The Puppies Of Terra

Chapter Five
In which the worst happens.

As soon as her feet touched Earth, Darling, Julie fell into one of her sentimental moods and begged our Master to take us out to the Skunk farm, where she had first met me. I seconded her request, less from sentiment than out of a need to escape the presence of St Bernard (who had somehow got hold of the notion that he was in the neighborhood of the Black Forest). Our Master, as usual, indulged our whim.

While Petite ran off to explore the dark wood (which was in its way every bit as realistic as anything one could produce on the console), Julie and I sat in the lightest of Leashes and marveled at the changes that time had wrought not only in ourselves (for we had, after all, passed from puppyhood to maturity in the meantime, and the gleeful shouts of our own dear pup were ringing in our ears) but also in the scene about us. The roof of the barn had fallen in, and in the orchard and surrounding meadows, saplings had taken root and were flourishing. Julie gloried in all this decay, just as the young ladies of the eighteenth century must have gloried in the built-to-order ruins of the Gothic Revival. So great was her passion for returning to the past that she begged our Master to be unleashed!

“Please!” she whined. “Just this once. I feel so aloof, so anachronistic, out here in a Leash. I want to see what wilderness tastes like.”

Our Master pretended to ignore her.

“Pretty please,” she whined more loudly, though it had become more of a bark by now.

A voice in my head (and in Julie’s too, of course) soothed: There, now, gently. What’s this, my darlings, my dears, my very own pets? Why should you wish to throw off your nice Leashes? Why, you’re hardly Leashed at all! Do you want to turn into Dingoes?

“Yes!” Julie replied. “Just for this one afternoon I want to be a Dingo.”

I was shocked. Yet I must admit that at the same time I was a little excited. It had been so long since I had been without a Leash, that so primitive an idea appealed to me. There is always a certain morbid pleasure in putting on the uniform of one’s enemy, of becoming, as it were, a double-agent.

If I unleash you, there’s no way for you to call me back. You’ll just have to wait till I come back for you.

“That’s all right,” Julie assured him. “We won’t set foot off the farm.”

I’ll return in the morning, little one. Wait for me.

“Oh, we will, we will,” Julie and I promised antiphonally.

“Me too,” Petite demanded, having returned from her explorations, prompt to her Master’s bidding.

And then he was gone, and our minds slipped from their Leashes and into such a tumble and whirlwind of thought that none of us could speak for several minutes. Leashed, one can keep more thoughts simultaneously before consciousness, and with the Leash off we had to learn to think more slowly than in linear sequence.

A more vivid pink flushed Julie’s cheek, and her eyes were sparkling with a sudden, unaccustomed brilliance. I realized that this was probably the first time in her life as a pet—in her whole life, that is—that she had been entirely off her Leash. She was probably feeling tipsy. I was, and I was no stranger to the experience.

“Hello, Earthling,” she said. Her voice seemed different, sharper and quicker. She plucked an apple from the branches overhead and polished it on her velvety skin.

“You shouldn’t eat that, if you recall,” I warned. “There may be germs.”

“I know.” She bit into it, then, repressing her laughter, offered the rest of the apple to me. It was rather an obvious literary reference, but I could see no reason to refuse the apple on that account.

I took a large bite out of it. When I saw the other half of the worm that remained in the apple, I brought our little morality play to an abrupt conclusion. It was Julie who found the old pump and got it working. The wellwater had a distinctly rusty flavor, but it was at least preferable to the taste lingering in my mouth. Then, with my head in Julie’s lap and her fingers tousling my hair, I went to sleep, though it was the middle of the day.

When I woke the heat of the afternoon sun was touching me at every pore, and I was damp with sweat. The wind made an irregular sound in the trees around us, and from the branches overhead, a crow cried hoarsely and took to the air. I watched its clumsy trajectory with an amusement somehow tinged with uneasiness. This was what it was like to be mortal.

“We’re getting sunburnt,” Julie observed placidly. “I think we should go into the house.”

“That would be trespassing,” I pointed out, recalling how Roxanna had laid the house under her interdict.

“So much the better,” said Julie, for whom the romance of being a Dingo for a day had not yet worn off.

In the farmhouse, dusty strands of adhesive—cobwebs—hung from ceilings, and the creaking floor was littered with paper that time had peeled from the walls. In one of the upstairs rooms, Julie found closets and drawers of mildewed clothing, including some cotton dresses that would have been the right size for a ten-year-old. It was hard to think of Roxanna ever being that small—or that poor. I felt vaguely guilty to have opened up this window on her past, and when one of the dresses, rotten with age, came apart in my hands, a little spooky too. I took Julie into another of the upstairs rooms, which contained a broad, cushioned apparatus, raised about a yard off the floor. The cushion smelled awfully.

“Cuddles, look—a bed! A real one! Why, an antique like this would be worth a fortune in the asteroids.”

“I suppose so,” I replied. “If they could get the smell out of it.”

“Beds must decay—like clothing.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed, and it bounced with a creaking, metallic sound, much like the sound made by the pump outside. Julie laughed and jumped onto the bed beside me. It groaned, and the groan deepened to a rasp, and the rasp snapped. Julie went right on laughing as the bed collapsed to the floor. Looking at her sprawled out beside me on that quaint apparatus, I became aware of a feeling that I had never experienced before. For, though we had known each other intimately for years, I had never felt quite this urgently desirous of Julie. Undoubtedly this too was a consequence of being unleashed.

“Julie,” I said, “I’m going to bite you.”

“Grrr,” she growled playfully.

“Arf,” I replied.

“Me too, me too!” Petite cried, bounding into the room. She very quickly found herself outside again, digging a hole in the garden in which to bury her uncle Pluto. Before the afternoon was passed, there were holes for Clea and St Bernard and the entire absentee Skunk family.

Julie is my Darling, Julie is my Darling.

The three of us spent the night in the farmhouse amid creakings and groanings of old wood and ominous scurryings in the walls. Petite slept in a little crib that must once have been Roxanna’s. We were up with the sun and went, shivering, directly out of doors to wait beneath the apple trees. We were cold and we were hungry, and swarms of hostile, buzzing insects rose from the dew-drenched grass to settle on our raw skins and feed on our blood. I killed three or four, but the senseless things continued to attack us oblivious to their danger. Even in the darkest ages of Shroeder, we pets had not been subjected to such strenuous discomforts. I began to see the utilitarian value of clothing and wished wistfully for my cloth-of-gold suit of yesterday’s feasting.

The sun had risen nearly to noonday, when Julie finally turned to me and asked: “What do you suppose is wrong, Cuddles?”

It was useless by now to pretend that nothing was amiss, but I could only answer her question with a look of dismay. Perhaps we were being punished for asking to be unleashed. Perhaps, impossible as such a thought was, our Master had forgotten us. Perhaps…

But how could a pet presume to interpret his Master’s actions? Especially such irresponsible, inconceivable, and thoughtless ways as leaving three pedigreed pets—one the merest puppy—defenseless in an alien world among Dingoes!

When our hunger grew extreme, we gorged on apples, cherries, and sour plums, not even bothering to look for wormholes. Through that afternoon and into the night we waited for our Master’s return, until at last the chill and darkness of the night forced us into the house.

The next morning was spent in more useless waiting, though this time we had the prudence to wear clothing—pants and jackets of rough blue cloth and rubberized boots. Almost everything else had rotted beyond salvage. Our Master did not return.

“Julie,” I said at last (having sent Petite off to pick blueberries so that she might be spared for as long as possible the knowledge of her changed condition), “we’re on our own. Our Master has abandoned us. He doesn’t want us any more.” Julie began to cry, not making much noise about it, but the tears rolled down her cheeks in a steady stream faster than I could kiss them away.

But for all that, I must confess that Julie adapted to our abandoned state more readily than I. She enjoyed the challenges of that archaic, Dingo-like existence. No doubt she was aided by her sense of make-believe. Every day while I went to a high hill in the vicinity to call, hopelessly and to no apparent effect, to our Master, Julie made believe to fix up the farmhouse. She cleared the floors, dusted, washed, aired out the musty furniture and decaying mattresses, and experimented with the interesting new vegetables that grew among the weeds of a forgotten garden. (Carrots, by the bye, are very good boiled in rusty water with a little dirt thrown in for seasoning.) After the first week my visits to the hillside became less frequent. I was convinced that our Master would never return to us. The thought of such cruelty and indifference—after all those years at Swan Lake—passed quite beyond belief.

Helping Julie at odd jobs around the farm, I began to have a certain respect for the pre-Mastery technology of Earth. I discovered and repaired one mechanism that was especially useful: a rough stone wheel three feet in diameter and three inches thick that was set into rotary motion by a foot pedal. By holding a piece of metal to the revolving wheel, the machine could be made to give off sparks, and these in turn ignited dry scraps of wood. The fire thus produced could be conserved in various ingenious engines in the farmhouse. Fire has an immense utility, but since I assume my readers are familiar with it, I will not make my digression any longer. I only mention in passing that on the night of my discovery Julie, sitting by me in front of a roaring log fire, looked at me with real admiration! A look that I returned—for she was very lovely in the firelight, lovelier than she had ever been before, it seemed. The firelight softened the contours of her face, until I was aware only of her relaxed, easy smile and the brightness of her eyes, a brightness that did not need to borrow its brilliance from the fire but seemed to issue from her very being.

“Prometheus,” she whispered.

“My own Pandora,” I returned, and a scrap of old verse popped into my mind, at once comforting and terrible in its implications. I recited it to Julie in a low voice:

Julie shivered theatrically. “Cuddles,” she said, “we’ve got to find our own way home.”

“Don’t call me Cuddles,” I said in, for me, a rough manner. “If you won’t call me White Fang, stick to Prometheus.”

Day followed day with no sign of our Master’s return. The longer we stayed at the farm, the more inevitable discovery became. On my trips to the hillside I had sometimes noticed clouds of dust rising from the country roads, and, though I was careful to keep under cover and off the roads, I knew that luck alone and merely luck had prevented our capture so far. My imagination recoiled from what would become of us if we were to fall into the hands of Dingoes. I had only to behold my father’s defaced monument (which I passed by every day on the way to my hilltop) to be reminded of his terrible fate, and it was not a memory to inspire confidence.

Therefore I determined that Julie, Petite and I must find our way to Shroeder Kennel on foot, where, though we might not be so happy as we had been in the asteroids, we would at least be secure. But I had no idea how to get there. Years ago when we had driven with Roxanna to the Skunk farmhouse, the robot-driver had taken a circuitous route, in a vaguely southwesterly direction, which I had never troubled to learn. In any case, it was not wise to walk along the roads.

I renewed my treks through the nearby woods, searching for a vantage from which I could see the cathedral tower or some other signpost back to civilization. At last, a sign was given to me: a hill rose on the other side of a marsh; on the crest of that hill was an electric power line!

Where there was electricity there, surely, would be Masters.

In 1970 when the Masters had first manifested themselves to mankind, they had insisted that they be given complete authority over all electric plants, dams, dynamos, and radio and television stations. Without in any way interfering with their utility from a human standpoint (indeed, they effected major improvements), the Masters transformed this pre-existent network into a sort of electromagnetic pleasure spa.

In time, of course, their additions and refinements exceeded mere human need or comprehension. What do the cows know of the Muzak playing in their dairybarn, except that it makes them feel good? Human labor could manufacture devices according to the Masters’ specification that human understanding would never be able to fathom. But even human labor became obsolete as the Masters—in themselves, a virtually unlimited power supply—stayed on and took things over, setting automatons to do the dirty work, freeing man from the drudgery of the commonplace that had been his perennial complaint. Freeing, at least, those who would accept such freedom—who would, in short, agree to become pets.

Although in many respects the Masters’ innovations had superseded the primitive technology of the 1970’s, they still maintained (largely for the benefit of ungrateful Dingoes) a modified system of electric power lines, lacing the entire world in arcane geometrical patterns that only the Masters could understand—or maintain.

It was to these high-tension lines that the Masters came to bathe and exercise, and so it was to the power lines that I would take my family. Even if there was no way to reach the Masters as they flowed back and forth in the wires overhead, we could follow the lines to some generator or powerhouse, perhaps the one that adjoined Shroeder, perhaps another elsewhere, for kennels were invariably located near power stations.

Once we reached the power line, it would be safe journeying. No Dingo would dare trespass into the very heart of the Masters’ domain.

I rushed to the farm jubilantly. Julie was drawing water at the pump. “Don’t run through the garden, Cuddles,” she called to me. “We’ll need those tomatoes for the winter ahead.”

“It makes… no difference… any more… Darling, Julie!” I had run a long way, and breath came hard. “I found them!… We can go now… home again, home again… jiggety-jog!”

Stumbling up to Julie I gave her a quick kiss and upended the bucket of water over my head, shuddering deliciously. The cold water seemed to stun every nerve ending into a happy numbness. It felt marvelous—almost like the Leash. Julie stood dumbfounded. I kissed her again.

“You beast, you’re soaking wet!”

Clothing does have its inconveniences, the chief of which (once one is used to the discomfort) is absorbency.

“Julie, I found them! I have. We’re practically home already.” And I explained about the power line and what it meant.

Julie looked meditative. “Well, I guess that means we’ll have to leave the farm now?”

“Have to! Mastery, Julie, aren’t you anxious to be away from here?”

“I don’t know. It was coming to seem like our own kennel. It was so nice, so private. And I haven’t started to learn to cook. Do you know what Petite brought home today? Eggs! We can…”

“You want to stay in this wilderness with Dingoes on all sides? Never to be Leashed again? And in this archaic, stinking, ruinous, dirty, foul…” Julie began to cry piteously, and I relented, conscious that I had rather overstated the case. “It would have been every bit that horrible without you. It was nice, Julie, but only on your account. If we go back, I’m sure our Master will let you continue learning to cook. And he’ll rig up a much better kitchen than you have here. With an electric stove.” She brightened, and I pressed my point. “But you know we have to go back. Our Leashes need us. If we stayed here, we’d become no better than Dingoes.”

“I suppose you’re right. I suppose.”

“That’s the spirit! Now, how soon can we be ready? You fix something to carry food in. Blankets would do, and at night we’ll be able to keep warm. And see if you can’t find some shoes that will fit Petite. If we start out early tomorrow, I don’t expect we’ll spend a night in the open, but just in case…”

While Julie improvised knapsacks, I went to the toolshed. There was an ancient weapon there that circumstances had made me uniquely equipped (as it then seemed) to handle—an axe. Not in the flaring Medieval style of St Bernard’s, but lethal enough in its modest way to slice through any number of Dingoes. I found that it was more difficult to throw the thing at a target than it had been at Swan Lake, because the sharp edge of the wedge was as often as not facing in the wrong direction at the moment of impact. However, wielding it by hand I was able to break up armloads of kindling from the broken rafters of the barn. Take that! And that! What ho! What havoc!

Grimly I refined upon the murderous properties of my weapon. I had noticed that the spark-producing machine would put a fine edge on metal that was held against it at the proper angle. After patient experimentation, I had so sharpened the iron blade that the merest touch of it would sliver flesh. Now, I thought, let the Dingoes come!

We set off before noon. Though Petite, still believing it was all a game, was amused and talkative, neither of her parents were in such high spirits. Julie was wistful and melancholic at leaving the farm (though she agreed we had no other choice), and I was nervous and apprehensive. From the hill from which I had espied the power line, we struck out into a wood of scrub pine, birch, and balsam. In the woods there was no way to estimate our progress. The sun can be used as a compass and even, in a rough way, as a clock, but it is no speedometer at all. We walked, and when it seemed that we had walked twice, three times the distance to the power line, we kept on walking. Julie became petulant; I became angry. Then she grew angry and I sulked. But always while we were walking. The brush caught at our pants’ legs, and the mud at the edge of the marshes about which we were forced to detour sucked at our boots. And we walked. Petite, riding pickaback on my shoulders, was having a world of fun slapping the mosquitoes that landed on my forehead. And still we walked.

The sun, striated by long, low, wispy clouds, hung huge and crimson at the horizon behind us; before us a pale sliver of moon peeped over the crest of a hill—and on the hill, black against the indigo of the sky, stood the power line.

Julie dropped her pack and ran up the hill. “Masters!” she cried. “Masters, we’ve come! Leash us. Make us yours again. Bring us home.”

The power line stood stark and immobile, wires swaying gently in the breeze. Julie embraced the wooden pole and screamed at the unhearing wires: “Master, your pets have come back to you. We love you! MASTER!”

“They don’t hear you,” I said softly. “If they could hear you, they would come.”

Julie stood up, squaring her shoulders bravely, and joined me where I had remained at the foot of the hill. There were no tears in her eyes. But her lips were pressed together in a mirthless, unbecoming smile. “I hate them,” she pronounced clearly. “With my whole being, I hate them!” Then she fell into my arms in a dead faint.

Petite stayed awake to keep me company through the early hours of the evening. We listened to the nightsounds of animals and birds and tried to guess what they were. At about nine o’clock by the moon, a complete and utter silence enveloped the land.

“Now that’s strange,” I observed.

“What’s strange, Papa?”

“That when the crickets are quiet, there’s no sound at all. Not a scrap. Aren’t wires supposed to hum? To make some small noise? These don’t. I think they may be dead.”

“Dead?” echoed Petite. “Are the Masters dead? Will the Dingoes eat us now? Will they let me go to the bathroom first? Because when I get scared…”

“No, Pete sweet. The wires are dead, not the Masters. The Masters will never die. Don’t you remember what I told you the other day about God?”

“But that was God.”

“Same difference, darling. Now you go to sleep. Your Papa was just thinking aloud and your Mommy was only pretending to be afraid. You know Mommy likes to pretend.”

“But why didn’t God come down from the electric poles when Mommy asked?”

“Maybe this line isn’t in use, honey. Maybe it’s broken. Tomorrow we’re going to walk down the line and find out. Anyhow I was probably wrong about the noise. That could be just a susperstition that wires hum, and only Dingoes are superstitious. The Masters probably can’t hear us through all the insulation on the wires. What would they be listening for way out here, anyhow? We’ll find our way to a nice kennel tomorrow, Petite, don’t you worry.”

Petite fell asleep then, but I could not. Great shafts of light streamed from the northern horizon. They glowed whitely in the black sky, dimming the stars as they shot out, dissolved, reformed.

The Northern Lights. Aurora Borealis.

It was there especially that the Masters loved to play and relax. They felt at home among the electrons of the Van Allen belt, and where it curved in to touch the Earth’s atmosphere at the magnetic poles they followed it, controlling the ionization of the air, structuring those pillars of light that men have always wondered at to conform to the elaborate rules of their supravisual geometry. These shifting patterns were the supreme delight of the Masters, and it was precisely because Earth, of all the planets in the solar system, possessed the strongest Van Allen belt that they had originally been drawn to this planet. They had only bothered to concern themselves with mankind after a number of nuclear explosions had been set off in the Van Allen belt in the 1960’s.

The aurora that night was incredibly beautiful, and so I knew that the Masters were still on Earth, living and flaming for their pets—their poor, lost maltreated pets—to see.

But it was a cold flame and very remote. I drew small comfort from it.

“Your courteous lights in vain you waste,” I muttered.

Julie, who has always been a light sleeper, stirred. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, probably too sleepy still to remember why she was supposed to be sorry.

“It’s all right. We’ll find them tomorrow,” I said, “and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Julie smiled and slid by imperceptible degrees back into sleep.

The next day we followed the lines to the north. They ran along beside an old asphalt road, scarred with fissures and upheavals, but still easier to travel than the rank brush on either side. We moved slower since I had found that my knees would no longer support the double burden of a knapsack and Petite, and we were obliged to match our pace against hers.

A faded sign gave the distance to Shroeder as twelve miles. Using the road (for the wires overhead were sufficient protection, as we thought, against the Dingoes), we could hope to reach the kennel by midafternoon. Regularly we passed deserted farmhouses set back from the road and, twice, the road widened and the ruins of houses were set closer together: a town. Here the wires would branch off in all directions, but the main power line followed its single course toward Shroeder. The poles were of rough pine, stained to reddish-brown by creosote, one just like another, until…

Julie noticed it as we were on the outskirts of Shroeder. Running up and down the poles were thin silvery lines that glinted metallically in the sunlight. On closer inspection these lines could be seen to form vertical chains of decorative elements in simple, repeating patterns. One common design consisted of overlapping circles linked in series by straight lines, so:

Another was a single zigzag pattern:

The most frequent design resembled a circuiting diagram of dry cells in series:

In fact they were all circuiting diagrams.

It was too crude decoratively and such nonsense from any other viewpoint that I knew it could not be the work of the Masters. There was something barbaric about these markings that smelt of Dingoes!

But what Dingo would dare approach this near the sanctuary of the Masters? The Kennel must be only a few hundred yards off. I began to have misgivings about our security. Before I could properly begin to savor this danger, another, and graver, had presented itself.

“Cuddles!” Julie screamed. “Gods and Masters, look! The power station!”

I scooped up Petite and was at Julie’s side instantly. A cyclone fence that ran some hundred feet along the road prevented our entrance to the power station, but it made no difference, for it was nothing but a rubble heap now. I-beams, gnarled and twisted like the limbs of denuded oaks, showed in gruesome silhouette against the light blue of the summer sky. The pylons that had fed the high-tension wires into the substation lay on the ground like metal Goliaths, quite dead. The wires that had led out from the station had been snapped and hung inert from the top of the cyclone fence, where now and again a breeze would stir them. All, all defunct.

“It’s been bombed,” I said, “and that’s impossible.”

“The Dingoes?” Petite asked.

“I daresay. But how could they?”

It made no sense. So primitive an attack as this could not succeed against the Mastery when the whole rich arsenal of twentieth-century science had failed. Oh, the nuclear blasts in the Van Allen belt had annoyed them, but I doubted then and I doubt now whether man has it in his power actually to kill one of the Masters.

How could it be done? How do you fight something without dimensions, without even known equations that might give some symbolic approximation of their character? Not, surely, by bombing minor power stations here and there; not even by bombing all of them. As well hope to kill a lion with a thistle. The Masters transcended mere technology.

Inside the fence, from somewhere in the tangle of gutted machinery, there was a moan. A woman’s voice reiterated the single word: “Masters, Masters…”

“That’s no Dingo,” Julie said. “Some poor pet is caught in there. Cuddles, do you realize this means all the pets have been abandoned?”

“Hush! You’ll only make Petite cry with talk like that.”

We made our way through a hole in the fence sheared open by a falling pylon. Kneeling a few feet from that hole, her face turned away from us, was the moaning woman. She was using the blasted crossbeam of the pylon as a sort of prie-dieu. Her hair, though tangled and dirty, still showed traces of domestication. She was decently naked, but her flesh was discolored by bruises and her legs were badly scratched. Confronted with this pathetic ruin of a once-handsome pet, I realized for the first time how terribly wild Julie looked: dressed in the most vulgar clothes, her hair wound up in a practical but inartistic bun and knotted with strips of cloth, her lovely feet encased in clumsy rubber boots. We must have looked like Dingoes.

The poor woman stopped moaning and turned to confront us. By slow degrees her expression changed from despair to blank amazement. “Father!” she said, aghast.

“Roxanna!” I exclaimed. “Is it you?”