The Werewolf Principle (11 page)

“You're sure it was a wolf?”

“Yes, sir, I am sure.”

“How could you be sure. It might have been a dog.”

“Dr. Winston,” Daniels said, “you're trying to confuse the issue. It makes no difference whether it was a wolf or dog.”

The chief of staff glared at him angrily, then made an impatient gesture.

“All right,” he said. “All right. The rest of you may leave. If you'd be so good as to stay, Dr. Daniels, I would like to talk with you.”

The two waited and the others filed out.

“Now, Mike,” said the chief of staff, “let the two of us sit down and make some sense of it. Blake was your patient, wasn't he?”

“Yes, he was. You're acquainted with him, doctor. The man who was found in space. Frozen and encapsulated.”

“Yes, I know,” said Winston. “What did he have to do with this?”

“I'm not sure,” said Daniels. “I'd suspect he was the wolf.”

Winston made a face. “Come now,” he said. “You can't expect me to believe a thing like that. What you are saying is Blake most likely was a werewolf.”

“Did you read this evening's papers?”

“No, I can't say I have. What would the papers have to do with what happened here?”

“Nothing, perhaps, but I'm inclined to think …”

Daniels stopped what he had meant to say. Good God, he told himself, it is too fantastic. It simply couldn't happen. Although it was the one thing which might explain what had happened up on the third floor an hour or so ago.

“Doctor Daniels, what are you inclined to think? If you have some information, please come forth with it. You realize, of course, what this means to us. Publicity—too much publicity and the wrong kind of it entirely. Sensationalism, and a hospital can't afford sensationalism. I hate to think what, even now, the papers and dimensino may be doing with it. And there'll be a police inquiry. Already they're snooping around the place, talking to people they have no right to talk with and asking questions that should not be asked. And investigations of all sorts. Congressional hearings maybe. Space Administration will be down our throat, wanting to know what happened to Blake, to this prize pet of theirs. And I can't tell them, Daniels, that he turned into a wolf.”

“Not a wolf, sir. But an alien creature. One that looks remarkably like a wolf. You'll recall the police claimed it was a wolf with arms sprouting from its shoulders.”

The chief of staff growled. “No one else said that. The police were panicked. Shooting straight into the lobby. One bullet missed the receptionist by no more than inches. Crashed into the paneling just above her head. They were frightened men, I tell you. They don't know what they saw. What was this you were saying about an alien creature?”

Daniels drew in a deep breath and took the plunge. “A witness by the name of Lukas testified this afternoon at the bioengineering hearing. He'd dug up some old record about two simulated men being processed a couple of centuries ago. Claimed he found the records in the Space Administration files …”

“Why those files? Why should a record of that sort …”

“Wait,” said Daniels. “You haven't heard the half of it. These were open-ended androids …”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Winston. He stared glassily at Daniels. “The old werewolf principle! An organism that could change, that could be anything at all. There is that old myth …”

“Apparently it wasn't a myth,” said Daniels, grimly. “Two of the androids were synthesized and sent out on survey and exploration ships.”

“And you think Blake is one of them?”

“That's the thought I had. Lukas testified this afternoon that the two went out. The records then are silent. No mention of their coming back.”

“It just doesn't make good sense,” protested Winston. “Good Lord, man, two hundred years ago. If they made androids then, good, serviceable androids, we'd be swarming with them now. You just don't make two of anything and then drop the entire project.”

“You would,” said Daniels, “if those two didn't work. Let's say, just for argument, that not only the androids failed to return, but likewise the ships that they were on. That they just blasted off into nothingness and there was no further word of them. Not only would no more of the androids be made, but the record of the failure would be buried deep inside the files. It wouldn't be anything that Space Administration would want someone digging out.”

“But they couldn't know the androids had anything to do with the disappearance of the ships. In the old days, and even now, there are ships that don't come back.”

Daniels shook his head. “One ship maybe. Anything could happen to a single ship. But two ships with one thing in common, each ship with an android aboard—then it wouldn't take anyone long to figure the android might have been the reason. Or that the android set up a certain circumstance …”

“I don't like it,” complained the chief of staff. “I don't like the smell of it. I don't want to get tangled up with Space. They swing a lot of weight and they wouldn't like it if we tried to pin it onto them. And anyhow, I don't see how all this would tie up with Blake turning, as you seem to think, into a wolf.”

“I told you once before,” said Daniels. “Not a wolf. Into an alien that has the appearance of a wolf. Say the werewolf principle didn't work the way it was thought it would. The android was intended to turn into an alien form, utilizing the data extracted from a captured alien and to live as that alien for a time. Then the alien data would be erased and the android would be a man again, ready to be changed into something else. But suppose …”

“I see,” said Winston. “Suppose it didn't work. Suppose the alien data couldn't be erased. Suppose the android stayed both alien and human—two creatures and either one it wished.”

“That, sir,” said Daniels, “is what I had been thinking. And there is something else. We took an electroencephalogram of Blake and it showed up something strange. As if he had more minds than one. Like shadows of other minds showing in the tracings.”

“Shadows? You mean more than one extra mind?”

“I don't know,” said Daniels. “The indications were not pronounced. Nothing that you could be sure of.”

Winston got up from behind the desk and paced up and down the floor.

“I hope you're wrong,” he said. “I think you are. It's crazy.”

“It's one way,” Daniels told him, stubbornly, “that we can explain what happened.”

“But one thing we don't explain. Blake was found frozen, in a capsule. No sign of the ship. No other debris. How do we figure that one out?”

“We don't,” said Daniels. “There is no way that we can. We can't know what happened. When you talk about debris, you are presuming the ship was destroyed and we don't know if that happened. Even if it had been, over a couple of centuries the debris would have drifted apart. It might even have been in the vicinity of the capsule and not been seen. In space, visibility is poor. Unless something picks up light and reflects it, you wouldn't know that it was there.”

“You think perhaps the crew got onto what had happened and grabbed Blake and froze him, then shot him out into space inside the capsule? One way of getting rid of him? An unmessy way to do it?”

“I wouldn't know, sir. There is no way that we can know. All we can do is speculate and there are too many areas of speculation for us to be certain we have concentrated on the right one. If the crew did what you said, getting rid of Blake, then why didn't the ship come back. You explain one thing and then you have another to explain and perhaps another and another. It would seem a hopeless task to me.”

Winston stopped his pacing, came back to the desk and sat down in the chair. He reached out his hand for the communicator.

“What was the name of this man who testified?”

“Lukas. Dr. Lukas. I don't recall his first name. It would be in the papers The switchboard operator more than likely has one.”

“I suppose we'd better get the senators down here, too, if they can come. Horton—Chandler Horton. Who is the other one?”

“Solomon Stone.”

“O.K.,” said Winston, “we'll see what they think of this. Them and Lukas.”

“Space, too, sir?”

Winston shook his head. “No. Not right at the moment. We'll need more to go on before we start tangling with Space.”

16

The den was small and close—a projecting ledge of rock with a space eroded out beneath it. Above it the ground rose sharply, below it the ground fell steeply away. At the foot of the hill a stream of water ran raggedly over a pebbly bed. On the slope at the lip of the cave the ground was littered with tiny slabs of rock—the shards that through the years had been eroded out of the face of the stone. The slabs shifted treacherously under Quester's paws as he scrambled for the cave, but he managed to squeeze himself into it, twisting around until he could face outward.

For the first time now he felt a measure of safety, with his flanks and back protected, but he knew that it was an illusory safety. The creatures of this planet, even now, perhaps, were hunting him and it would not be long, he was certain, before they'd be combing through the area. Certainly he had been seen by the metallic creature which had come charging after him with its howling windstorm and its glaring eyes that shot out light before it. He shuddered as he recalled how he had barely gained the shelter of the trees just ahead of it. Another three lengths of his body to have gone and it would have overrun him.

He relaxed, willing his body to grow limp in every muscle.

His mind went out, checking, seeking, prying. There was life, more life than one would expect—an over-crowded planet, a place that swarmed with life. Tiny resting life, unthinking, unintelligent, existing but doing little more. There were small intelligences that rustled, restless, alert, afraid—but their intelligence so thin and barren that they were little more than aware of life and the dangers that might threaten it. One thing ran, seeking, hunting, with the red streak of killing pulsating in its mind, vicious and terrible and a very hungry thing. Three life forms were huddled in one place, some safe and hidden place, for their minds were snug and smug and warm. And others—many, many others. Life and some of the life with intelligence. But nowhere the sharp, bright, terrifying sense of the things that lived in the above-ground caves.

A messy planet, thought Quester, untidy and unneat, with too much life and water and too much vegetation, its air too thick and heavy and its climate far too hot. A place that gave one no rest at all, no sense of security, the sort of place where one must sense and watch and listen and fear that, even so, an undetected danger might come slipping through the net and fasten on one's throat. The trees were moaning gently and he wondered, as he listened to them, if it were the trees themselves, or if the moaning came from the moving atmosphere that was blowing through them.

And as he lay there wondering, he knew that it was the friction of the wind against the substance of the trees and the rustling of the leaves, the groaning of the branches, that the trees themselves had no way to make a sound, that the trees and all the other vegetation upon this planet, which was called the Earth, were alive, but with no intelligence and no perceptive senses. And that the caves were buildings and that the humans were not tribal members, but formed sexual units which were known as families, and that a building in which a family lived was called a home.

The information bore down upon him like a tidal wave that curled above him and overwhelmed him in a moment of blind panic and he came battling out of it and the tidal wave was gone. But in his mind, he knew, lay all the knowledge of the planet, every shred of information which lay in the mind of Changer.

—I am sorry, Changer said. There was no time for you to absorb it slowly and decently and get acquainted with it and try to classify it. I gave it all at once. Now you have it all to use.

Tentatively, Quester took a quick survey of it and shuddered at the tangled pile it was.

—Much of it is out of date, said Changer. There are many things that I don't know. You have this planet as I knew it two hundred years ago, plus what I picked up since I returned to it. I would impress upon you that the data are not complete and some of it may now be worthless.

Quester crouched close against the rock floor of the den, still probing out into the darkness of the woods, straightening and strengthening the detection net that he had laid out in all directions.

A sense of desolation swept through him. Homesickness for the planet of drifted snow and sand—and no way to get back. Perhaps never to get back. Here in this tangled place of too much life and too much danger and not knowing where to turn, not knowing what to do. Hunted by the dominant creatures of the planet, creatures that he now knew were more horrible than he had thought they were. Cunning and ruthless and illogical, weighed down by fears and hatreds, obeying the murderous drive of a species on the make.

—Changer, he asked, what of my other body? The one I inhabited before you humans came. You caught that body, I remember. What did you do with it?

—Not I! I didn't catch it. I did nothing with it.

—Don't try your human legalistic tricks on me. Don't take refuge in semantics. Not you alone, perhaps. Not you personally, but …

—Quester, Thinker said, don't take that tone of thought. The three of us are caught in a single trap—if it is a trap. I'm inclined to believe it may not be a trap, but a unique situation which will work to our advantage. We share one body and our minds are closer than any minds have ever been before. And we must not quarrel; we must not have differences, for we can't afford them. We must work together always. We must harmonize ourselves. If there are differences, we must work them out immediately, we must not let them fester.