by Craig Spence
“It’s okay,” he apologized too, swiveling in his chair and rolling back from the computer to face her. She glided past him, perching on a corner of his desk.
“I just wanted to say thank you,” she stumbled.
“For what?”
She considered this for a second. “For being you, I guess.”
“You don’t think I’ve been myself lately, do you?”
“I think there has been a distance between you and everybody else.”
“Between Bertrand and me, you mean?”
She nodded.
“And you think the gap has closed?” Professor Smith said doubtfully.
“You’re a good man, Alex. But how are you going to keep your promise?”
“Promise?” he stalled.
“You know what I’m talking about. Your promise to bring Libra home.”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “I will go see Dean Zolinsky tomorrow to report on the birth of Libra’s pups. Perhaps I can raise it then.”
“She refused the last time you asked.”
He nodded.
“So nothing’s changed, except now we’ve got five more pups in captivity,” Elaine said, her voice quavering.
“Well, something has changed,” he answered thoughtfully. “Me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“If she won’t come round, I’ll have to go public, I suppose. The research can continue, but the SMART dogs must have a life beyond this laboratory. If the dean refuses, I’ll call the media. I’m quite sure they would oblige if I made some kind of grand gesture — burning my research papers or something like that.”
“You’d be ruined!”
“No,” he frowned. “I’ll be ruined unless I fight this battle for Libra and her pups. These are not ordinary dogs, Elaine. Today has convinced me of that. They are as intelligent as humans and have feelings like you and I. They cannot be kept in captivity indefinitely. That would be a crime.”
Elaine looked baffled. “Alex,” she cried. “I’ve never known you to be an activist! Burning your research results in public?” The thought made her laugh.
“Well,” he said ruefully. “I’m learning a few things about myself through all this. I guess I have Bertrand and Libra to thank for that . . . and you.”
“Am I invited to the bonfire?”
“Bring some marshmallows and hot dogs,” he advised. “That might become my standard diet afterward.”
Leaning forward, Elaine cupped his face in her hands and kissed him. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Whatever happens, we’ll get by.”
Bertrand pushed the bike along between them, the tick tick of its rear sprocket filling the silence. Since leaving Triumph he and Ariel hadn’t said a word. So much had happened in Professor Smith’s lab that neither of them knew where to begin.
Something had to be said sooner or later, though, and Ariel broke the silence. “What was that all about?” she wondered.
Bertrand wanted to shrug her question off and avoid the Pandora’s box, but he found himself glancing her way. “I should be happy, I suppose,” he replied. “Dad did communicate in Dog for the first time, which proves I’m not completely crazy.”
They walked for a while. “Did you feel Libra’s telly?” he asked.
Ariel shook her head.
“But you have to believe me now, Airee. I’m not making things up.”
She nodded reluctantly. Ariel couldn’t deny what she had seen, or explain Professor Smith’s behaviour any other way.
Bertrand sensed her confusion. He knew that if she returned his glance, her eyes would be that dark emerald hue they took on whenever she was perplexed, or angry, or both.
She turned to him. “You don’t seem very happy. Shouldn’t your head be a little swollen or something?”
“I am happy,” he protested. “Of course I’m happy.”
“But?”
“But before we named the pups Libra tellied some things to me that I can’t figure out. I’m scared Airee. Really scared.”
For a second she frowned, still unaccustomed to the notion of talking dogs. But with effort she smoothed her brow. “What did Libra say?” Ariel wanted to know.
“She made me promise to look after her pups,” Bertrand recalled. “She said I’m their older brother and it’s my duty to look after them until they’ve got homes to go to. I think something’s going to happen, Ariel.”
“Libra can say things like that?”
“She can make me understand her feelings. She sends images, sensations, it’s hard to describe, but they add up to a language that’s just as good as English . . . maybe better.”
Ariel shook her head, amazed, then frowned thoughtfully. “Is what she asked so unusual?” she probed. “It’s not much different than being asked to be someone’s Godfather, is it? She probably just wants to be sure her pups will be taken care of if something ever happens to her.”
Bertrand wanted to accept Ariel’s interpretation, but the fear that gripped him would not let go. “I had the feeling she wasn’t talking about if something happens, but when, Airee,” he said glumly.
“What could happen, Birdman?” Ariel wondered. “Maybe you’ve been worried about her so long you can’t think of Libra without being afraid.”
“No,” Bertrand shook his head. “She knows something, Ariel.”
He didn’t say it out loud, but he thought Libra’s fear had something to do with Frank Hindquist. She’d warned him about the president of AMOS and her suspicions gathered like dark clouds dampening his joy. Bertrand was not convinced he had a right to be happy yet.
The pups had a whole new world to explore and their enthusiasm didn’t leave much room for his fretting, so as the days passed Bertrand’s fears waned. He was too busy chasing after the SMART pups to think much about Frank Hindquist and AMOS. Maybe he had overreacted to Libra’s strange behaviour on the day of their birth.
Bertrand and Ariel cycled to Professor Smith’s laboratory almost every day after school, spending the time between final bell and dinner playing with the SMARTs.
At first all the pups seemed pretty much alike. They waddled about, barking in their high-pitched voices. They slept, played, suckled, and pooped. The kennel fell into a predictable routine. But after eight weeks the children began to notice differences.
Cap was clearly dominant when it came to roughhousing. Strong, determined, courageous, he would never get muscled aside when they were fighting for a ball or stuffed toy.
Breeze showed early her healing nature. If one of the others was hurt she’d tend to the injured party. If two of her siblings got into an argument, she’d try to smooth things over.
Blizzard had a bit of the fortune teller in him. He always seemed to know when someone was about to enter the room, as if he could detect them with a mysterious sort of radar that penetrated walls and saw around corners.
Einstein and Genie were something else again.
“It’s unbelievable,” Professor Smith said one day after running a set of trials. “They understand what you say almost before you say it. I swear they’re learning English at eight weeks old. Astounding!”
Bertrand, too, could not help noticing the superior intelligence of Einstein and Genie. All of the pups were transmitting tellies almost immediately. Mixed in with their barking, whining, and scrabbling, the tellies came in such a torrent that he had trouble keeping up, but Einstein’s and Genie’s were much more powerful and sophisticated. They not only wanted to know what things were, but how they worked.
What were the strange animals that rolled by the college on Glover Road? Who threw the sun into the sky each morning, and who caught it at night? Where did humans go to pee and poop? What existed beyond the bowl of Campus Green? If you set out to reach the ends of the earth, how long would it take to get there?
Sometimes they struggled to formulate their questions into Dog. But that only amazed Bertrand all the more, because the two pups were trying to ask in tellies what many
human adults had never thought to ask in words. Their curiosity was insatiable.
That made it all the harder for Bertrand to accept the dogs’ imprisonment in the SMART lab, a point he continued to make with his father and Elaine whenever he got a chance.
“It’s like keeping a bunch of human kids in jail, Dad!” he complained one day.
“I love them too, and won’t let anything happen to them, son,” his father said. “But you have to understand, I cannot simply remove them from the university. Not yet. We have to try diplomacy first, not commit any rash acts that are bound to fail.”
Later Elaine told Bertrand about Professor Smith’s ultimatum to Dean Zolinsky — how the professor had threatened to discontinue the project and go to the media unless the dogs were placed in homes off campus.
“She laughed in his face, Bertrand,” Elaine said. “She told him he’d be kicked off the faculty and others would continue his research if he dared endanger the project.”
Still, Bertrand couldn’t shake his anger and he refused to believe that his father and Elaine had done all they could. “They don’t care about me or Libra,” he muttered. “All they care about is their research . . . and each other.”
Einstein glanced at Genie. She ignored him, focused intensely on the collection of objects laid out at the far end of her retrieve lane.
“Stuffed monkey, ball, rubber duck, stick, bone, slipper,” Professor Smith named them, pointing the items out one by one. Genie quivered, tensed to launch herself into the race.
Professor Smith didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He fussed with a video camera set on a tripod at the end of the track. He hadn’t tightened the tripod’s spindly legs enough and it had almost crashed to the floor. Now, he wanted to make sure the unit wouldn’t keel over in the middle of the trial.
If Bertrand had been there they would have had a good laugh at the professor’s expense, but Einstein’s favourite human rarely came during the day. When Einstein had asked why, Bertrand answered with a telly that showed a square brick building filled with children sitting at small tables.
Einstein hadn’t figured out what the building was for, but he knew it was connected to a particular human sound.
“Sk . . . sk . . . skool . . . ” he attempted the strange guttural in his thoughts.
As always with human jabber, the result was ugly. Most sounds came to him easily. He could remember them and replicate them in his thoughts after a single exposure. A dog barking or growling, the trilling of any number of birds, a breeze shushing through the grass . . . these things he could imitate at will. But the long trains of gibberish that spouted out of human mouths gave Einstein no end of trouble.
He had figured out a few astonishing things, though. First Einstein detected minute breaks in the garbled streams of human speech. Their squawking could be broken down into smaller units, which he and Genie had picked out even before Professor Smith introduced them to the concept of language by pointing to objects and repeating their words.
The two smartest pups easily memorized the lists Professor Smith made up for his trials. It was child’s play, and though he was just eight weeks old, child’s play bored Einstein. What fascinated him was the bigger picture: the gathering awareness that there were tens of thousands of words he didn’t understand, and a rich tapestry of meaning that would emerge once you added all those significant sounds together.
“I think we’re ready now,” Professor Smith announced, walking up the lane to their end and taking his seat. He balanced a clip board on his lap. In one hand he clutched a pen, in the other a stopwatch.
Einstein and Genie crouched at their start lines. They were used to drills, even a bit tired of them, but they still couldn’t help trying to win. Mazes, obstacle courses, quizzes . . . they’d been put through any number of trials. At first the entire litter had taken part, but when it became obvious Einstein and Genie won every round, the others were eliminated. Einstein had no idea why Professor Smith wanted to test them. All he knew was the professor whooped with glee when they performed well, and rewarded them with praise and affection.
“On your marks! Get set! Monkey!” he shouted.
They charged down their lanes, Genie one step in the lead. Einstein cursed his short puppy legs. He wished he could run like his mother. By comparison he and Genie flapped and flopped like rag dolls. Grabbing his stuffed monkey by the neck and resisting the urge to shake it savagely, Einstein wheeled and began his dash back to the start line.
Genie gripped her monkey by the midriff, a much better hold because it kept the dangling arms and legs from trailing under her paws. She had widened her lead considerably by the time they arrived back at the start line.
“Ball!” Professor Smith shouted.
Genie had turned and bolted by the time Einstein reached his base. He dropped his monkey and lit out after her, pushing hard and gaining a few steps as they raced for the rubber balls. Go, go, go, he urged his pudgy legs, snatching the ball up, twisting and galloping back toward his start line.
“Duck!”
Einstein panted, blowing out the used up air and sucking in fresh.
“Stick!”
Genie spurred herself on, yapping as she galumphed down her lane. She skidded to a stop in front of the stick, and to Einstein’s delight missed her first attempt at fetching it. He’d regained most of the lost ground by the time she clamped it between her teeth for her return leg.
“Bone!”
Up and down the course they galloped, silently now, to conserve energy. By the time they dropped their bones, she clung to her lead by a nose, but the momentum had shifted. Einstein would catch her; would pass her; would beat her!
“Slipper!” Professor Smith shouted.
Every ounce of will counted now. Einstein sensed Genie’s panic. Victory was slipping away from her. They grabbed their slippers at the same instant, then whirled, scrabbling for the finish line neck and neck. “Come on!” Einstein urged his legs and lungs. He surged forward, inching ahead of Genie. The race was his!
A sudden jolt sent him stumbling off course. Genie had checked him! Furious, he snapped at her, then howled in outrage, realizing two things simultaneously: one, he’d dropped his slipper, and two, Genie had sprinted past him and across the finish line.
Einstein barked and whined in protest, but Professor Smith paid no heed. “Well done!” he chortled, patting Genie, who obliged him by wagging her whole body. “That’s the best time yet.”
Genie smirked, accepting her reward of strokes and praise.
“Come now, Einstein,” the professor scolded. “You can’t win every race.”
Not when your sister is a big cheater, the disconsolate pup grumped.
Five minutes later the two of them were back in the kennel with Libra and the others. Einstein had forgotten about the indignity of losing. They played for a while, then nestled together against the warmth of Libra’s belly. Professor Smith wasn’t the only one who had picked Einstein and Genie out of the litter; they’d picked each other too, and no dispute over a silly race was going to change that.
Einstein had drifted into a pleasant snooze when, suddenly, he felt himself muscled roughly aside. Cap had arrived to claim his preferred spot. Einstein grunted uncomfortably, then yelped as a sharp pain shot up his rump. Cap had bitten him! Flushed with anger, Einstein growled and turned on his brother. The two faced each other, lips curled, hackles raised.
Stop it! Libra commanded with a telly too potent to ignore. Einstein wriggled over to make more room, and Cap shoved himself in, taking advantage of the offer. Then they lay there, side by side, each angry at the other.
The sun glittered in the treetops like a gigantic Christmas ornament. Campus Green rolled invitingly away from the kennel compound toward Campus Wood.
“If it wasn’t for Dean Zolinsky’s orders we could be out there playing,” Bertrand complained, closing his eyes to shut out the tantalizing scene. He was slouching against the warmed concrete of the Stafford Building
.
Libra grunted agreement, shifting her head in his lap. She missed running free.
Why she mean?
Bertrand considered the question. He’d never asked it before, but it needed an answer, especially since his father would be going to see the dean again very soon to talk about
Libra and the SMART pups. Professor Smith claimed to be “making progress”, but Bertrand would believe it when he saw it.
Elaine, too, said Dean Zolinsky was “softening” her stand because his father had convinced her that keeping the SMART dogs in captivity was having a negative effect on their research. “Seeing is believing,” Bertrand muttered.
He let go the thought. No sense clouding a perfectly wonderful hour in the sun with useless speculations. Instead he tilted his face up and adjusting his back against the warm concrete.
Stupid lady!
He blushed, thankful at least he hadn’t uttered his childish insult out loud. Professor Smith had taught him from a very young age to avoid name-calling. Bertrand could hear his father’s gentle admonition now: “Don’t use labels. Think things through. Understand what it is you’re angry about and state the problem intelligently.”
Libra shifted again, pointing her head toward Bertrand’s feet. A faint tickling at the back of his cranium made him smile. Libra was laughing.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
She bad!
Bertrand shook his head and groaned. He seemed to be going through some kind of regression. “What’s the matter with me?” he muttered, opening his eyes. Libra’s head was still nestled in his lap, but she wasn’t snoozing. He followed her glance beyond his feet to the spot where Einstein sat staring, like a determined child.
She bad! Einstein repeated.
“Huh?”
It took Bertrand a second to realize what was happening — his “thoughts” about Dean Zolinsky actually belonged to an eight week old SMART pup.
“I don’t believe it!” Bertrand said.
Talkies, Einstein proclaimed proudly. Genie talk too. We teach others.
“But that’s impossible!” Bertrand cried. “It takes human babies a year or more to learn how to talk. You’re only a couple of months old!”