himself a moment to think. It wasn’t so much the heat and humidity that had
gotten to him. It was the thought of Yarbeck’s warrior roaming the Orange County
hills that made him break out in a sweat.
He wanted to go public, warn the unwary world that something new and dangerous
was loose upon the earth. But that would be playing into the hands of the new
Luddites, who would use Yarbeck’s warrior to generate public hysteria in an
attempt to bring an end to all recombinant-DNA research. Already, such research
had created strains of corn and wheat that could grow with 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 monstrosity to the world, he might save a couple of lives in the short
run, but he might be playing a role in denying the world the beneficial miracles
of recombinant-DNA research, which would cost tens of thousands of lives in the
long run.
“Shit,” Walt said. “It’s not a black-and-white issue, is it?”
Lem said, “That’s what makes life interesting.”
Walt smiled sourly. “Right now, it’s a whole hell of a lot more interesting than
I care for. Okay. I can see the wisdom of keeping a lid on this. Besides, if we
made it public, you’d have a thousand half-assed adventurers out there looking
for the thing, and they’d end up victims of it, or they’d gun down one another.”
“Exactly.”
“But my men could help keep the lid on by joining in the search.”
Lem told him about the hundred men from Marine Intelligence units who were still
combing the foothills, dressed as civilians, using high-tech tracking gear and,
in some cases, bloodhounds. “I’ve already got more men on line than you could
supply. We’re already doing as much as can be done. Now will you do the right
thing? Will you stay out of it?”
Frowning, Walt said, “For now. But I want to be kept informed.”
Lem nodded. “All right.”
“And I have more questions. For one thing, why do they call it The Outsider?”
“Well, the dog was the first breakthrough, the first of the lab subjects to
display unusual intelligence. This one was next. They were the only two
successes: the dog and the other. At first, they added capital letters to the
way they pronounced it, The Other, but in time it became The Outsider because
that seemed to fit better. It was not an improvement on one of God’s creations,
as was the dog; it was entirely outside of creation, a thing apart. An
abomination—though no one actually said as much. And the thing was aware of its
status as an outsider, acutely aware.”
“Why not just call it the baboon?”
“Because . . . it doesn’t really look much of anything like a baboon any more.
Not like anything you’ve ever seen—except in a nightmare.”
Walt did not like the expression on his friend’s dark face, in his eyes. He
decided not to ask for a better description of The Outsider; perhaps that was
something he did not need to know.
Instead, he said, “What about the Hudston, Weatherby, and Yarbeck murders? Who
was behind all that?”
“We don’t know the man who pulled the trigger, but we know the Soviets hired
him. They also killed another Banodyne man who was on vacation in Acapulco.”
Walt felt as if he were jolting through one of those invisible barriers again,
into an even more complicated world. “Soviets? Were we talking about the
Soviets? How’d they get into the act?”
“We didn’t think they knew about the Francis Project,” Lem said. “But they did.
Apparently, they even had a mole inside Banodyne who reported out to them on our
progress. When the dog and, subsequently, The Outsider escaped, the mole
informed the Soviets, and evidently the Soviets decided to take advantage of the
chaos and do us even more damage. They killed every project leader—Yarbeck and
Weatherby and Haines—plus Hudston, who had once been a project leader but no
longer worked at Banodyne. We think they did this for two reasons: first, to