The Puppies Of Terra

Chapter Eight
In which we may witness some of the sad consequences of domestication

“And these,” Doctor Quilty explained, waving a pudgy hand at certain rude upheavals of unfenestrated brick, “are the ovens.”

“They’re very big,” I commented blandly. (Wanting very much to add—And ugly. But one of the first lessons Palmino had given me was to steer clear of aesthetic judgments. The average Dingo was too much at home with ugliness to notice any but the most awful examples.)

“We used to use gas, but that was before the manufacturer who supplied it to us went out of business. A pity too… gas is much more efficient. But the whole chemical industry is gone now—or going. For which we have the Masters to blame. All these years of free power have sapped our technological strength. Fortunately, Frangle was able to have the ovens converted.”

“To what? Electricity?”

The Doctor laughed nervously, as at a particularly gauche joke. “Hardly! We burn logs. You’d be surprised the temperatures one can build up that way. The problem is getting these goddamned pets to go out and cut down the trees. Without lots of firewood, we can’t work the ovens to capacity.”

“What is their capacity?”

“I’m told that working all the ovens around the clock they can turn out twenty thousand units. But of course we don’t work all around the clock. And since it’s the goddamned, lazy pets who have to do all the heavy work, we don’t come anywhere near capacity even in the ovens that are working. Talk about feet-dragging!”

“How many do you do, then?”

“No more than five hundred. That’s a good day. You can see that that doesn’t come anywhere near our needs. Ideally, this should be a profit-making proposition.”

“Selling the ash as fertilizer, you mean?”

“Say, that’s an angle that never occurred to me! We’ve just been dumping the ashes till now. Would you like to see the operation? Are you interested in that sort of thing?”

“By all means, Doctor. Lead the way.”

“It’s just around… Oh! Just a second, please, Major. My feet! there’s something wrong with them these last few days. They’ve been swelling up… I don’t understand it.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested with a small laugh, “it’s not your feet at all. Perhaps your shoes are growing smaller?”

Doctor Quilty smiled wanly in reply, as he loosened his laces. A fat man, Doctor Quilty: even so slight an effort as stooping over his shoes caused him to be flushed and short of breath. His sad flesh drooped in dewlaps from his face and forearms, and his great belly was an edifying reminder of man’s immemorial bondage to gravity and death.

Limping, Quilty led me around the corner of the building, where we could see teams of dispirited pets hauling sawn-up logs from stacks outside the main gate of the prison and restacking them again within the gate. The whole operation, involving nearly fifty pets, was being supervised by only one drowsy guard.

“Look at them!” Quilty said scornfully. “They don’t put any more muscle into the job than a bunch of women would. With their bodies, you’d think they’d at least be able to lift logs.”

“Could it be their morale? Perhaps if they were working… somewhere else… at some other sort of work? Maybe they’re depressed by the ovens.”

“No, take my word for it, they’d do the same halfassed job no matter what kind of work you set them to. And in any case, why should this sort of work depress them? I don’t understand you, Major.”

I colored, mortified at having to become so explicit. It seemed gruesome. “Wouldn’t they show more spirit, if they were working… more in their own interest? Or at least not so entirely against it?”

“But what could be more in their own interest than this? Where else do you think their food comes from?”

“Surely, Doctor, you don’t mean to say that… that these ovens supply…”

“Every loaf of bread in this prison, Major. Yes sir, we’re set up to be completely self-sufficient. And we would be too, if these goddamned pets would show some backbone!”

“Oh, that kind of oven! Well, then there must be some other sort of reason, I suppose, for their apathy. Perhaps they’re not interested in baking any more bread than they can eat themselves. Rather like the Little Red Hen, if you’ve read that story.”

“Can’t say I have, Major, not being as much of a reader as I’d like to be. But the point is—they won’t even bake that much. There are pets in the cellblocks who are starving, while these curs won’t get themselves into a sweat unless you take a whip to them. They just don’t have any sense of the consequences of their own actions. They want to be fed, but they won’t take the trouble of feeding themselves. That’s almost what it amounts to.”

“Surely you’re exaggerating, Doctor.”

“It’s hard to believe at first, I know. Take another case in point: the other day they sent out two hundred, men and women, to dig up potatoes, turnips, and such from the old fields hereabouts. Well, those two hundred pets returned from their day’s work with no more than ten pounds of potatoes per capita. That’s Latin, you know. We doctors are obliged to learn Latin. Two thousand pounds of potatoes to feed to thirteen thousand prisoners! And you can’t tell me they’re not hungry, because, damn it, they’re starving!”

“It must be something in their background,” I theorized, incautiously. (Palmino had been very explicit on just that point: “A Major should never express an opinion that someone else might think original.”) “They’ve come to expect their food to be handed to them outright. And they’ve grown to feel a positive antipathy for any sort of work. That’s understandable.”

“I don’t pretend to understand it,” Quilty said, shaking his head and setting the folds of his chin into swaying motion. “Everybody has to work—that’s life.”

“Well, workers—of course they have to work. But perhaps the pets—the goddamned pets, I should say—have an attitude more like our own, Doctor. Perhaps they think of themselves—however misguidedly—as officers and gentlemen.”

“Do you think doctoring isn’t work?” Quilty asked, wonderstruck. “There are few nastier jobs, to my mind, than poking around in other people’s pustules and looking down their throats and sticking your finger up their pons assinorum!”

“You’re right, Doctor. Absolutely—but still, don’t you think there’s an essential difference between ourselves and common laborers? As you point out, work is demeaning, and if a person could possibly get by without doing any…”

“De-mean-ing? I didn’t say that! I love my work, Major. I need it. I couldn’t get through one week without it. But that doesn’t mean I have to pretend it’s any bed of roses. It’s a job, the same as any other, and it has its bad points the same as… Major? Major, is something wrong? Are you ill? Your face is so…”

My sudden pallor had betrayed the emotion that had overcome me: fear. Only a few yards away and looking directly, intently at me was St Bernard. He had been among the members of the log-hauling crew. Smiling, but still uncertain, he began walking toward me.

“Back in line there!” the guard bellowed. St Bernard paid no attention.

“White Fang! Brüderlein, bist du’s?” His arms closed about me in a brotherly embrace of irresistible force.

“Help! Guard!” I shouted. “Arrest this madman! Get him off of me! Throw him into prison, into solitary!”

St Bernard’s friendly features clouded with perplexity. As the guard pulled him away, I tried, with a mime show of winks and grimaces, to tell him that he had nothing to fear.

“If you want this guy in solitary, shall I put Mosely somewhere else?” the guard demanded.

“No! Leave Mosely alone. Surely you can find someplace to stick this one till I have a chance to cross-examine him. I know—lock him in my room and post a guard outside the door. And—” (whispering in the guard’s ear) “—don’t be too rough with him. I want him fresh when I get to him. Then I’ll by-god make him wish he’d attacked somebody else.

“Goddamned pets,” I grumbled, returning to Quilty, whose bewilderment might at any moment, I feared, change to suspicion. “I think they must all be crazy.”

Which seemed a pretty weak explanation for that last episode with St Bernard, but happily it contented Quilty. He even waxed enthusiastic. “Insanity—that’s exactly my theory, Major! If you had the time, there’s a case I’ve been studying which I’d like you to see. The most extreme example of its type. The classic symptoms of psychosis. A beautiful compulsion neurosis. It would only take a moment. Then, if you wanted to, we could come back to see the ovens.”

“Take me to Bedlam, Doctor. Let’s see all your lunatics. A day of watching madmen should be much more entertaining than a peek into the ovens.”

“Splendid. But let us walk more slowly, if you please, Major. My feet seem to hurt more every minute.”

I should explain somewhere along here that, though this was my third day at the St Cloud Women’s Reformatory (such had been its purpose only a short time before and such has become its purpose again), I had not attempted in the interim to make contact with St Bernard or Clea. Until such time as I could effect their rescue it would have been an empty—and a dangerous—gesture to have disclosed my presence to them. Dangerous, because it was quite probable that Palmino would learn of their special significance to me and thus have additional resources for blackmail—or betrayal. I dreaded to think to what actions his cruel and lascivious nature would lead him were he to discover Clea was my mother! Already it had taken all my persuasive gifts to make him spare Mosely’s life, and, even so, I could not prevent Palmino’s nightly interrogations of the unfortunate lieutenant (for which the general opinion held me responsible), though the piteous nocturnal cries arising from the solitary cell caused me to weep tears as I waited out the torturous hours concealed in the radio shack.

I tried as much as possible to escape Palmino’s baleful influence by spending my time with the other officers—either exercising a restraining influence upon Captain Frangle’s avarice, or accompanying the Reverend Captain or Doctor Quilty as they went about their rounds, baptizing and healing. Between those two men, the latter was more to my taste, a favoritism that Quilty reciprocated.

“Like you, I’m a skeptic. Cogito, ergo sum. I doubt, therefore I am. That’s Descartes.” Quilty had made this declaration in the middle of a discussion of the Reverend Captain’s rather roughshod missionary tactics. “I believe, with the immortal Sigmund Freud, in the power of reason. I don’t suppose that you military men get to study much about psychology? All that depth stuff must be a terra incognita to you guys.”

“Unless you’d count military strategy in that category, I guess I haven’t studied much psychology.” That, I felt sure, was exactly the sort of thing a genuine Major would say.

“Yes… Well, that’s a very special branch of the subject. Along more general lines, however, you’ve probably read very little except The Life of Man. You must know that by heart though—eh, Major?”

“Oh…” (I’d never heard of the book) “… parts. Other parts I only remember vaguely, indistinctly.”

“You’re probably surprised to hear me speak of it as a book of psychology—and yet it’s one of the profoundest examinations of the subject ever written by the pen of man. Yet it’s also eminently practical.”

“I’ve never heard it expressed quite this way, Doctor. Do go on.”

“You know where he says: ‘When the gods are malign, men worship at the feet of demons.’ Now the Reverend Captain would probably interpret that in a strictly religious sense—and of course he would not be entirely wrong. But those words also express an important psychological insight. Oh, my feet!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, only a twinge. I was just trying to make a point, and that is—what the Reverend Captain calls baptism is actually a venerable therapeutic tool in the history of psychology. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

“Actually, no.”

“Yes. We psychologists used to call it shock treatment.

“Here they are, Major. The nuts—in this whole cellblock you won’t find anything else. And these, I should point out, are only the worst, the most hopeless cases. ‘Autism’ is the technical word that we psychologists use to describe their condition.”

“I like it. It’s far more restful here than in the other cellblocks. It rather reminds me of a beehive—that humming sound.”

“It’s so restful that we don’t even have to use guards for this building. They sit like that all day long, mumbling their sick nonsense, or listening to other sick nonsense from somebody else. Impossible to understand them. They eat a bit of porridge in the morning and drink a bowl of broth at night—and even that has to be put in their hands. Otherwise they’d just sit there and starve to death. Pets!”

“How do you explain their condition, Doctor?”

“Insanity, that’s my theory. The shock of S-Day—” (this was the Dingoes’ name for the day on which the sunspots had blown the Masters’ fuseboxes) “—was a traumatic experience for them. Consequently, they retreated into themselves until…” (the Doctor finished his sentence with a sweeping gesture that included all five tiers of cells) “… this happened.

“Of course,” he continued, in a somewhat chastened tone, “it’s only a theory.”

“It seems quite sound to me, Doctor. I wouldn’t apologize.”

“Do you like it? Come then, I want to show you my most interesting patient. This one is for the textbooks. If only Professor Freud were alive today! How he would have enjoyed this one!”

We climbed up a metal staircase to the third tier of cells and down a long corridor that took us farther and farther from what little sunlight sneaked into the building through the dirty skylights. There, standing in the center of a group of puppies and young dogs who were attentive to the point of being hypnotized, swaying in time to the incantatory rhythms of his own speech, was my brother Pluto. I recognized what he was reciting immediately: it was A Prayer for Investments from his latest Book of Ceremonies. This brief work is meant to be sung by two antiphonal choirs of fifty voices each, supported by chamber orchestras. While the Celebrant dresses (or “invests”) himself in the three “sacred” articles of clothing. It can be an awesome spectacle, but in these reduced circumstances it could inspire only pathos or derision. For an alb Pluto had a begrimed undershirt; his chasuble was a floursack stolen from the bakery; his ring was a rusty bolt. Yet for all the ridiculousness of his appearance, Pluto was not entirely a figure of fun. The nobility of the prayer itself—which I transcribe from memory—went far to redeem him:

“You see what I mean?” Quilty said, digging at my ribs with his soft elbow. “He’s as nutty as peanut butter. They all are.”

“Actually, he seems remarkably unchanged.”

“How’s that! You’ve seen this fellow somewhere before? When?”

I was rescued from the necessity of having to seal up this new breach in my defenses by the timely arrival of two guards who were conducting the shadowy figure of a manacled bitch. “I’m sorry, Major,” one guard said, “but orders came in over the short wave to let this woman look around for her son. The both of them is ordered to be transported to St Paul.”

“That’s him,” the bitch said, pointing. “That’s my son Pluto.”

So Roxanna had finally got around to reporting the probability of my brother and mother being among the captive pets! I had dreaded this moment.

“Exactly!” I rasped in my most Dingo-like tones. “I have been expecting something like this. Before they are sent off, I had better give them a preliminary interrogation. Take them to my chamber, where the other prisoner is already. I shall be there immediately.”

Clea, though but ill-acquainted with the timbre of my voice, stepped forward to peer at me in the gloom, but I turned my back on her abruptly. “Take them away! There is no time to spare!”

When the four of us—St Bernard and Clea, Pluto and myself—were together in the quarters of the unfortunate Lieutenant Mosely, I explained to them, as well as I could, how I had come to be in my present, so-convenient position. Only Pluto received my story calmly and without repeated protests and expressions of incredulity—and I suspect this was because he wasn’t really listening to me at all, but to the sweeter voices of his own superior, interior world.

“Impossible!” Clea declared firmly. “You can’t expect us to believe such a fairy tale. Parachuting right into the prison compound in the middle of the night! In a major’s overcoat! Tell me another!”

“But if he says so, Clea,” St Bernard protested, “it must be true. White Fang wouldn’t lie to a blood-brother.”

“The problem isn’t whether you care to believe me—but how we are to escape. You dare not let them transport you to St Paul. It is the capital of the Dingoes. Your best safety was to lose yourself among the millions of other abandoned pets. How was it that you let them find you out, Clea?”

“They came around calling for me and Pluto by name. They said the Masters were taking us back. I didn’t know if I could believe them, but it seemed that anything would be better than this hellhole. So I spoke up before someone else got the same idea.”

“I’ve already made some escape plans,” St Bernard volunteered. “Is it safe for me to speak of them aloud in this room? Yes? How about digging a tunnel? Under the wall. When I was down in the basement of the bakery I saw that it had a dirt floor. Dirt—that eliminates half of the difficulty from the start. Imagine tunneling through stone! Now, if we start the tunnel there and dig west…”

“But it’s over a hundred yards from there to the wall!”

“So much the better! They’ll expect us to start somewhere else. I figure with two men working all through the night, the tunnel can be done in a month.”

“A month!” Clea scoffed. “But I’m to be carted off tonight!”

“Hm! That puts things in a different light. Well, in that case, I have a second plan. Here, let me demonstrate…” He ripped the bedsheets off the bunk and began shredding them into long strips. “We’ll knot these strips together—into a rope ladder—like this. Now here, White Fang, you take this end—and I’ll take this end. Now, pull! That’s it! Harder! Oops!

“Hm. Does anyone know a better knot?”

“What do you need a rope ladder for?” I asked. It was only a fifteen-foot drop from the window of my room, after all, as St Bernard must have been well aware after spending the last few hours confined there.

“I thought you and I could take care of the guards at the southwest tower—the one with the nice crenelations—and then we’d climb the stairs to the top, and then use the rope ladder to climb down.”

“But I can just order the guards to let us go up to the top.”

“So much the better. Our only problem in that case is making sure the knots will hold. Is a square knot over-and-under and under-and-over or under-and-over and over-and-under? I can never get it straight.”

“But we don’t have to go to the top of the tower, St Bernard. If it were just a simple matter of getting out of the prison, we could jump from the window of this room.”

“You mean you won’t need a rope ladder at all?” He sounded terribly hurt.

“Finding a way out of the prison is not the entire problem, St Bernard. Think of the thousands of other pets I’ll be leaving in Frangle’s hands. What will become of them? Yes, and there’s the little matter of eluding Palmino, who’s on to my masquerade. I have every reason to believe that he has my least actions closely observed. And he will do his utmost to keep me here, for it’s only through me that he possesses a large degree of power here, or hopes of a life in the asteroids hereafter. The problem, then, is not so much escaping from this prison as from him. Palmino—that’s the real problem.”

“Thank you, Major Jones, but it isn’t the case any more,” said Palmino, stepping into the room, brandishing that little pistol of his. “The real problem is escaping with him.”

“Would you introduce your friend, White Fang?” Clea asked loftily.

“Mother, this is Warrant Officer Palmino. Officer Palmino, this is my mother, Miss Clea Melbourne Clift.” Clea offered her hand to Palmino, who received it with his pistol-hand. With a deft motion Motherlove wrenched the pistol from Palmino.

“Now, apologize to my son, young man, for this rude interruption, and pray, explain yourself more fully.”

“I’m sorry. Okay? And you’re going to be sorry too. Because they’re on to us. I’ve intercepted radio messages. They’re arriving tonight en masse.”

“Who? Why? How?”

“The troops from Shroeder and from Fargo. Even a contingent from the capital. They must know you’re here, running the operation. You see, there’s something I didn’t have a chance to tell you. It sort of slipped my mind. Yesterday afternoon Major Worthington showed up for that inspection. The sentry saw him—and as luck would have it, he was one of my men. He fired—”

“But I told you I wouldn’t allow that! I can’t afford to be involved in murder. Things are bad enough already.”

“It wasn’t murder. The way I see it, it was self-defense. Anyhow, as it happens, it doesn’t make any difference what you want to call it, because the sentry had bad aim and Worthington was only wounded. He escaped. He told the Inductance Corps, and they’re coming to lay siege to the prison.”

“Then it’s all over! You botched it! We’re through!”

“No—wait till I’ve explained everything. We’re saved, maybe. I’ve been radioing to the Masters, and…”

“Do they still use radios here?” St Bernard asked. “I’ve heard some charming transcriptions of the old radio programs. Do you know The Green Hornet? Thrilling stuff. But I’m surprised to hear that the Masters listen to the Dingoes’ programs.”

“It was more like an SOS than a program that I sent out. I’ve been calling for help ever since Worthington got away. After all, it can’t make much difference if it’s intercepted.”

“Did you contact them? That’s the important thing.”

“I think so. I contacted someone. But how can I tell who it is? It’s all in Morse. Anyhow, I went under the assumption that it was them. We bargained all morning before we reached an agreement. I said I’d help all the pets get out of the prison, and they promised to let me and four friends come along with the pets and live in a kennel. So now it’s only a matter of assembling all the pets around Needlepoint Hill at twelve tonight.”

“Why do we have to take them outside the prison? That sounds like a trick.”

“It has something to do with the field of potential. It’s stronger in places that come to a point. Thirteen thousand pets would weigh a good two thousand tons, and the Masters say they’re still weak from S-Day. Do you think we should trust them?”

“Unless you’re ready to withstand a siege, it looks like we’ll have to. But how are we going to get thirteen thousand pets out the gates by twelve tonight? What explanation could we possibly give Frangle for it? There must be limits to the man’s credulity.”

“I don’t know,” Palmino said, shaking his greasy, black curls in perplexity. “I thought we might send some of the pets out on work details with my guards, and the others could sneak out this window. One at a time. Unobtrusively, sort of.”

“The others? The thirteen thousand others?”

“It’s sticky,” Palmino agreed, digging his fingers into his hair. “It’s really sticky.”

Pluto, who had till this time given no impression of being aware of the matters under discussion, suddenly arose from the corner in which he had been sitting in Gandhi-like self-absorption, and, raising the bolt-bedizened forefinger, announced in magistral tones:

“Now here’s my plan…”