The Werewolf Principle

16

The den was small and close — a projecting ledge of rock with a space eroded out beneath it. Above it the ground rose sharply, below it the ground fell steeply away. At the foot of the hill a stream of water ran raggedly over a pebbly bed. On the slope, at the lip of the cave, the ground was littered with tiny slabs of rock — the shards that through the years had been eroded out of the face of the stone. The slabs shifted treacherously under Quester's paws as he scrambled for the cave, but he managed to squeeze himself into it, twisting around until he could face outwards.

For the first time now he felt a measure of safety, with his flanks and back protected, but he knew that it was an illusory safety. The creatures of this planet, even now, perhaps, were hunting him and it would not be long, he was certain, before they'd be combing through the area. Certainly he had been seen by the metallic creature which had come charging after him with its howling windstorm and its glaring eyes that shot out light before it. He shuddered as he recalled how he had barely gained the shelter of the trees just ahead of it. Another three lengths of his body to have gone and it would have overrun him.

He relaxed, willing his body to grow limp in every muscle.

His mind went out, checking, seeking, prying. There was life, more life than one would expect — an overcrowded planet, a place that swarmed with life. Tiny resting life, unthinking, unintelligent, existing but doing little more. There were small intelligences that rustled, restless, alert, afraid — but their intelligence so thin and barren that they were little more than aware of life and the dangers that might threaten it. One thing ran, seeking, hunting, with the red streak of killing pulsating in its mind, vicious and terrible and a very hungry thing. Three life forms were huddled in one place, some safe and hidden place, for their minds were snug and smug and warm. And others — many, many others. Life and some of the life with intelligence. But nowhere the sharp, bright, terrifying sense of the things that lived in the above-ground caves.

A messy planet, thought Quester, untidy and unneat, with too much life and water and too much vegetation, its air too thick and heavy and its climate far too hot. A place that gave one no rest at all, no sense of security, the sort of place where one must sense and watch and listen, and fear that, even so, an undetected danger might come slipping through the net and fasten on one's throat. The trees were moaning gently and he wondered, as he listened to them, if it were the trees themselves, or if the moaning came from the moving atmosphere that was blowing through them.

And as he lay there wondering, he knew that it was the friction of the wind against the substance of the trees and the rustling of the leaves, the groaning of the branches, that the trees themselves had no way to make a sound, that the trees and all the other vegetation upon this planet, which was called the Earth, were alive, but with no intelligence and no perceptive senses. And that the caves were buildings and that the humans were not tribal members, but formed sexual units which were known as families, and that a building in which a family lived was called a home.

The information bore down upon him like a tidal wave that curled above him and overwhelmed him in a moment of blind panic and he came battling out of it and the tidal wave was gone. But in his mind, he knew, lay all the knowledge of the planet, every shred of information which lay in the mind of Changer.

— I am sorry, Changer said. There was no time for you to absorb it slowly and decently and get acquainted with it and try to classify it. I gave it all at once. Now you have it all to use.

Tentatively, Quester took a quick survey of it and shuddered at the tangled pile it was.

— Much of it is out of date, said Changer. There are many things that I don't know. You have this planet as I knew it two hundred years ago, plus what I picked up since I returned to it. I would impress upon you that the data are not complete and some of it may now be worthless.

Quester crouched close against the rock floor of the den, still probing out into the darkness of the woods, straightening and strengthening the detection net that he had laid out in all directions.

A sense of desolation swept through him. Homesickness for the planet of drifted snow and sand — and no way to get back. Perhaps never to get back. Here in this tangled place of too much life and too much danger and not knowing where to turn, not knowing what to do. Hunted by the dominant creatures of the planet, creatures that he now knew were more horrible than he had thought they were. Cunning and ruthless and illogical, weighed down by fears and hatreds, obeying the murderous drive of a species on the make.

— Changer, he asked, what of my other body? The one I inhabited before you humans came. You caught that body, I remember. What did you do with it?

— Not I! I didn't catch it. I did nothing with it.

— Don't try your human legalistic tricks on me. Don't take refuge in semantics. Not you alone, perhaps, Not you personally, but…

— Quester, Thinker said, don't take that tone of thought. The three of us are caught in a single trap — if it is a trap. I'm inclined to believe it may not be a trap, but a unique situation which will work to our advantage. We share one body and our minds are closer than any minds have ever been before. And we must not quarrel; we must not have differences, for we can't afford them. We must work together always. We must harmonize ourselves. If there are differences, we, must work them out immediately, we must not let them fester.

— That, said Quester, is exactly what I'm doing. There is a thing that bothers me. What happened to that first me?

— That first body, Changer told him, was biologically scanned. It was taken apart, almost molecule by molecule, and analysed. There was no way in which it could be re-assembled.

— You murdered me, you mean.

— If you want to call it that.

— And Thinker, too?

— Thinker, too. Thinker was the first.

— Thinker, Quester asked, do you not resent this?

— What good would resentment accomplish?

— That is no answer and you know it.

— I can't be sure, said Thinker. I would have to cogitate it. One must, of course, resent any violence done him. But I would be inclined to consider what has happened as a transfiguration rather than a violence. If this had not occurred to me I could never have existed in your body or touched your mind. All the data that you gathered from the stars would have been lost to me and lost most pitifully, for I'd never have known of it. And you, in turn, if it had not been for what the humans did, never would have guessed the significance of the pictures that you garnered from the stars. You simply would have gone on garnering them and enjoying them and perhaps not even wondered at them and I can conceive of nothing more tragic than that, to be on the edge of mystery and not even wonder at it.

— I am not so sure, said Quester, that I would prefer the mystery and forgo the wonder.

— But don't you see the beauty of it? Thinker asked. Here the three of us, all of us most different. Three types most distinctive. You, Quester, the roughneck and the bandit, Changer the cunning schemer, and I…

— And you, said Quester, the all-wise, the far-seeing…

— I was about to say, said Thinker, the fumbler after truth.

— If it will make either of you feel better, Changer told them, I'll apologize for the human race. In many ways I like them no better than you do.

— For good reason, Thinker said. For you are not human. You are something made by humans, you are an agent of the humans.

— And yet, said Changer, one must be something. I'd rather be a human than not anything at all. One cannot stand alone.

— You will not be alone, said Thinker. The two of us are with you.

— Still, said Changer stubbornly, I insist on being human.

— I cannot understand, said Thinker.

— Perhaps I can, said Quester. Back there in the hospital I felt something I had not felt before, something that no quester has felt for a long, long time. The pride of race, and, furthermore, a pride in the racial fighting spirit that was tucked away somewhere deep inside of me and that I had not known was there. I suspect, Changer, that my race, in the time of long ago, was as much upon the prod as your race is today. And it is a prideful thing to be of such a race. It gives you strength and stature and a great deal of self-respect. It is something that Thinker and his kind perhaps could never feel.

— My pride, if I had any, Thinker said, would be of a different kind and arise from different motives. But I will not foreclose there being many kinds of pride.

Quester jerked his attention to the hillside and the woods, alerted by a whiff of danger that had come snaking along the detection net that he had laid out.

— Quiet! he told the other two.

Faint, far off, he caught the indications and zeroed in on them. There were three of them, three humans, and in a little time more than three of them — a long line of them advancing cautiously, searching through the woods. And there could be, he knew, only one thing that they sought.

He caught the faint edges of their mind-waves and they were afraid, but they were also angry and filled with a hate-tinged loathing. But, as well as this fear and hatred, there was the sense of hunt, the strange, wild excitement that drove them on to find and kill the thing that was the cause of fear.

Quester bunched his body and half rose to dart out of the den. For there was, he thought, only one way to elude these humans — to run and run and run.

— Wait, said Thinker.

— They will be on top of us.

— Not for a time. They are moving slowly. There may be a better way. We cannot run for ever. We have made one mistake. We should not make another.

— What mistake?

— We should not have changed to you. We should have stayed as Changer. It was blind panic that forced us to make the change.

— But we had no knowledge. We saw danger and reacted. We were being threatened…

— I could have bluffed it out, said Changer. But this way may have been the best at that. They had suspicions of me. They would have put me under observation. They might have locked me up. This way, at least, we're free.

— But not for long, said Thinker, if we keep on running. There are too many of them — too many on the planet. We can't hide from all of them. We can't dodge them all. Mathematically we have so little chance that it is no chance at all.

— You have something in your mind? asked Quester.

— Why don't we change to me. I can be a lump, a nothing, something in this cave. A rock, perhaps. When they look into it they will see nothing strange.

— A minute, there, said Changer. Your idea is all right, but there may be problems.

— Problems?

— You should have it figured out by now. Not problems, but a problem. The climate of this planet. It is too warm for Quester. It will be far too cold for you.

— Cold is lack of heat?

— That's right.

— Lack of energy?

— Correct.

— It takes a little time to get all the terminology sorted out, said Thinker. It has to be catalogued, soaked into the mind. But I can stand some cold. For the common cause I can stand a lot of cold.

— It's not just a matter of standing it. Of course, you can do that. But you require great amounts of energy.

— When I formed that time in the house…

— You had the energy supply of the house to draw on. Here there is nothing but the heat stored in the atmosphere. And now that the sun is down, that is steadily becoming less and less. You'll have to operate on the energy that the body has. You can't draw on outside sources.

— I see, said Thinker. But I can form a shape to conserve what energy there is. I can hug it to me. If the change is made, I have all the energy that is in the body?

— I would think you would have. The change itself perhaps requires some energy exchange, but I suspect not very much.

— How do you feel, Quester?

— Hot, said Quester.

— I don't mean that. You aren't tired, are you? No lack of energy?

— I feel all right, said Quester.

— We wait, said Thinker, until they are almost here. Then we change to me and I am a nothing or almost a nothing. Just a shapeless lump. Best way would be for me to spread myself all around the cave, a lining for the cave. But that way I'd lose too much energy.

— They may not see the cave, said Changer. They may pass it by.

— We can't take chances, Thinker said. I'll be me no longer than we have to. We must change back as soon as they are past. If what you say is true.

— Calculate it for yourself, invited Changer. You have the data that I gave you. You know as much physics, as much chemistry as I do.

— The data, perhaps, Changer. But not the habit of mind to employ it. Not your way of thought. Not your ability at mathematics, not your swift grasp of universal principles.

— But you are our thinker.

— I think another way.

— Stop this jabbering, Quester said, impatiently. Let's get set what we are to do. Once they're past, we change back to me.

— No, said Changer. Back to me.

— But you haven't any clothes.

— Out here it doesn't matter.

— Your feet. You need shoes. There are rocks and sticks. And your eyes are no good in the dark.

— They are almost here, warned Thinker.

— That is right, said Quester. They are coming down the hill.