Watchers

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 perceived as enemies.
    “Yarbeck’s first task in the physical alteration of the baboon was to make it larger, big enough to threaten a grown man,” Lem said. “She decided that it would have to stand at least five feet and weigh one hundred to a hundred and ten pounds.”
    “That’s not so big,” Walt protested.
    “Big enough.”
    “I could swat down a man that size.”
    “A man, yes. But not this thing. It’s solid muscle, no fat at all, and far quicker than a man. Stop and think of how a fifty-pound pit bull can make mincemeat of a grown man, and you’ll realize what a threat Yarbeck’s warrior Could be at a hundred and ten.”
    The patrol car’s steam-silvered windshield seemed like a movie screen on Which Walt saw projected images of brutally murdered men: Wes Dalberg,
    Teel Porter . . . He closed his eyes but still saw cadavers. “Okay, yeah, I get your point. A hundred and ten pounds would be enough if we’re talking about something designed to fight and kill.”
    “So Yarbeck created a breed of baboons that would grow to greater size. Then she set to work altering the sperm and ova of her giant primates in other ways, sometimes by editing the baboon’s own genetic material, sometimes by introducing genes from other species.”
    Walt said, “The same sort of cross-species patch-and-stitch that led to the smart dog.”
    “I wouldn’t call it patch-and-stitch . . . but yeah, essentially the same techniques. Yarbeck wanted a large, vicious jaw on her warrior, something more like that of a German shepherd, even a jackal, so there would be room for more teeth, and she