The Werewolf Principle

12

Fear thundered in the tunnel. There was the reek of alien odours 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 paralysing 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 for ever, reeking with its odours and filled with murky talk and awash with fear.

There were openings, it saw, all along the tunnel, and some of them were closed with a dark material, while there were others open, leading, more than likely, into other tunnels that went on and on, as endlessly as this.

Far down the tunnel a creature, huge, misshapen, terrible, came from one of the openings. It made a clicking sound as it walked and it turned towards the creature, coming down the tunnel. It screamed and something that it carried clattered on the floor and the sound of its wrenching terror, welling from its brain, bounced back and forth like shrieks along the tunnel walls. It turned and ran, moving very rapidly, the vocalization of its fear combining with the bouncing reverberations of the terror that welled within its brain to fill the tunnel to bursting with the turmoil of the sound.

The creature moved, its toenails scratching desperately on the hard material, its body flashing towards the nearest opening that led outward from the tunnel. Inside its body its viscera curled and tightened with the panic that surged through it and its brain grew dim and limp with fear and it felt the darkness coming down upon it like a great weight which dropped from some great height. And suddenly it was not itself, it was not within the tunnel, it was back again in that place of warm, black comfort which had been its prison.

Blake skidded to a halt beside his bed and in the moment of his skidding, wondered why he ran and why his hospital gown should be lying on the floor and he naked in the room. And in that second of his wonder there was a snapping in his skull as if something inside his head, too tightly bound, had ripped, and he knew about the tunnel and the fear and those other two who were one with him.

He dropped down to sit upon the bed and happiness gushed through him. He was whole again; he was the creature he had been before. Now he no longer was alone, but with the other two.-Hiyah, pals, he whispered and they answered back, not with words, but with a huddling of their minds.

(Clasped hands and brotherhood. Sharp, cold stars above a desert of drifted sand and snow. The reaching out and snaring of the data from the stars. The hot and steaming swamp. The long weighing of the data inside the pyramid that was a biological computer. The swift, mutual pooling of three separate pools of thought. The touch of minds, one against another.)

— It ran when it saw me, Quester said. There'll be others coming.

— This is your planet, Changer. You know what to do.

— Yes, Thinker, Changer said, my planet. But our knowledge is one knowledge.

— But you're the quicker at it. The knowledge is too much, there is too much of it. We follow you, but slowly.

— Thinker's right, said Quester. The decision's up to you.

— They may not know it's me, said Changer. Not right away. We may have a little time.

— But not too much.

— No, Quester, not too much.

And that was right, thought Blake. There would be little time. The screaming nurse racing down the hall would bring the others tumbling out — interns, other nurses, doctors, the maintenance men and the people in the kitchen. In just a few more minutes the hospital would become a churning turmoil.

— The trouble is, he said, that Quester looks too much like a wolf.

— Your definition, Quester said, means one that eats another. You know that I would never…

No, Blake told himself. No, of course you wouldn't, Quester. But they will think you would. When they see you they will think you are a wolf. Like the guard that night at the senator's, seeing you outlined against the lightning flash. And filled with the old folklore of wolves, reacted instinctively.

And if anyone should see Thinker, what would they think of him?

— What happened to us, Changer? Quester asked. Twice I broke free, once in wet and dark, again in light and narrow.

— Once I broke free, said Thinker, and I could not function.

— Later we will think of that, said Changer. Now we're in a jam. We must get out of here.

— Changer, Quester said, we must stay as you. If, later, we need running, I can run.

— And I, said Thinker, if we need it later — I can be anything at all.

'Quiet! said Blake aloud. 'Quiet. Let me think a second.