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

course, along with the high-sulfur coal now burned in many automobiles. But I deduce—olfactorily—that you took instead one of the electrically operated, fuel-celled, relatively odorless buses. Am I correct?”
    “I would have said that it was amazing, but of course your nose makes it easy for you,” I said.
    “An extremely distinguished colleague of mine,” Ralph said, “undoubtedly the most distinguished, once said that it is the first quality of a criminal investigator to see through a disguise. I would modify that to the second quality. The first is that he should smell through a disguise.”
    Though he seemed somewhat nettled, he became more genial after a few more laps from the saucer. So did I after a few more sips from my glass. He even gave me permission to smoke, provided that I did it under a special vent placed over my easy chair.
    “Cuban make,” he said, sniffing after I had lit up. “La Roja Paloma de la Revolution.”
    “Now that is astounding!” I said. I was also astounded to find Stampfert on my lap.
    “It’s nothing,” he said. “I started to write a trifling little monograph on the subtle distinctions among cigar odors, but I realized that it would make a massive textbook before I was finished. And who could use it?”
    “What are you doing here?” I said to Stampfert. “This is business. I don’t want to give Herr von Wau Wau the wrong impression.”
    “You didn’t used to mind,” she said, giggling. “But I’m here because I want to smoke, too, and this is the only vent he has, and he told me not to smoke unless I sat under it.”
    Under the circumstances, it was not easy to carry on a coherent conversation with the dog, but we managed. I told him that I had read something of his life. I knew that his parents had been the property of the Hamburg Police Department. He was one of a litter of eight, all mutated to some degree since they and their parents had been subjected to scientific experiments. These had been conducted by the biologists of das Institut und die Tankstelle fur Gehirntaschenspielerei. But his high intelligence was the result of biosurgery. Although his brain was no larger than it should have been for a dog his size, its complexity was comparable to that of a human’s. The scientists had used artificial protein to make billions of new nerve circuits in his cerebrum. This had been done, however, at the expense of his cerebellum or hindbrain. As a result, he had very little subconscious and hence could not dream.
    As everybody now knows, failure to dream results in a progressive psychosis and eventual mental breakdown. To rectify this, Ralph created dreams during the day, recorded them audiovisually, and fed them into his brain at night. I don’t have space to go into this in detail in this narrative, but a full description will be found in The Case of the Stolen Dreams. (Not yet published.)
    When Ralph was still a young pup, an explosion had wrecked the Institute and killed his siblings and the scientists responsible for his sapiency. Ralph was taken over again by the Police Department and sent to school. He attended obedience school and the other courses requisite for a trained Schutzhund canine. But he was the only pup who also attended classes in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
    Ralph was now twenty-eight years old but looked five. Some attributed this anomaly to the mutation experiments. Others claimed that the scientists had perfected an age-delaying elixir which had been administered to Ralph and his siblings. If the explosion had not destroyed the records, the world might now have the elixir at its disposal. (More of this in A Short Case of Longevity, n.y.p.)
    Ralph’s existence had been hidden for many years from all except a few policemen and officials sworn to silence. It was believed that publicity would reduce his effectiveness in his detective work. But recently the case had come to the attention of the public because of Ralph’s own doing. Fed