Watchers

stared at him, uncomprehending.
    Lem searched for the words to convey what he felt. As he found the language to describe what the dog had meant to him, his chest grew tight with emotion. “Well . . . I mean, if we can do these amazing things, if we can bring such a wonder into the world, then there’s something of profound value in us no matter what the pessimists and doomsayers believe. If we can do this, we have the power and, potentially, the wisdom of God. We’re not only makers of weapons, but makers of life. If we could lift members of another species up to our level, create a companion race to share the world . . . our beliefs and philosophies would be changed forever. By the very act of altering the retriever, we’ve altered ourselves. By pulling the dog to a new level of awareness, we are inevitably raising our own awareness as well.”
    “Jesus, Lem, you sound like a preacher.”
    “Do I? That’s because I’ve had more time to think about this than you
    have. In time, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. You’ll begin to feel it, too, this incredible sense that humankind is on its way to godhood—and that we deserve to get there.”
    Walt Gaines stared at the steamed glass, as if reading something of great interest in the patterns of condensation. Then: “Maybe what you say is right. Maybe we’re on the brink of a new world. But for now we’ve got to live in and deal with the old one. So if it wasn’t the dog that killed my deputy— what was it?”
    “Something else escaped from Banodyne the same night that the dog got out,” Lem said. His euphoria was suddenly tempered by the need to admit that there had been a darker side to the Francis Project. “They called it The Outsider.”
     
     
5
    Nora held up the magazine ad that compared an automobile to a tiger and that showed the car in an iron cage. To Einstein, she said, “All right, let’s see what else you can clarify for us. What about this one? What is it that interested you in this photograph—the car?”
    Einstein barked once: No.
    “Was it the tiger?” Travis asked. One bark.
    “The cage?” Nora asked.
    Einstein wagged his tail: Yes.
    “Did you choose this picture because they kept you in a cage?” Nora asked.
    Yes.
    Travis crawled across the floor until he found the photo of a forlorn man in a prison cell. Returning with it, showing it to the retriever, he said, “And did you choose this one because the cell is like a cage?”
    Yes.
    “And because the prisoner in the picture reminded you of bow you felt when you were in a cage?”
    Yes.
    “The violin,” Nora said. “Did someone at the laboratory play the violin for you?”
    Yes.
    “Why would they do that, I wonder?” Travis said.
    That was one the dog could not answer with a simple yes or no.
    “Did you like the violin?” Nora asked. Yes.
    “You like music in general?”
    Yes.
    “Do you like jazz?”
    The dog neither barked nor wagged his tail.
    Travis said, “He doesn’t know what jazz is. I guess they never let him hear any of that.”
    “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