The Compleat Werewolf

by Anthony Boucher

  (Trubz has been working on the psychology of this. He explains it by the fact that the bipeds have five digits on each forelimb, or a total of ten, whereas we have four each, a total of eight.)

  Halov now beckoned to Karnim, who as astrogator is the best mathematician among us, and asked him to take over. He studied for a moment the biped’s numbers, adjusted his mind rapidly to the (for the layman) hopeless confusion of a decimal system, and went ahead with simple mathematical operations. The biped followed him not unskillfully, while the rest of us concentrated on his thought patterns and began to gather their shape and nature.

  The growing darkness bothered the biped before it incommoded Karnim. He rose from his squatting position over the numerals and went into the structure, the interior of which was soon alight. He came back to the doorway and beckoned us to enter. As we did so, he spoke words which Trubz conjectures to mean:

  “Enter my abode and stay in peace, O emissaries from the fourth planet.”

  Phonetic transcription:

  YOU’LL BE GONE IN THE MORNING, AND WILL I HAVE A HEAD!

  Murvin to Falzik:

  What a yam! A planet of intelligent beings! What a future for the art! Maybe I never was sold on this expedition, but I am now. Keep the reports coming. And include as much phonetic transcription as you can—the specialists are working on what you’ve sent and are inclined to doubt some of Trubz’s interpretations. Also tell Trubz to get to work as soon as possible on the psychological problem of extinction. If this being’s a mammal, he should help.

  [Several reports are omitted here, dealing chiefly with the gradually acquired skill of the expedition in reading a portion of the biped’s thought patterns and in speaking a few words of his language.]

  Report of First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition, presented by Falzik, specialist in reporting:

  Halov and Trubz agree that we should stay with this man (for such we have by now learned is the name of his race) until we have learned as much from him as we can. He has accepted us now and is almost at ease with us, though the morning after our arrival, for some peculiar reason, he seemed even more surprised to see us than when we first appeared.

  We can learn much more from him, now that he is used to us, than we could from the dwellers in the large massed structures, and after we are well versed in his civilization we stand much more chance of being accepted peaceably.

  We have been here now for three of the days of this planet, absorbed in our new learning. (All save Lilil, who is fretful because he has not practiced his art for so long. I have occasionally seen him eyeing the man speculatively.) By using a mixture of telepathy, sign language, and speech, we can by now discuss many things, though speech comes with difficulty to one who has used it only on formal and fixed occasions.

  For instance, we have learned why this man lives alone, far from his fellows. His speciality is the making of pictures with what he calls a camera, a contrivance which records the effect of differing intensities of light upon a salt of silver—a far more complex method than our means of making pictures with photosensitized elduron, but one producing much the same results. He has taken pictures of us, though he seems doubtful that any other man will ever believe the record of his camera.

  At present he is engaged in a series of pictures of aspects of the desert, an undertaking that he seems to regard not as a useful function but as an art of some strange sort. Trubz is working on the psychology of it and says that a reproductive and imitative art is conceivable, but Lilil is scornful of the notion.

  Today he showed us many pictures of other mans and of their cities and structures. Man is a thin-skinned and almost hairless animal. This man of ours goes almost naked, but that is apparently because of the desert heat. Normally a man makes up for his absence of hair by wearing a sort of artificial fur of varying shapes known as clothes. To judge from the pictures shown us by the man, this is true only of the male of the species. The female never covers her bare skin in any way.

  Examination of these pictures of females shown us by our man fully confirms our theory that the animal man is a mammal.

  The display of pictures ended with an episode still not quite clear to us. Ever since our arrival, the man has been worrying and talking about something apparently lost—something called a kitten. The thought pattern was not familiar enough to permit us to gather its nature, until he showed us a picture of the small white beast which we had first met, and we recognized in his mind this kitten- pattern. He seemed proud of the picture, which showed the beast in its ritual with the ball, but still worried, and asked us, according to Trubz, if we knew anything of its whereabouts. Transcription:

  YOU WOULDN’T ANY OF YOU BIG BUGS KNOW WHAT THE DEVIL’S BECOME OF THAT KITTEN, WOULD YOU?

  Thereupon Lilil arose in his full creative pride and led the man to the place where we had met the kitten. The corpse was by now withered in the desert sun, and I admit that it was difficult to gather from such a spectacle the greatness of Lilil’s art, but we were not prepared for the man’s reaction.

  His face grew exceedingly red, and a fluid formed in his eyes. He clenched his digits and made curious gestures with them. His words were uttered brokenly and exceedingly difficult to transcribe. Trubz has not yet conjectured their meaning but the transcription reads:

  YOU DID THAT? TO A POOR, HARMLESS LITTLE KITTEN? WHY, YOU—*

  His attitude has not been the same toward us since. Trubz is working on the psychology of it.

  Murvin to Falzik:

  Tell Trubz to work on the major psychological problem. Your backers are getting impatient.

  Falzik to Murvin:

  I think that last report was an aspect of it. But I’m still puzzled. See what you can make of this one.

  Report of First Interplanetary Expedition, presented by Falzik, specialist in reporting:

  Tonight Halov and Trubz attempted to present the great psychological problem to the man. To present such a problem in our confusion of thoughts, language, and gesture is not easy, but I think that to some extent they succeeded.

  They stated it in its simplest form: Our race is obsessed by a terrible fear of extinction. We will each of us do anything to avoid his personal extinction. No such obsession has ever been observed among the minute mammalian pests of our planet.

  Now, is our terror a part of our intelligence? Does intelligence necessarily imply and bring with it a frantic clinging to the life that supports us? Or does this terror stem from our being what we are, rather than mammals? A mammal brings forth its young directly; the young are a direct continuation of the life of the old. But with us a half dozen specialized individuals bring forth all the young. The rest of us have no part in it; our lives are dead ends, and we dread the approach of that black wall.

  Our psychologists have battled over this question for generations. Would another—say, a mammalian—form of intelligent life have such an obsession? Here we had an intelligent mammal. Could he answer us?

  I give the the transcription of his answer, as yet not fully deciphered:

  I THINK I GET WHAT YOU MEAN. AND I THINK THE ANSWER IS A LITTLE OF BOTH. OK, SO WE’RE INTELLIGENT MAMMALS. WE HAVE MORE FEAR OF DEATH THAN THE UNINTELLIGENT, LIKE THE POOR LITTLE KITTEN YOU BUTCHERED; BUT CERTAINLY NOT SUCH A DOMINANT OBSESSION AS I GATHER YOUR RACE HAS.

  Trubz thinks that this was an ambiguous answer, which will not satisfy either party among our specialists in psychology.

  We then proposed, as a sub-question, the matter of the art. Is it this same psychological manifestation that has led us to develop such an art? That magnificent and highest of art which consists in the extinction with the greatest aesthetic subtlety of all other forms of life?

  Here the man’s reactions were as confusing as they had been beside the corpse of the kitten. He said.

  SO THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO SNOWPUSS? ART … I ART, YOU CALL IT, YETI AND YOU’VE COME HERE TO PRACTICE THAT ART ON THIS WORLD? I’LL SEE YOU FRIED CRISP ON BOTH SIDES ON HADES’ HOTTEST GRI
DDLE FIRST!

  Trubz believes that the extremely violent emotion expressed was shock at realization of the vast new reaches of aesthetic experience which lay before him.

  Later, when he thought he was alone, I overheard him talking to himself. There was something so emphatically inimical in his thought patterns that I transcribed his words, though I have not yet had a chance to secure Trubz’s opinion on them. He beat the clenched digits of one forelimb against the other and said:

  SO THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE UP TO! WE’LL SEE ABOUT THAT. BUT HOW? HOW …? GOT IT! THOSE PICTURES I TOOK FOR THE PUBLIC HEALTH CAMPAIGN …

  I am worried. If this attitude indicated by his thought patterns persists, we may have to bring about his extinction and proceed at once by ourselves. At least it will give Lilil a chance to compose one of his masterpieces.

  Final Report of the First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition, presented by Falzik, specialist in reporting:

  How I could so completely have misinterpreted the man’s thought patterns I do not understand. Trubz is working on the psychology of it. Far from any hatred or enmity, the man was even then resolving to save our lives. The First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition owes him a debt that it can never repay.

  It was after sunup the next day that he approached us with his noble change of heart. As I describe this scene I cannot unfortunately give his direct words; I was too carried away by my own emotions to remember to transcribe. Such phrases as I attribute to him here are reconstructed from the complex of our intercourse and were largely a matter of signs and pictures.

  What he did first was to show us one of his pictures. We stared at it and drew back horrified. For it represented a being closely allied to us, almost to be taken for one of us, meeting extinction beneath a titanic weapon wielded by what was obviously the characteristic five-digited fore-limb of a man. And that forelimb was many, many times the size of the being resembling us.

  “I’ve been keeping this from you,” he informed us. “I’ll admit I’ve been trying to trap you. But the truth is: I’m a dwarf man. The real ones are as much bigger than me as you are bigger than the kitten. More, even. And their favorite pastime—only they call it a sport, not art—is killing bugs like you.”

  We realized now what should have struck us before—the minute size of his structure compared with those which we had seen before. Obviously he spoke the truth—he was a dwarf specimen of his race.

  Then he produced more pictures—horrible, terrifying, monstrous pictures, all showing something perturbingly like us meeting cruel extinction at the whim of a man.

  “I’ve just been keeping you here,” he said, “until some real members of my race could come and play with you. They’d like it. But I haven’t got the heart to do it. I like you, and what you told me about your art convinces me that you don’t deserve extinction like that. So I’m giving you your chance: Clear out of here and stay away from this planet. It’s the most unsafe place in the universe for your kind. If you dread extinction, stay away from the third planet!”

  His resolve to spare our lives had made him happy. His face kept twisting into that grimace which we had learned to recognize as a sign of man’s pleasure. But we hardly watched him or even listened to him. Our eyes kept returning with awful fascination to those morbidly terrifying pictures. Then our thoughts fused into one, and with hardly a word of farewell to our savior we sped back to the ship.

  This is our last report. We are now on the temporary base established on the satellite and will return as soon as we have recovered from the shock of our narrow escape. Lilil has achieved a new composition with a captive pergut from the ship which has somewhat solaced us.

  Murvin to First Interplanetary Exploratory Expedition:

  You dopes! You low mammalian idiots! It’s what comes of sending nothing but specialists on an expedition. I tried to convince them you needed a good general worker like me, but no. And look at you!

  It’s obvious what happened. On our planet, mammals are minute pests and the large intelligent beings are arthropodal hexapods. All right. On the third planet things have worked out the other way round. Bugs, as the man calls our kind, are tiny, insignificant things. You saw those pictures and thought the mans were enormous; actually they meant only that the bugs were minute!

  That man tricked you unpardonably, and I like him for it. Specialists …! You deserve extinction for this, and you know it. But Vardanek has another idea. Stay where you are. Develop the temporary base in any way you can. We’ll send others to help you. We’ll build up a major encampment on that side of the satellite, and in our own sweet time we can invade the third planet with enough sensible ones to counteract the boners of individual specialists.

  We can do it, too. We’ve got all the time we need to build up our base, even if that man has warned his kind—who probably wouldn’t believe him anyway. Because remember this always, and feel secure: No being on the third planet ever knows what is happening on the other side of its satellite.

  * The mathematical signs indicating these coordinates are, unfortunately, typographically impossible to reproduce in this publication.—EDITOR

  * For the convenience of the reader, these transcriptions have been retranscribed into the conventional biped spelling.—EDITOR

  * The remainder of this transcription has been suppressed for this audience.—EDITOR

  We Print the Truth

  I.

  “All right, then, tell me this: If God can do anything—” Jake Willis cleared his throat and paused, preparatory to delivering the real clincher.

  The old man with the scraggly beard snorted and took another shot of applejack. “—can He make a weight so heavy He can’t lift it? We know that one, Jake, and it’s nonsense. It’s like who wakes the bugler, or who shaves the barber, or how many angels can dance how many sarabands on the point of a pin. It’s just playing games. It takes a village atheist to beat a scholastic disputant at pure verbal hogwash. Have a drink.”

  Jake Willis glared. “I’d sooner be the village atheist,” he said flatly, “than the town drunkard. You know I don’t drink.” He cast a further sidewise glare at the little glass in Father Byrne’s hand, as though the priest were only a step from the post of town drunkard himself.

  “You’re an ascetic without mysticism, Jake, and there’s no excuse for it. Better be like me: a mystic without ary a trace of asceticism. More fun.”

  “Stop heckling him, Luke,” Father Byrne put in quietly. “Let’s hear what if God can do anything.”

  Lucretius Sellers grunted and became silent. MacVeagh said, “Go ahead, Jake,” and Chief Hanby nodded.

  They don’t have a cracker barrel in Grover, but they still have a hot-stove league. It meets pretty regularly in the back room of the Sentinel. Oh, once in a while someplace else. On a dull night in the police station they may begin to flock around Chief Hanby, or maybe even sometimes they get together with Father Byrne at the parish house. But mostly it’s at the Sentinel.

  There’s lots of spare time around a weekly paper, even with the increase in job printing that’s come from all the forms and stuff they use out at the Hitchcock plant. And Editor John MacVeagh likes to talk, so it’s natural for him to gather around him all the others that like to talk too. It started when Luke Sellers was a printer, before he resigned to take up drinking as a career.

  The talk’s apt to be about anything. Father Byrne talks music mostly; it’s safer than his own job. With John MacVeagh and Chief Hanby it’s shop talk: news and crime—not that there’s much of either in Grover, or wasn’t up to this evening you’re reading about.

  But sometime in the evening it’s sure to get around to Is there a God? And if so why doesn’t He— Especially when Jake Willis is there. Jake’s the undertaker and the coroner. He says, or used to say then, that when he’s through with them, he knows they’re going to stay dead, and that’s enough for him.

  So here Jake had built up to his usual poser again. Only this time it wasn’t the
weight that Omnipotence couldn’t lift. Everybody was pretty tired of that. It was, “If God can do anything, why doesn’t he stop the war?”

  “For once, Jake, you’ve got something,” said John MacVeagh. “I know the problem of Evil is the great old insoluble problem; but Evil on a scale like this begins to get you. From an Old Testament God, maybe yes; but it’s hard to believe in the Christian God of love and kindness permitting all this mass slaughter and devastation and cruelty.”

  “We just don’t know,” Chief Hanby said slowly. “We don’t understand. ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the Heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ Isaiah, fifty-five, eight and nine. We just don’t understand.”

  “Uh-uh, Chief,” MacVeagh shook his head. “That won’t wash. That’s the easy way out. The one thing we’ve got to know and understand about God is that He loves good and despises evil, which I’ll bet there’s a text for, only I wouldn’t know.”

  “He loves truth,” said Chief Hanby. “We don’t know if His truth is our ‘good.’”

  Lucretius Sellers refilled his glass. “If the Romans thought there was truth in wine, they should’ve known about applejack. But what do you say, Father?”

  Father Byrne sipped and smiled. “It’s presumptuous to try to unravel the divine motives. Isaiah and the Chief are right: His thoughts are not our thoughts. But still I think we can understand the answer to Jake’s question. If you were God—”

  They never heard the end to this daring assumption; not that night, anyway. For just then was when Philip Rogers burst in. He was always a little on the pale side—thin, too, only the word the girls used for it was “slim,” and they liked the pallor, too. Thought it made him look “interesting,” with those clean, sharp features and those long dark eyelashes. Even Laura Hitchcock liked the features and the lashes and the pallor. Ever since she read about Byron in high school.