Spaceman Spiff and the

"Don't worry, I'm sure he'll be fine."

She dropped her hand to to stare incredulously at the tiger. "Let me repeat," she said, very slowly. "Calvin has a weapon whose power is only limited by his imagination."

"I said he'd be fine, nothing about the rest of us."

In the darkness between stars, in that cold emptiness so vast that few could grasp it any way other than mathematically, something very small waited. It tumbled slowly, lazily even, as it had for longer than even those who might have known of its existence would care to remember, and likely would until over the millennia the occasional rare, random, and infinitesimal hits from stray atoms slowly and inexorably robbed it of its kinetic energy.

But as it happened, we live in an unlikely universe, and one day it simply stopped. Not completely. Had anyone actually been in a position to notice it, they would have said it seemed to be wavering, vibrating, not so much like a compass needle as a scent hound that had just picked up a trail. Just as suddenly as it had stopped, it began turning again, faster and faster, picking up speed as it fell (inasmuch as something could fall in the absence of a nearby gravitational source), leaving the hypothetical observer scrambling for the nearest physics textbook.

This was the worst summer. Calvin knew this to be a fact in much the same way that he knew that the sky was blue, that Susie Derkins was annoying and gross, and that Chocolate Frosted Sugar