Dog Tales

by Jack Dann

  Then I began to think what must have happened. Like I told you, my man comes from Transylvania. You know, in that part of the old country they got people that turn themselves into wolves at night and run all around. Well, Putzi is one of them, that’s why he wouldn’t be married by no priest, only he don’t turn into no wolf, he turns into a dachshund. And when Putzi is a man, he has lousy bad manners, but when he is a dog, ach, he has manners like an archduke!

  It wasn’t no use asking him how he done it, because he’d only get mad and start yelling at me. But how he turns from a dog into a man, I do know because of an accident. It is a week after the last time and I was drinking a little schnapps in the evening and I woke up early in the morning, just before sunlight, and here was Putzi the dog scratching at the door to get out. I let him out just as it got light—and right away here was Putzi, my man, red in the eyes and mad enough to chew the paper off the wall. And that other dachshund, the bitch, was just across the street.

  So then I know that if sunlight hits him when he is Putzi the dog, he turns back into a man, but also I find out something not so good, that Putzi the dog is chasing around with this bitch. I will not have my man doing that, even if she is not human, but what can you do? I cannot make him stay in every night, he wouldn’t do that. So I think maybe if we can get away from Budapest, the change don’t work anymore. I went to my father, he owns some Schleppdampfern—what do you call them?—pugs, on the river, and a little piece of money, and I tell him we have to come to America.

  But when we got here, things were the same, only worse. The trouble I have with that man! All he does is eat, eat, eat, and kick when the food doesn’t come fast enough, and in the evening he goes out to the Deutscher Sängerbund and drinks beer and sings songs with a lot of Schwobs half the night. He doesn’t turn into no dachshund no more, and I am wishing he did until one night somebody from the Sängerbund brings them all over here to Gavagan’s after the Sängerfest. Then it is just like he used to go to Kettler’s Bierstube. The first thing I know it is after midnight and I am sitting waiting for my man to come home when something scratches at the door, and it is Putzi the dog, so good, so gentle.

  So now I am going on my vacation and I don’t want him to spoil it by being like Putzi the man. And always he comes here when the Sängerbund is not meeting and changes into a dog again and goes chasing bitches. But this time, no. I will take him with me in this bag, so the sun does not get at him.

  Mrs. Vacarescu poured the last drops from her bottle of Tokay. It tipped over as she set it back on the table and it rolled to the floor with a bump, for at that moment the door swung open as though under the touch of a heavy hand. There appeared to be nobody there, but before Mr. Cohan could come round the bar to close it, a small and very fat dachshund bounded in, wagging his tail so vigourously that his whole rear end was agitated, and hurled himself on Mrs. Vacarescu.

  “Here, Putzi!” she called, and stripped back the tarpaulin on the smaller bag. The little dog jumped in and seated himself contentedly. Mrs. Vacarescu replaced the tarpaulin and strode heavily out of Gavagan’s.

  Desertion

  by Clifford D. Simak

  Perhaps the best-known science fictional speculation about the future destiny of dogs is that set forth in Clifford D. Simak’s famous novel City, a poignant and autumnal vision of what happens to dogs in the wake of humanity’s own evolutionary destiny, as they become the heirs to our vanishing civilization. Here’s a classic story, from early in the City sequence, in which Simak demonstrates that going home again might be even more difficult than Thomas Wolfe suspected . . .

  The late Clifford D. Simak sold his first story in 1931, and was a towering ancestral figure in science fiction for more than fifty years. City won him the International Fantasy Award; he has also won two Hugo Awards, one in 1958for his short story “The Big Front Yard” and one in 1964 for his novel Way Station. His other books include the novels Time and Again, Ring Around the Sun, Time is the Simplest Thing, They Walked Like Men, The Goblin Reservation, and A Choice of Gods, and the collections All the Traps of Earth, The Worlds of Clifford Simak, The Best of Clifford D. Simak, and Skirmish.

  * * *

  Four men, two by two, had gone into the howling maelstrom that was Jupiter and had not returned. They had walked into the keening gale—or rather, they had loped, bellies low against the ground, wet sides gleaming in the rain.

  For they did not go in the shape of men.

  Now the fifth man stood before the desk of Kent Fowler, head of Dome No. 3, Jovian Survey Commission.

  Under Fowler’s desk, old Towser scratched a flea, then settled down to sleep again.

  Harold Allen, Fowler saw with a sudden pang, was young—too young. He had the easy confidence of youth, the face of one who never had known fear. And that was strange. For men in the domes of Jupiter did know fear—fear and humility. It was hard for Man to reconcile his puny self with the mighty forces of the monstrous planet.

  “You understand,” said Fowler, “that you need not do this. You understand that you need not go.”

  It was formula, of course. The other four had been told the same thing, but they had gone. This fifth one, Fowler knew, would go as well. But suddenly he felt a dull hope stir within him that Allen wouldn’t go.

  “When do I start?” asked Allen.

  There had been a time when Fowler might have taken quiet pride in that answer, but not now. He frowned briefly.

  “Within the hour,” he said.

  Allen stood waiting, quietly.

  “Four other men have gone out and have not returned,” said Fowler. “You know that, of course. We want you to return. We don’t want you going off on any heroic rescue expedition. The main thing, the only thing, is that you come back, that you prove man can live in a Jovian form. Go to the first survey stake, no farther, then come back. Don’t take any chances. Don’t investigate anything. Just come back.”

  Allen nodded. “I understand all that.”

  “Miss Stanley will operate the converter,” Fowler went on. “You need have no fear on that particular score. The other men were converted without mishap. They left the converter in apparently perfect condition. You will be in thoroughly competent hands. Miss Stanley is the best qualified conversion operator in the Solar System. She has had experience on most of the other planets. That is why she’s here.”

  Allen grinned at the woman and Fowler saw something flicker across Miss Stanley’s face—something that might have been pity, or rage—or just plain fear. But it was gone again and she was smiling back at the youth who stood before the desk. Smiling in that prim, school-teacherish way she had of smiling, almost as if she hated herself for doing it.

  “I shall be looking forward,” said Allen, “to my conversion.”

  And the way he said it, he made it all a joke, a vast, ironic joke.

  But it was no joke.

  It was serious business, deadly serious. Upon these tests, Fowler knew, depended the fate of men on Jupiter. If the tests succeeded, the resources of the giant planet would be thrown open. Man would take over Jupiter as he already had taken over the other smaller planets. And if they failed—

  If they failed, Man would continue to be chained and hampered by the terrific pressure, the greater force of gravity, the weird chemistry of the planet. He would continue to be shut within the domes, unable to see it with direct, unaided vision, forced to rely upon the awkward tractors and the televisor, forced to work with clumsy tools and mechanisms or through the medium of robots that themselves were clumsy.

  For Man, unprotected and in his natural form, would be blotted out by Jupiter’s terrific pressure of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch, pressure that made terrestrial sea bottoms seem a vacuum by comparison.

  Even the strongest metal Earthmen could devise couldn’t exist under pressure such as that, under the pressure and the alkaline rains that forever swept the planet. It grew brittle and flaky, crumbling like clay, or it ran away in little stre
ams and puddles of ammonia salts. Only by stepping up the toughness and strength of that metal, by increasing its electronic tension, could it be made to withstand the weight of thousands of miles of swirling, choking gases that made up the atmosphere. And even when that was done, everything had to be coated with tough quartz to keep away the rain—the liquid ammonia that fell as bitter rain.

  Fowler sat listening to the engines in the sub-floor of the dome—engines that ran on endlessly, the dome never quiet of them. They had to run and keep on running, for if they stopped, the power flowing into the metal walls of the dome would stop, the electronic tension would ease up and that would be the end of everything.

  Towser roused himself under Fowler’s desk and scratched another flea, his leg thumping hard against the floor.

  “Is there anything else?” asked Allen.

  Fowler shook his head. “Perhaps there’s something you want to do,” he said. “Perhaps you—”

  He had meant to say write a letter and he was glad he caught himself quick enough so he didn’t say it.

  Allen looked at his watch. “I’ll be there on time,” he said. He swung around and headed for the door.

  Fowler knew Miss Stanley was watching him and he didn’t want to turn and meet her eyes. He fumbled with a sheaf of papers on the desk before him.

  “How long are you going to keep this up?” asked Miss Stanley and she bit off each word with a vicious snap.

  He swung around in his chair and faced her then. Her lips were drawn into a straight, thin line, her hair seemed skinned back from her forehead tighter than ever, giving her face that queer, almost startling deathmask quality.

  He tried to make his voice cool and level. “As long as there’s any need of it,” he said. “As long as there’s any hope.”

  “You’re going to keep on sentencing them to death,” she said. “You’re going to keep marching them out face to face with Jupiter. You’re going to sit in here safe and comfortable and send them out to die.”

  “There is no room for sentimentality. Miss Stanley,” Fowler said, trying to keep the note of anger from his voice. “You know as well as I do why we’re doing this. You realize that Man in his own form simply cannot cope with Jupiter. The only answer is to turn men into the sort of things that can cope with it. We’ve done it on the other planets.

  “If a few men die, but we finally succeed, the price is small. Through the ages men have thrown away their lives on foolish things, for foolish reasons. Why should we hesitate, then, at a little death in a thing as great as this?”

  Miss Stanley sat stiff and straight, hands folded in her lap, the lights shining on her graying hair; and Fowler, watching her, tried to imagine what she might feel, what she might be thinking. He wasn’t exactly afraid of her, but he didn’t feel quite comfortable when she was around. Those sharp blue eyes saw too much, her hands looked far too competent. She should be somebody’s aunt sitting in a rocking chair with her knitting needles. But she wasn’t. She was the top-notch conversion unit operator in the Solar System and she didn’t like the way he was doing things.

  “There is something wrong, Mr. Fowler,” she declared.

  “Precisely,” agreed Fowler. “That’s why I’m sending young Allen out alone. He may find out what it is.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “I’ll send someone else.”

  She rose slowly from her chair, started toward the door, then stopped before his desk.

  “Someday,” she said, “you will be a great man. You never let a chance go by. This is your chance. You knew it was when this dome was picked for the tests. If you put it through, you’ll go up a notch or two. No matter how many men may die, you’ll go up a notch or two.”

  “Miss Stanley,” he said and his voice was curt, “young Allen is going out soon. Please be sure that your machine—”

  “My machine,” she told him, icily, “is not to blame. It operates along the coordinates the biologists set up.”

  He sat hunched at his desk, listening to her footsteps go down the corridor.

  What she said was true, of course. The biologists had set up the coordinates. But the biologists could be wrong. Just a hair-breadth of difference, one iota of digression and the converter would be sending out something that wasn’t the thing they meant to send. A mutant that might crack up, go haywire, come unstuck under some condition or stress of circumstance wholly unsuspected.

  For Man didn’t know much about what was going on outside. Only what his instruments told him was going on. And the samplings of those happenings furnished by those instruments and mechanisms had been no more than samplings, for Jupiter was unbelievably large and the domes were very few.

  Even the work of the biologists in getting the data on the Lopers, apparently the highest form of Jovian life, had involved more than three years of intensive study and after that two years of checking to make sure. Work that could have been done on Earth in a week or two. But work that, in this case, couldn’t be done on Earth at all, for one couldn’t take a Jovian life form to Earth. The pressure here on Jupiter couldn’t be duplicated outside of Jupiter and at Earth pressure and temperature the Lopers would simply have disappeared in a puff of gas.

  Yet it was work that had to be done if Man ever hoped to go about Jupiter in the life form of the Lopers. For before the converter could change a man to another life form, every detailed physical characteristic of that life form must be known—surely and positively, with no chance of mistake.

  ###

  Allen did not come back.

  The tractors, combing the nearby terrain, found no trace of him, unless the skulking thing reported by one of the drives had been the missing Earthman in Loper form.

  The biologists sneered their most accomplished academic sneers when Fowler suggested the coordinates might be wrong. Carefully they pointed out, the coordinates worked. When a man was put into the converter and the switch was thrown, the man became a Loper. He left the machine and moved away, out of sight, into the soupy atmosphere.

  Some quirk, Fowler had suggested; some tiny deviation from the thing a Loper should be, some minor defect. If there were, the biologists said, it would take years to find it.

  And Fowler knew that they were right.

  So there were five men now instead of four and Harold Allen had walked out into Jupiter for nothing at all. It was as if he’d never gone, so far as knowledge was concerned.

  Fowler reached across his desk and picked up the personnel file, a thin sheaf of paper neatly clipped together. It was a thing he dreaded but a thing he had to do. Somehow the reason for these strange disappearances must be found. And there was no other way than to send out more men.

  He sat for a moment listening to the howling of the wind above the dome, the everlasting thundering gale that swept across the planet in boiling, twisting wrath.

  Was there some threat out there, he asked himself? Some danger they did not know about? Something that lay in wait and gobbled up the Lopers, making no distinction between Lopers that were bona fide and Lopers that were men? To the gobblers, of course, it would make no difference.

  Or had there been a basic fault in selecting the Lopers as the type of life best fitted for existence on the surface of the planet? The evident intelligence of the Lopers, he knew, had been one factor in that determination. For if the thing Man became did not have capacity for intelligence, Man could not for long retain his own intelligence in such a guise.

  Had the biologists let that one factor weigh too heavily, using it to offset some other factor that might be unsatisfactory, even disastrous? It didn’t seem likely. Stiff necked as they might be, the biologists knew their business.

  Or was the whole thing impossible, doomed from the very start? Conversion to other life forms had worked on other planets, but that did not necessarily mean it would work on Jupiter. Perhaps Man’s intelligence could not function correctly through the sensory apparatus provided Jovian life. Perhaps the Lopers were so alien there was
no common ground for human knowledge and the Jovian conception of existence to meet and work together.

  Or the fault might lie with Man, be inherent with the race. Some mental aberration which, coupled with what they found outside, wouldn’t let them come back. Although it might not be an aberration, not in the human sense. Perhaps just one ordinary human mental trait, accepted as commonplace on Earth, would be so violently at odds with Jovian existence that it would blast human sanity.

  Claws rattled and clicked down the corridor. Listening to them, Fowler smiled wanly. It was Towser coming back from the kitchen, where he had gone to see his friend, the cook.

  Towser came into the room, carrying a bone. He wagged his tail at Fowler and flopped down beside the desk, bone between his paws. For a long moment his rheumy old eyes regarded his master and Fowler reached down a hand to ruffle a ragged ear.

  “You still like me, Towser?” Fowler asked and Towser thumped his tail.

  “You’re the only one,” said Fowler.

  He straightened and swung back to the desk. His hand reached out and picked up the file.

  Bennett? Bennett had a girl waiting for him back on Earth.

  Andrews? Andrews was planning on going back to Mars Tech just as soon as he earned enough to see him through a year.

  Olson? Olson was nearing pension age. All the time telling the boys how he was going to settle down and grow roses.

  Carefully, Fowler laid the file back on the desk.

  Sentencing men to death. Miss Stanley had said that, her pale lips scarcely moving in her parchment face. Marching men out to die while he, Fowler, sat here safe and comfortable.