WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

“Do you like rock and roll?” Nora asked.

One bark and, simultaneously, a wagging of the tail.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nora asked.

“Probably means ‘yes and no,’ “Travis said. “He likes some rock and roll. but

not all of it.”

Einstein wagged 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 treadmill. “They wouldn’t want to let you out of the lab, I guess. 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, no more excited, no more awestricken if he had been communicating with

an extraterrestrial intelligence.

6

I’m falling down a rabbit hole, Walt Gaines thought uneasily as he listened to

Lem Johnson.

This new high-tech world of space flight, computers in the home,

satellite-relayed telephone calls, factory robots, and now biological

engineering seemed utterly unrelated to the world in which he was born and grew

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 Armageddon within his own lifetime was something

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 kingdom of high technology could be delightful or frightening—

and occasionally both at the same time.

Like now.

The idea of an intelligent dog appealed to the child in him and made him want to

smile.

But something else—The Outsider—had escaped from those labs, and it scared the

bejesus out of him.

“The dog had no name,” Lem Johnson said. “That’s not so unusual. Most scientists

who work with lab animals never name them. If you’ve named an animal, you’ll

inevitably begin 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 name was given to

it. Everyone simply called it ‘the dog,’ which was enough to differentiate it

from all of Weatherby’s other pups because they’d been referred to by numbers.

Anyway, at the same time, Dr. Yarbeck was working 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 animal with dramatically increased

intelligence—but one also designed to accompany men into war as police dogs

accompanied cops in dangerous 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 human beings, of course, not as smart as the dog

that Weatherby was developing. It would be sheer madness to create a killing

machine as intelligent as the people who would have to use and control it.

Everyone had read Frankenstein or had seen one of the old Karloff movies, and no

one underestimated the dangers inherent in Yarbeck’s research.

Choosing to work with monkeys and apes because of their naturally high

intelligence and because they already possessed humanlike hands, Yarbeck

ultimately selected baboons as the base species for her dark acts of creation.

Baboons were among the smartest of primates, good raw material. They were deadly

and effective fighters by nature, with impressive claws and fangs, fiercely

motivated by the territorial imperative, and eager to attack those whom they

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *