The Puppies Of Terra

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 doctor-in-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.