Read Letters to Jenny for Free Online Page B

driver pulls the wrong switch, and radiation gets all over the place. But there is one kind of nuclear power, nuclear fusion—that’s pronounced New-Clear Few-Shun—that hardly makes radiation at all, and could make enough energy to take care of all our needs for just about forever. It’s what makes the sun shine, after all. The trouble is, it is very hard to make fusion work on Earth; it takes about a billion dollars worth of equipment, and they still don’t have it working. Except that now these scientists have found a way to do it simply and cheaply at room temperature. Maybe. They have set up something a bit like a car battery, that makes so much heat it melts the equipment, and they think that only fusion could account for that. We can’t be sure until other scientists duplicate the effect, to be sure it really works. But if it does work, it may mean that we won’t need oil any more, and no more poor ducks will die in the spills. That’s why, in the cartoon, the animals are hoping that fusion will work.
    So there was the lecture. Now you know why you should be interested in nuclear fusion. Because you care about animals. Maybe you’ll grow up to be a cartoonist like that, who helps folk understand what’s at stake.
    I understand you may have a roommate now. I hope you get along okay. My daughters have roommates at college. Anyway, keep getting better, Jenny!
    Apull 14, 1989
    Dear Jenny
,
    Ha: I finally got my new ribbon, so the letter will print out dark instead of light. See, look at it—isn’t that nice? No, don’t squinch your eyes shut! I’ll hold my breath until you look. One, two, threemph, fourmth, gasp—ha, you looked! Now let me catch my breath.
    I have several things, this time. First, I’m typing this letter Friday instead of Sunday, so that I can mail it Saturday, and it will arrive Monday or Tuesday so your mother can have it in time to read to you on Wednesday. Last time it came too late for her, and she was miffed, and you know how bad that is.
    She told me that you had decided on Sammy to be the cat that makes it into Xanth with Jenny Elf, and she sent three pictures of him in his speed-bump mode on the stairs. Okay, I am replacing [cat] with Sammy in the text; I haven’t changed them all yet, but I will when I edit the novel. I did go over Jenny Elf’s introduction in the novel, and I printed out those three pages for you. So you can make someone read that to you any time—no, don’t throw away this letter yet! You can wait till the end of this paragraph, can’t you? Because I need to tell you the background. Chex Centaur is searching for her foal Che, and has been checking with all the search parties, but no one has seen anything yet. Finally she comes back to her cottage in a clearing, with Grundy Golem, who is helping her search. That’s when this text starts. Remember, I’ll probably make small changes later, as my daughter Cheryl catches me on more errors. If you spy any, let me know; I may have forgotten more than I ever knew about Elfquest. Okay, now you can throw away this letter.
    Now let me tell you about the way I feel about cats. I don’t like them. No, wait, don’t throw the bedpan at me yet. You see, cats do like me. And there was one I did like, and she’s the one I want to tell you about. But it’s a sad story, so don’t listen too carefully.
    It all started with Pandora. Pandora was the girl who opened a box she shouldn’t have, because she was curious (girls are like that), and all the ills of the world flew out and we’ve been in trouble ever since. Well, this cat had kittens in our car, and we discovered this when we were about to drive somewhere. So we called her Pandora, because of all the mischief. The daddy-cat had skipped out—this has been known to happen with people, too—so we had to take care of her and them. She was a stray cat, you see. There were three kittens: two tiger-striped like their mother, and one black with a white face. All three