which Dr. Yarbeck had been working: in the dark, a good genetically engineered
warrior would be able to see as well as a cat. So why would it want a
flashlight? Unless . . . maybe even a creature of the night was sometimes afraid
of darkness.
That thought jolted Lem, and suddenly he pitied the beast as he had pitied it
that day he had watched it communicating by crude sign language with Yarbeck,
the day it had said that it wanted to tear its own eyes out so it would never
have to look at itself again.
Bockner moved the beam of his own flashlight and focused it on twenty candy
wrappers. Apparently, The Outsider had stolen a couple family packs of candy
somewhere along the way. The strange thing was that the wrappers were not
crumpled but were smoothed out and laid flat on the floor along the back
wall—ten from Reese’s peanut butter cups and ten from Clark Bars. Perhaps The
Outsider liked the bright colors of the wrappers. Or perhaps it kept them to
remind itself of the pleasure that the candy had given it because, Once those
treats were gone, there was not much other pleasure to be had in the hard life
to which it had been driven
In the farthest corner from the bed, deep in shadows, was a pile of bones. The
bones of small animals. Once the candy was eaten, The Outsider had been forced
to hunt in order to feed itself. And without the means to light a
fire, it had fed savagely on raw meat. Perhaps it kept the bones in the cave
because it was afraid that, by disposing of them outside, it would be leaving
clues to its whereabouts. By storing them in the darkest, farthest corner of its
haven, it seemed to have a civilized sense of neatness and order, but to Lem it
also seemed as if The Outsider had hidden the bones in the shadows because it
was ashamed of its own savagery.
Most pathetically of all, a peculiar group of items was stored in a niche in the
wall above the grassy bed. No, Lem decided, not just stored. The items were
carefully arranged, as if for display, the way an aficionado of art glass or
ceramics or Mayan pottery might display a valuable collection. There was a round
stained-glass bauble of the sort that people hung from their patio covers to
sparkle in the sun; it was about four inches in diameter, and it portrayed a
blue flower against a pale-yellow background. Beside that bauble was a bright
copper pot that had probably once contained a plant on the same—or
another—patio. Next to the pot were two things that surely had been taken from
inside a house, perhaps from the same place where The Outsider had stolen the
candy: first, a fine porcelain study of a pair of red-feathered cardinals
sitting on a branch, every detail exquisitely crafted; second, a crystal
paperweight. Apparently, even within the alien breast of Yarbeck’s monstrosity,
there was an appreciation of beauty and a desire to live not as an animal but as
a thinking being in an ambience at least lightly touched by civilization.
Lem felt sick at heart as he considered the lonely, tortured, self-hating,
inhuman yet self-aware creature that Yarbeck had brought into the world.
Last of all, the niche above the grass bed held a ten-inch-high figure of Mickey
Mouse that was also a coin bank.
Lem’s pity swelled because he knew why the bank had appealed to The Outsider. At
Banodyne, there had been experiments to determine the depth and nature of the
dog’s and The Outsider’s intelligence, to discover how close their perceptions
were to those of a human being. One of the experiments had been designed to
probe their ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality. On several
occasions, the dog and The Outsider had separately been shown a videotape that
had been assembled from film clips of all kinds: bite of old John Wayne movies,
footage from George Lucas’s Star Wars, news films, scenes from a wide variety of
documentaries—and old Mickey Mouse, cartoons. The reactions of the dog and The