Dog Tales

by Jack Dann

  Cooly, therefore, I told my father, “He has money of his own these days. His work on the correction of pitting in nuclear power containment vessels has brought us a comfortable stipend from Con Ed and certain other sizeable corporations.” No need to tell Randy everything. “Rest assured. Daddy. He won’t bite you.”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” my father said, “perfectly all right. No, pet, it’s just that in that case I hope his quark is not worse that his bite.” And the terrible man began to shout and shriek with mirth at his own excruciating silliness. Marcia must have told him about quarks, because I know for certain that Randy is no intellectual giant. His talents lie instead in the direction of making money, large amounts of which he expanded to make my wedding the happiest day of my life.

  Spot rose to his feet at the reception, lurching more than somewhat, and replied to the toast. The cantors smiled, and the mullahs, and the officiating Cardinal applauded, with all his enclave of nuns and monks and brace of castrati if I’m not in error.

  “Acknowledgements,” cried my husband, who had been smoking.

  “We wish to thank the musicians. All that sawing and smiting, bowing and puffing and groaning, and why? Why, only to soothe the guests into gaity. Here we go. Lift those ankles and prance.

  “The magicians. Tumbling, whipping endless purple, red, gold scarves throughout the spanking musical air, glorious. Fowls from eggs, great tails lofting under the high crystal-broken whiteness, green feathers, hard green, soft green. Sawn in half. Out of large bolted brass-and-leather boxes, proven empty moments earlier. Sheer magic. Good work, team.

  “Some people find the libretto obscure. Not us. We’re polyglot. And grateful for the poet’s drawn face and crabbed manner and song, song.

  “Who else? The lighting people, sure. Beams like harsh metal poles furring, fogging where they splash into astonishing scales of peals of tinkles of gongings of lightning blue, satin pinks, crimsons, purples, and all the whites, and the rest.

  “There’s food on every table, here and there in silver porcelain wooden platters slipping from plates into bowls of dip and sauces laid on the tables and marble waiting surfaces: birds, slabs of crusty meat oozing juice, the moon curves of mandarins, oranges, grapefruit, the gold and purple of passionfruit, slimy on the tongue but cut by tart, and tarts all slithery in berries and apricots, pale peaches with sugar crusting, melting cliffs of egg white meringue. So here’s one for the chef, the cooks and helpers, the serving staff. Good eating, no doubt. No question there.

  “The vintners fetched wine fit to make you drunk, smooth on the tongue and rufous, rough as dog’s rasp at some abdominal cavity which finds gentility a bore, but fairly innocent of histamines, thank Christ. We’ll drink a round to you lads, gladly.

  “Company. The guests. Did your bit, swarmed about, chattered and nattered, and spoke in adopted accents and bellyached just enough that we’d know you were taking the business seriously and giving no quarter out of love of Randy and Joan and the lovely lass herself.”

  The microphone made spattering noises from this point on, for Spot was salivating with delirious stoned intensity, laughing his fool head off and biting from moment to moment at his own flanks. Bruce Garbage (the punk crooner whom Randy had flown in from San Antonio) tried valiantly to wrest away command of the public address system, but was clearly in terror of having his leather Savile Row suit nipped. Balked, he brought up his fists and swung them down in the gesture which was later to be featured on the cover of Time, and his ensemble seized up their instruments once more and heaved themselves into a bout of interactive slam dancing. I was keeping my eye on the mullahs, and at last caught one furtively quaffing a small but wickedly illicit potation. When he found my eye on him he hoisted his skirts and scurried around the table, which was a happy ploy as it turned out; both castrati had passed out, sliding completely from their seats to lie curled like delicious pussycats beneath the wedding table. The guilty mullah did what he could to ease their discomforts.

  And the sun poured down like honey and all the wild meadows of my body ran with long-eared hares and does and quail for my love to chase and bring down in his soft, his sharp mouth, and my soul bobbed like a wooly cloud, all my education rising from my loins to the choking of my throat with my breasts all perfume yes and yes I said yes I will Yes.

  “Arf,” said Spot, forgetting himself.

  I felt equally rueful, as you might imagine, when the gentlemen from the government called by to announce that we might not emigrate after all. Their arguments were Byzantine and sturdily documented with sheafs of paper each of a different unusual size. Their case for refusing our exit gave every indication of hinging on Spot’s deficiencies as a human being, a bigoted and unpopular stance; carefully masked, therefore, by technicalities of a veterinarian nature. It quickly came home to me that these machinations in turn were intended to deflect attention from the true reason for our durance, namely. Spot’s peerless gifts as a nuclear theoretician. The government wanted my husband to make bombs for them.

  “It’s the diquark hypothesis,” he told me. We had no secrets from one another. Although I wasn’t certain that I followed him in every detail, it seemed that rather big bangs could be caused from rather small amounts of fairly rare stuff using another variety of extremely unlikely fizzy material, which failed to add up to zero when you checked the niobium spheres.

  Father interceded at once, bless him. An entire battery of lawyers worked around the clock with the opposite numbers in the Administration. Randy had lost his entree to the Pentagon, unfortunately, following the release of that film.

  Possibly with a view to comforting me, Mother called by. She patted my hand. “Rover will be just fine, you’ll see.”

  I kicked her ankle. She hobbled out.

  For some days we hid out in a Lina Wertmüller festival. Without disrespect I must reveal that she is not my ideal auteur, but Spot always made taking in a movie fun, and I was terrifically excited when he told me how much I had always put him in mind of Mariangela Melato, whom Lina employed with some wit.

  “Hang in there, baby,” Randy told me from the West Coast, his voice oddly interspersed by bleats of telemetry from the space shuttle mission. “We’ll have the kid back on the bomb bay floor by New Years.” For a fleeting moment I wondered if father’s lawyers had misunderstood the quandary facing my husband, and were in fact directing the enormous resources of the studio to the task of getting Spot into rather than out of the weapons research program. Such things had been known to happen.

  To relax, we stayed in Daddy’s apartment in Washington Heights, and strolled every day to The Cloisters to view the Unicorn Tapestries, for which I have an abiding passion. So sad and limpid. Spot put his ears back and growled, which made me reconsider. The high point of the day, its unmitigated delight, was our romp through Fort Tryon Park, where one step carries you from endless megalopolitan Upper West Side to genuine woods, and a further five minutes shows you the Hudson. By this time the shores were past their highest colors, but reds burned like coals in the midst of all the turning hues of green and yellow and russet. I say unmitigated, but in all honesty I must grant that I never relished the business with pooper-scooper and leash. Joan had given us an elaborate device with plastic bags and heat-sealer, a sentimental relic of our squashed poodle Phiphi, but while that was to be preferred to the fold of ScotTowel favoured in the Heights it never seemed to me altogether dignified. One was forced to admit, though, that the menacing glances of elderly folk walking their own Dobermans and Borzoi, pan or towel dutifully in hand, was ample deterrent to a more insouciant delinquency.

  On the evening of our last day together, Spot and I ventured into Puerto Rican midtown. Drug dealers conveyed their wares and their opinions to others of their kind on every corner. Dilapidated French restaurants struggled to sustain identity and solvency on one in every four of these corners. Young men struggled past us under the load of their gigantic quadrophonic portable sound systems. Spot dan
ced with pleasure; this milieu was not alien to his roots. It pleased him to strut beside me, a streetwise kelpie in Hell’s Kitchen.

  “Ghetto blasters,” he told me, as one kid bopped past in a drench of Cuban pop. The acoustic values were extraordinary. “Third world briefcase,” he said, with a yip of amusement. The Walkman craze had not yet reached the barrio; it seemed to me that these unfortunates needed the combined benefits of conspicuous consumption and enhanced personal presence. A news report roared in our ears, simulcast from two swarthy youths passing us in opposite directions, creating a disturbing illusion of dopplered spin. Whining abruptly, Spot crouched with his ears pricked, swinging his head from side to side in a manner which recalled (I say with some shame) the mascot on His Master’s Voice recordings.

  “Los astronautas Joe Engle y Richard Truly visitaron ayer el trasborador espacial Columbia y dijeron que todo luce ‘bellisimo’ y en perfecto estado para el lanzamiento de manana,” the reporter said rapidly, “siempre que el tiempo lo permita.”

  My breast became suffused with awful forboding. I had seen that look in Spot’s eye before, under a dust of stars hurled into heaven with a mad jeweler’s abandon.

  “Space,” he cried. “Boojum, the final frontier.”

  “Please don’t call me that,” I begged him, down on my knees on the broken, urine-dank sidewalk, arms about his straining neck. “If you must employ a diminutive, I much prefer ‘Jinny’.”

  “The spirit bloweth whither it listeth,” said my husband as he quivered and shivered in the epiphany of his hunger, and I knew that I had lost him at last, lost to the call of the wild.

  The Master of the Hounds

  by Algis Budrys

  Dogs are known for their unswerving loyalty and unquestioning obedience . . . but, as the unsettling little snapper that follows suggests, you can have too much of a good thing . . .

  Algis Budrys published his first SF story in 1952, and quickly established himself as one of the finest writers of his generation. His most famous novel is Rogue Moon, one of the classic SF novels of the sixties. His other books include Who?, The Falling Torch, and Some Will Not Die, as well as the well-known novel Michaelmas—one of the best SF novels of the seventies—and the collection Blood and Burning. Budrys is also one of SF’s most astute critics—his reviews appeared for years in Galaxy, and now appear regularly in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His most recent books are Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf, a collection of his Galaxy review columns, and, as editor, the Writers of the Future anthologies.

  * * *

  The white sand road led off the state highway through the sparse pines. There were no tire tracks in the road, but, as Malcolm turned the car onto it, he noticed the footprints of dogs, or perhaps of only one dog, running along the middle of the road toward the combined general store and gas station at the intersection.

  “Well, it’s far enough away from everything, all right,” Virginia said. She was lean and had dusty black hair. Her face was long, with high cheekbones. They had married ten years ago, when she had been girlish and very slightly plump.

  “Yes,” Malcolm said. Just days ago, when he’d been turned down for a Guggenheim Fellowship that he’d expected to get, he had quit his job at the agency and made plans to spend the summer, somewhere as cheap as possible, working out with himself whether he was really an artist or just had a certain commercial talent. Now they were here.

  He urged the car up the road, following a line of infrequent and weathered utility poles that carried a single strand of power line. The real estate agent already had told them there were no telephones. Malcolm had taken that to be a positive feature, but somehow he did not like the looks of that one thin wire sagging from pole to pole. The wheels of the car sank in deeply on either side of the dog prints, which he followed like a row of bread crumbs through a forest.

  Several hundred yards farther along, they came to a sign at the top of a hill:

  Marine View Shores! New Jersey’s Newest, Fastest-Growing Residential Community. Welcome Home!

  From $9,990. No Dn Pyt for Vets.

  Below them was a wedge of land—perhaps ten acres altogether that pushed out into Lower New York Bay. The road became a gullied, yellow gravel street, pointing straight toward the water and ending in three concrete posts, one of which had fallen and left a gap wide enough for a car to blunder through. Beyond that was a low drop-off where the bay ran northward to New York City and, in the other direction, toward the open Atlantic.

  On either side of the roughed-out street, the bulldozed land was overgrown with scrub oak and sumac. Along the street were rows of roughly rectangular pits—some with half-finished foundation walls in them—piles of excavated clay, and lesser quantities of sand, sparsely weed-grown and washed into ravaged mounds like Dakota Territory. Here and there were houses with half-completed frames, now silvered and warped.

  There were only two exceptions to the general vista. At the end of the street, two identically designed, finished houses faced each other. One looked shabby. The lot around it was free of scrub, but weedy and unsodded. Across the street from it stood a house in excellent repair. Painted a charcoal gray and roofed with dark asphalt shingles, it sat in the center of a meticulously green and level lawn, which was in turn surrounded by a wire fence approximately four feet tall and splendid with fresh aluminum paint. False shutters, painted stark white, flanked high, narrow windows along the side Malcolm could see. In front of the house, a line of whitewashed stones the size of men’s heads served as curbing. There wasn’t a thing about the house and its surroundings that couldn’t have been achieved with a straight string, a handsaw, and a three-inch brush. Malcolm saw a chance to cheer things up.

  “There now, Marthy!” he said to Virginia. “I’ve led you safe and sound through the howlin’ forest to a snug home in the shadder of Fort Defiance.”

  “It’s orderly,” Virginia said. “I’ll bet it’s no joke, keeping up a place like that out here.”

  As Malcolm was parking the car parallel to where the curb would have been in front of their house, a pair of handsome young Doberman pinschers came out from behind the gray house across the street and stood together on the lawn with their noses just short of the fence, looking out. They did not bark. There was no movement at the front window, and no one came out into the yard. The dogs simply stood there, watching, as Malcolm walked over the clay to his door.

  The house was furnished—that is to say, there were chairs in the living room, although there was no couch, and a chromium-and-plastic dinette set in the area off the kitchen. Though one of the bedrooms was completely empty, there was a bureau and a bed in the other. Malcolm walked through the house quickly and went back out to the car to get the luggage and groceries. Nodding toward the dogs, he said to Virginia, “Well! The latest thing in iron deer.” He felt he had to say something light, because Virginia was staring across the street.

  He knew perfectly well, as most people do and he assumed Virginia did, that Doberman pinschers are nervous, untrustworthy, and vicious. At the same time, he and his wife did have to spend the whole summer here. He could guess how much luck they’d have trying to get their money back from the agent now.

  “They look streamlined like that because their ears and tails are trimmed when they’re puppies,” Virginia said. She picked up a bag of groceries and carried it into the house.

  When Malcolm had finished unloading the car, he slammed the trunk lid shut. Although they hadn’t moved until then, the Dobermans seemed to regard this as a sign. They turned smoothly, the arc of one inside the arc of the other, and keeping formation, trotted out of sight behind the gray house.

  ###

  Malcolm helped Virginia put things away in the closets and in the lone bedroom bureau. There was enough to do to keep both of them busy for several hours, and it was dusk when Malcolm happened to look out through the living-room window. After he had glanced that way, he stopped.

  Across the street, floodlights had c
ome on at the four corners of the gray house. They poured illumination downward in cones that lighted the entire yard. A crippled man was walking just inside the fence, his legs stiff and his body bent forward from the waist, as he gripped the projecting handles of two crutch-canes that supported his weight at the elbows. As Malcolm watched, the man took a precise square turn at the comer of the fence and began walking along the front of his property. Looking straight ahead, he moved regularly and purposefully, his shadow thrown out through the fence behind the composite shadow of the two dogs walking immediately ahead of him. None of them was looking in Malcolm’s direction. He watched as the man made another turn, followed the fence toward the back of his property, and disappeared behind the house.

  Later Virginia served cold-cuts in the little dining alcove. Putting the house in order seemed to have had a good effect on her morale.

  “Listen, I think we’re going to be all right here, don’t you?” Malcolm said.

  “Look,” she said reasonably, “any place you can get straightened out is fine with me.”

  This wasn’t quite the answer he wanted. He had been sure in New York that the summer would do it—that in four months a man would come to some decision. He had visualized a house for them by the ocean, in a town with a library and a movie and other diversions. It had been a shock to discover how expensive summer rentals were and how far in advance you had to book them. When the last agent they saw described this place to them and told them how low the rent was, Malcolm had jumped at it immediately. But so had Virginia, even though there wasn’t anything to do for distraction. In fact, she had made a point of asking the agent again about the location of the house, and the agent, a fat, gray man with ashes on his shirt, had said earnestly, “Mrs. Lawrence, if you’re looking for a place where nobody will bother your husband from working, I can’t think of anything better.” Virginia had nodded decisively.