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bed and she wouldn’t say why. Once I counted noses, I discovered the three of you were missing. So you
    ”—that was me, of course—“owe me the explanation you wouldn’t let her give me.”
    “There’s something in the loch,” I said. “We got a sample and I’ll check it out tomorrow. Right now, we all need some sleep.”
    “Liar,” said Chris. “Who’s hungry? Midnight snacks”—she glanced at the clock and corrected—“whatever, food’s waiting.”
    Everybody obligingly trooped into the kitchen, lured by the smell of chowder. I followed, knowing this meant I wasn’t going to get off the hook without a full explanation. That meant no way of covering Susan’s tracks.
    We settled down and dived ravenously into the chowder. Chris poured a box of crackers into a serving tray. “There’s no bread,” she said with finality, eying Susan to let us all know who was responsible for this woeful state of affairs.
    Susan squirmed. “Next time I’ll take them crackers. They like your bread better, though.”
    “If you’d asked
    ,” Chris said, “I’d have made a couple of extra loaves.”
    “I wanted it to be a surprise from Mama Jason.” She looked around the table.
    “You know how hard it is to think up a birthday present for her!” She pushed away from the table. “Wait! I’ll be right back. I’ll show you!”
    I concentrated on the chowder. Birthday present, indeed! As if I needed some present other than the fact of those kids themselves. If Susan hadn’t opened her mouth, Elly would’ve assumed I taken her along with us, as Elly’d suggested earlier.
    Glancing up, I saw Elly rest a sympathetic eye on me.
    Well, I was off the hook, but Susan sure as hell wasn’t.
    There was a clamor of footsteps on the stairs and Susan was back with a huge box, full to overspilling with papers and computer tapes. Chris shoved aside the pot of chowder to make space for them.
    Susan pulled out her pocket computer and plugged it into the wall modem. “I did it right, Mama Jason. See if I didn’t.”
    The photo album wasn’t regulation but as the first page was a very pretty hologram (I recognized Ilanith’s work) that spelled out “Happy Birthday, Mama Jason!” in imitation fireworks I could hardly complain. The second page was a holo of a mother otter and her pups. The pup in the foreground was deformed—the same way the creatures Susan had fed Chris’s bread to were.
    “That’s Monster,” Susan said, thrusting a finger at the holo. She peeled a strip of tape from Page 18

    beneath the holo and fed it to the computer. “That’s his gene-read.” She glanced at Chris. “I lured his mother away with bread to get the cell sample. The otters love your bread too. I never used the fresh bread, Chris, only the stale stuff.”
    Chris nodded. “I know. I thought it was all going to the otters, though.”
    “More like ‘odders,’” Leo put in, grinning. “Two dees
    .”
    Susan giggled. “I like that. Let’s call ’em Odders, Mama Jason.”
    “Your critters,” I said. “Naming it’s your privilege.”
    “Odders is right,” Chris peered over my shoulder and said to Susan, “Why were you feeding Dragon’s Teeth?”
    “He’s so ugly, he’s cute. The first ones got abandoned by their mothers.
    She”—Susan tapped the holo again—“decided to keep hers. Got ostracized for it, too, Mama Jason.”
    I nodded absently. That happened often enough. I was well into the gene-read Susan had done on her Monster. It was a good, thorough piece of work. I couldn’t have done better myself.
    Purely herbivorous—and among the things you could guarantee it’d eat were water lilies and clogweed. That stopped me dead in my tracks. I looked up. “It eats clogweed!”
    Susan dimpled. “It loves it! That’s why it likes Chris’s bread better than crackers.”
    “Why you—” Chris, utterly outraged, stood up so suddenly Elly had to catch at her bowl to keep from slopping chowder on everything.
    I