Blood spurted from the man’s nose. I averted my eyes. Bruno, in his element, added his distinctive bellow to the uproar. Rocky watched me closely, treasuring my every blanch and wince. Daddy looked bored, and Julie kept her eyes shut through the whole thing. I should have done the same, but when I heard another thunk of bone on flesh and a loud crash, curiosity overcame my finer feelings and I looked back into the ring. The man in red trunks was lying on his back, his expressionless face a scant few inches from my own. The blood flowed from his nose and flooded the sockets of his eyes. Rocky was shrieking with pleasure, but Bruno, who felt an allegiance for the fighter in red trunks shouted, “Get up, you bum!”
I rose from my seat, mumbling apologies, and found my way outside, where I was discreetly sick in a hedge across the street from the Armory. Though I felt weak, I knew that I did not have to faint. The Masters’ conditioning was wearing off!
The hedge bordered on a park which had been allowed to go to seed. Through the thick summer foliage I could see the glint of moonlit water. I strolled down the hillside to the pond’s edge.
Down there, the din of the stadium melted into the other night sounds: the croaking of the frogs, the rustle of poplar leaves, the rippling water. It was quiet and Earthlike.
A full moon shone overhead, like the echo of a thousand poems. All the Earthbound poets who had stolen the fire of their lyrics from that moon, age after age! It had passed them by, oblivious of histories, and it would pass me by in time. That’s the way that things should be, I thought. The leaves should fall in autumn, snow in winter, grass springs up in spring, and the summer is brief.
I knew then that I belonged to the Earth, and my spirit dilated with happiness. It wasn’t quite the right time to be happy—but there it was. Julie and the moon were part of it, but it was also the frogs croaking, the poplars, the stadium; Daddy, cynical, aspiring, even defeated; partly too, it was Bruno and Roxanna, if only because they were so vital. These things melted into my memory of the farmhouse, and it seemed that I could smell the winy smell of apples rotting in the grass.
The sky was growing brighter and brighter. The moon…
But was it the moon? A cloud of mist had gathered above the pond and it glowed until the full moon was almost blotted out behind it.
The Meshes of the Leash closed over my mind, and a voice inside my head purred kindly: White Fang, good boy! It’s all right now. We heard your call… (But I hadn’t called! It was just that I had been so happy!) …and now I’ve come. Your Master has come back at last for you.
I cried out then, a simple cry of pain. To be taken away now! Only a few days before I had cried for the lack of this voice, and now—“NO!”
There, it soothed, there, there, there. Has it been bad? Has it been that very bad? Those terrible Dingoes have captured you, but it won’t happen again. There, there.
The Leash began gently to stroke the sensory areas of the cortex: soft fur wrapped me, scented with musk. Faint ripples of harp-music (or was that only the water of the pond?) sounded behind my Master’s voice, which poured forth comforting words, like salve spread over a wound.
Then, with a sudden pang, I remembered Daddy. (Don’t think of your poor father, the Leash bade.)
He was waiting for me. Julie was waiting for me. The Dingoes were waiting for me. (We’ll get Julie back too. Now, don’t you worry yourself any more about those nasty Dingoes. Soon there won’t be any Dingoes, ever, ever at all.)
Desperately I tried not to think—or at least to keep my thoughts so scrambled that I would not betray the things I knew. But it was exactly this effort that focused my thoughts on the forbidden subjects.
I tried to think of nonsense, of poetry, of the moon, dim behind the glowing air. But the Leash, sensing my resistance, closed tighter around my mind, and cut through my thin web of camouflage. It shuffled through my memory as though it were a deck of cards, and it stopped (there was just time enough for me to catch the images then) to examine images of my father with particular attention.
There was, on the very edge of my perception, a sound: Ourrp. Which was repeated: Ourrp. It was not a sound my Leash would make. The harp-music quavered for a moment, becoming a prosaic ripple of water. I concentrated on that single sound, straining against my Leash.
“What is that sound?” I asked my Master. To answer me he had to stop sorting through my memories. Nothing. It’s nothing. Don’t think about it. Listen to the beautiful music, why don’t you? Think of your father.
Whatever was making the sound seemed to be down in the grass. I could see clearly in the wash of light from the nimbus above me. I parted the grass at my feet, and I saw the beastly thing.
Don’t think about it!
The front half of a frog projected from the distended jaws of a water snake. The snake, seeing me, writhed, pulling his victim into the denser grass.
Again the Leash bade me not to look at this thing, and, truly, I did not want to. It was so horrible, but I could not help myself.
The frog had stretched his front legs to the side to prevent the last swallow that would end him. Meanwhile, the back half of him was being digested. He emitted another melancholy Ourrp.
Horrible, I thought. Oh, horrible, horrible, horrible!
Stop this. You… must… stop…
The snake lashed his body, wriggling slowly backwards. The frog’s front feet grasped at sprigs of grass. His Ourrp had grown quite weak. In the failing light, I almost lost sight of the struggle in the shadow of the tall grass. I bent closer.
In the moon’s light I could see a thin line of white froth about the snake’s gaping jaws.
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.