THE PUPPIES OF TERRA

Thomas M. Disch

Being a True and Faithful Account of the Great Upheavals of 2037; with Portraits of Many of the Principals Involved; as well as Reflections by the Author on the Nature of Art, Revolution & Theology

For Olex and Valkyrie, for Precious and Anathema, for Sheba and Elf and good dogs everywhere.

“I am His Highness’ dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”

– Alexander Pope On the Collar of a Dog

Chapter One

In which I am born, and my father is done in by Dingoes.

My name is White Fang, though of course that is not really my name. My name is really Dennis White, now. I like the old name better; it is more in keeping with the image I have of myself. But perhaps such an attitude is just a hangover from the time I was a pet. Some people would say that once you’ve been a pet, once you’ve grown used to the Leash, you’re never quite human again—in the sense of being free. I don’t know about that. Of course, it is more fun to be Leashed, but one can learn not to want it so badly. I did. And this, in one sense, is the story of how I did it.

As a puppy…

But already I have made a botch of it! For will not most of my readers resent such a phrase? Puppies, Pets, Masters, Leashes: the old way of speaking has come to have almost the force of obscenity among the zealous. And who in these times dares not to be among the zealous?

Yet, how am I to tell the story of my life as a pet without using a pet’s language, without adopting his attitudes? Surely the time must come to an end when every politician and philosopher must conceal himself behind the mask of a bare-bones, know-nothing prose. And am I then required to tell White Fang’s story from the point of view of a Dingo? No! The memoirs of a member of Louis XVI’s court could not be set down in the rough accents of a sansculotte—and I must be allowed to write of White Fang as White Fang would have written of himself. For the time being, let us leave Dennis White in abeyance—and let me say, without more preamble, that as a puppy I was uncommonly happy.

How could it have been otherwise? I was raised in the best kennels of the Solar System. My young body was sportive, and so it sported. My education ranged freely through the full scope of human knowledge, and yet I was never forced beyond my inclinations. I enjoyed the company of my own kind as well as the inestimable pleasures of the Leash. Lastly, I was conscious from earliest childhood of possessing the finest pedigree. My father Tennyson White was a major artist, perhaps the major artist, in a society that valued art above all things else. No little bit of that glory rubbed off on his bloodline. Later, in adolescence, a father’s fame may cramp the expanding ego, but then it was enough to know that one was as valuable a pet as there could be. It made me feel secure. In what else does happiness consist than in this: a sense of one’s own value? Not in freedom, surely. For I have known that state, oh very well, and I can assure you that it is far less happy. Had I been free in my childhood, I would almost certainly have been wretched.

Actually, when I speak of my childhood as being so idyllic, I refer chiefly to my first seven years, for shortly after my seventh birthday I was orphaned—that is to say, the Dingoes made away with my father, while Motherlove simply committed Pluto and myself to care of the Shroeder Kennel and vanished into outer space. Thus even at the age of seven I might have been said to be free, and it was a condition I bitterly resented, thinking of it simply as neglect. Now, of course, I can see that the Shroeder Kennel, by contrast to what we call “the human condition”, is truly Paradise. Then I only had the moons of Jupiter to judge by. But I see I am making something of a jumble of this. Perhaps it would be better to set about this in a more chronological fashion.

Let me make a narrative of this.

To begin my life with the beginning of my life, as David Copperfield does, I record that I was born on a Sunday afternoon in the year of Our Lord 2017, on Ganymede, the fourth moon of Jupiter. At my father’s behest a gigantic thunderclap accompanied my birth, attended with quite a smart display of meteors and artificial comets. These natural wonders were succeeded by a Masque written by my father and set to a reconstituted Vivaldi cantata, in which various of the bitches of the kennel took the parts of my fairy godmothers. The eleven fairies portrayed were Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, and Clean. Each presented me with a little token emblematic of the spiritual gift she was bequeathing to me, but my father had somehow neglected to invite the twelfth fairy, Reverence, with fateful consequences for my character.

In speaking of my “earliest memories”, I encounter difficulties, for I cannot be sure at this late date which of my seeming memories are indeed mine and which are borrowed from Motherlove, Pluto, or whichever other brain my Master may have happened to pick for me. For instance, I have a distinct recollection of Daddy (excuse me, but that is the name I know him by; he has no other) looking yearningly into my eyes as he declaimed a poem, which I also remember clearly though I dare not here repeat it. I think it is one of the Earl of Rochester’s. Daddy is wearing a shirt in the Byronic style, with billowing sleeves and a soft, expansive collar. His tights are of black velvet, with silver piping. His thin hair, blonde almost to whiteness, hangs down to his shoulders. His eyes are the deep blue of a Martian sky, and their blue is heightened by contrast to the extreme pallor of his skin. Like his use of clothes and his broad A, the pallor is sheer affectation. He might have been tan for the asking.

Now surely this is not my memory. Perhaps it is Motherlove’s, though she claimed, when I recited the poem for her, that she’d never heard such a thing in her life (attempting all the while not to giggle). It could have been the memory of any of a dozen bitches on Ganymede, for since Daddy was the kennel’s prize possession he was encouraged to bestow his favors liberally. From the number of pedigreed descendants who could legitimately claim paternity from him it seems evident that Daddy cooperated with this policy. I have never met (and now I never shall meet) all my half-brothers and half-sisters.

Another memory that is more likely to have been mine is of Daddy from a vantage point of about three feet from the ground. He is conventionally nude this time and laughing to bust a gut. I can’t remember the joke. This must have been one of my last memories of him, for behind him I can make out the vivid green of a Terran meadow and the light that plays across his body can only be the light of the sun as it shines on our home planet, no more nor less. Even foreshortened I can see that Daddy had then the body of an athlete—but so had everyone else under the Mastery. Daddy was really quite modest in his somatic tastes, tending toward the Cellini side of the scale, while the majority favored a more Michelangelesque style.

Of my mother, Clea Melbourne Clift, I have more memories but none so distinct. She had a type of classic handsomeness over which time could not exercise his cruel authority: a noble brow; an unimpeachable nose; lips that might have been sculpted of marble, so perfect was their articulation. Indeed, from the tip of her toe to the highest-piled lock of her perfectly composed hair, there was something about Clea Clift that suggested the work of a stonemason. Clea was such a stickler for form. She always wanted me and Pluto to call her “Clea” or better, “Miss Clift”, and would become incensed if we ventured to use, in moments of unconsidered fondness, the simpler “Mom”, or Daddy’s slightly joking “Motherlove”. Had we been French, I daresay she would have insisted upon the formal vous and forbidden the familiar tu. Like so many women of her generation, the first to grow up under the Mastery, Clea was something of a bluestocking and very jealous of her independence. For Clea to have married and taken on the name of White, renowned though that name was and proud as she might be otherwise to be associated with it, would have been in contradiction to the first article of her faith: the sexes must be equal in all things.

Pluto and I didn’t know quite how we were to behave around Clea. She didn’t want us to think of her as a mother, but more as a sort of friend of the family. A distant friend. She interested herself but little in our education, limiting her attentions to serving us up with little snippets of history and culture-lore. The legend of van Gogh’s ear seemed to possess a special attraction to her for some reason, and she related it to me in my comfy force-field gravity-pulse cradle in a dozen variant forms, in which, successively, the character of van Gogh himself grew more and more peripheral while that of his “girlfriend” became of central importance. All I can recall of van Gogh’s girlfriend now, however, was that she had, like Motherlove, a classic nose and the ability to drive men mad with love.

It was Clea’s distinction to have been the first puppy born on Ganymede, which was at that time and for decades after the premier kennel of the Solar System. Daddy only came to Ganymede after the success of his novel, A Dog’s Life, when he was thirty-three years old. Daddy says that at first Clea Melbourne Clift would have nothing to do with him. Only when it appeared that his literary reputation was not to wane after a season of notoriety, and more important, that Clea’s aloofness had served only to open up the field to candidates who would otherwise have stood little chance against Clea’s superior charms—only then did she relent. Too late. A month sooner, and she might have constrained Daddy to monogamy, as he had sometimes offered; as it was, she was lucky to win the position of “first wife”. Their romance resembled that of Romeo and Juliet, in the respect that the lovers’ misfortunes arose from their having failed, by ever so small a margin, to synchronize their watches.

From the very first they quarreled. I can remember in particular one night (a very crucial one for this tale, for it was the night upon which its narrator was conceived) when the several causes of their rupture had come to a head all at once. Daddy had been taking his duties as a stud more seriously than usual and was consequently not giving Clea all the attention she felt was her due. Moreover, he had happened to make disparaging remarks upon Clea’s interpretation of some Schubert Lieder. (Have I mentioned that Clea was a singer? No? Then let me at once make it clear that her voice was not her prime attraction, or—for Daddy—any at all.)

Throughout the argument I seem to see Clea’s lovely face—usually a delicate tint of rose, but now flushed an angry red—so I presume that this memory originated in Daddy’s mind; certainly its timbre, the pervading irony, the sense that everything he says is “in quotes”, is his. But perhaps the whole scene is no more than a transparently Oedipal dream disguising itself as a borrowed “memory”. Or worse, what if truth and fancy, event and wish, have become inextricably tangled, beyond the power of even a Tiresias to unknot them?

Well then, I must use a sword and just hack away…

The scent of jasmine. The smoothness of Clea’s skin beneath my hand. Everything bathed in the pink glow of a desert twilight. “Now, Clea,” I can hear my voice saying, “we’ve been through all this before. I have to do these things for the sake of the kennel—to keep the standard up. You can understand that. Why—it should make you proud.”

She moves away and veils her beauty, like a startled squid, in sworls of inky mist. “Bother the kennel!” she whines. “If you really loved me as much as you say, you wouldn’t want to be off every night…”

“That’s just it, Clea my loveliest bitch, I don’t want to be away from you. But it’s my duty, my vocation.”

“And tonight, just because our Master’s given you the go-ahead…”

“Isn’t that a good reason? Don’t you want another son?”

“But…”

“And don’t you want the very best possible son [Meaning me] that you can possibly have? Well then, Clea my lovely, tonight’s the night. Be reasonable, darling.”

“Oh, reason!” she says, with highest disdain. “You’ll always be right, if you use reason as an argument. But already the black mists about her were beginning to disperse.

“If you won’t be persuaded logically, let me show you what I mean.” Daddy’s mind calls for its Master, and in the same instant the meshes of the Leash close around his and Clea’s mind, linking them in telepathic bondage. Argument is no longer possible; reason is subdued; only the Vision persists, and that Vision is of me, of White Fang, the son who will be theirs, the form potential in the chromosomatic patterns that their Master, a renowned breeder, had selected from the trillions of possible permutations and combinations available to him during the several months past.

I must say it is a good likeness, this Vision. The face is mine as surely as the one I see every day in my bathroom mirror. Truly, I am now missing one or two of the teeth that the model White Fang flashes in a smile, and I have a little scar on my left cheek (it is only evident when I blush) which the prophecy did not include. But these discrepancies are the work of environment, not heredity. The body is as excellently put together as one might hope, though here again environment has been making itself felt (I eat too much). Splendid hind quarters and a handsome torso. The head is smallish, according to the classic prescription, but well compact with intelligence for all that. And of course, a flawless character: Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly…

“Oh, all right,” Clea sighs.

I—or rather, Daddy—kisses her, and there I had better bring this particular reminiscence to an end.

Of my first visit to Earth in 2024 I have only the fuzziest recollection, for here I must fall back on my own mnemonic resources. My chief impression seems to have been of sunlight, the authentic, inimitable sunlight of Earth. Organs that have evolved under particular conditions will naturally be most comfortable where those conditions obtain, and thus no substitute, however artful, can provide just those balances of color and intensity, those alternations of night and day, summer and winter, hazy and clear, that our very cells will recognize, demand, and crave. Though born on Ganymede, I knew from the first that Earth was my home.

But I did not like it. In this certainly I was influenced by the example of my Motherlove, for whom every day away from the civilized life of Jupiter was a torment of boredom. “There is nothing to do,” she would lament, when Daddy had returned from his afternoon jaunts about the countryside. “There’s nothing to see, and nothing to listen to. I’m going out of my mind.”

“It won’t be much longer now, Clea my loveliest. Besides, this is good for you. Being out here in the country, off your Leash and on your own, develops self-reliance and initiative.

“—self-reliance and initiative!” Clea said with a stamp of her gold-slippered foot. “I want my Leash. But it’s not me I’m worried about. It’s the boys. It’s been weeks since White Fang and Pluto have had any lessons. They’re running around these woods like a couple of wild Indians. Like Dingoes! What if they were captured! They’d be eaten alive.”

“Nonsense. You’d think this were Borneo or Cuba, the way you go on. There aren’t any Dingoes in the United States of America in the year 2024. This is a civilized country.”

“What about those people you said you met the other day—what was their name? The Nelsons. They were Dingoes.”

“They were just poor honest country folk trying to scratch a living out of the dirt. Once you get through to them, they’re very friendly.”

“I think it’s disgusting!” Clea said, stretching out in the little gravity-pocket of the Prefab that our Master had left behind so that we would not be utterly without the amenities. “Talking with them. Eating their dirty food. You could catch a disease.”

“Then I’d call up the Shroeder Kennel and be cured. Really, this part of Minnesota is just as civilized as anything on Ganymede. I like it here. If I had my way…”

“If you had your way, we’d all become Dingoes! The Shroeder Kennel—don’t talk to me about the Shroeder Kennel! Have you been there? Have you seen the way the pets are treated on Earth?”

“Not to the Shroeder Kennel exactly, but…”

“Well, I have, and I can tell you it’s barbaric. Those poor pets live like animals. It’s like something before the Mastery. They all run around unleashed, in this awful sunlight, out-of-doors, among all these loathsome vegetables…”

“It’s only grass, my love.”

“It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting to want to live here. Why you wanted to bring me and the children to this living hell, I’ll never comprehend.”

“I’ve explained to you a dozen times—my work requires it. I can’t even begin the sequel until I’ve recaptured the feeling of the place—the sense of being stranded here, of being without hope, of being mortal…”

Motherlove gave a little gasp of horror and covered her ears. The idea of mortality—even the word—was too depressing. She went to the medicine dispenser and dialed for a skyrocket, a mildly euphoric beverage derived from LSD. In a little while she was hallucinating happily in her own little pocket of gravity. Pluto and I wanted some drugs too, but Daddy promised us he’d read us a chapter from A Dog’s Life instead.

My father Tennyson White belonged to the first generation of humans to grow up away from the planet Earth. Born in 1980, just ten years after the first manifestations, Daddy had been abandoned on the steps of a power station. His first Master had been more interested in botanical specimens than in caring for foundlings, and so his early education had been erratic. Even so, it was such an education as no human had ever had before—with the possible exception of John Stuart Mill—and one feels that Mill did pay a rather steep price for his education. But with a Master assisting, one can be as polymathematical as one would like. Language and science, music and gymnastics—anything that requires more of competence and familiarity than of creative insight—can become “second nature” with no more effort than it would take to read a novel by, for instance, George Eliot.

At the age of three Daddy was sold or traded or somehow exchanged (just how the Masters arrange these matters among themselves none of their pets have ever been given to understand; when asked, the Masters make an analogy to the gold standard—but who has ever understood the gold standard?) and transported to the asteroid Ceres, where his abilities were cultivated to the full by one of the first truly great breeders. In fact, it was largely due to the successes of the Master of Ceres that the study and breeding of homo sapiens gradually usurped the attention of all Masters involved in Terran problems. Whether we are to be grateful to the Master of Ceres for this is not within my province to judge. I only wish to make it clear that, from the age of three to the age of twenty, Daddy could not have wanted a better Master or more thorough cultivation.

Then at the age of twenty it was discovered that Daddy had leukemia. Though it was easily within the competence of his Master to have cured him of this wasting disease (what was not within their competence, after all?), nothing was done. As his Master explained to Daddy, as he lay there in his sickbed, it was considered unsporting to tamper with basic genetic materials, as any permanent cure would have required. Daddy protested and was assured that his case was being debated in the highest councils of the Mastery, but that it would be an indeterminate time before any decision could be reached. Meanwhile Daddy was shipped back to Earth, much as a piece of inferior merchandise might be returned to the factory. There, in an inferior, overpopulated, and understaffed hospital in Northeastern Minnesota, haunted by the knowledge that his life or death was nothing but a sporting proposition to the Masters, he conceived of his great novel, A Dog’s Life. He began writing it the same day his Master announced to him that his leukemia was going to be cured and that he would be allowed to return to his home on Ceres.

A Dog’s Life was an epoch-making book—like Luther’s Bible, or Das Kapital, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even the Masters read and admired it. Tennyson White received the Nobel Prize, was elected to the French Academy, and was the first man to hold two seats in the American Congress—he was the senior senator from Arizona and the representative from the Ninth District in Minnesota. More than any other person, it was he who effected the reconciliation of men and their Masters. And it was just for that reason that the Dingoes—the small element of the population that still resisted the sovereignty of the Master—had marked him for vengeance. It was from A Dog’s Life, in fact, that they had taken their name.

The wonder of that novel is that it’s told entirely from a dog’s point of view—a real dog, a canine of the Industrial Revolution. The realistic surface is never distorted by the demands of the allegory, and yet… And yet, no one has ever surpassed Daddy in depicting their essential and unfathomable alienness. As Woof to Mr Manglesnatch, so man to his Master. The analogy is almost infinitely extensible.

Before A Dog’s Life, the Dingoes (this is still the most convenient name to use when discussing the various dissident elements prior to 2037, for though they went by any number of names—Republicans, Baptists, Harvard Club, B’nai B’rith, etc.—they never could come together on a good brand name to sell revolution) had used such words as “kennel”, “leash” and even “pet” as invectives. Daddy’s book rather turned the tables. It gave them the old one-two-transvaluation-of-all-values-sockeroo punch, as it were. Thus, it became a point of pride to be a pet; to be domesticated was self-evidently a superior state than to be wild. One has only to observe the difference between a greyhound and a wolf, a clever dachshund and a vulgar Dingo, to see why the Masters are innately our… Masters.

There were other, more trifling consequences of the book’s vogue. Everyone who read it, everyone who was anyone, began to name his children after famous dogs. There hasn’t been a generation of puppies with stranger names since the Pilgrim Fathers went off the deep end back in the seventeenth century. To mention only those who have gone on to win fame on their own: Ladadog, Bobby Greyfriars, Little Sheba, Rintintin, Beautiful Joe, Snoopy and See Spot Run.

The reason that Daddy had returned to Earth yet once again, despite the unhappy associations one would have expected him to have from his last sojourn there, was that after a slight hiatus he was at work on a new novel that was to be a sequel to A Dog’s Life. His work proceeded in absolute privacy, a privacy that even in the most self-transcendent moments of being Leashed he would not allow his Master to intrude upon. For this would have been to cast doubt upon the value of the work as an authentic human creation.

The days of his research project passed into weeks, the weeks into months. Motherlove grew more and more vocal in her boredom, and since Daddy was not usually about during the day for her to complain to, it fell upon Pluto and myself to bear witness to her wrongs and play endless rubbers of three-handed bridge with her. It was not a very gratifying occupation for two boys our age (I was seven; Pluto, ten), and we tried to be out of her way whenever possible. We spent the daylight hours roaming the woods and exploring the innumerable lakeshores and riverbanks of the area. It was impossible to get lost, for we had a homing device that could instruct us how to retrace our every step. We observed none of the cautions that Motherlove was always inventing for us, and I’m sure that if we had been lucky enough to meet any Dingo children we would have been delighted to befriend them and join their wild games. Pluto and I were quite sick of each other by this time. Partly it was the difference in age; partly the isolation (in two months almost anyone becomes unendurable). I also think that a fundamental antipathy between Pluto and myself extends right down to the core of our pineal glands (which organ, Descartes tells us, is the residence of the soul).

And so it came about quite naturally that it should be Pluto and I who discovered the car—his late-vintage Volkswagen—overturned and just beginning to smolder as we got there. The windshield was shattered into opacity with buckshot, and the driver’s seat was dark with blood. Even as we watched the automobile caught fire, and we had to back away.

It did not take a woodsman to follow the spoor of Daddy’s blood to the edge of the forest. Apparently he was still alive then, for there are evidences of a struggle all along the path into the wood. Once or twice we called his name aloud, but the woods remained as silent as death. Is there a better analogy?

It was another day before the search party from Shroeder Kennel found the traces of the pyre. The ashes were scattered all about the meadow. The Master of the Shroeder Kennel identified the bloodstains on the edge of the clearing as Daddy’s and Daddy’s alone, and the ear that they found nailed to the oak tree was likewise identified beyond the shadow of a doubt. The severed ear was given to Clea. It was perhaps exactly what she’d always wanted of Daddy. She had a special locket made to contain it—a sort of reliquary.

As for the bulk of him, one could assume that the Dingoes would have been thorough in disposing of the remains. It was popularly believed (and I’m not sure myself that it isn’t true) that the Masters could have resurrected a body from utter hamburger.

A monument was built to him on the site of the murder. It was a statue of Woof and Mr Manglesnatch. Beneath the bronze figures was a plaque with the inscription:

TENNYSON WHITE

1980–2024

A Martyr to the Spirit of Domestication

There was, as well, a quotation from his novel: “Ah, what bliss there is in servitude!” The monument was later disfigured by Dingoes in ways too hideous to be recalled.

Chapter Two

In which I am neglected shamefully by my Master, and I bloody my brother’s nose.

The Masters: let me say a few words about the Masters.

Perhaps my dear readers will tell me that there is no need for me to put in my two-cents’ worth on a topic so threadbare and tired as the Mastery. It is considered good form these days to leave the subject alone, just as in the third and fourth centuries A.D. one did not bring up the subject of the Trinity with strangers. Whether the Son was of one substance with the Father, or of like substance, or perhaps of only similar substance was a matter best left to each man’s private conscience. The analogy extends farther than I first intended, for the Masters were our gods and though now their altars have been overturned, there is still something a little holy (or unholy, which is almost the same thing) about their empty shrines and temples. When gods die, they become demons and are then, if anything, more troublesome than before.

But since most of the figures involved in the present controversies on the essential nature of the Masters had not had the benefit, as I have, of direct experience of them, I can justly claim a sort of apostolic authority—a distinction that few of the controversialists will begrudge me, I am sure.

As nearly as we can know them, the Masters can be said to be a pure electromagnetic phenomenon—formed of a “substance” that cannot be called either “matter” or “energy” but which nonetheless displays a potentiality for either. No, that isn’t quite right, since I’ve not mentioned the neutrino. The neutrino is a sub-atomic particle that has a mass of 0, a charge of 0, and a spin of +½. Well, the Masters, according to the best authority (theirs), can be identified more or less exactly (it depends on a few other things) with that spin.

As a direct consequence of these wonderful properties, the power of the Masters approached (should I not rather say “approaches”?) cosmic proportions, and their knowledge approached omniscience. They were not quite infinite, but then what is? Considered simply as a field of force (or as a potentiality for such) they were, corporately, of a scope and dimension equal at least to the magnetic field of the Earth. Beside them mankind is insignificant and laughable—or so it often seemed in those days. Like Jehovah in his earlier, more anthropomorphic days, it was no problem at all for them to take over the management of Earth from us. They were, if not altogether omnipotent, potent enough for all our purposes and, presumably, for most of theirs.

In the strictest sense of the word, the Masters were unaccountable. One could only accept them, reverence them, and hope for the best.

The best that one could hope for was the Leash. Despite the hundreds of volumes written about it, the Leash has always eluded description: the tides of knowledge that sweep through the mind; the sense of being in communion with the most transcendental forces, of being a spoke from the hub about which the universe is spinning; the total certainty that it affords; the ecstasy and the consuming love. Naturally it didn’t always reach those proportions. Sometimes it was no more than a mild, diffuse sense of well-being—just the absence of anxiety. But if the Leash had never been more than a tranquilizer it could never have bound man as firmly as it did and made him love his servitude.

What was the Leash then, in fact?

First let me say what it was not. It was not a “telepathic link” with the Masters, any more than the tug of a leather leash on the jeweled collar of a poodle is speech. It was the Masters’ means of communicating with us, truly—but they could communicate no more to us than our minds were capable of receiving, and I can assure you that the depths of the Masters will never be fathomed by even the best of our divers.

The Leash was simply their touch. Those floods of ecstasy it brought were nothing more than the Masters’ way of tugging on our collar. A touch of their hand could transmute a human nervous system from gross lead to gleaming gold, or scramble a brain into idiocy with, literally, the speed of lightning, but it could not, without changing the nature of the beast, make a man something he was not. They could not, in short, raise us up to their own level.

Desirable as the Leash was, one could not coerce it. Like the state of grace, it came as a gift or not at all. How often a pet was Leashed and the intensity of the bond depended upon the whim or good will of one’s master. And here I must clear up another popular misconception: all Masters are not alike. They have discrete and individual personalities, as any pet who has had more than a single Master can tell you. Some of them seemed to be deeply concerned for their pets’ well-being. (How large this interest loomed in the whole framework of any Master’s life can never be known, for all that a pet can know about his Master is what sort of interest he takes in pets.) Others simply put them into a kennel and let them languish there, scarcely ever bothering to Leash them and put them through their paces. Such a master was the Master of the Shroeder Kennel.

Pluto and I were placed in the Shroeder Kennel within a week of our father’s assassination. Clea told us that it would be only for a little while and then she would be back for us. Perhaps she meant it, but I have always felt that her deed was very much on a par with that of Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother. Clea surely knew the sort of place the Shroeder Kennel was, for we had heard her complain about it to our poor father. Daddy, we were sure, would never have left us in such a joyless place. But Clea, now that Daddy was out of the picture, now that the glamor was gone, simply didn’t give a damn for the two puppies he had given her.

In a purely physical sense, we were well cared for, I’ll grant that. The Shroeder Kennel (named for a little town that had once occupied that site, of which it had been said, in the days before the Mastery, that you could throw a frozen turd from one end of town to the other without much experience as a pitcher) had an excellent gymnasium, warm and cold pools, indoor tennis and golf courses, good robotic instruction in all sports, and the kennel rations were prepared with that exquisite simplicity that only the most refined tastes can command. Our rooms, both public and private, were spacious, airy, and bright. The central architectural feature of the Kennel, the jewel for which all else was but the setting, was a reconstruction, perfect in every detail, of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City. (Why? I have always wondered. Why that? Why not Notre Dame, Salisbury, the Frauenkirche?) The reconstituted cathedral was set amid acres of English landscape gardening and playing fields. Naturalness was everywhere the style of the thing, and it was no less natural for being adjusted, indoors and outdoors alike, to our convenience. Thus, in the summer the air was filtered and cooled, and in the winter the dome that encompassed the kennel heated us and added extra hours of sunlight and warmth to the brief northern days. The dome delimiting the kennel was fully a mile in diameter, and within its bounds our comforts were secure against the enmity of the Dingoes.

It would have been an ideal existence—if only our Master had truly cared for us.

Motherlove left us at the gate of the Shroeder Kennel at sunset of an autumn afternoon. Outside the dome, the ground was sere and the tree branches already denuded; within, the grass was a perpetual midsummer green, and though the leaves of the trees still crimsoned and fell, they did so in graceful sequence so that there was never a preponderance of decay. Motherlove blew us a parting kiss; then, wreathed in baroque spires of golden light, like an irradiated Bernini Madonna, she ascended into the clear blue sky of October. As her figure diminished to a pinpoint and vanished, we felt our Leashes fall away (for no Master’s influence can extend beyond a dozen or so miles) and our minds stood naked in an alien world—a world that, having just been the scene of our father’s bloody death, we could not suppose to be friendly.

In the middle distance we could make out the spire of the cathedral, and, supposing it to be the administrative center, we made our way toward it along a neatly graveled path that circled a field where a gymnastic competition was in progress. Five youths were running pell-mell along a dirt track in a race so evenly contested that none of them could hold the lead more than a few meters at a time. A distance away other young men hurled the discus and javelin, while dispersed over the grass at regular intervals, like polka dots, pairs of wrestlers strained against each other, groaning with effort. Each of these gymnasts was blond, deeply-tanned, and constructed according to the specification that Michelangelo had developed for his “David”. Neither Pluto nor I were of a mind to disarrange so splendid a grouping of figures in a landscape by asking our way from them, any more than we would have thought to disturb a display of china figurines on the mantel of a house we were visiting for the first time. We pressed on cheerlessly to St John’s.

The Master of Ganymede from whom Pluto and I had received our earliest education had not been an enthusiastic archaeologist, so there had been few reconstructions on Ganymede other than of a purely utilitarian sort—a scaled-down version of Hampton Court, a couple of Palladian villas, that sort of thing. Nothing monumental. Our first impression of St John the Divine was out of proportion, therefore, to anything but its proportions. It is a vulgar building, but it is an incredibly big building. With my chin hanging slack and my heart pumping at double-time, I stretched out my hand to touch the torus at the base of one of the gigantic columns at the rear of the nave. It was cool and tingly, reminding me that what here seemed to be stone was in fact much less substantial: an immensely strong force-field with a skin of matter only one molecule thick. It was this stagey method of construction (let me assure you, though, that the illusion was perfect, the stagecraft consummate) that made “Architecture” a matter of such indifference to the Masters. Under such conditions munificence was taken for granted, and taste became the sole consideration.

Though it was empty, there was something about the cathedral that made Pluto and me wish to stay there. The sheer magnitude of the place seemed to put our little problems into perspective. What could we possibly matter beneath a ceiling as high as all that? It is the size of the gods, and nothing else, that endears them to their worshippers. The best god is simply the biggest.

(Forgive me, dear reader, these little wanderings from the true path of narrative. Theology is my special vice, but I must learn to keep a tighter rein on it.)

Shortly after we had entered the cathedral, a solitary worshipper came in behind us: a young lady of indeterminate age (I would have guessed eighteen, and I would have been wrong), wearing clothes of a most improbable cut, and a complexion so white that a geisha might have envied her. She blessed herself at the front, then walked down the center aisle with such a deal of swaying and unsteadiness that one feared, despite the voluminous base provided by her hoop skirt, that she would topple at every step. Her black hair was done up in an artful and complicated style and was surmounted by a bonnet of even greater complications—a construction of cloth, flowers, jewels, and papier-mâché that seemed to vie with the high altar for the attention of the faithful. It seemed a shame that there was no one but Pluto and myself present to admire it. When this mirror of fashion had reached the foremost pew of the nave, she genuflected (I thought she had really toppled then), entered, and knelt in an attitude of devotion, reading from a little black book she had taken from her reticule.

We approached respectfully, wondering if it was right to come into such a building unclothed. It was my first intimation of guilt, and I did not like it.

Pluto reached a timid hand out to pull at her puffy sleeve for attention, and the woman (one could see she was not such a young lady after all) turned a cold eye upon us. “What is it? Can’t you see I’m reading? Why don’t you go bother a robot? That’s what they’re for. Well, don’t just stand there gaping. What is it you want? Speak up!”

“Please, Miss,” Pluto stammered, “we’re the new puppies, and we don’t know where to go.”

“Go to a robot, of course. Do I look like a robot? Does this” (gesturing with her little black book at the vasty spaces of the cathedral) “look like a schoolroom?”

“Could you take us to a robot, please? Because we’re lost, you know.”

“Bother!” the woman exclaimed.

From the first, you can see, there was something daunting about Roxanna Proust, as though the very melancholy in which she wrapped herself up were an actively aggressive force. She was at almost all times steeped in emotion. She didn’t seem to care what flavor it was either, just as long as she got lots of it. Even before we had interrupted her, she had been crying into her book, and, as she scolded us, there were still two tears trembling in the corners of her dark eyes. The skin thereabouts was scrunched into a great delta of wrinkles, as though from the pressure of squeezing out the tears. She had a prominent nose in profile, with a good cutting edge to it, and a small, slightly recessed chin that would tremble in moments of stress; that is, usually. She wore quantities of jewelry, especially rings, with the idea that an opulence of ornament would compensate for the general spareness of her own person. Yet for all this, she did give one the impression of a sort of beauty, a rare and highly frangible sort.

Pluto broke under the pressure and began crying… not, I suspect, without a certain childish cunning. “B-but we’re lost! We’re orphans. We’re all alone!”

Roxanna’s delta of wrinkles narrowed under the pressure of a thought. “What did you say your names were?”

“My name’s Pluto, and he’s White Fang. He’s my little brother.”

“Your last name, child!”

“White.”

“Your father was Tennyson White? The Tennyson White?” Pluto nodded. Roxanna made a sound rather like a bird of prey swooping down on a field mouse. “You poor dear darlings!” Even as this cry echoed and reechoed in the cathedral vaults, Roxanna laid down her book and caught up Pluto and myself into the dark, ample folds of her dress, as if she were netting us. “Why didn’t you say so? Oh my little pets! My loves!”

With such endearments and as many others as she knew, she led Pluto and myself out of the cathedral. Only when we got to the bronze doors did she remember her little black book. She regarded the two of us a moment calculatingly, then pointed a heavily bejeweled forefinger at me: “You! Run back and fetch my book, will you? That’s a good dog.”

I was only too eager to please her and at the same time escape a little while from a presence that was, like a room in which a bottle of perfume has been broken, a little overpowering.

When I had found Roxanna’s book, I opened it to the title page out of curiosity and discovered it was not, as I had imagined, a prayerbook, but something in French that I’d never heard of called A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (Volume V: La Prisonnière) by somebody called Marcel Proust.

Aside from the robots and teaching machines that looked after us, it was chiefly Roxanna Proust who undertook the responsibility of our education. Faute de mieux. Tant pis. Roxanna taught us French, reading long passages to us from her favorite author (from whom she had appropriated her surname). Even now, when I wish, I can close my eyes and hear her voice again, shrill with didacticism: “Proust! Proust is the great spirit of our age! No one but Proust has seen so profoundly into the depths, the veritable abysses, of the human character. No one! Only Marcel Proust!” I sometimes wondered if she had read any other book in her life besides the Remembrance of Things Past. She taught us German by reading a German translation of Proust. She taught us the history of literature by comparing all other authors to Proust. (There was no comparison.) If she could have taught us mathematics by reading Proust, she would have done that too.

She despised all other novelists, with but one exception: Daddy. “He did have a certain degree of literary skill,” she had informed us shortly after our arrival. “I’m sure that if he had been able to continue, he would have learned to profit from Proust’s example.”

It is possible that Roxanna’s attentions were not entirely due to her selfless concern for the development of our literary taste. She was only too well aware that her talents were not widely appreciated at the Shroeder Kennel, where the emphasis was so much on athletics. She languished in the intellectual night of Shroeder, much as Chekhov’s Three Sisters languished in the provinces, always dreaming of that wonderful, never-to-be day when they would go to Moscow. Roxanna’s Moscow was the asteroids, and she was hopeful that Pluto and I, sons of the eminent Tennyson White, would get her there more readily than her own rather limited attainments and a pedigree she blushed even to mention. (Roxanna had been born on a nearby farm to a family with the unhappy name of Skunk.)

It was an eclectic education, but there was no one else about with even a fraction of Roxanna’s talent, special as it was. Most of the pets at Shroeder lived their lives between the gymnasium and the boudoir. For my own part, I’ll confess that I spent more time exercising and playing games than I did in the education booths or at Roxanna’s feet. Without the intellectual stimulation and aid of the Leash, literature has not been my natural inclination.

Pluto was different. Pluto loved to read, and he sucked right up to the Skunk Lady (as she was generally known at Shroeder). Under her guidance he began to write. Not surprisingly his first style (at age ten) was very derivative of Proust. The next year he began to sound more like Joyce, and by the time he was pushing thirteen he came into his own.

That was a red-letter day in Pluto’s life—the day he found his own style—and I remember how he came running across the playing field to drag me away from a rough session of gymnochess. I was a bit peeved, since White was winning, but I liked to humor Pluto in these things, since he had almost no other audience at Shroeder and I knew he was lonely.

He wouldn’t read Ceremony (the title of his work) to me out-of-doors, but insisted that I come to the Cathedral, which was empty every day but Sunday, the one day when our Master would gather his pets together and give them an hour on the Leash of full-pressure beatitude. Once in the cathedral, Pluto put on what he called “vestments”, oddments of clothing he scraped together from the theatrical wardrobes, and insisted I do the same.

“This is going to be a ceremony,” Pluto informed me in a whisper. “So you have to fold your hands together like this and not say anything till I’m done with it.” He lighted a candle and threw on a tape of organ fugues that sounded peculiarly hollow here, since the walls lacked the acoustical properities of real stone. Candle in hand, he marched up the steps to the pulpit in time to the music, where in an uneven adolescent baritone, he began to declaim from Ceremony.

“Ceremony. Part One: Worship of the Muse. First, an oration composed by Plutonium Keats White. Ahem! Art! Art is a thing of futile beauty. It has no part in our lives, or very little, and it is as unsuitable at moments of great stress as it is silly on occasions of state. It has an affinity to death. Its greatness is the greatness of a king resigned to his fate. It is defeatist. It is not the sort of thing you would inculcate in children, for”—and here he stared down at me in his gravest manner—“it might kill them in too large a dosage. Art is the way we delay our departure, but it is no way to start the day.”

He seemed to have finished, and I clapped—rather mildly, I’m afraid. “It’s nothing like Proust,” I assured him. “And I don’t think you could say Joyce influenced it very much either.”

“Quiet! That was only Part One. Part Two is called ‘The Sacrifice’, and for that part you have to get down on your knees and hold out your hands so I can tie them together.”

I laughed, thinking he was making a joke.

“On your knees, you little son of a bitch!” he screamed at me.

I cannot say what my reply was to this strange demand, except to suggest that I had first discovered the expression in a novel by J.D. Salinger.

It is difficult to say which of us was responsible for the fight. Pluto did come storming down from the pulpit in what was for him a berserker rage. He did strike the first blow. But all this while I continued to shout “(Salinger)!” at him, and he could claim to having been provoked.

Pluto was thirteen, I a mere ten; Pluto was quite five feet tall, I only a bit over four. But Pluto was a creampuff, and my three years of gymnastics made the contest almost even. He kicked and bit and flailed about and made some really splendid loud noises, but before I’d even warmed to the task he was in retreat. I managed to put a good rip in his foolish “vestment” and dyed it a noble red with the blood from his noble nose. At last he admitted that everything I’d said about him was true, and I let him get up from the floor.

He ran straight to the power station to signal our Master on the emergency switch, something no other pet had ever dared to do, since the Master of Shroeder didn’t like to be bothered. I am amazed—to this day I am amazed—that it was I who was punished and not Pluto. He started the fight.

A bloody nose! What is so dreadful about a bloody nose?

It was not a dire punishment. In some ways it was scarcely a punishment at all. It was just done to guarantee that I would be less inclined to shed blood in the future. I was conditioned, irrevocably, to respond to the sight of blood, be it ever so small a gout, with nausea and vomiting, succeeded by fainting. In all my years as a pet, my conditioning was never put to the test, but later there would be occasions, bloody occasions…

But I am getting ahead of myself. Everything in due order.

CHAPTER THREE

In which I meet Darling, Julie, and fly away to Swan Lake.

I have always considered that my adult life began at the age of ten. Before that age my memory can only reconstruct a chronology of events from a few key images. Everything is suppositive, as it were. But from age ten on, I can remember whole days exactly as they happened.

The whole day I would take most pleasure in remembering is the Fourth of October, 2027, a Wednesday. On Wednesdays in good weather Roxanna would take Pluto and me out into the country, beyond the dome of the kennel. We drove along the dusty country roads in a special little cart operated by solar tap and covered with an invisible but nonetheless reassuring bubble-shield so strong that not even the Masters themselves could break through it once it was switched on. Not that we had to worry about such an eventuality (we would have been only too happy if a Master would break in and Leash us), but the Dingoes had become more and more of a nuisance since the incident three years before of my father’s assassination. Several pets visiting Earth for their pleasure had been done away with in similar ways, with nothing left to bury but ashes. In half an hour we would arrive at a deserted farm, where, in the shade of overburdened apple trees, we would pursue our studies or, if Roxanna felt indulgent toward us, explore the old farm buildings, and rusting machinery. We never went into the house itself though. The aura of Dingoes still clung to it, and in any case Roxanna had absolutely forbidden it.

Only years later did Roxanna admit to us what we had known all along—that this had been her parents’ farm, abandoned during the Great Collapse of 2003, when the economy of those humans who were still holding out against the Mastery fell completely into ruin. The Skunks (their name was still legible on the mailbox) had volunteered themselves and their children for the nearest kennel—Shroeder, as it happened. The children had been accepted, but the parents had been judged unfit and sent away, as by that time most older volunteers were. The Masters had no more need of wild pets (who could never be perfectly domesticated), for now they were breeding their own and (so it seemed to us pets) doing a better job of it than Man ever had.

It was principally from kennel rejects like the Skunks that the society of Dingoes, as we know it today, has evolved, and this no doubt accounts for the scent of sour grapes that clings to so many of them and even, a little, to Roxanna—as I think I’ve already pointed out.

It was late in the afternoon, and Roxanna, tired of reading, was fanning herself with a perfumed handkerchief and reminiscing to Pluto about her country childhood and how different the world had been then. She told about her father’s drinking bouts on Saturday nights and how he would come back home and beat Roxanna’s poor mother terribly. She had never witnessed these beatings, but she had heard them and assured us they were terrible. For Pluto and myself, such tales confirmed our worst imaginings about the Dingoes. I, having but recently bloodied my brother’s nose, was persona non grata and accordingly I had gone up into the branches of the apple tree, higher than Pluto dared climb, to work problems in calculus, which I had just begun to study. Suddenly there appeared as in a vision, suspended in the air before me almost near enough to touch, a girl of about my own age. Wisps of heliotrope spiraled about her bare, sun-bronzed body, and her white hair gleamed in the dying sunlight as though it were itself luminescent.

“Hello,” she said. “My name is Darling, Julie. Darling is my last name, but you can call me Julie if you like. Don’t you want to play with me?”

I couldn’t reply. I was stunned—as much by her loveliness (yes, I was only ten, but children are not insensible of these things; perhaps not so insensible as we are) as by the shock of meeting a stranger in those unlikely circumstances.

She took a step toward me, smiling (Darling, Julie has always had the loveliest, cheek-dimpling smile), and I realized what would have been immediately evident to any well-brought-up pet: that it was her Master’s unseen presence that supported her. For him, anti-gravity would be a moment’s improvisation. But our Master’s neglect had made even such commonplaces as flight seem rare and wonderful to us.

“Aren’t you Leashed?” she asked, seeing that I hesitated to step off my branch and meet her halfway.

“No—none of us are.”

By this time Roxanna and Pluto had become aware of our visitor, but since they were a good ten feet below Julie and me, it was awkward for them to join the conversation. It was awkward for me, for that matter, but I blustered on.

“Would you like an apple?” I asked, picking one from the abundance about me and offering it to her. She stretched forth her hand, then with a guilty look drew it back.

“My Master thinks I’d best not,” she explained. “He says that sort of food is for Dingoes. You’re not a Dingo, are you?”

“Oh no!” I blushed, and Julie laughed.

“Well, you look like a Dingo to me.” I should have realized at once that this was all teasing, for there could be no serious doubt of our domestication. Dingoes wear clothing, and pets (who never have to be ashamed of their bodies) only dress for the theatre or a pageant or (like Roxanna) out of perversity. “If you’re not a Dingo, why don’t you step off that silly old tree branch and prove it?”

From the first I’ve always behaved like a fool for Darling, Julie. I did just as she suggested and began falling, in obedience to Newton’s laws, directly toward Roxanna. Then, with a funny little internal somersault, I felt myself caught up in the anti-gravity belt supporting Julie. Julie swooped down, giggling, and caught hold of my hand, and in the same moment I felt the meshes of the Leash close over my mind. Beneath us, Roxanna had fainted. Pluto was trying to revive her. Each time he slapped her face, she groaned deliciously.

“What a silly game,” Julie commented. Then, letting go my hand, she leaped into the accommodating air to a height of thirty feet and hung here, secure as a ping-pong ball suspended by a jet of air.

“Try and catch me!” she shouted, and then sailed off on a long parabola that ended behind the sagging roof of the old barn.

“What about me?” Pluto protested. “I want to fly too.”

“You’re probably too old, but I’ll ask her,” I promised. Then I flew off to catch Julie, and Pluto saw no more of me or Julie for a good two hours. She led me quite a chase, high into the clouds, skimming the branches of the nearby scrub woods, skipping like stones over the smooth waters of Lake Superior. We were both delightfully exhausted before she let me catch her.

When I had caught my breath back, I asked her what kennel she came from.

“Oh, it’s a new kennel out in the asteroids. You’ve probably never heard of it. Not yet,” she added patriotically.

“And what are you doing here? I mean, the Skunk farm isn’t really a crossroads. Why come to Earth at all, if you’ve got a nice kennel in the asteroids?”

“Well, my Master needs more stock, and he brought me along to help him choose. Things are cheaper on Earth, and my Master has to count his pennies. That’s what he tells me anyhow. As far as I’m concerned,” she finished loyally, “I’d rather live at Swan Lake than anywhere else in the universe.”

I wanted to say that I felt exactly the same way, but instead I put in a good word for Shroeder’s rugby field and tennis courts.

Julie suddenly grew dejected. “Oh dear, then you won’t want to come back with us! I’d been hoping so much…”

“Ask me. Don’t jump to conclusions.”

“Will you come back to Swan Lake with me? Please!”

Her Master’s voice resonated in my mind, echoing Julie’s plea: Will you?

Her Master? No—now he was mine! I didn’t have to answer Julie’s question for our Master conveyed my happy assent to her mind. Her own delight bounced back like a well-returned ball in a friendly game of tennis.

“What about my brother? You’ll want him too, won’t you?” (It’s amazing how accomplished a hypocrite one can be at ten years of age.)

“Well, naturally! After all, you’re both Whites.”

I was more than a little shocked. Aside from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I had never come across examples of race prejudice. “Some of my best friends—” I began indignantly.

“Oh, not that kind of White, silly! Tennyson White. The most famous novelist in the last fifty years. And you’re his sons. The only ones, I might add, who haven’t been snapped up by top kennels. I wouldn’t say a word against Shroeder, you understand, but I really think you can do better. Why, the two of you are worth all the other pets in that kennel taken together!”

Now, of course, I realize that that kind of talk is undemocratic and subversive, but then my tender mind, depraved by the false values of the Mastery, was flattered by such a compliment. I even thanked Julie for it.

“I’ve told you my name. But you haven’t told me yours.”

“White Fang,” I said, still swollen with pride.

“Fang, White. That’s a funny name. I don’t see you as ‘Fang, White’, at all. I think I’ll call you Cuddles instead.”

I should have objected then and there, but I was anxious lest I offend her and lose my ticket to the asteroids. And that’s how it happened that, for the next ten years of my life, I was known as Cuddles to all my friends.

When Julie and I returned to the Skunk farmhouse, we found that Roxanna and Pluto had tired of waiting for us and returned to the kennel in their bubbletank. Julie and I took a direct route, skimming the treetops of the twilit woods, protected against the chill of the October evening by our Master’s thoughtfulness.

Within a few minutes of our return, Julie’s Master had negotiated the transfer of myself and Pluto from the Shroeder Kennel to Swan Lake. Roxanna protested that he could not interrupt our literary studies at this crucial point. We must either remain at Shroeder or she must be allowed to accompany us to the asteroids. I leave it to the reader to imagine which course Roxanna had in mind. But to all her pleadings and threats, the Master of Swan Lake was coldly indifferent. Roxanna’s pedigree was worthless; her physical person possessed an at-best-problematical beauty; her literary attainments extended no farther than her appreciation of Proust, an author for whom the Master of Swan Lake had the lowest regard. Roxanna cried; she fainted; she tore her hair. It was all to no avail. At last, when Pluto had gathered together all his scraps of poetry, and we were ready to go, Roxanna bade us farewell with a curse.

The trip to the asteroids was made that night as we slept. What means our new Master employed to transport us, I could not say. Nothing so crude as a spaceship. The Master’s technology was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and I will admit, for my own part, that mechanical engineering isn’t really that interesting to me.

We woke to the subdued luminescence of kennel walls that we had known all our lives. The walls shifted to livelier color schemes in response to the quickening neural patterns of our waking minds. For a moment I feared that we were still back at Shroeder.

But there was this difference: instead of the relentless drag of Earth gravity, a gentle gravitational pulse, a relaxed ebb-and-flow, seemed to issue from my own heart.

I felt the Leash of my new Master close more tightly over my mind (for the next ten years it would never entirely desert me, even in sleep), and I smiled and whispered my thanks to Him for having brought me away.

Julie was awake now too, and with a wave of her arm and a flourish of synthetic horn-music, the walls of the kennel dissolved, and I beheld the boundless, glowing landscape of the asteroids.

I gasped.

It is yours, said a voice in my head that would soon come to seem as familiar as my own.

Hand in hand, Julie and I sailed out over this phantasmagoric playground, and the spheres of heaven played their music for us. Exotic blossoms exploded like Roman candles, discharging hoards of rich perfume. Colors wreathed us in abstract, joyous patterns, as the two of us bounded and tumbled through the shifting fields of gravity, like starlings caught in a dynamo.

CHAPTER FOUR

In which I am perfectly happy.

It was paradise. What more can I say?

Oh, I know that’s cheating. I know I have to try. But consider the immensity of the task; consider how many better men than I have tried and failed. Milton’s heaven is a bore; his Eden, though nice enough at first glance, has a deadly sameness about it. Dante did rather better, but even so most of his admirers find it more difficult to soar through his Empyrean than to climb the steep side of Purgatory or slough through Hell’s mires. On the whole, Heaven is best left in the hands of the gods.

Let me begin, then, with something easy, like geography…

Swan Lake was composed of twelve smallish asteroids, which our Master had artfully woven into a sort of celestial clockwork. The interwoven trajectories of the twelve asteroids had been determined with such niceness that the whole configuration—from twelve o’clock to twelve o’clock, as it were—came full circle once every hundred years. It was thereby possible with just a glance at the sky to determine the year, the month, the day of the week, and—within a few minutes—the hour, providing of course that one could remember the code. The largest of these asteroids, Tchaikovsky, was a scant ten miles in diameter, and the least, Milhaud, was a tawdry rock not five thousand feet from pole to pole. The main kennels and all permanent installations of any size were on Tchaikovsky, but any pet could travel freely to the other asteroids along broad slipstreams, or—if he was feelings his oats—just by jumping, since the gravity was a piddling

.03 that of Earth anywhere outside the kennel proper. The kennels themselves were all gravitized at a comfortable

.85 just as they had been at Shroeder.

Swan Lake, though done up in better taste than other kennels I have known, was built along the usual lines. The walls, the floors, all the elements of construction were force-fields wrapped in microscopically thin layers of stuff—atoms, molecules, that sort of thing. The only permanent feature in any room was a console that any pet knew how to operate. This console controlled temperature, humidity, wind velocity, illumination, fog effects, gravity and dimensions. The dimensional control was extremely complex, and only a professional architect of long experience (or a Master) knew all its ins and outs. Most of us contented ourselves with a selection from the thousand or so presettings: Louis Sixième, Barnyard, Dracula’s Castle, Whale-belly, Sahara, Seraglio Steamroom, etc. There was a special dial that controlled the degree of realism or stylization of any of these scenes, and one could produce some very uncanny effects by, for instance, demanding a totally abstract Bronx Renaissance living room or an ultra-realistic Pleistocene swamp. And the effects one could get by spinning the dial…!

No more! I can’t stand remembering these things. The happiness—

Stoicism, White Fang old boy, stoicism!

Actually, Julie and I spent most of our time out-of-doors, dashing in and out among the asteroids. The ten asteroids intermediate in size between Tchaikovsky and Milhaud were, in descending order: Stravinsky, Adam, Pugno, Prokofiev, Delibes, Chopin, Glazunov, Offenbach, Glière and Nabokov.

As my readers may have gathered from this list, the Master of Swan Lake was something of a balletomane. For each of his asteroids was named after a composer of notable music for the ballet—or, a slight but telling distinction, of music for notable ballets. In fact, all of Swan Lake had been fashioned, all the pets had been gathered there, to serve this single passion of our Master, which was, I hasten to add, our passion too, our entire purpose, and our highest happiness next to the Leash itself.

Oh, hell, I should never have started to try to explain! I might have known I’d end up like this, muttering dithyrambs.

I was explaining a little ways back, how Julie and I would go sailing out among the asteroids. Now such times as we did this, we were dancing. In fact all the time we were at Swan Lake, all those ten years, we never stopped dancing. And as we would soar past any one of the asteroids, our passage would trigger a recording—a miniaturized electronic orchestra, actually—that would play the single composition of that composer which most suited our velocity, trajectory, idiorhythmic motion, and mood. It could also improvise transitions from and to any piece of music in the repertoire of any of the other asteroids. These transitions were often the most amazing passages of all (imagine a collaboration between Offenbach and Stravinsky!), which encouraged us never to linger overlong in one vicinity but to be ever flitting about like will-o’-the-wisps.

There were other machines that served the same purpose as a crew of stagehands, managing the lights, providing props, laying scenes when the music demanded something more specific than fireworks…

And machines that released scents that were harmonized with the other elements synaesthetically…

Yes, and finally there was us—Julie and me and the other pets. The ensemble. It was on our account that Swan Lake had been put together, so that our revels never would be ended, so that we would have music wherever we’d go. I say we danced, but that will not convey to most of my readers just what we did. For the average Dingo, dancing is just an exercise preliminary to mating. It provides a release of certain powerful tensions along socially approved channels. When we danced, it was nothing so crude as that. Everything we did, everything a person could do, became part of our dance: our dinners, our lovemaking, our most secret thoughts, and our silliest jokes. The dance integrated all these disparate elements into an aesthetic whole; it ordered the randomness of life into immense tapestries. Not Art for Art’s Sake, but Life for Art’s Sake was our motto.

How am I to explain this to Dingoes? There was nothing wasted. I think that’s the important thing. Not a word or thought or glance between two persons but that there was a deeper meaning to it. It fit, just as in a piece of music that observes the canons each chord has its place in the melodic succession.

Here again was the old Romantic idea of a synthesis of the arts: the same that inspired Wagner’s Bayreuth or Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. But the Master of Swan Lake had resources to accomplish what those men fumbled for—and his chief resource necessarily was his dearly beloved pets—us. He pampered us, he coddled us, he got us into trim. Not only physical trim (even the most negligent Master would see to that); more even than mental trim. In fact, too much acuity could be a disadvantage. Daddy’s Masters on Ceres and Ganymede had developed their pets’ intellects more than our Master altogether approved. There had always been something over-refined about that first generation of pets. Pope somewhere says of Shakespeare that he was an “unpolished diamond”. Well, what might not Shakespeare have said of Pope? The important thing, as we saw it, was not to be witty and cultivated and bright, but to be sincere. We of the second generation found our parents’ style dry, over-intellectual, unbecomingly ironic. We wanted to simplify, and since the material of our art was our own lives, we simplified ourselves. Like Young Werther, we cultivated a certain willful naïveté. Not only did we make a dance of our lives, but we turned the simplest statements—a “thank you” or a “by your leave”—into a sort of rhapsody.

It was certainly paradise, but what would not have been paradise with Darling, Julie there? It is nice to have a Master, but it is necessary to have a mate—as Woof observes somewhere in A Dog’s Life.

How to speak of her? Putting Julie “into words” is like sculpting in quicksilver. There was nothing constant about her, nothing you could call hers. The color of her hair changed from day to day; her eyes were blue or brown or hazel, as the mood came upon her; her figure might be lithe as a nymphette or buxom as a Rubens. It all depended on the rôle she had to play.

For Julie essentially was an actress. I have seen her dance the major rôles in the classical repertoire; I have seen her improvise; when I’ve been Leashed with her I’ve looked into the furthest recesses of her charming mind. And never have I glimpsed even a hint of the real, the quintessential Julie—unless it was an infinite capacity for pretending. She was Juliet and Lucrezia Borgia in equal measure; she was both acts of Giselle; she was Odette and Odile, the black swan and the white swan too. She was whoever it might occur to her that she might be. And she was lovely.

We were only sixteen, Julie and I, when our first child was born to us. The High Mass that celebrated Petite’s christening was based on the standard Roman model and set, sweetly, to Mother Goose melodies. My brother Pluto officiated at the ceremony and delivered a sermon in verse of his own composition in honor of the occasion. Since all of us present at the ceremony were in telepathic rapport with him, our appreciation of the sermon was equal exactly to Pluto’s (who admired it greatly), but I have had a chance recently to reexamine his verses with more dispassion, and I wonder…

But let my readers judge for themselves. The following is Pluto’s sermon in its entirety. It is meant to be read under bright lights with a slight scent of musk, as of a diaper pail opened briefly in the nearby room. Like most work he was turning out at that time, it should be delivered in a loud voice with something of a Gregorian chant:

Scrumptious ornament,

Bubbling liquid joy!

Thing, thing, energy, energy, thing!

Dearly beloved, let us pray.

Let us bump-dee bump-dee play!

Petite jeune fille, jolie et bonne!

Mr Wopsle, Lady Flutter,

Caracas Venezuela O!

Thing, thing, energy, energy, thing!

Amalgamation, splendid event

To celebrate berserk the little girl:

Petite jeune fille, joile et bonne, hèlas!

Considering that this was how our little Petite got her start in life, I think she’s done pretty well.

I should explain at once, since the subject has intruded itself here, that there was nothing promiscuous about Swan Lake. The hearth was sacred to us, the marriage bed a shrine. In this we differed from the cynical libertinism of our forebears—not through any want of libido, but really from an excess of it. For us monogamy was a continually passionate state. Anything else would have been less. Moreover, our Master did have fixed ideas on the subject of organic breeding (as he called it), and perhaps he sometimes assisted our natural inclination to monogamy by weeding out adulterous thoughts from our minds’ neat gardens in order to further these policies of his and, incidentally, to keep the prices up.

It may be, as contemporary critics have suggested, that the New Domesticity of the Twenties and Thirties was a highly artificial condition—a fashion if not merely a fad. But cannot the same charge be brought against Victorian sentimentality? Against the Moslem purdah? Against all institutions whatever? The difference between a folkway and a fashion is one of degree, not of kind.

What I mean to establish by all this is the simple fact that though we lived in Swan Lake ten years, we were always true to each other, Julie to me and me to Darling, Julie. And if anyone ever dares insinuate anything to the contrary, he will have to answer to me for it—and I shall accept no answer slighter than the forfeit of his life.

It was paradise.

Really, my dear readers, it was almost paradise. Illness and pain were banished from our lives, and it may have been (for I know of no instances to disprove it) that so long as we stayed Leashed, death too had lost its sting. Women no longer brought forth children in sorrow, nor did men eat their bread salted by the sweat of their brows. Our happiness did not degenerate into boredom, and our pleasures were never dampened by an aftertaste of guilt.

Paradise has a considerable flaw, however, from the narrative point of view. It is anti-dramatic. Perfection doesn’t make a good yarn, because it doesn’t have to go anywhere. Perfection is happy right where it is. So there isn’t much for me to tell you about Swan Lake, except: I liked it.

I liked it; for ten years that was the story of my life.

And so here we are in the year 2037 already, time having flown. By angle of declination between Glazunov and Chopin I can see that it was August. We were in a large marble courtyard, where Julie was teaching four-year-old Petite to pirouette. The sky flickered violently, and an obbligato of hunting horns announced visitors from outer space. At the console, I called up a triumphal arch from the willing ground so that our guests might enter in style. I turned the gravity up to a more formal 1.05, and poor little Petite went into a tailspin and plopped down to the floor, dismayed and giggling.

The horns quieted, and an anguished metallic din split the air, as of an anvil being struck—but no, it was only a pet striding forward through the arch. He wore armor in the Attic manner, very leathery and crusted with gauds, and his face was hidden behind a grotesque iron mask. Gaily waving a mace-and-chain, he shouted his greeting aloud to us above the anvil-clangor of his footsteps: “Hoi-ho! Hoi-ho!” The richness of his perfect Heldentenor voice made the ringing of the anvils seem the merest trill of violins. Only a few feet away from us he released the mace-and-chain, which went spinning straight up over our heads and at the top of its arc burst into fireworks, at which instant our visitor gripped my forearm with his right hand. A gesture I would have reciprocated, except that the casing of leather and iron about his massive wrist was too thick to afford me any sort of purchase. With his free hand he doffed the iron helmet and peering up (for as we stood, toe to toe, my eyes were at the level of the Medusa graven on his breastplate) I could behold the blond hair and the blue eyes of Wagner’s Seigfried.

“Hi there!” I said friendlily. Darling, Julie echoed my greeting, while Petite, ever the show-off, tried to execute another pirouette under 1.05 gravity and fell on her inevitable ass.

“I am St Bernard of Titan,” the visitor said, rending the air. “All just and godly men are my friends, but villains tremble at my name.”

“I’m glad to hear it. My name is White Fang, and this is my wife—Darling, Julie, and that at your feet is our daughter Petite. We all bid you welcome to Swan Lake, St Bernard.”

Now a softer music filled the air (the Venusberg music from Tannhäuser, I believe) and St Bernard, turning to face the arch, lowered himself reverently to one knee. A shimmering golden light formed in the center of the arch, and within this lambency, like a diamond set in a gold chalice, appeared a woman of beauty to rival the gods’.

My mother.

“Motherlove!” I exclaimed. “That is to say—Clea! What a surprise!”

“Yes, isn’t it? How long has it been now? Thirteen years? Fourteen? You’re not even a puppy any more—and who is this?” (It was Petite, who was shyly bent double and peering at Clea through the archway of her legs.) “Am I a grandmother! Fancy that! You’d never know by looking at me, would you? I still look as young as on the day your father first met me.”

Though this was true, the years had not been without their effect in other ways. Certain tics of character had reached a mature growth, chiefly an unawareness of other people that bordered on autism. Thus, she breezed right on with her soliloquy, oblivious of my attempts to introduce Julie to her.

“And speaking of your father, I assume you’ve already met my new companion?” By the solicitous manner in which she laid her hand on St Bernard’s leathern thigh, she robbed that “companion” of whatever sense it might have had of the euphemistic. “It was he who insisted that we stop by at Swan Lake. I was reluctant, since it is hardly a major attraction. Nothing on the order of Titan, which is positively another Bayreuth! You may be interested to know that St Bernard is our leading Titanic tenor. You’ve no doubt heard of his Lohengrin, and as for The Ring…”

“Actually, Clea,” I broke in determinedly, “we’re not such great Wagner fanciers here, you know. Our Master inclines more to the French and Russian end of the spect…”

“As I was saying, St Bernard said we had to stop by, so he could meet you and Pluto—Pluto is somewhere about too, no?—because, you see, St Bernard happens to be your brother.”

“But—Motherlove… isn’t that rather…? I mean, if he’s my brother, then isn’t this a matter of—if you’ll excuse the expression—inbreeding?”

St Bernard’s hand reached for the battleaxe hanging at his side, but Clea stopped him.

“Nonsense, White Fang! He bears no relation to me whatever. Shame on you, for making such a suggestion! You know your father sired several hundred children. St Bernard was his son by Sieglinde of Titan years before I ever met Tennyson White. I suppose, if you want to pick nits, you could say that St Bernard is your half-brother. But he’s no more related to me than his father was—or, rather, that is his relation precisely.”

I made a slight bow in acknowledgment of this unexpected bond, but St Bernard, not content with small gestures, came gallumphing forward to clasp me in a half-brotherly, titanic embrace, which I sidestepped by sitting down quickly at the console. “A feast!” I declared. “This definitely calls for feasting and song.”

I vanished the arch and dialed for an Anglo-Saxon Banquet Hall, moderately stylized, with an Automatic Tumbler. Julie quickly whisked herself into a few yards of brocade and a high-peaked hat, and I got into something suitable in cloth-of-gold. Pluto was called for and arrived in short order in a cardinal’s gowns. St Bernard, a true and reverent knight, had to get back down on one knee to kiss the cardinal’s ring.

“Mead!” I shouted to the robots in attendance (all done up, appropriately, in fustian). “Roast boar! Venison! Hecatomb of roast beef!”

“Hecatombs is anachronistic, Cuddles,” Julie advised.

“Well then, if you’re such a hot-shot Medievalist, you order!” Which she did—and in Old High German at that. As she told me later, though, our Master helped with irregular verbs. When she finished, Petite added her own postscriptive request in English for butter brickle ice cream.

While we sipped before-dinner meads, the Automatic Tumbler tumbled and a Robo-Jester came around to the table and made deliciously bad jokes, which St Bernard seemed to think as jolly as they had been on opening night a thousand years ago. Maybe it was the mead. Alcohol-wise the stuff was perfectly innocuous, but our Masters supplied through our Leashes the exact degree of inebriation that each of us was aiming at. Clea filled us in on her missing thirteen years (and they were just about what one would suppose they’d been, judging by their effect on her: the style of Titan—Clea’s style—was very Wagnerian, very passionate, and very, very big); then Pluto gave an account of our neglect and redemption, which I don’t think Clea heard because St Bernard was tickling her all the while. After the fish course, some partridges, and a suckling pig with truffles, Clea and St Bernard sang the second act of Tristan und Isolde for our benefit. Julie, to escape listening to it, went blotto on her Leash.

This done, and much mead later, St Bernard proposed to give an exhibition of his skill at axe-throwing. They have this whole Middle Ages bit on Titan. We upended the oaken dining table and painted a human figure on it as a target. St Bernard insisted that we make wagers against him. I did have my doubts as to how well he would do, since he was having difficulties just remaining upright at that point—but every axe sank into the wood right where he told it to. Petite was clamorous with admiration.

“Hoi-ho, Maedchen! Does the sport please you?” St Bernard lifted Petite to his shoulder. “Would you like to join it?” She nodded, smiling, eyes aglow.

“Now, see here, St Bernard—enough’s enough! If you’re getting delusions of singing William Tell, I can assure you it isn’t in my daughter’s repertoire.”

“Oh, let him have his way, or he’ll get into a pet,” Clea advised.

“It’s exactly because I’m afraid he shall get into a pet—with that axe of his—that I worry. If you have so much confidence in him, Motherlove, why don’t you let him use you as a target?”

“I have, many times. It’s terribly dull. I mean, you just stand there. I wish you hadn’t gotten him so loaded. He always gets this way when he’s had more than he can handle. Next he’ll be sentimental. I hate that!”

St Bernard, meanwhile, had posed Petite before the dining table and gone back twenty paces to take aim. The blade of the axe he was using was fully a third of the total length of my daughter.

“Stop, madman!” I screamed, but too late—already the axe was hurtling at Petite, seeming to wobble as it turned end over end about its center of gravity. I rushed forward, as though to catch it in flight…

There now, good fellow, be comforted! Your Master is watching and he won’t let anything ill betide. Calmly, calmly.

If I had not had so much mead myself, I would not have needed the Leash’s reminder. For what could there ever be to worry about at Swan Lake with my Master ever watching over me?

When St Bernard had finished his demonstration to Petite’s and his own immense satisfaction, I stepped up to the board and pulled out the axes. “Now,” I said airily, “let me show you how we throw axes at Swan Lake. Julie, step up here!”

Julie, who had been sailing through heaven at the end of her Leash until this moment, came to with a start of real fear. “Cuddles, are you out of your mind? I will not!” But quickly her features assumed a milder expression, and I knew that our Master had whispered his reassurances to her. She took her place before the target.

I opened my demonstration with an axe that sliced neatly between Julie’s legs, rending the thick brocade of her gown. Then I threw one underhand that snapped off the peak of her cap. Then several perfect throws as I stood with my back turned to Julie. St Bernard gasped at the daring of the feat. I concluded my show of skill by spinning an axe not end over end but sideways, rotating about the shaft like a top.

I bowed to St Bernard’s thunderous applause. “Thank you,” I said, as much for my Master’s assistance as for St Bernard’s applause.

“But you are wonderful! You are a genius! Now I am proud that you are my brother. Come, we must make it a solemn union—we must swear eternal brotherhood in blood. Blutbruderschaft!” With these words St Bernard removed the leathern bracelet binding his right wrist and sliced across the exposed flesh with a jeweled dagger. “Now you,” he said, handing me the bloody instrument. “We will mix our blood, and then to the end of time…”

St Bernard was interrupted by my rather copious heavings (it had been a large feast), which I regret to say was the only thing I contributed to be mixed with his blood. I remember only his first oaths (“Wotan! Fricka!” etc.), for as soon as my stomach was emptied out I fainted dead away.

When I woke, I found myself moving through outer space. Pluto had been kind enough to explain to St Bernard my peculiar infirmity (though failing to mention his own part in that story), and St Bernard had insisted, as a sort of reparation, that we all accompany himself and Clea on their trip to Earth. Pluto and Julie had demurred, for they were even less inclined to the Wagnerian than I, but our Master, surprisingly, had overridden them. So we had set forth, the eight of us (six pets, two Masters) immediately, and in no time at all we were on Earth. The morning sun was glittering with immoderate intensity on the waters of Lake Superior, and there again in the middle distance was the cathedral tower of St John the Divine.

Can it be that I shall never again enjoy the easy pleasures of that time? That I shall never, never again see Swan Lake and fly about among the familiar asteroids? And can it be that this exile has been my free choice! O ye Heavens, when I remember you—as I do now—too clearly, too dearly, all the force of my will melts away and I long only to be returned to you. Nothing, nothing on Earth can rival, and very little has the power even to suggest, the illimitable resources of the Master’s pleasure domes. Oh, nothing!

It was paradise—and it is quite, quite gone.

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, Dingolike 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:

Your courteous lights in vain you waste,

Since Julianna here is come;

For she my mind has so displaced,

That I shall never find my home.

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?”

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 absentmindedly 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:

Diode! Triode!

Highest Cathode!

Charge our hearts with a hundred amps!

Guard our ohms and light our camps

With the burning of your lamps!

As we chant this ode

To Victory,

Be thou still our goad

To Victory!

Guide us on the road

To Victory!

Hurray!

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.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

In which I stand in debt to N. Gogol.

Let us say nothing of frying pans and fires. Let us say nothing of probabilities. To have parachuted smack-dab into the middle of the enemy’s camp (and the neatest bomb could not have dropped on its target more truly than I had, by blind chance) is an event so deficient in probability that only the incontrovertible fact of its having happened can ease my embarrassment in relating it. In fiction such a coincidence would be inexcusable; in history these things happen all the time.

So, to return to la chose véritable…

“You have been,” I asked, hesitatingly, “expecting me?”

Captain Frangle twirled a moustache craftily. “There have been rumors… a word dropped here, and a word there… Nothing you can put your finger on, you understand… nothing explicit, but nevertheless.”

“Rumors, you say? Exactly what sort of rumors?”

“Oh—vague rumors, sir! Extremely vague and indistinct. Almost unbelievable, but nevertheless…” And the Captain winked knowingly.

“Nevertheless?” I insisted.

“What I meant to say was—nevertheless, here you are, you see. Which shows, I think, that there must have been something in the rumors after all. Then again, perhaps not. Far be it from me to say, one way or the other. You would certainly know better than I, Major.” He trailed off into a laugh of consummate self-deprecation. Then, turning to two of his underlings who had been gathering up the folds of the parachute, he bade them hurry up with their work—in quite opposite tones.

Now fortunately I was at that time well enough acquainted with “The Inspector General”, that splendid comedy by the Russian master, Nikolai Gogol, to suspect a certain congruence between the situation of Gogol’s hero and my own plight. The eagle on the shoulder of my borrowed overcoat had apparently deceived Captain Frangle into thinking I was his superior officer; it also seemed that he had been anticipating the visit of a senior officer—and not with relish. For the time being I could hope to keep up the bluff, but it was not an imposture that could be maintained indoors, for beneath my overcoat and rubber boots I was naked as Laocoön.

“A cup of coffee, Major? Or if you prefer something more… spirited? Eh? Something to bring color to the cheek and a smile to… Eh? That is to say, if you don’t object to a glass… or two? Eh?” All the while, Captain Frangle was edging toward a lighted doorway at the corner of the compound.

“A few questions first, Captain, if you don’t mind.”

“By all means, sir! Abso-lute-ly! We’ve nothing to hide from you, sir. Our hearts… and our hands… are as open for your inspections as if… and, if you wish, our pocket-books, too! Only joking, you understand, but feel free, Major. Make yourself right at home in our little penitentiary here.”

“How many officers are here beside yourself? And how many guards?”

“Officers? Well, Lieutenant Mosely, of course. Good man, Mosely. You’ve already met him, I think, when you were at the Shroeder evacuation.”

“Oh yes, Mosely. Where is Mosely?”

“He was in the shower when you landed. I suppose he’s getting dressed. He should be out here any minute now. And you might count Palmino. He’s only a warrant officer, but he runs the radio shack and keeps the generator working for us. We couldn’t get on very well without Palmino, I’m afraid. Though he’s not really a gentleman… not like you and me, Major. And then there’s Doc Quilty and the Reverend Captain. The Reverend Captain will probably want to discuss a matter of religion with you, sir. About these goddamned pets. You see, he thinks they should all be Baptists… now, understand, I have nothing against Baptists… some of my best friends are… you know? But the shock—that’s what I object to… all that current! I mean…”

“Later, Captain. How many guards?”

“No doubt you’ve seen my last memo on that subject. There is nothing to add. The situation has only become worse: desertions, betrayal, sabotage… I need guards to guard the guards, and that’s a fact. You see, now that the shouting’s over, now that the monotony’s setting in again, all the volunteers are… you know? And only the regulars—the old Corps members, like myself…”

“I didn’t ask for excuses, Captain. Only for a number.”

“Hundred and twenty. Less. I think. You see, sir, I can explain, if…”

“A hundred and twenty? For how many pets?”

“I’m not sure of the exact number. It changes all the time. I don’t understand. But this prison was never meant to accommodate…”

“Captain! The number!” This in my most peremptory tone.

“Thirteen thousand, sir. Give or take a few hundred.”

“One guard for every hundred pets! How do you keep them under control?”

“Oh, that’s no problem. I could probably get by with ten guards if I had to. They’re only pets, after all. It’s not as if… I mean, they aren’t like us. They don’t seem quite… what is the word… human? They know their place, and they keep in it. And then, you know, they’re in pretty poor spirits, thinking that their Masters have sold them back to us for slaves.”

“Slaves! The Masters? But that isn’t so?”

“Of course, it isn’t lit-erally true, but how are they to know? Eh?” Captain Frangle had recovered some of his earlier bounciness now that the worst of the interrogation seemed to be over, and he began edging back toward the open doorway.

“Captain Frangle, I did not give you permission to leave me!”

“No sir! I only thought… that is, wouldn’t you be more comfortable…”

“Don’t concern yourself with my comfort, Mister! I am interested solely in the management of this repatriation center. Or should I say mismanagement? I suspect, Captain… I suspect…”

Captain Frangle had come tremblingly to attention, and he listened to my improvised diatribe with visible dread. “Suspect, sir? May I ask what? May I ask… who?”

“Ha! Do you think I shall reveal that so easily? It would make it altogether too easy for you, sir. Or, if not for you, then for whoever has been… responsible… for these crimes.”

“Not me! No, you’ve been misinformed about… The petty cash is short, perhaps, I don’t know… I would have to examine… it may take days… and another thing, I have my own way of bookkeeping… a safer way, I must explain it to you first…”

“First, Captain, I would like you to assemble all the guards in this compound. Where I can see them. See that Lieutenant What’s-His-Name looks after that.”

“Lieutenant Mosely.”

“Him, yes. And I wish the barracks and rooms to be left in exactly the condition they’re in now. The men will assemble here in their shorts. And in stocking feet. The officers as well. See to it, Captain!”

While Captain Frangle roused up those few guards who had not already been roused by the news of my so-sudden arrival, I withdrew into the shadows and deliberated my next steps. When all guards and the four other officers were present in ranks before me, I had Captain Frangle show me to the door of the barracks.

“Mosely’s room is in this building?”

“The next floor up, sir. His name is on the door.”

“And your room, Captain?”

“I have the third floor to myself. I must explain… before you go up there… that not everything you may find up there is what you would call, in the strict sense, mine. I’m holding some articles in safekeeping for friends in town… citizens who were afraid of the anarchists, the vandals, you understand how it’s been…”

“You will return to your men, Captain Frangle, and see that they remain at attention. I do not tolerate laxity. There will be no conversations out there, not even among the officers.”

“Just as you say, sir.”

“Before you go, Captain—your uniform. Leave it on that…” What was the word? I couldn’t remember the word! “…on that… thing there.”

“The bunk, you mean? But, Major, consider my position—my dignity. What will the men think if they see me out there in my dirty… that is to say, in the same state they’re in?”

“Perhaps you’re right.”

“Oh, thank you, Major, I knew you’d understand.” Captain Frangle began to leave, but once more I brought him up short.

“I didn’t give permission to go, Captain. I must still insist on a complete inspection. But you may submit to it here instead of in the presence of your men. I expect to find you undressed by the time I’ve returned from my inspection upstairs.” With these words (which guaranteed that, for the time being, the Captain would not have any opportunity to converse with Mosely or anyone else who might have regarded my imposture with a keener eye) I turned my back on the Captain and went up a spiral staircase to the next floor.

Lieutenant Mosely’s room showed a pedantic respect for military punctilio. The walls were daubed the same drab olive as the metal bedposts and wall locker. The uniforms inside the locker were arrayed as if for an inspection. After assuring myself of complete privacy, I took down his best dress uniform and pulled on the trousers. The Lieutenant, fortunately, had a good figure, and the pants fit reasonably well. His shirt proved to be a little loose at the collar, but I was able to correct that by tightening the tie.

The tie! That was nearly the death of my whole scheme. I had never worn a tie in my life, and if I had, I certainly would not have been obliged to tie it myself. I tried to improvise a knot or two, but nothing I could manage bore any resemblance to what I had seen about Frangle’s neck. Desperately I emptied out Mosely’s footlocker, hoping there might be a pre-knotted tie there. Instead, I found his Manual of Arms, where on page 58 there are instructions for the approved military four-in-hand. As the alarm clock on the window sill ticked off the minutes, I fumbled with the maddening piece of silk. At last it passed muster (Lax muster.) By then I was in such a state of frazzlement that I nearly forgot to remove the silver bars from the shoulders of Mosely’s jacket and replace them with the gold oak leaf from the overcoat I had been wearing. Then I tried to squeeze into Mosely’s parade shoes.

No go. They were sizes too small. I tried in the next room. (Capt. C. Quilty, M.D., the placard on the door announced.) Quilty’s shoes, though nowhere near so well polished, fit snugly. I left Mosely’s shoes in Quilty’s locker to cover up my theft.

As a finishing touch, I retrieved a ragged copy of G.I. Jokes from the tumble of personal items that had fallen out of the footlocker. Then, smartly turned out in dress uniform, I returned to the dismantled, dismayed Captain Frangle on the floor below.

“I’ve found what I sought, Captain. You may dress and accompany me back to the compound.”

Outside Captain Frangle was able to obtain silence (and they were supposed to be at attention!) by lifting one hand. After he’d given them appropriate hell, I had him place Lieutenant Mosely under arrest. His hands were cuffed, his feet shackled, and his mouth securely gagged.

“I have in my right hand,” I then announced in my stagiest voice, “evidence that this man, known to you as Mosely, is in reality an impostor, a spy, an agent and a tool of the Mastery. The High Command first grew suspicious of him at Shroeder, when he was seen to go alone into the bombed power station there…” A gasp went up among the men. “Captain, do you have a stone wheel—or something equally suitable for starting a fire?”

“I have a cigarette lighter.”

“Set this so-called ‘jokebook’ on fire, please. What harm has been done cannot be undone, but the enemy shall not receive this report, at least. Pray God we have stopped their plot in time.”

While the jokebook burned, Lieutenant Mosely struggled against his bonds and went: Mmmph! Mmmph! Nn! Nn! Mmmmph!

“Captain, I presume you have a cell where this man may be kept to await trial in solitary confinement?”

“We do, but there are ten pets locked in there now. We’re filled up… right to the brim, as I explained before, but of course… if you say…”

“Put the pets elsewhere. Mosely is to be kept strictly incommunicado. He will receive bread and water twice a day—under my personal supervision. The man is known to be devilishly persuasive. We can’t take chances. As for his room, I shall take that for myself. There may be other documents secreted there.”

“Yes sir. Will that be all, sir? May I release the men?”

“Not just yet. I must see Mosely put away, and then I’d like you to accompany me on a tour of the prison itself. If I wait till tomorrow the whole point of this inspection may have been lost. I trust you take my meaning, Captain?”

“Perfectly,” the old man assured me. “Like crystal.” But truth to tell, he did look a bit puzzled.

It was easy enough to put it in terms he did understand. “And then, my good Captain, you may explain your system of bookkeeping.” Which Frangle understood perfectly, like crystal.

Such is the wonder of military discipline that the guards remained at attention out in the compound until two a.m. and were quiet as churchmice all the while. Meanwhile I dined (the best meal I’d had since coming to Earth and the most heartily appreciated of my life), then with Frangle at my side took a leisurely tour of the prisons. It was…

Unspeakable: the crowding; close, fetid air; inadequate sanitary facilities. Since the meager electric current produced by the prison’s own emergency generators was required for the operation of the security system, the only light in the cellblock was what leaked in through the barred windows. The place was as gloomy as the Dark Ages. Miseries heaped upon miseries, tier upon tier. And this was only a single cellblock!

“How many more are there of these?”

“Besides this, nine.”

After I’d gone past only a few of the cells, playing the beam of a flashlight over those sad heaps of still-proud bodies (so much finer than the ramshackle flesh of the guards standing outside), meeting their anguished, pleading gazes, I felt the bottom drop out. Pity consumed me, and rage seemed close behind. Often, the puppies, less perfectly in control, would come to the bars and stretch out their little hands for food. Captain Frangle would slap them away with an indignant bellow. I am ashamed to say that I tolerated his behavior, for I was still afraid he would construe my humanitarian impulses as being un-Dingolike, and begin to suspect…

“Oh sir,” one of the puppies begged, “can’t you spare a scrap of food? For pity’s sake, sir, some food!”

“Food? You’ll get food, you little sonofabitch! You’ll taste this fist if you don’t lie back down there. Food? If you’re hungry you have only your father to blame—if you know who that is. There’s plenty enough food outside these walls for them as are willing to gather it up.”

This seemed to exceed the reasonable limits of abuse, and I said as much.

“But it is their fault, Major, if you’ll forgive my saying so. We’ve sent out work parties of hundreds of men to take in the harvests from the abandoned farms around here. It’s August, and that food is rotting away. The birds are eating it up, but these goddamned pets are so goddamned lazy they won’t lift their hands to feed their mouths.”

Though this seemed not quite credible, I determined to consult a calmer authority—if I ever had the time.

Time—that was the difficulty! For though I did feel obliged to exert the full force of my spurious but nonetheless potent authority for the welfare and (if possible) the freedom of these thirteen thousand pets, I knew that each new hour I spent with Frangle only made my discovery that much more inevitable. My mask was slipping, slipping…

But—if I could release them that very night, I would not only have done the prisoners a service but would myself benefit by their escape, for their very numbers would act as a smokescreen to conceal my own departure.

“I intend to examine all ten cellblocks, Captain, but you needn’t accompany me. Just give me the keys. The ones for the individual cells, as well as those for the cellblocks.”

“Impossible, Major. We don’t use keys, you know. Everything is done by electricity. You can’t beat that, you know… electricity!” He seemed to lay special importance upon this notion, and I nodded sagely. Encouraged, he went on: “Electricity is man’s most powerful servant. It is the doorway to tomorrow. It’s another Aladdin’s Lamp. I love electricity, and electricity loves me.”

“Fine. I love it too. But who’s the electrician here—the man who can open the doors? I want to get this inspection over with.”

“We don’t have an electrician—in the strict sense. Palmino—the warrant officer—he does that sort of thing for us—in an amateur sort of way. Nothing very refined about him, you understand, but he keeps it running.”

“Let me see the switchbox that controls the cells—and send Palmino to meet me there. You, meanwhile, can put the time to use ordering your books.”

Frangle grasped my hand with speechless gratitude. He didn’t need speech, for he had just slipped me five hundred-dollar bills in the Dingo currency. I put the bribe in my pocket, and tears sprang to the eyes of Captain Frangle.

The man who came into the radio shack had a head of black hair so thick with dirt and oil that it looked like an engine component. His swarthy skin was corrugated by decades of acne, and his narrow eyes, magnified by thick glasses, glistened with rheum. He was short; he was overweight; he was ill-proportioned. He was, in short, exactly my idea of a Dingo.

The Dingo saluted smartly. “Major Jones? Warrant-Officer Palmino reporting for duty, as ordered, sir.”

I returned what I hoped was a convincing salute, but I boggled in replying to him. By what title should an officer address a warrant officer? There were whole worlds of protocol I was still innocent of. I had got through the bit with Frangle by piecing together faded memories of novels and Von Stroheim movies. Slipping, slipping…

“Very well, Palmino,” I replied, turning away from him, simulating absentmindedness. “I wish all the cellblocks to be opened. And then all the cells themselves. For my inspection. Immediately.” I turned to leave.

“I’m afraid that can’t be done, Major Jones. They can only be opened in sequence. That’s S.O.P.” Then, as though in mockery. “Standard operating procedure, you know.”

“My orders override standard procedure, Palmino. You will obey my orders.”

The Dingo laughed aloud. “I don’t think so, sir. If I may make a suggestion, sir, I think you will obey mine.” Palmino took a pistol from the drawer of his desk and pointed the end with a hole in it at me.

The show was over, obviously. The mask was off. “How…”

“There were a dozen signs, sir—easily a dozen. Though I have been admiring the way you ride right over them. With me helping out, it will be a lot easier now.”

“Helping out?”

“Don’t interrupt me, sir,” he commanded meekly. “I was just telling you how I figured it all out. First, there was an announcement over the radio here that a pet had escaped from an airplane flying from Duluth to St Paul—” (So, I thought, that’s where Julie will be!) “—which pet was said to be last seen wearing a major’s overcoat. That was a very suggestive clue to me, sir. The report came over the air a few moments after you’d landed. I put two and two together.”

“Helping me, you say?”

“And then observed that you had about two inches of skin showing between the hem of your coat and the top of your boots, whereas when you came out of the barracks you was wearing what appeared to me to be Lieutenant Mosely’s parade uniform. Ah-ha! I said to myself, there’s something fishy going on!”

“I have money, if that’s what you want…”

“Finally, when I came in here I addressed you as Major Jones, if you recall. Whereas the name of the Major we’ve been expecting is Worthington. When you didn’t object to being called Jones, everything seemed to fit together. Like the pieces of a jigsaw. It all came to me in a flash.”

“Five hundred dollars?”

“You didn’t listen! You pets are all alike—snobs! You think you’re so much better than we are, and you’re not worth the bullets it would take to kill you. If I didn’t need you to help me, I’d like to… I’d make you live in my body for a while. That would show you!” Palmino’s eyes grew rheumier; his pistol trembled with emotion.

“What is it you want of me? Practically speaking, that is.”

“I want to be a pet.”

“I’m sure we all do. All thirteen thousand of us. But the Masters have gone. They’ve deserted us.”

“They’ll return. We’ll wait for them. Here.”

“That’s fine for you, but I can’t stay on indefinitely. When the real Major Worthington arrives—”

“We’ll see he has a good funeral. Mosely, too. I never did like that bastard Mosely. And Frangle—you’re going to start putting the screws on Frangle. Oh, we’ll have fun while we wait, sir, let me tell you. There are about five thousand bee-yoo-tiful bitches in those cells, sir. Five thousand—goddamn!”

“Really, Palmino, if you want to become a pet, you’re going about it in the wrong way. I appreciate your cooperation, but no Master would tolerate the kind of actions you have in mind.”

“So? When they get me, they can reform my character. I won’t object to that. I’d probably like myself a lot better then. They can cure my acne and deepen my voice. They can give me 20-20 vision and fill me brimful with hormones and sweet charity. I’m willing. But meanwhile I’ll enjoy myself.”

“I need time to think about this. By myself.”

“Take fifteen minutes. But remember—if you don’t go along with me, you’ll be going against me. In which case, Captain Frangle will learn all about Major Jones. Think about it—but don’t think you can do with me like you did with Mosely—because I’ve already told four of the guards—friends of mine—which way the wind is blowing. And I don’t intend to let you know which four. But you go right ahead and think about it.”

I went to Mosely’s room. The window above the bed was not barred, and it was a negligible fifteen-foot drop from the ledge. No one would observe me, since the guards were still assembled at attention in the compound. It would be a simple matter to escape across the fields and hide out in other abandoned farmhouses as I worked my way south to St Paul and Darling, Julie. What purpose, after all, could I expect to serve by releasing these thousands of prisoners? What had they that was worth escaping to? Why should they risk their lives? The Masters’ return was, as Palmino had pointed out, their only hope, and the Masters would not be much hindered by prison walls.

I was perched on the window ledge, ready to leap, my feet dangling down over the rough stones, when I heard, distantly, a tenor voice, ineffably sad, a voice that could have melted even so adamantine a heart as Palmino’s with its melancholy refrain:

A! che la morte ognora è tarde nel venir

a chi desia, a chi desia morir!

(Which I would translate roughly thus:

Ah! how tardily death draws nigh

to he who, to he who desires to die!)

It was the last act of Il Trovatore! It was St Bernard!

St Bernard’s voice was joined by Clea’s faltering soprano. It is unreasonable, I know—it was madness—but I decided that moment that, willy-nilly, I would have to stay. My mother had thought nothing of deserting me when I was the merest pup, but my conscience would not be eased by that. I would have to rescue Motherlove from the Dingoes.

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:

A Prayer of Investments

(Investment of the Alb)

Pure white suds

Lemon yellow

The black krater

Bone white salve

(Investment of the Chasuble)

Colorful gown

Trimmed with yellow lace

Colorful gown

Laced with silver

(Investment of the Ring)

Navy blue buttons

Soft black pus

Dark gold ochre

Blacky black black

“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 Dingolike 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…”

Chapter Nine

In which we may witness Salami, and almost everybody escapes.

The great escape plot almost foundered at its launching, due to Pluto’s artsy-fartsy insistence on arena staging.

“Theatre-in-the-round, my good God!” I exclaimed. “These are Dingoes, not Elizabethans, boy. The groundlings, the Great Unwashed, the stinking rabble that doesn’t know the difference between a Holbein and a hole in the ground. What did Bizet say when he sat down to write the Toreador Song? He said, if they want merde, I’ll give them merde. This is Mass Culture. You’re in Hollywood now. Remember it.”

“But a proscenium arch! It’s… it’s indecent! Hamlet had arena staging. It was good enough for Marlowe; it was good enough for Jonson; it was good enough for Shakespeare; and it’s good enough for me.”

“Amen, brother!” said Clea, clapping her hands.

“They used a proscenium arch at Bayreuth,” St Bernard ventured timidly. Logical discourse was not his element.

“And if it was good enough for Wagner, it should be good enough for us,” I said, grateful for whatever allies. “Illusion—that’s the ticket! People like to be fooled. Besides, if we don’t have a big old painted backdrop, how will we get everyone out the gate? This isn’t art for art’s sake, but for ours.”

“Philistine!” Pluto growled. “Have it your way tonight, but if we ever get this show out of the provinces…”

“Once we’re in Swan Lake, I wash my hands of it. But for tonight, we’d better move. Clea, start the ladies sewing up costumes and rehearsing the production numbers. Remember, sex is everything. And they’ve got to fill up a lot of time, so don’t let them have anything until they’re screaming for it—and then give them half. Palmino, you’ve got an exodus to organize and a set to pound together. Don’t fuss over the style, but make sure the backdrop is opaque. Pluto, you can start helping St Bernard with his lines.”

“But they aren’t written yet.”

“Too late, too late. Give him his lines now and write them when you get to Swan Lake. That was Shakespeare’s way. For my own part, I’ll be the rest of the day at least convincing Frangle that Salami’s going to be the solution to his morale problem.”

“Not salami,” Pluto protested, “—Salome!”

“Salami,” I said sternly. “Remember—you’re in Hollywood now.”

“Salami?” Captain Frangle asked, giving a bewildered twist to his moustaches. “For my part—that is to say, speaking unofficially—I think it could be very, uh, beautiful… is that the word? The Bible and all, yes—but nevertheless.”

“Nevertheless, Captain?”

“Nevertheless, the men, you know. The men are a crude sort, generally speaking. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy a, uh, what is the word… a little culture?… myself, you understand. I’ve always fancied myself an intellectual, you know, but nevertheless.”

“Oh, as for the men, I can assure you there won’t be anything highbrow about this production. You know the story of Salami, of course?”

“Of course. That is to say… if you could refresh my memory…?”

“By all means.” And I told him the story, more or less as it appears in Matthew and Mark and Wilde and Hofmannsthal—and in the Rita Hayworth movie that had given Pluto his inspiration. Thank heaven for the film archives at the Shroeder Kennel! Pluto had altered the traditional story somewhat in the interests of heightened vulgarity.

“And all that is in the Bible?” Frangle asked, at the conclusion of my tale.

“Even as I have said.”

“And they’re going to do that on stage—here?”

“As I’ve been given to understand, five hundred or more of the most beautiful bitches in the penitentiary are rehearsing the roles of the harem slaves. Salami herself is a vision of such chaste purity that words are inadequate.”

“It might be a very rewarding experience at that. Eh, Major? I’ve always held that religious education is essential to the moral well-being of an army. Wasn’t it Napoleon who said an army travels on its soul? Too many commanders these days are willing to let spiritual matters go to hell.”

“I never thought you were one, Captain Frangle.”

Frangle smiled and adjusted one moustache to an expression of modest self-satisfaction and the other to randy anticipation. “When does the fun begin?”

“At nine-thirty, Captain. Promptly at nine-thirty.”

Promptly at nine-forty-five, the curtain rose and one hundred and fourteen guards and three officers of the St Cloud Repatriation Center gasped as one man as they caught their first view of Herod’s Palace in Galilee, brilliantly illuminated by the four searchlights which had been taken down from the prison watchtowers. The backdrop represented an infinite perspective of lotus columns and gothic vaulted roofs, of gilded caryatids and marble pylons, of niches and cornices and ogive windows looking out upon still vaster Babylonian perspectives—a mural that had been the corporate achievement of two hundred and several pets—and looked it. The composition flowed freely from style to style, from Poussin to Chirico and thence to Constable, as naturally as a spring brook babbles over a bed of boulders. Every square inch glowed with a disquietingly gemlike light, since the paint was still fresh and sticky.

The orchestra struck up the overture—a hastily reconstituted version of the Tales of the Vienna Woods, which had, despite itself, a rather oriental character, due to our instruments: water pipes and water xylophones, garbage can tympani, and a string section of barbed wire and bedsprings.

When the effect of these splendors began to dim, Pluto, in sacerdotal robes and a long false gray beard, came centerstage and declaimed, in his most magistral tone: “And Behold!”

And behold, the chorus lines of Herod’s wives and concubines came marching in from stage right and stage left, respectively, one thousand strong. They overflowed the stage and filled the courtyard. Not Solomon in all his glory had it so good.

“And behold, it came to pass in those days that Herod was Tetrarch of Galilee. Even Herod Antipasto—”

Herod Antipasto, with a Falstaffian gut, size 15 shoes, a putty nose, and long, gray moustaches not unlike the Captain’s, entered at the end of the chorus line, hiking up his fancy robes and kicking his hairy legs, blithely out of time with the orchestra’s galop, and pinching occasional asses to the loud delight of his audience.

“Now Herod was a cruel king who liked nothing better than his brother’s wife, Herodias Antipasto—unless it was his brother’s wife’s daughter, Salami Antipasto.” Enter Herodias, swinging her boa. Enter Salami, in a sedan chair borne by eight Nubians. For the time being, Salami kept her beauty dimmed behind the curtains of the sedan chair, only peeking out briefly to wink in my direction. Frangle, sitting beside me, exclaimed: “Did you see that? Did you see how she looked right at me?”

“Now it came to pass in those days, even then, that Herod, Tetrarch of Galilee, had a big party, and he invited everybody. He invited the Romans and their wives…” Enter the Romans and their wives. “The Egyptians and their wives.” Who entered. “The Nubians and their wives.” And many more, each doing the characteristic national striptease. But somehow, no matter how many Herod invited, the courtyard never seemed to get any more crowded.

When everyone had got to the party at last, Pluto assumed a gloomy tone: “But Herod had forgotten to invite one person to his big party, and that person found out that he’d been left out in the cold, and he was very angry, and behold he was called the Baptist, even St Bernard.”

Enter the aforementioned, with much clashing of garbage cans. St Bernard sang the Toreador Song from Carmen, with new lyrics that expressed his pique at not receiving an invitation and also scolds the Tetrarch for marrying his brother’s wife. This accomplished, he joined Motherlove, as Salami, in the love duet from La Bohème.

“And behold, Herod waxed hot with anger, and he ordered his henchmen to put the Baptist down in the dungeon, and behold St Bernard the Baptist slew three hundred soldiers with the jawbone of an ass!”

And sure enough, behold—for twenty minutes St Bernard lay about him, scattering the dead on all sides. The stage swarmed with litter bearers and nurses and fresh replacements. It had scarcely been cleared stage right, before St Bernard had reaped a new harvest stage left—and singing all the while. It was a wonderful fight, and the groundlings loved it, but the odds were against him, and at last he was caught and hauled away. To celebrate Herod’s victory, a thousand new dancing girls trooped in to the strains of the Triumphal March from Aida.

Pluto’s narration went on to describe how Salami and the Baptist were passionately in love with each other, but that Herod was determined to keep them apart because he loved Salami himself. Salami, hoping to save her lover, goes to her mother Herodias, who persuades her daughter (and this is the part that Pluto lifted from the Rita Hayworth movie) to dance the Dance of the Seven Veils for the Tetrarch, who has promised her any favor in return. Salami thinks the favor will be St Bernard’s release, but bad old Herodias asks for his head on a silver salver instead. What a plot! At least, that’s what was supposed to have happened, but at the point when there was to have been the big scene between the Antipastos, man and wife, a ballet of the slave girls was interpolated. Pluto was gesturing frantically for me to come backstage. Excusing myself to Frangle, Quilty, and the Reverend Captain, I left my front-row-center seat and went to see what was amiss.

“Herod has deserted!” Clea announced in dire tone, exhibiting the castoff costume. “He couldn’t wait to run off to Needlepoint Hill with the Egyptians.”

“Are all the pets gone now?” I asked. Unnecessarily, for I could see the steady streams of prisoners still hurrying out the gate under the supervision of Palmino and his four friends—who had volunteered to miss the stage show and man the lookout towers that night. Many of the pets ran right from the wings into the departing throng as soon as their business on stage was completed.

“Only six thousand are out,” Pluto confessed. “We’re ten minutes behind schedule because of the late curtain, but we’re catching up. The problem is Herod. We forgot to assign an understudy, and nobody knows the part.”

“Somebody has to go on—that much is obvious. I don’t care who you pick.”

“We thought…” St Bernard began hesitatingly. “… that you might.”

“You see, my darling, the other pets really have no idea of what we’re about,” Clea explained. “It’s easy enough for the girls to go out there and do a little belly dance, but the actor doing Herod was beside himself with the pain of the vulgarity. And we thought that since you’ve come to know the Dingoes so well…”

“But they’ve come to know me so well too!”

“But with this big tummy and the false moustache and a putty nose and a little rouge and mascara, they won’t. Please, White Fang, don’t be difficult. We can’t make those poor slave girls dance all night.” Clea took advantage of the time to prepare me for the rôle, and by the end of her entreaty I was more fit to go on as Herod than to return to my seat in front, so I gave in. Besides, as Pluto had known very well, I love amateur theatricals.

My first scene, with Herodias, was easy to ad-lib. The bargain was struck by which Salami was to do her bit and St Bernard was to have his head taken off. Then I settled back to watch, having no other business during the dance than to scramble out on all fours and pick up each of the seven veils as Motherlove let them fall, then bay like a wolf in appreciation. In all fairness I must say that her dance merited no less.

The first veil, for instance, revealed Motherlove’s arms—as graceful and ivory a pair as ever clasped a Tetrarch’s neck, hands like two doves, tipped with long almond nails that even the cruel regimen of prison life had not spoiled.

The second veil uncovered Motherlove’s classic nose and sculpted lips, parted, as the veil fell, in a taunting and suggestive smile, more exciting than many another woman’s kiss.

Motherlove spent as much time over the third veil as if she had been undoing the Gordian knot, and when it at last fell, the audience and I broke into a roar of approval. Motherlove’s legs were long, firm and elegantly muscled. When they moved in time to the crash of the cymbals and squeal of strings, one seemed to feel that the science of anatomy held no more mysteries. Such a feeling, however, was premature.

The orchestra had grown steadily quieter throughout the dance, the tempo slower. As each veil fell, a group of musicians quit their seats at the side of the stage and went behind the backdrop where they joined the escaping throng. The noise of the exodus became perceptible as the music quietened, but Motherlove commanded the guards’ attention with queenly authority, to say the least.

The fourth veil bared her swanlike neck and creamy shoulders to the vulgar view; the fifth revealed her midriff. The lithe bare belly rolled and pulled taut, then stretched out at length, making the delicately-convoluted navel peek forth from its little hollow of flesh. The arms moved violently with the music, clapping, swinging up above the high-piled hair and chopping down in counterpoint to the musician’s beat. The music slowed to the consistency of honey. Motherlove’s almond fingers touched the hem of the sixth veil.

“Take it off!” the guards chanted. “Take it off! Take it off!” The Tetrarch was limping in circles about the stage, while Captain Frangle had leapt to his feet and was chewing at his moustaches in an agony of concupiscence. Eventually, after a long season of doubt, she took it off. Ah, then what treasures did the Tetrarch’s court behold! The two breasts were like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.

One veil remained, and one musician—Pluto, who played a flute. Motherlove loosened the knot at her hip, but she did not let the veil drop. She lifted it, she lowered it, she moved it laterally—but she did not let it drop. Of a sudden the flute broke off, and Pluto stepped forward to resume his rôle as narrator. “And behold…” he sang out.

“Behold! Behold!” the audience shouted in agreement.

“…the Baptist broke from his bonds and escaped the dungeon of the Tetrarch, and he was at hand to spare the modesty of the Princess Salami from the lustful gaze of Herod.” St Bernard carried in a heavy wooden screen, which unfolded into six sections. The Princess Salami concealed herself modestly behind this screen, one end of which butted against the wing on stage left.

“Off with his head!” I, as the Tetrarch, roared.

“Off with his head!” the audience clamored. One of them, Frangle himself, favoring more direct action, rushed at the screen to tear it down. St Bernard ran downstage to prevent him but tripped over his own loincloth. Only I, Herod Antipasto, could stay Frangle’s lewd intent.

Grasping him roughly by the lapels of his uniform, I began dragging him back to his seat, but Frangle was not to be persuaded even by superior strength. He bit and clawed and tore and grabbed at Herod’s moustaches…

“Major Worthington!” he exclaimed. “What are you about?”

Fortunately the audience was making enough noise to drown out Frangle’s cry of recognition. St Bernard assisted me in dragging the Captain behind the screen, and together we assisted the Captain to become unconscious. As each of the articles of his clothing was thrown out from behind the screen for their inspection, the guards’ laughter grew louder. At last, when the inert officer was carried away in full sight on a stretcher the house came down.

Which bit of extempore business concluded, we returned with relief to the script.

“Desist, villainous Antipasto!” declaimed St Bernard, in his best Verdian style.

“Nay, prepare to meet thy death, fool,” I replied, “for I shall see the precious ruby beneath that final veil or die in the attempt.”

“Help, help,” said Clea peeking out from behind the screen.

“Off with his head!” the guards began again to chant, drowning out the noise that the last pets were making in their escape.

I whipped out the tipped fencing foil from the sheath at my side and laid on. Though my swordsmanship was no better than might have been expected from a bumbling, fat, old Tetrarch, luck was so far on my side that St Bernard was unable to despatch me with the same ease with which he’d disposed of the previous three hundred soldiers. Then, by a clever strategem, I made him circle about so that I was between him and the screen. Then I bolted towards Salami. With a shriek Clea started running away, pressing her single remaining veil (rather larger now than it had been) to her bosom and private parts. She was hindered from running too far ahead of me by the fact that the tip of my foil had become tangled in the corner of this garment. In this manner we circled the courtyard thrice, pursued by St Bernard, who was still tripping over his loincloth and therefore could never quite catch up. The credit for all this choreography must go to Pluto.

At last Motherlove regained the sanctuary of the screen. A mist comes before my eyes and my throat tightens as I am forced again to recall the sight of my mother’s cheerful smile and the friendly wave of her hand as she departed into the wings, and thence backstage. Her rôle was at an end, and she was to follow the rest of the pets now to Needlepoint Hill. Never, never more to see her! How lovely she was in those last moments! How hard to believe that she has left the Earth and me irredeemably behind!

But there was not time then to appreciate the ineffableness of that moment, for St Bernard was laying on thick and fast, switching my padded sides and rump with his lath broadsword. Howling inanely and flailing my foil, I ran about the stage. After a few circuits thus, I ran out at the wings stage left and circled the backdrop that I might reenter on the right. Only Palmino and his four cohorts were left backstage now. The pets were all out. It lacked but fifteen minutes of midnight.

Around the courtyard, back and forth across the stage, then a quick dash behind the screen (where the audience still supposed Clea to be cowering) to catch hold of one end of a trick “veil”, which when pulled out to its full length exceeded the measurements of the stage twice over. But the jokes were wearing thin. Our audience was demanding St Bernard’s head ever more loudly. Hugger-mugger can only go so far.

Then St Bernard, hoping to liven the performance, struck me one blow that didn’t land on the padding but on me. With a cry of authentic pain, I tumbled backward into Herod’s Palace. Samson, in the house of the Philistines, did not enjoy so instant a success. Tremors passed through the eclectic canvas, and there was a minatory, splitting sound. St Bernard pulled me away before it all came down on my head.

Like the rending of the temple veil, Herod’s Palace split neatly down the central seam and fell to the right and to the left, leaving in full view the gaping gates through which the pets had departed. But they did not gape quite so much as I would have liked, and they gaped less every second, as Palmino and his four companions pushed them closed. Pluto’s plan had called for the gate to be closed and locked, but only after St Bernard and I were outside. We rushed forward too late to prevent the outer bolt from sliding into place. Palmino had double-crossed us.

The guards that had comprised the audience of Salami did not take in the full extent of the deception that had been perpetrated upon them quickly enough to prevent St Bernard and me from dashing to the barracks’ door. When they did realize that all the other pets had escaped out the gate, the main body of them forgot the two of us entirely and battered at the locked portal. A contingent of five, however, did pursue us into the barracks and challenged us to stop. Since they were off duty and unarmed, we could afford to ignore their challenge.

It would have been an easy matter then to go up the stairs to Mosely’s room and out the unbarred window and on up to Needlepoint Hill, except that—unfortunately—I tripped.

The five guards were all over me, but St Bernard flew to my rescue and beat them back with his stick of lath. Which, however, broke off at the hilt. Scrambling to my feet, I tore off my putty nose and false moustaches and ordered the guards to come to attention. “If you dare lift your hand against me, I’ll have you court-martialed!”

“Jesus Christ, it’s the Major!”

They stood uncertain whether to advance upon us or obey my command, allowing St Bernard opportunity to pick up a packed foot locker from beside one of the bunks and to hurl it at them. Bonk! Oof! Thud! Great Scott!

We rushed up the stairs and into Mosely’s room. St Bernard was out at the window almost the moment he was in at the door, and I would have followed as quickly after, but for my costume. I was stuffed too abundantly to go through.

“Hurry!” St Bernard warned, pointing to the distant figures of the last pets gathering around Needlepoint Hill, about which a nimbus of roseate light seemed to be settling. “The Masters are there now.”

I had taken off half my uniform extricating myself from my costume, and I was out on the windowledge. Too late! All about us were the armies of the Dingoes!

The soldiers closed in around St Bernard, and I threw him my foil for his defense. He warred against their electric prods bravely, but it was a hopeless contest from the first. The guards of the penitentiary were pounding on the door at my back.

An officer, his arm in a sling (the original Major Worthington?), addressed me through a megaphone. “Better jump down from that ledge, White Fang. We have orders to take you alive. The guards in that prison do not.”

In the distance, on the crest of Needlepoint Hill, the first of the redeemed pets began ascending into the skies. Soon the heavens were filled with their glorious, glowing bodies. A golden light of overwhelming beauty flooded the scene so that even the Dingo soldiers had to turn to admire it. It reminded me of… something… something I could not, quite, put my finger on.

St Bernard could however: “The Last Judgment!”

The Masters were taking back their pets in exactly the manner that Michelangelo had laid out for them six centuries before on the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

The door gave behind me, and I jumped into captivity.

Chapter Ten

In which an execution is executed, followed by a controversy.

The scene is the prison of the Dingoes—not the teeming, raucous tumble of St Cloud (which had been, for all its squalor and inspissated misery, redeemed by the sheer bulk of the humanity packed within its walls)—not that, but a high and solitary chamber, aseptically white, odorless, soundless, sightless, boding. I say solitary, but I was not alone. St Bernard was confined in the same cell with me, but his state so mirrored my own that his companionship merely deepened my sense of being cut off, alone, doomed. Had there been a throng in that room with us, it would have been just the same—for in the courts of death all men are alone. Friends never come to stand beside a gallows.

The gallows…

No, let me for a while yet skirt that subject. Let’s talk about…

St Bernard. St Bernard was even more cast down than I. At least, his gloom was more tangible. Losing first the support of his Leash and then the solace of his beloved Clea (and the latter, through the agency of the contemnible Dingoes), his will had become de-elasticized. He no longer reacted against his environment; he did not plan new escapes; he didn’t even sing.

My only diversion from anxious speculation (and I shall leave it to my readers’ imagination to develop the subject that preoccupied me) was looking down from the cell’s single window at the semi-deserted streets below. The fivefold gallows in the foreground, though it did not inspire confidence, identified our prison as the St Paul Courthouse that my guard on the airplane had referred to so admiringly. The platform of the gallows was raised a dozen feet above street-level, and the main shaft that supported the cross-trees…

We’ll return to that subject. For now, let us focus our attention on that prospect beyond the gallows. All day long, civilian Dingoes passed by the Courthouse—the women in long, ungainly dresses and the men in unseasonably heavy suits—but their behavior was so unremittingly dull (mostly, they just marched, left-right, left-right, left-right, in long, slow, straight lines) that I soon grew tired of observing them and began instead to count the cars that went by.

This wasn’t so boring as you might think, for the various trucks, jeeps and tractors still in use among the Dingoes (rarely, if ever, did one see an ordinary car) presented a beautiful study in comparative ruination. Roaring and sputtering, spewing out black clouds of noxious gas, bouncing along the potholed road at their top speed of fifteen miles per hour, the procession of antique machines was worthy of the genius of Rintintin. (For those unacquainted with his work, an explanation: Rintintin of Eros is the greatest contemporary sculptor of mechanism. I was present at the premier—and only—performance of the reknowned “Death of a Helicopter”, an event that I shall always treasure in my memory and which I would describe at length except for the fear that it would be out of keeping at this moment.)

These machines were usually of an official nature, and those same insignia that I had seen scrawled on the telephone poles outside of Shroeder were painted on the sides of the trucks or on banners that streamed from the jeeps’ antennae. I was reminded of the heraldic devices of some crusading army: Resistor statant, sable on a field of gules; diode dormant on a quartered field, ermine and vert.

I would also give a little account of the architecture of the Dingoes, but the truth is I didn’t pay it much attention. Most of the time I looked at the gallows. The architecture of a gallows is very simple.

After two days in this limbo, I received my first visitor. It was Julie, but a Julie so altered in appearance that I thought at first she was a Dingo spy in disguise. (Prison does develop one’s paranoid tendencies.) She was wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved, floor-length dress in the Dingo style and her beautiful hair was concealed by an ungainly cork helmet such as I had seen on several persons passing below my window.

“Julie!” I exclaimed. “What have they done to you?”

“I’ve been repatriated.” She wasn’t able to raise her eyes to look into mine, and her whole manner was one of unnatural constraint. No doubt, this could be accounted for by the presence of the armed guard who was watching us from the open doorway.

“You mean they’ve forced you to…”

“Nobody’s forced me to do anything. I just decided to become a Dingo. They’re really much nicer than we thought they’d be. They’re not all like Bruno. And even he’s not so bad once you get to know him.”

“My God, Julie! Have you no shame?”

“Oh, don’t be upset. That’s not what I meant. Bruno’s too much in love with Roxanna to think of bothering me. Besides, he’s still laid up in a hospital bed.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

But Julie went blithely on. “They’re going to get married as soon as he’s out of the hospital. Isn’t that wonderful? On the airplane coming here, after you jumped out and deserted me, Bruno was delirious and he told me all about himself. I can’t say I understood much of it. But do you realize that he actually likes you? He does. There he was all bandaged up, lying on the stretcher, and all of us thinking the plane was going to crash any minute, and he said: ‘I wasn’t smashed like that since God knows when. Good man! We’ll get along—White Fang and me.’ I thought it was just the delirium, but he was serious. He wants you to visit him and Roxanna as soon as you can. I explained that that might not be soon.”

“If at all.”

“That’s what Roxanna suggested. And she didn’t seem at all upset by the idea. She’s still very angry with you for hurting Bruno.”

“But I was trying to protect her!”

The story that Julie at last unfolded, in her rather scattery way, was this: Roxanna, when she had seen me strike Bruno with the axe, suddenly was made aware that she was in love with her tormentor. Her new-found love was every bit as passionate as the hatred she had expressed only minutes before. In the heat of the moment, she had been almost angry enough to use my axe on me, but Julie and the Dingoes who had been drawn to the scene had been able to stop her. Since then she had pursued her vengeance more deviously.

“And Petite,” I asked, “what did she do to Petite?”

“Oh, it wasn’t at all what I’d feared. She just read to her from this propaganda-book that all the Dingoes like. It’s called The Life of Man. She convinced Petite that it’s very naughty to be a pet, but the first thing Petite asked when she saw me again was ‘Where’s my Leash?’ She can’t adjust to the idea that she’ll never have it again.”

“Julie, don’t say that. Of course she’ll have it again. We all will. Haven’t you heard about Needlepoint Hill? Pluto and Clea are probably already back on Swan Lake or Titan, and in one week more, or two weeks…”

The mention of his home brought a profound groan from the lips of St Bernard: “Gott! welch Dunkel hier!”

Julie pressed her forefinger to her lips anxiously. “Hush! We aren’t allowed to mention that. It’s a sore point with the Dingoes.”

“What are they going to do with us, Julie?” I whispered.

She shook her head sadly, avoiding my intent gaze. “I can’t talk about that,” she said. “They forbade it. And anyhow, I don’t know.” Somehow, though, I didn’t believe her.

Julie spent the rest of her visit trying to justify the haste with which she had allowed the Dingoes to repatriate her, and since she had no apparent excuse but expediency, it was rather hard going.

At last I interrupted her: “Julie, please don’t take on about it. I quite understand that you’ve had to disassociate yourself from me. Heaven only knows what they intend to do with me, but there’s no reason for you needlessly sharing in that fate. Perhaps they mean to use me as a hostage; perhaps they mean something worse. In either case you’re lucky to be rid of me.” I was just beginning to hit my stride, and I would soon have brought myself to the point of tears, when Julie started to giggle.

To giggle! She tittered and snorted and snuffled like someone who can’t keep a joke, and she left the room bent double with the pain of holding back her laughter.

Hysteria, of course. It was a very sad thing to see the girl you love in such a condition and to be unable to help. But I didn’t think too long about that, since it was even sadder to think of me in my condition.

Shortly after Julie left, a guard came to our cell to ask what we would like for our last meal.

It was sundown, and from the windows of the cell I could see that a large crowd of spectators had already gathered about the base of the gallows. At ten o’clock a guard came to remove the two trays of untouched food (he wolfed down the choicest bits of the steak before he went out into the corridor), and then a chaplain informed us apathetically that we could confess to him if we wished.

“I only confess to my Master, thank you,” St Bernard informed him. Now that the ceremony of our execution was well under way St Bernard was able to pull himself together: he knew the rôle he was expected to play.

Our cell began to fill with guards. I was commanded to come away from the window, and my hands were bound behind my back. St Bernard submitted to his bonds peacefully.

“I’m sorry that you find yourself in this situation on my account, St Bernard. I didn’t want it to end this way—for either of us.”

“Shaddup!” said the guard. “You ain’t supposed to talk any more.”

St Bernard smiled. “Oh, there’s no need for you to be sorry, Brüderlein. For my own part, I have but one regret: I regret that I have but one life to give for the Mastery.”

“Shaddup you! Whyntya shaddup when I say shaddup?”

We were escorted by some dozen Dingoes to the main entrance of the courthouse, where we were met by the officer in charge of this execution. He bowed to us curtly and smiled a thin—but not unhappy—smile.

“Lieutenant Mosely!” I exclaimed. “What a surprise, sir!”

Without, a solemn tattoo was begun, the doors were swung open, and the crowd screamed its approbation.

“Now,” St Bernard shouted above the din, “more than ever does it seem rich to die.”

Despite this noble affirmation he seemed no more eager than I to mount the thirteen steps to the gallows. We were stationed in our places—each in the middle of a rectangle distinctly demarcated from the other boards of the platform. When I jiggled my weight, I could feel the trapdoor wobble. On the whole, I stood very still.

The chaplain approached us a last time. “Did you wish to make a last statement?”

“Yes,” said St Bernard. “I know not what course others may choose, but as for myself— Give me liberty or give me death!”

“And you?”

“I’m willing to compromise. Give me something somewhere in between. How about a stay of execution? How about a trial? I’m being denied my rights as a United States citizen!”

“God damn the United States!” St Bernard cried. “I hope that I may never see nor hear of the United States again!”

“What a terrible thing to say!” the chaplain scolded. “It would serve you right if that’s just what happened to you.”

It was not, however, to be St Bernard’s fate, for the band assembled in front of the gallows chose that moment to strike up the National Anthem. The men in the crowd took off their caps, and the women quieted. St Bernard sang the words aloud in his wonderful tenor voice. It was a rare last opportunity.

Lieutenant Mosely came forward and offered blindfolds. I refused, but St Bernard accepted gratefully. With the black cloth over his eyes, he looked handsomer and more pathetic than ever. There was an ominous silence, interrupted by a rapturous outburst from one of the Dingo women in the front row of spectators: “Cut off their balls! Cut off their balls first!”

Pursing my lips at this demonstration of poor taste, I glanced down at the bloodthirsty creature who had expressed these sentiments—and imagine my surprise when I saw she was the same woman who had showered me with flowers and kisses during the parade in Duluth! Perhaps I was mistaken though; perhaps she was only of the same physical type. A guard hushed her before the last riffle of drums.

Mosely lifted his hand.

St Bernard rose to the occasion: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

Mosely lowered his right hand.

St Bernard dropped.

“But what about me?” I asked, even as the tears of pity rolled down my cheeks. Poor, poor St Bernard!

“You’ve got your stay of execution,” Mosely informed me glumly. “There’s someone who wants to see you first. You’re going there now.”

“Fine—but would you take the noose off first? Ah, that’s much better.”

I could not see where the limousine was taking me, for the curtains were drawn about all the windows in the back seat, but within minutes I found myself in a large and largely vacant underground parking area. Then, after a labyrinth of staircases, corridors, guards and passwords, I was at last left alone before an imposing mahogany desk. The desk and all the appointments of the room testified to the consequence of their possessor. In a subsistence economy like the Dingoes’, luxury is a potent symbol.

My attention was especially drawn to the portrait that hung over the desk. Done in the mock-primitive style popular in the sixties of the last century, it slyly exaggerated those features of the subject which were most suggestive of the raw and barbarous. His stomach, though monumental in itself, was seen from a perspective that magnified its bulk. The face was crudely colored, particularly the nose, which was a florid, alcoholic crimson. The violet-tinged lips were at once cynical and voluptuary. The picture was the perfect archetype of the Dingo.

Yet perhaps not perfect—for the eyes shone with an intelligence and good will that seemed to contradict the overall impression of brutishness. This one dissonance added to the archetype that touch of individual life which only the best portraitists have ever been able to achieve.

I was still engaged in studying this painting (and, really, it had the strangest fascination for me) when its original stepped into the room and came forward to shake my hand.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting, but my time hasn’t been my own ever since that damned sunspot.”

When he had left off shaking my hand, he did not immediately release it, but, keeping it still tightly clasped, looked me over appraisingly.

“You’ll have to get rid of that name of yours, you know. ‘White Fang’ just won’t do now. We Dingoes—as you call us—don’t like those doggish names. Your proper name is Dennis White, isn’t it? Well, Dennis, welcome to the revolution.”

“Thank you, but…”

“But who am I? I’m the Grand High Diode. As far as you’re concerned, you may think of me as a vice-president. The Diode is second only to the Cathode Himself. Are you interested in politics?”

“Pets don’t have to be. We’re free.”

“Ah, freedom!” The Grand High Diode made an expansive gesture, then plopped into the seat behind the desk. “Your Master takes care of everything for you and leaves you so perfectly free. Except that you can’t taste anything from the good-and-evil tree, why there’s nothing that isn’t allowed you.”

He glowered at me dramatically, and I had time to compare the portrait with the portrayed. Even the man’s wild, white locks seemed to be tumbled about his head according to the same formula that the painter had used to guide his brushstrokes. My admiration for him (the painter, not the portrayed) grew by leaps and bounds.

“The Masters appeared two-thirds of a century ago. In that time human civilization has virtually disappeared. Our political institutions are in a shambles; our economy is little more than bartering now; there are practically no artists left.”

“Among you Dingoes, perhaps not. But under the Mastery, civilization is flourishing as never before in man’s history. If you’re going to talk about civilization, the Dingoes haven’t a leg to stand on.”

“Cows were never more civilized than when we bred them.”

I smiled. “Word-games. But I can play them just as well.”

“If you’d rather not argue…”

“I’d rather argue. I’d rather do anything that keeps me from returning to the gallows. It was a most distasteful experience.”

“Perhaps you can avoid the gallows altogether. Perhaps, Dennis, I can convince you to become a Dingo?” The man’s thick, violet lips distended in a wolfish grin. His eyes, which were, like the eyes in the portrait, vivid with intelligence, glittered with a strange sort of mirth.

I tried my best to temper my natural disdain with a quaver of doubt. “Isn’t it rather late to join? I should think that most of the carnage must be over by now. Aren’t you nearly ready for defeat?”

“We’ll probably be defeated, but a good revolutionary can’t let that worry him. A battle that isn’t against the odds would hardly be a battle at all. The carnage, I’ll admit, is unfortunate.”

“And unjustifiable as well. Poor St Bernard had done nothing to justify—”

“Then I won’t bother to justify it. Dirty hands is one of the prices you pay in becoming a man again.”

“Are you fighting this revolution just so you can feel guilty about it?”

“For that—and for the chance to be our own Masters. Guilt and sweat and black bread are all part of being human. Domestic animals are always bred to the point that they become helpless in the state of nature. The Masters have been breeding men.”

“And doing a better job of it than man ever did. Look at the results.”

“That, I might point out, is exactly the view a dachshund would take.”

“Then let me put in a good word for dachshunds. I prefer them to wolves. I prefer them to Dingoes.”

“Do you? Don’t make up your mind too quickly—or it may cost you your head.” And, with this threat, my incredible inquisitor began to chuckle. His chuckle became a pronounced laugh, and the laugh grew to a roar. It occurred to me that the gleam in his eyes might as well have been madness as intelligence.

Suddenly I was overcome by a desire just to have done. “My mind is made up,” I announced calmly, when he had stopped laughing.

“Then you’ll make a declaration?” Apparently, he had taken the exact opposite of the meaning I had intended.

“Why should you care which side I’m on?” I demanded angrily.

“Because a statement from you—from the son of Tennyson White—with the strength of that name behind it—would be invaluable in the cause of freedom.”

Very deliberately I approached the mahogany desk where the man was sitting, wreathed in a fatuous smile, and very deliberately I raised my hand and struck him full in the face.

Instantly the room was filled with guards who pinioned my arms behind my back. The man behind the desk began, again, to chuckle.

“You beast!” I shouted. “You Dingo! You have the conscience to kidnap and murder my father, and then you dare ask me to make you a declaration of support. I can’t believe… If you think that…” I went on raving in this vein for some little while. And as I raved that incredible man lay sprawled on the top of his desk and laughed until he had lost his breath.

“White Fang,” he managed at last to say. “That is to say—Dennis, my dear boy, excuse me. Perhaps I’ve carried this a little too far. But you see…” And now he swept aside the thick white locks from the stub of his right ear. “…I am your father and not murdered in the least.”

Chapter Eleven

In which I commit myself to the Philosophy of Dingoism.

The next week went by at a pace that would have been nightmarish if I hadn’t been so giddily, busily happy. First off, I married Julie once again—this time in accordance with the rites of the Dingoes. Daddy explained that in some matters—marriage most especially—the Dingoes could be as great sticklers for ceremony as my brother Pluto. Darling, Julie entered into the spirit of things with enthusiastic atavism, and I suspect now that part of Daddy’s insistence had had its origin in my once-again-newlywed bride. Still, it was a well-wrought ceremony, which even Pluto might have approved. Hymen’s candle never burned brighter than on the day that our hands were joined over the glowing vacuum tube on the altar of the renovated power station.

We had our first quarrel as newlyweds an hour afterward, when Julie told me that she’d known about Daddy and the ordeal he was preparing for me on the day she had come to visit me in the courthouse jail. But the quarrel ended as soon as Julie had pointed out that, since I’d passed the test so well, I had no cause for anger. I hate to think what might have happened however, if I’d agreed to make the “declaration” that Daddy had proposed.

The moment I had dreaded most—when I should have to inform Daddy that the pet who had been executed with me was also his son—passed by without ruffling his considerable equanimity. He had known all the while, through Julie, and he had gone right ahead and ordered the execution, in order, so he claimed, to set me a sobering example of man’s mortality and the likely price of rebellion.

“But your own son!” I protested. “What bond is stronger than between father and son?”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s all very true—though that bond is somewhat attentuated when one has had hundreds of sons. But consider, Dennis—he was committing incest. So, even exclusive of his political crimes, which are great…”

“Daddy—you’re smiling that certain way again. I suspect there’s a trick up your sleeve.”

“Come see a movie, Dennis. If I told you, you wouldn’t, perhaps, believe.”

The film showed four pallbearers (by their physiques and nakedness one could tell they were pets) supporting a pallet upon which the corpse of St Bernard had been composed. They were climbing the twisty path to Needlepoint Hill. Reaching the summit, they laid down their burden and watched as a nimbus of golden light formed above the dead body: St Bernard’s Master had been summoned back to the hill.

The fingers trembled—and there is nothing to which I can compare the beauty of that moment unless it be the “Creation of Adam” panel in the Sistine Chapel—the eyelids fluttered (telephoto lens now) and opened. St Bernard, gloriously resurrected, began to sing Beethoven’s Ninth. Then, slowly, the five bodies rose into the air, caroling their joy. With such a happy ending, I couldn’t hold the charade of the execution against Daddy.

From the first Julie and I were celebrities among the Dingoes. At a steady succession of lunches, dinners, and dances, we played the parts of refugees from the “tyranny of the Masters, grateful for this new-found freedom”. That’s a quote from the speech that Daddy wrote for me to deliver on such occasions. It always draws applause. Dingoes have no taste.

While I acted my rôle as a model revolutionary, I carried on another drama inwardly. Had it been merely a contest between filial piety and my loyalty to the Masters, I would not have hesitated long, for filial piety is negligible when for seventeen years one has presumed one’s father dead.

But mine had been no ordinary father. He had been Tennyson White, and he had written A Dog’s Life. Now I discovered there was a sequel to that book.

I read through The Life of Man in one sitting of fifteen hours’ duration. It was one of the most shattering experiences of my life. In fact, right at this moment, I can’t remember any others comparable.

Anyone who’s read it realizes the difficulty one faces trying to describe The Life of Man. It’s got a little of everything: satire, polemic, melodrama, farce. After the classic unity of A Dog’s Life, the sequel strikes at one’s sensibilities like a jet of water from a high-pressure hose. It begins with the same high and dry irony, the same subdued wit, but gradually—it’s hard to say just when—the viewpoint shifts. Scenes from the first novel are repeated verbatim, but now its pleasantries have become horrors. Allegory gives way to a brutal, damning realism, and every word of it seemed an accusation aimed directly at me. After the first reading, I had no more distinct memory of it than I would have had of a hammer blow. And so I entirely overlooked the fact that The Life of Man is autobiography from first to last.

As I have earlier noted, my father Tennyson White belonged to the first generation of humans to grow up away from the planet Earth. He had had an exemplary upbringing on Ceres; then, when it was discovered he had leukemia, he was relegated to a second-rate Earthside hospital while the Masters argued the “sporting proposition” of his fate. It was then that he lost his faith in the Mastery, and it was then that he drew up the outlines for both his great novels. It was then too that Daddy contacted the leaders of the Dingoes and mapped out with their aid a program for revolution. A Dog’s Life was to be the overture to that program.

Many authors have been accused of corrupting youth and debasing the moral coinage of their times. Probably none has ever set about so deliberately as Daddy. His novel was a time-bomb disguised as an Easter egg and planted right in the middle of the Master’s basket; it was a Trojan horse; it was a slow-working acid that nibbled at the minds of the pets—just a mild, aesthetic tickle at first, then it worked in deeper, an abrasive that scarred them with guilt. For men, in the last analysis, are not meant to be domestic animals.

Those who stood the acid-test of that novel managed to escape to Earth and join the Dingoes (feigning, like Daddy, to having been butchered). Those who didn’t (and sadly, these were by far the majority) stayed with the Masters and incorporated the monstrous satire of A Dog’s Life into the fabric of their daily lives. They became dogs.

A decade after the publication of A Dog’s Life, Daddy effected his own escape to Earth. He managed to prevent the Master of Ganymede from realizing his intentions, then or later, by deliberately jumbling his true feelings and firm purpose among the welter of fictional ideas that were forever teeming in his fertile fancy. He further deceived his Master by surrounding this “plot” with such lustreless or unpleasant images (the ear, for instance) that his Master never encouraged him to cultivate this train of thought—nor examined it himself with more than cursory attention.

Daddy’s autobiography makes no mention of the fact that he left his two sons (to mention only Pluto and me) behind when he went over to the Dingoes, and he refuses to talk about it still. I have always suspected that he doubted, if only slightly, whether he was doing the right thing in leaving the Masters. It was a large enough doubt that he was willing to let us decide for ourselves whether we wished to become Dingoes or remain Leashed.

In 2024 Earth was swarming with refugees from the Mastery, and the revolutionary movement—the Revolutionary Inductance Corps, or RIC—was getting on its feet. (Naturally, the Dingoes didn’t call themselves “Dingoes”.) Daddy’s next task was more difficult, for he had to forge an army from the unorganized mass of apathetic Dingoes who had never left Earth. The Life of Man accomplished part of this purpose, for it showed the Dingoes what they were: an amorphous mass of discontent, without program or purpose; a race that had taken the first step towards its own extinction.

But the Dingoes were not such novel-readers as the pets. Only the more thoughtful read this second novel—and they didn’t need to. Daddy gradually came to see that no amount of literature would spark the tinder of the Dingoes into a revolutionary firebrand.

And so it was—and now we leave Daddy’s autobiography and enter the sphere of raw history—that my father invented a mythology.

The Dingoes were ripe for one. Ever since the first Manifestation in the ‘70’s, organized religion had become quite disorganized. The Master bore too close a resemblance to mankind’s favorite gods, and men of religious or mystical sensibilities were among the first to volunteer for the kennels, where they could contemplate the very-nearly-divine nature of the Masters without any of the usual discomforts of the ascetic life. The Dingoes, on the other hand, found it difficult to venerate gods who so much resembled their sworn enemies.

Daddy realized that under these conditions the Dingoes might accept a “religion” of demonology and sympathetic magic. When the gods are malign, men turn to jujus and totems.

But wax dolls and devil masks would no longer do, for the first law of sympathetic magic is that “Like produces like.” The Masters were electromagnetic phenomena: then what better talisman than a dry cell? In any elementary physics text, there was a wealth of arcane lore, hieratic symbols, and even battle cries. Children were taught Kirchoff’s laws in their cradles, and revolutionaries wore cork helmets to ward off the Masters—since cork was a good insulator. It was nonsense, but it was effective nonsense. The Revolutionary Inductance Corps won an overwhelming majority in the council of the Dingoes on the slogan: ELECT RIC. Daddy became Diode in the revolutionary government, next in authority to the High Cathode himself. Everyone was ready to begin the revolution, and no one had the least idea how to go about it.

Which goes to show that it’s good to be prepared, because that was when the providential sunspot short-circuited the Masters. The leaders of the Dingoes had managed to take credit for their own good luck, but now a month had passed since S-Day, and gradually the Masters were reasserting their old claims to dominion. Electric light and power were back on (though the Dingoes refused to use them); the kennels were back in place beneath their force-field domes; the captured pets were being systematically repossessed, the most imposing demonstration of this having been the massive escape from Needlepoint Hill. In a very short time the Mastery would be established stronger than ever, unless the Dingoes found a way to stop them.

Cork helmets may be good for morale, but in a real contest I’d as soon defend myself with a popgun. If the Dingoes had made any serious plans, Daddy wasn’t telling me about them.

Daddy, Julie, and I had been waiting in the lobby of the St Paul Hotel for fifteen minutes, and in all that time we hadn’t seen one room clerk or bellboy. There weren’t even any guests, for Earth had become so depopulated during the Mastery that a roof and a bed were always easy to come by. What you couldn’t find anywhere was labor. Even the best hotels and restaurants were self-service.

Finally Bruno and Rocky (for this had come to seem a better name for her than Roxanna) finished dressing and came down to the lobby. Bruno was wearing an unpressed cotton suit and a bowling shirt open at the neck, so that a little bit of the bandage about his chest peeped out. Rocky was dressed to kill; Darling, Julie looked as staid as a nun by comparison. But when you’re only twenty years old you don’t have to try as hard as when you’re thirty-eight.

We exchanged pleasantries, decided on a restaurant, and went out to Daddy’s car—and thus began the ghastliest evening of my life.

Bruno was returning to his post in Duluth the next day, and we’d been unable to put him off any longer. For weeks he’d been insisting that the five of us—the two Schwarzkopfs and the three Whites—“make a night of it”. I felt guilty toward Bruno, and at that time I hadn’t yet learned to live with a guilty conscience. I gave in.

I should have been suspicious of overtures of friendship from a man I’d nearly murdered, or I might have simply supposed that, like most Dingoes, Bruno was chiefly interested in making my father’s acquaintance. However, his first overture had come before he knew my father was Tennyson White, and so it was hard to doubt his sincerity. I decided that he was only mad.

If I felt guilty and awkward toward Bruno, I can’t imagine how Rocky felt toward me. When she revealed my identity to the Dingoes, she couldn’t have known that my father was the second-in-command of their forces—not, as she had supposed, their arch-enemy. Only initiated members of the RIC knew who their leaders were, and his novel, The Life of Man, which had won her over to the Dingo viewpoint (to the degree that Bruno hadn’t accomplished this purpose), had been published pseudonymously. She had intended to see me executed; instead she had saved my life. Now we were sitting next to each other in the back seat of Daddy’s limousine, talking about old times. When we got out, she managed to bring her spiked heel down on my instep with lethal accuracy, and once, in the middle of dinner, smiling brightly and chattering all the while, she kicked me square in the shin, underneath the tablecloth.

The meal wouldn’t have gone beyond the main course if it hadn’t been that almost all of Rocky’s remarks went over Bruno’s head. He was dauntlessly ebullient, and when he started to talk, he could go on indefinitely. To shut off Rocky (who couldn’t hear enough about our wedding; she was so glad that dear little Petite wasn’t a bastard any more), I questioned Bruno about his childhood, which had been spectacularly awful—or so it seemed to me. For the majority of Dingoes, life is one long battle: against the world, against their families, against their teachers, and against the decay of their own minds and bodies. No wonder Bruno was the aggressive lout that he was. But knowing this didn’t make me like him any better.

When the dinner was done and I thought we might make our escape, Bruno brought out an envelope from his coat-pocket and announced, as though he really expected us to be pleased, that he had five tickets for the fight.

“What fight?” I asked.

“The boxing match at the armory. Kelly Broughan’s there tonight, so it should be worth seeing. I bet you don’t see many good fights out there in the asteroids, do you?”

“No,” I said in defeated tones. “None at all.”

“There are some beautiful gymnastic competitions though,” Julie put in. “And fencing, though no one is ever hurt.”

Bruno’s laugh was the bellow of a wounded bull. Gymnastics was a good joke; beautiful was even better. “You’re a card, Julie. Dennis, that girl’s a card.”

Rocky’s eyes gleamed wickedly, intent upon prey. “Dennis, you really must come, seeing that you’re such a little scrapper yourself. And you too, Mr White. You look worn out. A man in your position needs diversions now and then.”

“What the hell,” Daddy said, “let’s all go! And afterwards we’ll watch the fireworks.”

“Oh, I love fireworks,” Julie said with forced cheer.

We got up from the table with one accord. Bruno and Rocky were as happy as two children. Julie and I were glum. But Daddy…

Daddy was in so profound an abyss of depression and defeat that he was quite literally unaware of most of what was going on around him. He knew, as we did not, that the Masters had presented their ultimatum to the Dingoes that day. It had been decided that mankind could not be entrusted with its own affairs. All men were henceforth to be put in kennels; there would be no more distinction between Dingoes and pets. The High Cathode had been thrown into a panic by this threat, and it had been determined, despite Daddy’s pleading to the contrary, that the Dingoes would shoot their wad that evening.

The Dingoes’ wad—as Daddy knew, and as they apparently did not—wasn’t worth a plugged nickel. All they had was atom bombs.

Whether it was because Bruno knew the gate-attendant or because Daddy was with us, I don’t know, but our general-admission tickets got us seats at ringside. The audience in the smoky indoors stadium made the crowd at the parade sound like a bevy of tranquilized sheep. One woman near us (and I am convinced that it was the same who had kissed me in Duluth and cursed me at the gallows) was screaming: “Murder him! Murder the m——!” And the fight hadn’t even begun!

A bell rang. Two men, modestly nude except for colored briefs, approached each other, moving their arms in nervous rhythms, circling about warily. One (in red trunks) lashed out at the other with his left hand, a feint to the stomach. With his right hand, he swung at the other man’s face. There was a cracking sound as his naked fist connected with his opponent’s cheekbone. The crowd began to scream.

Blood spurted from the man’s nose. I averted my eyes. Bruno, in his element, added his distinctive bellow to the uproar. Rocky watched me closely, treasuring my every blanch and wince. Daddy looked bored, and Julie kept her eyes shut through the whole thing. I should have done the same, but when I heard another thunk of bone on flesh and a loud crash, curiosity overcame my finer feelings and I looked back into the ring. The man in red trunks was lying on his back, his expressionless face a scant few inches from my own. The blood flowed from his nose and flooded the sockets of his eyes. Rocky was shrieking with pleasure, but Bruno, who felt an allegiance for the fighter in red trunks shouted, “Get up, you bum!”

I rose from my seat, mumbling apologies, and found my way outside, where I was discreetly sick in a hedge across the street from the Armory. Though I felt weak, I knew that I did not have to faint. The Masters’ conditioning was wearing off!

The hedge bordered on a park which had been allowed to go to seed. Through the thick summer foliage I could see the glint of moonlit water. I strolled down the hillside to the pond’s edge.

Down there, the din of the stadium melted into the other night sounds: the croaking of the frogs, the rustle of poplar leaves, the rippling water. It was quiet and Earthlike.

A full moon shone overhead, like the echo of a thousand poems. All the Earthbound poets who had stolen the fire of their lyrics from that moon, age after age! It had passed them by, oblivious of histories, and it would pass me by in time. That’s the way that things should be, I thought. The leaves should fall in autumn, snow in winter, grass springs up in spring, and the summer is brief.

I knew then that I belonged to the Earth, and my spirit dilated with happiness. It wasn’t quite the right time to be happy—but there it was. Julie and the moon were part of it, but it was also the frogs croaking, the poplars, the stadium; Daddy, cynical, aspiring, even defeated; partly too, it was Bruno and Roxanna, if only because they were so vital. These things melted into my memory of the farmhouse, and it seemed that I could smell the winy smell of apples rotting in the grass.

The sky was growing brighter and brighter. The moon…

But was it the moon? A cloud of mist had gathered above the pond and it glowed until the full moon was almost blotted out behind it.

The Meshes of the Leash closed over my mind, and a voice inside my head purred kindly: White Fang, good boy! It’s all right now. We heard your call… (But I hadn’t called! It was just that I had been so happy!) …and now I’ve come. Your Master has come back at last for you.

I cried out then, a simple cry of pain. To be taken away now! Only a few days before I had cried for the lack of this voice, and now—“NO!”

There, it soothed, there, there, there. Has it been bad? Has it been that very bad? Those terrible Dingoes have captured you, but it won’t happen again. There, there.

The Leash began gently to stroke the sensory areas of the cortex: soft fur wrapped me, scented with musk. Faint ripples of harp-music (or was that only the water of the pond?) sounded behind my Master’s voice, which poured forth comforting words, like salve spread over a wound.

Then, with a sudden pang, I remembered Daddy. (Don’t think of your poor father, the Leash bade.)

He was waiting for me. Julie was waiting for me. The Dingoes were waiting for me. (We’ll get Julie back too. Now, don’t you worry yourself any more about those nasty Dingoes. Soon there won’t be any Dingoes, ever, ever at all.)

Desperately I tried not to think—or at least to keep my thoughts so scrambled that I would not betray the things I knew. But it was exactly this effort that focused my thoughts on the forbidden subjects.

I tried to think of nonsense, of poetry, of the moon, dim behind the glowing air. But the Leash, sensing my resistance, closed tighter around my mind, and cut through my thin web of camouflage. It shuffled through my memory as though it were a deck of cards, and it stopped (there was just time enough for me to catch the images then) to examine images of my father with particular attention.

There was, on the very edge of my perception, a sound: Ourrp. Which was repeated: Ourrp. It was not a sound my Leash would make. The harp-music quavered for a moment, becoming a prosaic ripple of water. I concentrated on that single sound, straining against my Leash.

“What is that sound?” I asked my Master. To answer me he had to stop sorting through my memories. Nothing. It’s nothing. Don’t think about it. Listen to the beautiful music, why don’t you? Think of your father.

Whatever was making the sound seemed to be down in the grass. I could see clearly in the wash of light from the nimbus above me. I parted the grass at my feet, and I saw the beastly thing.

Don’t think about it!

The front half of a frog projected from the distended jaws of a water snake. The snake, seeing me, writhed, pulling his victim into the denser grass.

Again the Leash bade me not to look at this thing, and, truly, I did not want to. It was so horrible, but I could not help myself.

The frog had stretched his front legs to the side to prevent the last swallow that would end him. Meanwhile, the back half of him was being digested. He emitted another melancholy Ourrp.

Horrible, I thought. Oh, horrible, horrible, horrible!

Stop this. You… must… stop…

The snake lashed his body, wriggling slowly backwards. The frog’s front feet grasped at sprigs of grass. His Ourrp had grown quite weak. In the failing light, I almost lost sight of the struggle in the shadow of the tall grass. I bent closer.

In the moon’s light I could see a thin line of white froth about the snake’s gaping jaws.

Chapter Twelve

In which I am more or less responsible for saving the World.

The cloud of light disappeared. My Master had left, and I could hear Daddy calling my name. I ran back up to the street. He was there with Julie.

“Mastery!” Julie said. “You shouldn’t have run off like that. We came out and saw a light over the lake, and I was sure they’d carried you off.”

“They almost did. My Master was there, and I was in my Leash. But then I slipped out of it—and he went away. Just disappeared. I don’t understand it. Are you all right, Daddy?”

I had asked because he was visibly shaking with excitement. “Oh, quite, quite,” he said, paying scant attention. “I’m thinking though.”

“He had an idea,” Julie explained. “Right after you ran out of the stadium. I guess this is what happens when he has ideas.”

Bruno pulled up beside us in the limousine and honked, not because we hadn’t seen him, but just for the sake of honking. We got into the back seat and the car tore off down the street at a speed that it could not have hit for the last half century.

“Rocky’s making the calls you told her to, sir,” Bruno announced.

“Fine. Now, Dennis, what was this about your Master?”

I explained what had happened, concluding with an account of the frog and the snake. Not that I thought it relevant, but it had impressed me.

“And while you were watching that, your Master just faded away?”

“Yes. If he’d kept at me much longer, he’d have learned everything he was looking for. I couldn’t have stood out against him. So why did he go?”

“One more question: what did you feel about that frog? Precisely.”

“It was ugly. I felt… disgusted.”

“Was it anything like the way you felt at the fight tonight?”

“The fight was worse in a way. The snake was worse another way.”

“But both induced similar feelings: a sense of ugliness, then disgust and nausea?”

“Yes.”

“Then those are the weapons we’ll fight them with. Dennis, my boy, before this night is over, you will be a hero of the revolution.”

“Don’t I deserve an explanation? Or does the revolution require ignorant heroes?”

“When you left the fight earlier you looked so distressed that I was a bit amused. Dennis is such an esthete still, I thought. And then I remembered the old saw: Like master, like man. Turn it around, and it’s the formula for our weapon. Like man, like Master. The Masters are nothing but their own pets, writ large. They’re esthetes, every last one of them. And we’re their favorite art-form. A human brain is the clay they work in. They order our minds just the way they order the Northern Lights. That’s why they prefer an intelligent, educated pet to an undeveloped Dingo. The Dingoes are lumpy clay, warped canvas, faulty marble, verse that doesn’t scan.”

“They must feel about Dingoes the way I do about Salvador Dali,” Julie said. She always wanted to argue about Dali with me, since she knows I like him despite my better judgment.

“Or the way I feel about prize fights,” I suggested.

“Or any experience,” Daddy concluded, “that offends the esthetic sensibilities. They can’t stand ugliness.”

We were silent for a while, considering this. Except Bruno. “Give yourself time, Dennis. You’ll get so you enjoy the fights. Kelly just wasn’t in form tonight, that’s all.”

Before I could answer, the limousine was sailing down a concrete ramp into a brightly-lit garage. “The hospital,” Bruno announced.

A man in a white robe approached us. “Everything is in readiness, Mr White. As soon as we received your call, we set to work.”

“The radiomen are here too?”

“They’re working with our own technicians already. And Mrs Schwarzkopf said she’d join her husband directly.”

A terrible light suddenly kindled the night sky outside the garage.

“The Masters!” I cried in terror.

“Damnation, the bombs!” Daddy exclaimed. “I forgot all about them. Dennis, go with the doctor and do what he says. I have to call up RIC headquarters and tell them to stop the bombings.”

“What are they trying to hit?”

“They’re trying to land one in the Van Allen belt. I tried to tell them it wouldn’t do any good. They tried that in 1972, and it didn’t accomplish a thing. But they were getting desperate, and I couldn’t suggest any better plan. But now it would knock out radio communications, and we’re going to be needing them. Bruno, Julie—wait in the car for me.”

A team of doctors led me down the long enamel-white corridors to a room filled with a complicated array of electronic and surgical equipment. The doctorin-chief indicated that I was to lie down on an uncomfortable metal pallet. When I had done so, two steel bars were clamped on either side of my head. The doctor held a rubber mask over my mouth and nose.

“Breathe deeply,” he commanded.

The anesthetic worked quickly.

Daddy was yelling at the doctor when I woke up. “Did you have to use an anesthetic? We don’t have time to waste on daintinesses.”

“The placement of the electrodes is a very delicate operation. He should be awake in any moment.”

“He is awake,” I said.

The doctor rushed over to my pallet. “Don’t move your head,” he warned. Rather unnecessarily, it seemed, for my head was still clamped in the steel vice, although I was now propped up into a sitting position.

“How are you feeling?” Daddy asked.

“Miserable.”

“That’s fine. Now, listen—the machine behind you…” (“Don’t look,” the doctor interrupted.) “…is an electroencephalograph. It records brain waves.”

The doctor broke in again: “There are electrodes in six different areas. I’ve tried to explain to your father that we’re uncertain where perceptions of an esthetic nature are centered. What is the relationship between pleasure and beauty, for instance? Little work has been done since…”

“Later, doctor, later. Now what I want Dennis to do is suffer. Actually, it’s White Fang who must do the suffering. White Fang must drown in misery. I’ve already arranged some suitable entertainments, but you should tell me right now if there’s anything especially distasteful to you that we might send off for. Some little phobia all your own.”

“Please—explain what this is all about.”

“Your electroencephalograms are being taken to every radio station in the city. The wave patterns will be amplified and broadcast over AM and FM, radio and TV. Every station in the country—in the world is standing by to pick them up. Tomorrow night we’ll give the Masters a concert like they’ve never heard before.”

A man in workclothes brought in a blackboard and handed it to Daddy.

“Doctor, you have better fingernails than I do. Rub them over this slate.” It made an intolerable noise, which the doctor kept up for a solid minute.

“How does the graph look?” Daddy asked.

“Largest responses in the sensory areas. But fairly generalized elsewhere, especially during the first twenty seconds.”

“Well, there’s lots more coming. Look at these pictures, Dennis. Examine the details.” He showed me illustrations from an encyclopedia of pathology that I will refrain from describing here. The people in the pictures were beyond the reach of medicine. Beyond the reach, even, of sympathy. They were ordered in an ascending degree of horribleness, concluding with a large colorplate of… “Take these away!”

“The response is stronger now and well sustained. Good definition.”

Daddy passed a vial of formaldehyde beneath my nose. It smelt awfully. Actually, it was more of a bottle than a vial. In it—

I screamed.

“Excellent,” the doctor said. “Really alarming curves for that.”

“Bring in the band,” said Daddy.

A crew of four men with musical instruments I was unfamiliar with (they were, I’ve since learned, electric guitar, musical saw, accordion and tuba) entered the room. They were dressed in outlandish costumes: glorified working-clothes in garish colors garnished with all sorts of leather and metal accessories. On their heads were ridiculous, flaring bonnets.

“Extraordinary!” the doctor said. “He’s already responding.”

They began—well, they began to sing. It was like singing. Their untuned instruments blasted out a stupid One-two-three, One-two-three, repeating melody, which they accompanied with strident screams of “Roll out the bare-ul”.

When I thought that this new attack on my sensibilities had reached the threshhold of tolerance, Daddy, who had been watching me intently, leaped up and began to slam his feet on the floor and join them in that awful song.

Daddy has a terrible voice when he sings. It rasps.

But his voice was the least awfulness; it was his behavior that was so mortifying. I wanted to turn my head away, but the vice held it fast. For a man of such natural dignity to so debase himself, and that man my own father!

This was, of course, just the response Daddy was looking for.

When they had finished their gross display, I begged for a moment’s reprieve. Daddy dismissed the band and returned the accordion player his cowboy hat.

“Don’t work him too hard, until we have some idea of his breaking point,” the doctor advised. “Besides, I’d like to see the intern, if you’ll excuse me. Those photographs gave me an idea: there are some patients in the hospital…”

“Have you thought of anything, Dennis?”

“In a way, yes. Is Bruno still around?”

“He should be downstairs.”

“If he were to tell me about the things he enjoys—the very worst things—in the long run he might think of more horrors than you. They seem to come naturally to him.”

“Good idea. I’ll send for him.”

“Rocky too, if she’s down there. I remember how she watched me at the boxing match. She’d be able to help you quite a lot.”

As Daddy went out of the room, the doctor returned, escorting a caravan of wheelchairs and litters. Photographs are no equivalent for the real thing.

It went on that way for four hours, and every minute seemed worse than the one before. Bruno had a limitless imagination, especially when it was abetted by alcohol and his wife. He told me about his favorite fights to begin with. He told me what he liked to do with pets—and what he would like to do if he had the time. Then he discoursed on the mysteries of love, a subject on which Rocky too was eloquent.

After two hours of these and other pleasures, I asked to have some coffee. Rocky left for it and returned with a steaming mug from which I took one greedy swallow before I realized it was not coffee. Rocky had remembered my peculiar attitude toward blood.

When I had been revived with smelling salts, Daddy brought in more entertainers. They had come to the hospital directly after their last fight at the Armory. For some reason, most of what happened after that point I can no longer remember.

We were out on the tile terrace of the hospital, Daddy, Julie, and I. Below us the Mississippi was a pool of utter blackness and unknown extent. It was an hour after sunset, and the moon had not yet risen. The only light came from the North, where the great auroral floodlights swept out from the horizon across the constellations of the north.

“Five minutes,” Daddy announced nervously.

In five minutes, radio stations all over the world would begin to broadcast my performance of the night before. I had heard an aural equivalent of my electroencephalograms, and I wasn’t worried. In a war based on esthetics, that recording was a Doomsday machine.

“Does your head still hurt?” Julie asked, brushing a feather-light hand over my bandages.

“Only when I try to remember last night.”

“Let me kiss the hurt away.”

“Three minutes,” Daddy announced, “and stop that. You’re making me nervous.”

Julie straightened her blouse, which was made of some wonderful, sheer, crinkly nylon. I had really begun to admire some of the uses of clothing.

We watched the aurora. All over the city, lights had been turned off. Everyone, the whole world, was watching the aurora.

“What will you do now that you’re High Cathode?” Julie asked, to make the time pass.

“In a few minutes the revolution should be over,” Daddy replied. “I don’t think I’d like administrative work. Not after this.”

“You’re going to resign?”

“As soon as they let me. I’ve got the itch to paint some more. Did you know that I paint? I did that self-portrait that’s over my desk. I think it’s pretty good, but I should be able to do better. In any case, it’s traditional for retired generals to paint. And then I might do my memoirs. I’ve picked a title for them: The Esthetic Revolution.”

“Or Viva Dingo!” Julie suggested.

“Ten seconds,” I announced.

We watched the northern skyline. The aurora was a curtain of bluish light across which bands and streamers of intense whiteness danced and played.

At first you couldn’t notice any difference. The spectacle glimmered with the same rare beauty that has belonged to it from time immemorial, but tonight its beauty was that of a somber Dies Irae, played just for us.

Then one of the white bands that was shooting up from the horizon disappeared, like an electric light being switched off. It seemed unnaturally abrupt, but I couldn’t be sure.

For a long while nothing more happened. But when five of the arcing lights snapped out of the sky at the same moment, I knew that the Masters were beginning their exodus.

“Elephantiasis, I’ll bet.”

“What’s that, Dennis?”

“The last picture in the bunch you showed me. I remember it very clearly.”

The auroral display was less bright by half when they came to the hillbilly band. I turned on the radio just to be sure. Through all the blasts and shrieks and whistles of my neural patterns, there was an unmistakable rhythm of Ooom-pah-pah, Ooom-pah-pah.

When the broadcast came to Rocky’s unspeakable potion, there was a tremendous blast across the heavens. For an instant the entire sky was stained white. The white faded. The aurora was only a dim blue-white shadow in the north. There was hardly a trace of beauty in it. It flickered meaninglessly in random patterns.

The Masters had left Earth. They couldn’t stand the barking.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve