Crawling nearer to the dog on her hands and knees, Nora said, “Does that picture remind you of the family that owned you?”

The dog stared at her.

“Was there a mother, father, and new baby in the family you used to live with?”

The dog stared at her.

Still sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa, Travis said, “Gee, maybe we’ve got a real case of reincarnation on our hands. Maybe old Einstein remembers being a doctor, a mother, or a baby in a previous life.”

Nora would not dignify that suggestion with a response.

“A violin-playing baby,” Travis said.

Einstein mewled unhappily.

On her hands and knees in a doglike position, Nora was only two or three feet from the retriever, virtually face-to-face with him. “All right. This is getting us nowhere. We’ve got to do more than just have you associate one picture with another. We’ve got to be able to ask questions about these pictures and somehow get answers.”

“Give him paper and pen,” Travis said.

“This is serious,” Nora said, impatient with Travis as she had never been with the dog.

“I know it’s serious,” he said, “but it’s also ridiculous.”

She hung her head for a moment, like a dog suffering in summer heat, then suddenly looked up at Einstein and said, “How smart are you really, pooch?

You want to prove you’re a genius? You want to have our everlasting admiration and respect? Then here’s what you have to do: learn to answer my questions with a simple yes or no.”

The dog watched her closely, expectantly.

“If the answer to my question is yes-wag your tail,” Nora said. “But only if the answer is yes. While this test is under way, you’ve got to avoid wagging it out of habit or just because you get excited. Wagging is only for when you want to say yes. And when you want to say no, you bark once. Just once.”

Travis said, “Two barks mean ‘I’d rather be chasing cats,’ and three barks mean ‘Get me a Budweiser.’ “

“Don’t confuse him,” Nora said sharply.

“Why not? He confuses me.”

The dog did not even glance at Travis. His large brown eyes remained focused intently on Nora as she explained the wag-for-yes and bark-for-no system again.

“All right,” she said, “let’s try it. Einstein, do you understand the yes-no signs?”

The retriever wagged his tail five or six times, then stopped.

“Coincidence,” Travis said. “Means nothing.”

Nora hesitated a moment, framing her next question, then said, “Do you know my name?”

The tail wagged, stopped.

“Is my name… Ellen?”

The dog barked. No.

“Is my name… Mary?”

One bark. No.

“Is my name… Nona?”

The dog rolled his eyes, as if chastising her for trying to trick him. No wagging. One bark.

“is my name… Nora?”

Einstein wagged his tail furiously.

Laughing with delight, Nora crawled forward, sat up, and hugged the retriever.

“I’ll be damned,” Travis said, crawling over to join them.

Nora pointed to the photo on which the retriever still had one paw. “Did you react to this picture because it reminds you of the family you used to live with?”

One bark. No.

Travis said, “Did you ever live with any family?”

One bark.

“But you’re not a wild dog,” Nora said. “You must’ve lived somewhere before Travis found you.”

Studying the Blue Cross advertisement, Travis suddenly thought he knew all the right questions. “Did you react to this picture because of the baby?”

One bark. No.

“Because of the woman?”

No.

“Because of the man in the white lab coat?”

Much wagging: Yes, yes, yes.

“So he lived with a doctor,” Nora said. “Maybe a vet.”

“Or maybe a scientist,” Travis said as he followed the intuitive line of thought that had stricken him.

Einstein wagged a “yes” at the mention of scientist.

“Research scientist,” Travis said. Yes.

“In a lab,” Travis said. Yes, yes, yes. “You’re a lab dog?” Nora asked. Yes.

“A research animal,” Travis said. Yes.

“And that’s why you’re so bright.” Yes.

“Because of something they’ve done to you.” Yes.

Travis’s heart raced. They actually were communicating, by God, not just in broad strokes, and not just in the comparatively crude way he and Einstein had communicated the night that the dog had formed a question mark out of Milk-Bones. This was communication with extreme specificity. Here they were, talking as if they were three people-well, almost talking-and suddenly nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing could possibly be the same in a world where men and animals possessed equal (if different) intellects, where they faced life on equal terms, with equal rights, with similar hopes and dreams. All right, okay, so maybe he was blowing this out of proportion. Not all animals had suddenly been given human-level consciousness and intelligence; this was only one dog, an experimental animal, perhaps the only one of his kind. But Jesus. Jesus. Travis stared in awe at the retriever, and a chill swept through him, not a chill of fear but of wonder.

Nora spoke to the dog, and in her voice was a trace of the same awe that had briefly rendered Travis speechless: “They didn’t just let you go, did they?”

One bark. No.

“You escaped?”

Yes.

“That Tuesday morning I found you in the woods?” Travis asked. “Had you just escaped then?”

Einstein neither barked nor wagged his tail.

“Days before that?” Travis asked.

The dog whined.

“He probably has a sense of time,” Nora said, “because virtually all animals follow natural day-night rhythms, don’t they? They have instinctive clocks, biological clocks. But he probably doesn’t have any concept of calendar days.

He doesn’t really understand how we divide time up into days and weeks and months, so he has no way of answering your question.”

“Then that’s something we’ll have to teach him,” Travis said.

Einstein vigorously wagged his tail.

Thoughtfully, Nora said, “Escaped..

Travis knew what she must be thinking. To Einstein, he said, “They’ll be looking for you, won’t they?”

The dog whined and wagged his tail-which Travis interpreted as a “yes” with a special edge of anxiety.

4

An hour after sunset, Lemuel Johnson and Cliff Soames, trailed by two additional unmarked cars carrying eight NSA agents, arrived at Bordeaux Ridge. The unpaved street through the center of the unfinished housing tract was lined with vehicles, mostly black-and-whites bearing the Sheriffs Department shield, plus cars and a van from the coroner’s office.

Lem was dismayed to see that the press had already arrived. Both print journalists and television crews with minicams were being kept behind a police line, half a block from the apparent scene of the murder. By quietly suppressing details of the death of Wesley Dalberg in Holy Jim Canyon and of the associated murders of the scientists working at Banodyne, and by instituting an aggressive campaign of disinformation, the NSA had managed to keep the press ignorant of the connections among all these events. Lem hoped that the deputies manning these barriers were among Walt Gaines’s most trusted men and that they would meet reporters’ questions with stony silence until a convincing cover story could be developed.

Sawhorses were lifted out of the way to let the unmarked NSA cars through the police line, then were put into place again.

Lem parked at the end of the street, past the crime scene. He left Cliff Soames to brief the other agents, and he headed toward the unfinished house that appeared to be the focus of attention.

The patrol cars’ radios filled the hot night air with codes and jargon-and with a hiss-pop-crackle of static, as if the whole world were being fried on a cosmic griddle.