Пол Андерсон - Orbit 1

That’s enough for a sample. Try them for size. If they fit, Welcome to the Club. The password is May Day and don’t say you weren’t warned. Another thing, pay attention to what your wee ones jabber at you when you find the sink stopped up, the ceiling leaking milk, and the baby licking the flyswatter. Let me be a lesson to you. I didn’t listen and now I wear a size Gulp dress and my house is shrinking. Your motto should be watch out, lest thy hoe handle uprise and whack thee in thy teeth.

If you’re the It Can’t Happen Here type, get down on the kitchen floor where everything else usually is and hunt for eeny-weeny footprints. Act at once. The neck you save may be your own, honey. I learned the hard way, with a stray roller skate as my Cinderella slipper (a typical loolie ploy) and an ironing board for a partner. Recognizing this prone situation as a seldom-come-by pooprtunity [This is not a typographical error.], I rested a spell. Which is how I saw the footprints.

When I was a new bride I would’ve thought mice but I have realized that mice ain’t much, comparatively speaking, and that eeeeek don’t solve nuthin’. Therefore I merely shifted onto one elbow and ruminated hmmmmm. If I dipped snuff I’d’ve dipped some.

The prints were too large for mice. And they all had fairly human-looking toes, which is how human toes generally look. Was a lost doll walking around the neighborhood trying to beam in on Ma-Ma? Considering what-all dolls do nowadays this idea wasn’t far-fetched. Could it be a baby robot, for that matter? Or, a ditto Martian, a very likely possibility. Perhaps it was loolies. Maybe it was—

… loolies…

! and? Suppose loolies weren’t scapegoats invented by our imaginative progeny? Suppose loolies were the truth? It was idiotic to suppose that loolies had painted our car wheels, when I had collared the syndicate white-handed, but suppose loolies were the Masterminds. Lor’ luv a duck…

A succession of past events blipped across my inner eye, like the fruit on a slot machine. The Great Sugar Fight and Toothpaste Squirt. The company’s-coming, big, old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner which disinterested the company mightily when milord, probing the golden-brown-turkey-dripping-with-delicious-goodness, came up with a soggy wool-mitten. The day our offspring sneaked their scraggly, half-grown, spook-footed, purple Easter chickens into the car trunk and we didn’t discover the witless, scrawky, whap-flapthings until we arrived at our destination, a downtown hotel in Louisville. The day they built the snowman, indoors. The day I was sure I had erected an impregnable barricade to defend a freshly varnished floor when here they came, huffing and puffing, to show me how thistledown worked.

And what about like weevils in the flour. Cobwebs overnight. Holes in socks. All those long lost, tenor, s’wahoo ol’ buddy buddies milord finds at Homecomings, and places. And all those ol’ midnight invitations for beckon and eggsh at our housh while I weigh my chances of beating the rap on a murder charge.

Y’know something? An all-woman jury would be a cinch. They wouldn’t bother to leave the box. They would simply continue to knit one, purl two as they murmured in unison, “Justifiable homicide,” Their modish foreman (not a grease spot on her, not one bead of sweat) would stand and say, “Your Honor… we find the defendant. . NOT THE LEAST BITTY BIT GUILTY.” Pandemonium. Judge pounds gavel, to no avail. Jury pounds prosecuting attorney. Snake dance forms. . flambeaux. . floats. . bunting. . banners. . loudspeakers. . Allison Rice for President! A prominent (size 42, D cup) society matron climbs up on the Helen Hayes Theatre marquee and does the split. Huz-zah! Huzzah! Wall Street and ticker tape. . Pennsylvania Avenue… the Inaugural Ball. . and there, beside me, in the spotlight, my family. Milord has just met a long-lost, tattooed buddy. Our children have been eating dirt. The smallest is holding a one-eyed alley cat with a bad case of mange. They are showing a prominent society matron a bottle of spit they’ve saved up. They espy Lady Bird (a Mrs. Lady Bird Jackson who is famous for her salt-rising bread) and wave and yell for her to come watch how they can piddle-puddle through a knothole. I confront them with the footprints. Loolies? My voice booms over the microphones. There is a skitter of amusement. A widening sputter of mirth. A surge, a roar of jelly-belly laughter. I am horrified to discover I am the sole lady present who is not wearing a topless evening gown. The scene mercifully fades. .

Let’s see. Where—

Ah, there you are. What are you doing way over there? Never mind, let us hurry on, past milord’s theory that the loolie prints could’ve been made by any of the following: turtles, hamsters, cats, kittens, dogs, frogs, hoptoads, rabbits, a salamander with a short tail, or large mice. I make no comment except to remark that at least he doesn’t think they’re mine.

As traps are taboo (too many fingers and toes— 260½ to be exact, counting everyone) I left nightly saucers of milk for the loolies. Cookies. The latest issue of House Beautiful. I tried appealing to their sense of fun with a rubber lizard and a Hallowe’en nose. Please be informed that hope will get you nowhere. Our cat produced a litter of seven female kittens, and litter is the one right word, believe me. Our dog had an encounter with a skunk and, subsequently, terrorized the whole neighborhood by acting like an animal out of Mythical Beasts. We went through measles, mumps, green apples, a rash of dents and blown fuses and more baby rabbits and vacuum cleaner trouble. And have you ever, when getting the wash ready, emptied a child’s sock and found yourself holding something terrible with a bite out of it?

Next, I “hexed.” If you must know, I wrote “loolies” in pig Latin on the inside of a peanut-butter sandwich and ate it for lunch. It tasted clean, and good, and true. Yet, within twenty-four hours I was back on the s’wahoo ol’ buddy circuit, and’ there was a whole quartet of the aforementioned s.o.b.s. and one of them had a guitar. If you think I put up with this hootenanny nonsense you win first prize, two pounds of beckon and a dozen eggsh.

And then, out of the Slough of Despond, came the midnight storm. It was a doozy. One of those torrential, lightning-ripped, rumble, blam things, black as cats one second and livid fluroescent green the next. Did the children rouse, frightened and seeking comfort? No. Did milord awaken to batten down the hatches and protect his nearest and dearest from loose electricity? No. ‘Twas I, Minnie the Mermaid (no Ho-Daddy, she!) who crossed the Rubicon without so much as a flashlight (the battery was dead).

Oh, pioneers! I used to think I’d have made a splendid settler woman. Brave. Intrepid. Dauntless. The Indians would have named me Little Bright Rattlesnake. I know, now, I’d have been a dud. For, when I pussyfooted into the bathroom for a towel to mop wet windowsills with and, blam, saw the loolie. . had an Indian been handy he could have lifted my scalp right off my head, slick as a whistle, without benefit of tomahawk — that’s how high my hair rose and how loose I was all the way up from my knees… as I vainly flicked the light switch.

From my knees down I was pure steel piston and I was out in the kitchen in nothing flat, desperately trying light switches en route and making thin keening noises as I snatched up suitable weapons.

Armed, I took a deep breath and started back, an inch at a time, keeping close to the walls like they do in the movies. Quietly. Quietly. The storm slammed and glittered about the house but Little Bright Rattlesnake slipped silently — the lights came on suddenly and I screamed.