I believe that my mom brought Orson to me—for whatever reason—after falsifying the lab records to account for him as a dead puppy. Perhaps Orson fears being taken by force back to the lab if anyone realizes that he is one of their successes. Whatever the reason, he more often than not plays his I’m-just-a-good-old-dumb-dog game when he’s around anyone other than Bobby, Sasha, and me. While he doesn’t insult Roosevelt with that deception, Orson remains as taciturn as a turnip, albeit a turnip with a tail.
Now, sitting on a chair, raised on a pair of pillows, daintily eating milk-soaked bits of cinnamon bun, Mungojerrie made no pretense to being an ordinary cat. As we recounted the events of the past twelve hours, his green eyes followed the conversation with interest. When he heard something that surprised him, his eyes widened, and when he was shocked, he either twitched or pulled his head back and cocked it as if to say, Man, have you been guzzling catnip cocktails, or are you just a congenital bullshit machine? Sometimes he grinned, which was usually when Bobby and I had to reveal something stupid that we had said or done; it seemed to me that Mungojerrie grinned way too often. Bobby’s description of what we glimpsed through the faceplate of Hodgson’s bio-secure suit seemed to put the feline off his feed for a few minutes, but he was first and foremost a cat, with a cat’s appetite and curiosity, so before we finished the tale, he had solicited and received from Roosevelt another saucer of milk-soaked crustulorum.
“We’re convinced the missing kids and Orson are somewhere in Wyvern,” I said to Roosevelt Frost, because I still felt weird about directly addressing the cat, which is peculiar, considering that I directly address Orson all the time. “But the place is just too big to search. We need a tracker.”
Bobby said, “Since we don’t own a reconnaissance satellite, don’t know a good Indian scout, and don’t keep a bloodhound hanging in the closet for these emergencies…”
The three of us looked expectantly at Mungojerrie.
The cat met my eyes, then Bobby’s, then Sasha’s. He closed his eyes for a moment, as if pondering our implied request, then finally turned his attention to Roosevelt.
The gentle giant pushed aside his plate and coffee cup, leaned forward, propped his right elbow on the table, rested his chin on his fist, and locked gazes with our whiskered guest.
After a minute, during which I tried unsuccessfully to recall the melody of the movie theme song from That Darn Cat, Roosevelt said, “Mungojerrie wonders if you were listening to what I said when we first arrived.”
“‘Lots of death,’” I quoted.
“Whose?” Sasha asked.
“Ours.”
“Who says?”
I pointed at the cat.
Mungojerrie managed to look like a swami.
Bobby said, “We know there’s danger.”
“He’s not just saying it’s dangerous,” Roosevelt explained. “It’s a…sort of prediction.”
We sat in silence, staring at the cat, who favored us with an expression as inscrutable as that on the cats in Egyptian tomb sculptures, and eventually Sasha said, “You mean Mungojerrie’s clairvoyant?”
“No,” Roosevelt said.
“Then what do you mean?”
Still staring at the cat, who was now gazing solemnly at one of the candles as if reading the future in the sinuous dance of the flame upon the wick, Roosevelt said, “Cats know things.”
Bobby, Sasha, and I looked at one another, but none of us could provide enlightenment.
“What, exactly, do cats know?” Sasha asked.
“Things,” Roosevelt said.
“How?”
“By knowing.”
“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Bobby asked rhetorically.
The cat twitched its ears and looked at him as if to say, Now you understand.
“This cat’s been reading too much Deepak Chopra,” Bobby said.
Frustration pinched Sasha’s face and voice. “Roosevelt?”
When he shrugged his massive shoulders, I could almost feel the cubic yard of displaced air wafting across the table. “Daughter, this animal-communication business isn’t always like talking on the telephone. Sometimes it is just exactly as clear as that. But then sometimes there are…ambiguities.”
“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 the night but come home without the kids and Orson, or that I would fail in the rescue and also lose Sasha and Bobby and Roosevelt and Mungojerrie in the process.
With friends, this is a cool world; without friends, it would be unbearably cold.
I washed my face a third time, peed to show my solidarity with Mungojerrie, washed my hands (because my mom, would-be destroyer of the world, had taught me hygiene), and returned to the kitchen, where the others were waiting for me. I suspect that, with the exception of the cat, they had been through a ritual similar to mine, in other bathrooms.
Because Sasha—like Bobby—had noticed fishy types all over town and believed something major was soon to go down, she had anticipated that our house would be under surveillance by the authorities, if for no other reason than our connection with Lilly Wing. Therefore, she had arranged for us to meet Doogie Sassman at a rendezvous point far beyond prying eyes.
Sasha’s Explorer, Bobby’s Jeep, and Roosevelt’s Mercedes were parked in front of the house. We would surely be tailed if we drove off in any of them; we would have to leave on foot and with considerable stealth.
Behind our house, beyond our backyard, is a hard-packed dirt footpath that separates our property and those flanking it from a grove of red-gum eucalyptus trees and, beyond the trees, the golf course of the Moonlight Bay Inn and Country Club, of which Roosevelt is half-owner. Surveillance probably extended to the footpath, and there was no chance that the watchers assigned to us could be bought off with invitations to Sunday brunch at the country club.
The plan was to travel backyard to backyard for a few blocks, risking the attention of neighbors and their dogs, until we were beyond the purview of any surveillance teams that might have been assigned to us.
Because of Manuel’s confiscation celebration, Sasha possessed the only weapon, her .38 Chiefs Special, and two speedloaders in a dump pouch. She wouldn’t relinquish the piece to Roosevelt or Bobby, or to me—not even to Mungojerrie. She announced, in a tone brooking no argument, that she would take the risky point position.
“Where do we meet up with Doogie?” I asked as Bobby stowed the sole remaining cinnamon bun in the refrigerator and I finished stacking cups and saucers in the sink.
“Out along Haddenbeck Road,” Sasha said, “just beyond Crow Hill.”
“Crow Hill,” Bobby said. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
Sasha didn’t get it for a moment. Then she did: “It’s just a place. How could it have anything to do with those drawings?”