Free Einstein Dog by Craig Spence

keeping up, but Einstein’s and Genie’s were much more powerful and sophisticated. They not only wanted to know what things were, but how they worked.
    What were the strange animals that rolled by the college on Glover Road? Who threw the sun into the sky each morning, and who caught it at night? Where did humans go to pee and poop? What existed beyond the bowl of Campus Green? If you set out to reach the ends of the earth, how long would it take to get there?
    Sometimes they struggled to formulate their questions into Dog. But that only amazed Bertrand all the more, because the two pups were trying to ask in tellies what many human adults had never thought to ask in words. Their curiosity was insatiable.
    That made it all the harder for Bertrand to accept the dogs’ imprisonment in the SMART lab, a point he continued to make with his father and Elaine whenever he got a chance.
    â€œIt’s like keeping a bunch of human kids in jail, Dad!” he complained one day.
    â€œI love them too, and won’t let anything happen to them, son,” his father said. “But you have to understand, I cannot simply remove them from the university. Not yet. We have to try diplomacy first, not commit any rash acts that are bound to fail.”
    Later Elaine told Bertrand about Professor Smith’s ultimatum to Dean Zolinsky — how the professor had threatened to discontinue the project and go to the media unless the dogs were placed in homes off campus.
    â€œShe laughed in his face, Bertrand,” Elaine said. “She told him he’d be kicked off the faculty and others would continue his research if he dared endanger the project.”
    Still, Bertrand couldn’t shake his anger and he refused to believe that his father and Elaine had done all they could. “They don’t care about me or Libra,” he muttered. “All they care about is their research . . . and each other.”

    Einstein glanced at Genie. She ignored him, focused intensely on the collection of objects laid out at the far end of her retrieve lane.
    â€œStuffed monkey, ball, rubber duck, stick, bone, slipper,” Professor Smith named them, pointing the items out one by one. Genie quivered, tensed to launch herself into the race.
    Professor Smith didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He fussed with a video camera set on a tripod at the end of the track. He hadn’t tightened the tripod’s spindly legs enough and it had almost crashed to the floor. Now, he wanted to make sure the unit wouldn’t keel over in the middle of the trial.
    If Bertrand had been there they would have had a good laugh at the professor’s expense, but Einstein’s favourite human rarely came during the day. When Einstein had asked why, Bertrand answered with a telly that showed a square brick building filled with children sitting at small tables.
    Einstein hadn’t figured out what the building was for, but he knew it was connected to a particular human sound.
    â€œSk . . . sk . . . skool . . . ” he attempted the strange guttural in his thoughts.
    As always with human jabber, the result was ugly. Most sounds came to him easily. He could remember them and replicate them in his thoughts after a single exposure. A dog barking or growling, the trilling of any number of birds, a breeze shushing through the grass . . . these things he could imitate at will. But the long trains of gibberish that spouted out of human mouths gave Einstein no end of trouble.
    He had figured out a few astonishing things, though. First Einstein detected minute breaks in the garbled streams of human speech. Their squawking could be broken down into smaller units, which he and Genie had picked out even before Professor Smith introduced them to the concept of language by pointing to objects and repeating their words.
    The two smartest pups easily memorized the lists Professor Smith made up for his trials. It was child’s play, and though he was