“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.