dry. The ..wind had accelerated again. Sheer curtains of snow rippkd
and billowed across the black night. After his mom warned him against
allowing Falstaff to sleep on the bed, after good-nigh kisses, after
his dad told him to keep the dog on the floor, after the lights were
turned out--except for the red night-light-- after his mom warned him
again about Falstaff, after the hall door was pulled half shut, after
enough time had passed to be sure neither his mom nor his dad was going
to sneak back to check on the retriever, Toby sat up in his alcove bed,
patted the mattress invitingly, and whispered, 'Here, Falstaff. Come
on, fella.'
The dog was busily sniffing along the base of the door at the head of
the back stairs. He whined softly, unhappily. 'Falstaff,' Toby said,
louder than before.
'Here, boy, come here, hurry.' Falstaff glanced at him, then put his
snout to the doorsill again, snuffling and whimpering at the same
time.
'Come here--we'll play covered wagon or spaceship or anything you
want,' Toby wheedled. Suddenly getting a whiff of something that
displeased him, the dog sneezed twice, shook his head so hard that his
long ears flapped loudly, and backed away from the door.
'Falstaff!' Toby hissed. Finally the dog padded to him through the
red light-which was the same kind of light you'd find in the engine
room of a starship, or around a campfire out on a lonely prairie where
the wagon train had stopped for the night, or in a freaky temple in
India where you and Indiana Jones were sneaking around and trying to
avoid a bunch of weird guys who worshiped Kali, Goddess of Death.
With a little encouragement, Falstaff jumped onto the bed. 'Good
dog.'
Toby hugged him. Then in hushed, conspiratorial tones: 'Okay, see,
we're in a rebel starfighter on the edge of the Crab Nebula. I'm the
captain and ace Inner You're a super-superintelligent alien from a
lanet that circles the Dog Star, plus you're psychic, you can read the
thoughts of the bad aliens in their starfighters, trying to blow us
apart, which they I don't know. They don't know.
They're crabs with sort of hands instead of just claws, see, like this,
crab hands, rack-scrick-scrack-scrick, and they're mean, really really
vicious. Like after their mother gives birth to eight or ten of them
at once, they turn on her and eat her alive! You know? Crunch her
up.
Feed on her. Mean as it, these guys. You know what I'm saying?'
Falstaff regarded him face-to-face throughout the briefing and then
licked him from chin to nose when he finished. 'All right, you know!
Okay, let's see if we can ditch these crab geeks by going into
hyperspace--jump across half the galaxy and leave em in the dust. So
what's the first thing we got to do? Yeah, right, put up e
cosmic-radiation shields so we don't wind up full of pinholes from
traveling faster than all the subatomic particles we'll be passing
through.' He switched on the reading lamp above his headboard, reached
to the draw cord- -'Shields up!'--and pulled the privacy drapes all the
