“Cuddles, look—a bed! A real one! Why, an antique like this would be worth a fortune in the asteroids.”
“I suppose so,” I replied. “If they could get the smell out of it.”
“Beds must decay—like clothing.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed, and it bounced with a creaking, metallic sound, much like the sound made by the pump outside. Julie laughed and jumped onto the bed beside me. It groaned, and the groan deepened to a rasp, and the rasp snapped. Julie went right on laughing as the bed collapsed to the floor. Looking at her sprawled out beside me on that quaint apparatus, I became aware of a feeling that I had never experienced before. For, though we had known each other intimately for years, I had never felt quite this urgently desirous of Julie. Undoubtedly this too was a consequence of being unleashed.
“Julie,” I said, “I’m going to bite you.”
“Grrr,” she growled playfully.
“Arf,” I replied.
“Me too, me too!” Petite cried, bounding into the room. She very quickly found herself outside again, digging a hole in the garden in which to bury her uncle Pluto. Before the afternoon was passed, there were holes for Clea and St Bernard and the entire absentee Skunk family.
Julie is my Darling, Julie is my Darling.
The three of us spent the night in the farmhouse amid creakings and groanings of old wood and ominous scurryings in the walls. Petite slept in a little crib that must once have been Roxanna’s. We were up with the sun and went, shivering, directly out of doors to wait beneath the apple trees. We were cold and we were hungry, and swarms of hostile, buzzing insects rose from the dew-drenched grass to settle on our raw skins and feed on our blood. I killed three or four, but the senseless things continued to attack us oblivious to their danger. Even in the darkest ages of Shroeder, we pets had not been subjected to such strenuous discomforts. I began to see the utilitarian value of clothing and wished wistfully for my cloth-of-gold suit of yesterday’s feasting.
The sun had risen nearly to noonday, when Julie finally turned to me and asked: “What do you suppose is wrong, Cuddles?”
It was useless by now to pretend that nothing was amiss, but I could only answer her question with a look of dismay. Perhaps we were being punished for asking to be unleashed. Perhaps, impossible as such a thought was, our Master had forgotten us. Perhaps…
But how could a pet presume to interpret his Master’s actions? Especially such irresponsible, inconceivable, and thoughtless ways as leaving three pedigreed pets—one the merest puppy—defenseless in an alien world among Dingoes!
When our hunger grew extreme, we gorged on apples, cherries, and sour plums, not even bothering to look for wormholes. Through that afternoon and into the night we waited for our Master’s return, until at last the chill and darkness of the night forced us into the house.
The next morning was spent in more useless waiting, though this time we had the prudence to wear clothing—pants and jackets of rough blue cloth and rubberized boots. Almost everything else had rotted beyond salvage. Our Master did not return.
“Julie,” I said at last (having sent Petite off to pick blueberries so that she might be spared for as long as possible the knowledge of her changed condition), “we’re on our own. Our Master has abandoned us. He doesn’t want us any more.” Julie began to cry, not making much noise about it, but the tears rolled down her cheeks in a steady stream faster than I could kiss them away.
But for all that, I must confess that Julie adapted to our abandoned state more readily than I. She enjoyed the challenges of that archaic, Dingo-like existence. No doubt she was aided by her sense of make-believe. Every day while I went to a high hill in the vicinity to call, hopelessly and to no apparent effect, to our Master, Julie made believe to fix up the farmhouse. She cleared the floors, dusted, washed, aired out the musty furniture and decaying mattresses, and experimented with the interesting new vegetables that grew among the weeds of a forgotten garden. (Carrots, by the bye, are very good boiled in rusty water with a little dirt thrown in for seasoning.) After the first week my visits to the hillside became less frequent. I was convinced that our Master would never return to us. The thought of such cruelty and indifference—after all those years at Swan Lake—passed quite beyond belief.
Helping Julie at odd jobs around the farm, I began to have a certain respect for the pre-Mastery technology of Earth. I discovered and repaired one mechanism that was especially usefuclass="underline" a rough stone wheel three feet in diameter and three inches thick that was set into rotary motion by a foot pedal. By holding a piece of metal to the revolving wheel, the machine could be made to give off sparks, and these in turn ignited dry scraps of wood. The fire thus produced could be conserved in various ingenious engines in the farmhouse. Fire has an immense utility, but since I assume my readers are familiar with it, I will not make my digression any longer. I only mention in passing that on the night of my discovery Julie, sitting by me in front of a roaring log fire, looked at me with real admiration! A look that I returned—for she was very lovely in the firelight, lovelier than she had ever been before, it seemed. The firelight softened the contours of her face, until I was aware only of her relaxed, easy smile and the brightness of her eyes, a brightness that did not need to borrow its brilliance from the fire but seemed to issue from her very being.
“Prometheus,” she whispered.
“My own Pandora,” I returned, and a scrap of old verse popped into my mind, at once comforting and terrible in its implications. I recited it to Julie in a low voice:
Julie shivered theatrically. “Cuddles,” she said, “we’ve got to find our own way home.”
“Don’t call me Cuddles,” I said in, for me, a rough manner. “If you won’t call me White Fang, stick to Prometheus.”
Day followed day with no sign of our Master’s return. The longer we stayed at the farm, the more inevitable discovery became. On my trips to the hillside I had sometimes noticed clouds of dust rising from the country roads, and, though I was careful to keep under cover and off the roads, I knew that luck alone and merely luck had prevented our capture so far. My imagination recoiled from what would become of us if we were to fall into the hands of Dingoes. I had only to behold my father’s defaced monument (which I passed by every day on the way to my hilltop) to be reminded of his terrible fate, and it was not a memory to inspire confidence.
Therefore I determined that Julie, Petite and I must find our way to Shroeder Kennel on foot, where, though we might not be so happy as we had been in the asteroids, we would at least be secure. But I had no idea how to get there. Years ago when we had driven with Roxanna to the Skunk farmhouse, the robot-driver had taken a circuitous route, in a vaguely southwesterly direction, which I had never troubled to learn. In any case, it was not wise to walk along the roads.
I renewed my treks through the nearby woods, searching for a vantage from which I could see the cathedral tower or some other signpost back to civilization. At last, a sign was given to me: a hill rose on the other side of a marsh; on the crest of that hill was an electric power line!
Where there was electricity there, surely, would be Masters.
In 1970 when the Masters had first manifested themselves to mankind, they had insisted that they be given complete authority over all electric plants, dams, dynamos, and radio and television stations. Without in any way interfering with their utility from a human standpoint (indeed, they effected major improvements), the Masters transformed this pre-existent network into a sort of electromagnetic pleasure spa.