At the end of those five years the group made a presentation to the board of regents, the corporate underwriters, and the alumni association in order to justify their request for additional funding. They believed they were on the verge of discovering a way to augment human intelligence; their next task was to convince this audience that a mind is an expensive thing to buy.

Lankey had reason to be cocky. He had isolated a human gene which enables people with certain types of brain damage to recover many of their normal functions by using dormant areas of the brain to take over activities normally conducted by the sections which had been disabled by disease or trauma. The theory was that the gene, activated by the emergency (the damage to the brain), redirected bodily functions by instructing neurons to construct appropriate synapses through the unused portions of the brain. They were delighted to discover a similar gene in rats, and they had managed to find a trigger for it, a way to spur it into action whether or not the brain was really damaged.

In the next series of experiments, they took advantage of the newly activated brain cells by teaching rats to run complex mazes and to solve problems, which although simple were considered to be beyond the abilities of normal rats. The scientists had, of course, progressed beyond the point of having to tape a paralyzed, scalped rat to a table and implant electrodes in its brain. Apparently, they simply injected a substance that targeted the gene and kept it from receiving the "all is well" signals constantly sent to it by living brain cells.

Next, they tried using these newly accessible cerebral territories for higher functions. One of the graduate students told me that their prize specimen, a rat named Turing, was actually able to add. Turing could put two and two together and come up with four-- most of the time.

Naturally, theory had bounded ahead of experiment and the researchers wanted the opportunity to prove some of their more reasonable ones. They reasoned that if rats could count humans could easily learn fifty languages after a series of similar brain-boosting sessions. Or, as Turing's accomplishments hinted, perhaps humans could use the newly liberated areas of their brains for unspecified superhuman activities.

The research would continue at a modest pace, of course; chimps were next on the list. Lankey and his crew thought that turning chimps, orangutans or gorillas into mathematicians would take up the better part of their own academic careers; they would lay the groundwork and leave research on humans to their successors. I remember thinking at the time that they just didn't want to be there when humans smarter than themselves began prowling around their labs.

The fund-raising presentation included a summary of the research they had done, along with a budget proposal. The climax was a video made by the film department of Turing performing his amazing feats, and for the finale a student actor performed a carefully drafted script which explained in grandiose terms how continued research would ultimately change the world.

Unfortunately, over half the audience concluded that the project would change the world for the worse. Dr. Lankey had misjudged his audience, for the university was far from being the island of enlightenment in the midst of a sea of closed-minded superstition he supposed it should be. Instead of enthusiastically embracing this quest to hurry the evolution of mankind, those who held the purse strings pulled them tight. Located as we are at the buckle of the Bible Belt, the surrounding community encourages the intellectual pursuits of the university while expecting it to defend basic religious beliefs and discourage those under its control from any immoral tampering with nature. Perhaps if the scientists had couched their aspirations in less controversial terms they might have gained something, but evolution is still a touchy subject here--especially when it concerns the human mind.

The powers that be voted against funding the new primate building, lab, personnel, and equipment the scientists wanted so badly.

Mrs. Querry to the Rescue

All was not lost, however, for Dr. Lankey had had the good sense to invite his original benefactor, Mrs. Querry, although he had been reluctant to impose further in her generosity. The sight of little Turing pushing colored plastic chips into piles so fired the lady's imagination that after the smoke cleared she offered to finance the whole project. There was just one catch. Mrs. Querry saw the experiments as a way of combining her two favorite hobbies.

Another reason for the high turnover in her household was that many of those who had both proclaimed and believed themselves to be cat lovers soon realized that they had unwittingly overstated their enthusiasm. Returning to the job market was better for their mental health than contending with the daily battles in that feline-ridden household. Theoretically, the cats who didn't like one another were housed in separate areas of the house, but accidents were frequent and the resulting fights unnerving, as Mrs. Querry put it.

But she wasn't thinking of problems as she listened with rapt attention and growing fascination to Dr. Lankey's presentation. The only thing going through her mind, she told me, was her childhood fantasy of having a fairy-tale cat like Puss-in-Boots, or Dick Whittington's famous cat--a talking, thinking animal, one smart enough to be a true companion to her. Sitting there watching the counting rat go through his paces, she realized that for all these years she had only been making do with Siamese. They were the most intelligent and human-like of their species, but the professor's presentation was a dream come true--and it appeared to be for sale. She told Dr. Lankey that she would give him everything he needed, but they would have to begin their experiments with cats.

I was involved because I work the reference desk at the university's library every Thursday night. That was Mrs. Querry's research night. She went through all the periodicals and journals, and she liked to socialize a bit. We soon found that we had more than indices in common, for I am (or was) a fancier of Siamese cats, too. She was the one person who grieved with me over the loss of my old cat, Sigali. And I was the only person who rejoiced with her over the prospect of the creative process she had put in motion with Dr. Lankey. She even promised me a kitten.

Lankey and his team were undaunted by the prospect of producing Mrs. Querry's smart cat. They had, of course, planned on some intermediate steps between rat and gorilla, and only one of the students expressed any disappointment at the unexpected turn of events. She had been quite keen to start with either Labrador or Golden Retrievers, hoping to produce guide dogs that could read signs, maps and warning labels, understand directions from strangers, figure out bus schedules, and perform many other services with the same devotion their less gifted colleagues had shown to handicapped humans for generations. But the options were few--Siamese cats or back to rats--so altruism took aback seat to pandering, and every team member knew that the quicker they succeeded, the sooner they could proceed to better things.

Starting with mixed-breeds acquired from the local animal shelter, Lankey's team soon had cats that could outperform Turing by a decimal place. Mrs. Querry was elated. She told me she had seen a three-year-old tabby count three pieces of liver on one plate, add them to the seven on another, and push numbered wooden blocks together to form the equation: 4 + 6 = 10. The liver became the cat's dinner, and everyone celebrated with champagne.

Only two years later, Dr. Lankey informed his benefactor that he had accomplished the goal. He had created a dozen or so smart Siamese who were not only using parts of their brains which were normally dormant, their learning capacity had been further enhanced through the magic of chemicals which had changed the animals' genetic makeup. He gave Mrs. Querry not only the cats themselves, but also the first kittens produced from a mating between two of them. He had no idea what sort of future was possible for these offspring. It all depended, he told her, on their education.

The astonishing thing is that the researchers had no curiosity about the cats' potential. As soon as they had proven that the animals had cognitive abilities well beyond normal expectations--the fact that they could so simple math sufficed--they were no longer interested in them. They left further experimentation to the psychologists, but since the geneticists tended to look down their noses at those "soft" scientists (and more likely, because there was some personal animosity between the two departments) none of the cats ever ended up in the psychology labs.

The cats lose no time before causing trouble

The student who packed the scrawny little seal-point into a crate for me said that everyone involved was glad to see the end of the cat phase of the research, not only because they preferred to spend Mrs. Querry's fortune elsewhere, but also because the cats were becoming an intolerable bother. The adult cats in the lab were impossible to control, and they had begun teaching the kittens how to get themselves out of and into every type of cage or enclosure in the place. The famous Turing and several of his companions had been released from their cages, and presumably consumed, a few weeks earlier, and the staff arrived every morning to find their offices littered with files and the floors covered with broken beakers, test tubes, petri dishes and like. The cats had become so bold as to slip out in broad daylight, when no one was watching, and ransack everything in sight, including the refrigerator. Thank God, the young man sighed, there were no deadly bacterial cultures or viruses stored anywhere. The cats would surely have released them on the world by now!

Computerized locks had been recently installed on all the doors, but some trusting soul had punched in while carrying an errant cat under her arm. After that, it only took the felines a couple of days to figure out the codes every time the humans changed them.

Now you might think that simple curiosity would have motivated these scientists to explore a little further just what it was they had created, but they were used t working with stupid, passive lab animals and the cats were no longer an object of study, just a nuisance to be got rid of as quickly as possible.

My first year with Lulu was just as exciting and thrilling as I had hoped. In no time, she learned everything about my apartment. Within a week she could open all the doors and get into any cupboard, turn on water taps, lights and small appliances. The TV was always on and tuned to the nature channel when I got home from work. And, most astonishing of all, at about six months of age she began to talk.

Anyone who has ever owned a Siamese cat knows that they can "talk". My old cat, Sigali, was famous for her long, raucous, incomprehensible conversations. Sometimes I could guess correctly at what she was on about. Usually it was her food, her litter box, or birds at the feeder-things which concerned her own well being.

Lulu, on the other hand, could actually talk. She was no Olivier by any stretch of the imagination, but like a small child she listened carefully to everything I said to her and tried very hard to repeat the words. It took quite some time before I understood what she was doing, let alone what she was saying. It was like listening to someone with a heavy foreign accent and a serious speech defect. It took some getting used to and no one else understood her.

Most of her conversation consisted of questions-nonstop interrogation during all of our waking hours together, and she often woke me in the middle of the night with more. I was behind the reference desk twenty-four hours a day because of that cat. It wasn't long before I was pulling books off the shelf to answer her more arcane queries. When I had exhausted myself trying to satisfy her, I decided to see how smart she really was-I taught her to read. Within three weeks she tested out at sixth grade reading level.

Every day I laid out the books she chose, weighted down the covers, and left a wet sponge in a dish for her so she could moisten her paws and turn the pages. When she had gone through all the books and magazines in my personal library I started bringing home books from the university. She was especially fascinated with birds. She loved reading about them, and she spent a lot of time observing them when they crowded around the feeder on my little balcony.

On nice weekends we went to the park. She knew the names and habits of all the birds there from her reading and she often had educated remarks to make about them. She begged me to undo her leash so she could climb the trees and see the birds of close. The only time I gave in to her pleadings I regretted it. I naively thought that her superior mind and education would overcome her predatory instincts.

She sat quietly next to a bench where an elderly lady distributed crumbs to a little flock of pigeons and sparrows. Before I could stop her she pounced on one of the oblivious little creatures and killed it. The bird lady blamed me, of course, and threatened to report me to the police for letting such a dangerous animal loose in the park. But none of it had any effect on Lulu. She took her time washing blood off her dark brown face, closed her eyes and purred.

-Caught one, caught one, caught one, she was saying.

Lulu was smart enough to know she would never get off her lead again during visits to the park, so she turned her attentions elsewhere. The sight of airplanes flying above us fascinated her. Like many primitive creatures, she thought at first that they were large, noisy birds. Even when I brought her books on aircraft and explained as much about them as I could, she persisted in thinking of the airplanes as birds, and they remained an object of her intense curiosity.

We went through a bad time during her mating seasons. All Siamese are horribly noisy at this time, but with Lulu, who knew the implications of her state, the howls and gutteral yowls which persisted night and day became a terrible begging and pleading to be allowed to mate and have kittens. She gave me to believe that she would die if she couldn't produce offspring.

I should have simply taken her to the clinic to be neutered, but I don't know how she would have reacted. It was traumatic enough just taking her for routine shots. She wanted to know everything the vet was doing, right down to the batch number on the distemper vaccine. She knew all about the diseases and the possible reactions she could have to the shots. It took a lot of talking to reassure her and the vet, who couldn't understand a word she was saying, must have thought I was just one of those lonely single women who treat their cats like surrogate children!

If I had left her there, I'm sure she would have found some way to escape, and I couldn't bear the thought of losing her. I decided it was impossible to have her neutered, and I must admit that I was curious to see what sort of kittens she would produce. I had the idea that perhaps Lulu herself would teach them to read.

I knew that her genes were so much altered that if she could produce offspring at all it would have to be with another supercat. I had no idea where the other cats had ended up. Mrs. Querry, who was wrapped up in the care and education of the two females she had taken, rarely visited the library any more. One of the grad students at the lab told me the records of the supercat project had been archived. He and his colleagues were much too busy with their new chimps to bother doing a search to find Lulu a mate. I just smiled at him. Right, I told him silently, the next time you need some obscure document pulled up from the musty cellar of some tiny college on the other side of the world it will take some serious time and expense just to justify its existence!

I suddenly remembered Mrs. Querry telling me that she had earmarked a male kitten for Tom Haversham. He was such a nice young man, she said, and he had helped with some computer problems. Dr. Haversham's appearances in the library were rare, presumably because the output of all the minds who had ever lived on earth was available to him right in his own cyberspace, but Lulu kept coming into heat every month or so and Haversham't cat was my only chance for some peace and quiet, or so I thought. I only hoped he had not taken his cat, if indeed he had one, for that unkind cut at the clinic.

I tracked down the good doctor in his introductory computer science classroom just as the bell rang. The fleeing students were complaining about him. Apparently, Doc. Tom Terrific, as they called him, was a genius of sorts whose talents did not lie in his ability to explain his arcane world to the uninitiated.

"Did you fail that one?" a boy asked.

"Oh, yeah!" his companion answered. "How does he expect us to know stuff he's not even teaching us? We're supposed to float our brains out there and absorb it from the ether, maybe?'

"Well", another girl grumbled, "if that was a 'little quizzie' I can't wait to see his 'big testies'.later on."

"I bet you can't!" one of the boys leered back. The girl went red in the face and hit him with her notebook. In addition to being a genius, Doc Tom was also what the girls called "chunka"--a drop-dead gorgeous, unattached hunk.

Doc Tom didn't recognize me, and he was too busy packing up to pay much attention as I introduced myself, but as soon as I mentioned the cats his eyes lit up and we were chatting like old friends.

"Mephistopheles is a great cat!" he told me. "He's so smart, but people think I'm crazy when I try to tell them some of the things he can do. He uses the toilet most of the time, he can open anything, and he turns lights and appliances on and off. He even feeds himself. I set up the electric can-opener for him so all he has to do is push the can under and step on a button. I have to be careful not to leave my groceries on the counter for too long; I've lost a few cans of liver pâté that way! And, maybe even you won't believe this, but I think he can talk. He understands everything I tell him--and he talks back! It's almost like words. People just ell me all Siamese are talkative and have a lot of dexterity, but . . ." He lowered his voice and gripped his thumb for emphasis, "now this is really good: he plays a mean game of Tetris!"

Doc Tom clapped his hands in triumph, but I was unimpressed. Lulu had tired of simple computer games a couple of months earlier. It frustrated her not to be able to click the mouse properly with her paws, and the thing always slipped during moments of intense excitement. Her reflexes were much too fast for the human-oriented devices. Of course, Doc Tom had adapted his equipment for the feline user.

I told Tom that Lulu was now reading at just under college level. That got his attention in spades. He had been so wound up with his cat's potential on the computer that he had never thought about teaching him to read. Mephistopheles could recognize icons and get into some of the games, even play a little chess if the moves went fast enough, but Tom hadn't made much effort to teach him more than a few written commands.

"I want you and Lulu to come over on Saturday afternoon," he said, "just for a visit. If the cats hit it off together, we can plan a litter!