living without his pets. He had brought with him poodles and St. Bernards, greyhounds and terriers, sheep dogs and hounds, working breeds and miniature breeds in all their amusing varieties; and a few misguided masochists had insisted on bringing along Persian and Maltese and Siamese and Abyssinian and tabby and calico and plain old alley—cats. When self-styled philosophers and those who were called social scientists—social theorists would have been more accurate—dwelt on man's character, his ability to destroy himself and Old Earth with nuclear war was balanced by his love affair with his dog. A race that could form so perfect a symbiosis with what most said was a lesser species—although an argument could be joined there—could not be all bad. A race of people who could weep bitter tears over one dead dog lying in the dust while accepting the destruction of entire planets in the Zede war was rather puzzling, but then no one had ever accused man of having understandable motivations. Man told himself, well, by God, we really can't be all bad when our dogs are so devoted to us. The dog. He is content to pattern his entire existence around his human. He has long since sacrificed his native survival instincts and when he is lost or abandoned he is helpless, for in giving his total devotion to his human he has left himself totally dependent. He lives for the sound of his human's voice, the touch of his human's hand. He makes his human chuckle with his enthusiasm as he treats a hundred foot walk to the mailbox with the same excited anticipation as a hunt in the meadow or a walk on the beach. He asks little. Food and water, attention and affection. He will forgive the crudest of treatment. And when he is heartbroken, he is one of the most pitiable things in the universe. Mr. Mop was heartbroken. He was a little dog, but not as small, at seven pounds, as some of his breed, the Yorkshire terrier. He was of the drop-ear variety, or at least mostly of that sort, since neither John Kenner, his original human, nor Erin Kenner, whom he adopted after John Kenner's death, trimmed the abundant hair that weighted his ears and left him able to lift the left one only in moments of great excitement, such as when his human said, «Let's go.» He had a sharp muzzle and a fine beard that shaded down into gray from the long, blond hair on top of his head. He was a silverback, the hair on his back lustrous and silver-gray, and the sweeping fall of hair that touched the floor all around, except under his chin, was golden brown. His stub of a tail trailed a long tendril of hair as it pointed proudly upward and blended in with the hair of his body when he was feeling sorry for himself, as he now was all the time, every day, every waking minute. He had been abandoned. He had been forgotten. He was being ignored. His humans, Erin and Dent, were there, and a Mule wasn't that big inside. There were times when Mop had to scoot away to keep from being stepped on as his humans went about their work. They were there, but they weren't there. Mop didn't go hungry, although he was a little off his feed. All he had to do for food and water was to push buttons that had been designed for his feet, but he couldn't push a button and make Dent say, «Hey, Mop, what's up?» He couldn't push a button to make Erin stoop down to pick him up and cradle him in the crook of her arm and rub his chest and belly. He couldn't even make them talk to him, couldn't elicit one word from either of them. They just worked and worked and paid absolutely no attention to a lonely little dog. He had tried everything. Time and again he had approached Erin, put his head on the deck between his front paws, hoisted his rear into the air in his look-at-me-I'm-charming pose, wiggled his tailbone in a frantic circle, and made pleading little noises. Time and again he had used his special little growl that had always paid off in attention from Dent. They didn't even speak to tell him to get out of the way. They just swept him aside with an arm or a foot, and it was breaking his heart. Any decent, dog-loving human being would have felt a stab of empathy for the little dog as he moped around with his usually ebullient tail tucked between his legs. He was a portrait of dejection, a canine magnet for maudlin sympathy. He was man's best friend betrayed, a subject for poets, a source for fountains of sentimental tears. Mankind, because his relationship with his dogs went back beyond the parameters of recorded time, would have looked at little Mop the Dog and said, «Shame, shame,» to his humans, for they looked quite normal as they worked almost around the clock to construct a maze of electronic webs and connectors and generating fields in the cabin that had once housed the mining equipment. At that time no one, not even Erin Kenner, who, at times, was closer to Mop the Dog than Mop could suspect, would have had any inkling that the fate of man, the race, the swarming billions, rested with one hairy little dog who pouted under the control room chair wondering why his humans were mad at him. CHAPTER FIFTEEN Murdoch Plough had not bothered to be stealthy in bringing his yacht into laser range of the Mother Lode. Once he had assured himself that the Kenner woman had, indeed, brought him to the source of her gold it didn't matter whether or not she and her friend knew that they were not alone in the belt. Neither of them was going to live long enough to be a problem. The Plough was threading her way among the drifting asteroids in the open, so there was no reason why the Mother Lode's sensors had not spotted her. Plough ordered readiness on the laser canon but held off giving the order to fire. He had a question or two for Erin Kenner. He activated the radio and said, «Mother Lode, I have you on visual. Come in.» The background sound of a deep space communicator was not exactly static, was not even noticeably audible. It was more a subconscious awareness of unfathomed distance and blank nothingness. Not even a man like Murdoch Plough was immune to the penetrating loneliness that was embodied in the hissing silence. He said, «Erin Kenner, I want to talk to you.» He knew that unless things had gone totally awry aboard the Mule the computer's monitor systems would alert Kenner and Gale to a radio call. «Now come on, Miss Kenner,» Plough said. «I've got a pair of fleet standard lasers trained on you. I want some answers.» * * * Mop the dog heard little bells and responded excitedly, running to the room where Erin and Denton were working to tell them, «Hey, someone's coming.» Mop's reaction to the call-incoming alert was conditioned by the fact that John Kenner, while overhauling the Lode, had made the radio alert the same as the doorbell in his home. Before John Kenner died, Mop had come to know a few friends such as Denton Gale and the sound of the doorbell meant either that one of his friends was paying a visit, in which case he'd get a cheerful greeting and some pats and rubs, or that there was a stranger at the door against whom John had to be warned. John had programmed the doorbell sound into the computer's alert system so that each time someone hailed the Lode by radio Mop would have a little excitement. And, although Mop was an exceptional little dog, handsome, personable, considerate, and highly intelligent, he never got over wondering why, when the doorbell rang aboard ship, no one ever came in. It really didn't matter, however, that the Mother Lode was way to hell and gone out in deep space, the bell had rung and it was Mop's duty to tell his humans that something important was happening. The problem was that they ignored him. He ran around in circles, barking, his stub of a tail going at flank speed, but Erin and Dent kept their heads down over some piece of equipment that was growing like a cancer in what had been Mother's mining control. He ran up to Erin and pressed his nose against the calf of her leg, a signal he used often to say, «Hey, I'm down here.» She didn't even glance down. Frustrated, Mop ran to stand on his hind legs and put his forepaws on Dent's knee. Dent's head remained bent over his work. She had to look into the female's mind to understand why the dog was exhibiting behavior she had not witnessed before. «Someone is calling us on the radio,» Erin said, not in words but in thought. She let her senses burst out of the body, through the metal hulls, and there was a thrill of elation. Ever since leaving the planet of men, Haven, she'd been regretting not having brought along a supply of basic biological building blocks. She could only assume that her long imprisonment had diminished her capacity for reason, at least temporarily. Now there were seven of the men at close range, not riches in way of material, but more than triple that which she had available aboard the Mother Lode. She willed. Her will was, of course, obeyed. «This is the Mother Lode, « a female voice said. «Miss Kenner?» Plough asked. «I am Erin Kenner.» «You know who I am.» «Yes.» The voice was without modulation, almost as flat and mechanical as that of a computer. «I know who you are.» «Good,» Plough said. «You heard me say I have two laser cannon on you.» «I heard.» «Not that I intend using them, of course,» Plough said, with a forced laugh. «It's just that I want to be sure I have your attention. Now listen. I sent a ship out here. I want to know what happened to it.» «It was annihilated in the nearest star,» the robotic voice said. «Holy—» Plough was stunned. «Repeat, please?» «We set the generator to blink the ship into the corona of the sun,» the voice said. «Gaaaaawd damn,» Plough said, then punched the sender. «And the people on her?» «They were dead before the ship went into the sun.» «Stand ready to fire,» Plough said. She was probing. She could feel the minds of the five men aboard the Plough, but once again she was frustrated. Once she could have enforced her slightest whim on such minds from far greater distances. Now she was unable to break past the red haze of anger that she felt emanating from the mind of Murdoch Plough. That there was danger was evident. She knew something about the weapon the men called a laser, for there had been lasers aboard to be used in mining. A quick probe of the mind of the female who was manning fire control on the Plough gave her an image of the Mother's hull with a sizable hole, quite large enough to send all of Mother's air blasting out into the vacuum. That would be quite damaging to the bio-masses she controlled, and quite inconvenient to her, for, since she was incapable of independent movement in space, she would, at best, be left floating. At worst, she would be tossed into the nuclear fire of the sun if she did not leave Mother before those who were approaching carried out their intentions. She caused the female voice to be sent to the man who threatened. «We need to talk, Plough.» «All I want to know is how you managed to kill my brother and four other people,» Plough said. One tendril of her extension crept past the barriers and she saw a mind filled with anger, knew that the
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