Smart Dog (12 page)

Amy didn't know what to make of the look Mom was giving her.

"And it isn't all Amy's fault, either," Sean admitted. "I told a lot of lies, too."

"All right, all right," Minneh said, cracking under the pressure although her father wasn't even there to hear her confession. "So did I."

Dr. Schieber broke the uneasy silence. "Why don't we all go sit in one of the classrooms?" she suggested.

Amy led the way to Sister Mary Grace's room. The children sat in their usual seats, and the parents squeezed themselves into desks around them. Sherlock lay down by Amy's feet.

Dr. Schieber sat on the edge of Sister Mary Grace's desk. "As I said," she started, "I'm Dr. Karen Schieber, and I'm head of the Biological Research Department at the State College of New York at Rochester. One of our projects is an attempt to increase intelligence by a combination of gene-splicing and neuron stimulation."

"Huh?" Minneh said.

Which was exactly what Amy had been thinking.

Even the grown-ups looked relieved that someone had asked.

"Basically," Dr. Schieber explained, "we're trying to increase the size of people's brains, and then cause those brains to work more efficiently."

Sean's father nodded as though to say he'd known all along.

"Naturally," Dr. Schieber said, "we couldn't just jump in and start experimenting on humans."

Everybody turned and looked at Sherlock, who yawned, then began licking his foreleg as though he'd just decided it needed a cleaning.

"Hence, F-32, whom some of you call Sherlock."

"Or Big Red," Mom said.

Dr. Schieber looked skeptical but said, "If you so desire."

Mrs. Gorman looked skeptical, too, and moved her chair the tiniest bit farther away from Mom's. Obviously Amy's confession wasn't enough to convince her of Mom's normalcy.

"So," Mr. Gorman said, "exactly how smart
is
this dog of yours?"

"Smart enough to try pretending I've got the wrong dog here," Dr. Schieber said.

Sherlock never missed a lick.

"Though he should remember I've known him, so, long I listened to his heartbeat with a stethoscope before he was born." She leaned forward and said, "F-32, I know it's you, and I can prove it's you because we've got your DNA records back at the lab."

Sherlock stopped licking.

"So." Dr. Schieber sat back again. "He's smart enough to reason, to listen to reason—and to talk."

Mrs. Gorman looked out the window, no doubt convinced Mom's weirdness was contagious, and that Dr. Schieber had caught it.

"F-32, please speak."

Don't!
Amy thought, but Sherlock stood up. With his tail drooping in resignation, he said, "I'd like to thank you, Mrs. Prochenko, and Mr. and Mrs. Gorman, for raising kind and generous children who tried their best to help me. Any stories they made up were because they wanted to protect me."

"Oh, my goodness."

Amy wasn't sure which of the women said it—Mom or Mrs. Gorman. Both were fanning themselves.

Dr. Schieber said, "F-32—" But then she leaned forward again. "Or do you prefer Sherlock?" she asked. "Or"—she hesitated but then said it anyway—"Big Red?"

"Sherlock," Sherlock said.

Dr. Schieber nodded. "Sherlock," she told them, "was doing very well—as you can see. Then suddenly, Monday morning he was gone. We were all terribly worried: What had happened to him? Had he been kidnapped by animal-rights activists worried that we might be mistreating him? Or taken by a researcher at a rival institution? He pretty much had the run of our lab. Could he have somehow injured himself during the night, gotten confused, and wandered off? We looked all around the neighborhood, made inquiries. Then, that evening, one of our graduate students spotted him, Mrs. Prochenko, in your yard, playing with your daughter."

Mom clasped Amy's hand.

"Rachel was almost certain it was him, but he wouldn't come to her, wouldn't acknowledge her. He was obviously fine and being taken care of, but he chose not to come. Strange. Rachel couldn't understand why, and neither could I when Rachel told me. So the next day, I sent another of the students to watch to see if he could learn what was going on.
After I went to the police station to vouch for him"—
Dr. Schieber leaned forward and narrowed her eyes a bit but didn't seem genuinely upset, though Minneh sank low into her seat—"I could only come to one conclusion: Our dog had simply run away. Obviously he had opportunity to return if he wanted. Why didn't he want to? So, this morning I had a long conversation with Dr. Boden, who was heading the project. 'Could something here have made F-32 so unhappy,' I asked him, 'that he doesn't want to return?' Dr. Boden assured me he had no idea what that something could be."

Amy and Sherlock both started to fidget. Sean sat up straighter as though he was about to say something.

"But I'm persistent," Dr. Schieber said. "And finally he told me. He told me that Sherlock might have overheard him talking about dissecting Sherlock's brain."

"
What?
" Mom said.

The Gormans looked at each other in horror.

"No!" Minneh gasped.

Dr. Schieber waved an arm to indicate all of them. "My reaction exactly," she said. "Here we have this delightful test subject. And as if it's not wonderful enough how smart he is, he's bighearted, and gentle, and eager to learn, and even more eager to please, and he's funny—I mean that in the nicest way—and just generally an agreeable part of our department who fits in even better than some of the students." She considered. "
Much
better than the members of the hockey team."

"Thank you," Sherlock said, shy and surprised.

"So I said to myself"—Dr. Schieber held out both her hands as though weighing two separate things—"F-32 or Dr. Boden? Sweet, smart, easy to get along with—or someone who'd dissect a colleague's brain?" She put her hands down and smiled. "So I fired Dr. Boden."

"Good for you!" Mom said.

"Yay!" Sean and Minneh cheered.

Amy was too relieved to say anything.

Dr. Schieber continued, "Of course, Dr. Boden protested that F-32—Pardon me that I keep calling you that, Sherlock, but that's how we referred to you in our conversations..."

Sherlock nodded to indicate he understood.

"Dr. Boden protested that F-32 had learned everything there was to learn in the lab. I disagree, except..." Again she smiled.

She did have a nice smile, Amy decided, when she wasn't zeroing in on you.

"Except," Dr. Schieber repeated, "I think at this point you could learn more
outside
the lab. If only"—she looked up at the ceiling innocently—"we could find a nice, trustworthy, respectable family to take you in."

Amy's hand shot up into the air to volunteer. Belatedly she glanced at her mother for permission, which came in a nod. Amy waved her arm.

"All right, Sherlock?" Dr. Schieber asked, even though Sherlock was wagging his tail so hard it was thumping against the side of Amy's desk.

"Yes, yes, yes," Sherlock said.

"Of course, the college will provide for food and medical expenses and reading material and an Internet account and a voice-recognition computer for him so that he doesn't gum up your computer by pressing the keys with a pencil eraser."

"Oops." Sherlock slunk down guiltily.

"In return, we would like you to bring him to the lab once a month—say the first Saturday of each month—so we can check his progress, see if we need to increase his required reading—he's a terrible speller, you know. That sort of thing."

Amy and Sherlock and Mom, and even Minneh and the Gormans, all nodded eagerly.

"Then it's settled." Dr. Schieber stood and went to shake everybody's hand or paw. "Understand, we want him to have as normal a life as possible. For the moment, while he's one of a kind, that means not letting other people in on quite how smart he is, or all the talk shows would be after him continually for interviews. But other than that, expose him to all you can think of. The more new experiences, the better. Let him watch TV, go on vacation with you, read comic books if he wants, meet other animals. Cats, even."

Sherlock shuddered, and Dr. Schieber laughed to show that she was just teasing about the cats.

"Yeah," Sean said, "you can finally meet Big Red, whose collar you've been wearing. Mom, do you have that picture in your wallet still?"

While Mrs. Gorman searched through her purse, Dr. Schieber stopped in front of Amy and said, though not unkindly, "You know, I think we could have saved a lot of trouble if you had been up front with your parents to begin with."

Amy hung her head but nodded.

Dr. Schieber nudged her chin up. "Next time," she said.

Amy nodded some more.

"I knew you hadn't stolen that awful girl's egg. I'd been watching Sherlock since before everybody came out of the building; and once you came out, you never went back in. So, unless you'd stolen it when everybody was there watching, it couldn't have been you. Besides, I trusted Sherlock's instinct to trust you."

Looking very pleased with himself and Amy, Sherlock wagged his tail so hard it thumped against the chairs on either side of the aisle.

"Thank you," Amy said. There was too much to thank Dr. Schieber for to say anything else.

By then Mrs. Gorman had pulled out a family snapshot taken at the beach: Mr. and Mrs. Gorman, Sean, and a big Irish setter.

"Wow!" Sherlock said, wagging his tail even faster. "Look at those long legs!"

Dr. Schieber looked startled, then amused, then she shook Amy's hand. "Best of luck to all of you," she said. Then to Amy arid Sherlock, she added, "Try to stay out of trouble."

"Yes," said Amy.

"Certainly," said Sherlock.

But even as he said it, his wagging tail swiped across the blackboard's chalk tray, knocking down an eraser.

Sean and Minneh both dove to get it and clunked their heads together. The eraser fell between their outstretched hands and hit the floor with a cloud of chalk dust. Mrs. Gorman leaned forward to make sure Sean was all right, and knocked over her opened purse, scattering its contents in the chalk dust. Mr. Gorman stood to help his wife, but the fifth-grade-sized chair clung to his considerably more than fifth-grade-sized bottom. The chair's legs caught in the legs of Amy's mom's desk, toppling it over, dumping out the books and papers and pens from inside, as well as Mom's purse from off the top, which clunked down on Mrs. Gorman's head.

Dr. Schieber had her I'm-getting-a-headache look as Sherlock repeated, "Certainly," and Amy once again said, "Yes."

Amy didn't think any of them really believed it for a minute.