The Werewolf Principle (8 page)

SENATOR HORTON: But you finally prevailed?

DR. LUKAS: Yes, finally. With considerable competent assistance, I might add. You see, the records at one time had been under the highest top security such material could be given. Technically, this security still applied. It took considerable argument to make it apparent that such a situation was ridiculous …

SENATOR STONE: Now, hold up a minute, doctor. Before you go on, one question. You said you had assistance.

DR. LUKAS: Yes, I did.

SENATOR STONE: Could a considerable part of that assistance have come from Senator Horton?

SENATOR HORTON: Since the question concerns me, I'll answer if Dr. Lukas will consent. I am quite happy to admit that I did lend him some assistance.

SENATOR STONE: All right, that's all I wanted. Just so it's on the record.

SENATOR HORTON: Dr. Lukas, if you'll please continue.

DR. LUKAS: The records showed that two hundred and twenty one years ago—2266, to be exact—two synthetic beings had been made. They were in the shape of humans and they had human minds, but they were constructed for a very special purpose. They were to be used in initial contacts with life on other planets, to be carried aboard exploratory and survey ships and used to gather data on the dominant life on whatever new planets might be found.

SENATOR HORTON: Now, Dr. Lukas, without going into details at the present moment, can you tell us exactly how it was planned they were to do this sort of job?

DR. LUKAS: I'm not sure I can make myself entirely clear, but I'll try. These synthetic humans were highly adaptable. You might have described them, for want of a better term, as plastic. The concept of open-endedness was employed—it couldn't have been developed earlier than ten years or so before, and it is unusual, to say the least, to find a concept as intricate as this bent to practical purpose in such a length of time. All the basic components of the constructed human bodies involved open-endedness—completed, you understand, and yet, in a sense, essentially incomplete. The amino acids …

SENATOR HORTON: Perhaps, for the moment, you will only tell us what these bodies were intended to do, without going into the principles involved.

DR. LUKAS: You mean simply how they were intended to function?

SENATOR HORTON: If you will, please.

DR. LUKAS: The idea was that once an exploratory ship landed on a planet one of the dominant species of that planet would be captured and be scanned. You are familiar, I think, with the biological scanning process. The structure, the chemistry, the metabolic processes—all the data which made the creature what it was—would be determined. This data would be stored in a memory core. Once this was done, the data would be transmitted to the simulated human which, because of the uniqueness of its biological open-endedness, would change into an exact copy of the creature which was described by the data in the tapes. This would not have been a slow process. Any delay would have been fatal. It must have been an uncanny thing to watch—a human being almost instantaneously changing into an alien creature.

SENATOR HORTON: You say the human would have changed into the alien creature. Does that mean in every respect—mental, intellectual, if the term implies, as well as …

DR. LUKAS: The human would, in fact, become the creature. Not one of the creatures, you understand, but an exact copy of the creature from which it had been patterned. It would have that creature's memories and its mind. It would be able to pick up immediately where the other creature had left off. Released from the ship, it could seek out that creature's fellows and rejoin them and could carry out its investigations …

SENATOR HORTON: You mean it still would retain the human mind as well?

DR. LUKAS: Well, that would be hard to say. The human mentality and memory and identity and all the rest of it would still be there, although perhaps deeply sublimated. It would exist as a subconscious that could be triggered to the surface. A compulsion would be planted for the human-turned-creature to return to the ship after a stated interval of time and once returned, it would be induced to revert to its human form. Once back in human form, it would be able to recall the memories of its existence as an alien creature and data which otherwise might have been impossible to obtain would be made available.

SENATOR HORTON: And, may I ask, how did this all work out?

DR. LUKAS: That, sir, is hard to say. There are no reports as to results. There are records of them—both of them—having been sent out. But after that there is only silence.

SENATOR HORTON: Your surmise would be that something went wrong?

DR. LUKAS: Yes. But I can't imagine what it might have been.

SENATOR HORTON: Something to do with the simulated men, perhaps.

DR. LUKAS: Yes, that could be the case. There is no way of knowing.

SENATOR HORTON: They didn't work, perhaps.

DR. LUKAS: Oh, they would have performed their function. There could have been no reason for them not to perform as they were planned. They would have had to work.

SENATOR HORTON: I ask these questions because I know that if I do not, my distinguished colleague will. Now let me ask you one of my own. Could such a, simulated man be constructed today?

DR. LUKAS: Yes, with the blueprints in our hands, there would be not a bit of trouble to build another one.

SENATOR HORTON: But no others were ever built, so far as you know, that is.

DR. LUKAS: So far as I know.

SENATOR HORTON: Would you care to speculate …

DR. LUKAS: No, senator, I would not.

SENATOR STONE: If I may interrupt. Dr. Lukas, do you have some sort of descriptive term for the process which was employed to make such men as these?

DR. LUKAS: Yes, as a matter of fact, we have. It is called the werewolf principle.

11

In the parking lot across the street a man carried a tub out of the back door of one of the houses and set it on the patio at the edge of the pool. A tree was planted in the tub and when the man had set it down and moved away the tree began to ring—emitting a sound like the happy ringing of many silver bells.

Blake, sitting on a chair and wrapped in a robe of candy-colored stripes, leaned his elbows on the railing five stories above the street, and strained his ears, trying to make certain that the ringing really came from the tree. It seemed incredible, but there had been no such silver sound until the tub in which the tree was planted had been set beside the pool. And his ears told him that the sound did, indeed, come from the direction of the house.

Washington dozed in the blue smokiness of a late October afternoon. A few ground cars went past on the boulevard below, their air jet making soft, sighing sounds as they moved along. In the far distance, over the Potomac, a few floaters bobbed along—floating chairs with humans sitting in them. The houses in the parking lot were lined up in orderly rows, each with its bright green lawn, its beds of brightly colored autumn flowers, the blue shine of the pools. By leaning forward and craning his neck, he could just make out his own house, down the boulevard, third row from the front, squatting on the foundation where it had put down.

His nearest neighbor on the solarium porch was an elderly man, muffled to the ears in a thick red blanket, blank eyes staring out into the space beyond the railing, seeing nothing, mumbling to himself. A short distance away two patients were playing a game that might have been checkers.

An attendant came hurrying across the porch.

“Mr. Blake,” he said, “there is someone here to see you.”

Blake rose and turned around. Standing in the door that led out onto the porch was a woman, tall, dark-haired, wearing a robe of pale rose, a material that had the sheen of silk.

“Miss Horton,” said Blake. “Yes, please show her in.”

She came across the porch and held out her hand to him.

“I drove down to your village yesterday afternoon,” she said, “and found that you had left.”

“I am sorry,” said Blake, “that I was not there. Won't you please sit down.”

She seated herself in a chair and Blake perched on the railing.

“You and your father are in Washington,” he said. “The hearings …”

She nodded. “They began this morning.”

“You'll be attending some of them, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” she said. “But it's a painful thing. It's hard to see my father take the beating he will take. I admire him, of course, for standing on the thing that he believes, but I could wish that, occasionally, he might plop for something that carried public approval. But he almost never does. He's always on the wrong side, so far as the public is concerned. And this one is the one that can really hurt him.”

“You mean this business of unanimity. I was reading something about it just the other day. It seems to me a foolish setup.”

“Perhaps it is,” she said, “but that's the way it is. It is carrying the rule of the majority to unnecessary limits. It will half kill the senator if he has to retire from public life. It has been meat and bread to him for all the years he's lived.”

“I liked your father very much,” said Blake. “There's something natural about him, something that corresponds to the house you live in.”

“You mean old-fashioned.”

“Well, maybe. Although that's not it exactly. There is something solid about the man, and yet he has an enthusiasm and an apparent dedication.…”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He has dedication. And you must admire him for it and I think that mostly people do. But he manages somehow or other to irritate a lot of people by showing them they're wrong.”

Blake laughed. “I don't know of a better way to irritate the people.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But how about yourself?”

“I'm getting along quite well,” he said. “There really is no reason why I should be here. Before you came I was sitting here, listening to a tree ring a lot of bells. I couldn't quite believe my senses. A man across the street brought one out of the house and set it by a pool and it began to ring.

She leaned forward to stare across the street. The tree emitted a rippling peal of bonging bells.

“A monastery tree,” she said. “There are not too many of them. A few of them are imported from a planet—one quite far out, I can't recall which one.”

“Continually,” said Blake, “I'm running up against these things that are entirely new to me. Things that are outside my entire circle of experience. Just the other day I met a Brownie.”

She stared at him, delighted. “A Brownie! You mean you really did?”

He nodded. “It ate all my lunch,” he said.

“Oh, how nice for you! Most people never see one.”

“I'd never heard of them,” he said. “I thought that I was having another hallucination.”

“Like the time you came to our house.”

“That's right. I still don't know what happened that night. There is no explaining it.”

“The doctors …”

“The doctors don't seem to be much help. They are as puzzled as I am. I think, perhaps, the Brownie might have come the closest to a guess.”

“The Brownie? What would he have to do with it?”

“He asked me how many there were of me. He said he felt quite sure, when he first saw me, that there was more than one of me. Two men in one, three men in one … I wouldn't know how many. More than one, he said.”

“Mr. Blake,” she said, “I think that every man is more than just one man. He has many sides to him.”

He shook his head. “That's not what the Brownie meant. I am sure it wasn't. I've been doing a lot of thinking about it and I'm sure he wasn't talking about different temperaments.”

“You've told this to your doctor?”

“Well, no, I guess I haven't. The poor guy has enough to worry him. This would be just another thing.”

“But important, maybe.”

“I wouldn't know,” said Blake.

“You act,” said Elaine Horton, “almost as if you didn't care, as if you didn't want to find out what has happened to you. Or, perhaps, that you are afraid to find out.”

He glanced sharply at her. “I hadn't thought of it quite that way,” he said, “but you may well be right.”

Across the way the bell-sounds changed—no longer the trilling of many silver bells, but the sonorous clanging of a bell much larger, calling out a warning and a challenge across the rooftops of the ancient city.

12

Fear thundered in the tunnel. There was the reek of alien odors and an alien muttering. Light bounced off the walls and the floor was hard as rock.

The creature crouched and whimpered, every muscle tensed, each separate nerve frayed with paralyzing fear.

The tunnel went on endlessly and there was no escape. It was caught and trapped. And it had no idea where it might be trapped. Certainly in a place such as it had never known before and a place it had not sought. It had been caught and dumped here and for no reason that it knew.

There had been a time before and then it had been wet and hot and dark, with the creepy feeling of many tiny life forms. And now it was hot and bright and dry, but there was no sense of tiny life forms—rather the sense of distant larger life forms and the thunder of their thoughts that rumbled like a drum within the brain.

The creature wheeled about, half rising from its crouch, toenails clicking on the hardness of the floor. The tunnel still went on, in back as well as front. An enclosed place where there were not any stars. But there was the talk—the thought-talk and the deeper rumble of the spoken talk—not the kind of talk that trickled from the stars, but jumbled and chaotic talk, a murky talk that surged and flared and hadn't any depth and not a shred of meaning.

A tunnel world, the creature thought in terror, a narrow, enclosed space that went on and on forever, reeking with its odors and filled with murky talk and awash with fear.