I suppose, at that particular time, I didn’t quite believe it. But the Dog was there and he was talking to me and there wasn’t much that I could do except to go along with it—with the gag, I mean.
“Why don’t you,” asked the Dog, “give the sack to me? I will hang onto it, I assure you, with the utmost concentration and with the grip of death. I will make it very much my business they do not get away.”
So I handed over the sack to him and be reached out a paw and, so help me God, that paw grabbed hold of the sack as neatly as if it had sprouted fingers.
I took the gun out of my pocket and laid it in my lap.
“What kind of instrument is that?” asked the Dog, not missing anything.
“This is a weapon called a gun,” I told him, “and with it I can blow a hole clear through you. One wrong move out of you, buster, and I will let you have it.”
“I will try my very best,” said the Dog quite matter-of-fact-ly, “to make no wrong move at all. I can assure you that I am very much on the side of you in this which is transpiring.”
“That is just fine,” I said. “See .you keep it that way.”
I started the car and turned around, heading down the lane.
“I am glad that you were agreeable,” said the Dog, “to hand this sack to me. I have had some experience in the handling of these things.”
“Perhaps, then,” I told him, “you might suggest where we go from here.”
“Oh, there are many ways,” said the Dog, “of disposing of them. I would venture to suggest, sir, that we should choose a method that is sufficiently restrictive and, perhaps, a little painful.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” I said, “of disposing of them. I went to a lot of trouble to get them in that sack.”
“That is too bad,” said the Dog regretfully. “Believe me, it is poor policy to let these things survive.”
“You keep calling them these things,” I pointed out, “and yet you say you know them. Haven’t they a name?”
“Name?”
“Yes. Designation. Descriptive term. You have to call them something.”
“I get you,” said the Dog. “There are times I do not catch so quick. I require a little time.”
“And before I forget to ask you, how come you can talk to me? There is no such thing as a talking dog.”
“Dog?”
“Yes, the thing you are. You look just like a dog.”
“How marvelous!” cried the Dog, enraptured. “So that is what I am. I had met creatures of my general appearance, but they were so different from me and of so many different types. At first I tried communicating with them, but—”
“You mean you’re really as you are. You aren’t something built out of something else, like our friends there in the sack?” “I am myself,” the Dog said proudly. “I would be nothing else even if I could.”
“But you haven’t answered how you can talk to me.” “My friend, if you please, let’s not go into that. It would require so much explanation and we have so little time. I am, you see, not really talking with you. I am communicating, but—”
“Telepathy?” I asked. “Come again—and slowly.”
I told him what telepathy was, or was supposed to be. I made a bad job of it, principally, I suppose, because I knew very little of it.
“Roughly,” said the Dog. “Not exact, however.” I let it go at that. There were other things that were more important.
“You’ve been hanging around my place,” I said. “I saw you yesterday.”
“Why, certainly,” said the Dog. “You were—let me try to put this right—you were the focal point.”
“The focal point,” I said, amazed. All this time I had been thinking I’d just fallen into it. Some guys are like that. If lightning hits a tree in a thousand-acre forest, they’ll be standing underneath it.
“They knew,” said the Dog, “and, of course, I knew. You mean that you were ignorant?” “You said a mouthful, buster.”
We had reached the end of Timber Lane and were out on the highway now, heading back for town.
“You didn’t answer me,” I said, “when I asked what these things are. The name you have for them. Come to think of it, there are a lot of things you haven’t answered.”
“You gave me no chance,” said the Dog. “You ask me things too fast. And you have a funny thinker. It keeps churning round and round.”
The window on his side of the car was open several inches and a sharp breeze was blowing in. It was blowing back his whiskers, smooth against his jaws. They were heavy, ugly jaws, and he kept them closed. They didn’t move as if he had been, talking—with his mouth, I mean.
“You know about my thinker?” I asked him feebly. “How else,” rejoined the Dog, “could I converse with you? And it’s most disorderly and moving very fast. It will not settle down.”
I thought that over and decided maybe he was right.
Although I didn’t like the connotations of what he’d said. I had a sneaking feeling that he might know everything I knew or thought, although, God knows, he didn’t act that way.
‘To return to your question about the whatness of these things,” said the Dog, “we do have a designation for them, but it does not translate into anything I can say to make you understand. Among many other things and in the context in which we here are concerned with them, they are realtors. Although you must realize the term is but approximate and has many qualifications I am helpless to express.”
“You mean they sell houses?”
“Oh no,” said the Dog, “they would not think to bother with a thing so trivial as a single building.”
“With a planet, perhaps?”
“Well, yes,” said the Dog, “although it would have to be a most unusual planet, of unusual value. They usually don’t concern themselves with anything much less than a solar system. And it has to be a good one or they won’t even touch it.”
“Now, let us get this straight,” I said. “You say they deal in solar systems.”
“Your understanding,” said the Dog, “leaves nothing to be desired. That is the simple fact alone, however. A complete understanding of the situation would tend to become just a bit complex.”
“But who do they buy these solar systems for?”
“Now,” said the Dog, “we begin to enter into deepish water. No matter what I told you, you would attempt to equate it with your own economic system, and your economic system—pardon me if I hurt your feelings—is the most outlandish I have ever seen.”
“It just happens that I know,” I told him, “they’re buying up this planet.”
“Ah yes,” said the Dog, “and most dirty in their dealings, as they always are.”
I didn’t answer him, for I got to thinking how ridiculous it was that I should be talking to a thing that was a dead ringer for an outsize dog about another race of aliens that were buying up the Earth and doing it, according to my alien friend, in their usual dirty manner.
“You see,” the Dog went on, “they can be anything. They never are themselves. Their entire mode of operation is based upon deceit.”
“You said they were competitors of yours. Then you must be a realtor yourself.”
“Yes, thank you,” said the Dog, greatly pleased, “and of the highest class.”
“I suppose, then, if these bowling balls, or whatever they may be, had failed to buy the Earth, you’d bought it up yourself.”
“No, never,” the Dog protested. “It would have been unethical. That is why, you understand, I have interested myself. The present operation will give the entire galactic realty field a exceedingly black eye, and this cannot be allowed to happen. Realty is an ancient and an honorable profession and it must retain its pristine purity.”
“Well, that is fine,” I said. “I am glad to hear you say it. What do you intend to do?”
“I really do not know. For you work against me. There is no help in you.”
“Me?”
“No, not you
. Not you alone. All of you, I mean. The silly rules you have.”
“But why do they want it? Once they get the Earth, what will they do with it?”
“I see you do not realize,” said the Dog, “exactly what you have. There are, I must inform you, few planets such as this one that you call the Earth. It is, you see, a regular dirt-type planet, and planets such as it are few and far between. It is a place where the weary may rest their aching bones and solace their aching eyes with a gentle beauty such as one seldom comes across. There have been built, in certain systems, orbiting constructions which seek to simulate such conditions as occur here naturally. But the artificial can never quite approach the actual, and that is why this planet is so valuable as a playground and resort.
“You realize,” he said apologetically, “that I am simplifying and using rough approximations to fit your language and your concepts. It is not, really, as I have told it to you. In many of its facets, it is entirely different. But you gain the main idea, and that is the best that I can do.”
“You mean,” I asked, “that once these things have the Earth they will run it as a sort of galactic resort?”
“Oh no,” said the Dog; “that would be quite beyond them. But they will sell it to those who would. And they’ll get a good price for it. There are many pleasure palaces built in space and a lot of simulated Earth-type planets where beings may go for outings and vacations. But, actually, there is really nothing which can substitute for a genuine dirt-type planet. They can get, I may assure you, whatever they may ask.”
“And this price they’ll ask?”
“Smell. Scent. Odor,” said the Dog. “I do not grasp the word.”
“Perfume?”
“That is it—perfume. An odor for the pleasure. To them the odor is the thing of beauty. In their natural form it is thek greatest, perhaps their only, treasure. For in then-natural state they are not as you and I—”
“I have seen them,” I told him, “in what I would presume would be thek natural state. The ones you have there in the sack.”
“Ah, then,” said the Dog, “perhaps you understand. They are as lumps of nothing.”
He joggled the sack he was holding savagely, bouncing the bowling balls together.
“They are lumps of nothing,” he declared, “and they lie there, soaked in then-perfume, and that is the height of happiness, if things like this be happy.”
I sat there and thought about it and it was outrageous. I wondered for a moment if the Dog might not be kidding me, and then I knew he wasn’t. For he, himself, if this were no more than kidding, must then necessarily be a part of the joke. For he was, in his own way, as grotesque and incongruous as the things imprisoned in the sack.
“I am sorry for you,” said the Dog, not sounding very sad, “but you have yourself to blame. All these silly rules …” “You said that once before,” I told him. “What do you mean —all these silly rules?”
“Why, the ones about each one having things.” “You mean our property laws.” “I suppose that is what you term them.” “But you said the bowling balls would sell the Earth—” “That’s different,” said the Dog., “I had to say it your way because there was no way of telling you except in ypur own way. But I can excellently assure you it is a different way.” And, of course, it would be, I told myself. No two alien cultures, more than likely, ever would arrive at the same way of doing things. The motivations would be different and the methods would be different, because the cultures in themselves could never be parallel. Even as the language—not the words alone, but the concept of the language in itself— » could not be parallel.
“This conveyance that you operate,” said the Dog, “has intrigued me from the first, and I have had no opportunity to acquaint myself with it. I have been very busy, as you may well imagine, gathering necessary information about many other things.”
He sighed. “You have no idea—of course, you haven’t; how could you have?—how much there is to learn when one is dropped without preliminary into another culture.”
I told him what I knew about the internal-combustion engine and about the drive mechanism which applied the power created by the engine, but I couldn’t tell him much. I made a bad job of it, but he seemed to catch the principle involved. I gathered from the way he acted that he had never run across such a thing before. But I gained the distinct impression that he was more impressed by the sheer stupidity ~of such engineering than by its brilliance.
“I thank you very much,” he said, with suavity, “for your lucid explanation. I should not have bothered you with it, but I have the large curiosity. It might have been much better, and somewhat more advantageous, if we had spent the time discussing the disposal of these things.”
He joggled the bag of plastic to let me know just what things he meant.
“I know what I am going to do with them,” I told him. “We’ll take them to a friend of mine by the name of Carleton Stirling. He is a biologist.”
“A biologist?” he asked.
“One who studies life,” I said. “He can take these things apart and tell us what they are.”
“Painfully?” asked the Dog.
“In certain aspects of it, I would imagine so.”
“Then it is good,” the Dog decided. “This biologist—it seems to me I’ve heard of other beings that had something similar.”
.But, from the way he said it, I was fairly certain that he was thinking of something else entirely. There were, I told myself, a lot of ways in which one could study life.
We rode along for a while without saying anything. We were close to the city now and the traffic was beginning to get heavy. The Dog sat rigid in his seat and I could see that the long string of approaching lights had gotten him on edge. Trying to look at them as something I had never seen before, I could realize just how terrifying they might seem to the creature sitting there beside me.
“Let’s listen to the radio,” I said.
I reached out and turned it on.
“Communicator?” asked the Dog.
I nodded. “Must be almost time for the evening news,” I said.
The news had just come on. A violently happy announcer was winding up a commercial about a wonderful detergent.
Then the news reporter said: “A man believed to be Parker Graves, science writer for the Evening Herald, was killed just an hour ago by an explosion in the parking lot at the rear of the Wellington Arms. Police believe that a bomb had been placed in his car and exploded when Graves got into it and turned the ignition key. Police are now attempting to make a positive identification of the man, believed to have been Graves, killed in the blast.”
Then he went on to something else.
I sat there, startled for a moment, then reached out and turned off the radio.
“What is wrong, my friend?”
“That man who was killed. That was me,” I told him.
“How peculiar,” said the Dog.
XIX
I saw the light in his third-floor laboratory and knew Stirling was at work. I pounded on the front door of the building until a wrathful janitor came stumping down the corridor. He motioned for me to leave, but I kept on pounding. Finally he opened the door and I told him who I was. Grudgingly, he let me in. The Dog slipped in beside me.
“Leave the dog outside,” ordered the wrathy jaintor. “There ain’t no dogs allowed.”
“That isn’t any dog,” I said.
“What is it, then?”
“It’s a specimen,” I told him.
That one stopped him long enough so we could get past him and start up the stairs. Behind us, I could hear him grumbling as he went stumping back down the first-floor corridor.
Stirling was leaning on a lab table, writing in a notebook. He wore a white coat, incredibly dirty.
He looked around at us as we came in and was very casual. He didn’t know what time it was. You could see he didn’t. He wasn’t surprised at our showing up at this unearthly hour.
> “Come for the gun?” he asked.
“Brought you something,” I said, holding out the sack.
“You have to get that dog out of here,” he said. “There are no dogs allowed.”
“That isn’t any dog,” I told him. “I don’t know what he calls himself, or where he may have come from, but he fs an alien.”
Stirling turned all the way around, interested. He squinted at the Dog.
“An alien,” he said, not too surprised. “You mean someone from the stars?”
“That,” said the Dog, “is exactly what he means.”
Stirling crinkled up his brow. He didn’t say a word. You could almost hear him thinking.
“It had to happen sometime,” he finally said, as if he were delivering an opinion of some weight. “No man could foresee, of course, how it would come about.”
“So you’re not surprised,” I said.
“Oh, of course, surprised. By the form of our visitor’s appearance, however, rather than the fact.”
“Glad to meet you,” said the Dog. “I understand you are a biologist, and that is something I find most interesting.”
“But this sack,” I told Stirling, “is really why we came.”
“Sack? Oh yes, I thought you had a sack.”
I held it up so he could see it. “They are aliens, too,” I told him.
It was getting damn ridiculous.
He quirked an eyebrow at me.
Quickly, stumbling over my words, I told him what they were, or what I thought they were. I don’t know why I had that terrible sense of urgency to get it blurted out. It was almost as if I thought that we had little time and had to get it done. And maybe I was right.
Stirling’s face was flushed .with excitement now and his eyes had taken on a glitter of dark intensity.
“The very thing,” he said, “I talked about this morning.”
I grunted questioningly, not remembering.
“A nonenvironmental being,” he explained. “Something that can live anywhere, that can be anything. A lifeform that has a letter-perfect adaptability. Able to adjust to any condition—”
“But that’s not what you talked about,” I told him, for now I remembered what he’d said.