THE WORLD IN THE JUKE BOX

Originally published in Infinity, August 1956.

Buzzing wakened Dot Sarx and she lifted an eyelid. With the alarm, two hypo needles stung—one sparking energy, the other stilling panic. One moment she was slumbering in bed, dreaming, and the next moment she was sitting at the control panel, her dream buried, facing the tuti-frutti flashing that recorded what was going on in the Juke Box.

Ominous red pulsing drew the inspiraling raster of her notice to Sty Ten. She touched her finger to a stud and instantly it seemed to her she was hurtling with the telescreen into Sty Ten itself. For a second the scene of her dream rose up and overlapped the screen so that the flames burned through fathoms of water. And then the sea of her dream was gone and the flames remained.

Fire.

It violated nature for fire to start without flint and without lightning—and in the Juke Box the earth was flintless and no lightning charged the air. And yet flame rose, knotting itself to fibers of smoke.

In the early dawn it glowed on the hulking forms shambling around it, its light drawing them nearer, its heat driving them farther. It kindled a gleam in dull eyes and seemed to lend the shuffling shadows a stirring pattern of ritual dance.

As the image expanded Dot saw the Pawkerys mouthing the thick-tongued mutterings that made up their speech. She touched another stud and the mike hidden in Sty Ten crackled to life. The mumblings reaching her ear were meaningless as message-bearing sounds, but their uttering conveyed feelings of delight and dread.

A young male Pawkery squatted by the hungering fire and fed it dead branches. Dot thought a moment and identified him as Bork, one of the many sons of King Dzug—though she doubted that Dzug knew as much.

His Majesty Dzug Pawkery, a living gargoyle, strode toward the circling forms. He moved with regal dignity and yet his striding scissored the weed-grown earth at a clip that left his retinue far in his wake and forced him to hold his dunce cap in place. With his free hand he absently bloodied noses and rolled out a royal carpet for himself. The circle opened quickly and he halted a yard from the fire.

Bork was a shade slow in bowing—too slow to suit His Majesty. A mud-caked foot with raking nails kicked out and the subject fell on his knees. King Dzug kicked almost without thinking, maintaining regal dignity with a kind of knee jerk. His real attention focused on the fire.

His tongue licked out at his lips as if unconsciously imitating the leaping flame. He reached out to seize the quivering thing. Bork cried a warning. King Dzug did not deign to hear. He thrust his fingers among the flames.

He whipped them back and his face twisted like the roping fire. He bellowed and danced his agony. He paused to deliver a kick to the kneeling figure and stretched it out, nearly plunging its face into the fire.

Bork arched away and rolled over and over and clothed his body in dust. He rose and swatted sparks in his hair.

King Dzug tongued the royal fingers and stared at the fire. Without stirring his gaze from the fire he grunted something. Bork bowed and continuing the motion picked up two sticks.

He laid one stick on the ground and held the other upright. Thrusting the upright stick into a hole in the other, he spun it between his palms until he brought forth a spark. He fed the spark upon dried grass and twigs and branches and a twin to the first fire came into being.

King Dzug was watching him and the royal eyes narrowed as the hulking forms boomed and stamped approvingly.

For the first time in the year she had been in charge of the Juke Box, Dot twanged to a feeling other than loathing. She knew she must refrain from tampering with the inner workings of the Juke Box and yet she found herself wishing for a weapon and a way to use it, that she might stand between Bork and King Dzug.

As a young buck Dzug had with cunning wrested the dunce cap from his failing king. Since then he had peered and planned to foresee and forestall the coming of the young buck who would one day de-cap him.

Dot looked away. If Dzug dealt now with the potential threat of Bork she did not want to see it happen. She glanced up from the screen to the high window and saw through a pink pane the overarching dome of sky. It was an illusory dome, a bubble the first rocket had burst—and a bubble the Board had tensed out again to keep Earth pure. Dot allowed long moments to pass and then steeled herself to look back at the scene in Sty Ten.

She wondered if she could bring herself to go against her training. If time remained she could send down a pelting rain and force Dzug to think of taking shelter, not life.

But King Dzug had already left, and with him his retinue and most of the fire-watchers. Bork lay on the ground. Dot felt a sudden ebbing. Then she saw Bork was only bending low to feed sticks to the fires and felt an equally sudden flooding. She sat a while and then rose slowly, turned off the televisor, and moved like a sleep-walker back to bed.

She lay open-eyed for a time and then drifted down into the deeps of the sea of her dream.

For a moment an event had shaken her out of her lethargy and unsettled her into thinking frightening thought. But both hypos had worn off and the moment had gone, drained into the cesspool of time, and the lethargy returned.

* * * *

He seemed to worship his first find, bringing it offerings of wood and meditating on the silver cord of smoke that rose in the still air, tapering. On a clear bright day Dot was watching and saw Bork gaze up hopefully, as if willing the smoke to shape out into a jinni.

The smoke reached a height where it climbed no farther. It smudged out into a faint cloud, graying a growing circle of sky. Bork fed the fire, but the smoke rose no higher. It had reached the limit of Bork’s world.

Bork let the fire die and crouched brooding by the smoldering ashes, a dark wondering clouding his face. He leaped to his feet suddenly and flung up his arms, almost enfolding the torn smoke like a fakir starting to climb his rope.

He danced.

He was lame; one foot trailed, scratching its tractrix in the dust. But he danced with grace of inspiration.

Although she was his age Dot smiled as indulgently as a mother at her child, and when he ran down like a top and lay scratching himself in his sleep she turned from the screen with the first real laugh she could remember.

* * * *

Through a blue pane in the control tower Dot gazed away from the Juke Box and out across the plain to where the City stood. The spaced spires lined the horizon and seemed to stitch heaven to earth. Bubbling pride filled her lungs when she thought of the people living in the City. The people were her people and their greatness was hers.

She beamed as a mote grew into the visible. In three minutes it was a copter buzzing the tower, corkscrewing the air, and grounding alongside hers.

Dot hurried from the window to the control panel and pretended to be studying the telescreen. She quickly switched from Sty Ten to Sty Fifty, where Bork’s dabbling had made the least change, and wondered why she was flushing.

She heard footsteps climbing the winding stairs and did not face around.

Vern Churmen paused on the threshold. He smoothed his hair and draped his cloak so it would hang evenly and so all its glittering edging would show. Then, with a lifting of the eyebrows and a flaring of the nostrils, he entered, imposing in the trappings of a Tout.

He hawked his presence and Dot turned, becomingly startled and flatteringly pleased to see him.

Then the talk began and it was what it always was, small talk, like foothills around a challenging peak they feared to mount.

He was going on—she was aware of it in waves—about the upcoming race between DIANE (Device, Integrating and Analyzing, Numerical, Elective) and DORIS (Device, Optatively Reintegrating, Involute, Selective), both out of Mark V. “I’ve had a look at the breeding tapes they’re feeding both fillies and… But with the given track conditions (it’ll be a muddy track—unusually heavy tote board drag)…DORIS clocks fine, but she’s a morning glory, too high-strung, very likely to get off to a bad start…” He delivered his tip in the prescribed furtive whisper and for a moment held her wavering attention, “DIANE will win in a standstill. She’s ready.”

Dot nodded politely and glanced at the wall clock. It semaphored four-thirty and she found herself vaguely surprised to find herself vaguely disappointed that it wasn’t later. Strange feelings to be registering fleetingly in the mind of a nubile female with her ordained mate at hand, stranger with the more compelling feeling in her marrow that her life was running meaninglessly out.

How much longer would he stand chattering? She felt unable to bear any further the sounds his mouth was forming. She stared through a maize pane, pretended to find the looming of a little cloud alarming, and began to fiddle with the weather controls.

It was true that she had to keep the templum surrounding the Juke Box clear of rain, snow, and clouds to save the poor brutes inside from wondering about storms that threatened and then mysteriously slid down the sky. To keep them from guessing there was an outside. But this cloud turned out to be not much of a threat and—too soon—Dot sent it tumbling away.

She faced Vern again, but he seemed just as willing as she to avoid speaking of living together. The window had a drawing power that proved to be too much for him to struggle against and he moved to it and looked down through a jade pane.

The tower stretched up little more than forty feet, but it gave a good general view across the damped undulating of the Juke Box’s land area. Inside the Box, at the near end, a stream sprang into being just beyond a thicket and ran along, snaking in and out of groves, undercutting the caves in the low bluffs, winding past the villages of burrows that one of Dot’s predecessors had styled Sties, and then fell a little way, glistening like cornsilk, ran some more, and thrust into the ground and disappeared. If it had kept on, the stream would have run up against the curving black band that was the far end of the Juke Box and the edge of the Pawkery world.

The band was really a stripe of one-way opaqueness that ran all the way around and one-third of the way up that part of the force field that curved above ground and formed the shell of the Juke Box. Vern could look in through the stripe but not out the far end. The Pawkerys couldn’t look through the stripe at all, and the force field above it and over them appeared to be the open sky.

Vern shuddered, “It must seem to them they’re living in the bottom of a cup. That is, if they can handle the concept ‘cup’.”

He turned from the jade pane and joined a preoccupied Dot at the telescreen, where the doings down in Sty Fifty were leaping into immediacy.

A Pawkery hunter had stoned a rabbit and Pawkery scavengers gathered fast, watching the hunter tear the rabbit with his teeth, waiting for him to get his fill of the bleeding meat, whetting for his leavings. One woman—a girl, really; it was hard to tell how many years she had, though not so hard to tell how few she had coming—was too weak to hasten to the feasting. When she at last reached the banqueting place the other scavengers were wolfing the remains and she snared only a rag of flesh snagged on a splinter of bone. Dot searched her memory and came up with the girl’s name—Lida. She could see herself marking d. and the date beside the name on the Pawkery genealogical chart. Lida had the swollen belly of the starving. She was heavy with death.

Vern stood for a while, staring down at the Pawkerys and fixing them with loathing. He shivered his shoulders and the spell and turned to Dot. He looked pale. “They give me the creeps. If you weren’t here I’d never come near the place.”

Dot smiled. “Not even on Jukes Day?”

“Jukes Day!” he said with a scorn she knew he was far from feeling. “That’s different. Everyone has to then. But you can bet no one would if the Board stopped penalizing us for failing to show up.”

Dot knew it was so. In the beginning the idea, for all its underlying seriousness, had an appealing whimsicality. This showed in such touches as calling the Pawkery zoo the “Juke Box,” after the Jukes, who (the exasperatingly fragmentary writings that survived the Disaster indicated) were a family glorying in an imposing pedigree; whereas the Pawkerys—originally, father and mother and three sons and their wives—had amassed a record, as long as the arm of the law, of breaking out in nauseating diseases, misdemeaning, living from hand to mouth, and sinning against the light, all of which eminently fitted them for the carrying out of the idea. But the idea of sparing the Pawkerys, out of all the misfits the Board had weeded out and doomed, and setting them apart as a kind of royal family of bad examples, lost its appeal.

As time went on the Board, still fearing to taint the race, showed no sign of lifting the ban on contact with those who had left the City, before the establishment of the Board, and colonized planets of Iota Ursae Majoris and beyond—those who carried within their loins the seeds of their own destruction because they had not weeded out and doomed their misfits. As time went on, births in the stymied City dropped, while in the Juke Box the Pawkerys spawned and overflowed the caves and pocked the ground with their burrowing. And as time went on, fewer and fewer went to gape, until of late the Board had almost to use force to get the people out here where the Pawkerys could remind and warn them how humanity had once sunk—and might sink again.

Vern shuddered again and remembered he had to rush back to the City and pay a few touting calls. Dot watched his copter dwindle into the invisible.

She knew if she did not hold this post she would be as unwilling as Vern or the rest of her people to come near the Juke Box.

Or would have been…

She tuned the telescreen to Sty Ten.

* * * *

It seemed strange to Dot to watch one of these animals—she could not believe they had ever been kin to her—behaving like a man, and still more so to see him behaving like a thinking man. She smiled.

Bork stepped onto the platform and, holding to a lashing with one hand, made a sign with the other.

It was only when the balloon rose—and it rose as if the gasping cry of the horde of Pawkerys sent it up the sky—that it flashed across Dot’s mind what was really happening. Bork had deciphered the scrawling of the smoke and was now writing his own scrawl up the palimpsest of air. Still smiling, but with something of remorse, Dot touched a stud.

To her surprise, then up the scale to her horror, she saw the stripe of opaqueness at the far edge of the Juke Box narrow down. To have pressed the wrong stud was unthinkably careless!

Unfreezing, she pressed the right one this time and saw, to her relief, opaqueness creep up the curve of the dome, like ink spreading over blotting paper. It rose faster than the balloon.

The tower hummed to vibrant keening coming from the open mike. The Pawkerys, finding darkness closing over them, were setting up a wailing in Bork’s wake. The rising balloon brought on the rising darkness. Eternal night was the sky demon’s retort to Bork’s hubris. They suddenly remembered: the sky demon slew birds that beat their wings too high. Panic fed on panic in their chests, making them fear to feed the fire on the ground. Which of them knew what new terror the sky demon might send down?

The fire on the ground spat itself out and the only light they could see was the fire in the brazier casting a glow on the underbelly of the bag. But that, too, was waning as Bork vanished into the eye socket of Nothing. Their babble grew.

In the telescreen their figures darkened into the ground as if all was melting tar. Total opaqueness inside the Juke Box acted like a dark silvering and pearled the outer surface of the dome. When Dot gazed at it through a livid pane only the fire of Bork’s balloon burned through, like a filament giving up the ghost.

It flickered out.

She had no idea how long she waited, but she knew it would be better to wait a bit longer, wait until she was sure the balloon had lost its lifting power and sunk. But grave misgivings chilled her. She had failed in her trust. Why hadn’t she rushed to tell the Board of the finding of fire? What if something was going on in the dark—this very moment—that really called for informing the Board?

She felt herself swaying in a wind of her mind’s making. The wind swept her limbs toward the control panel and she found herself switching it from power line to battery and unplugging it. Once she pruned it of the telescreen circuit and slipped it out of the massive frontage of cabinets, it was surprisingly small and light, hardly bearing down on her shoulder when she slung it accordion-wise. When you came right down to it, it was merely a key—although a very special one, one that turned the force field projector buried under the geometrical center of the Juke Box on and off and channeled its power.

She spiraled downstairs and took off in her copter. In two tangents she was hovering over the center of the Juke Box. She reslung the control panel so she could face its dials more easily.

Her fingers hesitated to grasp a dial, as though fearing it would burn. A moment, and they walked swiftly to the dial and straddled it.

Slowly she verniered the opaqueness down, creating a disc of white—like a tiny cicatricle on the yolk of an egg. She saw something moving.

She had to enlarge the transparency, to see what it was. It was the top of the balloon, articulating in the greater curve of the force field, rolling sluggishly as if exercising lazily, as if luxuriating in warmth.

With a start she saw she had opened the iris too wide. But it was too late to undo the mistake her hand had made.

Bork was looking at her.

He stood twined about a thong on the dangling platform. The swinging and twisting and untwisting seemed to have greened his face. But the eyes in that face were the burning lenses of an imprisoned intelligence. They burned through the haze.

It frightened her. Up to now she had thought of him as behaving like a man. Now she was thinking of him as being a man. And the implications of that made her go hot all over.

He stared at her with a force that seemed to make the invisible field bulge. Then his gaze went past her and he saw the spires of the City lacing the horizon together. His lambent eyes flamed as if they were looking at all the kingdoms of all the worlds.

His eyes turned to her again. She became aware that his expression changed as his gaze shaped to her form. Was he embarrassed at seeing for the first time a woman—more than a mere woman, a goddess—clothed?

A strange shyness came over her as he kept looking at her from under shaggy eyebrows. It was enough, she thought, and she fingered the dial.

But there was no need to darken the Juke Box. Bork had already begun to slip away from her. The balloon was drifting down.

She tooled her copter off to a side and as the balloon descended lowered the opaqueness to its former setting. Through this shield she saw the platform touch earth and Bork leap out from under the wrinkling bag.

She wondered if the Pawkerys would try to curb him, keep him from pitting himself against the Unknown. She didn’t see why they should. After all, he had brought the light back with him (she smiled), and with fire he was more than a match for them.

* * * *

He skirted the Sties along his path, crept under the bluffs, stole past the cave where King Dzug sat thoughtfully picking the royal nose, threaded the groves, and, making a part in a thicket, reached the edge of his world.

He sat on a crest of midden, facing the force field screen as if looking through it. He seemed to be staring directly at the tower.

But that was impossible.

Dot got hold of herself. Again she disconnected the control panel, slung it over her shoulder, and spiraled downstairs. She hurried across the lawn. Off to the left her predecessors lay—the Board bestowed that honor, burial near the job, to those who served long and well—and the green gums of the graveyard grinned memento mori at her.

She shivered again. Bork seemed to be staring into her eyes. It shook her. There he was, not a yard away. Could he somehow see her as plainly as she was seeing him?

She suddenly waved a hand in front of his face. He didn’t blink.

He couldn’t see through. If anything, this was an even greater shock to her. How could he know where to look? It came to her that he was simply trusting she would again come to investigate—but how had he known where the tower stood?

Of course! When he was aloft he had seen it and grasped its meaning. He had somehow oriented himself and now, holding the lay of the land in his mind, he was gazing with an impersonation of imperturbability at the spot where he hoped she would be.

She smiled and was turning to leave when something impelled her to stay. It was his eyes. She read in them a passion for release, as if the Juke Box were a Leyden jar and himself the imprisoned spark.

An imp, an impulse, an impetus.

Her fingers implemented it; they dialed an opening, a peephole, in the opaqueness.

Drinking in the new wine of excitement reddening Bork’s face, she didn’t regret her imprudence. She felt shamelessly impenitent.

Bork spidered a hand to his chest and then swung the curving fingers toward her, as if hurling his body through the barrier to her side. He waited and looked at her hopefully.

“Oh,” she said to his unhearing ears in a confessional, conspiratorial whisper, “you want out, do you?”

Suddenly she knew she wanted him beside her. She looked at him hopelessly. She wanted him out, but she dared not let him out. She pantomimed helplessness.

Bork look puzzled. He pointed to the peephole, made a circle of thumb and forefinger, then exploded that circle and made another with a swing of his arm.

Dot smiled, shaking her head, and enlarged the peephole.

Bork rose from the midden on his good leg and in one iamb was at the gate to the big world. Instinctively Dot took a backward step, and had to laugh at herself. Bork was trying to lift a foot through and finding the opening impenetrable. His face clouded when he saw hers and she tried to make him see she wasn’t laughing at him. It seemed to get across to him, for his face unclouded and he smiled.

But there was something lacking in the smile, something missing from the eyes, though they were still smoldering.

Dot heard a droning and started.

Vern! He would soon be landing at the tower.

Quickly she waved farewell and began to close the opening. Bork stood dumbly; then, evidently spying the growing mote in the narrowing circle, he shook his head understandingly.

He pointed to the sun and to the length of his shadow and looked at her inquiringly.

She nodded. She would meet him at the same time tomorrow. But she put a finger to her lips.

He did the same and nodded and limped away.

* * * *

She had barely shoved the control panel back in place when Vern, smoothed and draped, lifted and flared, crossed the threshold.

She hoped he would fail to see the tendrils of smoke rising throughout the Juke Box, and he obliged. He had his mind on something nearer home and wasted no glance on the jade pane or the telescreen.

He had just come from filing a damage suit, having had the misfortune to suffer numerous contusions of a painful nature—he was still limping—when a faulty imprinted circuit caused his uniform to re-press itself while he was wearing it.

Dot listened and sympathized automatically, her (you might say) printed circuit of good manners in working order. But once she lost track of what he was saying, and he had to repeat himself.

“Drab Vern,” she was thinking, “for all his purple and yellow hair, for all his gaudy livery.”

She gave a slight start when he repeated his question, but he seemed not to see that. Quickly she got hold of herself and answered in a matter-of-fact way. But the thought and the feeling that went with the thought would not die away so quickly.

It was new to her to find fault with him and she felt a twinge and made up for it by nodding brightly to all he was saying—and once or twice she caught a strange look on his face.

How long could she hoodwink him? How long could she blindfold herself? Jukes Day was coming. In three weeks it would be here, dragging with it the unwilling visitors from the City; and her failure on the job—her betrayal of her trust—would come to light.

Vern seemed to be long in taking his leave. Oh, he was waiting for her to hand him her monthly report to the Board, which he often saved her the trouble of delivering.

Would the emerging of Bork have meaning for the Board? Something tempted her to doubt it, and in writing the report she had not gone out of her way to highlight the activity in the Juke Box. She had done little more than note the bare facts as a sop to her (you might say) printed circuit of conscience, but she had so swathed them in minutiae of temperature readings, births and deaths, force field fluctuations, and the like that they were all but shrouded.

She found herself looking at Vern in a new light—or rather in the shadow of Bork—and wondering how she could ever have borne him.

She handed him the report and he fluttered the sheaf at her as he entered his copter. There was a deep troubling in her at this moment. Her nerve seemed to be failing her.

There was still time to call him back and point up Bork’s doings. But she returned Vern’s wave and watched him disappear.

* * * *

If this be treason, she thought wryly…

One day he failed to appear and she waited a long while in vain, biting her lips until they bled. She returned to the tower and probed the Juke Box with the telescreen. She found no sign of him.

Likely he was down in his burrow. She hoped he wasn’t ailing. But to have him ailing was better than to have to admit that Dzug might have done away with him or—what was even worse—that he was tiring of a courting that was getting him nowhere.

But Bork showed up the day following and she felt strong new stirrings as if her heart were a ship rocking at anchor.

Something new seemed to be stirring in him, too. She became aware the lambent eyes were fixing on her face in a way they never had before. She tried to make out the feeling underlying his look.

Was it loving? Was it pitying? She was unable to tell, but it seemed to her to be a longing look.

She smiled at him tenderly; his eyes fell for a moment and then fully met hers again, and he answered her smile.

But whatever he had been feeling had withdrawn from his eyes and he himself soon withdrew.

The morning after, she saw two figures coming toward her. They were moving at little more than a walk and it took some moments for her to realize one was hunting the other down.

The hunted one limped and the hunter, enjoying the hunt, held his own pace down and hefted his club as if paying out slack to a leash-straining hound.

The limping figure, the hunted one, was Bork. The hunter was a brute with a name that sounded something like Chixigg. Dot had let fall a warm rain not long before and the going was treacherous. Pieces of water lay scattered like a puzzle of the sky. Bork limped on. He kept looking back. Chixigg moved smoothly, not slopping the rain or its afterdip that pooled in the hollow marking the trepanning that had let out all the evil spirits his head once housed.

They rounded the Sties. The other Pawkerys were keeping out of the chase and out of sight. Only their heads bubbled up out of the burrows as if the mud were boiling. Bork and Chixigg passed the bluffs and the caves, threaded the groves, and neared the thicket, which seemed now a stand of javelins.

Dot knew she had to deliver Bork.

There was only one way to save him—cut off the force field and let him out, then switch it back on in Chixigg’s face. She forgot the Board, she forgot herself, she forgot everything.

The controls were cold and hard to her touch.

Her ears rang with the screaming of crucified air as two weathers met and mingled.

The Juke Box area shimmered, settling almost imperceptibly into the cup of the force field. For a splith of a second a hairline of nothing showed, then crumbs of rock spilled into the space and wiped out the mark of the perimeter.

Opaqueness had gone with the field and Bork saw her waving him across. He moved warily, putting out his hand like one blind and feeling the air where the barrier had been.

She called impatiently. “Come on!”

Though Chixigg stood frozen, his mouth an “O” at the opening of vast new vistas, he would soon snap out of his freeze and spring after Bork, who was sniffing his way as if time did not matter. What possessed him? “Hurry!”

At last his hands convinced him his eyes weren’t tricking him and he limped a lively limp as he iambed to her.

They stared at each other, somewhat unbelievingly. They were able to touch each other but neither reached out.

Chixigg’s unfreezing unfroze Dot. She quickly turned to the controls to cut off his menacing approach.

A heavy and hurting hand struck hers away from the dials.

Drowning in pain, she saw Bork looming larger than life and wavery, as if through imperfect glass, and she thought crazily of uncorking him.

She stared at him in bewilderment. “Don’t you understand?” She pointed to Chixigg. “He’ll cross in a second unless I turn on the field.” Her hands moved to the dials again.

Bork’s hands locked around her wrists. His fetid breath stifled her.

She grew angry. “Are you crazy? Do you want him to kill you?”

Coldness at her marrow. Are you crazy? It would be a wonder if he were not crazy. Her people had bred his people to be crazy. She had been crazy to think he was sane.

Still holding her, Bork grinned at Chixigg and called something to him. Chixigg grinned at Bork. He threw back his head, flinging spray. He shouted—it was more call of partridge than call of human—and thumped his club on the earth ecstatically.

A legion of sounds answered and the caves and burrows spewed Pawkerys. Bludgeoning the air with clubs and carving it with knives and spears of sharpened bone, the Pawkerys swarmed out of what had been the Juke Box.

Leading the horde, six harnessed Pawkerys jolted King Dzug along in a spanking new four-wheeled chariot. His whip flicked their hides raw. He savaged the reins and the team slithered to a stop one yard in front of Bork and Dot. Dzug leaped from his chariot.

Bork knelt before him, forcing Dot to do the same.

Dzug waved them to their feet. He thrust his fingers among Dot’s locks. He bent back her head and peered into her face. Lambent eyes like Bork’s lit a face chiseled out of some porous rock.

Dzug unsnarled his fingers abruptly, bringing tears to Dot’s eyes. He turned to scan the horizon.

Bork spoke and Dzug shot another look at Dot and this time took in the control panel slung across her shoulder. Dzug barked and a male Pawkery raised his spear and aimed it at Dot.

Her heart stopped. But the Pawkery—automatically, the name Doey came up—only touched the tip of his spear to her throat with one hand and with the other gestured to her to keep her hands from the dials.

Bork unfettered her wrists, which she did not dare to rub, and without glancing at her moved to Dzug’s side. He talked, punctuating his talking by pointing to the tower, the copter, and the City. Pawkerys—male and female, young and old—yokeled.

Dot heard a throbbing. Not her heart, though that was throbbing, too.

Vern!

The Pawkerys heard the throbbing and saw in the gilt-edging sun a glittering bird, small but growing.

Bork cried a warning.

The Pawkerys ran into each other in their rush to take cover in the thicket. Some made for the tower and others, instinctively trusting to their natural camouflaging of spattered mud, flung themselves into ditches and lay prone.

Doey grabbed Dot with a sweating paw and dragged her into the brush. They crouched behind hawthorn saplings. The spear pricking her back told her not to call out.

If Vern failed to see that the dark stripe of the otherwise transparent Juke Box had vanished he would not know all had vanished. He would not know the Pawkerys were loose.

Dot prayed he would use his eyes and his brains and head back to the City for help.

The bird swooped down. But it didn’t land. It came to roost on nothing. It hung motionless for a moment and hope surged through Dot.

It landed. Vern stepped out.

Dot bit her lips. It took a minute for her to sense that the tip of the spear was not touching her back. She slowly moved her head and cornered her eyes.

Doey, gaping at what the bird had laid, was forgetting to guard her and had ordered arms.

She got set. It took Doey by surprise when she made the dash. She broke through the javelin wood, her spinal cord writhing, recoiling from the spear that would nail it down.

Vern had paused momentarily to wonder mildly at the abandoned chariot. He was nearing the tower when Dot came panting up to him.

Hurriedly he smoothed, draped, lifted, flared. He blushed at her heaving breast.

“Oh, good morrow, Citizen Sarx.”

She recovered her breath.

“We have to take off. Hurry!”

He lifted higher, flared wider.

“Leave your post? You’re joking.”

She knew she was looking wild.

“Turn back, Vern! Get help! The Pawkerys are loose!”

“Oh?” The joke was in poor taste.

She wanted to beat understanding into him. The thicket was moving. She remembered her controls. There might be time to seal in most of the horde.

Too late. The horde was upon them. They were Pawkeried about. Vern was calm.

“How did they get loose? Power shorted somehow, I suppose, hum?”

The Pawkerys stared at Vern in marveling silence. Dot and Vern stood in a halo of clear space, the Pawkerys around them like microbes around mold growth.

Vern might be able to burst through, Dot thought.

She whispered tensely, “Run!”

Vern smiled at her.

“Now, now, my dear. Leave them to me.”

She was sick with fear. All the males of her people were Verns. If he failed, all who followed him in trying to deal with the Pawkerys would fail.

Vern folded his arms and gazed at them kindly. It was touching. The poor brutes were free and didn’t know what to do with their freedom. Likely they thought they were lost and were afraid with the newborn’s fear on being thrust from the warm womb.

It was touching, but he couldn’t help wanting to move away from their overpowering stink.

But the poor troglodytes were so clearly out of their element he made up his mind to herd them back as gently as he could—though he did want to get this over with as quickly as he could and get back to telling Dot the really exciting news about the race.

They were muttering now and he raised a hand to still them.

“Back, back.”

Gently but firmly. No need to frighten the poor beasts further.

“Go back, go back.”

The muttering swelled. Chixigg moved nearer. Vern brought his down-staring gaze to bear on this impudent creature. A shade more firmness.

“Back, back.”

He frowned. Why weren’t they backing? He unfrowned. He had to smile at himself. Of course! The words would mean nothing to them. He skyed his eyes. Unreasoning brutes!

He brushed the air with the back of his hand to show them.

The circle closed in.

The worm at his temple came to life. He didn’t know where to look. They were all around him. Their unblinking eyes—not at all like the friendly winking lights of DIANE or DORIS—impaled him.

Chixigg reached out to Vern and felt the dazzling silk of his cloak.

Vern humored him, though he winced to think of the markings those impertinent paws would leave.

The silk tore. Vern pulled away, angrily, to a longer scream of ripping, but Chixigg still held to him daintily by the strip, like a bridesmaid carrying a train.

The catenary straightened, tautened, as if the brute were reeling him in. The one with the tall cone on his head grunted something and the tone of the answering grunts lifted Vern’s scalp.

He remembered the rabbit.

His eyes rolled wildly, trying to escape taking in that ill-bred mass. He suddenly broke loose from the one with the top of his head sucked in. He ducked through the circle and darted toward his copter. But Pawkerys, their pupils live coals, blocked the way. He turned and darted into the tower and across the ground floor, bolting for the rear door. Once through the door, he could reach his copter from behind.

The door wouldn’t give.

He screeched. “Let me out!” His nails scraped at the bronze. He was a corpse scratching at its coffin lid.

* * * *

When Dot came to she found Bork squatting at her side. He had unslung the control panel and was trying to make out how it worked. Chixigg entered the tower and twisted up out of sight. Soon she heard and saw the many-colored glass of the dome shatter. Other Pawkerys stole upon the copters, ready to dodge if the big birds stirred, and crippled them. A boy came running with a fluttering torch of fennel and fired them. The ghosts of their guts went up in greasy dove-gray columns. The main body of Pawkerys started to swarm toward the City. Dzug’s team yoked itself and stood champing.

Dzug hovered, smiling down at Bork. Without altering his smile he plucked a spear from the hand of one of his retinue. One who had stolen the lightning (that there was such a thing was somehow in his memory) of the gods could steal the thunder of Dzug. Now that Dzug’s realm was boundless his grip had to be ail the tighter. Still smiling he gripped the spear tighter and thrust.

Dot never knew whether it was her scream or the shadow of the spear that warned Bork.

Bork slid away from the point. It grazed him and, whetted with the taste of blood, sought him again.

Bork catted to all fours but Dzug pressed on and gave him no pause. The thirsting spear drank again, but not its fill. Fear took hold of Bork and dark shadows floated before his eyes.

He rose and ran. One of Dzug’s retinue stuck out a foot and Bork stumbled but kept going. He was in the clear now and heading for the Juke Box area, hoping to lose himself in the burrows. And now, when he was really running for his life, he made surprising time.

Clouds impinged on Dot’s consciousness. No eyes were on her as she crept to the control panel. All eyes were enjoying the spectacle of King Dzug desperately holding to the spear as it lapped after Bork. She twirled dials imploringly.

The sky turned to clay. An instant’s growth of lightning took root. Windfall of thunder stoned them all.

Veiling her eyes against the hail, Dot passed a cowering Dzug. As soon as she felt she was treading Pawkery midden she tensed out the force field around the Juke Box.

Immediately there was the silence and stillness of another weather.

She had been prepared to abandon all hope, but when she looked around at the trembling apart of saplings she saw Bork.

He emerged from the thicket. His face was white where hail or sweat had plowed it. His legs gave under him and he sat in a bowed mass, not moving his head when she tore her underclothing and bandaged his ribs.

* * * *

Dot had not restored the opaqueness. When she looked toward the City that night she saw a pyre.

The next morning she saw the tower, its dome a gouged Argus, a web of empty leading, and wondered dully if the Board, too, lay in shatters.

Away out over the plain and streaming from the City she saw toward noon something like a crowd of people. At first she wasn’t sure who they were, but after they had come a little nearer, although they were still some way off, she saw they were at least not naked Pawkerys, and her heart leaped.

A hushed and ashen hope that her people had risen from the flames took wing in her breast. Meanwhile they had moved nearer and the more she stared the less she could hold back tears of joy-

She could tell by the silks that making up the crowd were Touts (poor Vern!) and Bingoists and Pollsters and all the rest and her heart made holiday.

They moved unsteadily—it must have been a wearing mix-up—but they moved on. And now they had come almost to the edge of the Juke Box and she could see clearly who they were.

They had the Pawkery face.

With benumbing crystallinity she watched the wedge of King Dzug’s chariot split the crowd. His Imperial Majesty, swaddled in a bloody stole, stepped down and toddled regally back and forth on high heels.

Bork stood looking out, a Moses on Pisgah, forlornly gazing on the promised land.

Dot began to laugh and couldn’t stop, not even when Bork glared at her. It had suddenly struck her—this was Jukes Day.

When she at last choked off her laughing she was verging on tears. She turned from the Pawkerys parading their finery and looked inward.

Beyond the thicket, sunlight lent the stream a warm pulsing. All was not lost. At least she had Bork to herself.

Not quite.

She heard a moaning and saw a figure crawling toward them.

It was the starveling Lida. From the crest of midden she stared at the cavorting Pawkerys. There came over her the lost look of a child shut out of a magic mountain. She spilled and clawed to the edge of the force field. She pressed her bony form against the implacable wall and whimpered. The hair falling over her face muffled the sound and the wall seemed to give back a peering echo. The vapor of her panicky breathing fogged out on adamant nothing and curtained mocking faces.

First sight of Lida lit a fuse in Dot but the fire raging along her veins fizzled out. Her eyes softened. It wasn’t as if she would have to share Bork with this pitiful creature.

They would simply have to put up with one another. She smiled gravely. It would be no easy job. They could never be on the same footing. But she would be kind to the poor thing.

She hoped there were no other lost souls lurking in the Juke Box.

* * * *

Her belly at last made up her mind and she was fighting for the scraps Bork tossed aside. She and Lida were evenly matched and it soon became politic to share and share alike, though they still glared at each other as they gnawed.

Other things changed.

One day there was no Dzug.

Chixigg passed by, cutting a dash in the bloodied dunce cap. The Pawkerys at first hung about the Juke Box and pointed in at whichever of the prisoners they spotted, and purpled laughing. But as time went on more and more of them drifted away across the landscape as if seeking a way out of the horizon.

And each one of the few who stayed anywhere near the Juke Box no longer came to make sport but turned his head away from it as if he didn’t want it to remind him of something he had shut away in his skull.

And so, although the Juke Box might in time become a lost Eden, it was now a place taboo.

Bork’s eyes had lost their fire and he grew heavy and slept much. He never tinkered nowadays. He lorded a world where game abounded, filling his traps faster than he was able to empty them; where grain and fruit had rich communion with the wind; where the largest cave was his and two females did his bidding.

* * * *

Lida, sunk in her own thoughts, was licking her fingers.

Dot gazed at the lonely flickering figure and thought, why must we hate each other? It might pay to make friends with the girl. She could afford to be gracious to Lida. She could hold her own against Lida when it came to clawing, so it wouldn’t seem a sign of weakness if she made the first move.

Her body, at least the part of it she turned to the fire, was warm but her soul was shivering. She felt the need of warmth and understanding. True, she had Bork to herself. He hadn’t given Lida a glance since she crawled into sight and his only intercourse with her was his grunting at her to bring water or wood—and this was another reason why Dot could afford to be gracious.

But he was hardly the most charming of lovers.

Maybe she would find the missing tenderness if she got at the sister-feeling in Lida. She rose and circled the fire.

Lida watched her with eyes that showed suspicion. Dot smiled down. Lida looked sullenly. The pouched eyes took in Dot’s flowing, though shredding and blackening, clothing resentfully.

Dot had picked up a few words.

“Greufir!”

Lida stared blankly at Dot.

Dot turned down her mouth, then recovered her smile.

“Gur!”

Lida’s stare hardened.

Dot gave it one last try, gamely.

“Zutmak!” A look of distaste passed across Lida’s face and she turned her back to Dot.

Feeling beaten, and angry at having demeaned herself in vain, Dot returned to her place. She had failed to get through to Lida.

She was wrong.

Dot’s move had stilled whatever qualms Lida had about challenging Dot’s status and had sparked Lida to make a move of her own.

When Bork came into the cave, belching, Lida greeted him as softly as the tongue allowed.

Bork looked at her in surprise and grunted back. He seemed to be seeing her for the first time.

That night Bork and Lida drew off into the depths of the cave.

Dot lay curled up with her back to the fire, watching the dumb show of shadows on the wall of the cave searchingly. Leaving mind and manners out of it, how could he favor that—that pale bloated grub over Dot?

The following morning Lida answered Dot’s gaze by opening her grinning gap in an arch of triumph. But as it turned out, that night Bork favored neither over the other. And the morning following that, Lida’s mouth seemed more the opening of a tomb, and when Dot emerged from the depths of the cave Lida gave her a vicious pinch as they passed.

Airtight, Dot thought. She would wait her chance and turn off the field when no one but Lida was at its edge, let her cross (rather, lean on nothing and fall across), then turn it on.

She lived on hope of that chance.

* * * *

A heavy shadow was moving across her face. She lifted an eyelid and cringed within her housing of flesh.

Her shadow skin sloughing as she leaned into light, Lida, damp as the oozing walls of the cave, was looming. A stone, a boulder almost, poised in her uplifting hands.

People in glass houses, Dot thought hysterically.

She slued her body as Lida dashed the stone at her. Slivers of lightning split into darkness.

The dark shroud lifted. The rock had merely grazed her temple. But it pained and wet warmth stuck to her fingers when she touched them to it.

She sat up quickly and there was a tutti-frutti flashing behind her eyes. The fire was burning low but she could see Lida had fled. She sank back with a sigh.

She felt for the panel, the key. Her fingers crawled the floor of the cave. In panic she sat up quickly again, and again a mosaic of pain lit her brain.

She looked around for the control panel. She was too dazed to see it at once but if it had been a snake it would have bitten her—if it hadn’t been a snake that was all entrails.

The rock had missed crushing her skull but it had caved the shell of the panel and extruded a mess of molybdenum electrodes.

She crept to the mouth of the cave and thrust out like a tongue. She gazed up at the moon and the stars—which one was Iota Ursae Majoris?—and wondered if the Juke Box had lost its covering.

She rose tremblingly but gathered strength as she went. She descended the bluff. Her body all one pulse, she darted along the stream, the moon and stars pacing her above and below. Hardly marking her way, she bore on, her face stony but wet.

She reached the midden and saw she needed to go no farther.

In bowed silhouette against the sky Lida was beating her fists against nothing.

Dot returned to the cave, moving slowly to think. There was still hope. Maybe someday, Bork would regain the spark and calculate pi or radius or whatever it was—she wished she had really learned math—and find the center of the Juke Box and sink a shaft to the buried force field projector and worry out of it the way it worked and deliver them. She believed it because it was absurd. By that time the Pawkerys would welcome—would have to if they didn’t want to—their legendary fire-bringer. Anyway, pending those happenings, the Juke Box would protect as well as imprison.

And meanwhile she would have to watch out for Lida, sleep with one eye open.

She wakened from the sea with a start. A heavy shadow was falling across her again. She cringed and looked around.

It was Bork entering the cave. He flung a brace of rabbits to the floor. His glance slipped past Dot and fell on the smashed controls.

What she saw of his face—the down had turned into barbed tangle—clenched like a fist. He bent over her and pulled her to her feet by an arm.

He stropped his hand on her cheeks. She grunted in pain. Her knees gave and she sank to them.

“No, no! Lida did it! Lida did it!”

But he was beyond hearing her voice and much farther beyond understanding her words even if blood had not clotted them. The key (you might say) had snapped off in the lock and in the snapping had jammed the wards. In fine, the smashing the controls had taken had knocked the weather down a notch or two. It was always cold when the sun slid away.

There was an aching under her left collarbone. If only she had the use of the hypos. That would have been one way out of the Juke Box. At first she had thought of finding another way out, and her eyes kept following the fall of the bluff almost sheer to the stream.

She was coming to accept, if not to welcome, pain. It was only fair that she should atone in some measure for her great guilt. And yet it was something more that made her friends with pain.

Joy-sorrow, good-evil, black-white—on the negative pole’s charge depended the potential of the positive pole. And watching the careless way Lida went up and down the crumbling path in the face of the bluff, Dot stored energy for the time of hope’s fulfilling.

The streaming of time wore the pebble days smooth, and one evening as she lay by the fire her memory picked up and handed over a pebble. She turned it around and wondered which had won the race—DIANE or DORIS. She dropped it quickly.

Lida stood over her.

Dot narrowed her eyes and gunned her reactions. But Lida, as if she had never borne Dot any ill will, much less tried to kill her, was gazing at her trustingly.

Lida spoke. A strange stirring in her belly frightened her.

Dot rose and stared at Lida coldly. Did the girl really expect sympathy or help?

Lida shifted her feet nervously, the trusting look beginning to melt into a mask of tragedy.

Dot grimaced. She sighed and told Lida to stand still.

She examined the girl. Lida stood tense. Dot finished. She asked Lida a question and nodded when she heard the answer. She gazed at Lida strangely. Lida stood tenser. Dot told her she was heavy with life.

In the next few moments Lida veered back and forth between being overbearing, as one carrying Bork’s first child, and being fawning, as one who would be needing midwifing.

For a while Dot could stop staring at each shadow to see if it lived. She breathed deeply the stale air of the cave. Surcease. For a while the shadows would not hold shudders.

Still, her eyes followed the fall of the bluff and she felt vaguely cheated.

The setting sun broke through clouds. It lent the stream a warm pulsing that reflected back on Dot.

Rubbing a painful swelling of her left lid, she remembered the way things were in her childhood, the way the Board had run the City Crèche.

She gestured suddenly as if flinging away a handful of pebbles. She would start from scratch. She began making hopeful plans. There were many things to think of and many things to do—delivering a woman of child and helping to raise the child were no light matters.

First she had to warn Lida about going up and down the path.