Einstein Dog

by Craig Spence

  We could rig the thing so it could be operated by a dog. Doctor Molar did it for Genie with guns and all kinds of things.

  “Doctor Molar is a scientist, in a laboratory, with access to specialized equipment and help. There’s no way I can rig a video camera so you can run it.”

  You’re lying! Cap grumbled.

  “I’m not!”

  We can’t send a kid in to do this job, Einstein! Cap pleaded.

  Einstein looked back and forth between the two of them, an expression of deep concern creasing his brow. With a long, weary sigh, he faced his brother. He’s right, Cap. Neither of us can operate the camera.

  Cap looked away stubbornly.

  And unless we expose AMOS, Hindquist will only get stronger.

  Still Cap refused to concede the point.

  Do you see any choice but to send the boy?

  What about the three of us going in?

  Einstein shook his head sadly. No point, he concluded. We’d only increase the risk. Besides, we need as many people as possible outside to carry out the diversion.

  Einstein turned to Bertrand. Are you sure you want to do this? he asked. Hindquist might not harm you or Ariel if you don’t show yourselves as a threat.

  Bertrand found himself transfixed by Einstein’s gaze. He didn’t want to volunteer. He knew the fear that already gripped him would intensify, squeezing tighter and tighter as zero hour approached. But he also knew that he would not be able to look in the mirror if he shirked this destiny.

  “I’m sure,” he answered.

  And you Ariel?

  “I’m ready, too,” she said.

  Einstein nodded grimly. So be it.

  You humans! Cap scowled. Just when a dog thinks he’s got you figured for a tribe of worthless, self-centered, conniving jerks that the planet would be better off without, along comes someone to make you doubt the facts.

  They all laughed, because they knew that was about as close to a compliment as Cap was likely to get.

  The days following their conference in Fort Nicomekl were crammed with activity. Bertrand and Ariel pondered how best to build a container for a dog and a human. How big did it have to be? How strong? What materials would work best?

  Einstein and Cap ran through mission scenarios again and again, looking for flaws, sharpening the timing, accounting for every conceivable detail. They pulled the team together every day for dry runs, practicing the operation until every choreographed move had become a habit.

  We’re ready, they announced at a final meeting. We move tonight.

  And so, Ariel found herself stuffing clothes under her blankets and arranging a soccer ball on her pillow, making it look as if she were asleep facing the wall with the covers pulled over her head. Then she snuck down the staircase and out the patio door, sliding it quietly shut behind her. As she wheeled her bike out the back gate Cap, Breeze, and Blizzard greeted her with wagging tails and encouraging nuzzles.

  Time to move, Cap ordered. Breeze, you take the lead. Blizzard, you follow. I’ll stick with Ariel.

  She knew Bertrand and Einstein were also on the move, and wished she could have said one last goodbye to both of them. But they had farther to go and had left earlier. If things were going according to plan, they were already well on their way to the AMOS warehouse in Vancouver.

  They’ll be okay, Cap said. They haven’t entered the danger zone yet.

  Do you think this is going to work, Cap? she asked, transmitting her question in a talkie, a skill she’d picked up quickly after her breakthrough in Fort Nicomekl.

  We’ll make it work, little sister, Cap vowed.

  “Little sister?” Ariel asked, smiling.

  Welcome to the pack, Airee, he confirmed solemnly. I think you’ve had your initiation over the last week or so, don’t you?

  She wheeled along proudly, heartened by the sound of his paws drumming against the pavement.

  Welcome, Breeze and Blizzard chimed in from their stations in front and behind.

  Einstein squirmed inside his harness, a contraption Bertrand had fashioned out of belts, sticks and wires. As long as nobody examined it too closely, it would pass for the rig of a seeing-eye dog. Bertrand sat on the bench seat facing the driver.

  They wanted to be inconspicuous. Things had not gone according to plan. Because his dark glasses made it hard to see, Bertrand had walked smack into a post near their stop, eliciting a loud cry and string of curses. Then he’d scraped his shin and fallen with a clatter into the bus’ stairwell.

  “You might want to get that seeing-eye dog of yours an eye-test,” the driver joked, helping Bertrand up the steps.

  “I might want to trade him in at the SPCA,” Bertrand had grumped.

  For a while they jounced along in silence. Einstein surrendered to the momentum of the bus, which shuddered and lurched toward Vancouver. Now that their plan was afoot there could be no turning back. Even as he and Bertrand hurtled through the suburbs toward the intensifying glow of the city, Cap, Ariel, and the others were making their way toward AMOS.

  An hour-and-a-half later they stumbled off the last bus in their long journey. This way, Einstein said, leading them down a long, drab street. They kept to the opposite side, passing in front of the AMOS depot, then crossed over, looking for a place where they could sneak under the perimeter fence.

  What if the cops catch us? Bertrand fretted.

  There’s no cops around, Einstein assured him. There, he gestured to a spot where the fence could be pulled back enough for them to wriggle under. Bertrand held it up for Einstein first, then shoved his heavy backpack under and finally squirmed through himself.

  That’s the one. Einstein nodded at a semi-trailer backed up to the loading dock. It had the AMOS logo painted on its side. It’ll leave around two o’clock.

  A forklift rattled across the loading dock and into the trailer, a large crate balanced on its tines. A couple of seconds latter it clanged and clattered out of the unit, backing into the warehouse for another load.

  Shhh! Einstein ordered suddenly. Get down.

  The two of them lay flat, pressing their bodies to the lumpy terrain. Someone was approaching from behind a row of trailers parked in the yard. The dancing beam of a flashlight preceded the guard. A few scraggly tufts of weed were all Einstein and Bertrand had to conceal themselves and as the light swept back and forth over the dark corner of the lot. Einstein couldn’t believe the guard hadn’t spotted them.

  “Hank?” An annoyed voice crackled in the guard’s walkie-talkie.

  “Yeah. Just checking the southeast quadrant.”

  “You tripped the damned motion sensors again!”

  “Sorry. Didn’t know I was in range.”

  The tramp of the guard’s boots and the crackle of his supervisor’s voice faded into the night. Einstein and Bertrand were alone.

  “Jeez!” Bertrand gasped.

  Let’s go, Einstein ordered. Almost break time.

  All Doctor Molar’s technology couldn’t replace that strange, undefined sensation called a hunch. Genie snuffled the night air. They would move tonight. She knew it in her bones.

  She flicked the lens on her visor to night vision, target mode. Instantly a grid appeared, showing exactly where she aimed. A readout in the upper left quadrant showed the range and speed of her target: fifty metres away; zero kilometres per hour. Another readout in the right quadrant told her what mode the gun was set to. “Kill”, it indicated.

  Bang! she imagined.

  If she’d used the proper command the rifle would have bucked in her harness, spitting a single, lethal round, dead centre into the enemy tree trunk.

  “What was that?” Charlie shouted into his mike.

  “I check radio,” she snapped angrily.

  Genie hadn’t meant for the signal to be audible, but she hadn’t mastered Doctor Molar’s Thought Matrix Translator, which had picked up her imagined rifle shot. It might take the better part of a year for the machine to learn the aura of Genie’s m
ind and for her to perfect the kind of clear thinking required to operate the TMT without mishaps.

  “How’s the system working, Genie?” Hindquist broke in.

  She cringed, his voice sending a shiver like static through her nerves.

  “TMT good,” she responded.

  “And getting better by leaps and bounds,” he enthused.

  “Even now, it allows us to communicate well beyond the range of talkies. A couple of more months and we will have a full vocabulary to work with.”

  “TMT learn fast.”

  “Just in time, too. This upgrade takes us beyond SMART,” Hindquist bragged. “The TMT is giving you a voice, Genie. The day will come when your ancestors will run herd on the entire world. Think of it.”

  She shivered. The vision of her descendants as pawns in the New World Order disgusted her. Despite all she’d been through and what she’d become, Genie still fought back twinges of envy whenever she saw a dog in a car whiz by on the Trans-Canada Highway, its head stuck out the window, eyes squinted, ears flapping.

  What kind of future awaited her offspring? To be feared and hated? To be forever in the service of an evil empire?

  No! she growled, careful this time not to be overheard.

  Tonight will put an end to Hindquist’s madness, or it will be the end of me. Of that she was certain. If her siblings and their human allies did not show, she would simply kill the demon Hindquist with a single shot as she should have done long ago.

  Genie stopped and sniffed at the night air. She’d picked up a scent.

  Cap! Breeze! Blizzard!

  What should she do? She had rehearsed this very moment, but now she froze. They were making their way through the underbrush toward their abandoned surveillance post. The girl Ariel was with them. My human, Genie remembered with a sting. The infiltration had begun. Since Einstein and Bertrand were not with the party, she assumed they’d be on board the next load to arrive from the AMOS warehouse.

  Guilt gnawed at her.

  You cannot betray them!

  I must preserve my cover. At all costs.

  You cannot do this!

  I must!

  She wrestled with her conscience: pitting what her heart told her against what she must do.

  “Go round big road,” she ordered Charlie through the TMT.

  “What?”

  “Big road! Behind wood! Go round there. Wait for order.”

  “Huh?”

  “Circle around the woods by the highway side, idiot!” Hindquist barged into the network. “Wait there for further orders.”

  “Yes sir!” Charlie answered.

  “What is it, Genie?” the President of AMOS wanted to know.

  “Not sure. Brothers, sister me think.”

  “And your plan?”

  “Call for speak. Bang with stun bomb.”

  “Brilliant!” Hindquist gushed. “Good! Very good! So you intend to call them together for a parley — sibling to sibling and all that — then blast ’em with a stun bomb. Very good indeed, Genie. That is a plan worthy of a Global Council operative.”

  Sickened by his praise, she circled to the top of the wood, entering from the far end of the AMOS lot. She desperately wanted to escape Hindquist’s surveillance. The thought of him gloating over the betrayal of her brothers and sister tormented her.

  Besides, there might be some opportunity to avoid what she dreaded, if she could only get an unobserved moment with the others. The conversation would be in Dog, and Hindquist was too far away to intercept talkies, so if she could break the visual link, she would gain a little flexibility.

  Break! That was it, Genie thought, remembering how the cable from the helmet to the video transmitter ran into her K-Pack beside her right cheek. Finding a sturdy branch, she hooked it under the video cable, then pulled. Her head jerked sideways as she felt the cable yank free.

  “What?” Hindquist squawked. “I’ve lost your visuals, Genie. What happened?”

  “Me no know,” she responded.

  “Damn!” Hindquist muttered. “Damn it all!”

  For the SMART dogs, moving through the underbrush was easy. They crouched a little, but hardly enough to slow them down. Ariel had to crawl along on her belly, dragging herself through the dirt and debris on hands and knees. Dried leaves rattled in her hair; sand and grit ground into her palms and knees.

  Come on, slowpoke, Cap coaxed. We have to get you to the backup post before we can take up our positions.

  She tried not to show it, but Ariel’s fear ballooned in a vivid telly, which she was sure could be detected for miles. Sorry, she apologized to Cap, who was watching her intently.

  Cap darted forward, wagged his tail and licked her, one big slurp right on the kisser, as if she were a Popsicle. Stunned, but deeply moved, Ariel resisted her impulse to wipe her face and shout, “Yech!”

  I’ve been aware of your fear since we set out, he explained. We dogs make a study of human fear. It comes in many shapes and sizes, the aura, and it has many names. Can I tell you something about yours?

  She continued staring.

  Yours is what I call the hero’s terror. If you examine it to its point of origin in your gut, you’ll find that what you’re feeling is the determination of courage.

  “You’re talking about yourself,” she said.

  As you know, I’m not prone to modesty, Cap admitted. I share the hero’s fear, and that makes it easy to recognize in you, and Breeze, and Blizzard. We may not succeed tonight, but if we do fail, we will do so gloriously. I can guarantee that.

  “Thank you, Cap,” Ariel whispered.

  Thank me by believing in yourself, my friend. Let’s get going.

  He turned to lead them east, along the edge of the AMOS property line, but before they’d taken another step, they froze. A pair of eyes gleamed in the dark. Dog’s eyes.

  Well, well. That was a nice pep talk, their stalker said.

  Genie! Cap growled.

  She stepped out of hiding into a little clearing. By the moonlight Ariel could make out what appeared to be a canine storm trooper. Genie’s body bristled with weapons and gadgets and she stared out at them through the visor of her helmet. Robo-dog!

  What kind of outfit is that? Cap mocked.

  This is Hindquist’s latest version of the K-pack.

  So you’re still working for that creep?

  Things aren’t always as they seem, Cap.

  In my experience, they’re usually worse, he snarled, hackles raised.

  I don’t have time to explain, and you don’t have time to listen, she answered. Hindquist knows already that you’re in the vicinity. He anticipates an infiltration of the AMOS facility.

  And how would he know that?

  He knows, Genie repeated. And unless we work together, he will defeat you. Tell Breeze and Blizzard to join us. Time is very short and I have a proposal to make that must be heard by all of you.

  Cap stared at her coldly, making no move to call in the others.

  Genie sighed. You’re a shrewd commander, Captain, she said. You have given up the bully’s armour for the mantle of true leadership. I understand that you don’t trust me. You have good reason to doubt.

  Yes, I do, he grunted.

  Cap! Hear her out! Ariel pleaded.

  Brother and sister stared at one another. Then Genie spoke into the silence.

  What can it hurt to listen, Cap? Let me make my proposal, then decide.

  Now, Cap’s strong features creased with doubt. He stared, as if she were made of glass and he could see right into her; he glanced at Ariel, as if she might offer the confirmation he sought.

  We’ve never liked one another, Sister, but the bond of the litter still holds, he said at last. I would give up my life for you, and must believe you would do the same for me and the others. I make this decision on their behalf, but if you cross us you will be damned for such a monstrous crime. Do you understand?

  Genie nodded. Now hurry, she said. We’re running out of tim
e.

  Cap woofed softly.

  Instantly Breeze and Blizzard emerged from the shrubs, where they’d been listening all along. Despite his annoyance, Cap laughed. So who’s been standing guard while you two watched the show? he demanded.

  You don’t suppose we were going to miss your fine speech, do you, or the homecoming of our sister? Blizzard countered.

  Breeze trotted up to Genie without hesitation, touching noses. Sister! she greeted. Let’s begin.

  The unmistakable shockwave of a stun bomb pulsed through the night air. “Yes!” Hindquist celebrated, raising his fist and pumping victoriously.

  “Genie!” he hollered into his headset microphone. “What’s going on?”

  “Stunner go boom. Dogs down. Need Charlie. Send others.”

  “Good work, Genie! Great work!” he exulted. “Charlie, lug your carcass in there and help out.”

  “Yeah, boss. I’m on my way.”

  Hindquist hurried down from his office, then through the AMOS lobby and outside into the parking lot. “Get them in quickly,” he ordered. To the untrained ear a stun bomb would sound like a big firecracker. The physical effects were limited to close range. Still, the police might come snooping if the detonation had been reported.

  A couple of guards wheeled a cart with a row of portable dog cages stacked on it across the lot. Genie had ordered them to be ready.

  “Perfect planning and execution,” Hindquist marveled. “Absolutely flawless.”

  Charlie emerged from the wood first, lugging a stunned dog over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes.

  “Cap!” Hindquist grinned. “Welcome back. Your stay will be very short and most unpleasant, I trust.” Another guard followed, then another, with Breeze and Blizzard on their backs. Finally Genie emerged from the grove, head held high, tail flying like a pennant.

  “Magnificent!” Hindquist cheered. “Well done!”

  She acknowledged his praise with a barely perceptible nod and answered in Dog now that they were within range. The first stage of our counter-insurgency has worked, she said. Now we must prepare for our second set of guests.

  A greeting party is already in place, Hindquist chuckled.