“Do you like rock and roll?” Nora asked.
One bark and, simultaneously, a wagging of the tail.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nora asked.
“Probably means ‘yes and no,’ “Travis said. “He likes some rock and roll. but
not all of it.”
Einstein wagged his tail to confirm Travis’s interpretation.
“Classical?” Nora asked.
Yes.
Travis said, “So we’ve got a dog that’s a snob, huh?”
Yes, yes, yes.
Nora laughed in delight, and so did Travis, and Einstein nuzzled and licked them
happily.
Travis looked around for another picture, snatched up the one of the man on the
exercise treadmill. “They wouldn’t want to let you out of the lab, I guess. Yet
they’d want to keep you fit. Is this how they exercised you? On a treadmill?”
Yes.
The sense of discovery was exhilarating. Travis would have been no more
thrilled, no more excited, no more awestricken if he had been communicating with
an extraterrestrial intelligence.
6
I’m falling down a rabbit hole, Walt Gaines thought uneasily as he listened to
Lem Johnson.
This new high-tech world of space flight, computers in the home,
satellite-relayed telephone calls, factory robots, and now biological
engineering seemed utterly unrelated to the world in which he was born and grew
up. For God’s sake, he had been a child during World War II, when there had not
even been jet aircraft. He hailed from a simpler world of boatlike Chryslers
with tail fins, phones with dials instead of push buttons, clocks with hands
instead of digital display boards. Television did not exist when he was born,
and the possibility of nuclear Armageddon within his own lifetime was something
no one then could have predicted. He felt as though he had stepped through an
invisible barrier from his world into another reality that was on a faster
track. This new kingdom of high technology could be delightful or frightening—
and occasionally both at the same time.
Like now.
The idea of an intelligent dog appealed to the child in him and made him want to
smile.
But something else—The Outsider—had escaped from those labs, and it scared the
bejesus out of him.
“The dog had no name,” Lem Johnson said. “That’s not so unusual. Most scientists
who work with lab animals never name them. If you’ve named an animal, you’ll
inevitably begin to attribute a personality to it, and then your relationship to
it will change, and you’ll no longer be as objective in your observations as you
have to be. So the dog had only a number until it was clear this was the success
Weatherby had been working so hard to achieve. Even then, when it was evident
that the dog would not have to be destroyed as a failure, no name was given to
it. Everyone simply called it ‘the dog,’ which was enough to differentiate it
from all of Weatherby’s other pups because they’d been referred to by numbers.
Anyway, at the same time, Dr. Yarbeck was working on other, very different
research under the Francis Project umbrella, and she, too, finally met with some
success.”
Yarbeck’s objective was to create an animal with dramatically increased
intelligence—but one also designed to accompany men into war as police dogs
accompanied cops in dangerous urban neighborhoods. Yarbeck sought to engineer a
beast that was smart but also deadly, a terror on the battlefield— ferocious,
stealthy, cunning, and intelligent enough to be effective in both jungle and
urban warfare.
Not quite as intelligent as human beings, of course, not as smart as the dog
that Weatherby was developing. It would be sheer madness to create a killing
machine as intelligent as the people who would have to use and control it.
Everyone had read Frankenstein or had seen one of the old Karloff movies, and no
one underestimated the dangers inherent in Yarbeck’s research.
Choosing to work with monkeys and apes because of their naturally high
intelligence and because they already possessed humanlike hands, Yarbeck
ultimately selected baboons as the base species for her dark acts of creation.
Baboons were among the smartest of primates, good raw material. They were deadly
and effective fighters by nature, with impressive claws and fangs, fiercely
motivated by the territorial imperative, and eager to attack those whom they