The Bad Weather Friend

by Dean Koontz

“But remember me, Dooley Peebles. Remember me if ever the world goes so wrong that there seems no way to make it right again.”

One thing common to all of us in this life, if we are wise enough to understand, is that we live always under one threat or another and must never let our guard all the way down.

Benny was convinced that most people meant well, but sometimes they just didn’t think hard enough about the consequences of their actions.

“When it comes to human behavior,” Mengistu said, “if you can imagine people doing something stupid or dangerous, then there are people somewhere who are doing it. Often highly educated people.”

Years from now, when all the vehicles are electric, when tens of millions of acres of Earth’s surface have been destroyed by open-pit mining for the enormous quantities of lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper required for EVs, when thousands of new landfills have been crammed full of batteries that can’t be recycled and are leaking horrifying toxins into the water table, when thousands of square miles of windmills have made extinct hundreds of species of birds with disastrous environmental effects, I will still—always, always—remember this special and exhilarating night, chauffeuring you two hither and yon in the dogged pursuit of justice, my destiny buddies.”

How you live your life will earn the face you have in years to come; if you think you’re superior to others, if you can’t live and let live, if your arrogance inspires perpetual anger and resentment because others do not agree with you, then you’ll age into a face that reveals the corruption of your soul.

“You are foolishly, absurdly, dangerously nice. You are also wise, you smug little shit, wiser than you know. And it’s the wrong kind of wisdom, based on truth that isn’t the New Truth. When you realize how wise you are, you’ll be wise and nice, you preening little pile of angel puke. When you’re wise and nice, you’ll have charisma. When you have charisma, you despicable Goody Two-Shoes, you might inspire niceness in others,

As unsettling as a floating, bodiless head might be, it was also the kind of thing that most boys of a certain age would find irresistible, and the young men of Felthammer House were no exception.

However, the people and events of his life had shaped him into a boy who was immediately receptive to the idea of a severed-head intergalactic radio receiver.