The Cat Who Walks Through Walls by Robert Anson Heinlein

Author:Robert Anson Heinlein [Heinlein, Robert Anson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, adventure, Science Fiction, Mystery, C429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780450061493
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1985-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XVII

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety: other women cloy

The appetites they feed; but she makes hungry

Where most she satisfies—”

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 1564-1616

So this girl tells the school nurse, “My brother thinks he’s a hen.” The nurse answers, “Oh, goodness! What’s being done to help him?” The girl answers, “Nothing. Mama says we need the eggs.”

Are a woman’s delusions anything to worry about? If she’s happy with them? Was I duty bound to take Gwen to a shrink to try to get her cured?

Hell, no! Shrinks are the blind leading the blind; even the best of them are dealing from a short deck. Anyone who consults a shrink should have his head examined.

Close scrutiny showed that Gwen was possibly over thirty, probably under forty—but certainly not as old as fifty. So what was a gentle way to handle her claim that she was born more than a century ago?

Everyone knows that natives of Luna age more slowly than groundhogs who have grown up in a one-gee field. Gwen’s delusion seemed to include the notion that she herself was actually a Loonie instead of the native groundhog she had claimed to be. But Loonies do age, albeit slowly, and Loonies more than a hundred years old (I had met several) do not look only thirty-odd years old; they look ancient.

I would have to try hard to let Gwen think that I believed her every word…while believing none and telling myself that it did not matter. I once knew a man who, sane himself, was married to a woman who believed devoutly in astrology. She was forever buttonholing someone and asking what sign her victim was born under. That sort of antisocial nuttiness must be much harder to live with than Gwen’s gentle delusion.

Yet this man seemed happy. His wife was an excellent cook, a pleasant woman (aside from this hole in her head), and may have been a bedroom artist equal to Rangy Lil. So why should he worry about her syndrome? She was happy with it, even though she annoyed other people. I think he did not mind living in an intellectual vacuum at home as long as he was physically comfortable there.

Having gotten off her pretty chest what was fretting her, Gwen went right to sleep, and soon I did likewise, for a long, happy, solid night of rest. I woke up restored and cheerful, ready to fight a rattlesnake and allow the snake the first two bites.

Or ready to eat a rattlesnake. Come Monday, I was going to have to find us new quarters; I’m usually willing to go out for other meals but breakfast should be available before one has to face the world. This is not the only reason to be married but it is a good one. Of course there are other ways to manage breakfast at home, but marrying and conning your wife into getting breakfast is, I believe, the commonest strategy.

Then I came a little wider awake and realized that we could get breakfast right here.

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