Free Tales of the Wold Newton Universe by Philip José Farmer Page A

I was startled. His mouth did not move while the words came from his throat. The words were excellent standard High German. But the voice was that of a long-dead American movie actor. Humphrey Bogart’s, to be exact.
    I would have picked Basil Rathbone’s, but de gustibus non disputandum . Especially someone with teeth like Ralph’s. There was no mystery or magic about the voice, though the effect, even to the prepared, was weird. The voice, like his high intelligence, was a triumph of German science. A dog (or any animal) lacks the mouth structure and vocal chords to reproduce human sounds intelligibly. This deficiency had been overcome by implanting a small nuclear-powered voder in Ralph’s throat. This was connected by an artificial-protein neural complex to the speech center of the dog’s brain. Before he could activate the voder, Ralph had to think of three code words. This was necessary, since otherwise he would be speaking whenever he thought in verbal terms. Inflection of the spoken words was automatic, responding to the emotional tone of Ralph’s thoughts.
    “What about pouring us a drink, sweetheart?” he said to Stampfert. “Park it there, buddy,” he said to me, indicating with a paw a large and comfortable easy chair. I did so, unsure whether or not I should resent his familiarity. I decided not to do so. After all, what could, or should, one expect from a dog who has by his own admission seen The Maltese Falcon forty-nine times? Of course, I found this out later, just as I discovered later that his manner of address varied bewilderingly, often in the middle of a sentence.
    Stampfert prepared the drinks at a well-stocked bar in the corner of the rather large living room. She made herself a tequila with lemon and salt, gave me the requested double Duggan’s Dew o’ Kirkintilloch on the rocks, and poured out three shots of King’s Ransom Scotch in a rock-crystal saucer on the floor. The dog began lapping it; then seeing me raise my eyebrows, he said, “I’m a private eye, Doc. It’s in the best tradition that PI.’s drink. I always try to follow human traditions—when it pleases me. And if my drinking from a saucer offends you, I can hold a glass between my paws. But why the hell should I?”
    “No reason at all,” I said hastily.
    He ceased drinking and jumped up onto a sofa, where he sat down facing us. “You two have been drinking at the Kennzeichen,” he said. “You are old customers there. And then, later, you had lunch at the Neu Bornholt. Doctor Stampfert said you were coming in the taxi, but you changed your mind and took the bus.”
    There was a silence which lasted until I understood that I was supposed to comment on this. I could only say, “Well?”
    “The babe didn’t tell me any of this,” Ralph said somewhat testily. “I was just demonstrating something that a mere human being could not have known.”
    “Mere?” I said just as testily.
    Ralph shrugged, which was quite an accomplishment when one considers that dogs don’t really have shoulders.
    “Sorry, Doc. Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. No offense.”
    “Very well,” I said. “How did you know all this?”
    And now that I came to think about it, I did wonder how he knew.
    “The Kennzeichen is the only restaurant in town which gives a stein of Lowenbrau to each habitué as he enters the bar,” von Wau Wau said. “You two obviously prefer other drinks, but you could not turn down the free drink. If you had not been at the Kennzeichen, I would not have smelled Lowenbrau on your breath. You then went to the Neu Bornholt for lunch. It serves a salad with its house dressing, the peculiar ingredients of which I detected with my sense of smell. This, as you know, is a million times keener than a human’s. If you had come in a taxi, as the dame said you meant to do, you would be stinking much more strongly of kerosene. Your clothes and hair have absorbed a certain amount of that from being on the streets, of