Watchers

nights, more than a score of Diamond Bar’s domestic animals had been torn to pieces, and the condition of the carcasses left no doubt in Lem’s mind that the perpetrator was The Outsider.
    Then the trail went ice-cold for more than a week, until the morning of June 18, when two young campers at the foot of Johnstone Peak, on the southern flank of the vast Angeles National Forest, reported seeing something they insisted was “from another world.” They had locked themselves in their van, but the creature had tried repeatedly to get in at them, going so far as to smash a side window with a rock. Fortunately, the pair kept a .32 pistol in the van, and one of them opened fire on their assailant, driving it off. The press treated the campers as a couple of kooks, and on the evening news the happy-talk anchorpersons got a lot of mileage out of the story.
    Lem believed the young couple. On a map, he traced the thinly populated corridor of land by which The Outsider could have gone from Diamond Bar to the area below Johnstone Peak: over the San Jose Hills, through Bonelli Regional Park, between San Dimas and Glendora, then into the wilds. It would have had to cross or go under three freeways that cut through the area, but if it had traveled in the deep of night, when there was little or no traffic, it could have passed unseen. He shifted the hundred men from Marine Intelligence into that portion of the forest, where they continued their search in civilian dress, in groups of three and four.
    He hoped the campers had hit The Outsider with at least one shot. But no blood was found at their campsite.
    He was beginning to worry that The Outsider might evade capture for a long time. Lying north of the city of Los Angeles, the Angeles National Forest was discouragingly immense.
    “Nearly as large as the entire state of Delaware,” Cliff Soames said after he had measured the area on the wall map pinned to the bulletin board in Lem’s office and had calculated the square miles. Cliff had come from Delaware. He was relatively new to the West and still had a newcomer’s amazement at the gigantic scale of everything at this end of the continent. He was also young, with the enthusiasm of youth, and he was almost dangerously optimistic. Cliff’s upbringing had been radically different from Lem’s, and he did not feel himself to be on a tightrope or at risk of having his life destroyed by just one error, by a single failure. Sometimes Lem envied him.
    Lem stared at Cliff’s scribbled calculations. “If it takes refuge in the San Gabriel Mountains, feeding on wildlife and content with solitude, venturing out only rarely to vent its rage on the people living along the periphery of the preserve . . . it might never be found.”
    “But remember,” Cliff said, “it hates the dog more than it hates men. It wants the dog and has the ability to find it.”
    “So we think.”
    “And could it really tolerate a wild existence? I mean, yeah, it’s part savage, but it’s also smart. Maybe too smart to be content with a hardscrabble life in that rugged country.”
    “Maybe,” Lem said.
    “They’ll spot it soon, or it’ll do something to give us another fix on it,” Cliff predicted.
    That was June 18.
    When they found no trace of The Outsider during the next ten days, the expense of keeping a hundred men in the field grew insupportable. On June 29, Lem finally had to relinquish the Marines that had been put at his disposal and send them back to their bases.
    Day by day, Cliff was heartened by the lack of developments and was willing to believe that The Outsider had suffered a mishap, that it was dead, that they would never hear of it again.
    Day by day, Lem sank deeper into gloom, certain that he had lost control of the situation and that The Outsider would reappear in a most dramatic fashion, making its existence known to the public. Failure.
    The only bright spot was that the beast was now in Los Angeles County, out of Walt Gaines’s jurisdiction. If there were additional victims, Walt might not even learn of them and would not have to be persuaded, all over again, to remain out of the case.
    By Thursday, July 15, exactly two months after the breakout at Banodyne, almost one month after the campers had been terrorized by a supposed extraterrestrial or smaller cousin of Bigfoot, Lem was convinced he would soon have to consider alternate careers. No one had blamed him for the way things had gone. The heat was on him to