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However, that was behind him; he was a new man, transformed by Einstein and Nora, and he was not going to run again, damned if he was.
    Einstein went rigid. He arched his back, thrust his head down and forward, and barked so furiously that saliva flew from his mouth.
    Travis took a step toward the dining-room arch.
    The retriever stayed at Travis’s side, barking more viciously.
    Holding the revolver in front of him, trying to take confidence from the powerful weapon, Travis eased forward another step, treading cautiously in the treacherous rubble. He was only two or three steps from the archway. He squinted into the gloomy dining room.
    Einstein’s barking resounded through the house until it seemed as if a whole pack of dogs must be loose in the place.
    Travis took one more step, then saw something move in the shadowy dining room.
    He froze.
    Nothing. Nothing moved. Had it been a phantom of the mind?
    Beyond the arch, layered shadows hung like gray and black crepe.
    He wasn’t sure if he had seen movement or merely imagined it.
    Back off, get out, now! the inner voice said.
    In defiance of it, Travis raised one foot, intending to step into the archway.
    The thing in the dining room moved again. This time there was no doubt of its presence, because it rushed out of the deepest darkness at the far side
    of that chamber, vaulted onto the dining-room table, and came straight at Travis, emitting a blood-freezing shriek. He saw lantern eyes in the gloom, and a nearly man-size figure that—in spite of the poor light—gave an impression of deformity. Then the thing was coming off the table, straight at him.
    Einstein charged forward to engage it, but Travis tried to step back and gain an extra second in which to squeeze off a shot. As he pulled the trigger, he slipped on the ruined books that littered the floor, and fell backward. The revolver roared, but Travis knew he had missed, had fired into the ceiling. For an instant, as Einstein scrambled toward the adversary, Travis saw the lantern-eyed thing more clearly, saw it work alligator jaws and crack open an impossibly wide mouth in a lumpish face, revealing wickedly hooked teeth.
    “Einstein, no!” he shouted, for he knew the dog would be torn to pieces in any confrontation with this hellish creature, and he fired again, twice, wildly, from his position on the floor.
    His cry and the shots not only brought Einstein to a halt but gave the enemy second thoughts about going up against an armed man. The thing turned— it was quick, far quicker than a cat—and crossed the unlighted dining room to the kitchen doorway. For a moment, he saw it silhouetted in the murky light from the kitchen, and he had the impression of something that had never been meant to stand erect but was standing erect anyway, something with a misshapen head twice as large as it ought to have been, a hunched back, arms too long and terminating in claws like the tines of a garden rake.
    He fired again and came closer the mark. The bullet tore out a chunk of the door frame.
    With a shriek, the beast disappeared into the kitchen.
    What in the name of God was it? Where had it come from? Had it really escaped from the same lab that had produced Einstein? But how had they made this monstrosity? And why? Why?
    He was a well-read man: in-fact, for the last few years, most of his time was devoted to books, so possibilities began to occur to him. Recombinant-DNA research was foremost among them.
    Einstein stood in the middle of the dining room, barking, facing the doorway where the thing had vanished.
    Lurching to his feet in the living room, Travis called the dog back to his side, and Einstein returned quickly, eagerly.
    He shushed the dog, listened intently. He heard Nora frantically calling his name from the yard out front, but he heard nothing in the kitchen.
    For Nora’s benefit, he shouted, “I’m okay! I’m all right! Stay out there!”
    Einstein was shivering.
    Travis could hear the loud two-part thudding of his own heart, and he could almost hear the sweat trickling down his face and down the small of his back, but he could hear nothing whatsoever to pinpoint that escapee from a nightmare. He did not think it had gone out the back door into the rear yard. For One thing, he figured the creature did not want to be seen by a lot of people and, therefore, only went outside at night, traveled exclusively in the dark, When it could slip even into a fair-sized town like Santa Barbara without