The Werewolf Principle (21 page)

Elaine shuddered.

“You'll pardon me,” said Wilson. “I should not have said that.”

“Why shouldn't you?” she asked. “Unpleasant as it is, that's what it's called by everyone.”

“I told you about that day he came into the office,” Wilson said. “He was a nice young man.”

“He was a frightened man,” said Elaine, “running from the world. If he had only told me …”

“Perhaps then he didn't know …”

“He knew he was in trouble. The senator and I would have helped him. Dr. Daniels would have helped him.”

“He didn't want to involve you. It was not the sort of thing one would involve his friends in. And he wanted to keep your friendship. He was afraid, more than likely, if he told you, that he would lose the friendship.”

“I can see,” said Elaine, “how he might have thought so. And I didn't even try to make him tell me. I blame myself for that. But I didn't want to hurt him. I thought he should have a chance of finding the answer for himself.”

The crowd came down the hill, went by the two of them and continued down the road.

30

The pyramid stood to the left, and in front of the row of seats. It glowed dully, pulsating slightly, and out from it hung a curtain of light.

“Don't go too close,” the captain said. “You might frighten it.”

Elaine did not answer. She stared at the pyramid and the horror and the wonder of it rose in her throat to choke her.

“You can go down two or three more rows of seats,” the captain said. “It might be dangerous if you tried to get too close. We don't really know.”

Words forced themselves up and out of her. “Frighten it?” she asked.

“I don't know,” the captain said. “That's the way it acts. As if it might be frightened of us. Or suspicious of us. Or maybe just doesn't want anything to do with us. It wasn't like this until recently. It was blacked out, a piece of emptiness, as if there were nothing there. Creating a world of its own, with all defenses up.”

“And now he knows that we won't harm him?”

“Him?”

“Andrew Blake,” she said.

“You knew him, miss? Mr. Wilson said so.”

“I saw him three times,” she said.

“About knowing we won't hurt him,” the captain said. “Maybe that is it. Some of the scientists think so. A lot of them have tried to study it—pardon me, Miss Horton—have tried to study him. But they don't get too far. Nothing much to work on.”

“They're sure?” she asked. “They're sure it's Andrew Blake?”

“Down underneath the pyramid,” the captain told her. “Down at the base of it, on the right hand side.”

“The robe!” she cried. “That was the one I gave him!”

“Yes. The one that he was wearing. It's down there on the floor. Just the corner of it sticking out.”

She took a step down the aisle.

“Not too far,” the captain warned. “Not too close.”

She took another step and halted.

This is foolish, she thought. If he is there, he knows. He'd know that it is me and he would not be frightened—he'd know I have for him nothing but my love.

The pyramid pulsated gently.

But perhaps he doesn't know, she told herself. Perhaps he has locked himself against the world and if that is what he's done, he had reason to.

How must it be, she wondered, to know that your mind is the mind of another man—a loaned mind since you can have none of your own, because man's ingenuity was not quite great enough to fabricate a mind? Ingenuity sufficient to fashion bone and flesh and brain, but not to fashion mind. And how much worse, perhaps, to know that you were a part of two other minds—at least two other minds.

“Captain?” she asked.

“Yes, Miss Horton.”

“Do the scientists know how many minds there are? Could it be more than three?”

“They don't seem to know,” he said. “Granted the situation as it stands, there might not be a limit.”

No limit, she thought. Room for an infinity of minds, for all the thought that lay in the universe.

I am here, she said, speaking silently to the creature that had been Andrew Blake. I am here. Can't you tell I'm here? If you ever need me, if you change back into a man again …

But why should he change back into a man again? Perhaps he had changed to this so he need not be a man, so that he need not face a humanity that he could not share.

She turned and took a hesitant step toward the chapel's front, then turned back once more.

The pyramid was shining softly and it seemed so peaceful and so solid, yet withdrawn, that her throat constricted and tears came to her eyes.

I will not weep, she told herself, fiercely. I will not weep, for whom would I be weeping? For Andrew Blake? For myself? For the befuddled race of man?

Not dead, she thought. But worse than death, perhaps. If he had been a man and dead, she could have walked away. She could have said goodbye.

Once he had turned to her for help. Now he was beyond her help, or any human help. Perhaps, she thought, he was beyond all humanity.

She turned again.

“I'll leave now,” she said. “Captain, please, would you walk beside me.”

He took her arm and walked beside her up the aisle.

31

It all was there. The great black towers anchored in the planet's granite crust, reached toward the skies. The green and leafy glade, with its flowers and gaily-playing animals, stood motionless in time. The pink-white structure rose in airy curves and spirals above the purple, foam-flecked sea. And in the aridity of the great plateau the mustard-colored domes of hermit intelligences ran as far as sense could reach.

These and many others—and not the pictures of them only, snatched from the ice-hard stars which lay like scattered crystals across the skies that roofed a planet of drifted sand and snow—but the ideas and the thoughts and concepts that clung to all the pictures, like bits of dirt to roots.

Most of the thoughts and concepts were simply isolated pieces which would not correlate, but all of them were springboards for the fabrication of a vast jigsaw puzzle net of logic.

The task was an enormous one and at times confusing, but bit by bit the various data fell into filing patterns, and once identified were erased from active consideration, but still tagged and available when there should be need of them.

It worked with satisfaction and a happiness—and that bothered it. Satisfaction was all right and quite permissible, but happiness was wrong. It was something that had been unknown and should not be felt; it was an alien thing and it was emotion. For the best result, there must be nothing like emotion, and it was irritated at the happiness and tried to wipe it out.

A contagion, it told itself. A contagion that it had caught from Changer and, as well, perhaps, from Quester, who was at the best a most unstable creature. A situation that it must guard against, for happiness was bad enough—there were other illogical emotions held by those two that could be even worse.

So it wiped away the happiness and posted guard against it, and went on with its work, reducing the ideas and the thoughts and concepts, insofar as they could be so reduced, to formulae and axioms and symbols, being careful in the process not to lose the substance of them, for the substance would be needed later.

There were tantalizing hints that must be docketed for more consideration and, perhaps, even for more data. The logic pattern potentially was sound, but extrapolated too far it left some room for error and needed further data to indicate direction. There were so many tricky things; there was nothing ever easy. The process called for hard discipline and constant self-examination to be certain that the concept of one's self was eliminated. That was the thing, it thought, that made the happiness so bad.

The material of that black tower, for example. So thin it seemed impossible for it to stand, let alone have strength. But there coud be no doubt about its thinness; that information came through very clear and solid. But the hint of neutrons was something else—neutrons packed so solidly together that they assumed the characteristics of a metal, all held in a rigid association by a force for which there was no definition. The hint indicated time, but was time a force? A dislocated time, perhaps. A time straining to take its proper place in either past or future, forever striving toward a goal made impossible by some fantastic mechanism that kept time out of step?

And the fishers of space who cast their nets across empty cubic light-years, catching the energy spewed out in space by all the angry suns. Catching, in the process, the incredible flotsam of unknown things that once had crossed or once had lived in space—the garbage of the vast stretches of abandoned space. Nothing about the fishers or what kind of nets they cast or how these nets might trap the energy. Just the thought that the fishers fished. Some fantasy, perhaps of some dim communal mind, a religion or a faith or myth—or could there be the fishers?

These and many more and that one faint impression, so faint it barely registered, faint, perhaps, because it had been dredged from a star so distant that even light grew tired. A universal mind, it said, and that was all it said. A mind, perhaps, from which all thinking came. A mind, perhaps, that gathered in all thinking. Or a mind that set the law and order which spun the electron around the nucleus and called out marching cadences to the galaxies.

There was much, and all of it fragmentary and very puzzling. And this was just a start. This was the harvest merely of a moment of time on a single planet. But it was important, all of it, every bit of information, every faint impression. Somewhere it all fit in, somehow there was a place for it in that pattern of law and order, cause and effect, action and reaction which made up the universe.

Time was all that was needed. With more data and more logic it could all become as one. And time, as a factor, could be canceled out. There was an eternity of it.

Thinker, squatted on the chapel floor, pulsated gently, the logic mechanism that was its mind driving toward the universal truth.

32

Changer struggled.

He must get out. He must escape. He could not remain, buried in this blackness and quietness, in the comfort and security, in the brotherhood that encompassed and engulfed him.

He did not want to struggle. He would rather have stayed exactly where he was, remain the thing he was. But something made him struggle—not something inside himself, it seemed, but something from outside himself, a creature or a being or a situation that called out to him and told him that he could not stay, that no matter how much he might wish to stay, he could not. There was something left undone and it could not be left undone and he was the only one who would be able to perform the task, whatever it might be.

—Quiet, quiet, said Quester. You are better where you are. There is too much grief, too much bitterness for you outside of here.

Outside of here? he wondered. And remembered some of it. A woman's face, the tall pines at the gate—another world seen as one would see it through a wall of running water, remote and far away and improbable. But he knew that it was there.

—You shut me in! he shouted. You must let me go.

But Thinker paid no attention to him. Thinker went on thinking, all his energies directed toward the many pieces of information and of fact—the great black towers, the mustard-colored domes, the hint of something or someone barking out the orders for the universe.

His strength and will wore off and he sank into the blackness and the quiet.

—Quester, he said.

—No, said Quester. Thinker's hard at work.

He lay and raged wordlessly at the two of them, raging in his mind. But raging did no good.

I did not treat them that way, he told himself. When I was in the body, I listened to them always. I did not shut them out.

He lay and rested and the thought was in his mind that it was better to stay in the comfort and the quietness. What did this other matter, whatever it might be? What did Earth matter?

And there he had it—Earth!

Earth and humanity. And the both of them did matter. Not, perhaps, to Quester or to Thinker—although what mattered to the one of them must matter to all three.

He struggled feebly and he did not have the strength, nor perhaps the will.

So he lay back again and waited, gathering strength and patience.

They cared for him, he told himself. They had reached out and taken him in an hour of anguish and now they held him close, for healing, and they would not let him go.

He tried to call up the anguish once again in the hope that in the anguish he would find the strength and will. But he could not recall it. It had been wiped away. He could claw at the edges of it, but could not get a grip upon it.

So he snuggled close against the darkness and let the quiet come in, but even as he did he knew that he would struggle to break free again, feebly, perhaps, hoping, more than likely, that he would not succeed, but knowing that he must keep on and on, never ceasing, because there was some not entirely understood, but compelling reason that he should.

He lay quietly and thought how like a dream it was, a dream wherein one climbed a mountain, but could never reach the top, or one in which one clung to a precipice until his fingers slipped and then fell endlessly, filled with the terror of the falling and of hitting bottom, but never reaching bottom.

Time and futility stretched out ahead of him and time itself, he knew, was futile, for he knew what Thinker knew—that time was not a factor.

He tried to put his situation into correct perspective, but it refused to fall into a pattern against which perspective could be measured. Time was a blur and reality a haze and swimming down toward him through the haze came a face—a face that at first meant not too much to him, but, finally, he realized, of someone that he knew, and then, at last, a face, half seen in darkness, that was imprinted on his mind forever.