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Authors: Sarah A. Hoyt
Tags: Science Fiction/Fantasy
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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.
Ten thousand cats howled, disconsolate, at the unreachable stars.
LIGHTHOUSE SURFER
Daniel M. Hoyt
“L IGHTHOUSE, shmighthouse,” Ten-Speed said one night after the three of us’d gotten a few beers in us and weren’t thinking much. “It’s probably the safest place to go if there’s a freakin’ tsunami. Hell, if the wave knocks it over, you can surf the freakin’ lighthouse to land!” Ten-Speed drained his beer can and tossed the empty into the dark, away from the blazing car headlights. “But there won’t be no tsunami. Hasn’t been one anywhere around here since my freakin’ mom was born. Before, even. Sixtyfour, I think. Freakin’ forty-some-years ago.”
We nodded and gulped our own beers. Hell, what did we know? A trio
“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.
Ten thousand cats howled, disconsolate, at the unreachable stars.
LIGHTHOUSE SURFER
Daniel M. Hoyt
“L IGHTHOUSE, shmighthouse,” Ten-Speed said one night after the three of us’d gotten a few beers in us and weren’t thinking much. “It’s probably the safest place to go if there’s a freakin’ tsunami. Hell, if the wave knocks it over, you can surf the freakin’ lighthouse to land!” Ten-Speed drained his beer can and tossed the empty into the dark, away from the blazing car headlights. “But there won’t be no tsunami. Hasn’t been one anywhere around here since my freakin’ mom was born. Before, even. Sixtyfour, I think. Freakin’ forty-some-years ago.”
We nodded and gulped our own beers. Hell, what did we know? A trio
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