Back there were men who couldn’t see the beauty that was Jupiter. Men who thought that swirling clouds and lashing rain obscured the planet’s face. Unseeing human eyes. Poor eyes. Eyes that could not see the beauty in the clouds, that could not see through the storm. Bodies that could not feel the thrill of trilling music stemming from the rush of broken water.
Men who walked alone, in terrible loneliness, talking with their tongue like Boy Scouts wigwagging out their messages, unable to reach out and touch one another’s mind as he could reach out and touch Towser’s mind. Shut off forever from that personal, intimate contact with other living things.
He, Fowler, had expected terror inspired by alien things out here on the surface, had expected to cower before the threat of unknown things, had steeled himself against disgust of a situation that was not of Earth.
But instead he had found something greater than Man had ever known. A swifter, surer body. A sense of exhilaration, a deeper sense of life. A sharper mind. A world of beauty that even the dreamers of the Earth had not yet imagined.
‘Let’s get going,’ Towser urged.
‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Anywhere,’ said Towser. ‘Just start going and see where we end up. I have a feeling . . . well, a feeling—’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Fowler.
For he had the feeling, too. The feeling of high destiny. A certain sense of greatness. A knowledge that somewhere off beyond the horizons lay adventure and things greater than adventure.
Those other five had felt it, too. Had felt the urge to go and see, the compelling sense that here lay a life of fullness and of knowledge.
That, he knew, was why they had not returned.
‘I won’t go back,’ said Towser.
‘We can’t let them down,’ said Fowler.
Fowler took a step or two, back towards the dome, then stopped.
Back to the dome. Back to that aching, poison-laden body he had left. It hadn’t seemed aching before, but now he knew it was.
Back to the fuzzy brain. Back to muddled thinking. Back to the flapping mouths that formed signals others understood. Back to eyes that now would be worse than no sight at all. Back to squalor, back to crawling, back to ignorance.
‘Perhaps some day,’ he said, muttering to himself.
‘We got a lot to do and a lot to see,’ said Towser. ‘We got a lot to learn. We’ll find things—’
Yes, they could find things. Civilizations, perhaps. Civilizations that would make the civilization of Man seem puny by comparison. Beauty and, more important, an understanding of that beauty. And a comradeship no one had ever known before – that no man, no dog had ever known before.
And life. The quickness of life after what seemed a drugged existence.
‘I can’t go back,’ said Towser.
‘Nor I,’ said Fowler.
‘They would turn me back into a dog,’ said Towser.
‘And me,’ said Fowler, ‘back into a man.’
NOTES ON THE FIFTH TALE
Bit by bit, as the legend unfolds, the reader gets a more accurate picture of the human race. By degrees, one gains the conviction that here is a race which can be little more than pure fantasy. It is not the kind of race which could rise from humble beginnings to the eminence of culture with which it is gifted in these tales. Its equipment is too poor.
So far its lack of stability has become apparent. Its preoccupation with a mechanical civilization rather than with a culture based on some of the sounder, more worthwhile concepts of life indicates a lack of basic character.
And now, in this tale, we learn of the limited communications which it possessed, a situation which certainly is not conducive to advancement. Man’s inability to understand and appreciate the thought and the viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.
That Man himself realized this is quite apparent in his anxiety to obtain the Juwain philosophy, but it will be noted that he did not wish it for the understanding that it might give him, but for the power and glory and the knowledge that it might make possible. The philosophy was seen by Man as something which would advance him a hundred thousand years in the space of two short generations.
Throughout these tales it becomes clear that Man was running a race, if not with himself, then with some imagined follower who pressed close upon his heels, breathing on his back. Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it.
He has, according to the legend, come from the caves a million years before. And yet, only a little over a hundred years before the time of this tale, has he been able to eliminate killing as a basic part of his way of life. Here, then, is the true measure of his savagery: After a million years he has rid himself of killing and he regards it as a great accomplishment.
To most readers it will be easy, after reading this tale, to accept Rover’s theory that Man is set up deliberately as the antithesis of everything the Dogs stand for, a sort of mythical strawman, a sociological fable.
This is underlined by the recurring evidence of Man’s aimlessness, his constant running hither and yon, his grasping at a way of life which continually eludes him, possibly because he never knows exactly what he wants.
V
Paradise
The dome was a squatted, alien shape that did not belong beneath the purple mist of Jupiter, a huddled, frightened structure that seemed to cower against the massive planet.
The creature that had been Kent Fowler stood spraddling on its thick-set legs.
An alien thing, he thought. That’s how far I’ve left the human race. For it’s not alien at all. Not alien to me. It is the place I lived in, dreamed in, planned in. It is the place I left – afraid. And it is the place I come back to – driven and afraid.
Driven by the memory of the people who were like me before I became the thing I am, before I knew the aliveness and the fitness and the pleasure that is possible if one is not a human being.
Towser stirred beside him and Fowler sensed the bumbling friendliness of the one-time dog, the expressed friendliness and comradeship and love that had existed all the time, perhaps, but was never known so long as they were man and dog.
The dog’s thoughts seeped into his brain. ‘You can’t do it, pal,’ said Towser.
Fowler’s answer was almost a wail. ‘But I have to, Towser. That’s what I went out for. To find what Jupiter really is like. And now I can tell them, now I can bring them word.’
You should have done it long ago, said a voice deep inside of him, a faint, far-off human voice that struggled up through his Jovian self. But you were a coward and you put it off – and put it off. You ran away because you were afraid to go back. Afraid to be turned into a man again.
‘I’ll be lonesome,’ said Towser, and yet he did not say it. At least there were no words – rather a feeling of loneliness, a heart-wrench cry at parting. As if, for the moment, Fowler had moved over and shared Towser’s mind.
Fowler stood silent, revulsion growing in him. Revulsion at the thought of being turned back into a man – into the inadequacy that was the human body and the human mind.
‘I’d come with you,’ Towser told him, ‘but I couldn’t stand it. I might die before I could get back. I was nearly done for, you remember, I was old and full of fleas. My teeth were wore right down to nubbins and my digestion was all shot. And I had terrible dreams. Used to chase rabbits when I was a pup, but towards the last it was the rabbits that were chasing me.’
‘You stay here,’ said Fowler. ‘I’ll be coming back.’
If I can make them understand, he thought. If only I can. If I can explain.
He lifted his massive head and stared at the lift of hills which swelled to mountain peaks shrouded in the rose and purple mist. A lightning bolt snaked across the sky and the clouds and mist were lighted with a fire of ecstasy.
He shambled forward
s, slowly, reluctantly. A whiff of scent came down the breeze and his body drank it in – like a cat rolling in catnip. And yet it wasn’t scent – although that was the closest he could come to it, the nearest word he had. In years to come the human race would develop a new terminology.
How could one, he wondered, explain the mist that drifted on the land and the scent that was pure delight. Other things they’d understand, he knew. That one never had to eat, that one never slept, that one was done with the whole range of depressive neurosis of which Man was victim. Those things they would understand, because they were things that could be told in simple terms, things which could be explained in existent language.
But what about the other things – the factors that called for a new vocabulary? The emotions that Man had never known. The abilities that Man had never dreamed of. The clarity of mind and the understanding – the ability to use one’s brain down to the ultimate cell. The things one knew and could do instinctively that Man could never do because his body did not carry the senses with which they could be done.
‘I’ll write it down,’ he told himself. ‘I’ll take my time and write it down.’
But the written word, he realized, was a sorry tool.
A televisor port bulged out of the crystalline hide of the dome and he shambled towards it. Rivulets of condensed mist ran down across it and he reared up to stare straight into the port.
Not that he could see anything, but the men inside would see him. The men who always watched, staring out at the brutality of Jupiter, the roaring gales and ammonia rains, the drifting clouds of deadly methane scudding past. For that was the way that men saw Jupiter.
He lifted a forepaw and wrote swiftly in the wetness on the port – printing backwards.
They had to know who it was, so there would be no mistake. They had to know what co-ordinates to use. Otherwise they might convert him back into the wrong body, use the wrong matrix and he would come out somebody else – young Allen, maybe, or Smith, or Pelletier. And that might well be fatal.
The ammonia ran down and blurred the printing, wiped it out. He wrote the name again.
They would understand that name. They would know that one of the men who had been converted into a Loper had come back to report.
He dropped to the ground and whirled around, staring at the door which led into the converter unit. The door moved slowly, swinging outwards.
‘Good-bye, Towser,’ said Fowler softly.
A warning cry rose in his brain: It’s not too late. You aren’t in there yet. You still can change your mind. You still can turn and run.
He plodded on, determined, gritting mental teeth. He felt the metal floor underneath his pads, sensed the closing of the door behind him. He caught one last, fragmentary thought from Towser and then there was only darkness.
The conversion chamber lay just ahead and he moved up the sloping ramp to reach it.
A man and dog went out, he thought, and now the man comes back.
The press conference had gone well. There had been satisfactory things to report.
Yes, Tyler Webster told the newsmen, the trouble on Venus had been all smoothed out. Just a matter of the parties involved sitting down and talking. The life experiments out in the cold laboratories of Pluto were progressing satisfactorily. The expedition for Centauri would leave as scheduled, despite reports it was all balled up. The trade commission soon would issue new monetary schedules on various interplanetary products, ironing out a few inequalities.
Nothing sensational. Nothing to make headlines. Nothing to lead off the newscast.
‘And Jon Culver tells me,’ said Webster, ‘to remind you gentlemen that to-day is the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the last murder committed in the Solar System. One hundred and twenty-five years without a death by premeditated violence.’
He leaned back in the chair and grinned at them, masking the thing he dreaded, the question that he knew would come.
But they were not ready to ask it yet – there was a custom to be observed – a very pleasant custom.
Burly Stephen Andrews, press chief for Interplanetary News, clearing his throat as if about to make an important announcement, asked with what amounted to mock gravity:
‘And how’s the boy?’
A smile broke across Webster’s face. ‘I’m going home for the weekend,’ he said. ‘I bought my son a toy.’
He reached out, lifted the little tube from off the desk.
‘An old-fashioned toy,’ he said. ‘Guaranteed old-fashioned. A company just started putting them out. You put it up to your eye and turn it and you see pretty pictures. Coloured glass falling into place. There’s a name for it—’
‘Kaleidoscope,’ said one of the newsmen quickly. ‘I’ve read about them. In an old history on the manners and customs of the early twentieth, century.’
‘Have you tried it, Mr. Chairman?’ asked Andrews.
‘No,’ said Webster. ‘To tell the truth, I haven’t. I just got it this afternoon and I’ve been too busy.’
‘Where’d you get it, Mr. Chairman?’ asked a voice. ‘I got to get one of those for my own kid.’
‘At the shop just around the corner. The toy shop, you know. They just came in to-day.’
Now, Webster knew, was the time for them to go. A little bit of pleasant, friendly banter and they’d get up and leave.
But they weren’t leaving – and he knew they weren’t. He knew it by the sudden hush and the papers that rattled quickly to cover up the hush.
Then Stephen Andrews was asking the question that Webster had dreaded. For a moment Webster was grateful that Andrews should be the one to ask it. Andrews had been friendly, generally speaking, and Interplanetary Press dealt in objective news, with none of the sly slanting of words employed by interpretative writers.
‘Mr. Chairman,’ said Andrews, ‘we understand a man who was converted on Jupiter has come back to Earth. We would like to ask you if the report is true?’
‘It is true,’ said Webster, stiffly.
They waited and Webster waited, unmoving in his chair.
‘Would you wish to comment?’ asked Andrews, finally.
‘No,’ said Webster.
Webster glanced around the room, ticking off the faces. Tensed faces, sensing some of the truth beneath his flat refusal to discuss the matter. Amused faces, masking brains that even now were thinking how they might twist the few words he had spoken. Angry faces that would write outraged interpretative pieces about the people’s right to know.
‘I am sorry, gentlemen,’ said Webster.
Andrews rose heavily from the chair. ‘Thank you, Mr. Chairman,’ he said.
Webster sat in his chair and watched them go, felt the coldness and emptiness of the room when they were gone.
They’ll crucify me, he thought. They’ll nail me to the barn door and I haven’t got a comeback. Not a single one.
He rose from the chair and walked across the room, stood staring out of the window at the garden in the sun of afternoon.
Yet you simply couldn’t tell them.
Paradise! Heaven for the asking! And the end of humanity! The end of all the ideals and all the dreams of mankind, the end of the race itself.
The green light on his desk flashed and chirped and he strode back across the room.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
The tiny screen flashed and a face was there.
‘The dogs just reported, sir, that Joe, the mutant, went to your residence and Jenkins let him in.’
‘Joe! You’re sure?’
‘That’s what the dogs said. And the dogs are never wrong.’
‘No,’ said Webster slowly, ‘no, they never are.’
The face faded from the screen and Webster sat down heavily.
He reached with numbed fingers for the control panel on his desk, twirled the combination without looking.
The house loomed on the screen, the house in North America that crouched on the windy hilltop. A structur
e that had stood for almost a thousand years. A place where a long line of Websters had lived and dreamed and died.
Far in the blue above the house a crow was flying and Webster heard, or imagined that he heard, the wind-blown caw of the soaring bird.
Everything was all right – or seemed to be. The house drowsed in the morning light and the statue still stood upon the sweep of lawn – the statue of that long-gone ancestor who had vanished on the star-path. Allen Webster, who had been the first to leave the Solar System, heading for Centauri – even as the expedition now on Mars would head out in a day or two.
There was no stir about the house, no sign of any moving thing.
Webster’s hand moved out and flipped a toggle. The screen went dead.
Jenkins can handle things, he thought. Probably better than a man could handle them. After all, he’s got almost a thousand years of wisdom packed in that metal hide of his. He’ll be calling in before long to let me know what it’s all about.
His hand reached out, set up another combination.
He waited for long seconds before the face came on the screen.
‘What is it, Tyler?’ asked the face.
‘Just got a report that Joe—’
Jon Culver nodded. ‘I just got it, too. I’m checking up.’
‘What do you make of it?’
The face of the World Security chief crinkled quizzically. ‘Softening up, maybe. We’ve been pushing Joe and the other mutants pretty hard. The dogs have done a top-notch job.’
‘But there have been no signs of it,’ protested Webster. ‘Nothing in the records to indicate any trend that way.’
‘Look,’ said Culver. ‘They haven’t drawn a breath for more than a hundred years we haven’t known about. Got everything they’ve done down on tape in black and white. Every move they’ve made, we’ve blocked. At first they figured it was just tough luck, but now they know it isn’t. Maybe they’ve up and decided they are licked.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Webster, solemnly. ‘Whenever those babies figure they’re licked, you better start looking for a place that’s soft to light.’
City (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Page 12