Watchers

raised his head off the mattress again and stared at the dish. His lolling tongue looked dry and was coated with a gummy substance. He whined and licked his chops.
    “Maybe,” Travis said, “if we help him—”
    “No,” Jim Keene said. “Let him consider it. He’ll know if he feels up to it. We don’t want to force water that’s going to make him vomit again. He’ll know by instinct if the time is right.”
    With some groaning and wheezing, Einstein shifted on the foam mattress, rolling off his side, half onto his belly. He put his nose to the dish, sniffed the water, put his tongue to it tentatively, liked the first taste, had another, and drank a third of it before sighing and lying down again.
    Stroking the retriever, Jim Keene said, “I’d be very surprised if he doesn’t recover, fully recover, in time.”
     
     
    In time.
    That phrase bothered Travis.
    How much time would Einstein require for a full recovery? When The
    Outsider finally arrived, they would all be better off if Einstein was healthy and if all of his senses were functioning sharply. The infrared alarms notwithstanding, Einstein was their primary early-warning system.
    After the last patient left at five-thirty, Jim Keene slipped out for half an hour on a mysterious errand, and when he returned he had a bottle of champagne. “I’m not much of a drinking man, but certain occasions demand a nip or two.”
    Nora had pledged to drink nothing during her pregnancy, but even the most solemn pledge could be stretched under these circumstances.
    They got glasses and drank in the surgery, toasting Einstein, who watched them for a few minutes but, exhausted, soon fell asleep.
    “But a natural sleep,” Jim noted. “Not induced with sedatives.”
    Travis said, “How long will he need to recover?”
    “To shake off distemper—a few more days, a week. I’d like to keep him here two more days, anyway. You could go home now, if you want, but you’re also welcome to stay. You’ve been quite a help.”
    “We’ll stay,” Nora said at once.
    “But after the distemper is beaten,” Travis said, “he’s going to be weak, isn’t he?”
    “At first, very weak,” Jim said. “But gradually he’ll get most if not all of his old strength back. I’m sure now that he never went into second-stage distemper, in spite of the convulsions. So perhaps by the first of the year he’ll be his old self, and there should be no lasting infirmities, no palsied shaking or anything like that.”
    The first of the year.
    Travis hoped that would be soon enough.
     
     
    Again, Nora and Travis split the night into two shifts. Travis took the first watch, and she relieved him in the surgery at three o’clock in the morning.
    Fog had seethed into Carmel. It roiled at the windows, softly insistent.
    Einstein was sleeping when Nora arrived, and she said, “Has he been awake much?”
    “Yeah,” Travis said. “Now and then.”
    “Have you . . . talked to him?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well?”
    Travis’s face was lined, haggard, and his expression was grave. “I’ve asked him questions that can be answered with a yes or no.”
    “And?”
    “He doesn’t answer them. He just blinks at me, or yawns, or he goes back to sleep.”
    “He’s very tired yet,” she said, desperately hoping that was the explanation for the retriever’s uncommunicative behavior. “He doesn’t have the strength even for questions and answers.”
    Pale and obviously depressed, Travis said, “Maybe. I don’t know . . . but I think . . . he seems . . . confused.”
    “He hasn’t shaken the disease yet,” she said. “He’s still in the grip of it, beating the damn stuff, but still in its grip. He’s bound to be a little muddleheaded for a while yet.”
    “Confused,” Travis repeated.
    “It’ll pass.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it’ll pass.”
    But he sounded as if he believed that Einstein would never be the same again.
    Nora knew what Travis must be thinking: it was the Cornell Curse again, which he professed not to believe in but which he still feared in his heart of hearts. Everyone he loved was doomed to suffer and die young. Everyone he cared about was torn from him.
    That was all nonsense, of course, and Nora did not believe in it for a moment. But she knew how hard it was to shake off the past, to face only toward the future, and she sympathized with his inability to be optimistic just now. She also knew there was nothing she could do for him to haul him out