A new voice with a thick New York accent said, “This is a”—bleep!—“nightmare! It’s a”—bleep!—“joke, too.”
A woman’s voice, more educated: “This is like that city—Bucharest, that was it—before Communism fell. Can’t we do better than that?”
“If we can do better than that, it’s not obvious,” the newsman said. “We talked to Professor Emeric Brody of the economics department at Johns Hopkins University, to ask him why our difficulties seem so long-lasting.”
“Until the shutdowns in Quebec, we were using as much power as the grid could produce,” Professor Brody said. “When something close to twenty percent of it abruptly became unavailable, distribution systems were badly deranged. Outages and damage to equipment only made the situation worse.”
“What is the solution?” the newsman asked.
“If we are going to consume power at our previous level, we have to produce more,” the professor said.
“Wow! Ya think?” Kelly like to talk back to the radio.
But Emeric Brody hadn’t finished. “Oil-fired powerplants seem impractical now. Petroleum is expensive and needed for other kinds of fuel. But plants using coal and nuclear plants can be built. The main obstacles are political, not economic. Congress and the President have not been able to agree on what kind of plants to construct or where to put them. And so the Northeast has gone through what it has gone through. Maybe close to a hundred million angry voters will force action. Maybe—but they haven’t done it yet.”
“That was Johns Hopkins Professor Emeric Brody,” the local newsman said. “Thanks very much, Professor. My engineer on the other side of the glass has just shown me a sign to let me know we’ll have to shut down in ten minutes. I’ll come back with more news and the five-day forecast right after we give you these important messages.”
The messages were important only to the station’s bottom line. Kelly didn’t waste battery power listening to them. She went to see what Deborah was doing. Her daughter was playing with hand-me-down toys: stuff her folks had put in boxes when she outgrew it. They figured a granddaughter might enjoy it one of these years, and sure enough… .
Deborah was feeding a Cabbage Patch doll a plastic drumstick and apple. “Now, Barry Woodrow,” she said, “you’ve got to clean your plate.” That Barry Woodrow wasn’t equipped to do any such thing didn’t bother her. She was a little kid. Like a novelist, she was allowed to make things up. She glanced over at Kelly. “Hi, Mommy! Want some lunch?”
“Sure,” Kelly said. “It smells delicious.”
“You’re silly,” Deborah told her.
“Thank you,” Kelly said.
That made her daughter laugh. Then Deborah said, “Read to me? Barry Woodrow has to digest for a while.”
“I’ll read to you,” Kelly said, which was how she almost always answered that request. She wondered where the devil Deborah had come up with digest. Wherever she’d found it, she knew what to do with it. “Do you want Oz or Commander Toad?”
“Oz,” Deborah said.
They were working their way through The Hungry Tiger of Oz. That was one of the books written by Ruth Plumly Thompson after L. Frank Baum died. Most of the time, novels by someone who continued a series were worse than the ones by the person who created it. Kelly thought the Oz books an exception to the rule. Thompson was a smoother, more clever writer than Baum. She gave Baum full props for inventing the world; Thompson probably couldn’t have done that. But Thompson did amusing things with what she’d inherited.
Deborah had enjoyed Baum’s Oz books, and she liked Thompson’s Oz books, too. She didn’t worry about which were better or why. As long as the stories were good enough—and as long as Mommy or Daddy was reading them—she just rolled with it. There were definite advantages to being a kid.
She wasn’t old enough for The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings yet. Colin said his older kids had been seven or eight before he could get through those with them. The movies came out not long after that.
He also had an evil scheme for when it was Deborah’s turn. Apparently, he’d pulled it on all of his children by Louise, and looked forward to doing it again. When the story got to Shelob’s lair, he’d taken a fat rubber spider and stuck it in his pocket. As soon as Shelob came onstage at last after the big buildup, he’d yanked it out and waved it in the kids’ faces.
“Should’ve heard ’em screech,” he’d said with a reminiscent chuckle.
Kelly’d wagged a finger at him. “You’re wicked!”
“Yeah, but I have fun,” he’d answered. “What I don’t have right this minute is a spider. Don’t know where that other one got to between then and now. Well, I expect I can come up with another one.” Kelly expected he could, too. And she expected he would.
Playboy ambled into the front room. He hopped up onto the couch and meowed for kitty treats. He did everything but put on sunglasses and wave a tin cup in Kelly’s and Deborah’s faces. Kelly finally fed him something to get rid of him.
“He’s our Hungry Tiger,” Deborah said.
“If he were a hungry tiger, he’d have us for lunch, not his crunchies,” Kelly said. Deborah thought that was funny. Well, Kelly did, too… up to a point. Every once in a while, when Playboy got annoyed, she’d see that I’d-eat-you-if-I-were-big-enough gleam in his eye. Since he wasn’t, he had to put up with being adored. Cats had a rugged life, all right.
He was an indoor kitty. Kelly didn’t want him going out and meeting dogs and raccoons and other cats with balls. So he saw birds and squirrels and such delicacies through the windows. Deborah called them his TV channels, which wasn’t a bad way to look at it.
He hunted, killed, and devoured crickets that got into the house. He hunted flies that got in, too. He also hunted the occasional buzzing bee or wasp. So far, he’d been lucky—he’d never caught one of those. He had proudly presented Kelly with the corpse of a small lizard he’d assassinated in the laundry room. She’d praised him and petted him and fed him kitty treats to distract him while she flushed the poor thing down the toilet. She didn’t think she’d distracted him well enough. He spent the next hour giving her reproachful looks, as if to ask Why didn’t you eat the tasty goody I brought you?
Deborah thought Playboy was the best kitty in the world. Every once in a while, he’d scratch her—or Kelly, or Colin—while he was pouncing on a piece of string or playing with a cat toy. He didn’t mean those; they were accidents that came from living with an animal that had claws.
Because she was still little, sometimes Deborah would literally rub him the wrong way or treat him too much like a squeeze toy. Then he’d swing with intent to hit. Where he was acting in plain self-defense, Kelly would spray Bactine on the scratches and remind Deborah she had to play nice with the cat.
Playboy was a good-natured beast. He had the manners of a gentleman—of a gentleman cat, anyway. But even a gentleman could lose his cool. When Playboy scratched or nipped without a good excuse, he got exiled to the laundry room till he yowled pitifully for release.
Gentleman or not, he definitely wasn’t the brightest cat that ever came down the pike. He knew—he knew—string and ribbon were a basic feline food group. He would swallow them whenever he got the chance. And, of course, then he would york them up again in short order, usually on the rug. Or sometimes he wouldn’t. Cat poop decorated with ribbon showed up in his box every now and then.