ow was Teel . . . ?“
“Gutted like Dalberg. Decapitated.”
The Outsider, Lem thought. No doubt about it now.
Moths had gotten inside and were bashing against the lens of the klieg light 
behind which Lem and Walt stood.
His voice thickening with anger, Walt said, “Haven’t found . . . his head. How 
do I tell his dad that Teel’s head is missing?”
Lem had no answer.
Walt looked hard at him. “You can’t push me all the way out of it now. Not now 
that one of my men is dead.”
“Walt, my agency works in purposeful obscurity. Hell, even the number of agents 
on the payroll is classified information. But your department is subject to full 
press attention. And in order to know how to proceed in this case, your people 
would have to be told exactly what they’re looking for. That would mean 
revealing national defense secrets to a large group of deputies—”
“Your men all know what’s up,” Walt countered.
“Yes, but my men have signed secrecy oaths, undergone extensive security checks, 
and are trained to keep their mouths shut.”
“My men can keep a secret, too.”
“I’m sure they can,” Lem said carefully. “i’m sure they don’t talk outside the 
shop about ordinary cases. But this isn’t ordinary. No, this has to remain in 
our hands.”
Walt said, “My men can sign secrecy oaths.”
“We’d have to background-check everyone in your department, not just deputies 
but file clerks. It’d take weeks, months.”
Looking across the kitchen at the open door to the dining room, Walt noticed 
Cliff Soames and another NSA agent talking with two deputies in the next room. 
“You started taking over the minute you got here, didn’t you? Before you even 
talked to me about it?”
“Yeah. We’re making sure your people understand that they must not talk of 
anything they’ve seen here tonight, not even to their own wives. We’re citing 
the appropriate federal laws to every man, ‘cause we want to be sure they 
understand the fines and prison terms.”
“Threatening me with jail again?” Walt asked, but there was no humor in his 
voice, as there had been when they’d spoken days ago in the garage of St. 
Joseph’s Hospital after seeing Tracy Keeshan.
Lem was depressed not only by the deputy’s death but by the wedge that this case 
was driving between him and Walt. “I don’t want anyone in jail. That’s why I 
want to be sure they grasp the consequences—”
Scowling, Walt said, “Come with me.”
Lem followed him outside, to a patrol car in front of the house.
They sat in the front seat, Walt behind the steering wheel, with the doors 
closed. “Roll up the windows, so we’ll have total privacy.”
Lem protested that they’d suffocate in this heat without ventilation. But even 
in the dim light, he saw the purity and volatility of Walt’s anger, and he 
realized his position was that of a man standing in gasoline while holding a 
burning candle. He rolled up his window.
“Okay,” Walt said. “We’re alone. Not NSA District Director and Sheriff. Just old 
friends. Buddies. So tell me all about it.”
“Walt, damn it, I can’t.”
“Tell me now, and I’ll stay off the case. I won’t interfere.”
“You’ll stay off the case anyway. You have to.”
“Damned if I do,” Walt said angrily. “I can walk right down the road to those 
jackals.” The car faced out of Bordeaux Ridge, toward the sawhorses where 
reporters waited, and Walt pointed at them through the dusty windshield. “I can 
tell them that Banodyne Laboratories was working on some defense project that 
got out of hand, tell them that someone or something strange escaped from those 
labs in spite of the security, and now it’s loose, killing people.”
“You do that,” Lem said, “you wouldn’t just wind up in jail. You’d lose your 
job, ruin your whole career.”
“I don’t think so. In court I’d claim I had to choose between breaching the 
national security and betraying the trust of the people who elected me to office 
in this county. I’d claim that, in a time of crisis like this, I had to put 
local public safety above the concerns of the Defense bureaucrats in Washington. 
I’m confident just about any jury would vindicate me. I’d stay out of jail, and 
in the next election I’d win by even more votes than I got the last time.”
“Shit,” Lem said because he knew Walt was correct.
“If you tell me about it now, if you convince me that your people are better
able to handle the situation than mine, then I’ll step out of your way. But if 
you won’t tell me, I’ll blow it wide open.”
“I’d be breaking my oath. I’d be putting my neck in the noose.”
“No one’ll ever know you told me.”
“Yeah? Well then, Walt, for Christ’s sake, why put me in such an awkward 
position just to satisfy your curiosity?”
Walt looked stung. “It’s not as petty as that, damn you. It’s not just 
curiosity.”
“Then what is it?”
“One of my men is dead!”
Leaning his head back against the seat, Lem closed his eyes and sighed. Walt had 
to know why he was required to forswear vengeance for the killing of one of his 
own men. His sense of duty and honor would not allow him to back off without at 
least that much. His was not exactly an unreasonable position.
“Do I go down there, talk to the reporters?” Walt asked quietly. Lem opened his 
eyes, wiped a hand across his damp face. The interior of the car was 
uncomfortably warm, muggy. He wanted to roll down his window. But now and then 
men walked past on their way in or out of the house, and he really could not 
risk anyone overhearing what he was going to tell Walt. “You were right to focus 
on Banodyne. For a few years they’ve been doing defense-related research.”
“Biological warfare?” Walt asked. “Using recombinant DNA to make nasty new 
viruses?”
“Maybe that, too,” Lem said. “But germ warfare doesn’t have anything to do with 
this case, and I’m only going to tell you about the research that’s related to 
our problems here.”
The windows were fogging. Walt started the car. There was no air conditioning, 
and the fog on the windows continued to spread, but even the vague, moist, warm 
breeze from the vents was welcome.
Lem said, “They were working on several research programs under the heading of 
the Francis Project. Named for Saint Francis of Assisi.”
Blinking in surprise, Walt said, “They’d name a warfare-related project after a 
saint?’
“It’s apt,” Lem assured him. “Saint Francis could talk to birds and animals. And 
at Banodyne, Dr. Davis Weatherby was in charge of a project aimed at making 
human-animal communication possible.”
“Learning the language of porpoises—that sort of thing?”
“No. The idea was to apply the very latest knowledge in genetic engineering to 
the creation of animals with a much higher order of intelligence, animals 
capable of nearly human-level thought, animals with whom we might be able to 
Communicate.”
Walt stared at him in openmouthed disbelief.
Lem said, “There’ve been several scientific teams working on very different 
experiments under the umbrella label of the Francis Project, all of which have
been funded for at least five years. For one thing, there were Davis Weatherby’s 
dogs . .
Dr. Weatherby had been working with the sperm and ova of golden retrievers, 
which he had chosen because the dogs had been bred with ever greater refinement 
for more than a hundred years. For one thing, this refinement meant that, in the 
purest of the breed, all diseases and afflictions of an inheritable nature had 
been pretty much excised from the animal’s genetic code, which insured Weatherby 
of healthy and bright subjects for his experiments. Then, if the experimental 
pups were born with abnormalities of any kind, Weatherby could more easily 
distinguish those mutations of a natural type from those that were an unintended 
side effect of his own sly tampering with the animal’s genetic heritage, and he 
would be able to learn from his own mistakes.
Over the years, seeking solely to increase the intelligence of the breed without 
causing a change in its physical appearance, Davis Weatherby had fertilized 
hundreds of genetically altered retriever ova in vitro, then had transferred the 
fertile eggs to the wombs of bitches who served as surrogate mothers. The 
bitches carried the test-tube pups to full term, and Weatherby studied these 
young dogs for indications of increased intelligence.
“There were a hell of a lot of failures,” Lem said. “Grotesque physical 
mutations that had to be destroyed. Stillborn pups. Pups that looked normal but 
were less intelligent than usual. Weatherby was doing cross-species engineering, 
after all, so you can figure that some pretty horrible possibilities were 
realized.”
Walt stared at the windshield, now entirely opaqued. Then he frowned at Lem. 
“Cross-species? What do you mean?”
“Well, you see, he was isolating those genetic determinants of intelligence in 
species that were brighter than the retriever—”
“Like apes? They’d be brighter than dogs, wouldn’t they?”
“Yeah. Apes. . . and human beings.”
“Jesus,” Walt said.
Lem adjusted a dashboard vent to direct the flow of tepid air into his face. 
“Weatherby was inserting that foreign genetic material into the retriever’s 
genetic code, simultaneously editing out the dog’s own genes that limited its 
intelligence to that of a dog.”
Walt rebelled. “That’s not possible! This genetic material, as you call it, 
surely it can’t be passed from one species to another.”
“It happens in nature all the time,” Lem said. “Genetic material is transferred 
from one species to another, and the carrier is usually a virus. Let’s say a 
virus thrives in rhesus monkeys. While in the monkey, it acquires genetic 
material from the monkey’s cells. These acquired monkey genes become a part of 
the virus itself. Later, upon infecting a human host, that virus has the 
capability of leaving the monkey’s genetic material in its human host. Consider 
the AIDS virus, for instance. It’s believed AIDS was a disease carried by 
certain monkeys and by human beings for decades, though neither species was 
susceptible to it; I mean, we were strictly carriers—we never got sick
from what we carried. But then, somehow, something happened in monkeys, a 
negative genetic change that made them not only carriers but victims of the AIDS 
virus. Monkeys began to die of the disease. Then, when the virus passed to 
humans, it brought with it this new genetic material specifying susceptibility 
to AIDS, so before long human beings were also capable of contracting the 
disease. That’s how it works in nature. It’s done even more efficiently in the 
lab.”
As creeping condensation fogged the side windows, Walt said, “So Weatherby 
really succeeded in breeding a dog with human intelligence?”
“It was a long, slow process, but gradually he made advancements. And a little 
over a year ago, the miracle pup was born.”
“Thinks like a human being?”
“Not like a human being, but maybe as well as.”
“Yet it looks like an ordinary dog?”
“That was what the Pentagon wanted. Which made Weatherby’s job a lot harder, I 
guess. Apparently, brain size has at least a little bit to do with intelligence, 
and Weatherby might have made his breakthrough a lot sooner if he’d been able to 
develop a retriever with a larger brain. But a larger brain would have meant a 
reconfigured and much larger skull, so the dog would have looked damned 
unusual.”
All the windows were fogged over now. Neither Walt nor Lem tried to clear the 
misted glass. Unable to see out of the car, confined to its humid and 
claustrophobic interior, they seemed to be cut off from the real world, adrift 
in time and space, a condition that was oddly conducive to the consideration of 
the wondrous and outrageous acts of creation that genetic engineering made 
possible.
Walt said, “The Pentagon wanted a dog that looked like a dog but could think 
like a man? Why?”
“Imagine the possibilities for espionage,” Lem said. “In times of war, dogs 
would have no trouble getting deep into enemy territory, scouting installations 
and troop strength. Intelligent dogs, with whom we could somehow communicate, 
would then return and tell us what they had seen and what they’d overheard the 
enemy talking about.”
“Tell us? Are you saying dogs could be made to talk, like canine versions of 
Francis the Mule or Mr. Ed? Shit, Lem, be serious!”
Lem sympathized with his friend’s difficulty in absorbing these astounding 
possibilities. Modern science was advancing so rapidly, with so many 
revolutionary discoveries to be explored every year, that to laymen there was 
going to be increasingly less difference between the application of that science 
and magic. Few nonscientists had any appreciation for how different the world of 
the next twenty years was going to be from the world of the present, as 
different as the 1980s were from the 1780s. Change was occurring at an 
Incomprehensible rate, and when you got a glimpse of what might be coming— as 
Walt just had—it was both inspiring and daunting, exhilarating and scary.
Lem said, “In fact, a dog probably could be genetically altered to be able to 
speak. Might even be easy, I don’t know. But to give it the necessary vocal
apparatus, the right kind of tongue and lips . . . that’d mean drastically 
altering its appearance, which is no good for the Pentagon’s purposes. So these 
dogs wouldn’t speak. Communication would no doubt have to be through an 
elaborate sign language.”
“You’re not laughing,” Walt said. “This has got to be a fucking joke, so why 
aren’t you laughing?”
“Think about it,” Lem said patiently. “In peacetime . . . imagine the president 
of the United States presenting the Soviet premier with a one-year-old golden 
retriever as a gift from the American people. Imagine the dog living in the 
premier’s home and office, privy to the most secret talks of the USSR’s highest 
Party officials. Once in a while, every few weeks or months, the dog might 
manage to slip out at night, to meet with a U.S. agent in Moscow and be 
debriefed.”
“Debriefed? This is insane!” Walt said, and he laughed. But his laughter had a 
sharp, hollow, decidedly nervous quality which, to Lem, indicated that the 
sheriffs skepticism was slipping away even though he wanted to hold on to it.
“I’m telling you that it’s possible, that such a dog was in fact conceived by in 
vitro fertilization of a genetically altered ovum by genetically altered sperm, 
and carried to term by a surrogate mother. And after a year of confinement at 
the Banodyne labs, sometime in the early morning hours of Monday, May 17, that 
dog escaped by a series of incredibly clever actions that cannily circumvented 
the facility’s security system.”
“And the dog’s now loose?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s what’s been killing—”
“No,” Lem said. “The dog is harmless, affectionate, a wonderful animal. I was in 
Weatherby’s lab while he was working with the retriever. In a limited way, I 
communicated with it. Honest to God, Walt, when you see that animal in action, 
see what Weatherby created, it gives you enormous hope for this sorry species of 
ours.”
Walt stared at him, uncomprehending.
Lem searched for the words to convey what he felt. As he found the language to 
describe what the dog had meant to him, his chest grew tight with emotion. “Well 
. . . I mean, if we can do these amazing things, if we can bring such a wonder 
into the world, then there’s something of profound value in us no matter what 
the pessimists and doomsayers believe. If we can do this, we have the power and, 
potentially, the wisdom of God. We’re not only makers of weapons, but makers of 
life. If we could lift members of another species up to our level, create a 
companion race to share the world . . . our beliefs and philosophies would be 
changed forever. By the very act of altering the retriever, we’ve altered 
ourselves. By pulling the dog to a new level of awareness, we are inevitably 
raising our own awareness as well.”
“Jesus, Lem, you sound like a preacher.”
“Do I? That’s because I’ve had more time to think about this than you
have. In time, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. You’ll begin to feel 
it, too, this incredible sense that humankind is on its way to godhood—and that 
we deserve to get there.”
Walt Gaines stared at the steamed glass, as if reading something of great 
interest in the patterns of condensation. Then: “Maybe what you say is right. 
Maybe we’re on the brink of a new world. But for now we’ve got to live in and 
deal with the old one. So if it wasn’t the dog that killed my deputy— what was 
it?”
“Something else escaped from Banodyne the same night that the dog got out,” Lem 
said. His euphoria was suddenly tempered by the need to admit that there had 
been a darker side to the Francis Project. “They called it The Outsider.”
 
 
5
Nora held up the magazine ad that compared an automobile to a tiger and that 
showed the car in an iron cage. To Einstein, she said, “All right, let’s see 
what else you can clarify for us. What about this one? What is it that 
interested you in this photograph—the car?”
Einstein barked once: No.
“Was it the tiger?” Travis asked. One bark.
“The cage?” Nora asked.
Einstein wagged his tail: Yes.
“Did you choose this picture because they kept you in a cage?” Nora asked.
Yes.
Travis crawled across the floor until he found the photo of a forlorn man in a 
prison cell. Returning with it, showing it to the retriever, he said, “And did 
you choose this one because the cell is like a cage?”
Yes.
“And because the prisoner in the picture reminded you of bow you felt when you 
were in a cage?”
Yes.
“The violin,” Nora said. “Did someone at the laboratory play the violin for 
you?”
Yes.
“Why would they do that, I wonder?” Travis said.
That was one the dog could not answer with a simple yes or no.
“Did you like the violin?” Nora asked. Yes.
“You like music in general?”
Yes.
“Do you like jazz?”
The dog neither barked nor wagged his tail.
Travis said, “He doesn’t know what jazz is. I guess they never let him hear any 
of that.”
“Do you like rock and roll?” Nora asked.
One bark and, simultaneously, a wagging of the tail.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nora asked.
“Probably means ‘yes and no,’ “Travis said. “He likes some rock and roll. but 
not all of it.”
Einstein wagged his tail to confirm Travis’s interpretation.
“Classical?” Nora asked.
Yes.
Travis said, “So we’ve got a dog that’s a snob, huh?”
Yes, yes, yes.
Nora laughed in delight, and so did Travis, and Einstein nuzzled and licked them 
happily.
Travis looked around for another picture, snatched up the one of the man on the 
exercise treadmill. “They wouldn’t want to let you out of the lab, I guess. Yet 
they’d want to keep you fit. Is this how they exercised you? On a treadmill?”
Yes.
The sense of discovery was exhilarating. Travis would have been no more 
thrilled, no more excited, no more awestricken if he had been communicating with 
an extraterrestrial intelligence.
 
 
 
6
I’m falling down a rabbit hole, Walt Gaines thought uneasily as he listened to 
Lem Johnson.
This new high-tech world of space flight, computers in the home, 
satellite-relayed telephone calls, factory robots, and now biological 
engineering seemed utterly unrelated to the world in which he was born and grew 
up. For God’s sake, he had been a child during World War II, when there had not 
even been jet aircraft. He hailed from a simpler world of boatlike Chryslers 
with tail fins, phones with dials instead of push buttons, clocks with hands 
instead of digital display boards. Television did not exist when he was born, 
and the possibility of nuclear Armageddon within his own lifetime was something 
no one then could have predicted. He felt as though he had stepped through an 
invisible barrier from his world into another reality that was on a faster 
track. This new kingdom of high technology could be delightful or frightening— 
and occasionally both at the same time.
Like now.
The idea of an intelligent dog appealed to the child in him and made him want to 
smile.
But something else—The Outsider—had escaped from those labs, and it scared the 
bejesus out of him.
“The dog had no name,” Lem Johnson said. “That’s not so unusual. Most scientists 
who work with lab animals never name them. If you’ve named an animal, you’ll 
inevitably begin to attribute a personality to it, and then your relationship to 
it will change, and you’ll no longer be as objective in your observations as you 
have to be. So the dog had only a number until it was clear this was the success 
Weatherby had been working so hard to achieve. Even then, when it was evident 
that the dog would not have to be destroyed as a failure, no name was given to 
it. Everyone simply called it ‘the dog,’ which was enough to differentiate it 
from all of Weatherby’s other pups because they’d been referred to by numbers. 
Anyway, at the same time, Dr. Yarbeck was working on other, very different 
research under the Francis Project umbrella, and she, too, finally met with some 
success.”
Yarbeck’s objective was to create an animal with dramatically increased 
intelligence—but one also designed to accompany men into war as police dogs 
accompanied cops in dangerous urban neighborhoods. Yarbeck sought to engineer a 
beast that was smart but also deadly, a terror on the battlefield— ferocious, 
stealthy, cunning, and intelligent enough to be effective in both jungle and 
urban warfare.
Not quite as intelligent as human beings, of course, not as smart as the dog 
that Weatherby was developing. It would be sheer madness to create a killing 
machine as intelligent as the people who would have to use and control it. 
Everyone had read Frankenstein or had seen one of the old Karloff movies, and no 
one underestimated the dangers inherent in Yarbeck’s research.
Choosing to work with monkeys and apes because of their naturally high 
intelligence and because they already possessed humanlike hands, Yarbeck 
ultimately selected baboons as the base species for her dark acts of creation. 
Baboons were among the smartest of primates, good raw material. They were deadly 
and effective fighters by nature, with impressive claws and fangs, fiercely 
motivated by the territorial imperative, and eager to attack those whom they 
perceived as enemies.
“Yarbeck’s first task in the physical alteration of the baboon was to make it 
larger, big enough to threaten a grown man,” Lem said. “She decided that it 
would have to stand at least five feet and weigh one hundred to a hundred and 
ten pounds.”
“That’s not so big,” Walt protested.
“Big enough.”
“I could swat down a man that size.”
“A man, yes. But not this thing. It’s solid muscle, no fat at all, and far 
quicker than a man. Stop and think of how a fifty-pound pit bull can make 
mincemeat of a grown man, and you’ll realize what a threat Yarbeck’s warrior 
Could be at a hundred and ten.”
The patrol car’s steam-silvered windshield seemed like a movie screen on Which 
Walt saw projected images of brutally murdered men: Wes Dalberg,
Teel Porter . . . He closed his eyes but still saw cadavers. “Okay, yeah, I get 
your point. A hundred and ten pounds would be enough if we’re talking about 
something designed to fight and kill.”
“So Yarbeck created a breed of baboons that would grow to greater size. Then she 
set to work altering the sperm and ova of her giant primates in other ways, 
sometimes by editing the baboon’s own genetic material, sometimes by introducing 
genes from other species.”
Walt said, “The same sort of cross-species patch-and-stitch that led to the 
smart dog.”
“I wouldn’t call it patch-and-stitch . . . but yeah, essentially the same 
techniques. Yarbeck wanted a large, vicious jaw on her warrior, something more 
like that of a German shepherd, even a jackal, so there would be room for more 
teeth, and she wanted the teeth to be larger and sharper and perhaps slightly 
hooked, which meant she had to enlarge the baboon’s head and totally alter its 
facial structure to accommodate all of this. The skull had to be greatly 
enlarged, anyway, to allow for a bigger brain. Dr. Yarbeck wasn’t working under 
the constraints that required Davis Weatherby to leave his dog’s appearance 
unchanged. In fact, Yarbeck figured that if her creation was hideous, if it was 
alien, it would be an even more effective warrior because it would serve not 
only to stalk and kill our enemies but terrorize them.”
In spite of the warm, muggy air, Walt Gaines felt a coldness in his belly, as if 
he had swallowed big chunks of ice. “Didn’t Yarbeck or anyone else consider the 
immorality of this, for Christ’s sake? Didn’t any of them ever read The Island 
of Doctor Moreau? Lem, you have a goddamn moral obligation to let the public 
know about this, to blow it wide open. And so do I.”
“No such thing,” Lem said. “The idea that there’s good and evil knowledge . . . 
well, that’s strictly a religious point of view. Actions can be either moral or 
immoral, yes, but knowledge can’t be labeled that way. To a scientist, to any 
educated man or woman, all knowledge is morally neutral.”
“But, shit, application of the knowledge, in Yarbeck’s case, wasn’t morally 
neutral.”
Sitting on one or the other’s patio on weekends, drinking Corona, dealing with 
the weighty problems of the world, they loved to talk about this sort of thing. 
Backyard philosophers. Beery sages taking smug pleasure in their wisdom. And 
sometimes the moral dilemmas they discussed on weekends were those that later 
arose in the course of their police work; however, Walt could not remember any 
discussion that had had as urgent a bearing on their work as this one.
“Applying knowledge is part of the process of learning more,” Lem said. “The 
scientist has to apply his discoveries to see where each application leads. 
Moral responsibility is on the shoulders of those who take the technology out of 
the lab and use it to immoral ends.”
“Do you believe that bullshit?”
Lem thought a moment. “Yeah, I guess I do. I guess, if we held scientists 
responsible for the bad things that flowed from their work, they’d never go
to work in the first place, and there’d be no progress at all. We’d still be 
living in caves.”
Walt pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his face, giving 
himself a moment to think. It wasn’t so much the heat and humidity that had 
gotten to him. It was the thought of Yarbeck’s warrior roaming the Orange County 
hills that made him break out in a sweat.
He wanted to go public, warn the unwary world that something new and dangerous 
was loose upon the earth. But that would be playing into the hands of the new 
Luddites, who would use Yarbeck’s warrior to generate public hysteria in an 
attempt to bring an end to all recombinant-DNA research. Already, such research 
had created strains of corn and wheat that could grow with less water and in 
poor soil, relieving world hunger, and years ago they had developed a man-made 
virus that, as a waste product, produced cheap insulin. If he took word of 
Yarbeck’s monstrosity to the world, he might save a couple of lives in the short 
run, but he might be playing a role in denying the world the beneficial miracles 
of recombinant-DNA research, which would cost tens of thousands of lives in the 
long run.
“Shit,” Walt said. “It’s not a black-and-white issue, is it?”
Lem said, “That’s what makes life interesting.”
Walt smiled sourly. “Right now, it’s a whole hell of a lot more interesting than 
I care for. Okay. I can see the wisdom of keeping a lid on this. Besides, if we 
made it public, you’d have a thousand half-assed adventurers out there looking 
for the thing, and they’d end up victims of it, or they’d gun down one another.”
“Exactly.”
“But my men could help keep the lid on by joining in the search.”
Lem told him about the hundred men from Marine Intelligence units who were still 
combing the foothills, dressed as civilians, using high-tech tracking gear and, 
in some cases, bloodhounds. “I’ve already got more men on line than you could 
supply. We’re already doing as much as can be done. Now will you do the right 
thing? Will you stay out of it?”
Frowning, Walt said, “For now. But I want to be kept informed.”
Lem nodded. “All right.”
“And I have more questions. For one thing, why do they call it The Outsider?”
“Well, the dog was the first breakthrough, the first of the lab subjects to 
display unusual intelligence. This one was next. They were the only two 
successes: the dog and the other. At first, they added capital letters to the 
way they pronounced it, The Other, but in time it became The Outsider because 
that seemed to fit better. It was not an improvement on one of God’s creations, 
as was the dog; it was entirely outside of creation, a thing apart. An 
abomination—though no one actually said as much. And the thing was aware of its 
status as an outsider, acutely aware.”
“Why not just call it the baboon?”
“Because . . . it doesn’t really look much of anything like a baboon any more. 
Not like anything you’ve ever seen—except in a nightmare.”
Walt did not like the expression on his friend’s dark face, in his eyes. He 
decided not to ask for a better description of The Outsider; perhaps that was 
something he did not need to know.
Instead, he said, “What about the Hudston, Weatherby, and Yarbeck murders? Who 
was behind all that?”
“We don’t know the man who pulled the trigger, but we know the Soviets hired 
him. They also killed another Banodyne man who was on vacation in Acapulco.”
Walt felt as if he were jolting through one of those invisible barriers again, 
into an even more complicated world. “Soviets? Were we talking about the 
Soviets? How’d they get into the act?”
“We didn’t think they knew about the Francis Project,” Lem said. “But they did. 
Apparently, they even had a mole inside Banodyne who reported out to them on our 
progress. When the dog and, subsequently, The Outsider escaped, the mole 
informed the Soviets, and evidently the Soviets decided to take advantage of the 
chaos and do us even more damage. They killed every project leader—Yarbeck and 
Weatherby and Haines—plus Hudston, who had once been a project leader but no 
longer worked at Banodyne. We think they did this for two reasons: first, to 
bring the Francis Project to a halt; second, to make it harder for us to track 
down The Outsider.”
“How would that make it harder?”
Lem slumped in his seat as if, in talking of the crisis, he was more clearly 
aware of the burden on his shoulders. “By eliminating Hudston, Haines, and 
especially Weatherby and Yarbeck, the Soviets cut us off from the people who 
would have the best idea how The Outsider and the dog think, the people best 
able to figure out where those animals might go and how they might be 
recaptured.”
“Have you actually pinned it on the Soviets?”
Lem sighed. “Not entirely. I’m focused primarily on recovering the dog and The 
Outsider, so we have another entire task force trying to track down the Soviet 
agents behind the murders, arson, and data hijacking. Unfortunately, the Soviets 
seem to have used freelance hitmen outside of their own network, so we have no 
idea where to look for the triggermen. That side of the investigation is pretty 
much stalled.
“And the fire at Banodyne a day or so later?” Walt asked.
“Definitely arson. Another Soviet action. It destroyed all the paper and 
electronic files on the Francis Project. There were backup computer disks at 
another location, of course . . . but data on them has somehow been erased.”
“The Soviets again?”
“We think so. The leaders of the Francis Project and all their files have been 
wiped out, leaving us in the dark when it comes to trying to figure how either 
the dog or The Outsider might think, where they might go, how they might be 
tricked into captivity.”
Walt shook his head. “Never thought I’d be on the side of the Russians, but 
putting a stop to this project seems like a good idea.”
“They’re far from innocent. From what I hear, they’ve got a similar project
under way at laboratories in the Ukraine. I wouldn’t doubt we’re working 
diligently to destroy their files and people the way they’ve destroyed ours. 
Anyway, the Soviets would like nothing better than for The Outsider to run wild 
in some nice peaceable suburb, gutting housewives and chewing the heads off 
little kids, because if that happens a couple of times . . . well, then the 
whole thing’s going to blow up in our face.”
Chewing the heads off little kids? Jesus.
Walt shuddered and said, “Is that likely to happen?”
“We don’t believe so. The Outsider is aggressive as hell—it was designed to be 
aggressive, after all—and it has a special hatred for its makers, which is 
something Yarbeck didn’t count on and something she hoped to be able to correct 
in future generations. The Outsider takes great pleasure in slaughtering us. But 
it’s also smart, and it knows that every killing gives us a new fix on its 
whereabouts. So it’s not going to indulge its hatred too often. It’s going to 
stay away from people most of the time, moving mainly at night. Once in a while, 
out of curiosity, it might poke into residential areas along the edge of the 
developed eastern flank of the county—”
“As it did at the Keeshan place.”
“Yeah. But I bet it didn’t go there to kill anyone. Just plain curiosity. It 
doesn’t want to be caught before it accomplishes its main goal.”
“Which is?”
“Finding and killing the dog,” Lem said.
Walt was surprised. “Why would it care about the dog?”
“We don’t really know,” Lem said. “But at Banodyne, it harbored a fierce hatred 
of the dog, worse than what it felt toward people. When Yarbeck worked with it, 
constructing a sign language with which to communicate complex ideas, The 
Outsider several times expressed a desire to kill and mutilate the dog, but it 
would never explain why. It was obsessed with the dog.”
“So you think now it’s tracking the retriever?”
“Yes. Because evidence seems to indicate that the dog was the first to break out 
of the labs that night in May, and that its escape drove The Outsider mad. The 
Outsider was kept in a large enclosure inside Yarbeck’s lab, and everything 
belonging to it—bedding, many educational devices, toys—was torn and smashed to 
pieces. Then, apparently realizing that the dog was going to be forever out of 
its reach if it didn’t make good its own escape, The Outsider put its mind to 
the problem and, by God, found its own way out.”
“But if the dog got a good head start—”
“There’s a link between the dog and The Outsider that no one understands. A 
mental link. Instinctual awareness. We don’t know its extent, but we can’t rule 
out the possibility that this link is strong enough for one of them to follow 
the other over considerable distances. It’s apparently a sort of mild sixth 
sense that was somehow a bonus of the technique of intelligence enhancement used 
in both Weatherby’s and Yarbeck’s research. But we’re only guessing. We don’t 
really know for sure. There’s so fucking much we don’t know!”
Both men were silent for a while.
The humid closeness of the car was no longer entirely unpleasant, Given all the 
dangers loose in the modern world, these steamy confines seemed safe and 
comfortable, a haven.
Finally, not wanting to ask any more questions, afraid of the answers he might 
get, Walt nevertheless said, “Banodyne is a high-security building. It’s 
designed to keep unauthorized people from getting in, but it must be hard to get 
out of the place, too. Yet both the dog and The Outsider escaped.”
“Yes.”
“And obviously no one ever figured they could. Which means they’re both smarter 
than anyone realized.”
“Yes.”
Walt said, “In the case of the dog . . . well, if it’s smarter than anyone 
figured, so what? The dog is friendly.”
Lem, who had been staring at the opaqued windshield, finally met Walt’s eyes. 
“That’s right. But if The Outsider is smarter than we thought . . . if it’s very 
nearly as smart as a man, then catching it’s going to be even harder.”
“Very nearly . . . or as smart as a man.”
“No. Impossible.”
“Or even smarter,” Walt said.
“No. That couldn’t be.”
“Couldn’t?”
“Definitely couldn’t?”
Lem sighed, wearily rubbed his eyes, and said nothing. He was not going to start 
lying to his best friend again.
 
 
7
Nora and Travis went through the photographs one by one, learning a little more 
about Einstein. By barking once or vigorously wagging his tail, the dog answered 
questions and was able to confirm that he had chosen the advertisements for 
computers because they reminded him of the computers in the lab where he had 
been kept. The photo of four young people playing with a striped beach ball 
appealed to him because one of the scientists in the lab had evidently used 
balls of various sizes in an intelligence test that Einstein had particularly 
enjoyed. They were unable to determine the reason for his interest in the 
parrot, the butterflies, Mickey Mouse, and many other things, but that was only 
because they could not hit upon the pertinent yes-or-no questions that would 
have led to explanations.
Even when a hundred questions failed to reveal the meaning of one of the 
photographs, the three of them remained excited and delighted by the process of 
discovery, for they met with success in enough cases to make the effort 
worthwhile. The only time the mood changed for the worse was when they
queried Einstein about the magazine picture of the demon from an upcoming horror 
movie. He became extremely agitated. He tucked his tail between his legs, bared 
his teeth, growled deep in his throat. Several times, he padded away from the 
photograph, going behind the sofa or into another room, where he stayed for a 
minute or two before returning, reluctantly, to face additional questions, and 
he shivered almost continuously when being quizzed about the demon.
Finally, after trying for at least ten minutes to determine the reason for the 
dog’s dread, Travis pointed to the slab-jawed, wickedly fanged, luminous-eyed 
movie monster and said, “Maybe you don’t understand, Einstein. This isn’t a 
picture of a real, living thing. This is a make-believe demon from a movie. Do 
you understand what I mean when I say make-believe?”
Einstein wagged his tail: Yes.
“Well, this is a make-believe monster.” One bark: No.
“Make-believe, phony, not real, just a man in a rubber suit,” Nora said.
No.
“Yes,” Travis said.
No.
Einstein tried to run off behind the sofa again, but Travis grabbed him by the 
collar and held him. “Are you claiming to have seen such a thing?”
The dog raised his gaze from the picture, looked into Travis’s eyes, shuddered, 
and whimpered.
The pitiful note of profound fear in Einstein’s soft whine and an indescribably 
disturbing quality in his dark eyes combined to affect Travis to an extent that 
surprised him. Holding the collar with one hand, his other hand on Einstein’s 
back, Travis felt the shivers that quaked through the dog—and suddenly he was 
shivering, too. The dog’s stark fear was transmitted to him, and he thought, 
crazily, By God, he really has seen something like this.
Sensing the change in Travis, Nora said, “What’s wrong?”
Instead of answering her, he repeated the question that Einstein had not yet 
answered: “Are you claiming to have seen such a thing?”
Yes.
“Something that looks exactly like this demon?”
A bark and a wag: Yes and no.
“Something that looks at least a little bit like it?”
Yes.
Letting go of the collar, Travis stroked the dog’s back, trying to soothe him, 
but Einstein continued to shiver. “Is this why you keep a watch at the Window 
some nights?”
Yes.
Clearly puzzled and alarmed by the dog’s distress, Nora began to pet him, too. 
“I thought you were worried that people from the lab would find
you.”
Einstein barked once.
“You’re not afraid people from the lab will find you?”
Yes and no.
Travis said, “But you’re more afraid that . . . this other thing will find you.”
Yes, yes, yes.
“Is this the same thing that was in the woods that day, the thing that chased 
us, the thing I shot at?” Travis asked.
Yes, yes, yes.
Travis looked at Nora. She was frowning. “But it’s only a movie monster. Nothing 
in the real world looks even a little bit like it.”
Padding across the room, sniffing at the assorted photographs, Einstein paused 
again at the Blue Cross ad that featured the doctor, mother, and baby in a 
hospital room. He brought the magazine to them and dropped it on the floor. He 
put his nose to the doctor in the picture, then looked at Nora, at Travis, put 
his nose to the doctor again, and looked up expectantly.
“Before,” Nora said, “you told us the doctor represented one of the scientists 
in that lab.”
Yes.
Travis said, “So are you telling me the scientist who worked on you would know 
what this thing in the woods was?”
Yes.
Einstein went looking through the photographs again, and this time he returned 
with the ad that showed a car in a cage. He touched his nose to the cage; then, 
hesitantly, he touched his nose to the picture of the demon.
“Are you saying the thing in the woods belongs in a cage?” Nora asked.
Yes.
“More than that,” Travis said, “I think he’s telling us that it was in a cage at 
one time, that he saw it in a cage.”
Yes.
“In the same lab where you were in a cage?”
Yes, yes, yes.
“Another experimental lab animal?” Nora asked.
Yes.
Travis stared hard at the photograph of the demon, at its thick brow and deeply 
set yellow eyes, at its deformed snoutlike nose and mouth bristling with teeth. 
At last he said, “Was it an experiment . . . that went wrong?”
Yes and no, Einstein said.
Now at a peak of agitation, the dog crossed the living room to the front window, 
jumped up and braced his forepaws on the sill, and peered out at the Santa 
Barbara evening.
Nora and Travis sat on the floor among the opened magazines and books, happy 
with the progress they had made, beginning to feel the exhaustion that their 
excitement had masked—and frowning at each other in puzzlement.
She spoke softly. “Do you think Einstein’s capable of lying, making up wild 
stories like children do?”
“I don’t know. Can dogs lie, or is that just a human skill?” He laughed at
the absurdity of his own question. “Can dogs lie? Can a moose be elected to the 
presidency? Can cows sing?”
Nora laughed, too, and very prettily. “Can ducks tap-dance?”
In a fit of silliness that was a reaction to the difficulty of dealing 
intellectually and emotionally with the whole idea of a dog as smart as 
Einstein, Travis said, “I once saw a duck tap-dancing.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. In Vegas.”
Laughing, she said, “What hotel was he performing at?”
“Caesar’s Palace. He could sing, too.”
“The duck?”
“Yeah. Ask me his name.”
“What was his name?”
“Sammy Davis Duck, Jr.,” Travis said, and they laughed again. “He was such a big 
star they didn’t even have to put his entire name on the marquee for people to 
know who was performing there.”
“They just put ‘Sammy,’ huh?”
“No. Just ‘Jr.’
Einstein returned from the window and stood watching them, his head cocked, 
trying to figure out why they were acting so peculiar.
The puzzled expression on the retriever’s face struck both Travis and Nora as 
the most comical thing they had ever seen. They leaned on each other, held each 
other, and laughed like fools.
With a snort of derision, the retriever went back to the window.
As they gradually regained control of themselves and as their laughter subsided, 
Travis became aware that he was holding Nora, that her head was on his shoulder, 
that the physical contact between them was greater than any they had allowed 
themselves before. Her hair smelled clean, fresh. He could feel the body heat 
pouring off her. Suddenly, he wanted her desperately, and he knew he was going 
to kiss her when she raised her head from his shoulder. A moment later she 
looked up, and he did what he knew he’d do—he kissed her—and she kissed him. For 
a second or two, she did not seem to realize what was happening, what it meant; 
briefly, it was without significance, sweet and utterly innocent, not a kiss of 
passion but of friendship and great affection. Then the kiss changed, and her 
mouth softened. She began to breathe faster, and her hand tightened on his arm, 
and she tried to pull him closer. A low murmur of need escaped her—and the sound 
of her own voice brought her to her senses. Abruptly, she stiffened with 
complete awareness of him as a man, and her beautiful eyes were wide with 
wonder—and fear—at what had almost happened. Travis instantly drew back because 
he knew instinctively that the time was not right, not yet perfect. When at last 
they did make love, it must be exactly right, without hesitation or distraction, 
because for the rest of their lives they would always remember their first time, 
and the memory Should be all bright and joyous, worth taking out and examining a 
thousand times as they grew old together. Although it was not quite time to put 
their
future into words and confirm it with vows, Travis had no doubt that he and Nora 
Devon would be spending their lives with each other, and he realized that, 
subconsciously, he’d been aware of this inevitability for at least the past few 
days.
After a moment of awkwardness, as they drew apart and tried to decide whether to 
comment on the sudden change in their relationship, Nora finally said, “He’s 
still at the window.”
Einstein pressed his nose to the glass, staring out at the night.
“Could he be telling the truth?” Nora wondered. “Could there have been something 
else that escaped from the lab, something that bizarre?”
“If they had a dog as smart as him, I guess they might have had other things 
even more peculiar. And there was something in the woods that day.”
“But there’s no danger of it finding him, surely. Not after you brought him this 
far north.”
“No danger,” Travis agreed. “I don’t think Einstein understands how far we came 
from where I found him. Whatever was in the woods couldn’t track him down now. 
But I’ll bet the people from that lab have mounted one hell of a search. It’s 
them I'm worried about. And so is Einstein, which is why he usually plays at 
being a dumb dog in public and reveals his intelligence only in private to me 
and now you. He doesn’t want to go back.”
Nora said, “If they find him . .
“They won’t.”
“But if they do, what then?”
“I’ll never give him up,” Travis said. “Never.”
 
 
8
By eleven o’clock that night, Deputy Porter’s headless corpse and the mutilated 
body of the construction foreman had been removed from Bordeaux Ridge by the 
coroner’s men. A cover story had been concocted and delivered to the reporters 
at the police barricades, and the press had seemed to buy it; they had asked 
their questions, had taken a couple of hundred photographs, and had filled a few 
thousand feet of videotape with images that would be edited down to a hundred 
seconds on tomorrow’s TV newscast. (In this age of mass murder and terrorism, 
two victims rated no more than two minutes’ airtime: ten seconds for lead-in, a 
hundred seconds for film, ten seconds for the well-coiffed anchorpersons to look 
respectfully grim and saddened—then on to a story about a bikini contest, a 
convention of Edsel owners, or a man who claimed to have seen an alien 
spacecraft shaped like a Twinkie.) The reporters were gone now, as were the lab 
men, the uniformed deputies, and all of Lemuel Johnson’s agents except Cliff 
Soames.
Clouds hid the fragment moon. The kliegs were gone, and the only light came from 
the headlamps of Walt Gaines’s car. He had swung his sedan around and aimed his 
lights at Lem’s car, which was parked at the end of the unpaved street, so Lem 
and Cliff would not have to fumble around in the dark. In the deep gloom beyond 
the headlamps, half-framed houses loomed like the fossilized skeletons of 
prehistoric reptiles.
As he walked toward his car, Lem felt as good as he could feel under the 
circumstances. Walt had agreed to allow federal authorities to assume 
jurisdiction without a challenge. Although Lem had broken a dozen regulations 
and had violated his secrecy oath by telling Walt the details of the Francis 
Project, he was sure Walt could keep his mouth shut. The lid was still on the 
case, a bit looser than it had been, perhaps, but still in place.
Cliff Soames reached the car first, opened the door, and got in on the 
passenger’s side, and as Lem opened the driver’s door he heard Cliff say, “Oh, 
Jesus, oh God.” Cliff was scrambling back out of the car even as Lem looked in 
from the other side and saw what the uproar was about. A head.
Teel Porter’s head, no doubt.
It was on the front seat of the car, propped so it was facing Lem when he opened 
the door. The mouth hung open in a silent scream. The eyes were gone.
Reeling back from the car, Lem reached under his coat and pulled his revolver.
Walt Gaines was already out of his car, his own revolver in hand, running toward 
Lem. “What’s wrong?”
Lem pointed.
Reaching the NSA sedan, Walt looked through the open door and let out a thin, 
anguished sound when he saw the head.
Cliff came around from the other side of the car, gripping his gun, with the 
muzzle pointed straight up. “The damn thing was here when we arrived, while we 
were in the house.”
“Might still be here,” Lern said, anxiously surveying the darkness that crowded 
them on all sides, beyond the beams from the patrol car’s headlights.
Studying the night-swaddled housing development, Walt said, “We’ll call in my 
men, get a search under way.”
“No point to it,” Lem said. “The thing will take off if it sees your men 
returning . . . if it’s not gone already.”
They were standing at the edge of Bordeaux Ridge, beyond which lay miles of open 
land, foothills and mountains, out of which The Outsider had come and into which 
it could disappear again. Those hills, ridges, and canyons were only vague forms 
in the meager glow of the partial moon, more sensed than Seen.
From somewhere down the unlighted street came a loud clatter, as if a pile of 
lumber or shingles had been knocked over.
“It is here,” Walt said.
“Maybe,” Lem said. “But we’re not going to go looking for it in the dark, not 
just the three of us. That’s what it wants.”
They listened.
Nothing more.
“We searched the whole tract when we first got here, before you arrived,” Walt 
said.
Cliff said, “It must’ve kept one step ahead of you, making a game of dodging 
your men. Then it saw us arrive, and it recognized Lem.”
“Recognized me from the couple of times I visited Banodyne,” Lem agreed. “In 
fact . . . The Outsider was probably waiting here just for me. It probably 
understands my role in all this and knows I’m in charge of the search for it and 
the dog. So it wanted to leave the deputy’s head for me.”
“To mock you?” Walt said.
“To mock me.”
They were silent, peering uneasily at the blackness within and around the 
unfinished houses.
The hot June air was motionless.
For a long while, the only sound was the idling engine of the sheriffs car.
“Watching us,” Walt said.
Another clatter of overturned construction materials. Nearer this time.
The three men froze, each looking a different direction, guarding against 
attack.
The subsequent silence lasted almost a minute.
When Lem was about to speak, The Outsider shrieked. The cry was alien, chilling. 
This time they could identify the direction from which it came: out in the open 
land, in the night beyond Bordeaux Ridge.
“It’s leaving now,” Lem said. “It’s decided we can’t be lured into a search, 
just the three of us, so it’s leaving before we can bring in reinforcements.”
It shrieked again, from farther away. The eerie cry was like sharp fingernails 
raked across Lem’s soul.
“In the morning,” he said, “we’ll move our Marine Intelligence teams into the 
foothills east of here. We’ll nail the damn thing. By God, we will.”
Turning to Lem’s sedan, evidently contemplating the unpleasant task of dealing 
with Teel Porter’s severed head, Walt said, “Why the eyes? Why does it always 
tear out the eyes?”
Lem said, “Partly because the creature’s just damned aggressive, bloodthirsty. 
That’s in its genes. And partly because it really enjoys spreading terror, I 
think. But also . .
“What?”
“I wish I didn’t remember this, but I do, very clearly . .
On one of his visits to Banodyne, Lem had witnessed a disturbing conversation 
(of sorts) between Dr. Yarbeck and The Outsider. Yarbeck and her assistants had 
taught The Outsider a sign language similar to that developed by the researchers 
who attempted the first experiments in communication with the higher primates, 
like gorillas, back in the mid-1970s. The most successful gorilla subject—a 
female named Koko, which had been the center of countless news stories over the 
past decade—was reputed to have attained a sign-language vocabulary of 
approximately four hundred words. When Lem had last seen it, The Outsider 
boasted a vocabulary considerably larger than
Koko’s, though still primitive. In Yarbeck’s lab, Lem had watched as the 
man-made monstrosity in the large cage had exchanged complicated series of hand 
signals with the scientist, while an assistant had whispered a running 
translation. The Outsider had expressed a fierce hostility toward everyone and 
everything, frequently interrupting its dialogue with Yarbeck to dash around its 
cage in uncontrolled rage, banging on the iron bars, screeching furiously. To 
Lem, the scene was frightening and repellent, but he was also filled with a 
terrible sadness and pity at the plight of The Outsider: the beast would always 
be caged, always a freak, alone in the world as no other creature— not even 
Weatherby’s dog—had ever been. The experience had affected him so deeply that he 
still remembered nearly every exchange of sign language between The Outsider and 
Yarbeck, and now a pertinent part of that eerie conversation came back to him:
At one point The Outsider had signed: Tear out your eyes.
You want to tear out my eyes? Yarbeck signed.
Tear out everyone’s eyes.
Why?
So can’t see me.
Why don’t you want to be seen?
Ugly.
You think you’re ugly?
Much ugly.
Where did you get the idea you’re ugly?
From people.
What people?
Everyone who see me first time.
Like this man with us today? Yarbeck signed, indicating Lem.
Yes. All think me ugly. Hate me.
No one hates you.
Everyone.
No one’s ever told you that you’re ugly. How do you know that’s what they think?
I know.
How do you know?
I know, I know, I know! It raced around its cage, rattling the bars, shrieking, 
and then it returned to face Yarbeck. Tear out my own eyes.
So you won’t have to look at yourself?
So won’t have to look at people looking at me, the creature had signed, and Lem 
had pitied it then, deeply, though his pity had in no way diminished his fear of 
it.
Now, standing in the hot June night, he told Walt Gaines about that exchange in 
Yarbeck’s lab, and the sheriff shivered.
“Jesus,” Cliff Soames said. “It hates itself, its otherness, and so it hates its 
maker even more.”
“And now that you’ve told me this,” Walt said, “I’m surprised none of You ever 
understood why it hates the dog so passionately. This poor damned
twisted thing and the dog are essentially the only two children of the Francis 
Project. The dog is the beloved child, the favored child, and The Outsider has 
always known that. The dog is the child that the parents want to brag about, 
while The Outsider is the child they would prefer to keep locked securely in a 
cellar, and so it resents the dog, stews in resentment every minute of every 
day.”
“Of course,” Lem said, “you’re right. Of course.”
“It also gives new meaning to the two smashed mirrors in the upstairs bathrooms 
in the house where Teel Porter was killed,” Walt said. “The thing couldn’t bear 
the sight of itself.”
In the distance, very far away now, something shrieked, something that was not 
of God’s creation.
 
 
SEVEN
1
During the rest of June, Nora did some painting, spent a lot of time with 
Travis, and tried to teach Einstein to read.
Neither she nor Travis was sure that the dog, although very smart, could be 
taught such a thing, but it was worth a try. If he understood spoken English, as 
seemed to be the case, then it followed that he could be taught the printed word 
as well.
Of course, they could not be absolutely certain that Einstein did understand 
spoken English, even though he responded to it with apt and specific reactions. 
It was remotely possible that, instead, the dog did not perceive the precise 
meanings of the words themselves but, by some mild form of telepathy, could read 
the word-pictures in people’s minds as they spoke.
“But I don’t believe that’s the case,” Travis said one afternoon as he and Nora 
sat on his patio, drinking wine coolers and watching Einstein frolic in the 
spray of a portable lawn sprinkler. “Maybe because I don’t want to believe it. 
The idea that he’s both as smart as me and telepathic is just too much. If 
that’s the case, then maybe I should be wearing the collar and he should be 
holding the leash!”
It was a Spanish test that appeared to indicate the retriever was not, in fact, 
even slightly telepathic.
In college, Travis had taken three years of Spanish. Later, upon choosing a 
career in the military and signing on with the elite Delta Force, he’d been 
encouraged to continue those language studies because his superiors believed the 
escalating political instability in Central and South America guaranteed that 
Delta would be required to conduct antiterrorist operations in Spanish speaking 
countries with steadily increasing frequency. He had been out of Delta for many 
years, but contact with the large population of California Hispanics had kept 
him relatively fluent.
Now, when he gave Einstein orders or asked questions in Spanish, the dog Stared 
at him stupidly, wagging his tail, unresponsive. When Travis persisted in 
Spanish, the retriever cocked his head and whuffed as if to inquire if this Was 
a joke. Surely, if the dog was reading mental images that arose in the mind of 
the speaker, he would be able to read them regardless of the language that 
inspired those images.
“He’s no mind reader,” Travis said. “There are limits to his genius—thank God!”
Day after day, Nora sat on the floor of Travis’s living room or on the patio, 
explaining the alphabet to Einstein and trying to help him to understand how 
words were formed from those letters and how those printed words were related to 
the spoken words that he already understood. Now and then, Travis took charge of 
the lessons to give Nora a break, but most of the time he sat nearby, reading, 
because he claimed not to have the patience to be a teacher.
She used a ring-binder notebook to compile her own primer for the dog. On each 
left-hand page, she taped a picture cut from a magazine, and on each right-hand 
page she printed, in block letters, the name of the object that was pictured on 
the left, all simple words: TREE, CAR, HOUSE, MAN, WOMAN, CHAIR. . . With 
Einstein sitting beside her and staring intently at the primer, she would point 
to the picture first, then to the word, pronouncing it repeatedly.
On the last day of June, Nora spread a score or more of unlabeled pictures on 
the floor.
“It’s test time again,” she told Einstein. “Let’s see if you can do better than 
you did on Monday.”
Einstein sat very erect, his chest puffed out, his head held high, as if 
confident of his ability.
Travis was sitting in the armchair, watching. He said, “If you fail, fur face, 
we’re going to trade you in on a poodle that can roll over, play dead, and beg 
for its supper.”
Nora was pleased to see that Einstein ignored Travis. “This is not a time for 
frivolity,” she admonished.
“I stand corrected, professor,” Travis said.
Nora held up a flashcard with TREE printed on it. The retriever went unerringly 
to the photo of a pine tree and indicated it with a touch of his nose. When she 
held up a card that said CAR, he put a paw on the photo of the car, and when she 
held up HOUSE, he sniffed at the picture of a colonial mansion. They went 
through fifty words, and for the first time the dog correctly paired every 
printed word with the image it represented. Nora was thrilled by his progress, 
and Einstein could not stop wagging his tail.
Travis said, “Well, Einstein, you’re still a hell of a long way from reading 
Proust.”
Rankled by Travis’s needling of her star pupil, Nora said, “He’s doing fine! 
Terrific. You can’t expect him to be reading at college level overnight. He’s 
learning faster than a child would.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that’s so! Much faster than a child would.”
“Well then, maybe he deserves a couple of Milk-Bones.”
Einstein dashed immediately into the kitchen to get the box of dog biscuits.
2
As the summer wore on, Travis was amazed by the swift progress Nora made in 
teaching Einstein to read.
By the middle of July, they graduated from her homemade primer to children’s 
picture books by Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Phil Parks, Susi Bohdal, Sue 
Dreamer, Mercer Mayer, and many others. Einstein appeared to enjoy all of them 
immensely, though his favorites were by Parks and especially—for reasons neither 
Nora nor Travis could discern— the charming Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. 
They brought armsful of children’s books home from the city library and 
purchased additional stacks of them at the bookstore.
At first, Nora read them aloud, carefully moving a finger under each word as she 
spoke it, and Einstein’s eyes followed along as he leaned in toward the book 
with undivided attention. Later, she did not read the book aloud but held it 
open for the dog and turned the pages for him when he indicated— by a whimper or 
some other sign—that he had finished that portion of the text and was ready to 
proceed to the next page.
Einstein’s willingness to sit for hours, focusing on the books, seemed proof 
that he was actually reading them and not just looking at the cute drawings. 
Nevertheless, Nora decided to test him on the contents of some of the volumes by 
posing a number of questions about the story lines.
After Einstein had read Frog and Toad All Year, Nora closed the book and said, 
“All right. Now, answer yes or no to these questions.”
They were in the kitchen, where Travis was making a cheese-and-potato casserole 
for dinner. Nora and Einstein were sitting on chairs at the kitchen table. 
Travis paused in his cooking to watch the dog take the quiz.
Nora said, “First—when Frog came to see Toad on a winter’s day, Toad was in bed 
and did not want to come outside. Is that right?”
Einstein had to sidle around on his chair to free his tail and wag it. Yes.
Nora said, “But finally Frog got Toad outside, and they went ice-skating.”
One bark. No.
“They went sledding,” she said.
Yes.
“Very good. Later that same year, at Christmas, Frog gave Toad a gift. Was it a 
sweater?”
No.
“A new sled?”
No.
“A clock for his mantel?”
Yes, yes, yes.
“Excellent!” Nora said. “Now what shall we read next? How about this One. 
Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
Einstein wagged his tail vigorously.
Travis would have enjoyed taking a more active role in the dog’s education, but 
he could see that working intensely with Einstein was having an enormously 
beneficial effect on Nora, and he did not want to interfere. Indeed, he 
sometimes played the curmudgeon, questioning the value of teaching the pooch to 
read, making wisecracks about the pace of the dog’s progress or its taste in 
reading matter. This mild naysaying was just enough to redouble Nora’s 
determination to stick with the lessons, to spend even more time with the dog, 
and to prove Travis wrong. Einstein never reacted to those negative remarks, and 
Travis suspected the dog exhibited forbearance because he understood the little 
game of reverse psychology in which Travis was engaged.
Exactly why Nora’s teaching chores made her blossom was not clear. Perhaps it 
was because she had never interacted with anyone—not even with Travis or with 
her Aunt Violet—as intensely as she had with the dog, and the mere process of 
extensive communication encouraged her to come farther out of her shell. Or 
perhaps giving the gift of literacy to the dog was extremely satisfying to her. 
She was by nature a giving person who took pleasure in sharing with others, yet 
she had spent all of her life as a recluse without a single previous opportunity 
to express that side of her personality. Now she had a chance to give of 
herself, and she was generous with her time and energy, and in her own 
generosity she found joy.
Travis also suspected that, through her relationship with the retriever, she was 
expressing a natural talent for mothering. Her great patience was that of a good 
mother dealing with a child, and she often spoke to Einstein so tenderly and 
affectionately that she sounded as if she were addressing her own much-loved 
offspring.
Whatever the reason, Nora became more relaxed and outgoing as she worked with 
Einstein. Gradually forsaking her shapeless dark dresses for summery white 
cotton slacks, colorful blouses, jeans and T-shirts, she seemed to grow ten 
years younger. She had her glorious dark hair redone at the beauty salon and did 
not brush out all the styling this time. She laughed more often and more 
engagingly. In conversation, she met Travis’s eyes and seldom looked shyly away 
from him, as she had done previously. She was quicker to touch him, too, and to 
put an arm around his waist. She liked to be hugged, and they kissed with ease 
now, although their kissing remained, for the most part, that of uncertain 
teenagers in the early stages of courting.
On July 14, Nora received news that lifted her spirits even higher. The Santa 
Barbara District Attorney’s Office called to tell her that it was not going to 
be necessary for her to appear in court to testify against Arthur Streck. In 
light of his previous criminal record, Streck had changed his mind about 
pursuing a plea of innocence and waging a defense against charges of attempted 
rape, assault, and breaking and entering. He had instructed his attorney to 
plea-bargain with the D.A. As a result, they dropped all charges except assault, 
and Streck accepted a prison sentence of three years, with a provision that he 
serve at least two years before being eligible for parole. Nora had dreaded the 
trial. Suddenly she was free, and in celebration she got slightly tipsy for the 
first time in her life.
That same day, when Travis brought home a new stack of reading material, 
Einstein discovered there were Mickey Mouse picture books for children and
comic books, and the dog was as jubilant about that discovery as Nora was about 
the resolution of the charges against Arthur Streck. His fascination with Mickey 
and Donald Duck and the rest of the Disney gang remained a mystery, but it was 
undeniable. Einstein couldn’t stop wagging his tail, and he slobbered all over 
Travis in gratitude.
Everything would have been rosy if, in the middle of the night, Einstein had 
stopped going through the house from window to window, looking out at the 
darkness with obvious fear.
 
 
 
 
 
3
By Thursday morning, July 15, almost six weeks after the murders at Bordeaux 
Ridge, two months after the dog and The Outsider had escaped from Banodyne, 
Lemuel Johnson sat alone in his office on an upper floor of the federal building 
in Santa Ana, the county seat of Orange County. He stared out the window at the 
pollutant-rich haze that was trapped under an inversion layer, blanketing the 
western half of the county and adding to the misery of hundred-degree heat. The 
bile-yellow day matched his sour mood.
His duties were not limited to the search for the lab escapees, but that case 
constantly worried him when he was doing other work. He was unable to put the 
Banodyne affair out of mind even to sleep, and lately he was averaging only four 
or five hours of rest a night. He could not tolerate failure.
No, in truth, his attitude was much stronger than that: he was obsessed with 
avoiding failure. His father, having started life dirt-poor and having built a 
successful business, had inculcated in Lem an almost religious belief in the 
need to achieve, to succeed, and to fulfill all of one’s goals. No matter how 
much success you had, his dad often said, life could pull the rug right out from 
under you if you weren’t diligent. “It’s even worse for a black man, Lem. With a 
black man, success is like a tightrope over the Grand Canyon. He’s up there real 
high, and it’s sweet, but when he makes a mistake, when he fails, it’s a 
mile-long drop into an abyss. An abyss. Because failure means being poor. And in 
a lot of people’s eyes, even in this enlightened age, a poor miserable failed 
black man is no man at all, he’s just a nigger.” That Was the only time his 
father ever used the hated word. Lem had grown up With the conviction that any 
success he achieved was merely a precarious toehold on the cliff of life, that 
he was always in danger of being blown off that cliff by the winds of adversity, 
and that he dared not relent in his determination to cling fast and to climb to 
a wider, safer ledge.
He wasn’t sleeping well, and his appetite was no good. When he did eat, the meal 
was inevitably followed by severe acid indigestion. His bridge game had gone to 
hell because he could not concentrate on the cards; at their
weekly get-togethers with Walt and Audrey Gaines, the Johnsons were taking a 
beating.
He knew why he was obsessed with closing every case successfully, but that 
knowledge was of no help in modifying his obsession.
We are what we are, he thought, and maybe the only time we can change what we 
are is when life throws us such a surprise that it’s like hitting a plate-glass 
window with a baseball bat, shattering the grip of the past.
So he stared out at the blazing July day and brooded, worried.
Back in May, he had surmised that the retriever might have been picked up by 
someone and given a home. It was, after all, a handsome animal, and if it 
revealed even a small fraction of its intelligence to anyone, its appeal would 
be irresistible; it would find sanctuary. Therefore, Lem figured locating the 
dog would be harder than tracking down The Outsider. A week to locate The 
Outsider, he had thought, and perhaps a month to lay hands on the retriever.
He had issued bulletins to every animal pound and veterinarian in California, 
Nevada, and Arizona, urgently requesting assistance in locating the golden 
retriever. The flyer claimed that the animal had escaped from a medical research 
lab that was conducting an important cancer experiment. The loss of the dog, the 
bulletin claimed, would mean the loss of a million dollars of research money and 
countless hours of researchers’ time—and might seriously impede the development 
of a cure for certain malignancies. The flyer included a photograph of the dog 
and the information that, on the inside of its left ear, it bore a lab tattoo: 
the number 33-9. The letter accompanying the flyer requested not only 
cooperation but confidentiality. The mailing had been repeated every seven days 
since the breakout at Banodyne, and a score of NSA agents had been doing nothing 
but phoning animal pounds and vets in the three states to be certain they 
remembered the flyer and continued to keep a lookout for a retriever with a 
tattoo.
Meanwhile, the urgent search for The Outsider could, with some confidence, be 
confined to undeveloped territories because it would be reluctant to show 
itself. And there was no chance that someone would think it was cute enough to 
take home. Besides, The Outsider had been leaving a trail of death that could be 
followed.
Subsequent to the murders at Bordeaux Ridge east of Yorba Linda, the creature 
had fled into the unpopulated Chino Hills. From there it had gone north, 
crossing into the eastern end of Los Angeles County, where its presence was next 
pinpointed, on June 9, on the outskirts of semirural Diamond Bar. The Los 
Angeles County Animal Control Authority had received numerous— and 
hysterical—reports from Diamond Bar residents regarding wild-animal attacks on 
domestic pets. Others called the police, believing the slaughter was the work of 
a deranged man. In two nights, more than a score of Diamond Bar’s domestic 
animals had been torn to pieces, and the condition of the carcasses left no 
doubt in Lem’s mind that the perpetrator was The Outsider.
Then the trail went ice-cold for more than a week, until the morning of June 18, 
when two young campers at the foot of Johnstone Peak, on the southern flank of 
the vast Angeles National Forest, reported seeing something they insisted was 
“from another world.” They had locked themselves in their van, but the creature 
had tried repeatedly to get in at them, going so far as to smash a side window 
with a rock. Fortunately, the pair kept a .32 pistol in the van, and one of them 
opened fire on their assailant, driving it off. The press treated the campers as 
a couple of kooks, and on the evening news the happy-talk anchorpersons got a 
lot of mileage out of the story.
Lem believed the young couple. On a map, he traced the thinly populated corridor 
of land by which The Outsider could have gone from Diamond Bar to the area below 
Johnstone Peak: over the San Jose Hills, through Bonelli Regional Park, between 
San Dimas and Glendora, then into the wilds. It would have had to cross or go 
under three freeways that cut through the area, but if it had traveled in the 
deep of night, when there was little or no traffic, it could have passed unseen. 
He shifted the hundred men from Marine Intelligence into that portion of the 
forest, where they continued their search in civilian dress, in groups of three 
and four.
He hoped the campers had hit The Outsider with at least one shot. But no blood 
was found at their campsite.
He was beginning to worry that The Outsider might evade capture for a long time. 
Lying north of the city of Los Angeles, the Angeles National Forest was 
discouragingly immense.
“Nearly as large as the entire state of Delaware,” Cliff Soames said after he 
had measured the area on the wall map pinned to the bulletin board in Lem’s 
office and had calculated the square miles. Cliff had come from Delaware. He was 
relatively new to the West and still had a newcomer’s amazement at the gigantic 
scale of everything at this end of the continent. He was also young, with the 
enthusiasm of youth, and he was almost dangerously optimistic. Cliff’s 
upbringing had been radically different from Lem’s, and he did not feel himself 
to be on a tightrope or at risk of having his life destroyed by just one error, 
by a single failure. Sometimes Lem envied him.
Lem stared at Cliff’s scribbled calculations. “If it takes refuge in the San 
Gabriel Mountains, feeding on wildlife and content with solitude, venturing out 
only rarely to vent its rage on the people living along the periphery of the 
preserve . . . it might never be found.”
“But remember,” Cliff said, “it hates the dog more than it hates men. It wants 
the dog and has the ability to find it.”
“So we think.”
“And could it really tolerate a wild existence? I mean, yeah, it’s part savage, 
but it’s also smart. Maybe too smart to be content with a hardscrabble life in 
that rugged country.”
“Maybe,” Lem said.
“They’ll spot it soon, or it’ll do something to give us another fix on it,” 
Cliff predicted.
That was June 18.
When they found no trace of The Outsider during the next ten days, the expense 
of keeping a hundred men in the field grew insupportable. On June 29, Lem 
finally had to relinquish the Marines that had been put at his disposal and send 
them back to their bases.
Day by day, Cliff was heartened by the lack of developments and was willing to 
believe that The Outsider had suffered a mishap, that it was dead, that they 
would never hear of it again.
Day by day, Lem sank deeper into gloom, certain that he had lost control of the 
situation and that The Outsider would reappear in a most dramatic fashion, 
making its existence known to the public. Failure.
The only bright spot was that the beast was now in Los Angeles County, out of 
Walt Gaines’s jurisdiction. If there were additional victims, Walt might not 
even learn of them and would not have to be persuaded, all over again, to remain 
out of the case.
By Thursday, July 15, exactly two months after the breakout at Banodyne, almost 
one month after the campers had been terrorized by a supposed extraterrestrial 
or smaller cousin of Bigfoot, Lem was convinced he would soon have to consider 
alternate careers. No one had blamed him for the way things had gone. The heat 
was on him to deliver, but it was no worse than the heat he had felt on other 
big investigations. Actually, some of his superiors viewed the lack of 
developments in the same favorable light as did Cliff Soames. But in his most 
pessimistic moments, Lem envisioned himself employed as a uniformed security 
guard working the night shift in a warehouse, demoted to the status of a 
make-believe cop with a rinky-dink badge.
Sitting in his office chair, facing the window, staring grimly at the hazy 
yellow air of the blazing summer day, he said aloud, “Damn it, I’ve been trained 
to deal with human criminals. How the hell can I be expected to outthink a 
fugitive from a nightmare?”
A knock sounded at his door, and as he swiveled around in his chair, the door 
opened. Cliff Soames entered in a rush, looking both excited and distraught. 
“The Outsider,” he said. “We’ve got a new fix on it . . . but two people are 
dead.”
 
 
Twenty years ago in Vietnam, Lem’s NSA chopper pilot had learned everything 
worth knowing about putting down and taking off in rugged terrain. Now, 
remaining in constant radio contact with the L.A. County sheriff’s deputies who 
were on the scene already, he had no difficulty locating the site of the murders 
by visual navigation, making use of natural landmarks. At a few minutes after 
one o’clock, he put his craft down on a wide section of a barren ridge 
overlooking Boulder Canyon in the Angeles National Forest, just a hundred yards 
from the spot where the bodies had been found.
When Lem and Cliff left the chopper and hurried along the crest of the ridge 
toward the gathered deputies and forest rangers, a hot wind buffeted them. It 
carried the scent of dry brush and pine. Only tufts of wild grass, parched and 
brittled by the July sun, had managed to put down roots on this high ground. Low 
scrub growth—including desert plants like mesquite—
marked the upper reaches of the canyon walls that dropped away to the right and 
left of them, and down on the lower slopes and canyon floors were trees and 
greener undergrowth.
They were less than four air miles north of the town of Sunland, fourteen air 
miles north of Hollywood, and twenty miles north of the populous heart of the 
great city of Los Angeles, yet it seemed they were in a desolation measuring a 
thousand miles across, disquietingly far from civilization. The sheriffs 
deputies had parked their four-wheel-drive wagons on a crude dirt track 
three-quarters of a mile away—coming in, Lem’s chopper had flown over those 
vehicles—and they had hiked with ranger guides to the site where the bodies had 
been found. Now, gathered around the corpses were four deputies, two men from 
the county crime lab, and three rangers, and they looked as if they, too, felt 
isolated in a primeval place.
When Lem and Cliff arrived, the sheriff’s men had just finished tucking the 
remains in body bags. The zippers hadn’t yet been closed, so Lem saw that one 
victim was male, the other female, both young and dressed for hiking. Their 
wounds were grievous; their eyes were gone.
The dead now numbered five innocents, and that toll conjured a specter of guilt 
that haunted Lem. At times like this, he wished that his father had raised him 
with no sense of responsibility whatsoever.
Deputy Hal Bockner, tall and tan but with a surprisingly reedy voice, apprised 
Lem of the identity and condition of the victims: “Based on the ID he was 
carrying, the male’s name was Sidney Tranken, twenty-eight, of Glendale. Body 
has more than a score of nasty bite marks, even more claw marks, slashes. 
Throat, as you saw, torn open. Eyes—”
“Yes,” Lem said, seeing no need to dwell on these grisly details.
The men from the crime lab pulled the zippers shut on the body bags. It was a 
cold sound that hung for a moment like a chain of icicles in the hot July air.
Deputy Bockner said, “At first we thought Tranken was probably knifed by some 
psycho. Once in a while you get a homicidal nut who prowls these forests instead 
of the streets, preying on hikers. So we figured . . . knifed first, then all 
this other damage must’ve been done by animals, scavengers, after the guy was 
dead. But now . . . we’re not so sure.”
“I don’t see blood on the ground here,” Cliff Soames said with a note of 
puzzlement. “There’d have been a lot of it.”
“They weren’t killed here,” Deputy Bockner said, then went on with his Summary 
at his own pace. “Female, twenty-seven, Ruth Kasavaris, also of Glendale. Also 
vicious bite marks, slashes. Her throat—”
Cutting him off again, Lem said, “When were they killed?”
“Best guess before lab tests is that they died late yesterday. We believe the 
bodies were carried up here because they’d be found quicker on the ridge top. A 
popular hiking trail runs along here. But it wasn’t other hikers found them. It 
was a routine fire-patrol plane. Pilot looked down, saw them sprawled here on 
the bare ridge.”
This high ground above Boulder Canyon was more than thirty air miles
north-northwest of Johnstone Peak, where the young campers had taken refuge from 
The Outsider in their van and had later fired at it with a .32 pistol on June 
18, twenty-eight days ago. The Outsider would have been reckoning 
north-northwest by sheer instinct and no doubt would have frequently been 
required to backtrack out of box canyons; therefore, in this mountainous terrain 
it had very likely traveled between sixty and ninety miles on the ground to 
cover those thirty air miles. Still, that was only a pace of three miles a day, 
at most, and Lem wondered what the creature had been doing during the time it 
was not traveling or sleeping or chasing down food.
“You’ll want to see where these two were killed,” Bockner said. “We’ve found the 
place. And you’ll want to see the den, too.”
“Den?”
“The lair,” one of the forest rangers said. “The damn lair.”
The deputies, rangers, and crime-lab men had been giving Lem and Cliff odd looks 
ever since they had arrived, but Lem had not been surprised by that. Local 
authorities always regarded him with suspicion and curiosity because they were 
not accustomed to having a powerhouse federal agency like the NSA show up and 
claim jurisdiction; it was a rarity. But now he realized that their curiosity 
was of a different kind and degree than what he usually encountered, and for the 
first time he perceived their fear. They had found something—the lair of which 
they spoke—that gave them reason to believe this case was even stranger than the 
sudden appearance of the NSA would usually indicate.
In suits, ties, and polished street shoes, neither Lem nor Cliff was properly 
dressed for a hike down into the canyon, but neither of them hesitated when the 
rangers led the way. Two deputies, the lab men, and one of the three rangers 
remained behind with the bodies, which left a party of six for the descent. They 
followed a shallow channel carved by runoff from rainstorms, then switched to 
what might have been a deer trail. After descending to the very bottom of the 
canyon, they turned southeast and proceeded for half a mile. Soon Lem was sweaty 
and covered with a film of dust, and his socks and pant legs were full of 
prickling burrs.
“Here’s where they were killed,” Deputy Bockner said when he led them into a 
clearing surrounded by scrub pines, cottonwoods, and brush.
The pale, sandy earth and sun-bleached grass were mottled with enormous dark 
stains. Blood.
“And right back here,” one of the rangers said, “is where we found the lair.”
It was a shallow cave in the base of the canyon wall, perhaps ten feet deep, 
twenty feet wide, no more than a dozen steps from the small clearing where the 
hikers had been murdered. The mouth of the cave was about eight feet wide but 
low, requiring Lem to stoop a bit as he entered. Once inside, he was able to 
stand erect, for the ceiling was high. The place had a mildly unpleasant, musty 
smell. Light found its way through the entrance and through a two-foot-wide 
water-carved hole in the ceiling, but for the most part the chamber was shadowy 
and twenty degrees cooler than the canyon outside.
Only Deputy Bockner accompanied Lem and Cliff. Lem sensed that the others held 
back not out of any concern that the cave would be too crowded, but out of an 
uneasiness about the place.
Bockner had a flashlight. He switched it on and played the beam over the things 
he had brought them to see, dispelling some of the shadows and causing others to 
flit batlike across the room to roost on different perches.
In one corner, dry grass had been piled to a depth of six or eight inches to 
make a bed on the sandstone floor. Beside the bed was a galvanized bucket full 
of relatively fresh water carried from the nearest stream, evidently placed 
there so the sleeper could get a drink upon waking in the middle of the night.
“It was here,” Cliff said softly.
“Yes,” Lem agreed.
Instinctively he sensed The Outsider had made this bed; somehow, its alien 
presence was still in the chamber. He stared at the bucket, wondering where the 
creature had acquired it. Most likely, along the way from Banodyne, it had 
decided it would eventually find a burrow and hide for a while, and it had 
realized it would need a few things to make its life in the wild more 
comfortable. Perhaps breaking into a stable or barn or empty house, it had 
stolen the bucket and various other things that Bockner now revealed with his 
flashlight.
A plaid flannel blanket for when the weather turned cooler. A horse blanket, 
judging by the look of it. What caught Lem’s attention was the neatness with 
which the blanket had been folded and placed on a narrow ledge in the wall 
beside the entrance.
A flashlight. This was on the same shelf that held the blanket. The Outsider had 
exceedingly good night vision. That was one of the design requirements with 
which Dr. Yarbeck had been working: in the dark, a good genetically engineered 
warrior would be able to see as well as a cat. So why would it want a 
flashlight? Unless . . . maybe even a creature of the night was sometimes afraid 
of darkness.
That thought jolted Lem, and suddenly he pitied the beast as he had pitied it 
that day he had watched it communicating by crude sign language with Yarbeck, 
the day it had said that it wanted to tear its own eyes out so it would never 
have to look at itself again.
Bockner moved the beam of his own flashlight and focused it on twenty candy 
wrappers. Apparently, The Outsider had stolen a couple family packs of candy 
somewhere along the way. The strange thing was that the wrappers were not 
crumpled but were smoothed out and laid flat on the floor along the back 
wall—ten from Reese’s peanut butter cups and ten from Clark Bars. Perhaps The 
Outsider liked the bright colors of the wrappers. Or perhaps it kept them to 
remind itself of the pleasure that the candy had given it because, Once those 
treats were gone, there was not much other pleasure to be had in the hard life 
to which it had been driven
In the farthest corner from the bed, deep in shadows, was a pile of bones. The 
bones of small animals. Once the candy was eaten, The Outsider had been forced 
to hunt in order to feed itself. And without the means to light a
fire, it had fed savagely on raw meat. Perhaps it kept the bones in the cave 
because it was afraid that, by disposing of them outside, it would be leaving 
clues to its whereabouts. By storing them in the darkest, farthest corner of its 
haven, it seemed to have a civilized sense of neatness and order, but to Lem it 
also seemed as if The Outsider had hidden the bones in the shadows because it 
was ashamed of its own savagery.
Most pathetically of all, a peculiar group of items was stored in a niche in the 
wall above the grassy bed. No, Lem decided, not just stored. The items were 
carefully arranged, as if for display, the way an aficionado of art glass or 
ceramics or Mayan pottery might display a valuable collection. There was a round 
stained-glass bauble of the sort that people hung from their patio covers to 
sparkle in the sun; it was about four inches in diameter, and it portrayed a 
blue flower against a pale-yellow background. Beside that bauble was a bright 
copper pot that had probably once contained a plant on the same—or 
another—patio. Next to the pot were two things that surely had been taken from 
inside a house, perhaps from the same place where The Outsider had stolen the 
candy: first, a fine porcelain study of a pair of red-feathered cardinals 
sitting on a branch, every detail exquisitely crafted; second, a crystal 
paperweight. Apparently, even within the alien breast of Yarbeck’s monstrosity, 
there was an appreciation of beauty and a desire to live not as an animal but as 
a thinking being in an ambience at least lightly touched by civilization.
Lem felt sick at heart as he considered the lonely, tortured, self-hating, 
inhuman yet self-aware creature that Yarbeck had brought into the world.
Last of all, the niche above the grass bed held a ten-inch-high figure of Mickey 
Mouse that was also a coin bank.
Lem’s pity swelled because he knew why the bank had appealed to The Outsider. At 
Banodyne, there had been experiments to determine the depth and nature of the 
dog’s and The Outsider’s intelligence, to discover how close their perceptions 
were to those of a human being. One of the experiments had been designed to 
probe their ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality. On several 
occasions, the dog and The Outsider had separately been shown a videotape that 
had been assembled from film clips of all kinds: bite of old John Wayne movies, 
footage from George Lucas’s Star Wars, news films, scenes from a wide variety of 
documentaries—and old Mickey Mouse, cartoons. The reactions of the dog and The 
Outsider were filmed and, later, they were quizzed to see it they understood 
which segments of the videotape were of real events and which were flights of 
the imagination. Both creatures had gradually learned to identify fantasy when 
they saw it; but, strangely, the one fantasy they most wanted to believe in, the 
fantasy they clung to the longest, was Mickey Mouse. They were enthralled by 
Mickey’s adventures with his cartoon friends. After escaping Banodyne, The 
Outsider had some how come across this coin bank and had wanted it badly because 
the poor damn thing was reminded of the only real pleasure it had ever known 
while in the lab.
In the beam of Deputy Bockner’s flashlight, something on the shelf glinted. It 
was lying nearly flat beside the coin bank, and they almost overlooked it. Cliff 
stepped onto the grass bed and plucked the gleaming object Out of the wall 
niche: a three-inch-by-four-inch triangular fragment of a mirror.
The Outsider huddled here, Lem thought, trying to take heart from its meager 
treasures, trying to make as much of a home for itself as was possible. Once in 
a while it picked up this jagged shard from a mirror and stared at itself, 
perhaps searching hopefully for an aspect of its countenance that was not ugly, 
perhaps trying to come to terms with what it was. And failing. Surely failing.
“Dear God,” Cliff Soames said quietly, for the same thoughts had apparently 
passed through his mind. “The poor miserable bastard.”
The Outsider had possessed one additional item: a copy of People magazine. 
Robert Redford was on the cover. With a claw, sharp stone, or some other 
instrument, The Outsider had cut out Redford’s eyes.
The magazine was rumpled and tattered, as if it had been paged through a hundred 
times, and now Deputy Bockner handed it to them and suggested they page through 
it once more. On doing so, Lem saw that the eyes of every person pictured in the 
issue had been either scratched, cut, or crudely torn out.
The thoroughness of this symbolic mutilation—not one image in the magazine had 
been spared—was chilling.
The Outsider was pathetic, yes, and it was to be pitied.
But it was also to be feared.
Five victims—some gutted, some decapitated.
The innocent dead must not be forgotten, not for a moment. Neither an affection 
for Mickey Mouse nor a love of beauty could excuse such slaughter.
But Jesus .
The creature had been given sufficient intelligence to grasp the importance and 
the benefits of civilization, to long for acceptance and a meaningful existence. 
Yet a fierce lust for violence, a killing instinct second to none in nature, was 
also engineered into it because it was meant to be a smart killer on a long 
invisible leash, a living machine of war. No matter how long it existed in 
peaceful solitude in its canyon cave, no matter how many days or weeks it 
resisted its own violent urges, it could not change what it was. The pressure 
would build within it until it could no longer contain itself, until the 
slaughter of small animals would not provide enough psychological relief, and 
then it would seek larger and more interesting prey. It might damn itself for 
its savagery, might long to remake itself into a creature that could exist in 
harmony with the rest of the world, but it was powerless to change what it Was. 
Only hours ago, Lem had pondered how difficult it was for him to become a 
different man from the one his father had raised, how hard it was for any man to 
change what life had made him, but at least it was possible if one had the 
determination, willpower, and time. However, for The Outsider change Was 
impossible; murder was in the beast’s genes, locked in, and it could expect no 
hope of re-creation or salvation.
“What the hell is this all about?” Deputy Bockner asked, finally unable to 
repress his curiosity.
“Believe me,” Lem said, “you don’t want to know.”
“What was in this cave?” Bockner asked.
Lem only shook his head. If two more people had to die, it was a stroke of good 
fortune that they had been murdered in a national forest. This was federal land, 
which meant much simpler procedures by which the NSA could assume authority in 
the investigation.
Cliff Soames was still turning the fragment of mirror over and over in his hand, 
staring at it thoughtfully.
Looking around the eerie chamber one last time, Lem Johnson made a promise to 
himself and to his dangerous quarry: When I find you, I won’t consider trying to 
take you alive; no net or tranquilizer guns, as the scientists and the military 
types would prefer; instead, I’ll shoot you quick and clean, take you down fast.
That was not only the safest plan. It would also be an act of compassion and 
mercy.
 
 
 
4
By the first of August, Nora sold all of Aunt Violet’s furniture and other 
possessions. She had phoned a man who dealt in antiques and secondhand 
furniture, and he had given her one price for everything, and she had accepted 
it happily. Now—except for dishes, silverware, and the furniture in the bedroom 
that she had made her own—the rooms were empty from wall to wall. The house 
seemed cleansed, purified, exorcised. All evil spirits had been driven out, and 
she knew she now had the will to redecorate entirely. But she no longer wanted 
the place, so she telephoned a real-estate agent and put it on the market.
Her old clothes were gone, too, all of them, and she had an entirely new 
wardrobe with slacks and skirts and blouses and jeans and dresses like any woman 
might have. Occasionally, she felt too conspicuous in bright colors, but she 
always resisted the urge to change into something dark and drab.
She still had not found the courage to put her artistic talent on the market and 
see if her work was worth anything. Travis nudged her about it now and then, in 
ways he thought were subtle, but she was not ready to lay her fragile ego on the 
anvil and give just anyone a chance to swing a hammer at it. Soon, but not yet.
Sometimes, when she looked at herself in a mirror or noticed her reflection in a 
sun-silvered store window, she realized that, indeed, she was pretty. Not 
beautiful, perhaps, not gorgeous like some movie star, but moderately pretty. 
However, she did not seem to be able to hold on to this breakthrough perception 
of her appearance, at least not for long, because every few days she would be 
surprised anew by the comeliness of the face looking back at her from the 
mirror.
On the fifth of August, late in the afternoon, she and Travis were sitting at 
the table in his kitchen, playing Scrabble, and she was feeling pretty. A few 
minutes ago, in the bathroom, she’d had another of those revelations when she 
had looked in the mirror, and in fact she had liked her looks more than ever 
before. Now, back at the Scrabble board, she felt buoyant, happier than she 
would have once believed possible—and mischievous. She started using her tiles 
to spell nonsense words and then vociferously defended them when Travis 
questioned their legitimacy.
‘Dofnup’?” he said, frowning at the board. “There’s no such word as ‘dofnup.’”
“It’s a triangular cap that loggers wear,” she said.
“Loggers?”
“Like Paul Bunyan.”
“Loggers wear knit caps, what you call toboggan caps, or round leather caps with 
earflaps.”
“I’m not talking about what they wear to work in the woods,” she explained 
patiently. “ ‘Dofnup.’ That’s the name of the cap they wear to bed.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Are you putting me on?”
She kept a straight face. “No. It’s true.”
“Loggers wear a special cap to bed?”
“Yes. The dofnup.”
He was unaccustomed to the very idea that Nora would play a joke on him, so he 
fell for it. “Dofnup? Why do they call it that?”
“Beats me,” she said.
Einstein was on the floor, on his belly, reading a novel. Since graduating with 
startling swiftness from picture books to children’s literature like The Wind in 
the Willows, he had been reading eight and ten hours a day, every day. He 
couldn’t get enough books. He’d become a prose junkie. Ten days ago, when the 
dog’s obsession with reading had finally outstripped Nora’s patience for holding 
books and turning pages, they had tried to puzzle out an arrangement that would 
make it possible for Einstein to keep a volume open in front of him and turn the 
pages himself. At a hospital-supply company, they had found a device designed 
for patients who had the use of neither arms nor legs. It was a metal stand onto 
which the boards of the book were clamped; electrically powered mechanical arms, 
controlled by three push buttons, turned the pages and held them in place. A 
quadriplegic could operate it with a stylus held in his teeth; Einstein used his 
nose. The dog seemed immensely pleased by the arrangement. Now, he whimpered 
softly about something he had just read, pushed one of the buttons, and turned 
another page.
Travis spelled “wicked” and picked up a lot of points by using a doublescore 
square, so Nora used her tiles to spell “hurkey,” which was worth even more 
points.
“‘Hurkey’?” Travis said doubtfully.
“It’s a favorite Yugoslavian meal,” she said.
“It is?”
“Yes. The recipe includes both ham and turkey, which is why they call it—” She 
couldn’t finish. She broke into laughter.
He gaped at her in astonishment. “You are putting me on. You are putting me on! 
Nora Devon, what’s become of you? When I first met you, I said to myself, ‘Now, 
there’s the grimmest-damn-most-serious young woman I’ve ever seen.’”
“And squirrelly.”
“Well, not squirrelly.”
“Yes, squirrelly,” she insisted. “You thought I was squirrelly.”
“All right, yeah, I thought you were so squirrelly you probably had the attic of 
that house packed full of walnuts.”
Grinning, she said, “If Violet and I had lived in the south, we’d have been 
straight out of Faulkner, wouldn’t we?”
“Too weird even for Faulkner. But now just look at you! Making up dumb words and 
dumber jokes, conning me into believing them ‘cause I’d never expect Nora Devon, 
of all people, to do any such thing. You’ve sure changed in these few months.”
“Thanks to you,” she said.
“Maybe thanks to Einstein more than me.”
“No. You most of all,” she said, and abruptly she was stricken by that old 
shyness that had once all but paralyzed her. She looked away from him, down at 
her tray of Scrabble tiles, and in a low voice she said, “You most of all. I’d 
never have met Einstein if I hadn’t met you. And you .. . cared about me . . . 
worried about me . . . saw something in me that I couldn’t see. You remade me.”
“No,” he said. “You give me too much credit. You didn’t have to be remade. This 
Nora was always there, inside the old one. Like a flower all cramped up and 
hidden inside a drab little seed. You just had to be encouraged to. . . well, to 
grow and bloom.”
She could not look at him. She felt as if a tremendous stone had been placed on 
the back of her neck, forcing her to bow her head, and she was blushing. But she 
found the courage to say, “It’s so damn hard to bloom. . . to change. Even when 
you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it’s hard. Desire 
to change isn’t enough. Or desperation. Couldn’t be done without . . . love.” 
Her voice had dropped to a whisper, and she was unable to lift it. “Love is like 
the water and the sun that make the seed grow.”
He said, “Nora, look at me.”
That stone on her neck must have weighed a hundred pounds, a thousand.
“Nora?”
It weighed a ton.
“Nora, I love you too.”
Somehow with great effort, she lifted her head. She looked at him. His brown 
eyes, so dark as to be almost black, were warm and kind and beautiful.
She loved those eyes. She loved the high bridge and narrow line of his nose. She 
loved every aspect of his lean and ascetic face.
“I should have told you first,” he said, “because it’s easier for me to say it 
than it is for you. I should have said it days ago, weeks ago: Nora, by God, I 
love you. But I didn’t say it because I was afraid. Every time I let myself love 
someone, I lose them, but this time I think maybe it’ll be different. Maybe 
you’ll change things for me the way I helped change them for you, and maybe this 
time luck’s with me.”
Her heart raced. She could barely get her breath, but she said, “I love you.”
“Will you marry me?”
She was stunned. She did not know what she’d expected to happen, but certainly 
not this. Just hearing him say he loved her, just being able to express the same 
sentiments to him—that was enough to keep her happy for weeks, months. She 
expected to have time to walk around their love, as if it were a great and 
mysterious edifice that, like some newly discovered pyramid, must be studied and 
pondered from every angle before she dared to undertake an exploration of the 
interior.
“Will you marry me?” be repeated.
This was too fast, recklessly fast, and just sitting there on a kitchen chair 
she got as dizzy as if she had been spinning around on a carnival ride, and she 
was afraid, too, so she tried to tell him to slow down, tried to tell him they 
had plenty of time to consider the next step before taking it, but to her 
surprise she heard herself say, “Yes. Oh, yes.”
He reached out and took both her hands.
She cried, then, but they were good tears.
Lost in his book, Einstein had nevertheless been aware of what was transpiring. 
He came to the table, sniffing at both of them, rubbing against their legs, and 
whining happily.
Travis said, “Next week?”
“Married? But it takes time to get a license and everything.”
“Not in Las Vegas. I can call ahead, make arrangements with a wedding chapel in 
Vegas. We can go next week and be married.”
Crying and laughing at the same time, she said, “All right.”
“Terrific,” Travis said, grinning.
Einstein wagged his tail furiously: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
 
 
5
On Wednesday, the fourth of August, working on contract for the Tetragna Family 
of San Francisco, Vince Nasco hit a little cockroach named Lou Pantangela. The 
cockroach had turned state’s evidence and was scheduled, in September, to 
testify in court against members of the Tetragna organization.
Johnny The Wire Santini, computer hacker for the mob, had used his high-
tech expertise to invade federal computer files and locate Pantangela. The 
cockroach was living under the protection of two federal marshals in a safe 
house in, of all places, Redondo Beach, south of L.A. After testifying this 
autumn, he was scheduled to be given a new identity and a new life in 
Connecticut, but of course he was not going to live that long.
Because Vince would probably have to waste one or both of the marshals to get at 
Pantangela, the rubout was going to bring a lot of heat, so the Tetragnas 
offered him a very high price—$60,000. They had no way of knowing that the need 
to kill more than one man was a bonus to Vince; it made the job more—not 
less—attractive.
He ran surveillance on Pantangela for almost a week, using a different vehicle 
every day to avoid being spotted by the cockroach’s bodyguards. They did not 
often let Pantangela outside, but they were still more confident of their hiding 
place than they should have been because three or four times a week they allowed 
him to have a late lunch in public, accompanying him to a little trattoria four 
blocks from the safe house.
They had changed Pantangela’s appearance as much as possible. He had once had 
thick black hair that he had worn longish, over his collar, Now his hair was cut 
short and dyed light brown. He’d had a mustache, but they’d made him shave it 
off. He had been sixty pounds overweight, but after two months in the care of 
the marshals, he had lost about forty pounds. Nevertheless, Vince recognized 
him.
On Wednesday, August 4, they took Pantangela to the trattoria at one o’clock, as 
usual. At ten minutes past one, Vince strolled in to have his own lunch.
The restaurant had only eight tables in the middle and six booths along each 
side wall. It looked clean but had too much Italian kitsch for Vince’s taste: 
red- and white-checkered tablecloths; garish murals of roman ruins; empty wine 
bottles used as candleholders; a thousand bunches of plastic grapes, for God’s 
sake, hanging from lattice fixed to the ceiling and meant to convey the 
atmosphere of an arbor. Because Californians tend to eat an early dinner, at 
least by Eastern standards, they also eat an early lunch, and by ten past one, 
the number of diners had already peaked and was declining. By two o’clock, it 
was likely that the only customers remaining would be Pantangela, his two 
bodyguards, and Vince, which was what made it such a good place for the hit.
The trattoria was too small to bother with a hostess at lunch, and a sign told 
guests to seat themselves. Vince walked back through the room, past the 
Pantangela party, to an empty booth behind them.
Vince had given a lot of thought to his clothes. He was wearing rope sandals, 
red cotton shorts, and a white T-shirt on which were blue waves, a yellow sun, 
and the words ANOTHER CALIFORNIA BODY. His aviator sunglasses were mirrored. He 
carried an open-topped canvas beach bag that was boldly lettered MY STUFF. If 
you glanced in the bag when he walked past, you’d see a tightly rolled towel, 
bottles of tanning lotion, a small radio, and a hairbrush,
but you wouldn’t see the fully automatic, silencer-equipped Uzi pistol with a 
forty-round magazine hidden in the bottom. With his deep tan to complement the 
outfit, he achieved the look he wanted: a very fit but aging surfer; a 
leisure-sotted, shiftless, and probably harebrained jerk who would be beaching 
it every day, pretending to be young, and still self-intoxicated when he was 
sixty.
He only glanced uninterestedly at Pantangela and the marshals, but he was aware 
of them giving him the once-over, then dismissing him as harmless. Perfect.
The booths had high padded backs, so from where he sat he could not see 
Pantangela. But he could hear the cockroach and the marshals talking now and 
then, mostly about baseball and women.
After a week of surveillance, Vince knew that Pantangela never left the 
trattoria sooner than two-thirty, usually three o’clock, evidently because he 
insisted on an appetizer, a salad, a main course, and dessert, the whole works. 
That gave Vince time for a salad and an order of linguini with clam sauce.
His waitress was about twenty, white-blond, pretty, and as deeply tanned as 
Vince. She had the hip look and sound of a beach girl, and she started coming on 
to him right away, while taking his order. He figured she was one of those sand 
nymphs whose brain was as sun-fried as her body. She probably spent every summer 
evening on the beach, doing dope of every description, spreading her legs for 
any stud who vaguely interested her—and most of them would interest her—which 
meant that, no matter how healthy she looked, she was disease-ridden. Just the 
idea of humping her made him want to puke, but he had to play out the role he’d 
chosen for himself, so he flirted with her and tried to look as if he could 
barely keep from drooling at the thought of her naked, writhing body pinned 
under him.
At five minutes past two, Vince had finished lunch, and the only other customers 
in the place were Pantangela and the two marshals. One of the waitresses had 
left for the day, and the other two were in the kitchen. It could not have been 
better.
The beach bag was on the booth beside him. He reached into it and withdrew the 
Uzi pistol.
Pantangela and the marshals were talking about the Dodgers’ chances of getting 
in the World Series.
Vince got up, stepped around to their booth, and sprayed them with twenty to 
thirty rounds from the Uzi. The stubby, high-tech silencer worked beautifully, 
and the shots sounded like nothing more than a stuttering man having trouble 
pronouncing a word that began with a sibilant. It went down so fast that the 
marshals didn’t have a chance to reach for their own weapons. They didn’t even 
have time to be surprised.
Ssssnap.
Ssssnap.
Ssssnap.
Pantangela and his guardians were dead in three seconds.
Vince shuddered with intense pleasure, and was briefly overcome by the wealth of 
life energy that he had just absorbed. He could not speak. Then in a tremulous 
and raspy voice, he said, “Thank you.”
When he turned away from the booth, he saw his waitress standing in the middle 
of the room, frozen in shock. Her wide blue eyes were fixated on the dead men, 
but now her gaze shifted slowly to Vince.
Before she could scream, he emptied the rest of the magazine into her, maybe ten 
shots, and she went down in a rain of blood.
Ssssnap.
“Thank you,” he said, then said it again because she had been young and vital 
and, therefore, of more use to him.
Concerned that someone else would come out of the kitchen—or maybe someone would 
walk past the restaurant and look in and see the waitress on the floor—Vince 
stepped quickly to his booth, snatched up the beach bag, and jammed the Uzi 
pistol under the towel. Putting on his mirrored sunglasses, he got out of there.
He was not worried about fingerprints. He had coated the pads of his fingers 
with Elmer’s glue. It dried nearly transparent and could not be noticed unless 
he turned his hands palms-up and called people’s attention to it. The layer of 
glue was thick enough to fill the minute lines in the skin, leaving the 
fingertips smooth.
Outside, he walked to the end of the block, turned the corner, and got into his 
van, which was parked at the curb. As far as he could tell, no one gave him a 
second look.
He went to the ocean, looking forward to some time in the sun and an 
invigorating swim. Going to Redondo Beach, two blocks away, seemed too bold, so 
he followed the Coast Highway south to Bolsa Chica, just north of where he lived 
in Huntington Beach.
As he drove, he thought about the dog. He was still paying Johnny The Wire to 
keep tabs on animal pounds, police agencies, and anyone else who might be 
dragged into the search for the retriever. He knew about the National Security 
Agency’s bulletin to veterinarians and animal-control authorities in three 
states, and he also knew that the NSA had so far had no luck.
Maybe the dog had been killed by a car, or by the creature that Hudston had 
called “The Outsider,” or by a coyote pack in the hills. But Vince didn’t want 
to believe it was dead because that would mean an end to his dream of making a 
huge financial killing with the dog either by ransoming it back to the 
authorities or selling it to a rich showbiz type who could work up an act with 
it, or by finding some means of using the animal’s secret intelligence tO pull a 
safe and profitable scam on unsuspecting marks.
What he preferred to believe was that someone had found the dog and had taken it 
home as a pet. If he could just locate the people who had the dog, he could buy 
it from them—or blow them away and just take the mutt.
But where the hell was he supposed to look? How was he supposed to find them? If 
they were findable, the NSA would surely reach them first.
Most likely, if the dog was not already dead, the best way to get his hands on 
it was to find The Outsider first and let that beast lead him to the dog, which 
Hudston had seemed to think it would. But that was not an easy task, either.
Johnny The Wire was also still providing him with information about particularly 
violent killings of people and animals throughout southern California. Vince 
knew about the slaughter at the Irvine Park petting zoo, the murder of Wes 
Dalberg, and the men at Bordeaux Ridge. Johnny had turned up the rash of reports 
about mutilated pets in the Diamond Bar area, and Vince had actually seen the TV 
news story about the young couple who had encountered what they thought was an 
extraterrestrial in the wilds below Johnstone Peak. Three weeks ago, two hikers 
had been found horribly mauled in the Angeles National Forest, and by hacking 
his way into the NSA’s own computers, Johnny had confirmed that they had taken 
over jurisdiction in that case, too, which meant it had to be the work of The 
Outsider.
Since then, nothing.
Vince was not ready to give up. Not by a long shot. He was a patient man. 
Patience was part of his job. He would wait, watch, keep Johnny The Wire at 
work, and sooner or later he would get what he was after. He was sure of it. He 
had decided that the dog, like immortality, was part of his great destiny.
At Bolsa Chica State Beach, he stood for a while with the surf pounding against 
his thighs, staring out at the great dark masses of surging water. He felt as 
powerful as the sea. He was filled with scores of lives. He would not have been 
surprised if electricity had suddenly leaped from his fingertips the way 
thunderbolts flashed from the hands of the gods in mythology.
Finally, he threw himself forward, into the water, and swam against the powerful 
incoming waves. He went far out before turning parallel to the shore, swimming 
first south and then north, keeping at it until, exhausted, he at last allowed 
the tide to carry him back to shore.
He dozed for a while in the hot afternoon sun. He dreamed of a pregnant woman, 
her stomach large and round, and in the dream he strangled her to death.
He often dreamed of killing children or, even better, the unborn children of 
pregnant women because it was something he longed to do in real life. Child 
murder was, of course, much too dangerous; it was a pleasure he had to deny 
himself, though a child’s life energy would be the richest, the purest, the most 
worthy of absorption. Too dangerous by far. He couldn’t indulge in infanticide 
until he was certain he had achieved immortality, whereupon he would no longer 
need to fear the police or anyone else.
Although he often had such dreams, the one he woke from on Bolsa Chica Beach 
struck him as more meaningful than others of its type. It felt . .. different. 
Prophetic. He sat yawning and blinking in the westering sun, pretending not to 
notice the bikinied girls who were giving him the eye, and he told himself that 
this dream was a glimpse of pleasure to come. One day he would actually feel his 
hands around the throat of a pregnant woman like the one in the
dream, and he would know the ultimate thrill, receive the ultimate gift, not 
only her life energy but the pure, untapped energy of the unborn in her womb.
Feeling like a million bucks, he returned to his van, drove home, showered, and 
went out to dinner at the nearest Stuart Anderson steak house, where he treated 
himself to filet mignon.
 
 
6
Einstein bolted past Travis, out of the kitchen, across the small dining room, 
disappearing into the living room. Carrying the leash, Travis went after him. 
Einstein was hiding behind the sofa.
Travis said, “Listen, it’s not going to hurt.”
The dog watched him warily.
“We’ve got to take care of this before we go off to Vegas. The vet will give you 
a couple of shots, vaccinate you against distemper and rabies. It’s for your own 
good, and it really won’t hurt. Really. Then we’ll get you a license, which we 
should’ve done weeks ago.
One bark. No.
“Yes, we will.”
No.
Crouching, holding the leash by the clip with which he would attach it to the 
collar, Travis took a step toward Einstein.
The retriever scrambled away. He ran to the armchair, leaped up, and stood on 
that observation platform, watching Travis intently.
Coming slowly out from behind the sofa, Travis said, “Now, you listen up, fur 
face. I’m your master—”
One bark.
Frowning, Travis said, “Oh, yes, I am your master. You may be one damn smart 
dog—but you’re still the dog, and I’m the man, and I’m telling you that we’re 
going to the vet.”
One bark.
Leaning against the dining-room archway, arms folded, smiling, Nora said, “I 
think he’s trying to give you a taste of what children are like, in case we ever 
decide to have any.”
Travis lunged toward the dog.
Einstein flew off his perch and was already out of the room when Travis, unable 
to halt, fell over the armchair.
Laughing, Nora said, “This is vastly entertaining.”
“Where’d he go?” Travis demanded.
She pointed to the hallway that led to the two bedrooms and bath.
He found the retriever in the master bedroom, standing on the bed, facing the 
doorway. “You can’t win,” Travis said. “This is for your own good, damn it, and 
you’re going to have those shots whether you like it or not.”
Einstein lifted one hind leg and peed on the bed.
Astonished, Travis said, “What in the hell are you doing?”
Einstein stopped peeing, stepped away from the puddle that was soaking into the 
quilted bedspread, and stared defiantly at Travis.
Travis had heard stories of dogs and cats expressing extreme displeasure by 
stunts like this. When he had owned the real-estate agency, one of his 
saleswomen had boarded her miniature collie in a kennel for two weeks while away 
on vacation. When she returned and bailed out the dog, it punished her by 
urinating on both her favorite chair and her bed.
But Einstein was not an ordinary dog. Considering his remarkable intellect, the 
soiling of the bed was even more of an outrage than it would have been if he had 
been ordinary.
Getting angry now, moving toward the dog, Travis said, “This is inexcusable.”
Einstein scrambled off the mattress. Realizing the dog would try to slip around 
him and out of the room, Travis scuttled backward and slammed the door. Cut off 
from the exit, Einstein swiftly changed directions and dashed to the far end of 
the bedroom, where he stood in front of the dresser.
“No more fooling around,” Travis said sternly, brandishing the leash.
Einstein retreated into a corner.
Closing in at a crouch, spreading his arms to prevent the dog from bolting 
around either side of him, Travis finally made contact and clipped the leash to 
the collar. “Ha!”
Huddled defeatedly in the corner, Einstein hung his head and began to shudder.
Travis’s sense of triumph was short-lived. He stared in dismay at the dog’s 
bowed and trembling head, at the visible shivers that shook the animal’s flanks. 
Einstein issued low, almost inaudible, pathetic whines of fear.
Stroking the dog, trying to calm and reassure him, Travis said, “This really is 
for your own good, you know. Distemper, rabies—the sort of stuff you don’t want 
to mess with. And it will be painless, my friend. I swear it will.”
The dog would not look at him and refused to take heart from his assurances.
Under Travis’s hand, the dog felt as if he were shaking himself to pieces. He 
stared hard at the retriever, thinking, then said, “In that lab . . . did they 
put a lot of needles in you? Did they hurt you with needles? Is that why you’re 
afraid of getting vaccinations?”
Einstein only whimpered.
Travis pulled the reluctant dog out of the corner, freeing his tail for a 
session. Dropping the leash, he took Einstein’s head in both hands and forced 
his face up, so they were eye-to-eye.
“Did they hurt you with needles in the lab?”
Yes.
“Is that why you’re afraid of the vet?”
Though he did not stop shuddering, the dog barked once: No.
“You were hurt by needles, but you’re not afraid of them?”
No.
‘Then why are you like this?”
Einstein just stared at him and made those terrible sounds of distress.
Nora opened the bedroom door a crack and peeked in. “Did you get the leash on 
him yet, Einstein?” Then she said, “Phew! What happened in here?”
Still holding the dog’s head, staring into his eyes, Travis said, “He made a 
bold statement of displeasure.”
“Bold,” she agreed, moving to the bed and beginning to strip off the soiled 
spread, blanket, and sheets.
Trying to puzzle out the reason for the dog’s behavior, Travis said, “Einstein, 
if it’s not needles you’re afraid of—is it the vet?”
One bark. No.
Frustrated, Travis brooded on his next question while Nora pulled the mattress 
cover from the bed.
Einstein trembled.
Suddenly, Travis had a flash of understanding that illuminated the dog’s 
contrariness and fear. He cursed his own thickheadedness. “Hell, of course! 
You’re not afraid of the vet—but of who the vet might report you to.”
Einstein’s shivering subsided a bit, and he wagged his tail briefly. Yes. “If 
people from that lab are hunting for you—and we know they must be hunting 
furiously because you have to be the most important experimental animal in 
history—then they’re going to be in touch with every vet in the state, aren’t 
they? Every vet . . . and every dog pound . . . and every dog-licensing agency.”
Another burst of vigorous tail wagging, less shivering.
Nora came around the bed and stooped down beside Travis. “But golden retrievers 
have to be one of the two or three most popular breeds. Vets and 
animal-licensing bureaucrats deal with them all the time. If our genius dog here 
hides his light under a bushel and plays dopey mutt—”
“Which he can do quite well.”
“—then they’d have no way of knowing he was the fugitive.”
Yes, Einstein insisted.
To the dog, Travis said, “What do you mean? Are you saying they would be able to 
identify you?”
Yes.
“How?” Nora wondered. Travis said, “A mark of some kind?” Yes.
“Somewhere under all that fur?” Nora asked.
One bark. No.
“Then where?” Travis wondered.
Pulling loose of Travis’s hands, Einstein shook his head so hard that his floppy 
ears made a flapping noise.
“Maybe on the pads of his feet,” Nora said.
“No,” Travis said even as Einstein barked once. “When I found him, his
feet were bleeding from a lot of hard travel, and I had to clean out the wounds 
with boric acid. I’d have noticed a mark on one of his paws.”
Again, Einstein shook his head violently, flapping his ears.
Travis said, “Maybe on the inner lip. They tattoo racehorses on the inner lip to 
identify them and prevent ringers from being run. Let me peel back your lips and 
have a look, boy.”
Einstein barked once—No—and shook his head violently.
At last Travis got the point. He looked in the right ear and found nothing. But 
in the left ear, he saw something. He urged the dog to go with him to the 
window, where the light was better, and he discovered that the mark consisted of 
two numbers, a dash, and a third number tattooed in purple ink on the pink-brown 
flesh: 33-9.
Looking over Travis’s shoulder, Nora said, “They probably had a lot of pups they 
were experimenting with, from different litters, and they had to be able to 
identify them.”
“Jesus. If I’d taken him to a vet, and if the vet had been told to look for a 
retriever with a tattoo . .
“But he has to have shots.”
“Maybe he’s already had them,” Travis said hopefully.
“We don’t dare count on that. He was a lab animal in a controlled environment 
where he might not have needed shots. And maybe the usual inoculations would’ve 
interfered with their experiments.”
“We can’t risk a vet.”
“If they do find him,” Nora said, “we simply won’t give him up.”
“They can make us,” Travis said worriedly.
“Damned if they can.”
“Damned if they can’t. More likely than not, the government’s financing the 
research, and they can crush us. We can’t risk it. More than anything else, 
Einstein’s afraid of going back to the lab.”
Yes, yes, yes.
“But,” Nora said, “if he contracts rabies or distemper or—”
“We’ll get him the shots later,” Travis said. “Later. When the situation cools 
down. When he’s not so hot.”
The retriever whined happily, nuzzling Travis’s neck and face in a sloppy 
display of gratitude.
Frowning, Nora said, “Einstein is about the number-one miracle of the twentieth 
century. You really think he’s ever going to cool down, that they’ll ever stop 
looking for him?”
“They might not stop for years,” Travis admitted, stroking the dog. “But 
gradually they’ll begin to search with less enthusiasm and less hope. And the 
Vets will start forgetting to look in the ears of every retriever that’s brought 
to them. Until then, he’ll have to go without the shots, I guess. It’s the best 
thing we can do. It’s the only thing we can do.”
Ruffling Einstein’s coat with one hand, Nora said: “I hope you’re right.”
“I am.”
“I hope so.”
“I am.’’
 
 
Travis was badly shaken by how close he had come to risking Einstein’s freedom, 
and for the next few days he brooded about the infamous Cornell Curse. Maybe it 
was happening all over again. His life had been turned around and made livable 
because of the love he felt for Nora and for this impossible damn dog. And now 
maybe fate, which had always dealt with him in a supremely hostile manner, would 
rip both Nora and the dog away from him.
He knew that fate was only a mythological concept. He did not believe there was 
actually a pantheon of malevolent gods looking down on him through a celestial 
keyhole and plotting tragedies for him to endure—yet he could not help looking 
warily at the sky now and then. Each time he said something even slightly 
optimistic about the future, he found himself knocking on wood to counter 
malicious fates. At dinner, when he toppled the salt shaker, he immediately 
picked up a pinch of the stuff to throw it over his shoulder, then felt foolish 
and dusted it off his fingers. But his heart began to pound, and he was filled 
with a ridiculous superstitious dread, and he didn’t feel right again until he 
snatched up more salt and tossed it behind him.
Although Nora was surely aware of Travis’s eccentric behavior, she had the good 
grace to say nothing about his jitters. Instead, she countered his mood by 
quietly loving him every minute of the day, by speaking with great delight about 
their trip to Vegas, by being in unrelieved good humor, and by not knocking on 
wood.
She did not know about his nightmares because he did not tell her about them. It 
was the same bad dream, in fact, two nights in a row.
In the dream, he was wandering in the wooded canyons of the Santa Ana foothills 
of Orange County, the same woods in which he had first met Einstein. He had gone 
there with Einstein again, and with Nora, but now he had lost them. Frightened 
for them, he plunged down steep slopes, scrambled up hills, struggled through 
clinging brush, calling frantically for Nora, for the dog. Sometimes he heard 
Nora answering or Einstein barking, and they sounded as if they were in trouble, 
so he turned in the direction from which their voices came, but each time he 
heard them they were farther off and in a different place, and no matter how 
intently he listened or how fast he made his way through the forest, he was 
losing them, losing them—
—until he woke, breathless, heart racing, a silent scream caught in his throat.
Friday, August 6, was such a blessedly busy day that Travis had little time to 
worry about hostile fate. First thing in the morning, he telephoned a wedding 
chapel in Las Vegas and, using his American Express number, made arrangements 
for a ceremony on Wednesday, August 11, at eleven o’clock. Overcome by a 
romantic fever, he told the chapel manager that he wanted
twenty dozen red roses, twenty dozen white carnations, a good organist (no damn 
taped music) who could play traditional music, so many candles that the altar 
would be bright without harsh electric light, a bottle of Dom Perignon with 
which to conclude events, and a first-rate photographer to record the nuptials. 
When those details had been agreed upon, he telephoned the Circus Circus Hotel 
in Las Vegas, which was a family-oriented enterprise that boasted a 
recreational-vehicle campgrounds behind the hotel itself; he arranged for camp 
space beginning the night of Sunday, August 8. With another call to an RV 
campgrounds in Barstow, he also secured reservations for Saturday night, when 
they would pull off the road halfway to Vegas. Next, he went to a jewelry store, 
looked at their entire stock, and finally bought an engagement ring with a big, 
flawless three-carat diamond and a wedding band with twelve quarter-carat 
stones. With the rings hidden under the seat of the truck, Travis and Einstein 
went to Nora’s house, picked her up, and took her to an appointment with her 
attorney, Garrison Dilworth.
“Getting married? That’s wonderful!” Garrison said, pumping Travis’s hand. He 
kissed Nora on the cheek. He seemed genuinely delighted. “I’ve asked around 
about you, Travis.”
Surprised, Travis said, “You have?”
“For Nora’s sake.”
The attorney’s statement made Nora blush and protest, but Travis was pleased 
that Garrison had been concerned about her welfare.
Fixing Travis with a measured stare, the silver-haired attorney said, “I gather 
you did quite well in real estate before you sold your business.”
“I did all right,” Travis confirmed modestly, feeling as if he were speaking 
with Nora’s father, trying to make the right impression.
‘Very well,” Garrison said. “And I also hear you’ve invested the profits rather 
well.”
“I’m not broke,” Travis admitted.
Smiling, Garrison said, “I also hear you’re a good, reliable man with more than 
your share of kindness.”
It was Travis’s turn to blush. He shrugged.
To Nora, Garrison said, “Dear, I’m delighted for you, happier than I can say.”
“Thank you.” Nora favored Travis with a loving, radiant look that made him want 
to knock on wood for the first time all day.
Because they intended to take a honeymoon of at least a week or ten days 
following the wedding, Nora did not want to have to rush back to Santa Barbara 
in the event her real-estate agent found a taker for Violet Devon’s house. She 
asked Garrison Dilworth to draw up a power of attorney, giving him authority to 
handle all aspects of such a sale in her name during her absence. This was done 
in less than half an hour, signed and witnessed. After another round of 
congratulations and best wishes, they were on their way to buy a travel trailer.
They intended to take Einstein with them not only to the wedding in Vegas but on 
the honeymoon. Finding good, clean motels that would accept a dog
might not always be easy where they were going, so it was prudent to take a 
motel-on-wheels with them. Furthermore, neither Travis nor Nora could have made 
love with the retriever in the same room. “It’d be like having another person 
there,” Nora said, blushing as bright as a well-polished apple. Staying in 
motels, they would have to rent two rooms—one for them and one for 
Einstein—which seemed too awkward.
By four o’clock, they found what they were looking for: a middle-size, silvery, 
Quonset-shaped Airstream with a kitchenette, a dining nook, a living room, one 
bedroom, and one bath. When they retired for the night, they could leave 
Einstein in the front of the trailer and close the bedroom door after 
themselves. Because Travis’s pickup was already equipped with a good trailer 
hitch, they were able to hook the Airstream to the rear bumper and haul it with 
them as soon as the sale was concluded.
Einstein, riding in the pickup between Travis and Nora, kept craning his head 
around to look out the back window at the gleaming, semicylindrical trailer as 
if amazed at the ingenuity of humankind.
They shopped for trailer curtains, plastic dishes and drinking glasses, food 
with which to stock the kitchenette cabinets, and a host of other items they 
needed before they hit the road. By the time they returned to Nora’s house and 
cooked omelets for a late dinner, they were dragging. For once there was nothing 
smartass about Einstein’s yawns; he was just tired.
That night, at home in his own bed, Travis slept the deep, deep sleep of ancient 
petrified trees and dinosaur fossils. The dreams of the previous two nights were 
not repeated.
 
 
Saturday morning, they set Out on their journey to Vegas and to matrimony. 
Seeking to travel mostly on wide divided highways on which they would be 
comfortable with the trailer, they took Route 101 south and then east until it 
became Route 134, which they followed until it became Interstate 210, with the 
city of Los Angeles and its suburbs to the south of them and the great Angeles 
National Forest to the north. Later, on the vast Mojave Desert, Nora was 
thrilled by the barren yet hauntingly beautiful panoramas of sand, stone, 
tumbleweed, mesquite, Joshua trees, and other cacti. The world, she said, 
suddenly seemed much bigger than she had ever realized, and Travis took pleasure 
in her bedazzlement.
Barstow, California, was a sprawling pit stop in that enormous wasteland, and 
they arrived at the big RV campgrounds by three that afternoon. Frank and Mae 
Jordan, the middle-aged couple in the next camper space, were from Salt Lake 
City and were traveling with their pet, a black Labrador named Jack.
To Travis’s and Nora’s surprise, Einstein had a terrific time playing with Jack. 
They chased each other around the trailers, took playful nips at each other, 
tangled and tumbled and sprang up and went chasing again. Frank Jordan tossed a 
red rubber ball for them, and they sprinted after it, vying to
be the champion retriever. The dogs also made a game of trying to get the ball 
away from each other and then holding on to it as long as possible. Travis was 
exhausted just watching them.
Einstein was undoubtedly the smartest dog in the world, the smartest dog of all 
time, a phenomenon, a miracle, as perceptive as any man—but he was also a dog. 
Sometimes, Travis forgot this fact, but he was charmed every time Einstein did 
something to remind him.
Later, after sharing charcoal-grilled hamburgers and corn on the cob with the 
Jordans, and after downing a couple of beers in the clear desert night, they 
said goodbye to the Salt Lakers, and Einstein seemed to say goodbye to Jack. 
Inside the Airstream, Travis patted Einstein on the head and told him, “That was 
very nice of you.”
The dog cocked his head, staring at Travis as if to ask what the devil he meant.
Travis said, “You know what I’m talking about, fur face.”
“I know, too,” Nora said. She hugged the dog. “When you were playing games with 
Jack, you could have made a fool of him if you’d wanted to, but you let him win 
his share, didn’t you?”
Einstein panted and grinned happily.
After one last nightcap, Nora took the bedroom, and Travis slept on the fold-out 
sofa bed in the living room. Travis had thought about sleeping with her, and 
perhaps she had considered allowing him into her bed. After all, the wedding was 
less than four days away. God knew, Travis wanted her. And although she surely 
suffered slightly with a virgin’s fear, she wanted him, too; he had no doubt of 
that. Each day, they were touching each other and kissing more often—and more 
intimately—and the air between them crackled with erotic energy. But why not do 
things right and proper since they were so close to the day? Why not go to their 
marriage bed as virgins—she as a virgin to everyone, he to her?
That night, Travis dreamed that Nora and Einstein were lost in the desolate 
reaches of the Mojave. In the dream, he was for some reason legless, forced to 
search for them at an agonizingly slow crawl, which was bad because he knew 
that, wherever they were, they were under attack by . . . something.
 
 
Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday in Las Vegas, they prepared for the wedding, watched 
Einstein playing enthusiastically with other campers’ dogs, and took side trips 
to Charleston Peak and Lake Mead. In the evenings, Nora and Travis left Einstein 
with his books while they went to stage shows. Travis felt guilty about leaving 
the retriever alone, but by various means Einstein indicated that he did not 
want them to stay at the trailer merely because the Strip hotels were so 
prejudiced and shortsighted as to refuse to allow well-behaved genius dogs into 
the casinos and showrooms.
Wednesday morning, Travis dressed in a tuxedo, and Nora wore a simple 
calf-length white dress with spare lace trim at the cuffs and neckline. With
Einstein between them, they drove to their wedding in the pickup, leaving the 
unhitched Airstream at the campgrounds.
The nondenominational, commercial chapel was the funniest place Travis had ever 
seen, for the design was earnestly romantic, solemn, and tacky all at the same 
time. Nora thought it was hilarious, too, and upon entering they had trouble 
suppressing their laughter. The chapel was tucked in among neondripping, glitzy, 
high-rise hotels on Las Vegas Boulevard South. It was only the size of a 
one-story house, pale-pink stucco with white doors. Engraved in brass above the 
doors was the legend YE SHALL GO TWO BY TWO . . . Instead of depicting religious 
images, the stained-glass windows were aglow with garishly rendered scenes from 
famous love stories including Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise, Aucassin 
and Nicolette, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca—and, unbelievably, I Love Lucy and 
Ozzie & Harriet.
Curiously, the tackiness did not deflate their buoyant mood. Nothing could 
diminish this day. Even the outrageous chapel was to be prized, remembered in 
every gaudy detail to be vividly recalled over the years, and always to be 
recalled fondly because it was their chapel on their day and therefore special 
in its own strange way.
Dogs were not ordinarily admitted. But Travis had generously tipped the entire 
staff in advance to insure that Einstein would not only be allowed inside but 
would be made to feel as welcome as anyone.
The minister, the Reverend Dan Dupree—’ ‘Please call me Reverend Dan”— was a 
florid-faced, potbellied fellow, a strenuous smiler and glad-hander who looked 
like a stereotypical used-car salesman. He was flanked by two paid witnesses—his 
wife and her sister—who were wearing bright summery dresses for the occasion.
Travis took his place at the front of the chapel.
The woman organist struck up “The Wedding March.”
Nora had expressed a deep desire to actually walk down the aisle and meet Travis 
rather than just beginning the ceremony at the altar railing. Furthermore, she 
wanted to be “given away,” as other brides were. That should have been her 
father’s singular honor, of course, but she had no father. Nor was anyone else 
at hand who would be a likely candidate for the job, and at first it seemed that 
she would have to make the walk alone or on the arm of a stranger. But in the 
pickup, on their way to the ceremony, she had realized that Einstein was 
available, and she had decided that no one in the world was more suited to 
accompany her down the aisle than the dog.
Now, as the organist played, Nora entered the back of the nave with the dog at 
her side. Einstein was acutely aware of the great honor of escorting her, and he 
walked with all the pride and dignity he could muster, his head held high, his 
slow steps timed to hers.
No one seemed disturbed—or even surprised—that a dog was giving Nora away. This 
was, after all, Las Vegas.
“She’s one of the loveliest brides I’ve ever seen,” Reverend Dan’s wife 
whispered to Travis, and he sensed that she was sincere, that she did not 
routinely bestow that compliment.
The photographer’s flash blinked repeatedly, but Travis was too involved with 
the sight of Nora to be bothered by the strobe.
Vases full of roses and carnations filled the small nave with their perfume, and 
a hundred candles flickered softly, some in clear glass votive cups and others 
on brass candelabras. By the time Nora arrived at his side, Travis was oblivious 
of the tacky decor. His love was an architect that entirely remade the reality 
of the chapel, transforming it into a cathedral as grand as any in the world.
The ceremony was brief and unexpectedly dignified. Travis and Nora exchanged 
vows, then rings. Tears full of reflected candlelight shimmered in her eyes, and 
Travis wondered for a moment why her tears should blur his vision, then realized 
that he, too, was on the verge of tears. A burst of dramatic organ music 
accompanied their first kiss as man and wife, and it was the sweetest kiss he 
had ever known.
Reverend Dan popped the Dom Perignon and, at Travis’s direction, poured a glass 
for everyone, the organist included. A saucer was found for Einstein. Slurping 
noisily, the retriever joined in their toast to life, happiness, and love 
eternal.
 
 
Einstein spent the afternoon in the forward end of the trailer, in the living 
room, reading.
Travis and Nora spent the afternoon at the other end of the trailer, in bed. 
After closing the bedroom door, Travis put a second bottle of Dom Perignon in an 
ice bucket and loaded a compact-disk player with four albums of George Winston’s 
most mellow piano music.
Nora drew down the blind at the only window and switched on a small lamp with a 
gold cloth shade. The soft amber light lent the room an aura rather like that of 
a place in a dream.
For a while they lay on the bed, talking, laughing, touching, kissing, then 
talking less and kissing more.
Gradually, Travis undressed her. He’d never before seen her unclothed, and he 
found her even more lovely and more exquisitely proportioned than he had 
imagined. Her slender throat, the delicacy of her shoulders, the fullness of her 
breasts, the concavity of her belly, the flair of her hips, the round sauciness 
of her buttocks, the long smooth supple sleekness of her legs—every line and 
angle and curve excited him but also filled him with great tenderness.
After he undressed himself, he patiently and gently introduced her to the art of 
love. With a profound desire to please and with full awareness that everything 
was new to her, he showed Nora—sometimes not without delicious teasing all the 
sensations that his tongue, fingers, and manhood could engender in her.
He was prepared to find her hesitant, embarrassed, even fearful, because her 
first thirty years of life had not prepared her for this degree of intimacy. But 
she harbored no trace of frigidity and was eager to engage in any act that 
‘flight pleasure either or both of them. Her soft cries and breathless murmurs
of excitement delighted him. Each time that she sighed climactically and 
surrendered to a shudder of ecstasy, Travis became more aroused, until he was of 
a size and firmness that he had never attained before, until his need was almost 
painful.
When at last he let his warm seed flower within her, he buried his face in her 
throat and called her name and told her that he loved her, told her again and 
again, and the moment of release seemed so long that he half-thought time had 
stopped or that he had tapped an inexplicable well that could never be 
exhausted.
With consummation achieved, they held each other for a long time, silent, not 
needing to talk. They listened to music, and in a while they finally spoke of 
what they felt, both physically and emotionally. They drank some champagne, and 
in time they made love again. And again.
Although the constant shadow of certain death looms over every day, the 
pleasures and joys of life can be so fine and deeply affecting that the heart is 
nearly stilled by astonishment.
 
 
From Vegas, they hauled the Airstream north on Route 95, across the immense 
Nevada barrens. Two days later, on Friday, August 13, they reached Lake Tahoe 
and connected the trailer to the electric and water lines at an RV campsite on 
the California side of the border.
Nora was not quite as easily overwhelmed by each new scenic vista and novel 
experience as she had been. However, Lake Tahoe was so stunningly beautiful that 
it filled her with childlike wonder again. Twenty-two miles long and twelve 
miles wide, with the Sierra Nevadas on its western flank and the Carson Range on 
the east, Tahoe was said to be the clearest body of water in the world, a 
shimmering jewel in a hundred amazingly iridescent shades of blue and green.
For six days, Nora and Travis and Einstein hiked in the Eldorado, Tahoe, and 
Toiyabe National Forests, vast primeval tracts of pine, spruce, and fir. They 
rented a boat and went on the lake, exploring paradisiacal coves and graceful 
bays. They went sunning and swimming, and Einstein took to the water with the 
enthusiasm indigenous to his breed.
Sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the late afternoon, more often at night, 
Nora and Travis made love. She was surprised by her carnal appetite. She could 
not get enough of him.
“I love your mind and your heart,” she told him, “but, God help me, I love your 
body almost as much! Am I depraved?”
“Good heavens, no. You’re just a young, healthy woman. In fact, given the life 
you’ve led, you’re emotionally healthier than you’ve any right to be. Really, 
Nora, you stagger me.”
“I’d like to straddle you instead.”
“Maybe you are depraved,” he said, and laughed.
Early on the serenely blue morning of Friday the twentieth, they left Tahoe and 
drove across the state to the Monterey Peninsula. There, where the continental 
shelf met the sea, the natural beauty was, if possible, even greater than that 
at Tahoe, and they stayed four days, leaving for home on the afternoon of 
Wednesday, August 25.
Throughout their trip, the joy of matrimony was so all-consuming that the 
miracle of Einstein’s humanlike intelligence did not occupy their thoughts as 
much as previously. But Einstein reminded them of his unique nature when they 
drew near to Santa Barbara late that afternoon. Forty or fifty miles from home, 
he grew restless. He shifted repeatedly on the seat between Nora and Travis, sat 
up for a minute, then laid his head on Nora’s lap, then sat up again. He began 
to whimper strangely. By the time they were ten miles from home, he was 
shivering.
“What’s wrong with you, fur face?” she asked.
With his expressive brown eyes, Einstein tried hard to convey a complex and 
important message, but she could not understand him.
Half an hour before dusk, when they reached the city and departed the freeway 
for surface streets, Einstein began alternately to whine and growl low in his 
throat.
“What’s wrong with him?” Nora asked.
Frowning, Travis said, “I don’t know.”
As they pulled into the driveway of Travis’s rented house and parked in the 
shade of the date palm, the retriever began to bark. He had never barked in the 
truck, not once on their long journey. It was ear-splitting in that confined 
space, but he would not stop.
When they got out of the truck, Einstein bolted past them, positioned himself 
between them and the house, and continued barking.
Nora moved along the walkway toward the front door, and Einstein darted at her, 
snarling. He seized one leg of her jeans and tried to pull her off balance. She 
managed to stay. on her feet and, when she retreated to the birdbath, he let go 
of her.
“What’s gotten into him?” she asked Travis.
Staring thoughtfully at the house, Travis said, “He was like this in the woods 
that first day . . . when he didn’t want me to follow the dark trail.”
Nora tried to coax the dog closer in order to pet him.
But Einstein would not be coaxed. When Travis tested the dog by approaching the 
house, Einstein snarled and forced him to retreat.
“Wait here,” Travis told Nora. He walked to the Airstream in the driveway and 
went inside.
Einstein trotted back and forth in front of the house, looking up at the door 
and windows, growling and whining.
As the sun rolled down the western sky and kissed the surface of the sea, the 
residential street was quiet, peaceful, ordinary in every respect—yet Nora felt 
a wrongness in the air. A warm wind off the Pacific elicited whispers from the 
palm and eucalyptus and ficus trees, sounds that might have been pleasant any 
other day but which now seemed sinister. In the lengthening shadows, in the last 
orange and purple light of the day, she also perceived an indefinable
menace. Except for the dog’s behavior, she had no reason to think that danger 
was near at hand; her uneasiness was not intellectual but instinctual.
When Travis returned from the trailer, he was carrying a large revolver. It had 
been in a bedroom drawer, unloaded, throughout their honeymoon trip. Now, Travis 
finished inserting cartridges into the chambers and snapped the cylinder shut.
‘Is that necessary?” she asked worriedly.
‘Something was in the woods that day,” Travis said, “and though I never actually 
saw it . . . well, it put the hair up on the back of my neck. Yeah, I think the 
gun might be necessary.”
Her own reaction to the whispering trees and afternoon shadows gave her a hint 
of what Travis must have felt in the woods, and she had to admit that the gun 
made her feel at least slightly better.
Einstein had stopped pacing and had taken up his guard position on the walkway 
again, barring their approach to the house.
To the retriever, Travis said, “Is someone inside?” A quick wag of the tail. 
Yes.
“Men from the lab?” One bark. No.
“The other experimental animal you told us about?” Yes.
“The thing that was in the woods?”
Yes.
“All right, I’m going in there.”
No.
“Yes,” Travis insisted. “It’s my house, and we’re not going to run from this, 
whatever the hell it is.”
Nora remembered the magazine photograph of the movie monster to which Einstein 
had reacted so strongly. She did not believe anything even remotely like that 
creature could actually exist. She believed that Einstein was exaggerating or 
that they had misunderstood what he had been trying to tell them about the 
photo. Nevertheless, she suddenly wished they had not only the revolver but a 
shotgun.
“This is a .357 Magnum,” Travis told the dog, “and one shot, even if it hits an 
arm or a leg, will knock down the biggest, meanest man and keep him down. He’ll 
feel as if he’s been hit by a cannonball. I’ve taken firearms training from the 
best, and I’ve done regular target practice over the years to keep my edge. I 
really know what I’m doing, and I’ll be able to handle myself in there. Besides, 
we can’t just call the cops, can we? Because whatever they find in there is 
going to raise eyebrows, lead to a lot of questions, and sooner or later they’ll 
have you back in that damn lab again.”
Einstein was clearly unhappy with Travis’s determination, but the dog padded up 
the front steps to the stoop and looked back as if to say, All right, okay, but 
I’m not letting you go in there alone.
Nora wanted to go in with them, but Travis was adamant that she remain in the 
front yard. She reluctantly admitted that—since she lacked both a
weapon and the skill to use it—there was nothing she could do to help and that 
she would most likely only get in the way.
Holding the revolver at his side, Travis joined Einstein on the stoop and 
inserted his key in the door.
 
 
7
Travis disengaged the lock, pocketed the key, and pushed the door inward, 
covering the room beyond with the .357. Warily, he stepped across the threshold, 
and Einstein entered at his side.
The house was silent, as it should have been, but the air reeked of a bad smell 
that did not belong.
Einstein growled softly.
Little of the fast-fading sunlight entered the house through the windows, many 
of which were partly or entirely covered with drapes. But it was bright enough 
for Travis to see that the sofa’s upholstery was slashed. Shredded foam padding 
spilled onto the floor. A wooden magazine rack had been hammered to pieces 
against the wall, gouging holes in the plasterboard. The TV screen had been 
smashed in with a floor lamp, which still protruded from the set. Books had been 
taken off the shelves, torn apart, and scattered across the living room.
In spite of the breeze blowing in through the door, the stench seemed to be 
getting worse.
Travis flicked the wall switch. A corner lamp came on. It did not shed much 
light, just enough to reveal more details of the rubble.
Looks like somebody went through here with a chainsaw and then a power mower, he 
thought.
The house remained silent.
Leaving the door open behind him, he took a couple of steps into the room, and 
the crumpled pages of the ruined books crunched crisply underfoot. He noticed 
dark, rusty stains on some of the paper and on the bone-white foam padding, and 
suddenly he stopped, realizing the stains were blood.
A moment later, he spotted the corpse. It was that of a big man, lying on his 
side on the floor near the sofa, half-covered by gore-smeared book pages, book 
boards, and dust jackets.
Einstein’s growling grew louder, meaner.
Moving closer to the body, which was just a few feet from the dining-room 
archway, Travis saw that it was his landlord, Ted Hockney. Beside him was his 
Craftsman toolbox. Ted had a key to the house and Travis had no objections to 
his entering at any time to make repairs. Lately there had been a number of 
repairs required, including a leaky faucet and broken dishwasher. Evidently, Ted 
had walked down the block from his own house and entered With the intention of 
fixing something. Now Ted was broken, too, and beyond repair.
Because of the ripe stink, Travis first thought the man must have been killed at 
least a week ago. But on closer inspection, the corpse proved to be neither 
bloated with the gas of decomposition nor marked by any signs of decay, so it 
could not have been there for very long. Perhaps only a day, perhaps less. The 
hideous stench had two other sources: for one thing, the landlord had been 
disemboweled; furthermore, his killer had apparently defecated and urinated on 
and around the body.
Ted Hockney’s eyes were gone.
Travis felt sick, and not only because he had liked Ted. He would have been 
sickened by such insane violence regardless of who the dead man had been. A 
death like this left the victim no dignity whatsoever and somehow diminished the 
entire human race.
Einstein’s low growling gave way to ugly snarling punctuated with hard, sharp 
barks.
With a nervous twitch and a sudden hammering of his heart, Travis turned from 
the corpse and saw that the retriever was facing into the nearby dining room. 
The shadows were deep in there because the drapes were drawn shut over both 
windows, and only a thin gray light passed through from the kitchen beyond.
Go, get out, leave! an inner voice told him.
But he did not turn and run because he had never run away from anything in his 
life. Well, all right, that was not quite true: he had virtually run away from 
life itself these past few years when he had let despair get the best of him. 
His descent into isolation had been the ultimate cowardice. However, that was 
behind him; he was a new man, transformed by Einstein and Nora, and he was not 
going to run again, damned if he was.
Einstein went rigid. He arched his back, thrust his head down and forward, and 
barked so furiously that saliva flew from his mouth.
Travis took a step toward the dining-room arch.
The retriever stayed at Travis’s side, barking more viciously.
Holding the revolver in front of him, trying to take confidence from the 
powerful weapon, Travis eased forward another step, treading cautiously in the 
treacherous rubble. He was only two or three steps from the archway. He squinted 
into the gloomy dining room.
Einstein’s barking resounded through the house until it seemed as if a whole 
pack of dogs must be loose in the place.
Travis took one more step, then saw something move in the shadowy dining room.
He froze.
Nothing. Nothing moved. Had it been a phantom of the mind?
Beyond the arch, layered shadows hung like gray and black crepe.
He wasn’t sure if he had seen movement or merely imagined it.
Back off, get out, now! the inner voice said.
In defiance of it, Travis raised one foot, intending to step into the archway.
The thing in the dining room moved again. This time there was no doubt of its 
presence, because it rushed out of the deepest darkness at the far side
of that chamber, vaulted onto the dining-room table, and came straight at 
Travis, emitting a blood-freezing shriek. He saw lantern eyes in the gloom, and 
a nearly man-size figure that—in spite of the poor light—gave an impression of 
deformity. Then the thing was coming off the table, straight at him.
Einstein charged forward to engage it, but Travis tried to step back and gain an 
extra second in which to squeeze off a shot. As he pulled the trigger, he 
slipped on the ruined books that littered the floor, and fell backward. The 
revolver roared, but Travis knew he had missed, had fired into the ceiling. For 
an instant, as Einstein scrambled toward the adversary, Travis saw the 
lantern-eyed thing more clearly, saw it work alligator jaws and crack open an 
impossibly wide mouth in a lumpish face, revealing wickedly hooked teeth.
“Einstein, no!” he shouted, for he knew the dog would be torn to pieces in any 
confrontation with this hellish creature, and he fired again, twice, wildly, 
from his position on the floor.
His cry and the shots not only brought Einstein to a halt but gave the enemy 
second thoughts about going up against an armed man. The thing turned— it was 
quick, far quicker than a cat—and crossed the unlighted dining room to the 
kitchen doorway. For a moment, he saw it silhouetted in the murky light from the 
kitchen, and he had the impression of something that had never been meant to 
stand erect but was standing erect anyway, something with a misshapen head twice 
as large as it ought to have been, a hunched back, arms too long and terminating 
in claws like the tines of a garden rake.
He fired again and came closer the mark. The bullet tore out a chunk of the door 
frame.
With a shriek, the beast disappeared into the kitchen.
What in the name of God was it? Where had it come from? Had it really escaped 
from the same lab that had produced Einstein? But how had they made this 
monstrosity? And why? Why?
He was a well-read man: in-fact, for the last few years, most of his time was 
devoted to books, so possibilities began to occur to him. Recombinant-DNA 
research was foremost among them.
Einstein stood in the middle of the dining room, barking, facing the doorway 
where the thing had vanished.
Lurching to his feet in the living room, Travis called the dog back to his side, 
and Einstein returned quickly, eagerly.
He shushed the dog, listened intently. He heard Nora frantically calling his 
name from the yard out front, but he heard nothing in the kitchen.
For Nora’s benefit, he shouted, “I’m okay! I’m all right! Stay out there!”
Einstein was shivering.
Travis could hear the loud two-part thudding of his own heart, and he could 
almost hear the sweat trickling down his face and down the small of his back, 
but he could hear nothing whatsoever to pinpoint that escapee from a nightmare. 
He did not think it had gone out the back door into the rear yard. For One 
thing, he figured the creature did not want to be seen by a lot of people and, 
therefore, only went outside at night, traveled exclusively in the dark, When it 
could slip even into a fair-sized town like Santa Barbara without being
spotted. The day was still light enough to make the thing leery of the outdoors. 
Furthermore, Travis could sense its presence nearby, the way he might sense that 
someone was staring at him behind his back, the way he might sense an oncoming 
thunderstorm on a humid day with a lowering sky. It was out there, all right, 
waiting in the kitchen, ready and waiting.
Cautiously, Travis returned to the archway and stepped into the half-dark dining 
room.
Einstein stayed close at his side, neither whining nor growling nor barking. The 
dog seemed to realize that Travis needed complete silence in order to hear any 
sound the beast might make.
Travis took two more steps.
Ahead, through the kitchen door, he could see a corner of the table, the sink, 
part of a counter, half of the dishwasher. The setting sun was at the other end 
of the house, and the light in the kitchen was dim, gray, so their adversary 
would not cast a revealing shadow. It might be waiting on either side of the 
door, or it might have climbed onto the counters from which it could launch 
itself down at him when he entered the room.
Trying to trick the creature, hoping that it would react without hesitation to 
the first sign of movement in the doorway, Travis tucked the revolver under his 
belt, quietly picked up one of the dining-room chairs, eased to within six feet 
of the kitchen, and pitched the chair through the open door. He snatched the 
revolver out of his waistband and, as the chair sailed into the kitchen, assumed 
a shooter’s stance. The chair crashed into the Formica-topped table, clattered 
to the floor, and banged against the dishwasher.
The lantern-eyed enemy did not go for it. Nothing moved. When the chair finished 
tumbling, the kitchen was again marked by a hushed expectancy.
Einstein was making a curious sound, a quiet shuddery huffing, and after a 
moment Travis realized the noise was a result of the dog’s uncontrollable 
shivering.
No question about it: the intruder in the kitchen was the very thing that had 
pursued them through the woods more than three months ago. During the 
intervening weeks, it had made its way north, probably traveling mostly in the 
wildlands to the east of the developed part of the state, relentlessly tracking 
the dog by some means that Travis could not understand and for reasons he could 
not even guess.
In response to the chair he had thrown, a large white-enameled canister crashed 
to the floor just beyond the kitchen doorway, and Travis jumped back in 
surprise, squeezing off a wild shot before he realized he was only being 
taunted. The lid flew off the container when it hit the floor, and flour spilled 
across the tile.
Silence again.
By responding to Travis’s taunt with one of its own, the intruder had displayed 
unnerving intelligence. Abruptly Travis realized that, coming from the same 
research lab as Einstein and being a product of related experiments, the 
creature might be as smart as the retriever. Which would explain Einstein’s fear 
of it. If Travis had not already accommodated himself to the idea of a
dog with humanlike intelligence, he might have been unable to credit this beast 
with more than mere animal cleverness; however, events of the past few months 
had primed him to accept—and quickly adapt to—almost anything.
Silence.
Only one round left in the gun.
Deep silence.
He had been so startled by the flour canister that he had not noticed from which 
side of the doorway it had been flung, and it had fallen in such a fashion that 
he could not deduce the position of the creature that had hurled it. He still 
did not know if the intruder was to the left or right of the doorway.
He was not sure he any longer cared where it was. Even with the .357 in hand, he 
did not think he would be wise to enter the kitchen. Not if the damn thing was 
as smart as a man. It would be like doing battle with an intelligent buzz saw, 
for Christ’s sake.
The light in the east-facing kitchen was dwindling, almost gone. In the dining 
room, where Travis and Einstein stood, the darkness was deepening. Even behind 
them, in spite of the open front door and window and the corner lamp, the living 
room was filling with shadows.
In the kitchen, the intruder hissed loudly, a sound like escaping gas, which was 
immediately followed by a click-click-click that might have been made by its 
sharply clawed feet or hands tapping against a hard surface.
Travis had caught Einstein’s tremors. He felt as if he were a fly on the edge of 
a spider’s web, about to step into a trap.
He remembered Ted Hockney’s bitten, bloodied, eyeless face.
Click-click.
In antiterrorist training, he had been taught how to stalk men, and he had been 
good at it. But the problem here was that the yellow-eyed intruder was maybe as 
smart as a man but could not be counted on to think like a man, so Travis had no 
way of knowing what it might do next, how it might respond to any initiative he 
made. Therefore, he could never outthink it, and by its alien nature the 
creature had a perpetual and deadly advantage of surprise.
Click.
Travis quietly took a step back from the open kitchen door, then another Step, 
treading with exaggerated care, not wanting the thing to discover that he was 
retreating because only God knew what it might do if it knew he was slipping out 
of its reach. Einstein padded silently into the living room, now equally eager 
to put distance between himself and the intruder.
When he reached Ted Hockney’s corpse, Travis glanced away from the dining room, 
searching for the least littered route to the front door—and he
saw Nora standing by the armchair. Frightened by the gunfire, she had gotten a 
butcher’s knife from the kitchenette in the Airstream and had come to see if he 
needed help.
He was impressed by her courage but horrified to see her there in the glow of 
the corner lamp. Suddenly it seemed as if his nightmares of losing both
Einstein and Nora were on the verge of coming true, the Cornell Curse again, 
because now they were both inside the house, both vulnerable, both possibly 
within striking distance of the thing in the kitchen.
She started to speak.
Travis shook his head and raised one hand to his mouth.
Silenced, she bit her lip and glanced from him to the dead man on the floor.
As Travis quietly stepped through the rubble, he was stricken by a feeling that 
the intruder had gone out the back of the house and was coming around the side, 
heading for the front door, risking being seen by neighbors in the gloom of 
twilight, intending to enter behind them, swift and fast. Nora was standing 
between Travis and the front door, so he would not have a clear shot at the 
creature if it came that way; hell, it would be all over Nora one second after 
it reached the door. Trying not to panic, trying not to think of Hockney’s 
eyeless face, Travis moved more quickly across the living room, risking the 
crackle of some debris underfoot, hoping those small noises would not carry to 
the kitchen if the intruder was still out there. Reaching Nora, he took her by 
the arm and propelled her toward the front door, out onto the stoop and down the 
stairs, looking left and right, half-expecting to see the living nightmare 
rushing at them, but it was nowhere in sight.
The gunshots and Nora’s shouting had drawn neighbors as far as their front doors 
all along the street. A few had even come outside onto porches and lawns. 
Somebody surely would have called the cops. Because of Einstein’s status as a 
much-wanted fugitive, the police seemed almost as grave a danger as the 
yellow-eyed thing in the house. 
The three of them piled into the pickup. Nora locked her door, and Travis locked 
his. He started the engine and backed the truck—and the Airstream— out of the 
driveway, into the street. He was aware of people staring.
The twilight was going to be short-lived, as it always was near the ocean. 
Already, the sunless sky was blackish in the east, purple overhead, and a 
steadily darkening blood-red in the west. Travis was grateful for the oncoming 
cover of nightfall, although he knew the yellow-eyed creature would be sharing 
it with them.
He drove past the gaping neighbors, none of whom he had ever met during his 
years of self-imposed solitude, and he turned at the first corner. Nora held 
Einstein tightly, and Travis drove as fast as he dared. The trailer rocked and 
swayed behind them when he took the next couple of corners at too great a speed.
“What happened in there?” she asked.
“It killed Hockney earlier today or yesterday—”
“It?”
“—and it was waiting for us to come home.”
“It?” she repeated.
Einstein mewled.
Travis said, “I’ll have to explain later.” He wondered if he could explain.
No description he gave of the intruder would do it justice; he did not possess 
the words necessary to convey the degree of its strangeness.
They had gone no more than eight blocks when they heard sirens in the 
neighborhood that they had just left. Travis drove another four blocks and 
parked in the empty lot of a high school.
“What now?” Nora asked.
“We abandon the trailer and the truck,” he said. “They’ll be looking for both.”
He put the revolver in her purse, and she insisted on slipping the butcher’s 
knife in there, too, rather than leave it behind.
They got out of the pickup and, in the descending night, walked past the side of 
the school, across an athletic field, through a gate in a chain-link fence, and 
onto a residential street lined with mature trees.
With nightfall, the breeze became a blustery wind, warm and parched. It blew a 
few dry leaves at them and harried dust ghosts along the pavement.
Travis knew they were too conspicuous even without the trailer and truck. The 
neighbors would be telling the police to look for a man, woman, and golden 
retriever—not the most common trio. They would be wanted for questioning in the 
death of Ted Hockney, so the search for them would not be perfunctory. They had 
to get out of sight quickly.
He had no friends with whom they could take refuge. After Paula died, he had 
withdrawn from his few friends, and he hadn’t maintained relationships with any 
of the real-estate agents who had once worked for him. Nora had no friends, 
either, thanks to Violet Devon.
The houses they passed, most with warm lights in the windows, seemed to mock 
them with unattainable sanctuary.
 
 
8
Garrison Dilworth lived on the border between Santa Barbara and Montecito, on a 
lushly landscaped half acre, in a stately Tudor home that did not mesh well with 
the California flora but which perfectly complemented the attorney. When he 
answered the door, he was wearing black loafers, gray slacks, a navy-blue sports 
jacket, a white knit shirt, and half-lens tortoiseshell reading glasses over 
which he peered at them in surprise but, fortunately, not with displeasure. 
“Well, hello there, newlyweds!”
“Are you alone?” Travis asked as he and Nora and Einstein stepped into a large 
foyer floored with marble.
“Alone? Yes.”
On the way over, Nora had told Travis that the attorney’s wife had passed away 
three years ago and that he was now looked after by a housekeeper named Gladys 
Murphy.
“Mrs. Murphy?” Travis asked.
“She’s gone home for the day,” the attorney said, closing the door behind them. 
“You look distraught. What on earth’s wrong?”
“We need help,” Nora said.
“But,” Travis warned, “anyone who helps us may be putting himself in jeopardy 
with the law.”
Garrison raised his eyebrows. “What have you done? Judging by the solemn look of 
you—I’d say you’ve kidnapped the president.”
“We’ve done nothing wrong,” Nora assured him.
“Yes, we have,” Travis disagreed. “And we’re still doing it—we’re harboring the 
dog.”
Puzzled, Garrison frowned down at the retriever.
Einstein whined, looking suitably miserable and lovable.
“And there’s a dead man in my house,” Travis said.
Garrison’s gaze shifted from the dog to Travis. “Dead man?”
“Travis didn’t kill him,” Nora said.
Garrison looked at Einstein again.
“Neither did the dog,” Travis said. “But I’ll be wanted as a material witness, 
something like that, sure as hell.”
“Mmmmm,” Garrison said, “why don’t we go into my study and get this straightened 
out?”
He led them through an enormous and only half-lit living room, along a short 
hallway, into a den with rich teak paneling and a copper ceiling. The maroon 
leather armchairs and couch looked expensive and comfortable. The polished teak 
desk was massive, and a detailed model of a five-masted schooner, all sails 
rigged, stood on one corner. Nautical items—a ship’s wheel, a brass sextant, a 
carved bullock’s horn filled with tallow that held what appeared to be 
sail-making needles, six types of ship lanterns, a helmsman’s bell, and sea 
charts—were used as decoration. Travis saw photographs of a man and woman on 
various sailboats, and the man was Garrison.
An open book and a half-finished glass of Scotch were on a small table beside 
one of the armchairs. Evidently, the attorney had been relaxing here when they 
had rung the doorbell. Now, he offered them a drink, and they both said they 
would have whatever he was having.
Leaving the couch for Travis and Nora, Einstein took the second armchair. He sat 
in it, rather than curling up, as if prepared to participate in the discussion 
to come.
At a corner wet bar, Garrison poured Chivas Regal on the rocks in two glasses. 
Although Nora was unaccustomed to whiskey, she startled Travis by downing her 
drink in two long swallows and asking for another. He decided that she had the 
right idea, so he followed suit and took his empty glass back to the bar while 
Garrison was refilling Nora’s.
“I’d like to tell you everything and have your help,” Travis said, “but you 
really must understand you could be putting yourself on the wrong side of the 
law.”
Recapping the Chivas, Garrison said, “You’re talking as a layman now. As an 
attorney, I assure you the law isn’t a line engraved in marble, immovable and 
unchangeable through the centuries. Rather . . . the law is like a string, fixed 
at both ends but with a great deal of play in it—very loose, the line of the 
law—so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are 
nearly always—short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder—safely on the right 
side. That’s a daunting thing to realize but true. I’ve no fear that anything 
you tell me could land my bottom in a prison cell, Travis.”
Half an hour later, Travis and Nora had told him everything about Einstein. For 
a man only a couple of months shy of his seventy-first birthday, the 
silver-haired attorney had a quick and open mind. He asked the right questions 
and did not scoff. When given a ten-minute demonstration of Einstein’s uncanny 
abilities, he did not protest that it was all mere trickery and flummery; he 
accepted what he saw, and he readjusted his ideas of what was normal and 
possible in this world. He exhibited greater mental agility and flexibility than 
most men half his age.
Holding Einstein on his lap in the big leather armchair, gently scratching the 
dog’s ears, Garrison said, “If you go to the media, hold a press conference, 
blow the whole thing wide open, then we might be able to sue in court to allow 
you to keep custody of the dog.”
“Do you really think that would work?” Nora asked.
“At best,” Garrison admitted, “it’s a fifty-fifty chance.” Travis shook his 
head. “No. We won’t risk it.”
“What have you in mind to do?” Garrison asked.
“Run,” Travis said. “Stay on the move.”
“And what will that accomplish?” “It’ll keep Einstein free.”
The dog woofed in agreement.
“Free—but for how long?” Garrison asked.
Travis got up and paced, too agitated to sit still any longer. “They won’t stop 
looking,” he admitted. “Not for a few years.”
“Not ever,” the attorney said.
“All right, it’s going to be tough, but it’s the only thing we can do. Damned if 
we’ll let them have him. He has a dread of the lab. Besides, he more or less 
brought me back to life—”
“And he saved me from Streck,” Nora said.
“He brought us together,” Travis said.
“Changed our lives.”
“Radically changed us. Now he’s as much a part of us as our own child Would be,” 
Travis said. He felt a lump of emotion in his throat when he met the dog’s 
grateful gaze. “We fight for him, just as he’d fight for us. We’re family. We 
live together . . . or we die together.”
Stroking the retriever, Garrison said, “It won’t only be the people from the lab 
looking for you. And not only the police.”
“The other thing,” Travis said, nodding.
Einstein shivered.
“There, there, easy now,” Garrison said reassuringly, patting the dog. To
Travis, he said, “What do you think the creature is? I’ve heard your description 
of it, but that doesn’t help much.”
“Whatever it is,” Travis said, “God didn’t make it. Men made it. Which means it 
has to be a product of recombinant-DNA research of some kind. God knows why. God 
knows what they thought they were doing, why they wanted to build something like 
that. But they did.”
“And it seems to have an uncanny ability to track you.”
“To track Einstein,” Nora said.
“So we’ll keep moving,” Travis said, “And we’ll go a long way.”
“That’ll require money, but the banks don’t open for more than twelve hours,” 
Garrison said. “If you’re going to run, something tells me you’ve got to head 
out tonight.”
“Here’s where we could use your help,” Travis told him.
Nora opened her purse and withdrew two checkbooks, Travis’s and her own. 
“Garrison, what we’d like to do is write a check on Travis’s account and one on 
mine, payable to you. He’s only got three thousand in his checking, but he has a 
large savings account at the same bank, and they’re authorized to transfer funds 
to prevent overdrawing. My account’s the same way. If we give you one of 
Travis’s checks for twenty thousand—backdated so it appears to’ve been written 
before all this trouble—and one of mine for twenty, you could deposit them into 
your account. As soon as they clear, you’d buy eight cashier’s checks for five 
thousand apiece and send them to us.”
Travis said, “The police will want me for questioning, but they’ll know I didn’t 
kill Ted Hockney because no man could’ve torn him apart like that. So they won’t 
put a lock on my accounts.”
“If federal agencies are behind the research that produced Einstein and this 
creature,” Garrison said, “then they’ll be hot to get their hands on you, and 
they might freeze your accounts.”
“Maybe. But probably not right away. You’re in the same town, so your bank 
should clear my check by Monday at the latest.”
“What’ll you do for funds in the meantime, while you’re waiting for me to send 
you the forty thousand?”
“We’ve got some cash and traveler’s checks left over from the honeymoon,” Nora 
said.
“And my credit cards,” Travis added.
“They can track you by credit cards and traveler’s checks.”
“I know,” Travis said. “So I’ll use them in a town where we don’t intend to 
stay, and we’ll scoot out fast as we can.”
“When I’ve purchased the cashier’s checks for forty thousand, where do I send 
them?”
“We’ll be in touch by phone,” Travis said, returning to the couch and sitting at 
Nora’s side. “We’ll work something out.”
“And the rest of your assets—and Nora’s?”
“We’ll worry about that later,” Nora said.
Garrison frowned. “Before you leave here, Travis, you can sign a letter giving 
me the right to represent you in any legal matters that may
arise. If anyone does try to freeze your assets, or Nora’s, I can beat them off 
if at all possible—though I’ll keep a low profile until they connect me with 
you.”
“Nora’s funds are probably safe for a while. She and I haven’t told anyone but 
you about the marriage. The neighbors will tell the police I left in the company 
of a woman, but they won’t know who she is. Have you told anyone about us?”
“Just my secretary, Mrs. Ashcroft. But she’s not a gossip.”
“All right, then,” Travis said. “I don’t think the authorities will find out 
about the marriage license, so they might take quite a while to come up with 
Nora’s name. But when they do, they’ll discover you’re her attorney. If they 
monitor my accounts for canceled checks in the hope of learning where I’ve gone, 
they’ll know about the twenty thousand I paid to you, and they’ll come looking 
for you—”
“That doesn’t give me the slightest pause,” Garrison said.
“Maybe not,” Travis said. “But as soon as they connect me to Nora and both of us 
to you, they’ll be watching you closely. As soon as that happens . . . then the 
next time we call, you’ll have to tell us at once, so we can hang up and break 
off all contact with you.”
“I understand perfectly,” the attorney said.
“Garrison,” Nora said, “you don’t have to involve yourself in this. We’re really 
asking too much of you.”
“Listen, my dear, I’m almost seventy-one. I still enjoy my law practice, and I 
still go sailing . . . but in truth I find life a bit on the dull side these 
days. This affair is just what I need to get my ancient blood flowing faster. 
Besides, I do believe you have an obligation to help keep Einstein free, not 
just for the reasons you mentioned but because . . . mankind has no right to 
employ its genius in the creation of another intelligent species, then treat it 
like property. If we’ve come so far that we can create as God creates, then we 
have to learn to act with the justice and mercy of God. In this case, justice 
and mercy require that Einstein remain free.”
Einstein raised his head from the attorney’s lap, gazed up admiringly, then 
nuzzled his cold nose under Garrison’s chin.
 
 
In the three-car garage, Garrison kept a new black Mercedes 560 SEL, an older 
white Mercedes 500 SEL with pale-blue interior, and a green Jeep that he used 
primarily to drive down to the marina, where he kept his boat.
“The white one used to belong to Francine, my wife,” the attorney said as he led 
them to the car. “I don’t use it much any more, but I keep it in Working order, 
and I drive it often enough to prevent the tires from disintegrating. I should 
have gotten rid of it when Franny died. It was her car, after all. But . . . she 
loved it so, her flashy white Mercedes, and I can remember the way she looked 
when she was behind the wheel . . . I’d like you to take it.”
“A sixty-thousand-dollar getaway car?” Travis said, sliding one hand along the 
polished hood. “That’s going on the run in style.”
“No one will be looking for it,” Garrison said. “Even if they do eventually 
connect me with you two, they won’t know I’ve given you one of my cars.”
“We can’t accept something this expensive,” Nora said.
“Call it a loan,” the attorney told her. “When you’re finished with it, when 
you’ve gotten another car, just park this one somewhere—a bus terminal, an 
airport—and give me a call to tell me where it is. I can send someone to collect 
it.”
Einstein put his forepaws on the driver’s door of the Mercedes and peered into 
the car through the side window. He glanced at Travis and Nora and woofed as if 
to say he thought they would be foolish if they turned down such an offer.
 
 
9
With Travis driving, they left Garrison Dilworth’s house at ten-fifteen 
Wednesday night and took Route 101 north. By twelve-thirty they passed through 
San Luis Obispo, went by Paso Robles at one o’clock in the morning. They stopped 
for gasoline at a self-service station at two o’clock, an hour south of Salinas.
Nora felt useless. She was not even able to spell Travis at the wheel because 
she did not know how to drive. To some extent, that was Violet Devon’s fault, 
not Nora’s, just one more result of a lifetime of seclusion and oppression; 
nonetheless, she felt utterly useless and was displeased with herself. But she 
was not going to remain helpless the rest of her life. Damn it, no. She was 
going to learn to drive and to handle firearms. Travis could teach her both 
skills. Given his background, he could also instruct her in the martial arts, 
judo or karate. He was a good teacher. He had certainly done a splendid job of 
teaching her the art of lovemaking. That thought made her smile, and slowly her 
highly self-critical mood abated.
For the next two and a half hours, as they drove north to Salinas and then on to 
San Jose, Nora dozed fitfully. When not sleeping, she took comfort in the empty 
miles they were putting behind them. On both sides of the highway, vast 
stretches of farmland seemed to roll on to infinity under the frost-pale light 
of the moon. When the moon set, they drove long stretches in unrelieved darkness 
before spotting an occasional light at a farm or a cluster of roadside 
businesses.
The yellow-eyed thing had tracked Einstein from the Santa Ana foothills in 
Orange County to Santa Barbara—a distance of more than one hundred and 
twenty-five air miles, Travis had said, and probably close to three hundred 
miles on foot in the wilds—in three months. Not a fast pace. So if they went 
three hundred air miles north from Santa Barbara before finding a place to hole 
up in the San Francisco Bay area, maybe the stalker would not reach
them for seven or eight months. Maybe it would never reach them. Over how great 
a distance could it sniff out Einstein? Surely, there were limits to its uncanny 
ability to track the dog. Surely.
 
 
10
At eleven o’clock Thursday morning, Lemuel Johnson stood in the master bedroom 
of the small house that Travis Cornell had rented in Santa Barbara. The dresser 
mirror had been smashed. The rest of the room had been trashed as well, as if 
The Outsider had been driven into a jealous rage upon seeing that the dog lived 
in domestic comfort while it was forced to roam the wildlands and live in 
comparatively primitive conditions.
In the debris that covered the floor, Lem found four silver-framed photographs 
that had probably stood on the dresser or nightstands. The first was of Cornell 
and an attractive blonde. By now Lem had learned enough about Cornell to know 
that the blonde at his side must be his late wife, Paula. Another photo, a 
black-and-white shot of a man and woman, was old enough that Lem guessed the 
people smiling at the camera were Cornell’s parents. The third was of a young 
boy, about eleven or twelve, also black-and-white, also old, which might have 
been a shot of Travis Cornell himself but which was more likely a picture of the 
brother who had died young.
The last of the four photos was of ten soldiers grouped on what appeared to be 
the wooden steps in front of a barracks, grinning at the camera. One of the ten 
was Travis Cornell. And on a couple of their uniforms, Lem noticed the 
distinctive patch of Delta Force, the elite antiterrorist corps.
Uneasy about that last photograph, Lem put it on the dresser and headed back 
toward the living room, where Cliff was continuing to sift through bloodstained 
rubble. They were looking for something that would mean nothing to the police 
but might be extremely meaningful to them.
The NSA had been slow to pick up on the Santa Barbara killing, and Lem had not 
been alerted until almost six o’clock this morning. As a result, the press had 
already reported the grisly details of Ted Hockney’s murder. They were 
enthusiastically disseminating wild speculations about what might have killed 
Hockney, focusing primarily on the theory that Cornell kept some kind of exotic 
and dangerous pet, perhaps a cheetah or panther, and that the animal had 
attacked the unsuspecting landlord when he had let himself into the house. The 
TV cameras had lingered lovingly on the shredded and blood spattered books. It 
was National Enquirer stuff, which did not surprise Lem because he believed the 
line separating sensational tabloids like the Enquirer and the so-called 
“legitimate” press—especially electronic news media—was often thinner than most 
journalists cared to admit.
He had already planned and put into operation a disinformation campaign to 
reinforce the press’s wrongheaded hysteria about jungle cats on the loose. 
NSA-paid informants would come forth, claiming to know Cornell, and would
vouch that he did, indeed, keep a panther in the house in addition to a dog. 
Others who had never met Cornell would, in identifying themselves as his 
friends, sorrowfully report that they had urged him to have the panther defanged 
and declared as it had reached maturity. Police would want to question 
Cornell—and the unidentified woman—regarding the panther and its current 
whereabouts.
Lem was confident the press would be nicely deflected from all inquiries that 
might lead them closer to the truth.
Of course, down in Orange County, Walt Gaines would hear about this murder, 
would make friendly inquiries with local authorities here, and would swiftly 
conclude that The Outsider had tracked the dog this far north. Lem was relieved 
that he had Walt’s cooperation.
Entering the living room, where Cliff Soames was at work, Lem said, “Find 
anything?”
The young agent rose from the debris, dusted his hands together, and said, 
“Yeah. I put it on the dining-room table.”
Lem followed him into the dining room, where a fat ring-binder notebook was the 
only item on the table. When he opened it and leafed through the contents, he 
saw photographs that had been cut from glossy magazines and taped to the 
left-hand pages. Opposite each photo, on the right-hand page, was the name of 
the pictured object printed in large block letters: TREE, HOUSE, CAR...
“What do you make of it?” Cliff asked.
Scowling, saying nothing, Lem continued to leaf through the book, knowing it was 
important but at first unable to guess why. Then it hit him: “It’s a primer. To 
teach reading.”
“Yeah,” Cliff said.
Lem saw that his assistant was smiling. “You think they must know the dog’s 
intelligent, that it must’ve revealed its abilities to them? And so they . . . 
decided to teach it to read?”
“Looks that way,” Cliff said, still smiling. “Good God, do you think it’s 
possible? Could it be taught to read?”
“Undoubtedly,” Lem said. “In fact, teaching it to read was on Dr. Weatherby’s 
schedule of experiments for this autumn.”
Laughing softly, wonderingly, Cliff said, “I’ll be damned.”
“Before you get too much of a kick out of it,” Lem said, “you better consider 
the situation. This guy knows the dog is amazingly smart. He might’ve succeeded 
in teaching it to read. So we have to figure he’s worked out a means of 
communicating with it as well. He knows it’s an experimental animal. He must 
know a lot of people are looking for it.”
Cliff said, “He must know about The Outsider, too, because the dog would have 
found a way of telling him.”
“Yes. Yet, knowing all of this, he hasn’t chosen to go public. He could’ve sold 
the story to the highest bidder. But he didn’t. Or if he’s a crusading type, he 
could’ve called in the press and blasted the Pentagon for funding this kind of 
research.”
“But he didn’t,” Cliff said, frowning.
“Which means, first and foremost, he’s committed to the dog, committed to 
keeping it for his own and to preventing its recapture.”
Nodding, Cliff said, “Which makes sense if what we’ve heard about him is true. I 
mean, this guy lost his whole damn family when he was young. Lost his wife after 
less than a year. Lost all those buddies in Delta Force. So he became a recluse, 
cut himself off from all his friends. Must’ve been lonely as hell. Then along 
comes the dog . .
“Exactly,” Lem said. “And for a man with Delta Force training, staying 
undercover won’t be difficult. And if we do find him, he’ll know how to fight 
for the dog. Jesus, will he know how to fight!”
“We haven’t confirmed the Delta Force rumor yet,” Cliff said hopefully.
“I have,” Lem said, and he described the photograph he had seen in the wrecked 
bedroom.
Cliff sighed. “We’re in deep shit now.”
“Up to our necks,” Lem agreed.
 
 
11
They had reached San Francisco at six o’clock Thursday morning and, by 
six-thirty, had found a suitable motel—a sprawling facility that looked modern 
and clean. The place did not accept pets, but it was easy to sneak Einstein into 
the room.
Although a small chance existed that an arrest warrant might have been issued 
for Travis, he checked into the motel using his ID. He’d no choice because Nora 
possessed neither credit cards nor a driver’s license. These days, desk clerks 
were willing to -accept cash, but not without ID; the chain’s computer demanded 
data on the guests.
He did not, however, give the correct make or license number of his car, for he 
had parked out of sight of the office for the very purpose of keeping those 
details from the clerk.
They paid for only one room and kept Einstein with them because they were not 
going to need privacy for lovemaking. Exhausted, Travis barely managed to kiss 
Nora before falling into a deep sleep. He dreamed of things With yellow eyes, 
misshapen heads, and crocodile mouths full of sharks’ teeth.
He woke five hours later, at twelve-ten Thursday afternoon.
Nora had gotten up before him, showered, and dressed again in the only Clothes 
she had. Her hair was damp and clung alluringly to the nape of her fleck. “The 
water’s hot and forceful,” she told him.
‘So am I,” he said, embracing her, kissing her.
‘Then you better cool off,” she said, pulling away from him. “Little ears are 
listening.”
‘Einstein? He has big ears.”
In the bathroom, he found Einstein standing on the counter, drinking out of a 
sinkful of cold water that Nora had drawn for him.
“You know, fur face, for most dogs, the toilet is a perfectly adequate source of 
drinking water.”
Einstein sneezed at him, jumped down from the counter, and padded out of the 
bathroom.
Travis had no means of shaving, but he decided a day’s growth of beard would 
give him the look he needed for the work he would have to do this evening in the 
Tenderloin district.
They left the motel and ate at the first McDonald’s they could find. After 
lunch, they drove to a local branch of the Santa Barbara bank where Travis had 
his checking account. They used his computer-banking card, his MasterCard, and 
two of his Visa cards to make cash withdrawals totaling fourteen hundred 
dollars. Next they went to an American Express office, and using one of Travis’s 
checks and his Gold Card, they acquired the maximum allowable five hundred 
dollars in cash and forty-five hundred in traveler’s checks. Combined with the 
twenty-one hundred in cash and traveler’s checks left over from their honeymoon, 
they had eighty-five hundred in liquid assets.
During the rest of the afternoon and early evening, they went shopping. With 
credit cards, they bought a complete set of luggage and purchased enough clothes 
to fill the bags. They got toiletries for both of them and an electric razor for 
Travis.
Travis also bought a Scrabble game, and Nora said, “You don’t really feel in the 
mood for games, do you?”
“No,” he replied cryptically, enjoying her puzzlement. “I’ll explain later.”
Half an hour before sunset, with their purchases packed tightly in the spacious 
trunk of the Mercedes, Travis drove into the heart of San Francisco’s 
Tenderloin, which was the area of the city that lay below O’Farrell Street, 
wedged between Market Street and Van Ness Avenue. It was a district of sleazy 
bars featuring topless dancers, go-go joints where the girls wore nothing at 
all, rap parlors where men paid by the minute to sit with nude young women and 
talk about sex and where more than talk was usually accomplished.
This degeneracy was a shocking revelation to Nora, who had begun to think of 
herself as experienced and sophisticated. She was not prepared for the cesspool 
of the Tenderloin. She gaped at the gaudy neon signs that advertised peep shows, 
female mud wrestling, female impersonators, gay baths, and massage parlors. The 
meaning of some of the billboard come-ons at the worst bars baffled her, and she 
said, “What do they mean when the marquee says ‘Get a Wink at the Pink’?”
Looking for a parking place, Travis said, “It means their girls dance entirely 
nude and that, during the dance, they spread their labia to show themselves more 
completely.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“My God. I don’t believe it. I mean, I do believe it—but I don’t believe it. 
What’s it mean—’Extreme Close-Up’?”
“The girls dance right at the customers’ tables. The law doesn’t allow touching, 
but the girls dance close, swinging their bare breasts in the customers’ faces. 
You could insert one, maybe two, but not three sheets of paper between their 
nipples and the men’s lips.”
In the back seat, Einstein snorted as if with disgust.
“I agree, fella,” Travis told him.
They passed a cancerous-looking place with flashing red and yellow bulbs and 
rippling bands of blue and purple neon, where the sign promised LIVE
SEX SHOW.
Appalled, Nora said, “My God, are there other shows where they have sex with the 
dead?”
Travis laughed so hard he almost back-ended a carload of gawking college boys. 
“No, no, no. Even the Tenderloin has some limits. They mean ‘live’ as opposed to 
‘on film.’ You can see plenty of sex on film, theaters that show only 
pornography, but that place promises live sex, on stage. I don’t know if they 
deliver on the promise.”
“And I don’t care to find out!” Nora said, sounding as if she were Dorothy from 
Kansas and had just wandered into an unspeakable new neighborhood of Oz. 
“What’re we doing here?”
“This is the place you come to when you’re trying to find things they don’t sell 
on Nob Hill—like young boys or really large amounts of dope. Or phony driver’s 
licenses and other counterfeit ID.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, yes, I see. This area is controlled by the underworld, by 
people like the Corleones in The Godfather.”
“I’m sure the mob owns more of these places than not,” he said as he maneuvered 
the Mercedes into a parking space at the curb. “But don’t ever make the mistake 
of thinking-the real mob is a bunch of honorable cuties like the Corleones.”
Einstein was agreeable to remaining with the Mercedes.
“Tell you what, fur face. If we’re real lucky,” Travis joked, “we’ll get you a 
new identity, too. We’ll make you into a poodle.”
 
 
Nora was surprised to discover that, as twilight settled over the city, the 
breeze off the bay was chilly enough for them to need the nylon, quilt-lined 
Jackets they had bought earlier in the day.
“Even in summer, nights can be cool here,” he said. “Soon, the fog rolls in. The 
stored-up heat of the day pulls it off the water.”
He would have worn his jacket even if the evening air had been mild, for he was 
carrying his loaded revolver under his belt and needed the jacket to Conceal it.
“Is there really a chance you’ll need the gun?” she asked as they walked away 
from the car.
“Not likely. I’m carrying it mainly for ID.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll see.”
She looked back at the car, where Einstein was staring out the rear window, 
looking forlorn. She felt bad leaving him there. But she was quite certain that 
even if these establishments would admit dogs such places were not good for 
Einstein’s moral welfare.
Travis seemed interested solely in those bars whose signs were either in both 
English and Spanish or in Spanish only. Some places were downright shabby and 
did not conceal the peeling paint and the moldy carpeting, while others used 
mirrors and glitzy lighting to try to hide their true roach-hole nature. A few 
were actually clean and expensively decorated. In each, Travis spoke in Spanish 
with the bartender, sometimes with musicians if there were any and if they were 
on a break, and a few times he distributed folded twenty-dollar bills. Since she 
spoke no Spanish, Nora did not know what he was asking about or why he was 
paying these people.
On the street, searching for another sleazy lounge, he explained that the 
biggest illegal migration was Mexican, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan—desperate people 
escaping economic chaos and political repression. Therefore, more 
Spanish-speaking illegals were in the market for phony papers than were 
Vietnamese, Chinese, or those in all other language groups put together. “So the 
quickest way to get a lead on a supplier of phony paper is through the Latino 
underworld.”
“Have you got a lead?”
“Not yet. Just bits and pieces. And probably ninety-nine percent of what I’ve 
paid for is nonsense, lies. But don’t worry—we’ll find what we need. That’s why 
the Tenderloin doesn’t go out of business: people who come here always find what 
they need.”
The people who came here surprised Nora. In the streets, in the topless bars, 
all kinds could be found. Asians, Latinos, whites, blacks, and even Indians 
mingled in an alcoholic haze, so it seemed as if racial harmony was a beneficial 
side effect of the pursuit of sin. Guys swaggered around in leather jackets and 
jeans, guys who looked like hoods, which she expected. But there were also men 
in business suits, clean-cut college kids, others dressed like cowboys, and 
wholesome surfer types who looked as if they had stepped out of an old Annette 
Funicello movie. Bums sat on the pavement or stood on corners, grizzled old 
winos in reeking clothes, and even some of the business-suit types had a weird 
glint in their eyes that made you want to run from them, but it seemed as if 
most of the people here were those who would pass for ordinary upstanding 
citizens in any decent neighborhood. Nora was amazed.
Not many women were on the streets or in the company of the men in the bars. No, 
correct that: there were women to be seen, but they looked more lascivious than 
the nude dancers, and only a few of them seemed not to be for sale.
At a topless bar called Hot Tips, which had signs in both Spanish and English, 
the recorded rock music was so loud Nora got a headache. Six
beautiful girls with exquisite bodies, wearing only spike heels and sequined 
bikini panties, were dancing at the tables, wriggling, writhing, swinging their 
breasts in the sweaty faces of men who were either mesmerized or hooting and 
clapping. Other topless girls, equally pretty, were witnessing.
While Travis spoke in Spanish with the bartender, Nora noticed some of the 
customers looking at her appraisingly. They gave her the creeps. She kept one 
hand on Travis’s arm. She couldn’t have been torn away from him with a crowbar.
The stink of stale beer and whiskey, body odor, the layered scents of various 
cheap perfumes, and cigarette smoke made the air as heavy as that in a 
steambath, though less healthful.
Nora clenched her teeth and thought, I will not be sick and make a fool of 
myself. I simply will not.
After a couple of minutes of rapid conversation, Travis passed a pair of 
twenties to the bartender and was directed to the back of the lounge, where a 
guy as big as Arnold Schwarzenegger was sitting on a chair beside a doorway that 
was covered by a densely beaded curtain. He was wearing black leather pants and 
a white T-shirt. His arms seemed as large as tree trunks. His face looked as if 
it had been cast in cement, and he had gray eyes almost as transparent as glass. 
Travis spoke with him in Spanish and passed him two twenties.
The music faded from a thunderous din to a mere roar. A woman, speaking into a 
microphone, said “All right, boys, if you like what you see, then show it—start 
stuffin’ those pussies.”
Nora twitched in shock, but as the music rose again, she saw what was meant by 
the crude announcement: the customers were expected to slip folded five- and 
ten-dollar bills into the dancers’ panties.
The hulk in black leather pants got off his chair and led them through the 
beaded curtain, into a room ten feet wide and eighteen or twenty feet long, 
where six more young women in spike heels and bikini panties were getting ready 
to take over from the dancers already on the floor. They were checking their 
makeup in mirrors, applying lipstick, or just chatting with each other. They 
were all (she saw) as good-looking as the girls out front. Some of them had hard 
faces, pretty but hard, though others were as fresh-faced as schoolteachers. All 
were the kind of women that men probably had in mind when they talked about 
girls who were “stacked.”
The hulk led Travis—and Travis led Nora, holding her hand—through that dressing 
room toward the door at the other end. As they went, one of the topless 
dancers—a striking blonde—put a hand on Nora’s shoulder and walked beside her.
“Are you new, honey?”
“Me? No. Oh, no, I don’t work here.”
The blonde, who was so well-endowed that Nora felt like a boy, said, “You got 
the equipment, honey.”
“Oh, no,” was all Nora could say.
“You like my equipment?” the blonde asked.
“Oh, well, you’re very pretty,” Nora said.
To the blonde, Travis said, “Give it up, sister. The lady doesn’t swing that 
way.”
The blonde smiled sweetly. “If she tries it, she might like it.”
They went through a door, out of the dressing room and into a narrow, shabby, 
poorly lit hallway before Nora realized she had been propositioned. By a woman!
She did not know whether to laugh or gag. Probably both.
The hulk took them to an office at the back of the building and left them, 
saying, “Mr. Van Dyne will be with you in a minute.”
The office had gray walls, gray metal chairs, filing cabinets, and a gray metal 
desk that was battered and scarred. No pictures or calendars hung on the bare 
walls. No pens or notepads or reports were on the desk. The place looked as if 
it was seldom used.
Nora and Travis sat on the two metal chairs in front of the desk.
The music from the bar was still audible but no longer deafening. When she 
caught her breath, Nora said, “Where do they all come from?”
“Who?”
“All those pretty girls with their perfect boobs and tight little bottoms and 
long legs, and all of them willing to . . . to do that. Where do so many of them 
come from?”
“There’s a breeding farm outside of Modesto,” Travis said.
She gaped at him.
He laughed and said, “I’m sorry. I keep forgetting how innocent you are, Mrs. 
Cornell.” He kissed her cheek. His stubble scratched a little, but it was nice. 
In spite of wearing yesterday’s clothes and not having shaved, he seemed as 
clean as a well-scrubbed baby compared to the gauntlet they had run in order to 
reach this office. He said, “I should answer you straight because you don’t know 
when I’m joking.”
She blinked, “Then there isn’t a breeding farm outside Modesto?”
“No. There’s all kinds of girls who do it. Girls who hope to break into showbiz, 
go to L.A. to be movie stars but can’t make it, so they drift into places like 
this in L.A. or they come north to San Francisco or they go to Vegas. Most are 
decent enough kids. They see this as temporary. Very good money can be made 
fast. It’s a way to build up a stake before taking another crack at Hollywood. 
Then there are some, the self-haters, who do it to humiliate themselves. Others 
are in rebellion from their parents, from their first husbands, from the whole 
damn world. And some are hookers.”
“The hookers meet . . . johns here?” she asked.
“Maybe, maybe not. Some probably dance to have an explicable source of income 
when the IRS knocks on their doors. They report their earnings as dancers, which 
gives them a better chance of concealing what they make from turning tricks.”
“It’s sad,” she said.
“Yeah. In some cases . . . in a lot of cases, it’s damn sad.”
Fascinated, she said, “Will we get false IDs from this Van Dyne?”
“I believe so.”
She regarded him solemnly. “You really do know your way around, don’t you?”
“Does it bother you—that I know places like this?”
She thought a moment. Then: “No. In fact . . . if a woman’s going to take a 
husband, I suppose he ought to be a man who knows what to do in any situation. 
It gives me a lot of confidence.”
“In me?”
“In you, yes, and confidence that we’re going to get through this all right, 
that we’re going to save Einstein and ourselves.”
“Confidence is good. But in Delta Force, one of the first things you learn is 
that being overly confident can get you killed.”
The door opened, and the hulk returned with a round-faced man in a gray suit, 
blue shirt, and black tie.
“Van Dyne,” the newcomer said, but he did not offer to shake hands. He went 
around the desk and sat in a spring-backed chair. He had thinning blond hair and 
baby-smooth cheeks. He looked like a stockbroker in a television commercial: 
efficient, smart, as well-meaning as he was well-groomed. “I wanted to talk to 
you because I want to know who’s spreading these falsehoods about me.”
Travis said, “We need new ID—driver’s licenses, social security cards, the whole 
works. First-rate, with full backup, not junk.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Van Dyne said. He raised his eyebrows 
quizzically. “Where on earth did you get the idea that I’m in that sort of 
business? I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed.”
“We need first-rate paper with full backup,” Travis repeated.
Van Dyne stared at him, at Nora. “Let me see your wallet. And your purse, miss.”
Putting his wallet on the desk, Travis told Nora, “It’s okay.”
Reluctantly, she put her purse beside the wallet.
“Please stand and let Caesar search you,” Van Dyne said.
Travis stood and motioned for Nora to get up as well.
Caesar, the cement-faced hulk, searched Travis with embarrassing thoroughness, 
found the .357 Magnum, put it on the desk. He was even more thorough with Nora, 
unbuttoning her blouse and boldly feeling the cups of her bra for a miniature 
microphone, battery, and recorder. She blushed and would not have permitted 
these intimacies if Travis had not explained to her what Caesar was looking for, 
Besides, Caesar remained expressionless throughout, as if he were a machine 
without the potential for erotic response.
When Caesar was finished with them, they sat down while Van Dyne went through 
Travis’s wallet and then through Nora’s purse. She was afraid he was going to 
take their money without giving them anything in return, but he appeared to be 
interested in only their ID and the butcher’s knife that Nora Still carried.
To Travis, Van Dyne said, “Okay. If you were a cop, you wouldn’t be allowed to 
carry a Magnum”—he swung out the cylinder and looked at the
ammunition—loaded with magnums. The ACLU would have your ass.” He smiled at 
Nora. “No policewoman carries a butcher’s knife.”
Suddenly she understood what Travis meant when he’d said he was carrying the 
revolver not for protection but for its value as ID.
Van Dyne and Travis haggled a bit, finally settling on sixty-five hundred as the 
price for two sets of ID with “full backup.”
Their belongings, including the butcher’s knife and revolver, were returned to 
them.
From the gray office, they followed Van Dyne into the narrow hall, where he 
dismissed Caesar, then to a set of dimly lit concrete stairs leading to a 
basement beneath Hot Tips, where the rock music was further filtered by the 
intervening concrete floor.
Nora was not sure what she expected to find in the basement: maybe men who all 
looked like Edward 0. Robinson and wore green eye shades on elastic bands and 
labored over antique printing presses, producing not just false identification 
papers but stacks of phony currency. What she found, instead, surprised her.
The steps ended in a stone-walled storage room about forty by thirty feet. Bar 
supplies were stacked to shoulder height. They walked along a narrow aisle 
formed by cartons of whiskey, beer, and cocktail napkins, to a steel fire door 
in the rear wall. Van Dyne pushed a button in the door frame, and a 
closed-circuit security camera made a purring sound as it panned them.
The door was opened from inside, and they went through into a smaller room with 
subdued lighting, where two young bearded guys were working at two of seven 
computers lined up on work tables along one wall. The first guy was wearing soft 
Rockport shoes, safari pants, a web belt, and a cotton safari shirt. The other 
wore Reeboks, jeans, and a sweatshirt that featured the Three Stooges. They 
looked almost like twins, and both resembled young versions of Steven Spielberg. 
They were so intensely involved with their computer work that they did not look 
up at Nora and Travis and Van Dyne, but they were having fun, too, talking 
exuberantly to themselves, to their machines, and to each other in high-tech 
language that made no sense whatsoever to Nora.
A woman in her early twenties was also at work in the room. She had short blond 
hair and oddly beautiful eyes the color of pennies. While Van Dyne spoke with 
the two guys at the computers, the woman took Travis and Nora to the far end of 
the room, put them in front of a white screen, and photographed them for the 
phony driver’s licenses.
When the blonde disappeared into a darkroom to develop the film, Travis and Nora 
rejoined Van Dyne at the computers, where the young men were working happily. 
Nora watched them accessing the supposedly secure computers of the California 
Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security Administration, as well as 
those of other federal, state, and local government agencies.
“When I told Mr. Van Dyne that I wanted ID with ‘full backup,’ “Travis 
explained, “I meant the driver’s licenses must be able to stand up to inspection
if we’re ever stopped by a highway patrolman who runs a check on them. The 
licenses we’re getting are indistinguishable from the real thing. These guys are 
inserting our new names into the DMV’s files, actually creating computer records 
of these licenses in the state’s data banks.”
Van Dyne said, “The addresses are phony, of course. But when you settle down 
somewhere, under your new names, you just apply to the DMV for a change of 
address like the law requires, and then you’ll be perfectly legit. We’re setting 
these up to expire in about a year, at which time you’ll go into a DMV office, 
take the usual test, and get brand-new licenses because your new names are in 
their files.”
“What’re our new names?” Nora wondered.
“You see,” Van Dyne said, speaking with the quiet assurance and patience of a 
stockbroker explaining the market to a new investor, “we have to start with 
birth certificates. We keep computer files of infant deaths all over the western 
United States, going back at least fifty years. We’ve already searched those 
lists for the years each of you was born, trying to find babies who died with 
your hair and eye colors—and with your first names, too, just because it’s 
easier for you not to have to change both first and last. We found a little 
girl, Nora Jean Aimes, born October twelfth of the year you were born and who 
died one month later, right here in San Francisco. We have a laser printer with 
virtually an infinite choice of type styles and sizes, with which we’ve already 
produced a facsimile of the kind of birth certificate that was in use in San 
Francisco at that time, and it bears Nora Jean’s name, vital statistics. We’ll 
make two Xeroxes of it, and you’ll receive both. Next, we tapped into the Social 
Security files and appropriated a number for Nora Jean Aimes, who never was 
given one, and we also created a history of Social Security tax payments.” He 
smiled. “You’ve already paid in enough quarters to qualify you for a pension 
when you retire. Likewise, the IRS now has computer records that show you’ve 
worked as a waitress in half a dozen cities and that you’ve faithfully paid your 
taxes every year.”
Travis said, “With a birth certificate and legitimate Social Security number, 
they were then able to get a driver’s license that would have real ID behind 
it.”
“So I’m Nora Jean Aimes? But if her birth certificate’s on record, so is her 
death certificate. If someone wanted to check—”
Van Dyne shook his head. “In those days, both birth and death certificates were 
strictly paper documents, no computer files. And because it squanders more money 
that it spends wisely, the government has never had the funds to transfer 
records of the precomputer era into electronic data banks. So if someone gets 
suspicious about you, they can’t just search out the death records On computer 
and learn the truth in two minutes flat. They’d have to go to the courthouse, 
dig back through the coroner's files for that year, and find Nora Jean’s death 
certificate. But that won’t happen because part of our service involves having 
Nora Jean’s certificate removed from public records and destroyed now that 
you’ve bought her identity.”
“We’re into TRW, the credit-reporting agency,” one of the twin Spielberg 
look-alikes said with obvious delight.
Nora saw data flickering across the green screens, but none of it had any 
meaning for her.
“They’re creating solid credit histories for our new identities,” Travis told 
her. “By the time we do settle down somewhere and put in a change of address 
with the DMV and TRW, our mailbox will be flooded with offers for credit 
cards—Visa, MasterCard, probably even American Express and Carte Blanche.”
‘Nora Jean Aimes,” she said numbly, trying to grasp how quickly and thoroughly 
her new life was being built.
Because they could locate no infant who had died in the year of Travis’s birth 
with his first name, he had to settle for being Samuel Spencer Hyatt, who had 
been born that January and had perished that March in Portland, Oregon. The 
death would be expunged from the public record, and Travis’s new identity would 
stand up to fairly intense scrutiny.
Strictly for fun (they said), the bearded young operators created a military 
record for Travis, crediting him six years in the Marines and awarding him a 
Purple Heart plus a couple of citations for bravery during a 
peace-keeping-mission-turned-violent in the Middle East. To their delight, he 
asked if they could also create a valid real-estate broker’s license under his 
new name, and within twenty-five minutes they cracked into the right data banks 
and did the job.
“Cake and pie,” one of the young men said.
“Cake and pie,” the other echoed. Nora frowned, not understanding.
“Piece of cake,” one of them explained.
“Easy as pie,” the other said.
“Cake and pie,” Nora said, nodding.
The blonde with copper-penny eyes returned, carrying driver’s licenses imprinted 
with Travis’s and Nora’s pictures. “You’re both quite photogenic,” she said.
Two hours and twenty minutes after meeting Van Dyne, they left Hot Tips with two 
manila envelopes containing a variety of documents supporting their new 
identities. Out on the street, Nora felt a little dizzy and held on to Travis’s 
arm all the way back to the car.
Fog had rolled through the city while they had been in Hot Tips. The blinking 
lights and flashing-rippling neon of the Tenderloin were softened yet curiously 
magnified by the mist, so it seemed as if every cubic centimeter of night air 
was awash with strange lights, with an aurora borealis brought down to ground 
level. Those sleazy streets had a certain mystery and cheap allure after dark, 
in the fog, but not if you’d seen them in daylight first and remembered what you 
had seen.
In the Mercedes, Einstein was waiting patiently.
“Couldn’t arrange to have you turned into a poodle, after all,” Nora told him as 
she buckled her seat belt. “But we sure did ourselves up right. Einstein, say 
hello to Sam Hyatt and Nora Aimes.”
The retriever put his head over the front seat, looked at her, looked at
Travis, and snorted once as if to say they could not fool him, that he knew who 
they were.
To Travis, Nora said, “Your antiterrorist training . . . is that where you 
learned about places like Hot Tips, people like Van Dyne? Is that where 
terrorists get new ID once they slip into the country?”
“Yeah, some go to people like Van Dyne, though not usually. The Soviets supply 
papers for most terrorists. Van Dyne services mostly ordinary illegal 
immigrants, though not the poor ones, and criminal types looking to dodge arrest 
warrants.”
As he started the car, she said, “But if you could find Van Dyne, maybe the 
people looking for us can find him.”
“Maybe. It’ll take them a while, but maybe they can.”
“Then they’ll find out all about our new identities.”
“No,” Travis said. He turned on the defroster and the windshield wipers to clear 
the condensation off the outside of the glass. “Van Dyne wouldn’t keep records. 
He doesn’t want to be caught with proof of what he does. If the authorities ever 
tumble to him and go in there with search warrants, they won’t find anything in 
Van Dyne’s computers except the accounting and purchasing records for Hot Tips.”
As they drove through the city, heading for the Golden Gate Bridge, Nora stared 
in fascination at the people in the streets and in other cars, not just in the 
Tenderloin but in every neighborhood through which they passed. She wondered how 
many of them were living under the names and identities with which they had been 
born and how many were changelings like her and Travis.
“In less than three hours, we’ve been totally remade,” she said.
“Some world we live in, huh? More than anything else, that’s what high 
technology means—maximum fluidity. The whole world is becoming ever more fluid, 
malleable. Most financial transactions are now handled with electronic money 
that flashes from New York to L.A.—or around the world— in seconds. Money 
crosses borders in a blink; it no longer has to be smuggled out past the guards. 
Most records are kept in the form of electrical charges that only computers 
read. So everything’s fluid. Identities are fluid. The past is fluid.”
Nora said, “Even the genetic structure of a species is fluid these days.”
Einstein woofed agreement.
Nora said, “Scary, isn’t it?”
“A little,” Travis said as they approached the light-bedecked southern entrance 
to the fog-mantled Golden Gate Bridge, which was all but invisible in the mist. 
“But maximum fluidity is basically a good thing. Social and financial fluidity 
guarantee freedom. I believe—and I hope—that we’re heading toward an age when 
the role of governments will inevitably dwindle, when there’ll be no way to 
regulate and control people as thoroughly as was possible in the past. 
Totalitarian governments won’t be able to stay in power.”
“How so?”
“Well, how can a dictatorship control its citizens in a high-tech society of 
maximum fluidity? The only way is to refuse to allow high tech to intrude,
seal the borders, and live entirely in an earlier age. But that’d be national 
suicide for any country that tried it. They couldn’t compete. In a few decades, 
they’d be modern aborigines, primitive by the standards of the civilized 
high-tech world. Right now, for instance, the Soviets try to restrict computers 
to their defense industry, which can’t last. They’ll have to computerize their 
entire economy and teach their people to use computers—and then how can they 
keep the screws tight when their citizens have been given the means to 
manipulate the system and foil its controls on them?”
At the entrance to the bridge, no northbound toll was collected. They drove onto 
the span, where the speed limit had been drastically reduced because of the 
weather.
Looking up at the ghostly skeleton of the bridge, which glistened with 
condensation and vanished in the fog, Nora said, “You seem to think the world 
will be paradise in a decade or two.”
“Not paradise,” he said. “Easier, richer, safer, happier. But not a paradise. 
After all, there will still be all the problems of the human heart and all the 
potential sicknesses of the human mind. And the new world’s bound to bring us 
some new dangers as well as blessings.”
“Like the thing that killed your landlord,” she said.
“Yes.”
In the back seat, Einstein growled.
 
 
 
12
That Thursday afternoon, August 26, Vince Nasco drove to Johnny The Wire 
Santini’s place in San Clemente to pick up the past week’s report, which was 
when he learned of the murder of Ted Hockney in Santa Barbara the previous 
evening. The condition of the corpse, especially the missing eyes, linked it to 
The Outsider. Johnny had also ascertained that the NSA had quietly assumed 
jurisdiction in the case, which convinced Vince it was related to the Banodyne 
fugitives.
That evening, he got a newspaper and, over a dinner of seafood enchiladas and 
Dos Equis at a Mexican restaurant, he read about Hockney and about the man who 
had rented the house where the murder occurred—Travis Cornell. The press was 
reporting that Cornell, a former real-estate broker who had once been a member 
of Delta Force, kept a panther in the house and that the cat had killed Hockney, 
but Vince knew that the cat was bullshit, just a cover story. The cops said they 
wanted to talk to Cornell and to an unidentified woman seen with him, though 
they had not filed any charges against them.
The story also had one line about Cornell’s dog: “Cornell and the woman may be 
traveling with a golden retriever.”
If I can find Cornell, Vince thought, I’ll find the dog.
This was the first break he’d had, and it confirmed his feeling that owning the 
retriever was a part of his great destiny.
To celebrate, he ordered more seafood enchiladas and beer.
 
 
 
13
Travis, Nora, and Einstein stayed Thursday night at a motel in Marin County, 
north of San Francisco. They got a six-pack of San Miguel at a convenience store 
and take-out chicken, biscuits, and coleslaw from a fast-food restaurant, and 
ate a late dinner in the room.
Einstein enjoyed the chicken and showed considerable interest in the beer.
Travis decided to pour half a bottle in the new yellow plastic dish they had 
gotten the retriever during their shopping spree earlier in the day. “But no 
more than half a bottle, no matter how much you like it. I want you sober for 
some questions and answers.”
After dinner, the three of them sat on the king-size bed, and Travis unwrapped 
the Scrabble game. He put the board upside down on the mattress, with the 
playing surface concealed, and Nora helped him sort all the lettered game tiles 
into twenty-six piles.
Einstein watched with interest and did not seem even slightly woozy from his 
half-bottle of San Miguel .
“Okay,” Travis said, “I need more detailed answers than we’ve been able to get 
with yes-and-no questions. It occurred to me that this might work.”
“Ingenious,” Nora agreed.
To the dog, Travis said, “I ask you a question, and you indicate the letters 
that are needed to spell out the answer, one letter at a time, word by word. You 
got it?”
Einstein blinked at Travis, looked at the stacks of lettered tiles, raised his 
eyes to Travis again, and grinned.
Travis said, “All right. Do you know the name of the laboratory from which you 
escaped?”
Einstein put his nose to the pile of Bs.
Nora plucked a tile off the stack and put it on the portion of the board that 
Travis had left clear.
In less than a minute, the dog spelled BANODYNE.
“Banodyne,” Travis said thoughtfully. “Never heard of it. Is that the entire 
name?”
Einstein hesitated, then began to choose more letters until he had spelled out 
BANODYNE LABORATORIES INC.
On a pad of motel stationery, Travis made a note of the answer, then returned 
all the tiles to their individual stacks. “Where is Banodyne located?”
IRVINE.
“That makes sense,” Travis said. “I found you in the woods north of Irvine. All 
right . . . I found you on Tuesday, May eighteenth. When had you escaped from 
Banodyne?”
Einstein stared at the tiles, whined, and made no choices.
“In all the reading you’ve done,” Travis said, “you’ve learned about months, 
weeks, days, and hours. You have a sense of time now.”
Looking at Nora, the dog whined again.
She said, “He has a sense of time now, but he didn’t have one when he escaped, 
so it’s hard to remember how long he was on the run.”
Einstein immediately began to indicate letters: THATS RIGHT.
“Do you know the names of any researchers at Banodyne?”
DAVIS WEATHERBY.
Travis made a note of the name. “Any others?”
Hesitating frequently to consider possible spellings, Einstein finally produced 
LAWFON HANES, AL HUDSTUN, and a few more.
After noting all of them on the motel stationery, Travis said, “These will be 
some of the people looking for you.”
YES. AND JOHNSON.
“Johnson?” Nora said. “Is he one of the scientists?”
NO. The retriever thought for a moment, studied the stacks of letters, and 
finally continued: SECURITY.
“He’s head of security at Banodyne?” Travis asked.
NO. BIGGER.
“Probably a federal agent of some kind,” Travis told Nora as she returned the 
letters to their stacks.
To Einstein, Nora said, “Do you know this Johnson’s first name?” Einstein gazed 
at the letters and mewled, and Travis was about to tell him it was all right if 
he didn’t know Johnson’s first name, but then the dog attempted to spell it: 
LEMOOOL.
“There is no such name,” Nora said, taking the letters away.
Einstein tried again: LAMYOULL. Then again: LIMUUL.
“That’s not a name, either,” Travis said.
A third time: LEMB YOU WILL.
Travis realized the dog was struggling to spell the name phonetically. He chose 
six lettered tiles of his own: LEMUEL.
“Lemuel Johnson,” Nora said.
Einstein leaned forward and nuzzled her neck. He was wiggling with pleasure at 
having gotten the name across to them, and the springs of the motel bed creaked.
Then he stopped nuzzling Nora and spelled DARK LEMUEL.
“Dark?” Travis said. “By ‘dark’ you mean Johnson is . . . evil?”
NO. DARK.
Nora restacked the letters and said, “Dangerous?”
Einstein snorted at her, then at Travis, as if to say they were sometimes 
unbearably thickheaded. NO. DARK.
For a moment they sat in silence, thinking, and at last Travis said, “Black! You 
mean Lemuel Johnson is a black man.”
Einstein chuffed softly, shook his head up and down, swept his tail back and 
forth on the bedspread. He indicated nineteen letters, his longest answer:
THERES HOPE FOR YOU YET.
Nora laughed.
Travis said, “Wiseass.”
But he was exhilarated, filled with a joy that he would have been hard-pressed 
to describe if he had been required to put it into words. They had been 
communicating with the retriever for many weeks, but the Scrabble tiles provided 
a far greater dimension to their communication than they had enjoyed previously. 
More than ever, Einstein seemed to be their own child. But there was also an 
intoxicating feeling of breaking through the barriers of normal human 
experience, a feeling of transcendence. Einstein was no ordinary mutt, of 
course, and his high intelligence was more human than canine, but he was a 
dog—more than anything else, a dog—and his intelligence was still qualitatively 
different from that of a man, so there was inevitably a strong sense of mystery 
and great wonder in this interspecies dialogue. Staring at THERES HOPE FOR YOU 
YET, Travis thought a broader meaning could be read into the message, that it 
could be directed at all humankind.
For the next half an hour, they continued questioning Einstein, and Travis 
recorded the dog’s answers. In time they discussed the yellow-eyed beast that 
had killed Ted Hockney.
“What is the damned thing?” Nora asked.
THE OUTSIDER.
Travis said, “ ‘The Outsider’? What do you mean?”
THATS WHAT THEY CALLED IT.
“The people in the lab?” Travis asked. “Why did they call it The Outsider?”
BECAUSE IT DOES NOT BELONG.
Nora said, “I don’t understand.”
TWO SUCCESSES. ME AND IT. I AM DOG. IT IS NOTHING THAT CAN BE NAMED. OUTSIDER.
Travis said, “It’s intelligent, too?”
YES.
“As intelligent as you?”
MAYBE.
“Jesus,” Travis said, shaken.
Einstein made an unhappy sound and put his head on Nora’s knee, seeking the 
reassurance that petting could provide him.
Travis said, “Why would they create a thing like that?”
Einstein returned to the stacks of letters: TO KILL FOR THEM.
A chill trickled down Travis’s spine and seeped deep into him. “Who did they 
want it to kill?”
THE ENEMY.
“What enemy?” Nora asked.
IN WAR.
With understanding came revulsion bordering on nausea. Travis sagged back 
against the headboard. He remembered telling Nora that even a world
without want and with universal freedom would fall far short of paradise because 
of all the problems of the human heart and all the potential sicknesses of the 
human mind.
To Einstein, he said. “So you’re telling us that The Outsider is a prototype of 
a genetically engineered soldier. Sort of. . . a very intelligent, deadly police 
dog designed for the battlefield.”
IT WAS MADE TO KILL. IT WANTS TO KILL.
Reading the words as she laid out the tiles, Nora was appalled. “But this is 
crazy. How could such a thing ever be controlled? How could it be counted on not 
to turn against its masters?”
Travis leaned forward from the headboard. To Einstein, he said, “Why is The 
Outsider looking for you?”
HATES ME.
“Why does it hate you?”
DONT KNOW.
As Nora replaced the letters, Travis said, “Will it continue looking for you?”
YES. FOREVER.
“But how does something like that move unseen?”
AT NIGHT.
“Nevertheless . .
LIKE RATS MOVE UNSEEN.
Looking puzzled, Nora said. “But how does it track you?”
FEELS ME.
“Feels you? What do you mean?” she asked.
The retriever puzzled over that one for a long time, making several false starts 
on an answer, and finally said, CANT EXPLAIN.
“Can you feel it, too?” Travis asked.
SOMETIMES.
“Do you feel it now?”
YES. FAR AWAY.
“Very far away,” Travis agreed. “Hundreds of miles. Can it really feel you and 
track you from that far away?”
EVEN FARTHER.
“Is it tracking you flow?”
COMING.
The chill in Travis grew icier. “When will it find you?”
DONT KNOW.
The dog looked dejected, and he was shivering again.
“Soon? Will it feel its way to you soon?”
MAYBE NOT SOON.
Travis saw that Nora was pale. He put a hand on her knee and said, “We won’t run 
from it the rest of our lives. Damned if we will. We’ll find a place to settle 
down and wait, a place where we’ll be able to prepare a defense and where we’ll 
have the privacy to deal with The Outsider when it arrives.”
Shivering, Einstein indicated more letters with his nose, and Travis laid out 
the tiles: I SHOULD GO.
“What do you mean?” Travis asked, replacing the tiles.
I DANGER YOU.
Nora threw her arms around the retriever and hugged him. “Don’t you even think 
such a thing. You’re part of us. You’re family, damn you, we’re all family, 
we’re all in this together, and we stick it out together because that’s what 
families do.” She stopped hugging the dog and took his head in both hands, met 
him nose to nose, peered deep into his eyes. “If I woke up some morning and 
found you’d left us, it’d break my heart.” Tears shimmered in her eyes, a tremor 
in her voice. “Do you understand me, fur face? It would break my heart if you 
went off on your own.”
The dog pulled away from her and began to choose lettered tiles again: I
WOULD DIE.
“You would die if you left us?” Travis asked.
The dog chose more letters, waited for them to study the words, then looked 
solemnly at each of them to be sure they understood what he meant:
I WOULD DIE OF LONELY.
 
 
 
 
PART TWO
 
Guardian
Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and 
fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in 
themselves.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Greater love hath no man than this:
that he lay down his life
for his friends.
—The Gospel According to Saint John
 
 
 
EIGHT
1
On the Thursday that Nora drove to Dr. Weingold’s office, Travis and Einstein 
went for a walk across the grassy hills and through the woods behind the house 
they had bought in the beautiful California coastal region called Big Sur.
On the treeless hills, the autumn sun warmed the stones and cast scattered cloud 
shadows. The breeze off the Pacific drew a whisper from the dry golden grass. In 
the sun, the air was mild, neither hot nor cool. Travis was comfortable in jeans 
and a long-sleeved shirt.
He carried a Mossberg short-barreled pistol-grip pump-action 12-gauge shotgun. 
He always carried it on his walks. If he ever encountered someone who asked 
about it, he intended to tell them he was hunting rattlesnakes.
Where the trees grew most vigorously, the bright morning seemed like late 
afternoon, and the air was cool enough to make Travis glad that his shirt was 
flannel. Massive pines, a few small groves of giant redwoods, and a variety of 
foothill hardwoods filtered the sun and left much of the forest floor in 
perpetual twilight. The undergrowth was dense in places: the vegetation included 
those low, impenetrable thickets of evergreen oaks sometimes called “chaparral,” 
plus lots of ferns that flourished because of the frequent fog and the constant 
humidity of the seacoast air.
Einstein repeatedly sniffed out cougar spoor and insisted on showing Travis the 
tracks of the big cats in the damp forest soil. Fortunately, he fully understood 
the danger of stalking a mountain lion, and was able to repress his natural urge 
to prowl after them.
The dog contented himself with merely observing local fauna. Timid deer could 
often be seen ascending or descending their trails. Raccoons were plentiful and 
fun to watch, and although some were quite friendly, Einstein knew they could 
turn nasty if he accidentally frightened them; he chose to keep a respectful 
distance.
On other walks, the retriever had been dismayed to discover the squirrels, Which 
he could approach safely, were terrified of him. They froze with fear, Stared 
wild-eyed, small hearts pounding visibly.
WHY SQUIRRELS AFRAID? he had asked Travis one evening.
“Instinct,” Travis had explained. “You’re a dog, and they know instinctively 
that dogs will attack and kill them.”
NOT ME.
“No, not you,” Travis agreed, ruffling the dog’s coat. “You wouldn’t hurt them. 
But the squirrels don’t know you’re different, do they? To them, you look like a 
dog, and you smell like a dog, so you’ve got to be feared like a dog.”
I LIKE SQUIRRELS.
“I know. Unfortunately, they’re not smart enough to realize it.”
Consequently, Einstein kept his distance from the squirrels and tried hard not 
to terrify them, often sauntering past with his head turned the other way as if 
unaware of them.
This special day, their interest in squirrels and deer and birds and raccoons 
and unusual forest flora was minimal. Even views of the Pacific did not intrigue 
them. Today, unlike other days, they were walking only to pass the time and to 
keep their minds off Nora.
Travis repeatedly looked at his watch, and he chose a circular route that would 
bring them back to the house at one o’clock, when Nora was expected to return.
It was the twenty-first of October, eight weeks after they had acquired new 
identities in San Francisco. After considerable thought, they had decided to 
come south, substantially reducing the distance that The Outsider would have to 
travel in order to put its hands on Einstein. They would not be able to get on 
with their new lives until the beast found them, until they killed it; 
therefore, they wanted to hasten rather than delay that confrontation.
On the other hand, they did not want to risk returning too far south toward 
Santa Barbara, for The Outsider might cover the distance between them faster 
than it had traveled from Orange County to Santa Barbara last summer. They could 
not be certain that it would continue to make only three or four miles a day. If 
it moved faster this time, it might come upon them before they were ready for 
it. The Big Sur area, because of its sparse population and because it was a 
hundred ninety air miles from Santa Barbara, seemed ideal. If The Outsider got a 
fix on Einstein and tracked him down as slowly as before, the thing would not 
arrive for almost five months. If it doubled its speed somehow, swiftly crossing 
the open farmland and the wild hills between there and here, quickly skirting 
populated areas, it would still not reach them until the second week of 
November.
That day was drawing near, but Travis was satisfied that he had made every 
preparation possible, and he almost welcomed The Outsider’s arrival. Thus far, 
however, Einstein said that he did not feel his adversary was dangerously close. 
Evidently, they still had plenty of time to test their patience before the 
showdown.
By twelve-fifty, they reached the end of their circular route through the hills 
and canyons, returning to the yard behind their new house. It was a two-story 
structure with bleached-wood walls, a cedar-shingled roof, and massive stone 
chimneys on both the north and south sides. It boasted front and rear porches on 
the east and west, and either vantage point offered a view of wooded slopes.
Because no snow ever fell here, the roof was only gently pitched, making it 
possible to walk all over it, and that was where Travis made one of his first 
defensive modifications to the house. He looked up now, as he came out of the 
trees, and saw the herringbone pattern of two-by-fours that he had fixed across 
the roof. They would make it safer and easier to move quickly across those 
sloped surfaces. If The Outsider crept up on the house at night, it would not be 
able to enter by the downstairs windows because, at sundown, those were 
barricaded with interior locking shutters that Travis had installed himself and 
that would foil any would-be intruder except, perhaps, a maniacally determined 
man with an ax. The Outsider would then most likely climb the porch posts onto 
the front or rear porch roof to have a look at the second-floor windows, which 
it would find also protected by interior shutters. Meanwhile, warned of the 
enemy’s approach by an infrared alarm system that be had installed around the 
house three weeks ago, Travis would go onto the roof by way of an attic trap 
door. Up there, making use of the two-by-four handholds, he would be able to 
creep to the edge of the main roof, look down on the porch roof or on any 
portion of the surrounding yard, and open fire on The Outsider from a position 
where it could not reach him.
Twenty yards behind and east of the house was a small rust-red barn that backed 
up to the trees. Their property included no tillable land, and the original 
owner apparently erected the barn to house a couple of horses and some chickens. 
Travis and Nora used it as a garage because the dirt driveway led two hundred 
yards in from the highway, past the house, directly to the double doors on the 
barn.
Travis suspected that, when The Outsider arrived, it would scout the house from 
the woods and then from the cover of the barn. It might even wait in there, 
hoping to catch them by surprise when they came out for the Dodge pickup or the 
Toyota. Therefore, he had rigged the barn with a few surprises.
Their nearest neighbors—whom they had met only once—were over a quarter-mile to 
the north, out of sight beyond trees and chaparral. The highway, which was 
closer, was not much traveled at night, when The Outsider was most likely to 
strike. If the confrontation involved a great deal of gunfire, the shots would 
echo and reecho through the woods and across the bare hills, so the few people 
in the area—neighbors or passing motorists—would have trouble determining where 
the noise originated. He ought to be able to kill the creature and bury it 
before someone came nosing around.
Now, more worried about Nora than about The Outsider, Travis climbed the 
back-porch steps, unlocked the two dead bolts on the rear door, and went Into 
the house, with Einstein close behind him. The kitchen was large enough to serve 
also as the dining room, yet it was cozy: oak walls, a Mexican-tile floor, 
beige-tile counters, oak cabinets, a hand-textured plaster ceiling, the best 
appliances. The big plank table with four comfortable padded chairs and a stone 
fireplace helped make this the center of the house.
There were five other rooms—an enormous living room and a den at the front of 
the first floor; three bedrooms upstairs—plus one bath down and one
up. One of the bedrooms was theirs, and one served as Nora’s studio where she 
had done a little painting since they moved in—and the third was empty, awaiting 
developments.
Travis switched on the kitchen lights. Although the house seemed isolated, they 
were only two hundred yards from the highway, and power poles followed the line 
of their dirt driveway.
“I’m having a beer,” Travis said, “You want anything?”
Einstein padded to his empty water dish, which was in the corner beside his food 
dish, and scooted it across the floor to the sink.
They had not expected to be able to afford such a house so soon after fleeing 
Santa Barbara—especially not when, during their first call to Garrison Dilworth, 
the attorney informed them that Travis’s bank accounts had, indeed, been frozen. 
They had been lucky to get the twenty-thousand-dollar check through. Garrison 
had converted some of both Travis’s and Nora’s funds into eight cashier’s checks 
as planned, and had sent them to Travis addressed to Mr. Samuel Spencer Hyatt 
(the new persona), care of the Marin County motel where they had stayed for 
nearly a week. But also, claiming to have sold Nora’s house for a handsome 
six-figure price, he had sent another packet of cashier’s checks two days later, 
to the same motel.
Speaking with him from a pay phone, Nora had said, “But even if you did sell it, 
they can’t have paid the money and closed the deal so soon.”
“No,” Garrison had admitted. “It won’t close for a month. But you need the cash 
now, so I’m advancing it to you.”
They had opened two accounts at a bank in Carmel, thirty-odd miles north of 
where they now lived. They had bought the new pickup, then had taken Garrison’s 
Mercedes north to the San Francisco airport, leaving it there for him. Heading 
south again, past Carmel and along the coast, they looked for a house in the Big 
Sur area. When they had found this one, they had been able to pay cash for it. 
It was wiser to buy than rent, and it was wiser to pay cash rather than finance 
the house, for fewer questions needed to be answered.
Travis was sure their ID would stand up, but he saw no reason to test the 
quality of Van Dyne’s papers until necessary. Besides, after buying a house, 
they were more respectable; the purchase added substance to their new 
identities.
While Travis got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, twisted off the cap, 
took a long swallow, then filled Einstein’s dish with water, the retriever went 
to the walk-in pantry. The door was ajar, as always, and the dog opened it all 
the way. He put one paw on a pedal that Travis had rigged for him just inside 
the pantry door, and the light came on in there.
In addition to shelves of canned and bottled goods, the huge pantry contained a 
complex gadget that Travis and Nora had built to facilitate communication with 
the dog. The device stood against the rear wall: twenty-eight one-inch-square 
tubes made of Lucite, lined up side by side in a wooden frame; each tube was 
eighteen inches tall, open at the top, and fitted with a pedal-release valve at 
the bottom. In the first twenty-six tubes were stacked lettered tiles from six 
Scrabble games, so Einstein would have enough letters
to be able to form long messages. On the front of each tube was a hand-drawn 
letter that showed what it contained; A, B, C, D, and so on. The last two tubes 
held blank game tiles on which Travis had carved commas—or apostrophes—and 
question marks. (They’d decided they could figure where the periods were 
supposed to go.) Einstein was able to dispense letters from the tubes by 
stepping on the pedals, then could use his nose to form the tiles into words on 
the pantry floor. They had chosen to put the device in there, out of sight, so 
they would not be required to explain it to neighbors who might drop in 
unexpectedly.
As Einstein busily pumped pedals and clicked tiles against one another, Travis 
carried his beer and the dog’s water dish out to the front porch, where they 
would sit and wait for Nora. By the time he came back, Einstein had finished 
forming a message.
COULD I HAVE SOME HAMBURGER? OR THREE WEENIES?
Travis said, “I’m going to have lunch with Nora when she gets home. Don’t YOU 
want to wait and eat with us?”
The retriever licked his chops and thought for a moment. Then he studied the 
letters he had already used, pushed some of them aside, and reused the rest 
along with a K and a T and an apostrophe that he had to release from the Lucite 
tubes.
OK. BUT I’M STARVED.
“You’ll survive,” Travis told him. He gathered up the lettered tiles and sorted 
them into the open tops of the proper tubes.
He retrieved the pistol-grip shotgun that he’d stood by the back door and 
carried it out to the front porch, where he put it beside his rocking chair. He 
heard Einstein turn off the pantry light and follow him.
They sat in anxious silence, Travis in his chair, Einstein on the redwood floor.
Songbirds trilled in the mild October air.
Travis sipped at his beer, and Einstein lapped occasionally at his water, and 
they stared down the dirt driveway, into the trees, toward the highway that they 
could not see.
In the glove compartment of the Toyota, Nora had a .38 pistol loaded with 
hollow-point cartridges. During the weeks since they had left Marin County, she 
had learned to drive and, with Travis’s help, had become proficient with the 
.38—also with a fully automatic Uzi pistol and a shotgun. She only had the .38 
today, but she’d be safe going and coming from Carmel. Besides, even if The 
Outsider had crept into the area without Einstein’s knowledge, it did not want 
Nora; it wanted the dog. So she was perfectly safe.
But where was she?
Travis wished he had gone with her. But after thirty years of dependency and 
fear, solo trips into Carmel were one of the means by which she asserted— and 
tested—her new strength, independence, and self-confidence. She would not have 
welcomed his company.
By one-thirty, when Nora was half an hour late, Travis began to get a sick, 
twisting feeling in his gut.
Einstein began to pace.
Five minutes later, the retriever was the first to hear the car turning into the 
foot of the driveway at the main road. He dashed down the porch steps, which 
were at the side of the house, and stood at the edge of the dirt lane.
Travis did not want Nora to see that he had been overly worried because somehow 
that would seem to indicate a lack of trust in her ability to take care of 
herself, an ability that she did, indeed, possess and that she prized. He 
remained in his rocking chair, his bottle of Corona in one hand.
When the blue Toyota appeared, he sighed with relief. As she went by the house, 
she tooted the horn. Travis waved as if he had not been sitting there under a 
leaden blanket of fear.
Einstein went to the garage to greet her, and a minute later they both 
reappeared. She was wearing blue jeans and a yellow- and white-checkered shirt, 
but Travis thought she looked good enough to waltz onto a dance floor among 
begowned and bejeweled princesses.
She came to him, leaned down, kissed him. Her lips were warm.
She said, “Miss me terribly?”
“With you gone, there was no sun, no trilling from the birds, no joy.” He tried 
to say it flippantly, but it came out with an underlying note of seriousness.
Einstein rubbed against her and whined to get her attention, then peered up at 
her and woofed softly, as if to say, Well?
“He’s right,” Travis said, “You’re not being fair. Don’t keep us in suspense.”
“I am,” she said.
“You are?”
She grinned. “Knocked up.”
“Oh my,” he said.
“Preggers. With child. In a family way. A mother-to-be.”
He got up and put his arms around her, held her close and kissed her, and said, 
“Dr. Weingold couldn’t be mistaken,” and she said, “No, he’s a good doctor,” and 
Travis said, “He must’ve told you when,” and she said. “We, can expect the baby 
the third week of June, and Travis said stupidly, “Next June?” and she laughed 
and said, “I don’t intend to carry this baby for a whole extra year,” and 
finally Einstein insisted on having a chance to nuzzle her and express his 
delight.
“I brought home a chilled bottle of bubbly to celebrate,” she said, thrusting a 
paper bag into his hands.
In the kitchen, when he took the bottle out of the bag, he saw that it was 
sparkling apple cider, nonalcoholic. He said, “Isn’t this a celebration worth 
the best champagne?”
Getting glasses from a cupboard, she said, “I’m probably being silly, a 
world-champion worrier. . . but I’m taking no chances, Travis. I never thought 
I’d have a baby, never dared dream it, and now I’ve got this hinkey feeling that 
I was never meant to have it and that it’s going to be taken away from me if I 
don’t take every precaution, if I don’t do everything just right. So I’m not 
taking another drink until it’s born. I’m not going to eat too much red meat, 
and I’m going to eat more vegetables. I never have smoked, so that’s not a 
worry. I’m going to gain exactly as much weight as Dr. Weingold tells me I 
should, and I’m going to do my exercises, and I’m going to have the most perfect 
baby the world has ever seen.”
“Of course you are,” he said, filling their wine glasses with sparkling apple 
cider and Pouring some in a dish for Einstein.
“Nothing will go wrong,” she said.
“Nothing,” he said.
They toasted the baby—and Einstein, who was going to make a terrific godfather, 
uncle, grandfather, and furry guardian angel.
Nobody mentioned The Outsider.
 
 
Later that night, in bed in the dark, after they had made love and were just 
holding each other, listening to their hearts beating in unison, he dared to 
say, “Maybe, with what might be coming our way, we shouldn’t be having a baby 
just now.”
“Hush,” she said.
“But—’’
“We didn’t plan for this baby,” she said. “In fact, we took precautions against 
it. But it happened anyway. There’s something special about the fact that it 
happened in spite of all our careful precautions. Don’t you think? In spite of 
all I said before, about maybe not being meant to have it . . . well, that’s 
just the old Nora talking. The new Nora thinks we were meant to have it, that 
it’s a great gift to us—as Einstein was.”
“But considering what may be coming—”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll deal with that. We’ll come out of that 
all right. We’re ready. And then we’ll have the baby and really begin our life 
together. I love you, Travis.”
“I love you,” he said. “God, I love you.”
He realized how much she had changed from the mousy woman he’d met in Santa 
Barbara last spring. Right now, she was the strong one, the determined one, and 
she was trying to allay his fears.
She was doing a good job, too. He felt better. He thought about the baby, and he 
smiled in the dark, with his face buried in her throat. Though he now had three 
hostages to fortune—Nora, the unborn baby, and Einstein—he was in finer spirits 
than he had been in longer than he could remember. Nora had allayed his fears.
 
 
2
Vince Nasco sat in an elaborately carved Italian chair with a deep glossy finish 
that had acquired its remarkable transparency only after a couple of Centuries 
of regular polishing.
To his right was a sofa and two more chairs and a low table of equal elegance, 
arranged before a backdrop of bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes that 
had never been read. He knew they had never been read because Mario Tetragna, 
whose private study this was, had once pointed to them with pride and said, 
“Expensive books. And as good as the day they were made because they’ve never 
been read. Never. Not a one.”
In front of him was the immense desk at which Mario Tetragna reviewed earnings 
reports from his managers, issued memos about new ventures, and ordered people 
killed. The don was at that desk now, overflowing his leather chair, eyes 
closed. He looked as if he was dead of clogged arteries and a fat-impacted 
heart, but he was only considering Vince’s request.
Mario “The Screwdriver” Tetragna—respected patriarch of his immediate blood 
family, much-feared don of the broader Tetragna Family that controlled drug 
traffic, gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking, pornography, and other organized 
criminal activity in San Francisco—was a five-foot-seven-inch, 
three-hundred-pound tub with a face as plump and greasy and smooth as an 
overstuffed sausage casing. It was hard to believe that this rotund specimen 
could have built an infamous criminal operation. True, Tetragna had been young 
once, but even then he would have been short, and he had the look of a man who’d 
been fat all his life. His pudgy, stubby-fingered hands reminded Vince of a 
baby’s hands. But they were the hands that ruled the Family’s empire.
When Vince had looked into Mario Tetragna’s eyes, he instantly realized that the 
don’s stature and his all too evident decadence were of no importance. The eyes 
were those of a reptile: flat, cold, hard, watchful. If you weren’t careful, if 
you displeased him, he would hypnotize you with those eyes and take you the way 
a snake would take a mesmerized mouse; he would choke you down whole and digest 
you.
Vince admired Tetragna. He knew this was a great man, and he wished he could 
tell the don that he, too, was a man of destiny. But he had learned never to 
speak of his immortality, for in the past such talk had earned him ridicule from 
a man he’d thought would understand.
Now, Don Tetragna opened his reptilian eyes and said, “Let me be certain I 
understand. You are looking for a man. This is not Family business. It is a 
private grudge.”
“Yes, sir,” Vince said.
“You believe this man may have bought counterfeit papers and may be living under 
a new name. He would know how to obtain such papers, even though he is not a 
member of any Family, not of the fratellanza?”
“Yes, sir. His background is such that . . . he would know.”
“And you believe he would have obtained these papers in either Los Angeles or 
here,” Don Tetragna said, gesturing toward the window and the city of San 
Francisco with one soft, pink hand.
Vince said, “On August twenty-fifth he went on the run, starting from Santa 
Barbara by car because for various reasons he couldn’t take a plane anywhere. I 
believe he would’ve wanted a new identity as quickly as he could get it. At 
first, I assumed he’d go south and seek out counterfeit ID in Los
Angeles because that was closest. But I’ve spent the better part of two months 
talking with all the right people in L.A., Orange County, and even San Diego, 
all the people to whom this man could’ve gone for high-quality false ID, and 
I’ve had a few leads, but none panned out. So if he didn’t go south from Santa 
Barbara, he came north, and the only place in the north where he could get the 
kind of quality papers he would want—”
“Is in our fair city,” Don Tetragna said, gesturing again toward the window and 
smiling at the populous slopes below.
Vince supposed that the don was smiling fondly at his beloved San Francisco. But 
the smile didn’t look fond. It looked avaricious.
“And,” Don Tetragna said, “you would like for me to give you the names of the 
people who have my authorization to deal in papers such as this man needed.”
“If you can see it in your heart to grant me this favor, I would be most 
grateful.”
“They won’t have kept records.”
“Yes, sir, but they might remember something.”
“They’re in the business of not remembering.”
“But the human mind never forgets, Don Tetragna. No matter how hard it tries, it 
never really forgets.”
“How true. And you swear that the man you seek is not a member of any Family?”
“I swear it.”
“This execution must not in any way be traced to my Family.”
“I swear it.”
Don Tetragna closed his eyes again, but not for as long as he had closed them 
before. When he opened them, he smiled broadly but, as always, it was a 
humorless smile. He was the least jolly fat man Vince had ever seen. “When your 
father married a Swedish girl rather than one of his own people, his family 
despaired and expected the worst. But your mother was a good wife, unquestioning 
and obedient. And they produced you—a most handsome son. But you’re more than 
handsome. You’re a good soldier, Vincent. You have done fine, clean work for the 
Families in New York and New Jersey, for those in Chicago, and also for us on 
this coast. Not very long ago, you did me the great service of crushing the 
cockroach Pantangela.”
“For which you paid me most generously, Don Tetragna,”
The Screwdriver waved one hand dismissively. “We’re all paid for our labors. But 
we’re not talking money here. Your years of loyalty and good service are worth 
more than money. Therefore, you are owed at least this One favor.”
“Thank you, Don Tetragna.”
“You’ll be given the names of those who provide such papers in this City, and 
I’ll see that they are all forewarned of your visit. They’ll cooperate fully.”
“If you say they will,” Vince said, rising and bowing with only his head and 
shoulders, “I know that it is true.”
The don motioned him to Sit down. “But before you attend to this private affair, 
I’d like you to take another contract. There’s a man in Oakland who is giving me 
much grief. He thinks I can’t touch him because he’s politically well connected 
and well guarded. His name is Ramon Velazquez. This will be a difficult job, 
Vincent.”
Vince carefully concealed his frustration and displeasure. He did not want to 
take on a troublesome hit right now. He wanted to concentrate on tracking down 
Travis Cornell and the dog. But he knew Tetragna’s contract was more a demand 
than an offer. To get the names of the people who sold false papers, he must 
first waste Velazquez.
He said, “I would be honored to squash any insect that has stung you. And 
there’ll be no charge this time.”
“Oh, I’d insist on paying you, Vincent.”
As ingratiatingly as he knew how, Vince smiled and said, “Please, Don Tetragna, 
let me do this favor. It would give me great pleasure.”
Tetragna appeared to consider the request, though this was what he expected—a 
free hit in return for helping Vince. He put both hands on his enormous belly 
and patted himself. “I am such a lucky man. Wherever I turn, people want to do 
me favors, kindnesses.”
“Not lucky, Don Tetragna,” Vince said, sick of their mannered conversation. “You 
reap what you sow, and if you reap kindness it is because of the seeds of 
greater kindness you’ve sown so broadly.”
Beaming, Tetragna accepted his offer to waste Velazquez for nothing. The 
nostrils of his porcine nose flared as if he had smelled something good to eat, 
and he said, “But now tell me . . . to satisfy my curiosity, what will you do to 
this other man when you catch him, this man with whom you have a personal 
vendetta?”
Blow his brains out and snatch his dog, Vince thought.
But he knew the kind of crap The Screwdriver wanted to hear, the same hard-assed 
stuff most of these guys wanted to hear from him, their favorite hired killer so 
he said, “Don Tetragna, I intend to cut off his balls, cut off his ears, cut out 
his tongue—and only then put an ice pick through his heart and stop his clock.”
The fat man’s eyes glittered with approval. His nostrils flared.
 
 
3
By Thanksgiving, The Outsider had not found the bleached-wood house in Big Sur.
Every night, Travis and Nora locked the shutters over the inside of the windows. 
They dead-bolted the doors. Retiring to the second floor, they slept with 
shotguns beside their bed and revolvers on their nightstands.
Sometimes, in the dead hours after midnight, they were awakened by strange 
noises in the yard or on the porch roof. Einstein padded from window
to window, sniffing urgently, but always he indicated that they had nothing to 
fear. On further investigation, Travis usually found a prowling raccoon or other 
forest creature.
Travis enjoyed Thanksgiving more than he had thought he would, given the 
circumstances. He and Nora cooked an elaborate traditional meal for just the 
three of them: roast turkey with chestnut dressing, a clam casserole, glazed 
carrots, baked corn, pepper slaw, crescent rolls, and pumpkin pie.
Einstein sampled everything because he had developed a much more sophisticated 
palate than an ordinary dog. He was still a dog, however, and though the only 
thing he strongly disliked was the sour pepper slaw, he preferred turkey above 
all else. That afternoon he spent a lot of time gnawing contentedly on the 
drumsticks.
Over the weeks, Travis had noticed that, like most dogs, Einstein would go out 
into the yard occasionally and eat a little grass, though sometimes it seemed to 
gag him. He did it again on Thanksgiving Day, and when Travis asked him if he 
liked the taste of grass, Einstein said no. “Then why do you try to eat it 
sometimes?”
NEED IT.
“Why?”
I DON’T KNOW.
“If you don’t know what you need it for, then how do you know you need it at 
all? Instinct?”
YES.
“Just instinct?”
DON’T KNOCK IT.
That evening, the three of them sat in piles of pillows on the living-room floor 
in front of the big stone fireplace, listening to music. Einstein’s golden coat 
was glossy and thick in the firelight. As Travis sat with one arm around Nora, 
petting the dog with his free hand, he thought eating grass must be a good idea 
because Einstein looked healthy and robust. Einstein sneezed a few times and 
coughed now and then, but those seemed natural reactions to the Thanksgiving 
overindulgence and to the warm, dry air in front of the fireplace. Travis was 
not for a moment concerned about the dog’s health.
 
 
4
On the afternoon of Friday, November 26, the balmy day after Thanksgiving, 
Garrison Dilworth was aboard his beloved forty-two-foot Hinckley Sou’wester, 
Amazing Grace, in his boat slip in the Santa Barbara harbor. He was polishing 
brightwork and, diligently bent to his task, almost didn’t see the two men in 
business suits as they approached along the dock. He looked up as they were 
about to announce themselves, and he knew who they were— not their names, but 
who they must work for—even before they showed him their credentials.
One was named Johnson.
The other was Soames.
Pretending puzzlement and interest, he invited them aboard.
Stepping off the dock, down onto the deck, the one named Johnson said, “We’d 
like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Dilworth.”
“What about?” Garrison inquired, wiping his hands on a white rag.
Johnson was a black man of ordinary size, even a little gaunt, haggard-looking, 
yet imposing.
Garrison said, “National Security Agency, you say? Surely, you don’t think I’m 
in the hire of the KGB?”
Johnson smiled thinly. “You’ve done work for Nora Devon?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Nora? Are you serious? Well, I can assure you that Nora 
isn’t the sort of person to be involved—”
“You are her attorney, then?” Johnson asked.
Garrison glanced at the freckle-faced younger man, Agent Soames, and again 
raised his eyebrows as if to ask if Johnson was always this chilly. Soames 
stared expressionlessly, taking his cue from the boss.
Oh my, we’re in trouble with these two, Garrison thought.
 
 
After his frustrating and unsuccessful questioning of Dilworth, Lem sent Cliff 
Soames off on a series of errands: begin the procedures to obtain a court order 
allowing taps to be placed on the attorney’s home and office telephones; find 
the three pay phones nearest his office and the three nearest his house, and 
arrange for taps to be put on those as well; obtain telephone-company records of 
all long-distance calls made from Dilworth’s home and office phones; bring in 
extra men from the Los Angeles office to staff an around-the-clock surveillance 
of Dilworth, starting within three hours.
While Cliff was attending to those things, Lem strolled around the boat docks in 
the harbor, hoping the sounds of the sea and the calming sight of rolling water 
would help clear his mind and focus his thoughts on his problems. God knew, he 
needed desperately to get focused. Over six months had passed since the dog and 
The Outsider had escaped from Banodyne, and Lem had lost almost fifteen pounds 
in the pursuit. He had not slept well in months, had little interest in food, 
and even his sex life had suffered.
There’s such a thing as trying too hard, he told himself. It causes constipation 
of the mind.
But such admonishments did no good. He was still as blocked as a pipe full of 
concrete.
For three months, since they found Cornell’s Airstream in the school parking lot 
the day after Hockney’s murder, Lem had known that Cornell and the woman had 
been returning, on that August night, from a trip to Vegas, Tahoe, and Monterey. 
Nightclub table cards from Vegas, hotel stationery, matchbooks, and gasoline 
credit-card receipts had been found in the trailer and pickup truck, pinpointing 
every stop of their itinerary. He had not known
the woman’s identity, yet he had assumed she was a girlfriend, nothing more, but 
of course he should never have assumed any such thing. Only a few days ago, when 
one of his own agents went to Vegas to marry, Lem had finally realized that 
Cornell and the woman could have gone to Vegas for that same purpose. Suddenly 
their trip had looked like a honeymoon. Within hours, he confirmed that Cornell 
had, in fact, been married in Clark County, Nevada, on August 11, to Nora Devon 
of Santa Barbara.
Seeking the woman, he discovered that her house had been sold six weeks ago, 
after she’d vanished with Cornell. Looking into the sale, he found she had been 
represented by her attorney, Garrison Dilworth.
By freezing Cornell’s assets, Lem thought he had made it harder for the man to 
continue a fugitive existence, but now he discovered that Dilworth had helped 
slip twenty thousand out of Cornell’s bank and that all of the proceeds from the 
sale of the woman’s house had been transferred to her somehow. Furthermore, 
through Dilworth, she had closed out her local bank accounts four weeks ago, and 
that money also was in her hands. She and her husband and the dog might now have 
sufficient resources to remain in hiding for years.
Standing on the dock, Lem stared at the sun-spangled sea, which slapped 
rhythmically against the pilings. The motion nauseated him.
He looked up at the soaring, cawing seagulls. Instead of being calmed by their 
graceful flight, he grew edgy.
Garrison Dilworth was intelligent, clever, a born fighter. Now that the link had 
been made between him and the Cornells, the attorney promised to take the NSA to 
court to unfreeze Travis’s assets. “You’ve filed no charges against the man,” 
Dilworth had said. “What toadying judge would grant the power to freeze his 
accounts? Your manipulation of the legal system to hamper an innocent citizen is 
unconscionable.”
Lem could have filed charges against Travis and Nora Cornell for the violation 
of all sorts of laws designed to preserve the national security, and by doing so 
he’d have made it impossible for Dilworth to continue lending assistance to the 
fugitives. But filing charges meant attracting media attention. Then the 
harebrained story about Cornell’s pet panther—and perhaps the NSA’s entire 
cover-up—would come down like a paper house in a thunderstorm.
His only hope was that Dilworth would try to get in touch with the Cornells to 
tell them that his association with them had been at last uncovered and that 
contact between them would have to be far more circumspect in the future. Then, 
with luck, Lem would pinpoint the Cornells through their telephone number. He 
did not have much hope of everything working out that easily. Dilworth was no 
fool.
Looking around at the Santa Barbara yacht harbor, Lem tried to relax, for he 
knew he needed to be calm and fresh if he was to outthink the old attorney. The 
hundreds of pleasure boats at the docks, sails furled or packed away, bobbed 
gently on the rolling tide, and other boats with unfurled sails glided Serenely 
out toward the open sea, and people in bathing suits were sunning
on the decks or having early cocktails, and the gulls darted like stitching 
needles across the blue and white quilt of the sky, and people were fishing from 
the stone breakwater, and the scene was achingly picturesque, but it was also an 
image of leisure, great and calculated leisure, with which Lem Johnson could not 
identify. To Lem, too much leisure was a dangerous distraction from the cold, 
hard realities of life, from the competitive world, and any leisure activity 
that lasted longer than a few hours made him nervous and anxious to get back to 
work. Here was leisure measured in days, in weeks; here, in these expensive and 
lovingly crafted boats, was leisure measured in month long sailing excursions up 
and down the coast, so much leisure that it made Lern break into a sweat, made 
him want to scream.
He had The Outsider to worry about as well. There had been no sign of it since 
the day Travis Cornell had shot at it in his rented house, back at the end of 
August. Three months ago. What had the thing been doing in those three months? 
Where had it been hiding? Was it still after the dog? Was it dead?
Maybe, out in the wilds, it had been bitten by a rattlesnake, or maybe it had 
fallen off a cliff.
God, Lem thought, let it be dead, please, give me that much of a break. Let it 
be dead.
But he knew The Outsider was not dead because that would be too easy. Nothing in 
life was that easy. The damn thing was out there, stalking the dog. It had 
probably suppressed the urge to kill people it encountered because it knew each 
murder drew Lem and his men closer to it, and it did not want to be found before 
it had killed the dog. When the beast had torn the dog and the Cornells to 
bloody pieces, then it would once again begin to vent its rage on the population 
at large, and every death would hang heavily on Lem Johnson’s conscience.
Meanwhile, the investigation into the murders of the Banodyne scientists was 
dead in the water. In fact, that second NSA task force had been dismantled. 
Obviously, the Soviets had hired outsiders for those hits, and there was no way 
to find out whom they had brought in.
A deeply tanned guy in white shorts and Top-Siders passed Lem and said, 
“Beautiful day!”
“Like hell,” Lem said.
 
 
5
The day after Thanksgiving, Travis walked into the kitchen to get a glass of 
milk and saw Einstein having a sneezing fit, but he did not think much of it. 
Nora, even quicker than Travis to worry about the retriever’s welfare, was also 
unconcerned. In California, the pollen count peaks in spring and autumn; 
however, because the climate permits a twelve-month cycle of flowers, no season 
is pollen-free. Living in the woods, the situation was exacerbated.
That night, Travis was awakened by a sound he could not identify. Instantly 
alert, every trace of sleep banished, he sat up in the dark and reached for the 
shotgun on the floor beside the bed. Holding the Mossberg, he listened for the 
noise, and in a minute or so it came again: in the second-floor hallway.
He eased out of bed without waking Nora and went cautiously to the doorway. The 
hail, like most places in the house, was equipped with a low-wattage 
night-light, and in the pale glow Travis saw that the noise came from the dog. 
Einstein was standing near the head of the stairs, coughing and shaking his 
head.
Travis went to him, and the retriever looked up. “You okay?”
A quick wag of the tale: Yes.
He stooped and ruffled the dog’s coat. “You sure?”
Yes.
For a minute, the dog pressed against him, enjoying being petted. Then he turned 
away from Travis, coughed a couple of times, and went downstairs.
Travis followed. In the kitchen, he found Einstein slurping water from the dish.
Having emptied the dish, the retriever went to the pantry, turned on the light, 
and began to paw lettered tiles out of the Lucite tubes.
THIRSTY.
“Are you sure you feel well?”
FINE. JUST THIRSTY. NIGHTMARE WOKE ME.
Surprised, Travis said, “You dream?”
DON’T YOU?
“Yeah. Too much.”
He refilled t