Something Magic This Way Comes (7 page)

“What do you mean, probably?”

“Well, the moon’s not full, and so—”

“Oh, be quiet. Why don’t you just go to the moon?”

Geoffrey laughed then, which was a lot meaner than if he’d done it at first. And he howled after Tim when he rode away. Tim thought about turning back and knocking some sense into his friend’s thick head, but he decided Geoffrey was too dumb for that to do much good. He kept riding.

Over the next few weeks, things almost got back to normal between them. Almost, because Geoffrey wouldn’t let the whole werewolf business alone. Every so often, he’d make panting noises in the hallway at school, or check his forehead with his hand, as if to see whether he was getting hairy. After a while, Tim stopped paying any attention to it. If Geoffrey wanted to be weird, that was his problem. They were still buddies.

“Two days of freedom,” Geoffrey said as school let out for the weekend. “Can you come over tomorrow night? We can play till late, and I’ve got a new attack figured out that’ll knock your ears off.”

“Don’t you wish,” Tim said. He waited for Geoffrey to make one of his stupid werewolf jokes and get it out of his system—the moon would be full again tomorrow night. But Geoffrey just stood there, waiting to see what he’d say. Maybe he was finally bored with werewolves.
About time
, Tim thought. He said, “Sure, I’ll come. About seven?”

“Yeah, okay. We’ll be done eating by then.”

Tim spent the night studying the game board. If Geoffrey was silly enough to tell him he had something new up his sleeve, Tim wouldn’t waste a chance to work on figuring out what it was. Maybe Geoffrey would go through the foothills this time, instead of around them. He was welcome to try. Tim was positive a few tanks posted in the right spots would smash that move before it got started.

Or maybe . . . Tim was still figuring angles when it got to be time for him to go to sleep. Whatever Geoffrey was thinking of pulling, he expected he could handle it. Geoffrey talked better than he played.

The moon was at Tim’s back as he rode over to Geoffrey’s the next night. That way he didn’t have to look at it, but he knew it was there, fat and round and gleaming, like a big gold coin in the sky. However bright it was, it didn’t light up the woods back of Geoffrey’s place. They stayed black and foreboding.

Anything might live there
, Tim thought nervously.

Anything
.

Stay cool
, he told himself as he pulled up in front of Geoffrey’s house.
Just because something
might
live
there doesn’t mean it
does. That line of reasoning would have been a lot more comforting if a howl hadn’t come just as he stepped up onto Geoffrey’s front porch.

He almost turned around and jumped back on his bike. But what if Geoffrey was watching through the curtains? He’d never let him forget it. Tim made himself walk toward Geoffrey’s door. Even if something dreadful did live in the woods, it hadn’t shown any signs of wanting to come out.

He rang the bell. Geoffrey took his time about answering.

“Come on,” Tim muttered. The thing in the woods howled again. It sounded closer. “Come
on
!”

Tim said out loud.

The door opened. A werewolf sprang out at him.

It had fur and claws and enormous yellow teeth, but it walked like a man. To his terrified eyes, it seemed nine feet tall. It howled right in his face. He screamed and ran.

The werewolf chased him. He could hear its feet pounding after him, could hear its vicious laughter.

Laughter? He was almost to his bike when that finally registered. He could imagine werewolves doing lots of things, but laughing wasn’t one of them.

He turned around. The werewolf wasn’t chasing him any more. It was leaning against the house, laughing its head off. As soon as Tim stopped being panicked, he recognized its voice. That was no werewolf—that was Geoffrey!

“You—you—you—” Tim looked for something bad enough to call Geoffrey. He couldn’t think of anything.

He jumped on him instead.

Geoffrey was bigger, but Tim was furious. Besides, Geoffrey had trouble seeing out of the eyeholes in his werewolf suit, and the gloves with claws on them would hardly fold into fists. On the other hand, the thick, shaggy fur on the suit helped pad him against Tim’s blows.

After a few seconds, Geoffrey didn’t even try to hit back. He was still laughing too hard. He just covered up as best he could. “I’m sorry, Tim,” he got out at last. “I really am. But you—ouch!—should have seen your face.”

“I ought to kick your—” But then Tim was laughing too. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t seem to help it. He and Geoffrey rolled on Geoffrey’s front lawn.

Tim finally sat up and picked a couple of blades of grass out of his hair. “Do you really have a new attack planned, or were you just luring me over so you could scare me to death?”

“Wait a second.” Geoffrey pulled off the fur and rubber werewolf head. “Whew. Stuffy in there. No, I don’t have anything new figured out. Why?”

“Because,” Tim said grimly, “now that I’m here, I’m gonna drive a stake right through your heart.”

“You don’t do that with werewolves,” Geoffrey said.

“You’re no werewolf. There’s no such thing as werewolves.” As if on cue, the thing in the woods let out another howl. Tim couldn’t have cared less. He glared at Geoffrey. “Right?”

“Right.” Geoffrey got up. “Come on. Let’s see how tough you really are.”

“Okay.” They went into Geoffrey’s house together.

The next Friday night, Geoffrey went to Tim’s to play their wargame and sleep over. This time, Geoffrey
had
worked out something new, and Tim had all he could do to hold his own. The game swayed back and forth. First one of them had the edge, then the other. Tim didn’t realize how long they’d been playing until his mom came into the room.

“Come on, boys,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

“Oh, Mom,” Tim said.

“Don’t you ‘Oh, Mom’ me.”

“A little longer?” he pleaded.

She shook her head. “The sun will be rising soon— time for young vampires to sleep. You two don’t want to be caught out of your coffins when it comes up, do you?”

Tim and Geoffrey sighed and exchanged resigned looks. “No,” they answered. What else could they say?

“Well, come on then. Please don’t make me wait around—don’t forget I have to have time to get into my own coffin after you do, and you still have to wash your faces and brush your fangs.”

“Oh, Mom,” Tim said again, but he knew it was hopeless. He got up and headed for the bathroom.

Geoffrey followed him.

I
T looked like the funeral procession of a giant.

The great, flat platform with its multitude of tank tracks, the largest ground vehicle ever built, crept inch by weary inch under the heat of the Florida sun. The Titan rocket that it was bearing, that lay across its whole length, quivered slightly with the vibrations of all the different engines and all the many sets of tracks and wheels; faint but noticeable waves ran up and down the mighty vessel with its movement. Even a statue this big would have swayed with the wind.

A scattered remnant of people watched from all sides as the spaceship crawled not toward, but away from the launchpad. Camera crews from the various networks and newspapers worked in cliquish bands; many set up their equipment directly in front of the huge truck. This juggernaut was definitely moving slowly enough to avoid. The others, those actually dressed in work clothes, milled about idly and uneasily, their work done, or rather, left forever unfinished.

They didn’t look at each other, or if they did, they spoke briefly and then parted, as if embarrassed by the one metaphor that had occurred to them all.

In front of one of the old blast bunkers, a young woman and a middle-aged man sat feeding a milling band of cats from a small bag of treats.

“Had this party once,” the man said. “We catered this six-foot sandwich with everything, nobody there keeping kosher, you know, and the only place to put it was on this table that had to be illuminated by this one spotlight recessed into the ceiling, no other lamps nearby. And just as I’m thinking, jeez this is creepy, somebody says, hey, everybody, come look at the spread. So they come in, and just naturally form a line and walk past. The viewing of the sandwich. No flowers, please, donations can be made to Subway.”

“Well, it is a funeral, of course,” the woman said.

She looked down quickly, as if searching for a distraction.

A huge black cat batted and hissed to either side, and jumped for the bag.

“Hey, greedy gut, there’s enough for everybody.”

She looked at the assembly of cats. “Well, maybe not.” There were at least two dozen cats converging on them from all directions, some circling warily around the rocket; black, white, orange, gray, calico, tortoiseshell, long hairs, short hairs. They strutted with great aplomb, and there was no telling the long-feral from those who were only recently lost or abandoned.

“Where do you think they all came from?” the man asked.

She shook her blond head. “Nobody really knows. Dogs are just wolves that’ve got used to cadging meals, but cats were obviously developed, deliberately and carefully bred. But from what, we don’t know. Or why.” She handed the bag of treats to the man and pulled the big tomcat onto her lap. The cat made it clear he would have preferred to follow the treats.

“The Egyptians did it, that’s the old story, though it’s doubtful it happened recently. There’s something knowing about cats, and something—lost, exiled.” She stroked the black cat’s muzzle, to approving purrs.

“As if they remember who created them, and why, and only people have forgotten.”

The man leaned a bit too far forward during this, listed just a bit too raptly. “I meant these cats in particular,” he said, smiling.

She laughed in embarrassment. “From ship’s cats, if you’re to believe the locals. Unwanted kittens tossed out onto the docks after voyages, no more cats needed here, thank you. Spread out and went to work on the rats amid the docks. Moved into the gantries when they started launching rockets here. They seem to know the routine. You never find dead cats around the launch pads after the takeoffs.”

“They’ll be even safer from now on,” the man said quietly. “And lots of rats to eat. It’ll look like some damned J. G. Ballard story, with the jungle growing in over the wreck of the space age.”

“Might have been different if the space age hadn’t been run by governments. Leave the risks to anyone willing to take them, the rewards to anyone—”

“Couldn’t have that, my dear.” He was smiling, rather bitterly. “Daddy knows best. Daddy blows up cities, Daddy culls our paycheck. If we didn’t fight for our liberty to explore, we didn’t deserve it.” He looked out over the water. “You can’t get home by the old highway. It’s falling into the ocean. There isn’t a major infrastructure that isn’t rotting. All our money gets taken to build weapons with nobody to use them against. Money to keep people from working. To keep farmers from growing cheap food. To keep kids from learning how to read.” There was now fear in his voice. “Tens of millions of people are waiting for their welfare checks, and soon some of those checks aren’t going to get written.”

They watched the rocket slowly inch into the enormous hangar where it would be scrapped, though the price of metal wouldn’t pay for the disposal procedures currently required to dispose of the fuel.

“We still have our own space station on the drawing boards,” the woman said.

“Where it’ll stay,” the man said, emphatically. “We’ve got the old, worn-out shuttles, not practical to repair. We’ve got the Clipper Ship, the most expensive of all those cases of the wrong design getting chosen. The Russians used up all their big rockets rescuing the crew when their station fell apart, and our space program for years was based on running back and forth to that one foreign station. All the deep solar system manned probes were canceled because they were plutonium powered. There’s nothing left.”

They watched a little boy feeding the cats, part of the small crowd of civilians who had showed up. He soon used the empty bag to gather mementos from the tarmac. Odd bits of metal that might have come from one of the ships that sailed the moon. Someone shooed him off with the last of the ground crew and the cameramen who were packing it in anyway, an overcast evening, no dramatic shots left.

“Come on,” she croaked. “Maybe our great grandchildren won’t just wait around for some asteroid or ice age to wipe us out.” She walked away, her steps uneven, as if she were drunk.

The man stood, then reached down to pat a big orange cat. “Did you want to be the ship’s cat, Pixie?” he said softly. “See what it’s like to be weightless? Goodbye, boy,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be back.”

The last of the watchmen disappeared in the distance.

There were offices where they could sit out their watch; no one wanted to wander the ruins of Cape Canaveral in the dark. The cats, though, all came out at night.

On most nights, the majority of the cats would be sleeping, but tonight, the desolate plain of the Cape was alive with cats; there couldn’t be a single feral cat asleep and not present within ten miles. They were all here. The whole Cape seemed to move in a solid, furry, elegant mass. The great feline tide slowly converged on the center of the Cape and swirled in pools around the abandoned gantries, around the bare launchpads.

Suddenly they were still. Ten thousand small heads turned upward, twenty thousand slit eyes stared at the sky. Ten thousand fanged mouths opened.

Few people within five miles of the Cape remained asleep. Many called the police at the howling, convinced that the space program had not been canceled soon enough and that the great sound they were hearing was the shriek of some plutonium-bearing deathstar bearing in on their homes.

But one person somehow knew. A young boy, in a trailer home parked in a cheap lot with a view of the launch site, left off crying himself to sleep and sat bolt upright. He went to the little dingy window, kicking aside the catfood bag full of rocket scraps, and stared out the window through the jungle of spaceship models on his scratched up dresser. His sharp mind, used to fractioning some massive impossibility into its individual components, gauged the tone and pitch of the sound and divided its volume into the likely volume of its individual contributors. And he wondered.