The Complete Stories of Philip K. Dick. The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick

“I don’t really know much more,” he said. “I haven’t been back there for a long time, back in the woods. I’m afraid to. I know something is going on, but –”

“Why don’t we both go and take a look?”

He smiled with relief. “You wouldn’t mind, would you? I was hoping you might suggest that. This business is beginning to get me down.” He pushed his blanket aside and stood up, brushing himself off. “Let’s go then.”

We walked around the side of the house and along a narrow path, into the woods. Everything was wild and chaotic, overgrown and matted, an unkempt, unattended sea of green. Doc Labyrinth went first, pushing the branches off the path, stooping and wriggling to get through.

“Quite a place,” I observed. We made our way for a time. The woods were dark and damp; it was almost sunset now, and a light mist was descending on us, drifting down through the leaves above.

“No one comes here.” Then Doc stopped suddenly, looking around. “Maybe we’d better go and find my gun. I don’t want anything to happen.”

“You seem certain that things have got out of hand.” I came up beside him and we stood together. “Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”

Labyrinth looked around. He pushed some shrubbery back with his foot. “They’re all around us, everywhere, watching us. Can’t you feel it?”

I nodded absently. “What’s this?” I lifted up a heavy, moldering branch, particles of fungus breaking from it. I pushed it out of the way. A mound lay outstretched, shapeless and indistinct, half buried in the soft ground.

“What is it?” I said again. Labyrinth stared down, his face tight and for­lorn. He began to kick at the mound aimlessly. I felt uncomfortable. “What is it, for heaven’s sake?” I said. “Do you know?”

Labyrinth looked slowly up at me. “It’s the Schubert animal,” he mur­mured. “Or it was, once. There isn’t much left of it, any more.”

The Schubert animal — that was the one that had run and leaped like a puppy, silly and wanting to play. I bent down, staring at the mound, pushing a few leaves and twigs from it. It was dead all right. Its mouth was open, its body had been ripped wide. Ants and vermin were already working on it, toiling endlessly away. It had begun to stink.

“But what happened?” Labyrinth said. He shook his head. “What could have done it?”

There was a sound. We turned quickly.

For a moment we saw nothing. Then a bush moved, and for the first time we made out its form. It must have been standing there watching us all the time. The creature was immense, thin and extended, with bright, intense eyes. To me, it looked something like a coyote, but much heavier. Its coat was matted and thick, its muzzle hung partly open as it gazed at us silently, study­ing us as if astonished to find us there.

“The Wagner animal,” Labyrinth said thickly. “But it’s changed. It’s changed. I hardly recognize it.”

The creature sniffed the air, its hackles up. Suddenly it moved back, into the shadows, and a moment later it was gone.

We stood for a while, not saying anything. At last Labyrinth stirred. “So, that’s what it was,” he said. “I can hardly believe it. But why? What –”

“Adaptation,” I said. “When you toss an ordinary house cat out it becomes wild. Or a dog.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “A dog becomes a wolf again, to stay alive. The law of the forest. I should have expected it. It happens to everything.”

I looked down at the corpse on the ground, and then around at the silent bushes. Adaptation — or maybe something worse. An idea was forming in my mind, but I said nothing, not right away.

“I’d like to see some more of them,” I said. “Some of the others. Let’s look around some more.”

He agreed. We began to poke slowly through the grass and weeds, pushing branches and foliage out of the way. I found a stick, but Labyrinth got down on his hands and knees, reaching and feeling, staring near-sightedly down.

“Even children turn into beasts,” I said. “You remember the wolf children of India? No one could believe they had been ordinary children.”

Labyrinth nodded. He was unhappy, and it was not hard to understand why. He had been wrong, mistaken in his original idea, and the consequences of it were just now beginning to become apparent to him. Music would survive as living creatures, but he had forgotten the lesson of the Garden of Eden: that once a thing has been fashioned it begins to exist on its own, and thus ceases to be the property of its creator to mold and direct as he wishes. God, watching man’s development, must have felt the same sadness — and the same humiliation — as Labyrinth, to see His creatures alter and change to meet the needs of survival.

That his musical creatures should survive could mean nothing to him any more, for the very thing he had created them to prevent, the brutalization of beautiful things, was happening in them, before his own eyes. Doc Labyrinth looked up at me suddenly, his face full of misery. He had ensured their sur­vival, all right, but in so doing he had erased any meaning, any value in it. I tried to smile a little at him, but he promptly looked away again.

“Don’t worry so much about it,” I said. “It wasn’t much of a change for the Wagner animal. Wasn’t it pretty much that way anyhow, rough and tempermental? Didn’t it have a proclivity towards violence –”

I broke off. Doc Labyrinth had leaped back, jerking his hand out of the grass. He clutched his wrist, shuddering with pain.

“What is it?” I hurried over. Trembling, he held his little old hand out to me. “What is it? What happened?”

I turned the hand over. All across the back of it were marks, red cuts that swelled even as I watched. He had been stung, stung or bitten by something in the grass. I looked down, kicking the grass with my foot.

There was a stir. A little golden ball rolled quickly away, back toward the bushes. It was covered with spines like a nettle.

“Catch it!” Labyrinth cried. “Quick!”

I went after it, holding out my handkerchief, trying to avoid the spines. The sphere rolled frantically, trying to get away, but finally I got it into the handkerchief.

Labyrinth stared at the struggling handkerchief as I stood up. “I can hardly believe it,” he said. “We’d better go back to the house.”

“What is it?”

“One of the bach bugs. But it’s changed. . . .”

We made our way back along the path, toward the house, feeling our way through the darkness. I went first, pushing the branches aside, and Labyrinth followed behind, moody and withdrawn, rubbing his hand from time to time.

We entered the yard and went up to the back steps of the house, onto the porch. Labyrinth unlocked the door and we went into the kitchen. He snapped on the light and hurried to the sink to bathe his hand.

I took an empty fruit jar from the cupboard and carefully dropped the bach bug into it. The golden ball rolled testily around as I clamped the lid on. I sat down at the table. Neither of us spoke, Labyrinth at the sink, running cold water over his stung hand, I at the table, uncomfortably watching the golden ball in the fruit jar trying to find some way to escape.

“Well?” I said at last.

“There’s no doubt.” Labyrinth came over and sat down opposite me. “It’s undergone some metamorphosis. It certainly didn’t have poisoned spines to start with. You know, it’s a good thing that I played my Noah role carefully.”

“What do you mean?”

“I made them all neuter. They can’t reproduce. There will be no second generation. When these die, that will be the end of it.”

“I must say I’m glad you thought of that.”

“I wonder,” Labyrinth murmured. “I wonder how it would sound, now, this way.”

“What?”

“The sphere, the bach bug. That’s the real test, isn’t it? I could put it back through the Machine. We could see. Do you want to find out?”

“Whatever you say, Doc,” I said. “It’s up to you. But don’t get your hopes up too far.”

He picked up the fruit jar carefully and we walked downstairs, down the steep flights of steps to the cellar. I made out an immense column of dull metal rising up in the corner, by the laundry tubs. A strange feeling went through me. It was the Preserving Machine.

“So this is it,” I said.

“Yes, this is it.” Labyrinth turned the controls on and worked with them for a time. At last he took the jar and held it over the hopper. He removed the lid carefully, and the bach bug dropped reluctantly from the jar, into the Machine. Labyrinth closed the hopper after it.