The Werewolf Principle (3 page)

“It might not look like one,” said the senator, “but it still would be a man.”

She said to Blake, “You understand, of course, that I'm not against the senator. But there are times when it's terribly hard to make him realize what he's up against.”

“My daughter,” said the senator, “plays my devil's advocate and at times it is a service. But in this instance there is no particular need. I know the bitterness of the opposition.”

He lifted the decanter.

Blake shook his head. “If there is some way I can get back home. It has been quite a night.”

“You could stay the night with us.”

“Thank you, senator, but if there is some way …”

“Certainly,” said the senator. “One of the guards can take you. We had better use the ground car. Bad night for a floater.”

“I would appreciate it.”

“It'll give one of the guards a chance to be of use,” said the senator. “Driving you home, they won't be seeing wolves. By the way, when you were out there, you didn't see a wolf?”

“No,” said Blake, “I didn't see a wolf.”

4

Michael Daniels stood at the window and watched the ground crew at the Riverside development across the boulevard bring the houses in. The black foundation blocks gleamed wetly in the night and the Potomac, a quarter mile beyond, was a sheet of inky darkness that picked up and reflected back the gleam of the landing lights.

Slowly, one by one, the houses came lumbering down out of the cloud-fogged sky, to stop above their assigned foundations, hovering there and moving slowly and deliberately to square their landing grids with the foundation patterns.

Patients coming in, thought Daniels. Or, perhaps, staff members returning from a holiday. Although there might be, as well, others who were unconnected with the hospital, either as patient or as staff. The town was crowded, with the regional bioengineering hearings due to open in a day or two. Space was at a premium and migrating houses were being squeezed in wherever accommodations could be found.

Far across the river, somewhere over Old Virginia, its lights dimmed by fog and drizzle, a ship was coming in, heading for a landing at the spaceport.

Following its flight, Daniels speculated from what far star it might have come. And how long away from home? He smiled ruefully to himself. These were questions that he always asked—a holdover from a boyhood when he had held the hard determination that some day he would travel to the stars.

But in this, he knew, he was not unusual. Every boy, these days, dreamed of going to the stars.

Streams of moisture ran in jagged patterns down the smooth glass of the windows and beyond the windows the houses still came floating in, filling up the few foundations still available. A few ground cars went sliding smoothly along the boulevard, the cushions of air on which they rode throwing out a wide spray of water from the dampened surface. It was too foul a night, he told himself, for many floaters to be out.

He should be getting home, he knew. He should have left long ago. The kids would be in bed by now, but Cheryl would be waiting up for him.

To the east, almost beyond the angle of his vision, glowing by reflected light, he could see the ghost-like whiteness of the shaft that rose beside the river in honor of the first astronauts, who had gone out more than five hundred years ago to circle earth in space, boosted there by the raw, brute power of chemical reaction.

Washington, he thought, a town of mouldering buildings, and filled with monuments—a tangle of marble and of granite, and thick with the moss of old associations, its metal and its stone veneered with the patina of ancient memories and with the aura of once-great power still hanging over it. Once the national capital of an old republic, now no more than a seat of provincial government, it still held an air of greatness draped about it like a cloak.

And it was best, he thought, at a time like this, when a soft, wet night had fallen over it, creating an illusive background through which old ghosts could move.

The hushed sounds of a hospital at night whispered in the room—the soft padding of a nurse going down the corridor, the muted rumble of a cart, the low buzzing of a call bell at the station just across the hall.

Behind him someone opened the door. Daniels swung around.

“Good evening, Gordy,” he said.

Gordon Barnes, a resident, grinned at him. “I thought you'd be gone by now,” he said.

“Just about to. I was going over that report.”

He gestured at the table in the center of the room.

Barnes picked up the file of papers and glanced at it.

“Andrew Blake,” he said. “An intriguing piece of business.”

Daniels shook his head in puzzlement. “More than intriguing,” he declared. “It just isn't possible. How old would you take Blake to be? By just looking at him.”

“Not more than thirty, Mike. Of course we know he could be a couple of hundred, chronologically.”

“If he were thirty, you'd expect some deterioration, wouldn't you? The body begins wearing out early in the twenties. From there it goes progressively downhill, heading toward old age.”

“I know,” said Barnes. “But not this Blake, I take it.”

“Perfect,” said Daniels. “A perfect specimen. Youthful. More than youthful. Not a blemish. Not a weakness.”

“And no evidence of who he really is?”

Daniels shook his head. “Space Administration has gone through the records with a fine-toothed comb. He could be any one of thousands of people. Within just the last two centuries, several dozen ships have simply disappeared. Went out and no more heard of them. He could be any one of the people who were aboard those ships.”

“Someone froze him,” said Barnes, “and stuck him in the capsule. Could that be a clue of some sort?”

“You mean someone who was so important that someone else took a chance at saving him?”

“Something like that.”

“It doesn't make sense,” said Daniels. “Even if they did, it still is a bit too sticky. Fire a man out into space and what are the chances he'll be found again? A billion to one? A trillion to one? I don't know. Space is big and empty.”

“But Blake was found.”

“Yes, I know. His capsule floated into a solar system that had been colonized less than a hundred years ago and a gang of asteroid miners found him. The capsule had taken up an orbit around an asteroid and they saw it flashing in the sun and got curious. Too much flash to it. Had dreams of finding a monstrous diamond or something. A few years longer and he would have crashed on the asteroid. Try to figure out those odds.”

Barnes laid the folder back on the table and walked over to the window to stand beside Daniels.

“I agree with you,” he said. “It makes little sense. The odds keep working for the man. Even after he was found, someone could have broken open the capsule. They knew there was a man in there. The capsule was transparent; they could see him. Someone could have gotten the wild idea of trying to thaw him out and resuscitating him. It could have been worth their while. Who knows, he might have some information that it would be worth their having.”

“Fat lot of good it would have done,” said Daniels. “That's another thing. Blake's mind was blank except for a general human background—the kind of general background a man could have gotten only on the Earth. He had the language and the human outlook and the sort of basic information that a man who lived two hundred years ago would have stored away. But that was all. No slightest memory of what might have happened to him or who he was or where he might have come from.”

“There is no question that he originally came from Earth? Not from one of the stellar colonies?”

“There doesn't seem to be. He knew where and what Washington was once we had revived him. But to him it still was the capital of the United States. And there were a lot of other things, as well, that only an Earthman would have known. As you can well imagine, we ran him through quite a bunch of tests.”

“How is he getting along?”

“Apparently all right. I haven't heard from him. He's in a little community west of here. Out in the mountains. He thought, and I thought, he should get some resting time. Time just to take it easy. That might give him a chance to do some thinking, do some probing back. By now he may be beginning to recall who and what he was. I didn't suggest it—I didn't want to put any burden on him. But I'd think it would be natural that he might. He was a bit upset about it all.”

“And if he does, he'll tell you?”

“I don't know,” said Daniels. “I would hope he might. But I kept no strings on him. I didn't think it wise. Let him do it on his own. If he gets in trouble, I think he'll get in touch.”

5

Blake stood on the patio and watched the red tail lights of the ground car recede swiftly up the street.

The rain had stopped and through the scudding clouds a few stars could be seen. Up and down the street, the houses stood dark, with only the yard lights burning. In his own house a light was burning in the entry hall—a sign that the house was waiting up for him. To the west the mountains humped, a darker blot against the sky.

The wind that came cutting out of the northwest was cold and Blake pulled the brown wool of the robe tight about his chest and shucked it up about his ears.

Hunched in the robe, Blake turned and crossed the patio, mounted the short three steps up to the door. The door came open and he stepped inside.

“Good evening, sir,” said the House, and then, in a tone of reprimand, “it appears you were detained.”

“Something happened to me,” said Blake. “Would you have any idea what it might have been?”

“You left the patio,” said the House, disgusted that he should expect further information from it. “You are aware, of course, that our concern does not extend beyond the patio.”

“Yes,” mumbled Blake. “I am aware of that.”

“You should have let us know you were going out,” the House said, sternly. “You could have made arrangements to keep in touch with us. We would have provided clothing that was appropriate. As it is, I see you have come back with clothing different than you were wearing when you left.”

“A friend loaned it to me,” said Blake.

“While you were gone,” the House told him, “a message came for you. It is on the P.G.”

The postalgraph machine stood to one side of the entry way. Blake stepped over to it and pulled out the sheet of paper projecting from its face. The message was written in precise, bold hand and was short and formal. It read:

If Mr. Andrew Blake should find it convenient to contact Mr. Ryan Wilson at the town of Willow Grove, he might learn something to his great advantage
.

Blake held the sheet gingerly between his fingers. It was incredible, he thought. It smelled of melodrama.

“Willow Grove?” he asked.

Said the House, “We'll look it up.”

“If you please,” said Blake.

“A bath can be ready in a moment,” said the House, “if that is what you wish?”

“Food also can be ready soon,” yelled the Kitchen. “What does the master wish?”

“I think,” said Blake, “I would like some food. How about some ham and eggs and a slice or two of toast.”

“Something else could be made as easily,” said the Kitchen. “Welsh rarebit? Lobster thermidor?”

“Ham and eggs,” said Blake.

“How about the decor?” asked the House. “We have had the present one for an unseemly length of time.”

“No,” Blake told it, wearily, “leave it as it is. Leave the decor be. It doesn't really matter.”

“Of course it matters,” the House said, tartly. “There is such a thing as …”

“Just leave it be,” said Blake.

“As you wish, master,” said the House.

“Food first,” said Blake, “then the bath, then off to bed. It's been quite a day.”

“And the message?”

“Forget about it now. We'll think of it tomorrow.”

“The town of Willow Grove,” said the House, “is northwest of here. Fifty-seven miles. We looked it up.”

Blake walked across the living room into the dining room and sat down at the table.

“You have to come and get it,” wailed the Kitchen. “I can't bring it to you.”

“I know that,” said Blake. “Tell me when it's ready.”

“But you're sitting at the table!”

“The man has a right to sit wherever he may wish,” stormed the House.

“Yes, sir,” said the Kitchen.

The House relapsed into silence and Blake sat in the chair, bone tired.

The wallpaper of the room, he saw, had been animated. Although, come to think of it, it wasn't really wallpaper. The House had pointed that out to him the day he had arrived.

There were, he thought, so many new things, that he often was confused.

It was a woodland scene, interspersed with meadows, and with a brook that ran through woods and meadow. A rabbit came hopping deliberately along. It stopped beside a clump of clover and settled down to nibble at the blossoms. Its ears went back and forth and it scratched itself, holding its head to one side and hitting gentle strokes with a ponderous hind leg. The brook sparkled in the sunlight as it ran down a tiny rapids and there were flecks of foam and fallen leaves riding on its surface. A bird flew across the scene and landed in a tree. It raised its head and sang, but there was no sound. One could tell that it was singing by the trembling of its throat.

“Would you like the sound turned on?” asked the Dining Room.

“No, thank you. I don't believe I would. I want just to sit and rest. Some other time, perhaps.”

To sit and rest and think—to get it figured out. To try to find what had happened to him and how it might have happened, and why, of course, as well. And to determine who or what he was, what he had been and what he might be now. It all was, he thought, a nightmare happening while he was wide awake.