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.