The Werewolf Principle (12 page)

—That, said Quester, is exactly what I'm doing. There is a thing that bothers me. What happened to that first me?

—That first body, Changer told him, was biologically scanned. It was taken apart, almost molecule by molecule, and analyzed. There was no way in which it could be reassembled.

—You murdered me, you mean.

—If you want to call it that.

—And Thinker, too?

—Thinker, too. Thinker was the first.

—Thinker, Quester asked, do you not resent this?

—What good would resentment accomplish?

—That is no answer and you know it.

—I can't be sure, said Thinker. I would have to cogitate it. One must, of course, resent any violence done him. But I would be inclined to consider what has happened as a transfiguration rather than a violence. If this had not occurred to me I could never have existed in your body or touched your mind. All the data that you gathered from the stars would have been lost to me and lost most pitifully, for I'd never have known of it. And you, in turn, if it had not been for what the humans did, never would have guessed the significance of the pictures that you garnered from the stars. You simply would have gone on garnering them and enjoying them and perhaps not even wondered at them and I can conceive of nothing more tragic than that, to be on the edge of mystery and not even wonder at it.

—I am not so sure, said Quester, that I would prefer the mystery and forego the wonder.

—But don't you see the beauty of it? Thinker asked. Here the three of us, all of us most different. Three types most distinctive. You, Quester, the roughneck and the bandit, Changer the cunning schemer, and I …

—And you, said Quester, the all-wise, the farseeing …

—I was about to say, said Thinker, the fumbler after truth.

—If it will make either of you feel better, Changer told them, I'll apologize for the human race. In many ways I like them no better than you do.

—For good reason, Thinker said. For you are not human. You are something made by humans, you are an agent of the humans.

—And yet, said Changer, one must be something. I'd rather be a human than not anything at all. One cannot stand alone.

—You will not be alone, said Thinker. The two of us are with you.

—Still, said Changer stubbornly, I insist on being human.

—I cannot understand, said Thinker.

—Perhaps I can, said Quester. Back there in the hospital I felt something I had not felt before, something that no quester has felt for a long, long time. The pride of race, and, furthermore, a pride in the racial fighting spirit that was tucked away somewhere deep inside of me and that I had not known was there. I suspect, Changer, that my race, in the time of long ago, was as much upon the prod as your race is today. And it is a prideful thing to be of such a race. It gives you strength and stature and a great deal of self-respect. It is something that Thinker and his kind perhaps could never feel.

—My pride, if I had any, Thinker said, would be of a different kind and arise from different motives. But I will not foreclose there being many kinds of pride.

Quester jerked his attention to the hillside and the woods, alerted by a whiff of danger that had come snaking along the detection net that he had laid out.

—Quiet! he told the other two.

Faint, far off, he caught the indications and zeroed in on them. There were three of them, three humans, and in a little time more than three of them—a long line of them advancing cautiously, searching through the woods. And there could be, he knew, only one thing that they sought.

He caught the faint edges of their mind-waves and they were afraid, but they were also angry and filled with a hate-tinged loathing. But as well as this fear and hatred, there was the sense of hunt, the strange, wild excitement that drove them on to find and kill the thing that was the cause of fear.

Quester bunched his body and half-rose to dart out of the den. For there was, he thought, only one way to elude these humans—to run and run and run.

—Wait, said Thinker.

—They will be on top of us.

—Not for a time. They are moving slowly. There may be a better way. We cannot run forever. We have made one mistake. We should not make another.

—What mistake?

—We should not have changed to you. We should have stayed as Changer. It was blind panic that forced us to make the change.

—But we had no knowledge. We saw danger and reacted. We were being threatened …

—I could have bluffed it out, said Changer. But this way may have been the best at that. They had suspicions of me. They would have put me under observation. They might have locked me up. This way, at least, we're free.

—But not for long, said Thinker, if we keep on running. There are too many of them—too many on the planet. We can't hide from all of them. We can't dodge them all. Mathematically we have so little chance that it is no chance at all.

—You have something in your mind? asked Quester.

—Why don't we change to me. I can be a lump, a nothing, something in this cave. A rock, perhaps. When they look into it they will see nothing strange.

—A minute, there, said Changer. Your idea is all right, but there may be problems.

—Problems?

—You should have it figured out by now. Not problems, but a problem. The climate of this planet. It is too warm for Quester. It will be too cold for you.

—Cold is lack of heat?

—That's right.

—Lack of energy?

—Correct.

—It takes a little time to get all the terminology sorted out, said Thinker. It has to be catalogued, soaked into the mind. But I can stand some cold. For the common cause I can stand a lot of cold.

—It's not just a matter of standing it. Of course, you can do that. But you require great amounts of energy.

—When I formed that time in the house …

—You had the energy supply of the house to draw on. Here there is nothing but the heat stored in the atmosphere. And now that the sun is down, that is steadily becoming less and less. You'll have to operate on the energy that the body has. You can't draw on outside sources.

—I see, said Thinker. But I can form a shape to conserve what energy there is. I can hug it to me. If the change is made, I have all the energy that is in the body?

—I would think you would have. The change itself perhaps requires some energy exchange, but I suspect not very much.

—How do you feel, Quester?

—Hot, said Quester.

—I don't mean that. You aren't tired, are you? No lack of energy?

—I feel all right, said Quester.

—We wait, said Thinker, until they are almost here. Then we change to me and I am a nothing or almost a nothing. Just a shapeless lump. Best way would be for me to spread myself all around the cave, a lining for the cave. But that way I'd lose too much energy.

—They may not see the cave, said Changer. They may pass it by.

—We can't take chances, Thinker said. I'll be me no longer than we have to. We must change back as soon as they are past. If what you say is true.

—Calculate it for yourself, invited Changer. You have the data that I gave you. You know as much physics, as much chemistry as I do.

—The data, perhaps, Changer. But not the habit of mind to employ it. Not your way of thought. Not your ability at mathematics, not your swift grasp of universal principles.

—But you are our thinker.

—I think another way.

—Stop this jabbering, Quester said, impatiently. Let's get set what we are to do. Once they're past, we change back to me.

—No, said Changer. Back to me.

—But you haven't any clothes.

—Out here it doesn't matter.

—Your feet. You need shoes. There are rocks and sticks. And your eyes are no good in the dark.

—They are almost here, warned Thinker.

—That is right, said Quester. They are coming down the hill.

17

It was fifteen minutes until her favorite dimensino program came on. Elaine Horton had looked forward to it all day, for Washington was boring. Already she was looking forward to the time when she could return to the old stone house in the Virginia Hills.

She sat down and picked up a magazine and was idly flipping through its pages when the senator came in.

“What did you do all day?” he asked.

“Part of the time I watched the hearing.”

“Good show?”

“Fairly interesting. What I can't understand is why you bothered to dig up that staff from two hundred years ago.”

He chuckled. “Well, partly, I suppose, to shake up Stone. I couldn't see his face. I would guess his eyeballs might have popped.”

“Mostly,” she said, “he simply sat there glaring. I suppose that you were proving that bioengineering is not so new a thing as many people think.”

He sat down in a chair and picked up a paper, glanced at the glaring headlines.

“That,” he said, “and that it can be done—that it, in fact, was being done, and rather skillfully, two centuries ago. And that we were scared out once, but shouldn't be again. Think of all the time we've lost—two hundred years of time. I have other witnesses who will point that out, rather forcefully.”

He shook out the paper and settled down to read.

“Your mother get away all right?” he asked.

“Yes, she did. The plane left a little before noon.”

“Rome this time, isn't it. Was it films or poetry or what?”

“Films this time. Some old prints someone found from the end of the twentieth century, I believe.”

The senator sighed. “Your mother,” he told her, “is an intelligent woman. She appreciates such things; I'm afraid I don't. She was talking about taking you along with her. It might have been interesting if you had cared to go.”

“You know it wouldn't have been interesting,” she said. “You are an old fraud. You make noises as if you admired these things that Mother likes, but you don't care a lick.”

“I guess you're right,” he agreed. “What's on dimensino? Could I squeeze in the booth with you?”

“There is plenty of room and you know it. And you would be very welcome. I'm waiting for Horatio Alger. It will be on in another ten minutes or so.”

“Horatio Alger—what is that?”

“I guess you'd call it a serial. It goes on and on. Horatio Alger is the man who wrote it. He wrote a lot of books, back in the early part of the twentieth century, maybe before that. The critics then thought they were trashy books and I suppose they were. But a lot of people read them and that apparently meant that they had some sort of human appeal. They told all about how a poor boy makes good against terrific odds.”

“It sounds sort of corny to me,” said the senator.

“I suppose it does. But the producers and the writers have taken those trashy stories and turned them into social documents, with a good bit of satire laced into the story. And they have done a marvellous job of recreating the background, the most of it I suppose is the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. And not just the physical background, but the moral and social background. It was a barbarous age, you know. There are human situations in it that make your blood run cold …”

The phone beeped at them and the vision panel blinked.

The senator hoisted himself from the chair and crossed the room.

Elaine settled more comfortably in her chair. Five minutes more to go before the program would come on. And it would be nice to have the senator join her in watching. She hoped that nothing happened to prevent him joining her. Like that phone call, for instance. She flipped the pages of the magazine. Back of her she heard the mumbled voices of the conversation.

The senator came back.

“I'll have to go out for a while,” he said.

“You'll miss Horatio.”

He shook his head. “I'll catch it some other time. That was Ed Winston, down at St. Barnabas.”

“The hospital. Anything wrong?”

“No one hurt. No one ill. If that is what you mean. But Winston seemed upset. Said he had to see me. Wouldn't tell me what was going on.”

“You won't stay out too long. Get back early if you can. With these hearings, you need sleep.”

“I'll do my best,” he said.

She went to the front door with him, helped him with his cloak, then came back into the living room.

The hospital, she thought. She didn't like the sound of it. What could the senator possibly have to do with a hospital? Hospitals made her edgy. She had gone to that very hospital just this afternoon and she hadn't wanted to, but she was glad she had. That poor guy, she thought, is really in a jam. Not knowing who he is, not knowing what he is.

She went into the dimensino booth and sat down in a chair, the curving screen glinting in front of her and on either side. She pressed the buttons and turned the dial and the screen began its preliminary flicker.

Strange, she thought, how her mother could get excited about an ancient piece of film—an old, flat, two-dimensional entertainment medium that most people had forgotten ever had existed. And the worst of it, she thought wryly, was that people who professed to see something of great value in the old-time things also professed a great contempt for modern entertainment as devoid of all art. In a few hundred years, perhaps, when new entertainment mediums had evolved, the old dimensino would be rediscovered as an ancient art that had not been properly appreciated at the time it flourished.

The screen quit its flickering and she seemed to stand in a downtown street.

A voice said: “… no one yet can give an explanation of what happened here less than an hour ago. There are conflicting reports and no two stories absolutely check. The hospital is beginning to calm down now, but for a time there was pandemonium. There are reports that one of the patients is miss-in, but the reports can't be confirmed. Most accounts agree that some animal, some say it was a wolf, went raging through the corridors, attacking everyone who stood in its way. One story is that the wolf, if wolf it was, had arms that sprouted from its shoulders. The police, when they arrived, fired at something, spraying the reception room with bullets …”