Seize the Night

“Well,” Bobby said, “does this ball-bearing mousetrap think we have some chance of finding Orson and the kids, then getting back here alive — any chance at all?”

With his left hand, Roosevelt gently scratched the cat behind the ears and stroked its head. “He says there’s always a chance. Nothing is hopeless.”

“Fifty-fifty chance?” I wondered.

Roosevelt laughed softly. “Mr. Mungojerrie says he isn’t a bookmaker.”

“So,” Bobby said, “the worst that can happen is that we all go back there to Wyvern and we all die, get shredded and processed and packaged as lunchmeat. Seems to me, that’s always been the worst that could happen, so nothing’s changed. I’m up for it.”

“Me too,” said Sasha.

Obviously still speaking for the cat, which purred and leaned into his hand as he petted it, Roosevelt said, “What if these kids and Orson are somewhere we can’t go? What if they’re in The Hole?”

Bobby said, “Rule of thumb: Anyplace called The Hole can’t be a good place.”

“That’s what they call the genetic research facility.”

“They?” I asked.

“The people who work in it. They call it The Hole because…” Roosevelt tilted his head, as if listening to a small quiet voice. “Well, one reason, I guess, is that it’s deep underground.”

I found myself addressing the cat. “Then it’s still functioning out there in Wyvern somewhere, like we’ve suspected, still staffed and operational?”

“Yes,” Roosevelt said, stroking the cat under the chin. “Self-contained…secretly resupplied every six months.”

“Do you know where?” I asked Mungojerrie.

“Yes. He knows. It’s where he’s from, after all,” Roosevelt said, sitting back in his chair. “It’s where he escaped from…that night. But if Orson and the children are in The Hole, there’s no way to get to them or get them out.”

We all brooded in silence.

Mungojerrie raised one forepaw and began to lick it, grooming his fur. He was smart, he knew things, he could track, he was our best hope, but he was also a cat. We were entirely reliant on a comrade who, at any moment, might cough up a hairball. The only reason I didn’t laugh or cry was that I couldn’t do both at once, which was what I felt like doing.

Finally Sasha put the issue behind us: “If we have no chance of getting them out of The Hole, then we’ve just got to hope they’re somewhere else in Wyvern.”

“The big question is still the same,” I said to Roosevelt. “Is Mungojerrie willing to help?”

The cat had met Orson only once, aboard the Nostromo, on the night my father died. They had seemed to like each other. They shared, as well, an origin in the intelligence-enhancement research at Wyvern, and if my mother was in some sense Orson’s mother, because he was a product of her heart and mind, then this cat might feel that she was his lost mother, too, his creator, to whom he was in debt for his life.

I sat with my hands clasped tightly around my empty coffee cup, desperate to believe that Mungojerrie would not let us down, mentally listing reasons why the cat must agree to join our rescue effort, preparing to make the incredible and shameless claim that he was my spiritual brother, Mungojerrie Snow, just as Orson was my brother, that this was a family crisis to which he had a special obligation, and I couldn’t help but remember what Bobby had said about this brave new smart-animal world being like a Donald Duck cartoon that for all its wackiness is nevertheless rife with fearsome physical and moral and spiritual consequences.

When Roosevelt said, “Yes,” I was so feverishly structuring my argument against an expected rejection of our request that I didn’t immediately realize what our friend the animal communicator had communicated.

“Yes, we’ll help,” Roosevelt explained in response to my dumb blinking.

We passed smiles, like a plate of crustulorum, around the table.

Then Sasha cocked her head at Roosevelt and said, “‘We’?”

“You’ll need me along to interpret.”

Bobby said, “The mungo man leads, we follow.”

“It might not be that simple,” Roosevelt said.

Sasha shook her head. “We can’t ask you to do this.”

Taking her hand, patting it, Roosevelt smiled. “Daughter, you aren’t asking. I’m insisting. Orson is my friend, too. All these children are the children of my neighbors.”

“‘Lots of death,’” I quoted again.

Roosevelt counter-quoted the feline’s previous equivocation: “Nothing’s hopeless.”

“Cats know things,” I said.

Now he quoted me: “Not everything.”

Mungojerrie looked at us as if to say, Cats know.

I felt that neither the cat nor Roosevelt should finally commit to this dangerous enterprise without first hearing Leland Delacroix’s disjointed, incomplete, at times incoherent, yet compelling final testament. Whether or not we found Orson and the kids, we would return to that cocoon-infested bungalow at the end of the night to set a purging fire, but I was convinced that during our search, we would encounter other consequences of the Mystery Train project, some potentially lethal. If, after hearing Delacroix’s bizarre tale told in his tortured voice, Roosevelt and Mungojerrie reconsidered their commitment to accompany us, I would still try to persuade them to help, but I’d feel that I had been fair with them.

We adjourned to the dining room, where I replayed the original cassette.

The last words on the tape were spoken in that unknown language, and when they faded, Bobby said, “The tune’s good, but it doesn’t have a beat you can dance to.”

Roosevelt stood in front of the tape player, frowning. “When do we leave?”

“First dark,” I said.

“Which is coming down fast,” Sasha said, glancing at the window blinds, against which the press of daylight was less insistent than when Bobby and I had first listened to Delacroix.

“If those kids are in Wyvern,” Roosevelt said, “they might as well be at the gates of Hell. No matter what the risk, we can’t leave them there.”

He was wearing a black crewneck sweater, black chinos, and black Rockports, as though he had anticipated the covert action that lay ahead of us. In spite of his formidable size and rough-hewn features, he looked like a priest, like an exorcist grimly prepared to cast out devils.

Turning to Mungojerrie, who was sitting on Sasha’s composition table, I said, “And what about you?”

Roosevelt crouched by the table, eye-to-eye with the cat.

To me, Mungojerrie appeared to be supremely disinterested, much like any cat when it’s trying to live up to its species’ reputation for cool indifference, mystery, and unearthly wisdom.

Apparently, Roosevelt was viewing this gray mouser through a lens I didn’t possess or was listening to him on a frequency beyond my range of hearing, because he reported, “Mungojerrie says two things. First, he will find Orson and the kids if they’re anywhere in Wyvern, no matter what the risks, no matter what it takes.”

Relieved, grateful to the cat for its courage, I said, “And number two?”

“He needs to go outside and pee.”

21

At twilight, I went into my bathroom, failed to throw up though the urge was there, and instead washed my face twice, once with hot water, once with cold. Then I sat on the edge of the bathtub, clasped my hands on my knees, and endured a siege of the shakes as violent as those that reportedly accompany malaria or an IRS audit.

I wasn’t afraid that the mission into Fort Wyvern would result in the storm of death that our prescient pussycat had predicted — or that I would perish in the night ahead. Rather, I was afraid that I would live through