"The demon brought if off. But at least I didn't have to give that demon the satisfaction of making a profit from the episode. With no credit and no money—"
"Except that trust Bill's setting up for me that nobody can touch," she said. "Fisk, that money would have bought a lot of fun for both of us and now all it's good for is education. Ugh!"
"Precisely. Education abolishes demons."
"I just don't get it," she said crossly.
"Neither do I," Fisk admitted. "I just knew that neither the racing credit nor the money was rightfully mine. "I will earn my fortune in my own way or not at all. That's my particular hurdle. Maybe it's a question of whether Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde will govern."
"Who?"
He sighed. "Never mind. It's a devious point of characterization—and perhaps illusory. But disaster strikes every time I compromise my principles. I tried to make an illicit profit in Marsland speculation and lost everything. I got involved in black market adoption and almost landed in jail. This time I very nearly killed us all. The demon offers material riches, but his real goal is misery."
She uttered the expletive he still didn't understand. "The first time you got a new, exciting life. The second time you got me. This time you could have had—"
"At any rate—I'll never go near another racing car as long as I—"
"Hey, what's this?" she cried, lifting something out of the package slot of the apartment door.
Fisk looked at what she had found. It was a small square item with a gift tag.
Yola read it aloud. " 'You're a great sport. Sink Bill.' "
"That's 'Sinc.,' not 'sink,' " Fisk said. "For 'Sincerely.' " But she was already tearing open the wrapping with juvenile impatience.
Inside was the personalized ID ownership key for a new Fusion Special.
GONE TO THE DOGS
In 1969 we were getting ready for the arrival of our second daughter, Cheryl. Our first, Penny, then two years old, was a charming blonde, blue-eyed, hyperactive child—but we feared she would be jealous of the baby. We had lost three babies before getting one we could keep, and we wanted everything to be as right as we could make it. There may be parents who take their children for granted; not so with us. So we decided to get a pet to take Penny's attention. The rule of thumb is, the smaller the child, the larger the dog should be. We don't tolerate animal abuse, but you can't watch children and pets all the time; a big dog that liked children should be best. We saw an ad for a grown female Weimaraner who loved children; we went to see her at the kennel, liked her, phoned the owner—and discovered we were too late; she had just been sold. We didn't want to disappoint our child, so next day we bought the most similar dog we could find: a Dalmatian. Similar in size and shape, that is; in color the Dalmatian stands out from all others. We named him Canute, for this was the breed of Kings, and he merged instantly with the family. I wrote him into a juvenile science fiction novel, Race Against Time, and all was well.
But we had made a fatal miscalculation. When the baby arrived, Penny took it in stride. It was the dog who was jealous. In retrospect it becomes obvious, but then it was a mystery. We had not owned a dog before, and did not understand dog psychology. Had we realized, we might have worked things out. Human misunderstandings can be that way too; who among us would not do some things differently if we could carry our present knowledge back to relive the event? There are few things in my adult life that I really regret, and this is perhaps the major one: that I did not understand. Canute came down with kidney stones, evidently the result of emotional stress. He had surgery five times to alleviate them, but in the end it was too much and we had to put him away. He had lost the joy of living, and while I will not kill an animal for food or clothing or sport, I will do so to alleviate pain and hopelessness. We got another dog who remains with us today, and we are far more conscious of animal psychology than we were. I still miss Canute; he would have loved it here in the forest. But if we had gotten that Weimaraner, who already understood about children, we might have avoided the tragedy entirely.
One day some years later a strange dog wandered onto our property. He was emaciated. Penny went out to pet him, but I warned her away, as he was a big dog and an unknown quality. Suddenly I recognized the breed: "That's a Weimaraner!" I exclaimed. No mongrel, but a valuable purebreed animal. I am not snobbish about pedigrees; our present dogs are mongrels. But I realized that a Weimaraner probably had a home, and would have been well cared for before getting lost. So I let my daughter pet him, cautiously—and he was friendly. We fed him, and he was ravenous. We couldn't take him into the fenced portion of our yard because we had another dog, a purebreed Basenji foundling who hated all other animals except our half-Basenji female; it would be death for the weakened Weimaraner. Fortunately we had neighbors who cared about animals even more than we did; they put the Weimaraner in their yard while we tried to locate the owner. They couldn't keep the visitor long either, because they had a dog who weighed 101 pounds and tended to overwhelm the Weimaraner, so this arrangement was strictly temporary. They called the visitor Waldo.
But Waldo was lonely. He couldn't stand to be by himself. He had to remain outside, and he howled. So Penny stayed with him for hours each day. She was then six or seven years old, and this was a considerable chore for her, but she has always had strong sympathy for those with problems, and she stayed the course. I was proud of her effort; it saved us much trouble and that dog much grief. We never located the owner, so finally we placed an ad in the paper and gave Waldo away. He was fortunate; the new owners had loved a former Weimaraner pet, and were very good to this one. We visited once, and saw that Waldo, now renamed Schatze, was happy. It was enough; we were satisfied that we had done the right thing.
The experience moved me to write a story, "Gone to the Dogs," about the possible origin of Waldo Weimaraner, the dog who had come to us too late for us to keep. It is one way I react to the ironies of life. Once I have written about a thing or an experience, it is mine forever. So I did it, and marketed this story—and no publisher was interested. It was about the last straw; I departed the story field, never really to return. So perhaps it is fitting that this formerly unpublished story concludes this volume; now you understand why I left this particular arena. I can sell my science fiction or fantasy novels for ten times the word-rate I would get for a story—if I could even place the story. I can prevent arbitrary editorial interference in my novels. It's a better situation, all around.
I have been criticized for inadequate characterization in my fiction. Now characterization is the essence of fiction, and I feel strongly about it. It is my contention that the typical critic does not comprehend the kind of characterization that I do, just as he doesn't grasp my position on style. I do not stop the story to pontificate on the psychology of the protagonist: I prefer to show it in his reactions. This story serves as an example. The human character is a blank; he is Anyman, behaving as anyone in that situation would. But the dog—watch how Waldo behaves, and you will see what I mean by characterization.
The pain came suddenly to my chest. For a moment I couldn't breathe. I fell back on the couch, gasping, pressing my palms futilely to my rib-cage.
Waldo came up to nuzzle my hand, his yellow-gray eyes looking up at me with concern, his clipped tail wagging. He was a beautiful mouse-gray Weimaraner with silky ears. We had found him as a stray, gaunt and lonely—and by the time we had given up trying to locate his original home, he was ours. He had put on twenty pounds, and was now a sleek, powerful, and affectionate dog.