Anyhow, there’d been earthquakes, several of them. Mom and Donnie had gone out hunting me as soon as the worst shocks were over, and found me lying at the mouth of the cave. They got me up somehow; I don’t weigh much. Mom was nearly crazy with worry because I was still unconscious. For the last two hours or so she’d been smelling the smoke and hearing the crackling of the fire.
Some camper up in the mountains, I guess, started it. It was an awfully dry year. Anyhow, by the time I was conscious and on my feet again, it was too late to think about running. We didn’t even have time to grab a suitcase. Mom and Donnie and I went down the flume.
That was some trip. When we got to Portsmouth, we found the whole town ready to pick up and leave, the fire was that close. They got it out in time, though. And then we found out that we were refugees.
There were pieces about the three of us in the city papers, with scare-heads and everything. The photographers took pictures of all of us, even me, and they tried to make out we were heroes because we’d gone down the flume and hadn’t got burned up in the fire. That was a lot of foolishness; there isn’t anything heroic in saving your own life. And Mom hated those pictures. She said they made her look like she was in her seventies and heading for the grave.
One of the papers took up a collection for us, and we got a couple of hundred dollars out of it. It was a big help to us, because all we had in the world was the clothes we were standing in. After all, though, we hadn’t really expected to be alive. And we’d got rid of the things from the egg.
As Mom says, we have a lot to be thankful for.
I could be more thankful, though, if I didn’t have Ischeenar. I’ve tried and tried to figure out why he didn’t die when the rest of the things did, when the egg was blown into another space. The only thing I can think of is that maybe, having been born here on Earth, he’s different from the rest of them. Anyhow, he’s here with us. I’ve managed to keep Mom from finding out, but, as I say, he lives in my big toe.
Sometimes I feel almost sorry for him. He’s little and helpless, and alone in a big and hostile world. He’s different from everything around him. Like us, he’s a refugee.
But I wish I could get rid of him. He’s not so bad now while he’s young. He’s really not dangerous. But I wish to God I could get rid of him.
He’s going to be a stinker when he grows up.
<
~ * ~
Theodore Sturgeon
TINY AND THE MONSTER
The problem presented to the Monster must at first have seemed to be nearly insuperable. Its solution would result in the joyous “dis-invading” of Earth by a strictly impromptu visiting alien with no desire to be where he is, but in desperate need of a tungsten casting to go elsewhere. However, tungsten cannot be cast; and, furthermore, the Monster cannot communicate with human beings without being immediately threatened with violent elimination. And yet the problem is solved. How it is solved makes for one of the most ingenious pieces of “zoological” science fiction (shaggy-dog zoology) in the whole literature of fantasy.
Of course, the Forsythe Formulas have not yet been announced, but you may be sure they will be any day now.
~ * ~
She had to find out about Tiny—everything about Tiny.
They were bound to call him Tiny. The name was good for a laugh when he was a pup, and many times afterward.
He was a Great Dane, unfashionable with his long tail, smooth and glossy in the brown coat which fit so snugly over his heavily muscled shoulders and chest. His eyes were big and brown and his feet were big and black; he had a voice like thunder and a heart ten times his own great size.
He was born in the Virgin Islands, on St. Croix, which is a land of palm trees and sugar, of soft winds and luxuriant undergrowth whispering with the stealthy passage of pheasant and mongoose. There were rats in the ruins of the ancient estate houses which stood among the foothills—ruins with slave-built walls forty inches thick, and great arches of weathered stone. There was pasture land where the field mice ran, and brooks asparkle with gaudy blue minnows.
But—where in St. Croix had he learned to be so strange?
When Tiny was a puppy, all feet and ears, he learned many things. Most of these things were kinds of respect. He learned to respect that swift, vengeful piece of utter engineering called a scorpion, when one of them whipped its barbed tail into his inquiring nose. He learned to respect the heavy deadness of the air about him which preceded a hurricane, for he knew that it meant hurry and hammering and utmost obedience from every creature on the estate. He learned to respect the justice of sharing, for he was pulled from the teat and from the trough when he crowded the others of his litter. He was the largest.
These things, all of them, he learned as respects. He was never struck, and although he learned caution he never learned fear. The pain he suffered from the scorpion—it only happened once—the strong but gentle hands which curbed his greed, the frightful violence of the hurricane which followed the tense preparations—all these things and many more taught him the justice of respect. He half understood a basic ethic; namely, that he would never be asked to do something, or to refrain from doing something, unless there were a good reason for it. His obedience, then, was a thing implicit, for it was half-reasoned; and since it was not based on fear, but on justice, it could not interfere with his resourcefulness.
All of which, along with his blood, explained why he was such a splendid animal. It did not explain how he learned to read. It did not explain why Alec was compelled to sell him—not only to sell him but to search out Alistair Forsythe and sell him to her.
She had to find out. The whole thing was crazy. She hadn’t wanted a dog. If she had wanted a dog, it wouldn’t have been a Great Dane. And if it had been a Great Dane, it wouldn’t have been Tiny, for he was a Crucian dog and had to be shipped all the way to Scarsdale, New York by air.
The series of letters she sent to Alec were as full of wondering persuasion as his had been when he sold her the dog. It was through these letters that she learned about the scorpion and the hurricane; about Tiny’s puppyhood and the way Alec brought up his dogs. If she learned something about Alec as well, that was understandable. Alec and Alistair Forsythe had never met, but through Tiny they shared a greater secret than many people who have grown up together.
“As for why I wrote you, of all people,” Alec wrote in answer to her direct question, “I can’t say I chose you at all. It was Tiny. One of the cruise-boat people mentioned your name at my place, over cocktails one afternoon. It was, as I remember, a Dr. Schwellenbach. Nice old fellow. As soon as your name was mentioned, Tiny’s head came up as if I had called him. He got up from his station by the door and lolloped over to the doctor with his ears up and his nose quivering. I thought for a minute that the old fellow was offering him food, but no—he must have wanted to hear Schwellenbach say your name again. So I asked about you. A day or so later I was telling a couple of friends about it, and when I mentioned the name again, Tiny came snuffling over and shoved his nose into my hand. He was shivering. That got me. I wrote to a friend in New York who got your name and address in the phone book. You know the rest. I just wanted to tell you about it at first, but something made me suggest a sale. Somehow it didn’t seem right to have something like this going on and not have you meet Tiny. When you wrote that you couldn’t get away from New York, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do but send Tiny to you. And now—I don’t know if I’m too happy about it. Judging from those pages and pages of questions you keep sending me, I get the idea that you are more than a little troubled by this crazy business.”
She answered, “Please don’t think I’m troubled about this! I’m not. I’m interested, and curious, and more than a little excited; but there is nothing about the situation which frightens me. I can’t stress that enough. There’s something around Tiny—sometimes I have the feeling it’s something outside Tiny—which is infinitely comforting. I feel protected, in a strang
e way, and it’s a different and greater thing than the protection I could expect from a large and intelligent dog. It’s strange, and it’s mysterious enough; but it isn’t at all frightening.
“I have some more questions. Can you remember exactly what it was that Dr. Schwellenbach said the first time he mentioned my name and Tiny acted strangely? Was there ever any time that you can remember, when Tiny was under some influence other than your own—something which might have given him these strange traits? What about his diet as a puppy? How many times did he get—” and so on.
And Alec answered, in part, “It was so long ago now that I can’t remember exactly; but it seems to me Dr. Schwellenbach was talking about his work. As you know, he’s a professor of metallurgy. He mentioned Professor Nowland as the greatest alloy specialist of his time—said Nowland could alloy anything with anything. Then he went on about Nowland’s assistant. Said the assistant was very highly qualified, having been one of these Science Search products and something of a prodigy; in spite of which she was completely feminine and as beautiful a redhead as had ever exchanged heaven for earth. Then he said her name was Alistair Forsythe. (I hope you’re not blushing, Miss Forsythe; you asked for this!) And then it was that Tiny ran over to the doctor in that extraordinary way.
“The only time I can think of when Tiny was off the estate and possibly under some influence was the day old Debbil disappeared for a whole day with the pup when he was about three months old. Debbil is one of the characters who hang around here. He’s a Crucian about sixty years old, a piratical-looking old gent with one eye and elephantiasis. He shuffles around the grounds running odd errands for anyone who will give him tobacco or a shot of white rum. Well, one morning I sent him over the hill to see if there was a leak in the water line that runs from the reservoir. It would only take a couple of hours, so I told him to take Tiny for a run.
“They were gone for the whole day. I was short handed and busy as a squirrel in a nuthouse and didn’t have a chance to send anyone after him. But he drifted in towards evening. I bawled him out thoroughly. It was no use asking him where he had been; he’s only about quarter-witted anyway. He just claimed he couldn’t remember, which is pretty usual for him. But for the next three days I was busy with Tiny. He wouldn’t eat, and he hardly slept at all. He just kept staring out over the canefields at the hill. He didn’t seem to want to go there at all. I went out to have a look. There’s nothing out that way but the reservoir and the old ruins of the governor’s palace, which have been rotting out there in the sun for the last century and a half. Nothing left now but an overgrown mound and a couple of arches, but it’s supposed to be haunted. I forgot about it after that because Tiny got back to normal. As a matter of fact, he seemed to be better than ever, although, from then on, he would sometimes freeze and watch the hill as if he were listening to something. I haven’t attached much importance to it until now. I still don’t. Maybe he got chased by some mongoose’s mother. Maybe he chewed up some ganja-weed—marijuana to you. But I doubt that it has anything to do with the way he acts now, any more than that business of the compasses which pointed west might have something to do with it. Did you hear about that, by the way? Craziest thing I ever heard of. It was right after I shipped Tiny off to you last fall, as I remember. Every ship and boat and plane from here to Sandy Hook reported that its compass began to indicate due west instead of a magnetic north! Fortunately the effect only lasted a couple of hours so there were no serious difficulties. One cruise steamer ran aground, and there were a couple of Miami fishing boat mishaps. I only bring it up to remind both of us that Tiny’s behavior may be odd, but not exclusively so in a world where such things as the crazy compasses occur.”
And in her next, she wrote, “You’re quite the philosopher, aren’t you? Be careful of that Fortean attitude, my tropical friend. It tends to accept the idea of the unexplainable to an extent where explaining, or even investigating, begins to look useless. As far as that crazy compass episode is concerned, I remember it well indeed. My boss, Dr. Nowland—yes, it’s true, he can alloy anything with anything!—has been up to the ears in that fantastic happenstance. So have most of his colleagues in half a dozen sciences. They’re able to explain it quite satisfactorily, too. It was simply the presence of some quasi-magnetic phenomenon which created a resultant field at right angles to the Earth’s own magnetic influences. That solution sent the pure theorists home happy. Of course, the practical ones—Nowland and his associates in metallurgy, for example—have only to figure out what caused the field. Science is a wonderful thing.
“By the way, you will notice my change of address. I have wanted for a long time to have a little house of my own, and I was lucky enough to get this one from a friend. It’s up the Hudson from New York, quite countrified but convenient enough to the city to be practical. I’m bringing Mother here from upstate. She’ll love it. And besides—as if you didn’t know the most important reason when you saw it!—it gives Tiny a place to run. He’s no city dog… I’d tell you that he found the house for me, too, if I didn’t think that, these days, I’m crediting him with even more than his remarkable powers. Gregg and Marie Weems, the couple who had the cottage before, began to be haunted. So they said, anyway. Some indescribably horrible monster that both of them caught glimpses of, inside the house and out of it. Marie finally got the screaming meemies about it and insisted on Gregg’s selling the place, housing shortage or no. They came straight to me. Why? Because they—Marie, anyway; she’s a mystic little thing—had the idea that someone with a large dog would be safe in that house. The odd part of that was that neither of them knew I had recently acquired a Great Dane. As soon as they saw Tiny they threw themselves on my neck and begged me to take the place. Marie couldn’t explain the feeling she had; what she and Gregg came to my place for was to ask me to buy a big dog and take the house. Why me? Well, she just felt I would like it, that was all. It seemed the right kind of a place for me. And my having the dog clinched it. Anyway, you can put that down in your notebook of unexplainables.”
So it went for the better part of a year. The letters were long and frequent, and, as sometimes happens, Alec and Alistair grew very close indeed. Almost by accident they found themselves writing letters which did not mention Tiny at all, although there were others which concerned nothing else. And, of course, Tiny was not always in the role of canis superior. He was a dog—all dog—and acted accordingly. His strangeness only came out at particular intervals. At first it had been at times when Alistair was most susceptible to being astonished by it—in other words, when it was least expected. Later he would perform his odd feats when she was ready for him to do it, and under exactly the right circumstances. Later still, he only became the super-dog when she asked him to…
~ * ~
The cottage was on a hillside, such a very steep hillside that the view which looked over the river overlooked the railroad, and the trains were a secret rumble and never a sight at all. There was a wild and clean air about the place—a perpetual tingle of expectancy, as though someone coming into New York for the very first time on one of the trains had thrown his joyous anticipation high in the air, and the cottage had caught it and breathed it and kept it forever.
Up the hairpin driveway to the house, one spring afternoon, toiled a miniature automobile in its lowest gear. Its little motor grunted and moaned as it took the last steep grade, a miniature Old Faithful appearing around its radiator cap. At the foot of the brownstone porch steps, it stopped, and a miniature lady slid out from under the wheel. But for the fact that she was wearing an aviation mechanic’s coveralls, and that her very first remark—an earthy epithet directed at the steaming radiator—was neither ladylike nor miniature, she might have been a model for the more precious variety of Mother’s Day greeting card.
Fuming, she reached into the car and pressed the horn button. The quavering ululation which resulted had its desired effect. It was answered instantly by the mighty howl of a Great Dane at the peak of aural
agony. The door of the house crashed open, and a girl rushed out on the porch, to stand with her russet hair ablaze in the sunlight, her lips parted, and her long eyes squinting against the light reflected from the river. “What—Mother! Mother, darling… is that you? Already? Tiny!” she rapped as the dog bolted out of the open door and down the steps. “Come back here!”
The dog stopped. Mrs. Forsythe scooped a crescent wrench from the ledge behind the driver’s seat and brandished it. “Let him come, Alistair,” she said grimly. “In the name of sense, girl, what are you doing with a monster like that? I thought you said you had a dog, not a Shetland pony with fangs. If he messes with me, I’ll separate him from a couple of those twelve-pound feet and bring him down to my weight. Where do you keep his saddle? I thought there was a meat shortage in this part of the country. Whatever possessed you to take up your abode with that carniverous dromedary, anyway? And what’s the idea of buying a barn like this, thirty miles from nowhere and perched on a precipice to boot, with a stepladder for a driveway and an altitude fit to boil water at eighty degrees centigrade? It must take you forever to make breakfast. Twenty-minute eggs, and then they’re raw. I’m hungry. If that Danish basilisk hasn’t eaten everything in sight, I’d like to nibble on about eight sandwiches. Salami on whole wheat. Your flowers are gorgeous, child. So are you. You always were, of course. Pity you have brains. If you had no brains, you’d get married. A lovely view, honey, lovely. I like it here. Glad you bought it. Come here, you.” she said to Tiny.
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