The Werewolf Principle

by Clifford D. Simak

  “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 …”

  Elaine caught her breath. St. Barnabas! This was St. Barnabas. She had gone there to see Andrew Blake and her father now was on his way there—and what was going on?

  She half-rose from her chair, then sat down again. There was nothing she could do or should do. The senator would be able to look out for himself; he always had. And whatever had been in the hospital now was gone, or apparently it was. If she waited just a little while, she’d see her father get out of the car and walk up the stairs.

  She stood and shivered in the chill wind that was sweeping down the street.

  18

  The footsteps sounded near, slipping and sliding on the shards of stone that lay outside the cave mouth. A beam of light speared into the cave.

  Thinker pulled himself tighter and denser and reduced his field. The field might betray him, he knew, but he could not reduce it much further, even so, for it was a part of him and he could not exist without it. Especially not here, not at this moment, with the chill of the atmosphere sucking hungrily at his energy.

  We must be ourselves, he thought. I, myself, and Quester quester’s self and Changer changer’s self. We cannot be more or less than we are and we cannot change except through the process of long, slow evolution, but in the millenia to come might it not be possible that the three would meld as one, that there would not be three separate minds, but one mind only? And that mind would have emotion, which I do not have, which I can recognize, but cannot understand, and the hard, cold, impersonal logic which is mine, but not my companions’, and the keen sharp sensitivity which is Quester’s, but is neither mine nor Changer’s. Blind chance alone that put the three of us together, that put our minds inside a mass of matter which can be made a body—what were the odds that such a happening could have come about? Blind chance or destiny? What was destiny? Was there destiny? Could there be some great, over-riding universal plan and was this happening which had put the three of them together one part of that plan, a necessary step before the plan could reach that remote conclusion toward which it always moved?

  The human was crawling closer, the loose rock sliding underneath his feet, his hands clawing at the ground to hold himself against the downhill pull of gravity, the lighted flashlight in one fist bobbing and bouncing so that it threw an erratic arc of light.

  He got one elbow over the lip of the cave and hoisted himself upward so that his head was level with the opening.

  He gasped and yelled.

  “Hey, Bob, this cave has a funny smell. There’s been something in here. Just a while ago.”

  Thinker expanded his field, pushing it outward violently. It hit the man like a plunging fist. It knocked his elbow loose from the lip of rock and hurled him outward and away. He twisted and plunged downward. He screamed once, a shriek of terror pushed out of his lungs. Then his body thumped and slid. Thinker could sense its sliding, taking with it rocks that bounced and clicked, trash wood that slithered and rattled. The slithering and the clicking stopped and from the slope below came the sound of splashing.

  Thrashing bodies went plunging down the slope, lights bobbing back and forth, sweeping across brush and shiny tree trunks.

  Voices cried out:

  “Bob, something happened to Harry!”

  “Yeah, I heard him yell.”

  “He’s down there in the creek. I heard him hit the water.”

  The plunging bodies kept on going past, going down the hill in braking rushes. A half a dozen lights bobbed madly at the bottom of the slope and several of the humans were wading in the stream. From farther off came other shouts.

  Something stirred questioningly inside Thinker’s mind.

  —Yes, he asked, what is it?

  —What do we do now? growled Quester. You heard what he yelled. They’re all excited now, but one of them will remember. There’ll be some of them coming up here. They may start shooting at us.

  —I agree, said Changer. They’ll investigate. The man who fell …

  —Fell! said Thinker, witheringly. I pushed him.

  —All right, then. The man you pushed tipped them off. He smelled Quester, maybe.

  —I don’t stink, said Quester.

  —That’s ridiculous, said Thinker. I would suspect all three of us have distinctive body odors. Your body form was there long enough to contaminate the cave.

  —It might have been your body odor, said Quester. Don’t forget …

  —Cut it out, said Changer, sharply. The question isn’t which one of us he smelled. It is what do we do now. Thinker, can you change into something thin and flat, a shape that will give no profile, and creep out of here and up the hill?

  —I doubt it. The planet’s far too cold. I’m losing energy too fast. If I extended my body surface I’d lose it that much faster.

  —That’s a problem that we have to face, said Quester. The problem of retaining sufficient energy. Changer will have to eat for us. He’ll have to supply the energy, ingesting in his own body form the foods that are available. And staying in his body’s form long enough for the food to be digested. There are few energy sources for Thinker and probably no food that I could eat and that my bodily apparatus would be able to handle. I would suspect …

  —This all is true, said Changer. But let’s consider it some other time. For the moment, let’s go back to our present problem. Can you take over, Quester? They’d spot me. My body would show up white.

  —Certainly I can, said Quester.

  —Good. Crawl out of the cave and up the hill. Go easily, go quietly. But as swiftly as you can. We’ve got the searching party all together and if they don’t hear you, it’s unlikely we’ll run into any of them.

  —Over the hill, asked Quester, and then what?

  —Up on one of the drives, said Changer, we sho
uld find a public telephone.

  19

  “If what you believe is true,” Chandler Horton said, “then we must lose no time in contacting Blake.”

  “What makes you think it’s Blake any longer?” asked the chief of staff. “It wasn’t Blake that ran off from this hospital. If Daniels is right, it was an alien creature.”

  “But Blake was there, too,” protested Horton. “It might have been in an alien’s body, but it could change back to Blake.”

  Senator Stone, hunched up in the big chair, sneered at Horton. “If you want to know what I think,” he said, “this all is poppycock.”

  “We are interested in your thoughts of course,” said Horton. “But I do wish, Solomon, that for once your thinking could be a bit constructive.”

  “What is there to be constructive about?” yelled Stone. “This is some sort of childish, put-up job. I haven’t got it figured out yet, but I know that is what it is. And I’ll wager you’re at the bottom of it, Chandler. You’re always up to tricks. You’ve got this deal rigged up to prove something, more than likely, but so far I don’t quite see what it is. I knew there was something going on when you got this Lukas joker up to testify.”

  “Dr. Lukas, if you don’t mind, senator,” said Horton.

  “Well, all right then, Dr. Lukas. What does he know about it?”

  “Let’s find out,” said Horton. “Dr. Lukas, what do you know about it?”

  Lukas grinned drily. “As to what happened in this hospital, not a thing at all. As to whether it could happen as Dr. Daniels believes it could—why, I must agree with him.”

  “But it’s supposition,” Stone pointed out. “Nothing but supposition. Dr. Daniels got it figured out. Fine! Good! Bully for him! He’s got a good imagination. But it doesn’t mean that what he thinks is actually what happened.”

  “I must point out to you,” said the chief of staff, “that Blake was Dr. Daniels’ patient.”

  “Which means you believe what he thinks?”

  “Not necessarily. I don’t know what to think. But if anyone is entitled to any opinion, it is Daniels here.”

  “Now let’s all calm down a bit,” suggested Horton, “and take a look at what we have. I scarcely think it’s necessary to dignify the senator’s charges that this is a put-up job with any sort of answer, but I think we must all agree that something most unusual did happen here tonight. I also doubt that the decision by Dr. Winston to call us all together was one that was lightly made. He now says he can form no solid opinion, but certainly he must have felt there was some reason for concern.”

  “I still think there is,” said the chief of staff.

  “I understand the wolf, or whatever it was.…”

  Solomon Stone gave an explosive snort.

  Horton stared at him icily. “Or whatever it was,” he continued, “ran across the street into the park and the police gave chase.”

  “That’s right,” said Daniels. “They’re out there now, trying to hunt it down. Some damn fool of a motorist caught it in his headlights when it crossed the road and tried to run it down.”

  “Don’t you see,” said Horton, “that this is the sort of thing we have to stop. Everyone around here apparently went off half-cocked …”

  “You must understand,” explained the chief of staff, “that it all was fairly frantic. No one was thinking straight.”

  “If Blake is what Daniels thinks he is,” said Horton, “we have to get him back. We lost two centuries of progress in human bioengineering because it was believed the Space Administration project failed and because of that the project was hushed up. Hushed up so effectively, I might point out, that it was forgotten. All that remained of it was a myth and legend. But now it appears that it didn’t fail. We may have evidence of its success out there in the woods right now.”

  “Oh, it failed, all right,” said Lukas. “It didn’t work the way that Space had meant it to. I think Daniels has the right hunch. Once the characteristics of an alien were fed into the android, they couldn’t be erased. They became a permanent feature of the android itself. He became two creatures—the human and an alien. In everything. In bodily characteristics and in mental setup.”

  “This mental situation, sir,” asked the chief of staff. “Would the android’s mentality have been synthetic? By that I mean a carefully worked-out mentality that was synthesized and fed into it.”

  Lukas shook his head. “I would doubt that, doctor. It would have been a crude method, a rather silly way to go about it. The records, or at least the ones I’ve seen, make no mention of it, but I would presume that the pattern of an actual human mind was impressed upon its brain. Even then they would have had the technique for it. The mind-banks were created how long ago?”

  “A bit over three hundred years ago,” said Horton.

  “Then they would have had the technique for such a transfer. And this business of building up a synthetic mind would be difficult today, let alone two hundred years ago. Even now I would doubt that we’d know all the ingredients to provide a balanced mind—one that would be human. There is so much that goes to make a human mind. We could synthesize a mind—yes, I suppose we could—but a strange one, giving rise to strange actions, strange emotions, not entirely human, something less than human, perhaps something more than human.”

  “So you think,” said Horton, “that Blake carries around in his brain the duplication of the mind of a man who lived at the time he was fabricated.”

  “I would be almost positive of it,” said Lukas.

  “So would I,” said the chief of staff.

  “So then,” said Horton, “he really is a human—or, at least, he has a human mind?”

  “I see no other way,” said Lukas, “in which they could have provided him a mind.”

  “It’s all poppycock,” said Senator Stone. “I’ve never heard so much damn foolishness in all my born days.”

  No one paid attention to him.

  The chief of staff looked at Horton. “You believe it’s vital that we get Blake back?”

  “I do,” said Horton. “Before the police kill him or it or whatever body he may be occupying. Before they drive him into so deep a hole to hide that it will take months to find him, if we ever do.”

  “I agree,” said Lukas. “Think of all he’d have to tell us: Think of what we could learn by a study of him. If the Earth expects to embark on a program of human engineering, either now or at some future time what we could learn from Blake would be invaluable.”

  The chief of staff shook his head, bewildered. “But Blake’s a special case. An open-ended specimen. As I understand it, the proposed bioengineering program did not envision such a creature.”

  “Doctor,” said Lukas, “what you say is true, but any kind of android, any kind of organized synthetic …”

  “You gentlemen are wasting your time,” said Stone. “There isn’t going to be a human bioengineering program. I and some of my colleagues are about to see to that.”

  “Solomon,” said Horton, patiently, “let’s you and I worry about the politics of the issue later. Right now we have a frightened man out there in the woods and we have to find some way to let him know we don’t mean him any harm.”

  “And how do you propose doing that?”

  “Why, it seems simple to me. Call off the hunt, then release the news. Have the newspapers and the electronic media in and …”

  “You think a wolf will read a newspaper or watch dimensino?”

  “He wouldn’t stay a wolf, most likely,” Daniels said. “I have a hunch that as soon as possible, he’ll turn back into a man. For one thing, an alien creature might find this planet confusing and uncomfortable.”

  “Gentlemen,” said the chief of staff. “Please, gentlemen.”

  They all turned to look at him.

  “We can’t do that,” he said. “Such a story would make the hospital appear ridiculous. It would be bad enough in any instance, but the werewolf connotations! Can’t you see the headli
nes? Can’t you see the holiday the press would have at our expense?”

  “But if we were right?” asked Daniels.

  “That’s the point. We can’t know that we are right. We might have all the reason in the world to believe that we were right, but that still wouldn’t be enough. On a thing like this, we must be dead certain and we can’t be that.”

  “Then you refuse to let such an announcement be made?”

  “So far as the hospital is concerned, I can’t. If Space would give clearance to it, then I would agree. But I can’t, not on my own. Even if I were right, Space would be down on me like a ton of bricks. They’d raise holy hell …”

  “Even after two hundred years?”

  “Even after that long a time. Can’t you see that if Blake is what we think he is, he belongs to Space? It’s up to them. He is their baby, not mine. He is something that they started and …”

  Stone’s chuckle rumbled through the room.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him, Chandler. Go ahead and tell the newspaper boys yourself. Go on and break the story. Show us you have some guts. Follow your convictions. I just hope you do.”

  “I just bet you do,” said Horton.

  “If you do,” said Stone, “I warn you, friend. One public word from you and I’ll blow you so far out of the water it’ll take you two weeks to come down.”

  20

  The steady beeping of the phone finally beat its way into the illusion-world bounded by dimensino. Elaine Horton roused herself, came out of the booth in which she had been sitting with the shadow-world of ancient days going on about her.

  The phone kept up its beeping, the vision panel flashing in impatient pulses.

  She made her way to it and switched it to receive. A face looked out at her, faintly lighted by a defective light bulb in the ceiling of a public phone booth.

  “Andrew Blake?” she cried, surprised.

  “Yes, it’s me. You see …”

  “Is there something wrong? The senator was called down to the …”

  “I seem to be in a bit of trouble,” Blake told her. “You probably heard what happened.”