Sitting on the flat roof, my eyes were fixed on the gates and the road beyond where the car carrying the Professor had disappeared. Sarah sat beside me and ruffled the tangle of fur on my snout.
“You’re a miracle,” she said, “you know that, don’t you? You scare people, though. When you talk, people think they must be crazy. You understand? It doesn’t seem real. It doesn’t seem possible. As if it’s magic or something.”
“The Professor doesn’t like magic.” My voice was hoarse. “He says it’s irrational.”
“Well, he’s worked a piece of magic with you,” she said. “How’d they get such a big brain into such a little head?”
“Size doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s the variety of cortical modules that makes the difference.”
“You don’t say.”
“The Professor told me. Better cortical modules, more types. That’s how you get more intelligence without increasing brain size. Anyone knows that.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“We have to find him, you know that, don’t you?” I looked into her eyes, looking for the tell-tale signs. “Will you help us find him?” I fixed her with a stare.
She nodded and smiled and rubbed my back. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll help you. I promise.”
You can tell when humans lie. Their eyebrows twitch, and they blink a lot. Some of them rub their eyes or their nose. Others try to hide it, and their face goes stiff. I saw none of that in Sarah. She smelt right, too. I decided we could trust her.
“We have to get you out of here,” she said, her voice calmer now. “I don’t know how this Professor of yours worked this miracle of his, but the world is in for a shock.”
“It will be if those baboons get loose,” I said.
“They’ve been keeping all this secret,” Sarah said. “No one out there knows.”
I asked her why all these humans were here, what had brought them.
“On the news,” she said, “Professor Wainwright gave a press conference, though he rambled, talked about enhanced intelligence, but it all sounded theoretical. Then it came out, about putting human DNA into animals, giving them the human neocortex. That’s part of the brain. You know that?”
I nodded.
“That’s what brought all these people. That lot,” she said, pointing towards the crowd carrying placards, “they’re against the research, against the science.”
“And you?” I asked.
“We’re against the experiments, using live animals. We didn’t know,” she said. “We didn’t know about you. How could we?”
I thought of the poor Professor, going in front of all those people, which he would have hated, and having to say something to put things right, but never being able to tell the truth. He couldn’t, not without telling them about Ruby, me, the baboons. He wanted to keep that quiet for our sakes.
I gestured with my snout towards the gate and the road beyond. “How will we find him? He’ll be miles away.”
“We have to get you out of here first,” she said.
I looked at the grounds below, filled with police and Jempson’s men. The gates were blocked by protestors, and more police were arriving all the time.
“Don’t worry,” she said, as she rose to her feet, “we’ve called in reinforcements. Look, here they are,” she said, and pointed to a plume of smoke that rose above the hedge.
