house in more than two weeks?"
  "Hairs were just all over your pants," Walt said.
  "A hundred hairs."
  "Like the dog had just been sitting there minutes before you came in."
  "Like, if I'd been two minutes sooner, I'd have set right down on the dog himself."
  Walt turned the steaks on the barbecue. "You're a pretty observant man, Lem, which 
ought to've taken you far in the line of work you were in. I just don't understand how, 
with all your talents, you managed to screw up the Banodyne case so thoroughly."
  They both laughed, as they always did.
  "Just luck, I guess," Lem said, which was what he always said, and he laughed again.
   
  3
  When James Garrison Hyatt celebrated his third birthday on June 28, his mother was 
pregnant with his first sibling, who eventually became his sister.
  They threw a party at the bleached-wood house on the forested slopes above the Pacific. 
Because the Hyatts would soon be moving to a new and larger house a bit farther up the 
coast, they made it a party to remember, not merely a birthday bash but a goodbye to the 
house that had first sheltered them as a family.
  Jim Keene drove in from Carmel with Pooka and Sadie, his two black labs, and his young 
golden retriever, Leonardo, who was usually called Leo. A few close friends came in from 
the real-estate office where Sam-"Travis" to everyone-worked in Carmel Highlands, and 
from the gallery in Cannel where Nora's paintings were exhibited and sold. These friends 
brought their retrievers, too, all of them second-litter offspring of Einstein and his 
mate, Minnie.
  Only Garrison Dilworth was missing. He had died in his sleep the previous year.
  They had a fine day, a grand time, not merely because they were friends and happy to be 
with one another, but because they shared a secret wonder and joy that would forever bind 
them into one enormous extended family.
  All members of the first litter, which Travis and Nora could not have borne adopting 
out, and which lived at the bleached-wood house, were also present:
  Mickey, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, Louie.
  The dogs had an even better time than the people, frolicking on the lawn, playing 
hide-and-seek in the woods, and watching videotapes on the TV in the living room.
  The canine patriarch participated in some of the games, but he spent much of his time 
with Travis and Nora and, as usual, stayed close to Minnie. He limped-as he would for the 
rest of his life-because his right hind leg had been cruelly mangled by The Outsider and 
would not have been usable at all if his vet had not been so dedicated to the restoration 
of the limb's function.
  Travis often wondered whether The Outsider had thrown Einstein against the nursery wall 
with great force and then had assumed he was dead. Or at the moment when it held the 
retriever's life in its hands, perhaps the thing had reached down within itself and found 
some drop of mercy that its makers had not designed into it but which had somehow been 
there anyway. Perhaps it remembered the one pleasure it and the dog had shared in the 
lab-the cartoons. And in remembering the sharing, perhaps it saw itself, for the first 
time, as having a dim potential to be like other living things. Seeing itself as like 
others, perhaps it then could not kill Einstein as easily as it had expected. After all, 
with a flick of those talons, it could have gutted him.
  But though he had acquired the limp, Einstein had lost the tattoo in his ear, thanks to 
Jim Keene. No one could ever prove that he was the dog from Banodyne-and he could still 
play "dumb dog" very well when he wished.
  At times during young Jimmy's third birthday extravaganza, Minnie regarded her mate and 
offspring with charmed befuddlement, perplexed by their attitudes and antics. Although 
she could never fully understand them, no mother of dogs ever received half the love that 
she was given by those she'd brought into the world. She watched over them, and they 
watched over her, guardians of each other.
  At the dark end of that good day, when the guests were gone, when Jimmy was asleep in 
his room, when Minnie and her first litter were settling down for the night, Einstein and 
Travis and Nora gathered at the pantry off the kitchen.
  The scrabble-tile dispenser was gone. In its place, an IBM computer stood on the floor. 
Einstein took a stylus in his mouth and tapped the keyboard. The message appeared on the 
screen:
  THEY GROW UP FAST.
  "Yes, they do," Nora said. "Yours faster than ours."
  ONE DAY THEY WILL BE EVERYWHERE.
  "One day, given time and a lot of litters," Travis said, "they'll be all over the 
world."
  SO FAR FROM ME. IT'S A SADNESS.
  "Yes, it is," Nora said. "But all young birds fly from the nest sooner or later."
  AND WHEN I'M GONE?
  "What do you mean?" Travis asked, stooping and ruffling the dog's thick coat.
  WILL THEY REMEMBER ME?
  "Oh yes, fur face," Nora said, kneeling and hugging him. "As long as there are dogs and 
as long as there are people fit to walk with them, they will all remember you."
  
  
  
  
  1