*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79958 ***




  =Delfield had his own problems on the tiny asteroid without listening
  to the complaints of a child. He wished Susie’d stop talking about—=




                           The Pink Puppy Dog

                           by Mark Reinsberg




That was a hard-luck day for the Delfield family on K-840. In the early
relative morning while everyone slept, a shard struck their asteroid.

Awakened from a sleep as vacant as the space surrounding their hermetic
shack, Delfield felt their tiny fragment of a planet shudder in its
orbit between Mars and Jupiter. He saw the position of the stars shift
in the transparent dome overhead. Then he heard Susie wailing in the
next compartment.

He jumped up and ran to the child, but Jean was already there,
comforting Susie in her arms. She was a pretty two-year-old with brown
ringlets and a skin so fair that veins were visible on her forehead.
Tears welled from her yellow-gray eyes.

“It threw her out of bed,” said Jean, with something of the child’s
fright in her own eyes. “What happened?”

“Could have been a rock ramming into us. I don’t know. Could even be a
spaceship. I’ll have to go see.” He embraced Jean and held her close
with Susie in-between. “It’s all right, Susie, it’s all right. It’s all
right.”

“It’s all right,” said Jean. “Mommy and daddy protect you.” Delfield
heard the throb of the air compressor, muted beneath their shack’s
thick gravity floor.

“Did that just go on?” he asked his wife. He was frowning and listening
through Susie’s wails.

“I didn’t notice.” She bounced the little girl playfully but her aside
was sober.

Delfield strode to the hermestat. There was a slight drop in air
pressure.

“Anything?” said Jean.

“It’s down to thirteen.”

“That could be normal leakage, couldn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Delfield, “but we’d better check. We absorbed quite a
jarring.”

A prospector’s shack is small, a hemisphere less than thirty feet
in diameter with a large triangular room in the center and three
tiny compartments along the sides. But the surface area of the outer
shell is enormous when you go searching for leaks. Delfield ran his
eyes along the shelved, toy-cluttered wall of Susie’s room. Then he
inspected his own room, and finally the kitchen-bathroom compartment.
No obvious signs of a crack.

“I’ll make a thorough check from the outside,” he said, putting on his
clothes. Susie had stopped crying and Jean had laid her down in their
double bed.

“This is one risk you didn’t tell me about,” Jean said while tickling
Susie. The little girl was giggling delightedly.

“More tickle,” she said each time Jean stopped.

“Collision in space is mathematically almost impossible,” said Delfield.

“But it happened to us,” Jean said drily.

He knew what was going on in her mind. She had knowingly assumed all
the apparent hazards of an asteroid prospector’s life—bad synthetic
food, unhealthy close quarters, isolation from people. There was space
sickness, too, and gravity disease, and always the possibility of a
jammed airlock or failure of some other _nearly_ perfect machine. On
which their lives depended.

Now this new peril.

“You needn’t worry, dear. It’s a trillion to one it won’t happen
again.” He grinned and she smiled wrily.

“Say, you don’t think that was the man you were expecting? Making a
crash landing?”

“The Mars Metals representative?” Delfield laughed. “Well, if so, we
won’t get the contract.”

Jean laughed too, but it really wasn’t very funny. They were both
tensely awaiting his arrival. The ore samples they’d sent had aroused
interest. That was definite. Mars Metals officials don’t travel a
hundred million miles from Ceres just to pay a social call.

Delfield got into his space boots, and Jean helped him put on the rest
of the suit.

“Just when is this man supposed to arrive?” Jean asked as they adjusted
the helmet. Relative time had so little meaning from planet to planet,
and Jean had never been able to understand the new absolute time that
astronomers had worked out for interplanetary use.

Neither had Delfield, too well.

“Figure he’ll be here around suppertime.”

Jean winced. “Oh Dave! How can I make a decent meal with synthetics?”
She was a short, pert brunette with Susie’s fair skin and a naiad-like
waist, and expressive round eyes of sapphire gray.

“Honey, this isn’t like back on Earth when you bring home the boss for
supper. These reps aren’t impressed by home cooking on an asteroid.
They want rich ore, not rich food.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Delfield walked clumsily in his spacesuit towards the airlock. Then it
happened as always. Susie popped out of bed and grabbed hold of his leg
and started crying.

“Don’t go, daddy! Don’t go in airlock!” She wailed so forlornly and
pathetically that it usually broke Delfield’s heart, but now he was
impatient.

“It’s all right,” said Jean. “Daddy will be right back.”

“Don’t go!” cried Susie. Jean tried to detach her by force,
unsuccessfully. Delfield himself was afraid to move, for fear his
clumsy boots might come down on the child’s bare feet.

“Scoot, Susie!” he ordered. “Go play in your room.” Delfield was
irritated.

“What makes her so damn insecure?” he demanded of Jean. He’d gone out
in his suit at least two hundred times since they set up, three months
ago, on K-840. Somehow, Susie couldn’t get used to the idea.

“Susie, how would you like to close the doors?” Jean suggested.
Resourceful of her.

Delfield picked up the motif. “Yes, Susie, help mommy push the buttons.”

On a panel in the central, triangular room were three toggle switches
Susie loved to play with. They opened and shut the sliding doors of
each room. Actually, they were spaceproof emergency hatches rather than
simple doorways, sealing off the three outside compartments in case of
a punctured hull.

“Push buttons,” agreed Susie.

Jean carried her to the panel and the child stretched out her hand
eagerly to flick the switches. With a muffled rumble the bulkheads slid
shut. Susie was pleased.

“Now,” said Jean, “open the kitchen door for daddy.” The airlock was a
bulbous extension of the kitchen compartment.

“Say,” said his wife, “the compressor has stopped.”

Delfield nodded in his helmet. “Yes I noticed.”

“Then there’s no air leak? You don’t have to go outside?”

“It could be a slow leak, one that wouldn’t start the compressor going
until our hermestat was down to thirteen pounds per square inch. We’d
never find the hole from the inside but out in space I’d see air
escaping like steam.”

Delfield fastened his helmet and stepped into the lock. Always when he
did he thought of the expense. It cost a dollar’s worth of air each
round trip he made. Trivial amount to the successful miner but he
wasn’t in that class.

Jean came in over the helmet radio. “Darling the compressor’s started
again.”

“Yes it should. That’s the air we lost in the lock.” He walked gingerly
on the surface of Asteroid K-840. There was no atmosphere of course
and there was no perceptible gravity either. His magnetic boots clung
to the jagged mile-thick rock with a grip the manufacturers guaranteed
would “never fail.” But how many tales had he heard of asteroiders
taking one vigorous uncautious step into eternal space? He thought of
his suffocated spacesuited corpse floating in that infinite tank and
his steps slowed to a guarded shuffle.

“See anything?” Jean asked.

“Not yet.” He climbed the domed roof of their shack where he could see
the full hemisphere surface. There were no telltale jets of steam.
“Looks all right,” he said at last.

“Good! Come on in then and have breakfast.”

“A little later dear. I want to go over and see what hit us.”

“Can’t that wait?”

“Costs money to go in and out,” he reminded her.

He and Jean had left Earth with enough reserve for at least a year, so
they thought. But finding an asteroid was far more difficult than the
many glowing magazine articles had suggested. All the big ones like
Ceres and Pallas and Juno had been staked out for over a generation,
with meager returns.

Then James Gorton found erbium and thulium on Lutetia, and the great
Rare Earths Rush of ’57 was on. By the time Delfield had given up his
metallurgy job and reached the Belt, all the small asteroids of the
mile-diameter class had also been gobbled up. After a month’s futile
search, Delfield solved the problem by buying up another man’s unworked
claim.

That left them with money enough for six months, half of which was now
gone.

“Pink puppy dog,” said Susie. One of her stuffed toys, he recalled.

“What about pink puppy dog, sweetheart?” Delfield asked.

Susie babbled happily and incoherently into the radiophone.

“Listen, Jean. I think it must have hit on the other side. I’m going to
work my way over there.”

“Dave,” Jean protested. “Don’t go without breakfast all morning just to
save a little money.”

“Please,” said Delfield irritably. “This is important.”

He strapped the portable jet onto his suit. It was a nozzle attached
to a carboy of nitrogen gas. Delfield squirted it in the opposite
direction from which he wanted to go, sailing low above the rocky
surface at a cautious twenty miles an hour. Abruptly he was on the
daylight side of K-840, illuminated by the pale diminished sun, little
brighter at this distance than the terrestrial full moon.

“Dave, don’t you think if this man’s coming for supper I ought to
prepare something fancy?”

“Well, sure, why not??”

“I think I’ll radio Thetis for some frozen food. Have them make a
special delivery.”

Delfield tried hard to control his annoyance. “Look, honey, that’s
awfully expensive, and I don’t think it’s necessary.”

“But Mars Metals is so important to us. You want to make a good
impression on this man. It’s certainly worth the investment.”

“No, Jean, I don’t want you to do that.”

Delfield scanned K-840 in the dim light. In shape it was rather like
a mashed cigar butt, with raw, uneroded crags jutting at all angles,
and signs of terrible stress where the asteroid had splintered away
from some large parent body. There was in fact no ground smooth enough
and large enough on the daylight side to provide foundation for their
hermetic hut. But it was on the daylight side that Delfield had
discovered the praseodymium-ytterbium deposits, and it was there that
he carried out his small-scale refining operations each day.

And it was there, as if aimed at the spot, that a massive shard had
landed. It was a boulder that on Earth might weigh a thousand tons.
On K-840 it weighed nothing. But its mass and inertia had squashed
Delfield refinery to the shape of a lettuce leaf. He let out an
anguished wail.

       *       *       *       *       *

Delfield worked most of the day without food or water, without
returning to the shack. He strove frantically to clear away the rocky
debris. He blasted and shoved and dug and hauled.

“Please, darling. Please let it go,” his wife pleaded.

“Got to get it done before the man from Mars gets here. We don’t stand
a chance if he sees it like this.”

“Oh Dave, this isn’t our kind of life. Why do you struggle so?” Her
voice became despairing as the hours passed.

Delfield’s answers grew shorter. He was sweaty, breathless, exhausted.
“We can make a fortune at this. Go back to Earth in a year. Take it
easy the rest of our life.”

“That compressor has been going steadily all day,” Jean said. “Won’t
you come back and take a look at it?”

Nothing could tear Delfield away from his task. “Must’ve been the
shock. Jarred the mechanism. Don’t worry, Jean. I’ll fix it.”

“Dave,” his wife said finally, “it’s almost suppertime. If you expect
this man at all, you’d better come home. Right now.”

When Delfield returned he was desperately tired. For the first time in
three months he allowed himself the luxury of a full hot bath. It was
while he was in the tub, and while Jean was busy preparing the dinner,
and while Susie was sitting on the floor with a dozen of her toys
scattered about, that the man from Mars Metals arrived.

Delfield swooshed out of the bathroom, leaving a trail of wet
footprints into the bedroom. Urgently, Jean swept the toys into Susie’s
room. When the visitor came through the airlock there was superficial
order in the shack.

“Malcolm is my name, representing Mars Metals.”

He was a tall, burly man with a bullet-shaped head and close-cropped
hair. His cheeks were fleshy and his complexion a salmon pink
characteristic of Mars settlers. He carried a bulky grey-leather
briefcase which he set on the floor alongside a toy Jean saw she had
missed by the sofa.

“Yes, we’ve been expecting you. My husband will be right out. Won’t you
sit down?”

Susie came out of her room. “Pink puppy dog, mommy. Pink puppy dog.”
She gave the visitor a shy, puzzled look.

“Yes, darling, he’s in your room,” said Jean, smoothing her apron. “Mr.
Malcolm, our daughter Susie.”

Malcolm nodded cursorily but said nothing.

Jean could see he was not the avuncular type. She went back to her
dinner preparations, which had been thrown off schedule by the guest’s
early arrival. The dinner itself was a failure. Malcolm did not eat
synthetics, which was about all Jean had to offer. And Susie was
unusually restive in her highchair, spilling and spattering everything
that was put before her. It made a painful impression. Delfield had
a sinking feeling, and was glad Malcolm avoided business talk at the
table.

“I suppose,” said Delfield afterwards, “that you want to take a look at
the deposit?” There was no use postponing the inevitable.

“Not necessary,” said the man from Mars Metals. “Your samples and
survey tell us all we need to know.” Husband and wife exchanged
electric glances. Delfield remained prudently silent about the
collision.

“Then you think the lode is commercial?”

“No doubt about it,” said Malcolm. “We know this type of asteroid.
Your samples are much like the K-370 group, which has proved very
satisfactory.”

Jean bathed Susie while the men talked. A warmth of optimism chased
away the strain and weariness of three months. She sang nursery songs
as Susie splashed in the tub. She dried the little girl and put on a
bright red two-piece pajamas. Then she carried Susie through the living
room. “Say goodnight to daddy and Mr. Malcolm.”

“Goodnight,” said Susie, sleepily waving an arm.

Jean carried the child into her room and dropped her into bed with a
kiss. Then she sat down contentedly on the sofa beside Malcolm. “There
are two problems,” Malcolm was saying. “First is the matter of subsidy.
You’ll need considerable financing.”

“I don’t understand,” said Delfield. “I can produce the stuff without
financial assistance. At least, I’ve been doing it up till now.”

“Yes, but not in commercial quantities. It wouldn’t pay us to route a
ship this way for the amount you could produce by yourself. You’ll need
a full-scale refinery here, plus ten or twelve hired hands.”

“I didn’t realize—,” Delfield began, when Susie reappeared in her
doorway. She looked at her father hopefully.

“Come here, dear,” Delfield said, and Susie trotted over beside him.
He kissed her on the cheek and patted her back. “Now go to bed,
sweetheart.”

Susie stood doubtfully.

       *       *       *       *       *

Jean got up and took her by the hand and led her back to the bedroom.
“All right, dear,” she whispered. “Pop into bed.”

Susie started to whimper. “No bed, mommy. No pop into bed.”

“Oh, you must darling.”

“Pink puppy dog,” Susie whined.

“You want pink puppy dog in bed with you?” Jean said. “All right.” She
turned on the bedroom light and glanced at the toy-strewn floor. The
particular stuffed animal was nowhere in sight. “I’m sorry, honey. I
can’t find pink puppy dog. But here’s teddy bear.” She laid the brown
animal beside Susie and turned off the light. “Goodnight, dear.”

“—Very well,” continued Malcolm, “let’s assume then that a hundred
fifty thousand would cover the initial payroll period. You can have
that at five and a half per cent. And Mars Metals will rent you the
machinery for depreciation value plus ten per cent.” He withdrew a
figure chart from his briefcase. “For a type D refinery, which is the
largest you could use, that would amount to forty-five thousand a year.”

“Do you actually believe,” Delfield said, unable to conceal his awe,
“that K-840 can yield three quarters of a million in the first year?”

Malcolm stared expressionlessly.

“That’s our conservative estimate. An aggressive man can probably
exceed that figure by as much as one-third. Which of course brings us
to our second consideration, your—”

“Daddy!” It was Susie again in the doorway. She was rubbing her eyes
unhappily. “Daddy!”

“Go to bed, Susie,” Delfield said firmly. He could see that Malcolm was
staring at the little girl in annoyance.

Jean popped up again. “Into bed, young lady!” she said sternly.

“Don’t want ago to bed!” Jean took her arm and pulled Susie into the
bedroom. “Now listen, young lady! Do you want a spanking, or are you
going to bed?”

“Wee-wee,” said Susie. “Have to make a wee-wee.”

Her mother stood for a moment in uncertainty. They had only in the past
two months completed the child’s toilet training.

“All right,” Jean relented. She picked up Susie and carried her to the
bathroom.

“The second consideration,” said Malcolm, “is your own ability, Mr.
Delfield. Your own administrative ability. Your ability to handle an
operation of this size and complexity. You are a good prospector.
There’s no doubt of that. You’ve proved up your claim in a very short
time, and your samples show a fine sense of discrimination. However,
I must say candidly, there are hundreds of good prospectors in the
Asteroid Belt. Men just as capable as you are, if not always as lucky.

“The men we’re looking for are not merely prospectors. They’re highly
competent administrators. They’re able to handle other men. They’re
able to keep those men working hard. They’re able to drive them and
discipline them, and produce results!

“Are you that kind of a man, Mr. Delfield? Can you do the job?”

“I think so,” said Delfield confidently. “But you’ll have to be the
judge of that. You see, on Earth—”

“Pink puppy dog! I want pink puppy dog!” Susie wept in the doorway.

Delfield felt a flush of embarrassment. What a night for Susie to be
difficult! He looked at Jean imploringly. His wife glanced down with a
helpless expression.

“Excuse me,” said Delfield to the man from Mars Metals. He got up and
went into Susie’s bedroom. “Susie, you’ll have to get into bed, and no
more nonsense.”

“Pink puppy dog.”

Delfield picked up the little girl and put her in bed. “Now you stay
there and be quiet or you’ll get a spanking.”

She was silent as he turned to leave. Then she clambered out of bed.
“Daddy, give me pink puppy dog.”

Delfield lost his patience. He knew Malcolm was watching and listening,
especially after that speech about disciplining other men. He’d never
really spanked Susie before, but he did so now. She cried terribly,
inconsolably, in her bed. It was impossible to carry on a conversation
in the living room with her wails and the persistent humming of the
compressor in the background.

This was such an important interview, such a turning point in his
career, to be marred by an unruly child.

Jean glared at him disapprovingly as Delfield flicked the switch.
The door to Susie’s room slid firmly shut, muffling her cries almost
completely. After a while they died out, and the air compressor
stopped also, but it was hard for Delfield to pick up the thread of
conversation.

What had he been about to say about himself on Earth?

The two discussed other, peripheral points, yet Delfield knew the
damage was done. He had a sinking, heartsick feeling when Malcolm
closed his briefcase a half hour later.

“Well,” said the man from Mars Metals, standing up, “this has been a
very pleasant chat. Quite instructive and exploratory on both sides.”
He started to put on his spacesuit. “I’ll report the substance of our
discussion to the regional office on Ceres. I’m sure you’ll be hearing
from us very shortly.”

They watched his private rocket take off, and then Jean said anxiously,
“What do you think?”

“I’m sure they will say no,” said Delfield wearily. “Had it been yes,
Malcolm would have signed me up tonight.”

Jean caught her breath, suddenly remembering. “Oh! Poor Susie! Why did
you shut the door on her like that?”

“Why did she behave like that?” Delfield said angrily.

Jean ran to the door switch. The door mechanism whined but the hatch
itself remained tightly in place.

“It must be jammed,” said the father. He pounded on the metal panel.
“Now try it.”

Jean flicked the switch back and forth several times. The door did not
move.

Then Delfield saw the red warning light on the jamb above the door.
“The safety!” he screamed. “It won’t work because of the safety!” He
got into his space suit swiftly, with trembling hands and sobbing
breath.

A moment later he was outside the hermetic shack in the deep space
vacuum of Asteroid K-840. He was staring into Susie’s room by the light
of an electric torch. His child lay in bed asleep, brown ringlets
framing her face, the fine tracery of veins faintly visible on her
forehead.

She was a beautiful little girl, and the sleep had come gradually,
tenderly. The air had leaked out slowly through the small crack at
the base of the hemisphere, where the rock had faulted. All day the
compressor had replaced the loss. Until Delfield closed the door, the
airtight door.

In one claw of his spacesuit the father held an emergency blowout
patch. It was hard for him to put it on the breach. Half through the
hole, where it had been sucked by escaping air early in the morning,
was Susie’s pink puppy dog.




Transcriber’s note:


  This etext was produced from Imaginative Tales, May 1957 (Vol. 4, No.
  3). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
  copyright on this publication was renewed.

  Obvious errors have been silently corrected, but minor
  inconsistencies have been retained as printed.

  New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
  public domain.




*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79958 ***