The Puppies Of Terra

Chapter Six
In which I defend a woman’s honor, and with what dire consequence.

It was nobody else. She was rather thinner now than she had been; time had encroached upon her beauty to that degree that one could not, with the best will in the world, mistake her for eighteen—or even for twenty-eight. But her nose and her glance and her intelligence—these were still as sharp as they had ever been. No doubt of it, this was Roxanna Proust, née Skunk.

Roxanna, for her part, was not as readily convinced that, quite contrary to being her father, I was only her little White Fang, her former disciple, grown now to a man’s estate.

“But those clothes…” she insisted. “I’d know that jacket anywhere, with the missing bottom button. And those boots with the red circles around the rim. And a week’s growth of beard. It’s my father to the life!”

Out of courtesy I removed my jacket, but I was reluctant to remove my pants for some reason. Perhaps clothes are the cause of modesty, rather than, as Genesis would have it, the other way around. Briefly as I could, I explained to Roxanna how our Master had brought us to the farm and from there deserted us, and how we had to take clothes from the farmhouse to make our journey—her parents’ clothes, as it happened.

“And Pluto and your mother—you say they came with you?” Roxanna asked, scrunching up those shrewd wrinkles of hers inquiringly. “Where are they now?”

“I was hoping you might know, Roxanna. I thought Pluto might have seen fit to pay you a visit. I know that he sends you each new book he does.”

“No. No, it must not have occurred to him. This is the first I’ve heard of your being here. But what”—her expression underwent a subtle change, as though she had begun to make calculations—“a delightful surprise it is!”

Here the conversation lapsed awkwardly, for Julie and I did not wish to show ourselves boorishly concerned only with our own problems when Roxanna herself was in such evident distress, and Roxanna for her part seemed to be occupied with some private debate.

“Have you read The Prayers for Investments?” Julie asked after this embarrassing silence. “All Swan Lake is certain it’s Pluto’s best thing to date. They say his new ceremonies are absolutely compulsive.”

“I started it, but I couldn’t seem to… make much sense of it. So often, I find that… these modern writers, as I’ve observed… although Proust, however…” She trailed off vaguely and began absent-mindedly to rub her bony, bare thighs. I noticed that her skin was covered with small black-and-blue marks, chiefly on her thighs and lower torso. The marks were too tiny to have resulted from blows, too numerous to be accidental.

She sighed deeply, a sign expressive of more than the grinding ennui of life at Shroeder, of more than even the loss of her Master. It was an inexpressibly sad sound, yet at the same time perversely pleasurable. “The brute!” she whispered, not for our ears. “The filthy, f— brute!”

Then, as though this had all occurred in one mighty parenthesis, she returned to her earlier theme. “If the truth be known, I read much less of late than once I did. Even Proust, even he, doesn’t have the same—whatever it was he did have. No, not even Proust…” This speech, too, died away in a whisper, so that by the end it was not quite certain whether the last word was Proust or a repetition of the brute. “And then, of course, there’s been this revolution. And it’s hard to concentrate on reading, with a revolution going on all about one.”

“Ah yes,” I said, “the revolution. Would you tell us something about that?”

Roxanna’s account was none too clear, having been assembled from eavesdropped conversations and uninformed conjectures. Even the word revolution proved to be misleading. Further, her whole account was interlarded with such a quantity of sighs and imprecations, laments and curses, that a full transcription would be an excess of verisimilitude. Therefore, I’ve written here not the garbled story Roxanna told us that afternoon but the facts as they were later to be established by the courts and newspapers.

July had been a month of unusual sunspot activity. The Masters, anticipating the dynamic auroral displays that follow such periods, had flocked to Earth—many, like our Master, bringing their pets with them. Shortly after our arrival, during the afternoon that Julie and I had been unleashed, a solar prominence of extraordinary intensity had erupted from the center of a sunspot cluster and knocked the Masters out of commission.

It was like a house that’s been totally electrified. Everything was plugged in: the refrigerators, the stove, the air conditioner, the iron, the toaster, the coffeepot, the floodlights, the television and the model railroad in the basement. When BLAT! lightning strikes, and there’s one hell of a short-circuit. Lights out, tubes popped, wires fused, motors dead. The Masters weren’t dead, of course. They’re made of stronger stuff than toasters. But while they convalesced…

Roxanna herself had been spared the worst of it, since she’d been sitting on the cathedral steps when the lights went out. But she’d seen it happen. In a flash (literally, a flash) the entire kennel—walls, floors, even the stores of food and sporting equipment—had disappeared. It was as though they had existed only as an idea in the mind of God, and then God had gone off and forgotten that idea. Pets who had been soaring along slipstreams in the vast spaces of the gymnasium soared now in vaster spaces. Everyone who had been in the upper floors of the kennel buildings suddenly found himself plunging down to the ground, overpowered by Earth’s gravity, accelerating. For the fortunate, like Roxanna, it had meant only a sore behind or a sprained ankle. Others died.

The carnage had been terrible. The Shroeder Kennel, what was left of it, was thrown into panic. But the worst was still before them. The Dingoes, quicker to realize what had happened than the distracted pets, had overrun the breeding farms and kennels everywhere. In the first fire of insurrectionary excitement, they were ruthless. Puppies were taken from their mothers, to be raised in the dens of Dingoes; the men, any who resisted, were ruthlessly slaughtered before the eyes of their mates, and the poor bitches… Well, what would one expect of Dingoes?

At this point Roxanna broke into tears, quite unable to carry on with even the semblance of a chronology. “Oh, the brute!” she wailed. “Oh, you’ve no idea how I hate him! When he saw me that night, he had two of his minions take me to his tent, and then—it was so awful! The things I was forced to do! The abasement! Oh, I could poison him! The brute! But he doesn’t give me a chance. Oh, when I think… If you only knew…” As this diatribe continued, Roxanna’s hands rubbed ever more frenziedly across the scant flesh of her thighs, dark with a multitude of those curious pinpoint bruises. “Remember, when I told you, years and years ago, about my parents? How my father would go into town on Saturday night and return all tanked up? The beatings he gave my poor mother? How I would listen at the register upstairs? How I wanted to see them! But now I know! Because he’s just the same. Another brute. A vicious, ignorant, smelling, loutish brute!”

All in all, it took Roxanna the better part of an hour to tell this story, for she had a way of breaking into passionate denunciations or veering off into a digression that would have been the delight of any admirer of Tristram Shandy. For my own part, I am inclined to be more straightforward. In fact, her divagations began to distress me considerably as soon as I realized that the vicinity was still swarming with armed Dingoes, and that Roxanna was living at Shroeder in bondage to the chief of them. Bruno Schwarzkopf!

“Roxanna,” I said, trying to raise her to her feet, “Julie and I are going to help you escape from him. We’ll take you back to the farm. No one will look there. But we’d better start right away. We’ve wasted too much time sitting about and talking to no purpose.”

“It’s too late,” Roxanna said with a sigh in which the resignation was not unmixed with a certain self-satisfaction. “It’s already too late.”

Too long allegiance to the authority of Proust had finally taken its toll on Roxanna’s character, and though I may anticipate my story by mentioning the word here, I should like to say it this once and have done: Roxanna, sadly, was something of a masochist.

“Roxanna,” I said, more firmly now, “you must come with us.”

“Get your own bitch, Mister,” came a good-natured bellow of a voice from not too far away. With a sinking heart I faced the intruder, a red-faced, bow-legged, asymmetrical knot of flesh in khakis crusted with mud and grease. He stood on the other side of the fence, arms akimbo, exposing several ill-formed, decay-blackened teeth in the sort of grin I have since been told is “well-meaning”. Though not much more than five feet tall, his chest and arms seemed thick almost to deformity. He held what looked like a glass fishing rod in one meaty hand.

“The name’s Schwarzkopf, Mister. Bruno Schwarzkopf, and I’m the head of the RIC in these parts. We’re repatriating these damned pets. Now, come on home, Rocky old girl. You know what I told you about sniffing up to other dogs.” He laughed, rather the way a bull would laugh, if bulls laughed.

So this was a Dingo! This wretched, misformed runt. All these years of dread—and now at the moment of confrontation it was nothing much worse than a genetic prank. I allowed my just wrath to swell luxuriously. “You are not Roxanna’s Master, and she is not going with you.”

“The hell you say!”

“Please,” Roxanna implored. “I must go to him now.” But her body didn’t protest; she was limp with fear. I pushed her behind me and picked up my axe from the ground. That should send him running, I thought confidently.

His smile broadened. “What’s with you, pal? Are you some kind of goddamned pet? Or what?”

“Dingo!” I said, eloquent with contempt. “Defend yourself!”

Bruno reached a hand behind his back and made adjustments on an apparatus strapped there. It was the size of one of our knapsacks. Then he climbed through the hole in the fence, brandishing the long, flexible pole.

“Axes!” he scoffed. “The next thing you know, someone’s going to invent the bow and arrow.”

I advanced toward the Dingo, who stood within the fence now, my axe at the ready and murder in my heart, as they say. With my left hand I held to the metal frame of the fallen pylon, using it as a crutch. My knees were very weak, which I am told is not unusual in such circumstances.

Bruno flicked the end of the glass fishing rod against the pylon. There was a spark, and my mind reeled.

I was sitting on the ground. I could see Bruno’s black-toothed grin above me between white flashes of unconsciousness. I swung at his face wildly. The axe hit the pylon with a dull thunk.

He flicked the pole at me again. It touched my left leg at the knee. The shock tore through my body and wrenched a cry from my lips.

“Good stuff, huh, Jack? Great for the circulation. If you’re interested in mechanical things, it’s real easy to make. It’s a prod pole. Prod poles are meant for cattle, but they work even better on smaller animals.”

He flicked it again, tracing a line of pain across my neck. I screamed in agony—I couldn’t help it.

“The fishpole was my idea. Handles easier this way.”

He let the tip of the pole play over my right arm. Every shred of consciousness that remained to me was in my hand. I clenched the axe handle until the pain in my hand was worse than the flashes of pain that tore through my whole body—until there was no consciousness left.

When I woke—seconds later? minutes? I don’t know—I could hear Roxanna’s hysterical laughter. Bruno had finished with her. Julie’s voice, pitched so high that I could hardly recognize it, was saying Stay away! and then, still more shrilly, Stay away from my daughter!

There was a sparking sound, and Petite’s scream. “White Fang!” Julie called. “Oh, Mastery—White Fang!”

She had called me that! Not Cuddles, not Prometheus. But White Fang!

I sprang to my feet, and the axe was just part of my hand now. I felt, as never before, even when I was Leashed, totally alive and aware, absolutely sure of myself. My body was a living flame. Wow!

Bruno had ceased to torment Petite and had caught hold of Julie. He heard me scrambling over the wreckage of the station and turned around just in time for the axe to come crashing down across his chest.

I hadn’t meant to draw blood. I didn’t dare to. I had only wanted to smash the power pack strapped on his back.

There was a terrible gush of blood from the chest wound, thick and winy. The axe in my hand was covered with blood. It was horrible. I had never seen anyone bleeding like this before, never. It was a hundredfold worse than the injuries I’d done Pluto or St Bernard.

It was horrible! The blood.

Convulsed with vomiting, I collapsed onto Bruno’s fallen body. The last thing I remember was Roxanna’s tear-streaked face as she rushed forward to take the fallen Dingo in her arms.

In these days of P(BLAT)eril and P(BLAT)ossibility… Whenever the speaker enunciated a P, the public address system erupted into a horrible crepitant noise: P(BLAT)!

The crowd roared.

Hands tied, feet bound, I wiggled up in the back seat for a better view. We were moving down a city street at no more than five miles per hour through such a concentration of Dingoes that my immediate response was to wish myself unconscious again, the smell was so terrific.

Yes— P(BLAT)ossibility! Another oP(BLAT)ortunity to hoP(BLAT)e once more—for the Inductance Corps! P(BLAT)rovidence has ordained it, and…

The speaker’s voice (which issued from a metal horn on the hood of the jeep) was drowned by the swelling anthem that the swarm of Dingoes about us raised and that the resonating masses further along the parade route caught up and amplified:

Though Julie was in the back seat with me, an armed Dingo sat between us and discouraged our conversation with little pokes of his rifle butt. I was able to pantomime the question that concerned me most: “Petite?” But Julie could only give an anguished shrug and shake her head in reply.

“Where are we going?” I asked the Dingo guard. He answered with his rifle butt against my lower ribs. “Where are we now?” The rifle butt seemed not to know. I retired into a philosophic silence.

At the end of the anthem the loudspeaker renewed its own patriotic cacophony: But we must grasp this oP(BLAT)ortunity! Only B(BLAT)lood and sweat and toil and tears can P(BLAT)ay the P(BLAT)rice that history demands of us…

A woman rushed from the frenzied crowd through which the jeep was bulldozing its way. She threw a bouquet into my face and followed it as well as she could with herself. “Give ‘em hell, boy!” she shouted between kisses. “Give ‘em hell!” she was still screaming as the men in khaki were dragging her away. I had the distinct feeling that had she known me for what I was—a pet—she would have been less friendly, though perhaps no less demonstrative. Fortunately, the driver of the jeep, a Major of the so-called Inductance Corps, had had the foresight to wrap me in his overcoat, which offered almost as effective protection as invisibility.

The parade terminated at a makeshift airport, once a city park, where a Ford Trimotor was warming its engines at the end of a rough gravel runway. As our jeep pulled up to the plane, we could see a stretcher being loaded into the cabin under Roxanna’s fretful supervision.

“You brute!” she called out above the hiccoughing of the plane’s motors, as soon as she caught sight of me. When Bruno was stowed aboard and we were being led on at gunpoint, Roxanna developed her theme with more imagination. “Axe-murderer! Fiend! Judas! They’ve got your number now, boy! They’ll take care of you! I only wish I could do it with my own two hands. But I did what I could—I told them who you were—who your father was. Tennyson White! You should have seen the faces they made! And now they’re going to do for you what they did for him—and for the Manglesnatch statue. Ha!” The driver of the jeep began pulling her back. “Send me his ear, officer. And hers too. And their bones: I’ll grind their bones to make my bread!”

When we were at last safely (so to speak) aboard the plane and the hatch was closed, the guard assured us it would be nothing so awful as Roxanna had suggested. “You’d think we wasn’t civilized, the way she talks. Hanging’s the worst that can happen, you know. We’ve got a gallows out front of the courthouse in St Paul can hang five at a time. Christ almighty, you should see that! Oh, sweet Jesus! But don’t you believe any of her bull about cutting folks up in pieces. There ain’t none of that… any more.”

“Could you tell me, please,” I asked of him (for he seemed to be in a better mood now than he’d been in the jeep), “where my daughter is?”

“The little girl? That lady back there’s taking care of her. She asked to be the foster-mother, and so…”

“Petite! With that ogress? No!” Julie struggled against her bonds, while the plane began to taxi down the runway. “You have to stop this machine. I must have my daughter back!” When the plane was off the ground, even Julie could see the futility of further complaint.

The declining sun, scarcely five degrees above the horizon, was visible through the right-hand windows of the cabin, so I knew we were flying south. It seemed probable that so minuscule an aircraft could accomplish only a few hundred miles without having to touch down for fuel. I knew there were important kennels in that direction—Anoka, St Cloud, etc.—but I had never paid any attention to the geography of the Dingoes’ settlements. But the guard had mentioned one city—“St Paul.”

“What will happen when we get to St Paul?” I asked. “Will we be released then? Or held in a dungeon?”

The guard laughed. He didn’t bother to explain the joke.

“Shall I be tried in court? I demand a jury of my peers! I’m innocent. Julie witnessed it. I didn’t mean to…”

As though in reproof, the guard walked to the front of the small cabin to examine Bruno. I was left to stare out the window at the laboring propellers and wish desperately for a Master to assist them at their rustic task.

The guard was called up front to confer with the pilot, and I tried to comfort Julie with hollow reassurances. It was almost a relief when the erratic behavior of the plane (how can the air be bumpy?) took our attention from the longer-range anxieties and focused it on the existential moment, now. The guard returned to announce that the left-hand propeller had failed and the right-hand was going. The plane was losing altitude (though I couldn’t understand how he knew that, since it was perfectly dark and there was no way to judge). I had to help him jettison various complicated metal do-jiggers out the open hatch. The plane (we were told) regained altitude, but it continued to make arhythmic gaspings and grindings. The guard made us get into parachutes and showed us how they worked. One only had to jump, count to ten, pull the little ring out, and wait to see if it would work.

“Have you ever done it?” I asked the guard as we stood looking out the open hatch at the black nothingness below.

“Yeah, once. It was no picnic.”

“But it did work? It usually works?”

“Yeah. The danger isn’t so much in its not opening. It’s how you land. You can break a leg easy, and if you get caught in a bad wind—”

“Good-bye, Darling, Julie!” I shouted. “Wait for me. I’ll rescue you as soon as I possibly can.”

And then I was falling, the plane wasn’t above me, only its fading noise. The stars vanished as I fell through cloud-banks. I counted to five, and I couldn’t think what came next, so I pulled the string, the chute opened, the strap across my chest tightened and pulled me upright, and for a couple of minutes I had nothing to do but swing back and forth lazily in my lattice of straps and regret my hasty derring-do. For all I knew I was over an ocean!

Landing, I knocked my coccyx against some intractable concrete and twisted my ankle. All about me the floodlights switched on, and voices shouted contradictory orders.

“An excellent landing, sir. An as-ton-ishing landing, I would say. I hope you’re quite all right?” The man who addressed me was wearing an overcoat similar to my own. He had great white Franz-Josef moustaches and supported himself on an ornately carved walking stick. I had never seen so wrinkled a face, except in reproductions of Rembrandts.

“Oh, quite,” I replied. “Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”

His hand came up in a stiff salute. “Captain Frangle, sir. I’m commander of this here peniten-itentiary, sir.”

“Peniten-itentiary?”

“Well, that’s what we used to call it. What’s the word now? There’s so many new words for things, I tend to forget one here and one there. Repatriation center—that’s it! For the goddamned pets, you know.”