Watchers

breeding a dog with human intelligence?”
    “It was a long, slow process, but gradually he made advancements. And a little over a year ago, the miracle pup was born.”
    “Thinks like a human being?”
    “Not like a human being, but maybe as well as.”
    “Yet it looks like an ordinary dog?”
    “That was what the Pentagon wanted. Which made Weatherby’s job a lot harder, I guess. Apparently, brain size has at least a little bit to do with intelligence, and Weatherby might have made his breakthrough a lot sooner if he’d been able to develop a retriever with a larger brain. But a larger brain would have meant a reconfigured and much larger skull, so the dog would have looked damned unusual.”
    All the windows were fogged over now. Neither Walt nor Lem tried to clear the misted glass. Unable to see out of the car, confined to its humid and claustrophobic interior, they seemed to be cut off from the real world, adrift in time and space, a condition that was oddly conducive to the consideration of the wondrous and outrageous acts of creation that genetic engineering made possible.
    Walt said, “The Pentagon wanted a dog that looked like a dog but could think like a man? Why?”
    “Imagine the possibilities for espionage,” Lem said. “In times of war, dogs would have no trouble getting deep into enemy territory, scouting installations and troop strength. Intelligent dogs, with whom we could somehow communicate, would then return and tell us what they had seen and what they’d overheard the enemy talking about.”
    “Tell us? Are you saying dogs could be made to talk, like canine versions of Francis the Mule or Mr. Ed? Shit, Lem, be serious!”
    Lem sympathized with his friend’s difficulty in absorbing these astounding possibilities. Modern science was advancing so rapidly, with so many revolutionary discoveries to be explored every year, that to laymen there was going to be increasingly less difference between the application of that science and magic. Few nonscientists had any appreciation for how different the world of the next twenty years was going to be from the world of the present, as different as the 1980s were from the 1780s. Change was occurring at an Incomprehensible rate, and when you got a glimpse of what might be coming— as Walt just had—it was both inspiring and daunting, exhilarating and scary.
    Lem said, “In fact, a dog probably could be genetically altered to be able to speak. Might even be easy, I don’t know. But to give it the necessary vocal
    apparatus, the right kind of tongue and lips . . . that’d mean drastically altering its appearance, which is no good for the Pentagon’s purposes. So these dogs wouldn’t speak. Communication would no doubt have to be through an elaborate sign language.”
    “You’re not laughing,” Walt said. “This has got to be a fucking joke, so why aren’t you laughing?”
    “Think about it,” Lem said patiently. “In peacetime . . . imagine the president of the United States presenting the Soviet premier with a one-year-old golden retriever as a gift from the American people. Imagine the dog living in the premier’s home and office, privy to the most secret talks of the USSR’s highest Party officials. Once in a while, every few weeks or months, the dog might manage to slip out at night, to meet with a U.S. agent in Moscow and be debriefed.”
    “Debriefed? This is insane!” Walt said, and he laughed. But his laughter had a sharp, hollow, decidedly nervous quality which, to Lem, indicated that the sheriffs skepticism was slipping away even though he wanted to hold on to it.
    “I’m telling you that it’s possible, that such a dog was in fact conceived by in vitro fertilization of a genetically altered ovum by genetically altered sperm, and carried to term by a surrogate mother. And after a year of confinement at the Banodyne labs, sometime in the early morning hours of Monday, May 17, that dog escaped by a series of incredibly clever actions that cannily circumvented the facility’s security system.”
    “And the dog’s now loose?”
    “Yes.”
    “And that’s what’s been killing—”
    “No,” Lem said. “The dog is harmless, affectionate, a wonderful animal. I was in Weatherby’s lab while he was working with the retriever. In a limited way, I communicated with it. Honest to God, Walt, when you see that animal in action, see what Weatherby created, it gives you enormous hope for this sorry species of ours.”
    Walt