Fear Nothing

the table and said, “Okay, sit up here.”
        Immediately he leaped onto the chair and sat at eager attention, regarding me intently.
        I said, “Ms. Goodall here has bought a fully radical, way insane story from me, without any proof except a few months of diary entries by an obviously disturbed priest. She probably did this because she is critically sex crazy and needs a man, and I'm the only one that'll have her.”
        Sasha threw a corner of buttered toast at me. It landed on the table in front of Orson.
        He darted for it.
        “No way, bro!” I said.
        He stopped with his mouth open and his teeth bared, an inch from the scrap of toast. Instead of eating the morsel, he sniffed it with obvious pleasure.
        “If you help me prove to Ms. Goodall that what I've told her about the Wyvern project is true, I'll share some of my omelet and potatoes with you.”
        “Chris, his heart,” Sasha worried, backsliding into her Grace Granola persona.
        “He doesn't have a heart,” I said. “He's all stomach.”
        Orson looked at me reproachfully, as if to say that it wasn't fair to engage in put-down humor when he was unable to participate.
        To the dog I said, “When someone nods his head, that means yes . When he shakes his head side to side, that means no. You understand that, don't you?”
        Orson stared at me, panting and grinning stupidly.
        “Maybe you don't trust Roosevelt Frost,” I said, “but you have to trust this lady here. You don't have a choice, because she and I are going to be together from now on, under the same roof, for the rest of our lives.”
        Orson turned his attention to Sasha.
        “Aren't we?” I asked her. “The rest of our lives?”
        She smiled. “I love you, Snowman.”
        “I love you, Ms. Goodall.”
        Looking at Orson, she said, “From now on, pooch, it's not the two of you anymore. It's the three of us.”
        Orson blinked at me, blinked at Sasha, stared with unblinking desire at the bite of toast on the table in front of him.
        “Now,” I said, “do you understand about nods and shakes?”
        After a hesitation, Orson nodded.
        Sasha gasped.
        “Do you think she's nice?” I asked.
        Orson nodded.
        “Do you like her?”
        Another nod.
        A giddy delight swept through me. Sasha's face was shining with the same elation.
        My mother, who destroyed the world, had also helped to bring marvels and wonders into it.
        I had wanted Orson's cooperation not only to confirm my story but to lift our spirits and give us reason to hope that there might be life after Wyvern. Even if humanity was now faced with dangerous new adversaries like the members of the original troop that escaped the labs, even if we were swept by a mysterious plague of gene-jumping from species to species, even if few of us survived the coming years without fundamental changes of an intellectual, emotional, and even physical nature-perhaps there was nevertheless some chance that when we, the current champions of the evolutionary game, stumbled and fell out of the race and passed away, there would be worthy heirs who might do better with the world than we did.
        Cold comfort is better than none.
        “Do you think Sasha's pretty?” I asked the dog.
        Orson studied her thoughtfully for long seconds. Then he turned to me and nodded.
        “That could have been a little quicker,” Sasha complained.
        “Because he took his time, checked you out good, you know he's being sincere,” I assured her.
        “I think you're pretty, too,” Sasha told him.
        Orson wagged his tail across the back of his chair.
        “I'm a lucky guy, aren't I, bro?” I asked him.
        He nodded vigorously.
        “And I'm a lucky girl,” she said.
        Orson turned to her and shook his head: No.
        “Hey,” I said.
        The dog actually winked at me, grinning and making that soft wheezing sound that I swear is laughter.
        “He can't even talk,” I said, “but he can do put-down humor.”
        We weren't just doing cool now. We were being cool.
        If you're genuinely cool, you'll get through anything. That's one of the primary tenets of Bobby Halloway's philosophy, and from my current vantage point, post-Wyvern, I have to say that Philosopher Bob offers a more effective guide to a happy life than all of