Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories Read online

  But first I took out twenty-five hundred and sent them through the desk.

  For the ten days since we’d gotten the dust-collectors, we’d sent nothing through and there had been no sign from the Trader that he might be getting impatient. I wouldn’t have blamed him a bit if he’d done something, like sending through his equivalent of a bomb, to express his dissatisfaction at our slow delivery. I’ve often wondered what he thought of the long delay—if he hadn’t suspected we were reneging on the bargain.

  All this time, I had been smoking too much and gnawing my fingernails and I’d figured that Lewis was just as busy seeing what could be done about marketing the dusters.

  But when I mentioned it to him, he just looked blank. “You know, Joe, I’ve been doing a lot of worrying.”

  “We haven’t a thing to worry about now,” I said, “except getting these things sold.”

  “But the dust must go somewhere,” he fretted.

  “The dust?”

  “Sure, the dust these things collect. Remember we picked up an entire pile of cement dust? What I want to know is where it all went. The gadget itself isn’t big enough to hold it. It isn’t big enough to hold even a week’s collection of dust from the average house. That’s what worries me—where does it go?”

  “I don’t care where. It goes, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s the pragmatic view,” he said scornfully.

  It turned out that Lewis hadn’t done a thing about marketing, so I got busy.

  But I ran into the same trouble we’d had trying to sell the emotion gauge.

  The dust collector wasn’t patented and it didn’t have a brand name. There was no fancy label stuck on it and it didn’t bear a manufacturer’s imprint. And when anybody asked me how it worked, I couldn’t answer.

  One wholesaler did make me a ridiculous offer. I laughed in his face and walked out.

  That night, Lewis and I sat around the kitchen table, drinking beer, and neither of us too happy. I could see a lot of trouble ahead in getting the gadgets sold. Lewis, it seemed, was still worrying about what happened to the dust.

  He had taken one of the dust-collectors apart and the only thing he could find out about it was that there was some feeble force-field operating inside of it—feeble yet strong enough to play hell with the electrical circuits and fancy metering machinery he has at the lab. As soon as he found out what was happening, he slapped the cover back on as quick as he could and then everything was all right. The cover was a shield against the force-field.

  “That dust must be getting thrown into another dimension,” he told me, looking like a hound dog that had lost a coon track.

  “Maybe not. It could be winding up in one of those dust clouds way out in space.”

  He shook his head.

  “You can’t tell me,” I said, “that the Trader is crazy enough to sell us a gadget that will throw dust back into his face.”

  “You miss the point entirely. The Trader is operating from another dimension. He must be. And if there are two dimensions, his and ours, there may be others. The Trader must have used these dust-collectors himself—not for the same purpose we intend, perhaps, but they get rid of something that he doesn’t want around. So, necessarily, they’d have to be rigged to get rid of it in a dimension other than his.”

  We sat there drinking beer and I started turning over that business about different dimensions in my head. I couldn’t grasp the concept. Maybe Lewis was right about me being a pragmatist. If you can’t see it or touch it or even guess what it would be like, how can you believe there might be another dimension? I couldn’t.

  So I started to talk about marketing the dust collector and before Lewis went home that night, we’d decided that the only thing left to do was sell it door to door. We even agreed to charge $12.50 for it. The zebras figured out to four cents each and we would pay our salesmen ten per cent commission, which would leave us a profit of $11.21 apiece.

  I put an ad in the paper for salesmen and the next day we had several applicants. We started them out on a trial run.

  Those gadgets sold like hotcakes and we knew we were in!

  I quit my job and settled down to handling the sales end, while Lewis went back to the lab and started going through the pile of junk we had gotten from the Trader.

  There are a lot of headaches running a sales campaign. You have to map out territories for your salesmen, get clearance from Better Business Bureaus, bail out your men if they’re thrown in the clink for running afoul of some obscure village ordinance. There are more worrisome angles to it than you can ever imagine.

  But in a couple of months’ time, things were running pretty smoothly. We had the state well covered and were branching out into others. I had ordered another fifty thousand zebras and told them to expect re-orders—and the desk top was a busy place. It got to a point, finally, where I had to hire three men full time, paying them plenty not to talk, to man that desk top 24 hours a day. We’d send through zebras for eight hours, then take away dust gadgets for eight hours, then feed through zebras for another eight.

  If the Trader had any qualms about what was happening, he gave no sign of it. He seemed perfectly happy to send us dust collectors so long as we sent him zebras.

  The neighbors were curious and somewhat upset at first, but finally they got used to it. If I could have moved to some other location, I would have, for the house was more an office than a home and we had practically no family life at all. But if we wanted to stay in business, we had to stay right where we were because it was the only place we had contact with the Trader.

  The money kept rolling in and I turned the management of it over to Helen and Marge. The income tax boys gave us a rough time when we didn’t show any manufacturing expenses, but since we weren’t inclined to argue over what we had to pay, they couldn’t do anything about it.

  Lewis was wearing himself down to a nubbin at the lab, but he wasn’t finding anything that we could use.

  But he still did some worrying now and then about where all that dust was going. And he was right, probably for the first time in his life.

  One afternoon, a couple of years after we’d started selling the dust collectors, I had been uptown to attend to some banking difficulties that Helen and Marge had gotten all bollixed up. I’d no more than pulled into the driveway when Helen came busting out of the house. She was covered with dust, her face streaked with it, and she was the maddest-looking woman I have ever seen.

  “You’ve got to do something about it, Joe!” she shrieked.

  “About what?”

  “The dust! It’s pouring into the house!”

  “Where is it pouring from?”

  “From everywhere!”

  I could see she’d opened all the windows and there was dust pouring out of them, almost like a smoke cloud. I got out of the car and took a quick look up and down the street. Every house in the block had its windows open and there was dust coming out of all of them and the neighborhood was boiling with angry, screaming women.

  “Where’s Bill?” I asked.

  “Out back.”

  I ran around the house and called him and he came running.

  Marge had come across the street and, if anything, she was about six degrees sorer about all the dust than Helen was.

  “Get in the car,” I said.

  “Where are we going?” Marge demanded.

  “Out to pick up Lewis.”

  I must have sounded like nothing to trifle with, for they piled in and I got out of there as fast as the car would take us.

  The homes and factories and stores that had bought the gadget were gushing so much dust, visibility wouldn’t be worth a damn before long.

  I had to wade through about two feet of dust on the laboratory floor to get to Lewis’s office and hold a handkerchief over my nose to keep from suffocating.
/>   Inside the car, we got our faces wiped off and most of the dust hacked out of our throats. I could see then that Lewis was about three shades paler than usual, although, to tell the truth, he always was a pasty-looking creature.

  “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.

  —dww

  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.

  But even at that, Ebenezer couldn’t bring himself to blame the
wolf. To a wolf a rabbit wasn’t just something that was fun to chase. For the wolf had no herds for meat and milk, no fields of grain for meal to make dog biscuits.

  “What I ought to do,” grumbled the remorseless Shadow, treading at his heels, “is tell Jenkins that you ran out. You know that you should be listening.”

  Ebenezer did not answer, kept on trudging up the trail. For what Shadow said was true. Instead of rabbit-chasing, he should have been sitting up at Webster House listening—listening for the things that came to one—sounds and scents and awareness of something that was near. Like listening on one side of a wall to the things that were happening on the other, only they were faint and sometimes far away and hard to catch. Even harder, most times, to understand.

  It’s the animal in me, thought Ebenezer. The old flea-scratching, bone-chewing, gopher-digging dog that will not let me be—that sends me sneaking out to chase a rabbit when I should be listening, out prowling the forest when I should be reading the old books from the shelves that line the study wall.

  Too fast, he told himself. We came up too fast. Had to come up too fast.

  It took Man thousands of years to turn his grunts into the rudiments of speech. Thousands of years to discover fire and thousands more of years to invent the bow and arrow—thousands of years to learn to till the soil and harvest food, thousands of years to forsake the cave for a house he built himself.

  But in a little more than a thousand years from the day we learned to talk we were on our own—our own, that is, except for Jenkins.

  The forest thinned out into gnarled, scattered oaks that straggled up the hill, like hobbling old men who had wandered off the path.

  The house stood on the hilltop, a huddled structure that had taken root and crouched close against the earth. So old that it was the color of the things around it, of grass and flowers and trees, of sky and wind and weather. A house built by men who loved it and the surrounding acres even as the dogs now loved them. Built and lived in and died in by a legendary family that had left a meteoric trail across centuries of time. Men who lent their shadows to the stories that were told around the blazing fireplace of stormy nights when the wind sucked along the eaves. Stories of Bruce Webster and the first dog, Nathaniel; of a man named Grant who had given Nathaniel a word to pass along; of another man who had tried to reach the stars and of the old man who had sat waiting for him in the wheelchair on the lawn. And other stories of the ogre mutants the dogs had watched for years.