DR. CATALYST LIFTED HIMSELF TO HIS KNEES. HIS HEAD hurt and his hand was bleeding. He reached back and felt the spot on his calf where he’d been bitten. His fingers came away with more blood on them. How had such a small dog done such damage? It felt as if a Rottweiler had attacked him.

There was no chance the dog could get out of the park. The fence surrounding it was twelve feet high. Still, he did not look forward to chasing it down. The mutt was apparently both vicious and devious.

As he climbed slowly to his feet, he looked around for his tablet. It was protected by a hard shell case, but he was using it to run his systems and needed to make sure it wasn’t damaged. But he didn’t see it. The first rows of bleacher seats in the aquarium were a few feet away. Perhaps it had tumbled beneath them. Groaning with the effort, he sank to his knees again and searched carefully beneath the metal benches.

The tablet was not there.

It was gone. Had the dog picked the tablet up and run off with it?

“Doggie?” he called to the darkened aquarium.

There was no sound. The noise from the pumps and filters powering the tank would have drowned out a response, anyway.

“Apollo? Here, boy!” he shouted again.

Nothing but silence.

He wasn’t too concerned. All the doors leading into and out of the aquarium were closed and locked.

Still, hunting down the dog was going to be a waste of time, and he needed to get back to work. For that, he needed his tablet. He would go to the operations room, turn on all the lights in the building, and track down the dog.

An open doorway behind the tank led to a room filled with power switches and a console with equipment that controlled the pumps and filters. Dr. Catalyst flipped on the switches, and the room, as well as the rest of the aquarium, lit up in the harsh glow of fluorescent lights. Dr. Catalyst heard a soft thump and thought he felt a brief gust of air. He glanced beneath the equipment console as he made his way through the room. Even with the lights on, Apollo was completely black and would be difficult to see in the shadows.

Then the bumping sound again. And again. When he reached the end of the room he found the source. It was the door that entered from the outside. The door he used to get to and from the aquarium. The way he’d entered when he carried the unconscious dog inside a short while ago. Apparently it had not latched completely shut. Apollo was loose in the park.

Still Dr. Catalyst did not panic. Removing his phone from his pocket, he launched a GPS application that would track the location of the tablet. He had planned for every contingency.

On his phone’s screen a blue map of the area appeared. He zoomed in until the map showed the park. In the center of the map a red dot was moving in a zigzag pattern. It was Apollo, running around wildly with his tablet.

Dr. Catalyst stepped through the door and into the darkness. This was only a setback. It would be time-consuming to track the dog down and retrieve both it and his computer. But he would have the dog back and inside his cage, suspended over the tank, in time for his next broadcast.