“Oh, Jesus!” yipped one of the guards. “Don’t come closer, little girl. You stand right there.”
They took the light off her, and after a few seconds of blinking, she could see one of them talking on a portable phone. Robbie leaned against her leg. She reached down to scratch him behind the ears. “It’ll be all right. They’ll get a doctor,” she said.
A couple of minutes later, while Jenny stood silently and the guards stared at her, a figure on a bicycle pedaled up the road from the campus. It stopped by the guards, leaning the bike against the fence.
“Let me out,” she said. When the woman got close, Jenny saw that her blonde hair was tied into a ponytail, and that she wore a medical smock.
“Are you a doctor?” Jenny asked. “My dad needs a doctor right away. He’s only a couple of blocks on the other side of the bridge.”
The woman stopped, six feet away. Her voice sounded strained, as if she were trying not to scream. “We can help you, but you need to come inside right now. You can’t be outside the fence without permission.”
Jenny nodded and took a step forward.
“No, no!” gasped the woman. “The dog has to stay here. You can’t bring him inside.”
Confused, Jenny stopped. “This is just Robbie. He won’t bite or anything.”
The woman sidled toward Jenny, keeping away from Robbie. “You don’t understand. We can get your dad help, but the dog has to stay outside. We have to get behind the fence now, without the dog, or it might be too late.”
She put her hand on Jenny’s arm. “The dog will be fine, but we won’t be if we stay out here. Obstructionists disappear. They’ve let us keep the hospital open, but we have to do it by their rules.”
In the distance, Jenny heard a humming.
“Oh, God,” the woman whispered. “Quick, girl. We’ve got to go now.”
Jenny let herself be led to the fence without thinking. The humming grew louder. One of the aliens’ walking vehicles was coming.
Suddenly she pulled free. “I can’t leave Robbie out here!” But the men at the gate grabbed her, hustled her to the other side of the fence and closed it. One of them picked her up so that she faced backwards, looking at Robbie as they ran from the humming sound.
The last she saw of Robbie, he was still sitting on the street, his head tilted to one side and then to the other as if waiting for her to call him.
“Run away, Robbie! Run away and hide!” But the dog didn’t move. The man carried her into a building, closing the door behind them.
Inside, the woman in the medical smock gathered supplies. “We’ll get your dad when the machine’s gone,” she said. “They’re automatic. Doesn’t matter who you are if you’re on the wrong side of the fence. You’ll have to take us to him.”
“Robbie will run away. He’s a smart dog,” Jenny said. “They wouldn’t hurt a dog, would they?”
The woman paused, her hand partway into her medical bag. “No, darling. They don’t hurt dogs. They take them to a better place, far away from us.” She looked down, hiding her eyes, and continued stuffing equipment into the bag. “They took my dog. He was a big, friendly Labrador, and I guess I was a monster, because they took him away too.”
Thirty minutes later, Jenny led a line of people out of the building. They carried a stretcher, and they all had flashlights. The spot where Robbie had stood was empty. He wasn’t under the overpass.
Dad had rolled on his side under the tablecloth, and he was shivering. Jenny put her hand on his back as the woman inserted an I.V.. She felt his shaking, but he was still alive, and she’d found help. As soon as they arrived, she felt the responsibility lifting from her shoulders. Doctors would help. Doctors could cure anything. She picked up the photo album from the dew-slick grass.
As they marched back to the campus, Dad in the stretcher, Jenny shined her light into every shadow, and when they passed houses, she checked behind bushes, expecting at each new spot to see him, snout on his paws, tail wagging, waiting for her to pet his head. She called and called until one of the men asked her, not unkindly, to stop.
He wasn’t on one of the lawns, nor was he hiding beside a cement block beneath the broken overpass. He wasn’t waiting by the fence.
Jenny stopped at the gate as the line of people went on toward the hospital. She could hear their feet on the cement until they faded away. Fingers hooked in the chain-link, Jenny listened as hard as she could for a long time. Robbie would bark if he couldn’t find her. He always barked when he was lonely. Jenny listened, but he never barked. There were no noises at all. Not a single sound in the entire city.
No dog anywhere sending a joyful yelp into the night.
The cold metal of the fence burned against her hand while the smoke-filled breeze pushed against her face, irritating her eyes. Light only reached to the bridge, and the world beyond was all shadows, empty and lifeless.
I’m not a monster, Jenny thought, I don’t care what anyone says. She remembered the photo of them on the pier, the dog sitting before her. Suddenly the memory was very clear: the sun warming her shoulders, the water slapping at the wood beneath her feet, a hint of fish and wet sand in the air.
I’m not, she thought, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not a monster.
Robbie loves me.
THE SMALL ASTRAL OBJECT GENIUS
Dustin set the Peek-a-boo on his desk next to the computer. The softball-sized metal sphere rolled an inch before clicking against the keyboard, the only sound in the silent house. The house was almost always quiet now, noiseless as an empty kitchen with its cabinets neatly shut, the plates and dishes gradually collecting dust. Where to send it? Maybe this time something incredible would happen, if he just kept trying.
His computer listed options, starting with large objects or small ones. After he’d first bought the Peek-a-boo, he spent weeks sending it to the large ones: galaxies, nebulas, the gaseous remains of supernovas, star clusters. He’d double check the batteries, make sure the lens was clean, then choose one of the preprogrammed destinations. Sometimes he’d balance the device on his palm, hoping to feel the microsecond that it vanished in its dash across the light years before returning to his hand, but he never did. Not even a tingle. It sat against his skin, cool and hard and heavy, its absence too brief to sense.
An instant later, his computer pinged and the “picture taken” icon blinked red and green. Immediately would follow a confirmation from the Peek-a-boo Project website. “Thank you for participating,” the message would say, or, if he was really lucky, “New object! You have contributed to man’s knowledge of the universe,” and his face would tingle with joy.
He’d heard rumors among his friends that there were other messages, but he’d never seen them himself.
Lots of times, of course, the monitor showed nothing, just a black screen with maybe a wink of a star here or there, but every once in a while, the Peek-a-boo appeared in the distant space oriented perfectly and captured a spectacular image. He used to like nebulas best. Several DVDs full of pictures rested on the shelf above the computer. He’d devoted an entire disk to the Rosette Nebula, taking pictures from all the angles over the course of two weeks, its vermillion gasses thrown out in parsecs wide petals, but lately he’d turned his attention to small objects: individual stars, planets, and moons.
On the monitor, the computer gave him hundreds of preprogrammed selections. He carefully entered instead the coordinates for a planet circling Bellatrix, a giant star about 240 light years away on Orion’s right shoulder, then sent the Peek-a-boo. “Picture taken,” winked the message. The image began forming on the screen. Dustin leaned back in his chair, his hands resting one on the other on his chest.