I grabbed archie and made a dash for the house.

"Wow! Look at all the tech gear!" he exclaimed, as he sniffed around the main room getting his bearings. "Can I do email from here?"

"Help yourself," I offered, "as long as it's not spam or something that's going to get us in trouble. You don't want to draw attention to yourself," I pointed out.

"Heh! No problem," he laughed. "I'm a master at hiding my tracks online. I even know Dubya's accounts and passwords -- the doofus never suspected that I was in his email, and I just deleted anything I didn't think he should see. I'll show you...."

He turned to the keyboard, adjusted some configurations, and typed a couple of lines. "Welcome! You've got mail!" chirped the familiar AOL voice. He typed a couple more entries, and then turned with a grin. "See? Told you so!"

"The president uses AOL?" I said incredulously. I looked at the screen to see an email titled "RE: Now what?"

>Daddy, the Chinese are holding 
>one of our spy planes and 
>our crew. What should I do? 
>W
W, I'm trying to stay retired. 
Ask Cheney or Baker --
that's why I sent them to you. 
And don't send stuff like this 
in email. It might get out. 
GHWB

"Wow! This is really real? Nat's going to want to meet you when he gets back -- he's always looking for new tricks so that he can get his information electronically. He hates to travel."

"Nat? Another cat?"

I explained to him about Nat, and that he was on his way to Denver for a meeting, and then was going to try to head on to the DC area to get back inside AOL. "I'm not sure when he'll actually be back here physically," I told him, "but he'll be checking in within the next day or two."

The days went by and I learned a lot from Ernie. He snooped around on the Net and was able to hook up with Socks, who had been given to an ex-White House secretary and was able to use her home PC when she was at work. It didn't matter that Socks' human has been a Democrat and Ernie's a Republican. "Politics has no meaning to cats," Ernie explained. "Dogs are very partisan, and they fiercely defend the politics of their owners, even though they don't have a clue what it means. But cats are above such things."

It was when Socks sent an email and asked if Nat could drop by when he was in DC that I realized that he was 'way overdue in reporting in. "He might not have been able to get to a PC, but surely he could have called," I worried. "I haven't heard a word since he was about to tuck himself in someone's briefcase. Oh no ... I hope he's OK... I should have sent him on the plane and charged it to a credit card, and then just worried about paying later."

I started grooming furiously, something I always do when I'm worried or in doubt.

"Nothing you can do about what you might have done," said Ernie, philosophically. "Let me scout around through my contacts and see if I can find anything out."

archie also pitched in, messaging the minions that he had at Microsoft and also at AOL. He even messaged Deep_Code and the UPS driver. But no one had seen Nat, or heard anything about him. "at least that means he wasn't caught," archie reassured me. "i'm sure that they'd be dancing in the aisles in mountain view if they'd captured him.... or worse."

"That still doesn't mean he's safe," I responded, gnawing at an imaginary flea and then washing to spot for the fifteenth time. "If he got in a briefcase, someone might have dropped a book on top of him, or he might have gotten in the wrong briefcase, been shut up ever since, and starved to death. I don't even know if he ever got out of Seattle -- he could be there, or in Denver, and I wouldn't begin to know where or how to look for him."

"we can put out an all-point bulletins and ask everyone we know," said archie, "and maybe you can even ask the column readers to look for him."

"I'll do that," I promised, "and you should let everyone on your contact lists know, too. You too, Ernie -- who knows where he might be. But I don't have much hope they'll spot him -- one housefly looks pretty much like all the others, which is why he makes such a good spy. And if Nat were free, I know he'd contact us."

"what else can we do?" asked archie, resignedly. "hatch another fly?"

"Let's wait another few days," I said, hoping to postpone the conclusion that I worried was inevitable -- that Nat had met an untimely end in the course of his duties. It just wasn't something that I was prepared to face.

archie reminded me again a few days later. "bel, i don't want to worry you, but we still haven't heard anything from nat, and it takes some time to hatch and train a new agent. don't you think we ought to be prepared, just in case?"

It was with a heavy heart that I told archie to go ahead and start warming up the egg that would be Agent 008. "In fact, we'd better warm up 009 and 010 too," I told him. "Remember that we had had six before Nat that weren't very successful. He was ... is truly an exceptional housefly." I sniffed away a tear and began to groom again.

The eggs should hatch by tomorrow, but we haven't given up hope that we'll hear from Nat, and archie and Ernie are furiously pounding the keyboards at all hours, touching every online source they know in the search for him. I contacted one of my friends at the FBI, but he didn't offer any hope. "We can't even begin to catch the criminals online, and they leave an electronic trail," he told me. "I wouldn't even know where to begin to look for a housefly, and I'm not going to put my career in jeopardy by mentioning it to anyone else."

So in next time, please keep your eyes open for Nat, and let us know at buzz@net4tv.com if you see any sign of him, or come across any gossip, tidbits, or tasty treats that he might like. He looks just like any other housefly, but if you've got a WebTV or a PC, please let us know if you see a fly trying to send email.