The boy looked around and was not in the least afraid. “He’o,” he said, brightening up.
Wolf growled a cordial greeting, and wagged his tail and pawed at the ground to indicate that he’d take the lost infant wherever it wanted to go.
The child stood up and wiped away its tears with a dirty fist which left wide black smudges. “Tootootootoo!” he said.
Games, thought Wolf. He wants to play choo-choo. He took the child by the sleeve and tugged gently.
“Tootootootoo!” the boy repeated firmly. “Die way.”
The sound of a railway whistle, to be sure, does die away; but this seemed a poetic expression for such a toddler. Wolf thought, and then abruptly would have snapped his fingers if he’d had them. The child was saying “2222 Dwight Way,” having been carefully brought up to tell his address when lost. Wolf glanced up at the street sign. Bowditch and Hillegas; 2222 Dwight would be just a couple of blocks.
Wolf tried to nod his head, but the muscles didn’t seem to work that way. Instead he wagged his tail in what he hoped indicated comprehension, and started off leading the child.
The infant beamed and said, “Nice woof-woof.”
For an instant Wolf felt like a spy suddenly addressed by his right name, then realized that if some say “bow-wow” others might well say “woof-woof.”
He led the child for two blocks without event. It felt good, having an innocent human being like this. There was something about children; he hoped Gloria felt the same. He wondered what would happen if he could teach this confiding infant The Word. It would be swell to have a pup that would—
He paused. His nose twitched and the hair on the back of his neck rose. Ahead of them stood a dog: a huge mongrel, seemingly a mixture of St. Bernard and Husky. But the growl that issued from his throat indicated that carrying brandy kegs or rushing serum was not for him. He was a bandit, an outlaw, an enemy of man and dog. And they had to pass him.
Wolf had no desire to fight. He was as big as this monster and certainly, with his human brain, much cleverer; but scars from a dog fight would not look well on the human body of Professor Wolf, and there was, moreover, the danger of hurting the toddler in the fracas. It would be wiser to cross the street. But before he could steer the child that way, the mongrel brute had charged at them, yapping and snarling.
Wolf placed himself in front of the boy, poised and ready to leap in defense. The scar problem was secondary to the fact that this baby had trusted him. He was ready to face this cur and teach him a lesson, at whatever cost to his own human body. But halfway to him the huge dog stopped. His growls died away to a piteous whimper. His great flanks trembled in the moonlight. His tail curled craven between his legs. And abruptly he turned and fled.
The child crowed delightedly. “Bad woof-woof go away.” He put his little arms around Wolf’s neck. “Nice woof-woof. ” Then he straightened up and said insistently, “Tootootootoo. Die way,” and Wolf led on, his strong wolf’s heart pounding as it had never pounded at the embrace of a woman.
“Tootootootoo” was a small frame house set back from the street in a large yard. The lights were still on, and even from the sidewalk Wolf could hear a woman’s shrill voice.
“—Since five o’clock this afternoon, and you’ve got to find him, Officer. You simply must. We’ve hunted all over the neighborhood and—”
Wolf stood up against the wall on his hind legs and rang the doorbell with his front right paw.
“Oh! Maybe that’s somebody now. The neighbors said they’d— Come, Officer, and let’s see— Oh!”
At the same moment Wolf barked politely, the toddler yelled “Mamma!” and his thin and worn-looking young mother let out a scream—half delight at finding her child and half terror of this large gray canine shape that loomed behind him. She snatched up the infant protectively and turned to the large man in uniform. “Officer! Look! That big dreadful thing! It stole my Robby!”
“No,” Robby protested firmly. “Nice woof-woof.”
The officer laughed. “The lad’s probably right, ma’am. It is a nice woof-woof. Found your boy wandering around and helped him home. You haven’t maybe got a bone for him?”
“Let that big, nasty brute into my home? Never! Come on, Robby.”
“Want my nice woof-woof.”
“I’ll woof-woof you, staying out till all hours and giving your father and me the fright of our lives. Just wait till your father sees you, young man; he’ll— Oh, good night, Officer!” And she shut the door on the yowls of Robby.
The policeman patted Wolf’s head. “Never mind about the bone, Rover. She didn’t so much as offer me a glass of beer, either. My, you’re a husky specimen, aren’t you, boy? Look almost like a wolf. Who do you belong to, and what are you doing wandering about alone? Huh?” He turned on his flash and bent over to look at the nonexistent collar.
He straightened up and whistled. “No license. Rover, that’s bad. You know what I ought to do? I ought to turn you in. If you weren’t a hero that just got cheated out of his bone, I’d— Hell, I ought to do it, anyway. Laws are laws, even for heroes. Come on, Rover. We’re going for a walk.”
Wolf thought quickly. The pound was the last place on earth he wanted to wind up. Even Ozzy would never think of looking for him there. Nobody’d claim him, nobody’d say Absarka! and in the end a dose of chloroform— He wrenched loose from the officer’s grasp on his hair and with one prodigious leap cleared the yard, landed on the sidewalk, and started hell for leather up the street. But the instant he was out of the officer’s sight he stopped dead and slipped behind a hedge.
He scented the policeman’s approach even before he heard it. The man was running with the lumbering haste of two hundred pounds. But opposite the hedge, he too stopped. For a moment Wolf wondered if his ruse had failed; but the officer had paused only to scratch his head and mutter, “Say! There’s something screwy here. Who rang that doorbell? The kid couldn’t reach it, and the dog— Oh, well,” he concluded. “Nuts,” and seemed to find in that monosyllabic summation the solution to all his problems.
As his footsteps and smell died away, Wolf became aware of another scent. He had only just identified it as cat when someone said, “You’re were, aren’t you?”
Wolf started up, lips drawn back and muscles tense. There was nothing human in sight, but someone had spoken to him. Unthinkingly, he tried to say “Where are you?” but all that came out was a growl.
“Right behind you. Here in the shadows. You can scent me, can’t you?”
“But you’re a cat,” Wolf thought in his snarls. “And you’re talking.”
“Of course. But I’m not talking human language. It’s just your brain that takes it that way. If you had your human body, you’d think I was just going meowrr. But you are were, aren’t you?”
“How do you . . . why do you think so?”
“Because you didn’t try to jump me, as any normal dog would have. And besides, unless Confucius taught me all wrong, you’re a wolf, not a dog; and we don’t have wolves around here unless they’re were.”
“How do you know all this? Are you—”
“Oh, no. I’m just a cat. But I used to live next door to a werechow named Confucius. He taught me things.”
Wolf was amazed. “You mean he was a man who changed to chow and stayed that way? Lived as a pet?”
“Certainly. This was back at the worst of the depression. He said a dog was more apt to be fed and looked after than a man. I thought it was a smart idea.”
“But how terrible! Could a man so debase himself as—”
“Men don’t debase themselves. They debase each other. That’s the way of most weres. Some change to keep from being debased, others to do a little more effective debasing. Which are you?”
“Why, you see, I—”
“SA’Look. This is going to be fun. Holdup.”
Wolf peered around the hedge. A well-dressed, middle-aged man was walking along briskly, apparently enjoying a night constitutiona
l. Behind him moved a thin, silent figure. Even as Wolf watched, the figure caught up with him and whispered harshly, “Up with ’em, buddy!”
The quiet pomposity of the stroller melted away. He was ashen and aspen as the figure slipped a hand around into his breast pocket and removed an impressive wallet.
And what, thought Wolf, was the good of his fine, vigorous body if it merely crouched behind hedges as a spectator? In one fine bound, to the shocked amazement of the were-wise cat, he had crossed the hedge and landed with his forepaws full in the figure’s face. It went over backward with him on top, and then there came a loud noise, a flash of light, and a frightful sharp smell. For a moment Wolf felt an acute pang in his shoulder, like the jab of a long needle, and then the pain was gone.
But his momentary recoil had been enough to let the figure get to its feet. “Missed you, huh?” it muttered. “Let’s see how you like a slug in the belly, you interfering—” and he applied an epithet that would have been purely literal description if Wolf had not been were.
There were three quick shots in succession even as Wolf sprang. For a second he experienced the most acute stomach-ache of his life. Then he landed again. The figure’s head hit the concrete sidewalk and he was still.
Lights were leaping into brightness everywhere. Among all the confused noises, Wolf could hear the shrill complaints of Robby’s mother, and among all the compounded smells, he could distinguish scent of the policeman who wanted to impound him. That meant getting the hell out, and quick.
The city meant trouble, Wolf decided as he loped off. He could endure loneliness while he practiced his wolfry, until he had Gloria. Though just as a precaution he must arrange with Ozzy about a plausible-looking collar, and—
The most astounding realization yet suddenly struck him! He had received four bullets, three of them square in the stomach, and he hadn’t a wound to show for it! Being a werewolf certainly offered its practical advantages. Think what a criminal could do with such bullet-proofing. Or— But no. He was a werewolf for fun, and that was that.
But even for a werewolf, being shot, though relatively painless, is tiring. A great deal of nervous energy is absorbed in the magical and instantaneous knitting of those wounds. And when Wolfe Wolf reached the peace and calm of the uncivilized hills, he no longer felt like reveling in freedom. Instead he stretched out to his full length, nuzzled his head down between his forepaws, and slept.
“Now, the essence of magic,” said Heliophagus of Smyrna, “is deceit; and that deceit is of two kinds. By magic, the magician deceives others; but magic deceives the magician himself.”
So far the lycanthropic magic of Wolfe Wolf had worked smoothly and pleasantly, but now it was to show him the second trickery that lurks behind every magic trick. And the first step was that he slept.
He woke in confusion. His dreams had been human—and of Gloria—despite the body in which he dreamed them, and it took several full minutes for him to reconstruct just how he happened to be in that body. For a moment the dream, even that episode in which he and Gloria had been eating blueberry waffles on a roller coaster, seemed more sanely plausible than the reality.
But he readjusted quickly, and glanced up at the sky. The sun looked as though it had been up at least an hour, which meant in May that the time was somewhere between six and seven. Today was Thursday, which meant that he was saddled with an eight-o’clock class. That left plenty of time to change back, shave, dress, breakfast, and resume the normal life of Professor Wolf—which was, after all, important if he intended to support a wife.
He tried, as he trotted through the streets, to look as tame and unwolflike as possible, and apparently succeeded. No one paid him any mind save children, who wanted to play, and dogs, who began by snarling and ended by cowering away terrified. His friend the cat might be curiously tolerant of weres, but not so dogs.
He trotted up the steps of the Berkeley Inn confidently. The clerk was under a slight spell and would not notice wolves. There was nothing to do but rouse Ozzy, be Absarka! d and—
“Hey! Where are you going? Get out of here! Shoo!”
It was the clerk, a stanch and brawny young man, who straddled the stairway and vigorously waved him off.
“No dogs in here! Go on now. Scoot!”
Quite obviously this man was under no spell, and equally obviously there was no way of getting up that staircase short of using a wolf’s strength to tear the clerk apart. For a second Wolf hesitated. He had to get changed back. It would be a damnable pity to use his powers to injure another human being. If only he had not slept, and arrived before this unmagicked day clerk came on duty; but necessity knows no—
Then the solution hit him. Wolf turned and loped off just as the clerk hurled an ash tray at him. Bullets may be relatively painless, but even a werewolf’s rump, he learned promptly, is sensitive to flying glass.
The solution was foolproof. The only trouble was that it meant an hour’s wait, and he was hungry. Damnably hungry. He found himself even displaying a certain shocking interest in the plump occupant of a baby carriage. You do get different appetites with a different body. He could understand how some originally well-intentioned werewolves might in time become monsters. But he was stronger in will, and much smarter. His stomach could hold out until this plan worked.
The janitor had already opened the front door of Wheeler Hall, but the building was deserted. Wolf had no trouble reaching the second floor unnoticed or finding his classroom. He had a little more trouble holding the chalk between his teeth and a slight tendency to gag on the dust; but by balancing his forepaws on the eraser trough, he could manage quite nicely. It took three springs to catch the ring of the chart in his teeth, but once that was pulled down there was nothing to do but crouch under the desk and pray that he would not starve quite to death.
The students of German 31B, as they assembled reluctantly for their eight-o’clock, were a little puzzled at being confronted by a chart dealing with the influence of the gold standard on world economy, but they decided simply that the janitor had been forgetful.
The wolf under the desk listened unseen to their gathering murmurs, overheard that cute blonde in the front row make dates with three different men for that same night, and finally decided that enough had assembled to make his chances plausible. He slipped out from under the desk far enough to reach the ring of the chart, tugged at it, and let go.
The chart flew up with a rolling crash. The students broke off their chatter, looked up at the blackboard, and beheld in a huge and shaky scrawl the mysterious letters
ABSARKA
It worked. With enough people, it was an almost mathematical certainty that one of them in his puzzlement—for the race of subtitle readers, though handicapped by the talkies, still exists—would read the mysterious word aloud. It was the much-bedated blonde who did it.
“Absarka” she said wonderingly.
And there was Professor Wolfe Wolf, beaming cordially at his class.
The only flaw was this: He had forgotten that he was only a werewolf, and not Hyperman. His clothes were still at the Berkeley Inn, and here on the lecture platform he was stark naked.
Two of his best pupils screamed and one fainted. The blonde only giggled appreciatively.
Emily was incredulous but pitying.
Professor Fearing was sympathetic but reserved.
The chairman of the department was cool.
The dean of letters was chilly.
The president of the university was frigid.
Wolfe Wolf was unemployed.
And Heliophagus of Smyrna was right. “The essence of magic is deceit.”
“But what can I do?” Wolf moaned into his zombie glass. “I’m stuck. I’m stymied. Gloria arrives in Berkeley tomorrow, and here I am—nothing. Nothing but a futile, worthless werewolf. You can’t support a wife on that. You can’t raise a family. You can’t— Hell, you can’t even propose . . . I want another. Sure you won’t have one?” Ozymandias the Great shook hi
s round, fringed head. “The last time I took two drinks I started all this. I’ve got to behave if I want to stop it. But you’re an able-bodied, strapping young man; surely, colleague, you can get work?”
“Where? All I’m trained for is academic work, and this scandal has put the kibosh on that forever. What university is going to hire a man who showed up naked in front of his class without even the excuse of being drunk? And supposing I try something else—say one of these jobs in defense that all my students seem to be getting—I’d have to give references, say something about what I’d been doing with my thirty-odd years. And once these references were checked— Ozzy, I’m a lost man.”
“Never despair, colleague. I’ve learned that magic gets you into some tight squeezes, but there’s always a way of getting out. Now, take that time in Darjeeling—”
“But what can I do? I’ll wind up like Confucius the werechow and live off charity, if you’ll find me somebody who wants a pet wolf.”
“You know,” Ozymandias reflected, “you may have something there, colleague.”
“Nuts! That was a joke. I can at least retain my self-respect, even if I go on relief doing it. And I’ll bet they don’t like naked men on relief, either.”
“No. I don’t mean just being a pet wolf. But look at it this way: What are your assets? You have only two outstanding abilities. One of them is to teach German, and that is now completely out.”
“Check.”
“And the other is to change yourself into a wolf. All right, colleague. There must be some commercial possibilities in that. Let’s look into them.”
“Nonsense.”
“Not quite. For every kind of merchandise there’s a market. The trick is to find it. And you, colleague, are going to be the first practical commercial werewolf on record.”
“I could—They say Ripley’s Odditorium pays good money. Supposing I changed six times a day regular for delighted audiences?”
Ozymandias shook his head sorrowfully. “It’s no good. People don’t want to see real magic. It makes ’em uncomfortable—starts ’em wondering what else might be loose in the world. They’ve got to feel sure it’s all done with mirrors. I know. I had to quit vaudeville because I wasn’t smart enough at faking it; all I could do was the real thing.”
The Compleat Boucher Page 6