The Werewolf Principle

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 hold-over 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 honour 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 hail.

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 centre 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 towards 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 got 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 got 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 was still 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.