Page 30 (1/2)

"What’s that supposed to mean?" Nora asked

"Probably means ’yes and no,’ "Travis said "He likes soed 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 treaduess 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, nowith an extraterrestrial intelligence

6

I’ht uneasily as he listened to Leht, computers in the home, satellite-relayed telephone calls, factory robots, and now biological engineering seerew 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 Ar 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 kingdo- and occasionally both at the sa appealed to the child in hi else-The Outsider-had escaped fro had no name," Lem Johnson said "That’s not so unusual Most scientists ith lab animals never name thein 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 na,’ which was enough to differentiate it from all of Weatherby’s other pups because they’d been referred to by nu 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 anience-but one also designed to accoerous 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 hu that Weatherby was developing It would be sheer ent as the people ould have to use and control it Everyone had read Frankenstein or had seen one of the old Karloff ers inherent in Yarbeck’s research

Choosing to ith ence and because they already possessed humanlike hands, Yarbeck ultimately selected baboons as the base species for her dark acts of creation Baboons were aood raw hters by nature, with is, fiercely er to attack those whom they perceived as enemies

"Yarbeck’s first task in the physical alteration of the baboon was to rown 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 aIt’s solid muscle, no fat at all, and far quicker than a man Stop and think of how a fifty-pound pit bull can rown 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 seees of brutally ,

Teel PorterHe 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 soht and kill"

"So Yarbeck created a breed of baboons that would grow to greater size Then she set to work altering the speriant pri the baboon’s own genetic enes from other species"

Walt said, "The same sort of cross-species patch-and-stitch that led to the s"

"I wouldn’t call it patch-and-stitchbut yeah, essentially the sae, vicious jaw on her warrior, so more like that of a German shepherd, even a jackal, so there would be rooer and sharper and perhaps slightly hooked, which e the baboon’s head and totally alter its facial structure to accoed, 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 eney air, Walt Gaines felt a coldness in his belly, as if he had sed big chunks of ice "Didn’t Yarbeck or anyone else consider the immorality of this, for Christ’s sake? Didn’t any of theoddaation to let the public know about this, to bloide open And so do I"

"No such thing," Leewell, that’s strictly a religious point of view Actions can be either e can’t be labeled that way To a scientist, to any educated e is e, in Yarbeck’s case, wasn’ton one or the other’s patio on weekends, drinking Corona, dealing with the weighty proble Backyard philosophers Beery sages taking s 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 re 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 iht a uess, if we held scientists responsible for the bad things that flowed froo

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 fro himself a moment to think It wasn’t so otten to hi the Orange County hills that o public, warn the unorld that soerous was loose upon the earth But that would be playing into the hands of the new Luddites, ould use Yarbeck’s warrior to generate public hysteria in an atte an end to all recombinant-DNA research Already, such research had created strains of corn and wheat that could groith 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 ht save a couple of lives in the short run, but hethe world the beneficial miracles of recombinant-DNA research, which would cost tens of thousands of lives in the long run