“It’s the creatures from that third dimension,” he said anxiously. “The place where we were sending all the dust. They got sick and tired of having it pour in on them and they got it figured out and now they’re firing the dust right back at us.”
“Now calm down. We’re just jumping to the conclusion that this was caused by our gadget.”
“I checked, Joe. It was. The dust is coming out in jets from every single place where we sent it through. No place else.”
“Then all we have to do is fire it back at them.”
He shook his head. “Not a chance. The gadget works one way now—from them to us.” He coughed and looked wildly at me. “Think of it! A couple of million of those gadgets, picking up dust from a couple of million homes, stores and factories—some of them operating for two whole years! Joe, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to hole up somewhere till this—well, blows over.”
Being of a nasty legal turn of mind, he probably foresaw even then the countless lawsuits that would avalanche on us. Personally, I was more scared of being mobbed by angry women.
But that’s all past history. We hid out till people had quieted down and then began trying to settle the suits out of court. We had a lot of money and were able to pay off most of them. The judgements against us still outstanding don’t amount to more than a few hundred thousand. We could wipe that out pretty quickly if we’d just hit on something else as profitable as the cleaning gadget.
Lewis is working hard at it, but he isn’t having any luck. And the Trader is gone now. As soon as we dared come home, I went into the house and had a look at the desk. The inlaid dot was gone. I tried putting something where it had been, but nothing happened.
What scared the Trader off? I’d give a lot to know. Meanwhile, there are some commercial prospects.
The rose-tinted glasses, for instance, that we call the Happiness Lenses. Put them on and you’re happy as a clam. Almost every person on the face of the Earth would like a pair of them, so they could forget their troubles for a while. They would probably play hob with the liquor business.
The trouble is that we don’t know how to make them and, now that the Trader’s gone, we can’t swap for them.
But there’s one thing that keeps worrying me. I know I shouldn’t let it bother me, but I can’t keep it out of mind.
Just what did the Trader do with those couple of million zebras we sent him?
Hobbies
“Hobbies” is the sixth of the tales that, originally published as short stories in magazines, would later be woven into one of the most iconic books in the science fiction field: City. Written in early 1946 and published in the November 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, “Hobbies,” like the “City” stories that appeared before it, strongly reflects the world war that horrified, and disillusioned, so many.
By the time this story begins, the Dogs, who have been given powers of speech and the guidance of robot aides, have largely been abandoned by the humans they so loved—until another Webster shows up.
The rabbit ducked around a bush and the little black dog zipped after him, then dug in his heels and skidded. In the pathway stood a wolf, the rabbit’s twitching, bloody body hanging from his jaws.
Ebenezer stood very still and panted, red rag of a tongue lolling out, a little faint and sick at the sight before him.
It had been such a nice rabbit!
Feet pattered on the trail behind him and Shadow whizzed around the bush, slid to a stop alongside Ebenezer.
The wolf flicked his glare from the dog to the pint-size robot, then back to the dog again. The yellow light of wildness slowly faded from his eyes.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Wolf,” said Ebenezer, softly. “The rabbit knew I wouldn’t hurt him and it was all in fun. But he ran straight into you and you snapped him up.”
“There’s no use talking to him,” Shadow hissed out of the corner of his mouth. “He doesn’t know a word you’re saying. Next thing you know, he’ll be gulping you.”
“Not with you around, he won’t,” said Ebenezer. “And, anyhow, he knows me. He remembers last winter. He was one of the pack we fed.”
The wolf paced forward slowly, step by cautious step, until less than two feet separated him from the little dog. Then, very slowly, very carefully, he laid the rabbit on the ground, nudged it forward with his nose.
Shadow made a tiny sound that was almost a gasp. “He’s giving it to you!”
“I know,” said Ebenezer calmly. “I told you he remembered. He’s the one that had a frozen ear and Jenkins fixed it up.”
The dog advanced a step, tail wagging, nose outstretched. The wolf stiffened momentarily, then lowered his ugly head and sniffed. For a second the two noses almost rubbed together, then the wolf stepped back.
“Let’s get out of here,” urged Shadow. “You high-tail it down the trail and I’ll bring up the rear. If he tries anything—”
“He won’t try anything,” snapped Ebenezer. “He’s a friend of ours. It’s not his fault about the rabbit. He doesn’t understand. It’s the way he lives. To him a rabbit is just a piece of meat.”
Even, he thought, as it once was for us. As it was for us before the first dog came to sit with a man before a cave-mouth fire—and for a long time after that. Even now a rabbit sometime—
Moving slowly, almost apologetically, the wolf reached forward, gathered up the rabbit in his gaping jaws. His tail moved—not quite a wag, but almost.
“You see!” cried Ebenezer and the wolf was gone. His feet moved and there was a blur of gray fading through the trees—a shadow drifting in the forest.
“He took it back,” fumed Shadow. “Why, the dirty—”
“But he gave it to me,” said Ebenezer, triumphantly. “Only he was so hungry he couldn’t make it stick. He did something a wolf has never done before. For a moment he was more than an animal.”
“Indian giver,” snapped Shadow.
Ebenezer shook his head. “He was ashamed when he took it back. You saw him wag his tail. That was explaining to me—explaining he was hungry and he needed it. Worse than I needed it.”
The dog stared down the green aisles of the fairy forest, smelled the scent of decaying leaves, the heady perfume of hepaticas and bloodroot and spidery windflower, the quick, sharp odor of the new leaf, of the woods in early spring.
“Maybe some day—” he said.
“Yeah, I know,” said Shadow. “Maybe some day the wolves will be civilized, too. And the rabbits and squirrels and all the other wild things. The way you dogs go mooning around—”
“It isn’t mooning,” Ebenezer told him. “Dreaming, maybe. Men used to dream. They used to sit around and think up things. That’s how we happened. A man named Webster thought us up. He messed around with us. He fixed up our throats so we could talk. He rigged up contact lenses so that we could read. He—”
“A lot of good it did men for all their dreaming,” said Shadow, peevishly.
And that, thought Ebenezer, was the solemn truth. Not many men left now. Just the mutants squatting in their towers and doing God knows what and the little colony of real men still living in Geneva. The others, long ago, had gone to Jupiter. Had gone to Jupiter and changed themselves into things that were not human.
Slowly, tail drooping, Ebenezer swung around, clumped slowly up the path.
Too bad about the rabbit, he thought. It had been such a nice rabbit. It had run so well. And it really wasn’t scared. He had chased it lots of times and it knew he wouldn’t catch it.