dogs out back were barking, and in the waiting room the Pom had been joined by a couple of other dogs … and a feminine, wavering tail that was unmistakably feline.

Mrs Alden popped in, looking distressed. 'Dr Etheridge

'All right,' he said, sounding cross. 'Excuse me, Ms Anderson.'

He left in a hurry, heading for the ward first. When he opened the door, the noise of the dogs seemed to double – they're going bugshit, Anderson thought, and that was all she had time to think, because Peter almost lunged out from under her hand. That idling growl deep in his throat suddenly roughened into a snarl. Etheridge, already hurrying down the ward's central corridor, dogs barking all around him and the door swinging slowly shut on its pneumatic elbow behind him, didn't hear, but Anderson did, and if she hadn't been lucky in her grab for Peter's collar, the beagle would have been across the room like a shot and into the ward after the doctor. The trembling and the deep growl … those hadn't been fear, she realized. They had been rage – it was inexplicable, completely unlike Peter, but that's what it had been.

Peter's snarl turned to a strangled sound – yark! – as Anderson pulled him back by the collar. He turned his head, and in Peter's rolling, red-rimmed right eye Anderson saw what she would later characterize only as fury at being turned from the course he wanted to follow. She could acknowledge the possibility that there was a flying saucer three hundred yards around its outer rim buried on her property; the possibility that some emanation or vibration from this ship had killed a woodchuck that had the bad luck to get a little too close, killed it so completely and unpleasantly that even the flies seemingly wanted no part of it; she could deal with an anomalous menstrual period, a canine cataract in remission, even with the seeming certainty that her dog was somehow growing younger.

All this, yes.