“I’ve a number of people in mind,” said Sol. “Humans and animals aren’t the only creatures to get born on Earth, you know. Some of the darker ones are pretty strange and rather formidable. I suggest you go back to where you caught that whiff of the Zoi and start from there.”
“All right,” said Sirius, still rather puzzled.
He went on his way at a swift trot toward the cleared space, wondering, as he went, what was really in Sol’s mind. He had a feeling Sol knew much more than he had said. But that went out of his head when he caught a tingle from the Zoi again. It came from behind him, and it was gone as soon as he felt it. Nevertheless, he set off toward it. He was almost back at the yard, when he caught it again—a swift, living tingle from quite a new direction. He set off that way, but it was gone. On the outskirts of the town, he caught it again, from a new direction. Thoroughly confused, he turned back.
“What are you doing?” Sol wanted to know.
“I’ve felt it three times—from a different place each time,” Sirius explained.
“Could someone be trying to confuse you?” Sol asked.
Sirius tried to consider this. It was not easy, because he was tired now, and the dog stupidity was down on his brain like a low cloud. “It could be the Zoi itself,” he said doubtfully. “It—it isn’t made of quite the same stuff as anything else. I can’t explain properly, but I know it can work in several directions at once.”
“I hope it is only that,” said Sol. “You’d better go at it systematically. Take one small area and search that. Then go on to the next. I’m sorry to bully you like this, but I think it’s urgent.”
Again Sirius was puzzled. “A month ago you were saying it wouldn’t hurt me to wait,” he protested. “What’s got into you?”
Sol gave a little flare of laughter. “Call it my fiery and impatient nature. No, seriously, now I’ve heard a little more about Zoi, I can see they’re a good deal more peculiar and powerful than I thought. This one could do a lot of damage, and I want it found.”
Sirius trotted back to the center of town. He thought he would sweep the town in a spiral, to see if he could pinpoint the Zoi that way first. But, finding himself near the street where he had tried to rob the dustbin, he suddenly felt ravenous. He climbed the steps of the old lady’s house and, in the most natural way, battered at her door with a heavy clawed foot.
“So it’s you again,” she said, opening it. “I might have known.” She put a gnarled hand under his jaw and looked at him. “Naughty dog. Out again. I don’t know what your name really is, but I’m going to call you Sirius, because of your eyes. I am Miss Smith. Come in, Sirius, and I’ll see what I can find. And I expect you’ll want a drink.”
It was the start of a long acquaintance. After that, Sirius visited her nearly every day. It was not only because, poor though she evidently was, Miss Smith always had something for him to eat. He liked and respected her too. Apart from Kathleen, she was the only person who saw he understood English, and she called him by his onetime true name. Just as Kathleen did, she talked to him as if he was nearly her equal. And then he realized that she looked forward to seeing him and saved food for him specially. After that, he would no more have missed his daily visit to Miss Smith than he would have failed to be home in the yard before Kathleen was.
His search for the Zoi went on week after week. He felt it over and over again, always just for an instant, but he simply could not pin down where the feeling was coming from. The living tang came now from this way, now from that. Sometimes he did not feel it for days on end. He gave up chasing it when he did feel it. He always arrived at the outskirts of the town, only to feel it behind him, somewhere inside the town. At times, he almost agreed with Sol, that someone was deliberately confusing him. He took Sol’s impatient advice and searched the town, section by section. It seemed to him that if he could build up a picture of the town in his head, with all the places plotted on it where he had felt the Zoi, the middle of the plottings must be where the Zoi was.
It was very difficult. For one thing, his green nature became angry and bored. It seemed used to settling things quickly. To his surprise, it was his dog nature that helped him here. It was used to being bored, and it seemed to be able to stick patiently to its work, long after the luminary was howling with impatience. He began to see why humans had the word dogged.
But Sirius’s great difficulty was that neither of his natures could hold a useful picture of the town in its head. The dog saw it all as fragments, smells and the way to other fragments and smells. The green thoughts would try to bend it all into a sphere. But Sirius wanted a complete picture, flat and whole, the way humans liked to have things. The only one he knew of was in Basil’s room. Basil had an actual map of the town pinned to his wall. Whenever he could, Sirius nosed open Basil’s door and sat on the mat by Basil’s bed, staring at the map and trying to make sense of the symbols Basil had carefully painted on it.
Basil was furious when he found him there. “Get out, Rat! Beat it, or I’ll jump on your tail!” The room was full of tiny pieces of rock and bits of old pottery spread on half-made plans and charts. Sirius could have spoiled them all with one sweep of his tail. Basil did not know he had been careful not to. He shut the door and warned Kathleen to keep it shut. Sirius could not open the door for himself. In order to find out more about the map, he began, for the first time since he was a puppy, to attend to what Basil was saying.
Basil had a friend with glasses called Clive. Basil very much admired Clive—Sirius thought Clive was probably cleverer than Basil—and whenever Clive called, Basil became enormously enthusiastic about rocks and old pottery and imitated the way Clive talked. Clive called the bits and pieces Remains. Basil and he collected Remains of all kinds, and made maps of where they had found them. Many of the Remains were called fossils. Sirius thought they looked like playthings of Sol’s when he was an infant. He could not see any value in them. He could see even less value in the pottery, which Clive said was Roman, though he supposed some of the old coins they had must have been valuable once. The pride of their collection were some blue beads they had found in the cleared area near the moronic hallo-dogs—Clive said repeatedly those ought to have been in the museum—and a small fat meteorite.
None of this was much use to Sirius. He had almost given up listening to them, when he discovered that it was Clive’s—and therefore Basil’s—ambition to find another meteorite.
“We know one fell near here,” Basil said earnestly. “Everyone heard it. They discussed it on television.”
“Yes, but I don’t see how it could land with a festering thump like that and shake all the houses, and then just disappear,” said Clive. “Unless it was a very small black hole—like the one they think fell in Russia.”
Sirius realized, to his horror, that they were talking about the Zoi. The hair on his back rose. If Basil got hold of the Zoi—well, if he was not killed by it straight away, he could wreck Sol’s sphere in seconds, and maybe other neighboring ones into the bargain. He saw why Sol was so worried.
“If it was a black hole, it would have gone right through the Earth,” Basil objected, looking uneasily at Sirius. The Rat had that habit of staring at him sometimes. “It would have showed.”
“Yes,” agreed Clive. “I went and talked to the chap at the museum last Saturday, and he was sure it was just a meteorite. He said they tried to locate it, but the impact was too diffused. All the seismographs in the area went mad, and they all gave different readings. And listen to this, Basil—never mind that festering dog.”
Basil had grown tired of Sirius staring at him. He was making snarling noises and threatening to hit him.
“This is important,” said Clive.
“I’m going to put the Rat outside the door first,” said Basil. He seized Sirius by his collar and dragged him to the yard door. Sirius braced his legs and resisted, but the hold on his collar, as always, defeated him. He was thrust outside and the door slammed after him.
/> “What did you do that for?” Kathleen said in the kitchen.
“I don’t want Rats around me—or festering Irish morons either,” said Basil.
Sirius looked anxiously toward where Sol was westering. “Basil and his friend are trying to find the Zoi too. How can I stop them?”
“I don’t think you can,” said Sol. “I’ll do my best to distract them, but boys are the very blazes. They poke and pry and end up finding things long after everyone else has given up looking. The museum people gave up long ago.”
“I hope that was all Clive was going to say,” Sirius said.
When Kathleen let him in again, he sneaked up to Basil’s room, not very hopefully. He thought he ought to find out how much Basil knew about Zoi. And, to his joy, the door came open when he nosed it. Basil had been in too much of a hurry to show Clive his Remains to remember to close it properly. Sirius went over to the bookshelf and examined the books. He knew humans kept most of their knowledge in books—they were generous like that—and what Basil knew would be there somewhere.
After some thought, he selected one with a picture of a rock on the back, and another with what he supposed was meant to be a galaxy. Between them, they seemed to cover the case. He wished he had Tibbles to get them out for him. He had to do what he could himself, stabbing with a clumsy paw, backed up with his nose. The galaxy-book came out easily enough. He trotted with it to Kathleen’s room and laid it on the floor by her bed. Then he came back for the rock-book. The books were looser by then. The rock-book came out with half a shelf-full of heavy volumes. Sirius leaped from among them with his tail tucked under him and trotted away very hastily and guiltily indeed.
“Who’s been spilling my books about?” Basil demanded. “Was it you, Robin? If it was—!”
Being accused, Robin naturally looked guilty. “I never went near your books!” Basil cuffed his ears, and Sirius felt very uncomfortable. The worst of it was that there was no possible way he could have owned up, even if he had wanted to.
When Kathleen went to bed, she was very surprised to see the two books lying on the floor. “Those are Basil’s! How did they get here?” She picked them up and examined them for clues. Sirius did his best to seem casual. He had carried them as carefully as he knew how and—he hoped—had not left the faintest dent of a toothmark anywhere on them.
Kathleen could not find anything to tell her how the books came to be on her floor. “Oh well,” she said. “We may as well read them before we put them back.”
Sirius grinned widely as he scrambled onto the bed and made himself comfortable. He had known he could trust Kathleen to read the books. She had few books of her own, and a passion for reading. Once, she had even read him a book of Duffie’s on how to make pottery.
She began on the rock-book, because it was on top. “Schist and gneiss,” Kathleen read, “are igneous formations of the Pre-Cambrian era. Oh, Leo, I don’t think this is very interesting. Metamorphic rocks of high mineral content are to be found as follows—Leo, I don’t know how to say half of this. Shall we try the other book instead?”
She picked up the galaxy-book. It was written in slightly easier words and soon had both of them fascinated. Kathleen was awed and amazed at the thought of stars and planets wheeling around through infinite space. Sirius was amazed at how much humans had discovered, sitting on Earth and whizzing around once every day. They had contrived to measure this, record that and calculate what they could not see. They had a picture of the universe which bore about as much relation to the universe Sirius knew as a Police Identikit picture did to a real person. But he was astonished they had a picture at all.
“It’s about luminaries,” he explained to Tibbles, when she came through the window to join them. “Do you know about them?”
“The bright people who come and talk to our Sun sometimes?” she said. “They’re a bit big to notice me. I’d have to be as big as Earth before I could get to know them. And I don’t understand the language anyway. Does the Earth count as one of them?”
“Earth is a planet,” Sirius told her. “It spins round the sun.”
“That accounts for it,” Tibbles said, humping up into a tuffet under Sirius’s nose. “The top of my back itches. Just along my spine.”
“Accounts for what?” Sirius asked, licking obligingly.
“The way Earth speaks our languages,” said Tibbles. “I knew that it must be different.”
“Do listen to this, Leo!” Kathleen cried out. “It’s about the Dog Star. Sirius, Alpha Canis Major, often called the Dog Star, is only some eight and a half light-years distant from our Solar System. Since it is twice as hot as our sun, its brightness and characteristic green color make it a notable object in our winter sky. Why didn’t I know that before? I should have called you Sirius, Leo. It’s exactly right for you. I wish I’d known! You’re in Canis Major—that’s the Great Dog—and that’s Orion’s dog, Leo. I knew about Orion, too! My daddy showed me Orion’s belt once, when I was little. You’re in the same stardrift as the Great Bear—and us, I think, though it doesn’t say very clearly—and you’re a lovely bright green. Oh—and you’ve got a Companion that’s a white dwarf, about half the size of our sun. Tibbles, you must be his Companion.”
Sirius could not avoid sighing heavily. Someone from Castor had his green sphere now, and his Companion too.
“Don’t be sad,” said Kathleen. “I was just joking. It’s far too late to change your name now. You’re still Leo.”
She went on to read of the other stars. Sirius sighed once or twice more, as he recognized friends of his from the book’s descriptions: Betelgeuse, Procyon, Canopus and Aldebaran, Rigel, Dubhe, Mizar and Phad. He wondered if he would ever see them again. But he was glad to see, from the way the book talked, that Basil was unlikely to have learned anything helpful about Zoi. The people who wrote the book might be able to measure spheres, and their effulgence, and their distance apart, but they seemed to think they were as lifeless and mechanical as the marbles Robin sometimes rolled around the yard.
8
Though Sirius was now sure Basil had no idea it was a Zoi he was looking for, he still knew it would be a disaster if Basil found it. As soon as he was out of the yard next day, he went straight to the cleared space where he had first felt the Zoi. It seemed a very likely place for the Zoi to have fallen. But there was nothing. Sirius roved around among the dry weeds and the heaps of rubble without feeling the slightest twinge from the Zoi. So he decided to visit the four moronic hallo-dogs again. They might be stupid, even for dogs, but they fascinated him.
As he went along the street, Rover, Redears and Patchie all greeted him as they had done before.
“Hallo, hallo, hallo! Hey, dog! Hallo!”
But he found he had misjudged Bruce. “Hallo!” Bruce said, hurling himself against the netting around his gate. “I am glad to see you again. I wanted to talk to you. The others are such fools, and you look sensible. Why do we all look so alike?”
“I don’t know,” said Sirius. “I hoped you’d know. Were you all found floating in the river, by any chance?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Bruce. “Is that where dogs come from then?”
“No,” Sirius said patiently. “They get born. Didn’t you see that mother dog with puppies on television the other night?”
“Oh, yes,” said Bruce. “It did make me wonder. Why did you ask about the river then?”
“Because I can remember being picked out of it,” said Sirius.
“Good lord! You must have a good memory!” said Bruce. “That must have been months ago.”
“But haven’t you heard the people you live with talking about where you came from?” Sirius asked.
Bruce confessed that he did not know very much human talk. “I can follow if they speak slowly,” he said. “But they will gabble so. All I can usually pick out is the important words like walk, and supper, and biscuit, and bath.”
“Is bath important?” asked Sirius, who had never had one. br />
Bruce shivered. “Yes. When they say it, they’re going to put you in horrible deep warm water and rub smelly bubbles into you that hurt your eyes. They say it when they think you have a flea. Don’t your people do that?”
“Certainly not!” said Sirius. “No one in my house would dream of such a thing.”
“You are lucky,” Bruce said wistfully. “You’re lucky to be allowed out too. How do you manage it?”
“I open my gate,” said Sirius. “Can’t you open yours?”
“Not this latch,” said Bruce. “I could open the two they had before this one, so they put this one on to stop me. I’m being rather slow learning it, I’m afraid. But I’ll see you outside one day.”
“I’ll see you,” Sirius promised, and he went trotting off, thinking that he rather liked Bruce and feeling pleasantly superior to him—particularly about the baths.
Alas for Sirius. He had now been loose in the town for three weeks. He had talked to innumerable stray dogs and searched for the Zoi in many unsavory places. The next day he began to itch. He itched terribly. He sat down every hundred yards to scratch, but he still itched. He itched when he got home. He sat on the hearthrug and scratched, with his heavy leg thumping rhythmically on the floor. Tibbles sat beside him, elegantly scratching too. Up on the dresser, Romulus and Remus were scratching as well.
“Drat you!” said Tibbles. “I think you’ve given me—”
At that moment, Duffie leaned forward and stared incredulously at a small brown something crawling on her wide leg. “What?” she said. She caught the small brown thing between her finger and thumb and waved it about. “This,” she said dramatically, “is a flea. That Filthy Creature has fleas. Kathleen, if they are not got rid of by bedtime, it goes down to the vet tomorrow. Bathe it. Hoover the living room. And do it at once!”
“Oh dear!” Kathleen jumped up at once. “Yes, Duffie. What in?”
“The bath, of course. And make sure you clean it thoroughly afterwards,” said Duffie. “I’ll deal with those cats.”