“Jim,” said Junie, slapping spoonfuls of potato salad onto paper plates, “you make sure that dog doesn’t start scratching around in the petunias.”

  “C’mere, Robby,” said Jim. “Time to tie you up.”

  “Wrowrf,” the dog answered, looking a bit perturbed and backing away from the chain.

  “Daddy,” said Jim, “the dog won’t come when I call anymore.”

  Impatiently, Royce got up from his chair, his mouth full of chicken salad sandwich. “Doggonit, Jim, if you don’t control the dog we’ll just have to get rid of it. We only got it for you kids anyway!” And Royce grabbed the dog by the collar and dragged it to where Jimmy held the other end of the chain.

  Clip.

  “Now you learn to obey, dog, cause if you don’t I don’t care what tricks you can do, I’ll sell ya.”

  “Owrf.”

  “Right. Now you remember that.”

  The dog watched them with sad, almost frightened eyes all through dinner. Royce began to feel a little guilty, and gave the dog a leftover ham.

  That night Royce and Junie seriously discussed whether to show off the dog’s ability to write, and decided against it, since the kids loved the dog and it was cruel to use animals to perform tricks. They were, after all, very enlightened people.

  And the next morning they discovered that it was a good thing they’d decided that way—because all anyone could talk about was their dog’s newfound ability to write, or unscrew garden hoses, or lay and start an entire fire from a cold empty fireplace to a bonfire. “I got the most talented dog in the world,” crowed Detweiler, only to retire into grim silence as everyone else in the bowling team bragged about his own dog.

  “Mine goes to the bathroom in the toilet now, and flushes it, too!” one boasted.

  “And mine can fold an entire laundry, after washing her little paws so nothing gets dirty.”

  The newspapers were full of the story, too, and it became clear that the sudden intelligence of dogs was a nationwide—a worldwide—phenomenon. Aside from a few superstitious New Guineans, who burned their dogs to death as witches, and some Chinese who didn’t let their dogs’ strange behavior stop them from their scheduled appointment with the dinnerpot, most people were pleased and proud of the change in their pets.

  “Worth twice as much to me now,” boasted Bill Wilson, formerly an up-and-coming executive with the damnpowercompany. “Not only fetches the birds, but plucks ’em and cleans ’em and puts ’em in the oven.”

  And Kay Block smiled and went home to her mastiff, which kept her good company and which she loved very, very much.

  “In the five years since the sudden rise in dog intelligence,” said Dr. Wheelwright to his class of graduate students in animal intelligence, “we have learned a tremendous amount about how intelligence arises in animals. The very suddenness of it has caused us to take a second look at evolution. Apparently mutations can be much more complete than we had supposed, at least in the higher functions. Naturally, we will spend much of this semester studying the research on dog intelligence, but for a brief overview:

  “At the present time it is believed that dog intelligence surpasses that of the dolphin, though it still falls far short of man’s. However, while the dolphin’s intelligence is nearly useless to us, the dog can be trained as a valuable, simple household servant, and at last it seems that man is no longer alone on his planet. To which animal such a rise in intelligence will happen next, we cannot say, any more than we can be certain that such a change will happen to any other animal.”

  Question from the class.

  “Oh, well, I’m afraid it’s like the big bang theory. We can guess and guess at the cause of certain phenomena, but since we can’t repeat the event in a laboratory, we will never be quite sure. However, the best guess at present is that some critical mass of total dog population in a certain ratio to the total mass of dog brain was reached that pushed the entire species over the edge into a higher order of intelligence. This change, however, did not affect all dogs equally—primarily it affected dogs in civilized areas, leading many to speculate on the possibility that continued exposure to man was a contributing factor. However, the very fact that many dogs, mostly in uncivilized parts of the world, were not affected destroys completely the idea that cosmic radiation or some other influence from outer space was responsible for the change. In the first place, any such influence would have been detected by the astronomers constantly watching every wavelength of the night sky, and in the second place, such an influence would have affected all dogs equally.”

  Another question from a student.

  “Who knows? But I doubt it. Dogs, being incapable of speech, though many have learned to write simple sentences in an apparently mnemonic fashion somewhere between the blind repetition of parrots and the more calculating repetition at high speeds by dolphins—um, how did I get into this sentence? I can’t get out!”

  Student laughter.

  “Dogs, I was saying, are incapable of another advance in intelligence, particularly an advance bringing them to equal intellect with man, because they cannot communicate verbally and because they lack hands. They are undoubtedly at their evolutionary peak. It is only fortunate that so many circumstances combined to place man in the situation he has reached. And we can only suppose that somewhere, on some other planet, some other species might have an even more fortunate combination leading to even higher intelligence. But let us hope not!” said the professor, scratching the ears of his dog, B. F. Skinner. “Right, B. F.? Because man may not be able to cope with the presence of a more intelligent race!”

  Student laughter.

  “Owrowrf,” said B.F. Skinner, who had once been called Hihiwnkn on a planet where white hexagons had telepathically conquered time and space; hexagons who had only been brought to this pass by a solar process they had not quite learned how to control. What he wished he could say was, “Don’t worry, professor. Humanity will never be fazed by a higher intelligence. It’s too damn proud to notice.”

  But instead he growled a little, lapped some water from a bowl, and lay down in a corner of the lecture room as the professor droned on.

  It snowed in September in Kansas in the autumn of the year 2000, and Jim (Don’t call me Jimmy anymore, I’m grown up) was out playing with his dog Robby as the first flakes fell.

  Robby had been uprooting crab-grass with his teeth and paws, a habit much encouraged by Royce and Junie, when Jim yelled, “Snow!” and a flake landed on the grass in front of the dog. The flake melted immediately, but Robby watched for another, and another, and another. And he saw the whiteness of the flakes, and the delicate six-sided figures so spare and strange and familiar and beautiful, and he wept.

  “Mommy!” Jim called out. “It looks like Robby’s crying!”

  “It’s just water in his eyes,” Junie called back from the kitchen, where she stood washing radishes in front of an open window. “Dogs don’t cry.”

  But the snow fell deep all over the city that night, and many dogs stood in the snow watching it fall, sharing an unspoken reverie.

  “Can’t we?” again and again the thought came from a hundred, a thousand minds.

  “No, no, no,” came the despairing answer. For without fingers of some kind, how could they ever build the machines that would let them encapsulate again and leave this planet?

  And in their despair, they cursed for the millionth time that fool Mklikluln, who had got them into this.

  “Death was too good for the bastard,” they agreed, and in a worldwide vote they removed the commendation they had voted him. And then they all went back to having puppies and teaching them everything they knew.

  The puppies had it easier. They had never known their ancestral home, and to them snowflakes were merely fun, and winter was merely cold. And instead of standing out in the snow, they curled up in the warmth of their doghouses and slept.

  A Thousand Deaths

  Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?

  —Galatians 4:16

  “You will make no speeches,” said the prosecutor.

  “I didn’t expect they’d let me,” Jerry Crove answered, affecting a confidence he didn’t feel. The prosecutor was not hostile; he seemed more like a high school drama coach than a man who was seeking Jerry’s death:

  “They not only won’t let you,” the prosecutor said, “but if you try anything, it will go much worse for you. We have you cold, you know. We don’t need anywhere near as much proof as we have.”

  “You haven’t proved anything.” “We’ve proved you knew about it,” the prosecutor insisted mildly. “No point arguing now. Knowing about treason and not reporting it is exactly equal to committing treason.”

  Jerry shrugged and looked away.

  The cell was bare concrete. The door was solid steel. The bed was a hammock hung from hooks on the wall. The toilet was a can with a removable plastic seat. There was no conceivable way to escape. Indeed, there was nothing that could conceivably occupy an intelligent person’s mind for more than five minutes. In the three weeks he had been here, he had memorized every crack in the concrete, every bolt in the door. He had nothing to look at, except the prosecutor. Jerry reluctantly met the man’s gaze.

  “What do you say when the judge asks you how you plead to the charges?”

  “Nolo contendere.”

  “Very good. It would be much nicer if you’d consent to say ‘guilty’,” the prosecutor said.

  “I don’t like the word.”

  “Just remember. Three cameras will be pointing at you. The trial will be broadcast live. To America, you represent all Americans. You must comport yourself with dignity, quietly accepting the fact that your complicity in the assassination of Peter Anderson—”

  “Andreyevitch—”

  “Anderson has brought you to the point of death, where all depends on the mercy of the court. And now I’ll go have lunch. Tonight we’ll see each other again. And remember. No speeches. Nothing embarrassing.”

  Jerry nodded. This was not the time to argue. He spent the afternoon practicing conjugations of Portuguese irregular verbs, wishing that somehow he could go back and undo the moment when he agreed to speak to the old man who had unfolded all the plans to assassinate Andreyevitch. “Now I must trust you,” said the old man. “Temos que confiar no senhor americano. You love liberty, né?”

  Love liberty? Who knew anymore? What was liberty? Being free to make a buck? The Russians had been smart enough to know that if they let Americans make money, they really didn’t give a damn which language the government was speaking. And, in fact, the government spoke English anyway.

  The propaganda that they had been feeding him wasn’t funny. It was too true. The United States had never been so peaceful. It was more prosperous than it had been since the Vietnam War boom thirty years before. And the lazy, complacent American people were going about business as usual, as if pictures of Lenin on buildings and billboards were just what they had always wanted.

  I was no different, he reminded himself. I sent in my work application, complete with oath of allegiance. I accepted it meekly when they opted me out for a tutorial with a high Party official. I even taught his damnable little children for three years in Rio.

  When I should have been writing plays.

  But what do I write about? Why not a comedy—The Yankee and the Commissar, a load of laughs about a woman commissar who marries an American blue blood who manufactures typewriters. There are no women commissars, of course, but one must maintain the illusion of a free and equal society.

  “Bruce, my dear,” says the commissar in a thick but sexy Russian accent, “your typewriter company is suspiciously close to making a profit.”

  “And if it were running at a loss, you’d turn me in, yes, my little noodle?” (Riotous laughs from the Russians in the audience; the Americans are not amused, but then, they speak English fluently and don’t need broad humor. Besides, the reviews are all approved by the Party, so we don’t have to worry about the critics. Keep the Russians happy, and screw the American audience.) Dialogue continues:

  “All for the sake of Mother Russia.”

  “Screw Mother Russia.”

  “Please do,” says Natasha. “Regard me as her personal incarnation.”

  Oh, but the Russians do love onstage sex. Forbidden in Russia, of course, but Americans are supposed to be decadent.

  I might as well have been a ride designer for Disneyland, Jerry thought. Might as well have written shtick for vaudeville. Might as well go stick my head in an oven. But with my luck, it would be electric.

  He may have slept. He wasn’t sure. But the door opened, and he opened his eyes with no memory of having heard footsteps approach. The calm before the storm: and now, the storm.

  The soldiers were young, but unSlavic. Slavish, but definitely American. Slaves to the Slavs. Put that in a protest poem sometime, he decided, if only there were someone who wanted to read a protest poem.

  The young American soldiers (But the uniforms were wrong. I’m not old enough to remember the old ones, but these are not made for American bodies.) escorted him down corridors, up stairs, through doors, until they were outside and they put him into a heavily armored van. What did they think, he was part of a conspiracy and his fellows would come to save him? Didn’t they know that a man in his position would have no friends by now?

  Jerry had seen it at Yale. Dr. Swick had been very popular. Best damn professor in the department. He could take the worst drivel and turn it into a play, take terrible actors and make them look good, take apathetic audiences and make them, of all things, enthusiastic and hopeful. And then one day the police had broken into his home and found Swick with four actors putting on a play for a group of maybe a score of friends. What was it—Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Jerry remembered. A sad script. A despairing script. But a sharp one, nonetheless, one that showed despair as being an ugly, destructive thing, one that showed lies as suicide, one that, in short, made the audience feel that, by God, something was wrong with their lives, that the peace was illusion, that the prosperity was a fraud, that America’s ambitions had been cut off and that so much that was good and proud was still undone—

  And Jerry realized that he was weeping. The soldiers sitting across from him in the armored van were looking away. Jerry dried his eyes.

  As soon as news got out that Swick was arrested, he was suddenly unknown. Everyone who had letters or memos or even class papers that bore his name destroyed them. His name disappeared from address books. His classes were empty as no one showed up. No one even hoping for a substitute, for the university suddenly had no record that there had ever been such a class, ever been such a professor. His house had gone up for sale, his wife had moved, and no one said good-bye. And then, more than a year later, the CBS news (which always showed official trials then) had shown ten minutes of Swick weeping and saying, “Nothing has ever been better for America than Communism. It was just a foolish, immature desire to prove myself by thumbing my nose at authority. It meant nothing. I was wrong. The government’s been kinder to me than I deserve.” And so on. The words were silly. But as Jerry had sat, watching, he had been utterly convinced. However meaningless the words were, Swick’s face was meaningful: he was utterly sincere.

  The van stopped, and the doors in the back opened just as Jerry remembered that he had burned his copy of Swick’s manual on playwriting. Burned it, but not until he had copied down all the major ideas. Whether Swick knew it or not, he had left something behind. But what will I leave behind? Jerry wondered. Two Russian children who now speak fluent English and whose father was blown up in their front yard right in front of them, his blood spattering their faces, because Jerry had neglected to warn him? What a legacy.

  For a moment he was ashamed. A life is a life, no matter whose or how lived.

  Then he remembered the night when Peter Andreyevitch (no—Anderson. Pretending to be American is fashionable nowadays, so long as everyone can tell at a glance that you’re really Russian) had drunkenly sent for Jerry and demanded, as Jerry’s employer (i.e., owner), that Jerry recite his poems to the guests at the party. Jerry had tried to laugh it off, but Peter was not that drunk: he insisted, and Jerry went upstairs and got his poems and came down and read them to a group of men who could not understand the poems, to a group of women who understood them and were merely amused. Little Andre said afterward, “The poems were good, Jerry,” but Jerry felt like a virgin who had been raped and then given a two-dollar tip by the rapist.

  In fact, Peter had given him a bonus. And Jerry had spent it.

  Charlie Ridge, Jerry’s defense attorney, met him just inside the doors of the courthouse. “Jerry, old boy, looks like you’re taking all this pretty well. Haven’t even lost any weight.”

  “On a diet of pure starch, I’ve had to run around my cell all day just to stay thin.” Laughter. Ha ho, what a fun time we’re having. What jovial people we are.

  “Listen, Jerry, you’ve got to do this right, you know. They have audience response measurements. They can judge how sincere you seem. You’ve got to really mean it.”

  “Wasn’t there once a time when defense attorneys tried to get their clients off?” Jerry asked.

  “Jerry, that kind of attitude isn’t going to get you anywhere. These aren’t the good old days when you could get off on a technicality and a lawyer could delay trial for five years. You’re guilty as hell, and so if you cooperate, they won’t do anything to you. They’ll just deport you.”

  “What a pal,” Jerry said. “With you on my side, I haven’t a worry in the world.”

  “Exactly right,” said Charlie. “And don’t you forget it.”

  The courtroom was crowded with cameras. (Jerry had heard that in the old days of freedom of the press, cameras had often been barred from courtrooms. But then, in those days the defendant didn’t usually testify and in those days the lawyers didn’t both work from the same script. Still, there was the press, looking for all the world as if they thought they were free.)