THE SOIL SMELLS DIFFERENT?
IT’S ALL SO DIFFERENT!
You were moved. The scent in your nostrils was the earth baked by the sun. But it wasn’t daytime now. When you emerged from that cramped world, it was the dead of night.
July 1969.
The moon was out. You turned to look at it. It was dazzling. This was nothing else, only moonlight, but for you, born and raised underground, it might as well have been as bright as the sun. You had seen the Vietnamese doctor’s light in the tunnels, so your eyes were familiar with illumination. They had been educated by the bulb in the operating room, and they had felt awed by its vivid round glow. But the moon hovering up there in the sky…this was different. The shock of it was altogether different. You were moonstruck. Any number of stars twinkled in the sky along with the moon, but it was the moon that got you. An American reconnaissance plane carrying an infrared camera flew by, but you were enchanted by the moon.
That summer, humans, too, found their gazes drawn to the same celestial body. The whole world was focused on the moon that season, because the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration had launched Apollo 11 and, for the first time in human history, landed a man on the moon. That was the human world, though, not the dog world. Dogs had been the ones to open the door to space travel, but now the man-made satellite Sputnik 2 was all but forgotten. Twelve years had passed since then.
The human twentieth century continued, that summer, as though Anno Canis didn’t exist.
You cried.
Nameless, gazing straight up at the moon, you were pained. Your eyes hurt. You had been born underground, where vision was useless, and the moonlight was too strong for you. Tears welled in your eyes. Tears fell. But you didn’t look away.
You kept staring up at the moon, overwhelmed.
You sensed something behind you.
You turned around. Your eyesight still blurred by tears.
It was a human. He held a night vision device in one hand and a military map in the other. He was different from all the other humans you had seen…spied on…so far. There was a difference in race—in build, in odor—but of course that meant nothing to a dog like you. You were on the edge of a firebase to the north of the DMZ, an area that was on the front lines but which had been cleared of North Vietnamese soldiers.
You were unsure how to react.
Because instinct told you there was no need to run.
WHAT IS…WHAT…?
You, nameless dog, were at a loss. How could a human do what he was doing, stand there opposite you as he was, in the darkness?
The human spoke: “Are you crying?”
His voice sounded like a dog’s whine. It radiated through your body with the same warmth as the commands the unnameable sense issued. You had no way of knowing, of course, but the language the man spoke was not Vietnamese. Neither was it Chinese. Or English.
WHAT IS IT, HUMAN?
“I saw you,” the human said. Then, holding up the night vision device, “I saw you with this. Crawling up out of the ground. Like the earth was giving birth to you. You were looking up at the moon.”
ARE YOU A GUIDE? you thought, your vision clouded with tears. A GUIDE TO THIS OTHER WORLD?
“You’re the opposite of those dogs who returned from outer space. But not unrelated. And look at that physique of yours…you’re purebred, huh? Purebred German shepherd? You don’t look that old either. Young, in fact. You’ve just graduated from puppyhood.”
HEY, HUMAN, you say. THIS IS A GREAT, MYSTERIOUS WORLD.
“Strange…are you an American dog?”
I CAME ABOVEGROUND.
“They set you loose in the tunnels to explore them in secret, and you got lost—is that it? No, it can’t be. You don’t have that kind of attitude at all. Are you Chinese, then? One of the dogs in that platoon they talk about, the one they say the PLA sent in four years ago? No…that’s not right either.”
YOU WERE HERE.
“Anyway, I was here, and then you turned up,” the human said. He spoke the same words, dog, nameless dog, that you yourself had just said. Not in Vietnamese, or in Chinese, or even in English. In Russian.
“Come. I’ll take you with me. Can your children be the next Belka, the next Strelka?”
The KGB officer held out his hands, and you barked. Woof!
In March 1969, the Sino-Soviet split finally escalated into armed conflict. The two