The Werewolf Principle (16 page)

The diner seemed to buck and the howling of the cruiser was almost unendurable. Blake felt himself sliding on the floor.

Then the howling tapered off and died away, became a faint, long-drawn and distorted moaning.

Blake picked himself off the floor.

A lake of coffee lay upon the counter where his cup had been and there was no sign of the cup. The plate on which the cakes and bacon had rested was on the floor, smashed and scattered. The cakes lay limply on the stool. The cakes meant for the Brownie still were on the griddle, but were smoking and had turned black around the edges.

“I'll start over,” said the Diner.

The arm reached out and snatched up a spatula, scraped the burned cakes off the griddle, flipped them into a garbage can underneath the burner.

Blake looked over the counter and saw that the space behind it was littered with broken crockery.

“Yeah, look at it!” the Diner screeched. “There ought to be a law. I'll notify the boss and he'll slap a claim against that outfit and he'll see they pay—he always has so far. You guys might want to file claims as well. Allege mental agony or something. I got claim forms if you want to do it.”

Blake shook his head. “What about motorists. What if you met that thing on the road?”

“You saw those bunkers along the road, ten feet high or so, with exit lanes leading up to them?”

“Yes, I did,” said Blake.

“The cruiser has to sound its horn as soon as it leaves water and starts traveling on land. It has to keep on sounding it all the time it's traveling. You hear that siren and you head for the nearest bunker and you duck behind it.”

The spigot traveled deliberately along its track, pouring out the batter.

“How come, mister,” asked the Diner, “you didn't know about the cruisers and the bunkers? You come from the backwoods, maybe?”

“It's none of your business,” said the Brownie, speaking for Blake. “Just get on with our breakfast.”

23

“I'll walk you a piece down the road,” said the Brownie when they left the diner.

The morning sun was topping the horizon behind them and their elongated shadows bobbed along the road in front of them. The paving, Blake noted, was broken and eroded.

“They don't keep up the roads,” he said, “the way I remember them.”

“No need to,” said the Brownie. “No wheels. No need of a smooth surface since there isn't any contact. The cars all ride on cushions of air. They only need roads as designation strips and to keep the traffic out of people's hair. Now, when they lay out a new road, they just set out a double row of stakes, to show the drivers the location of the highway.”

They jogged along, not hurrying. A flock of blackbirds rose in a blue of flashing wings out of a marshy swale off to the left.

“Flocking up,” the Brownie said. “They'll be leaving soon. Cheeky things, the blackbirds. Not like larks or robins.”

“You know about these wild things?”

“We live with them,” the Brownie said. “We get to understand them. Some we get so we can almost talk with them. Not birds, though. Birds and fish are stupid. But raccoons and foxes, muskrats and mink—they are all real people.”

“You live out in the woods, I understand.”

“In the woods and fields. We conform to ecology. We take things as we find them. We adapt to circumstances. We are blood brothers to all life. No quarrels with anyone.”

Blake tried to remember what Daniels had told him. A strange sort of little people who had taken a liking to the Earth, not because of the dominant life form that inhabited it, but because of the planet itself. Perhaps, Blake thought, because they found in the non-dominant residents, in the few remaining wild denizens of the woods and fields the sort of simple associations that they liked. Insisting on living their own way of life to go their independent way, and yet beggars and moochers, attaching themselves in a slipshod alliance with anyone who would provide whatever simple needs they had.

“I met another of your people a few days ago,” said Blake. “You'll pardon me, but I can't be sure. Could you …”

“Oh, no,” the Brownie said. “That was another one of us. He was the one who spotted you.”

“Spotted me?”

“Oh, yes, indeed. As one who would bear watching. He said that there was more than one of you and that you were in trouble. He sent out word we should, any one of us who could, keep an eye on you.”

“Apparently you've been doing a good job of it. It didn't take you long to pick me up.”

“When we set out to accomplish something,” the Brownie said, with pride, “we can be most efficient.”

“And I? Where do I fit in?”

“I am not sure exactly,” said the Brownie. “We are to keep an eye on you. You only need to know we're watching. You can count on us.”

“I thank you,” Blake told him. “I thank you very much.”

And that was all he needed, he told himself—to have these crazy little creatures keeping tabs on him.

They walked along in silence for a time and then Blake asked: “He told you, this one that I met, to keep an eye on me …”

“Not just me alone.…”

“I know that,” said Blake. “He told all of you. Would you mind explaining how he told the rest of you? Or maybe it's a stupid question. There are mail and telephones.”

The Brownie made a clucking sound of immense disgust. “We wouldn't be caught dead,” he said, “using such contrivances, It would be against our principles and there really is no need to use them. We just pass the word along.”

“You mean you are telepathic.”

“Well, to tell you the honest truth, I don't know if we are or not. We can't transmit words, if that is what you mean. But we have a oneness. It gets a bit hard to explain.”

“I would imagine so,” said Blake. “A sort of tribal psychic grapevine.”

“You don't make any sense to me,” the Brownie said, “but if you want to think of it that way, I guess it does no harm.”

“I suppose,” said Blake, “there are a lot of people that you keep an eye on.”

It would be just like them, he told himself, a bunch of little busybodies very much concerned with other people's lives.

“There are no others,” said the Brownie. “Not at the moment, anyhow. He told us there were more than one of you and …”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“Why, bless you,” said the Brownie, “that's the whole of it. How often does one find a creature there is more than one of? Would you mind telling me, I wonder, just how many …”

“There are three of me,” said Blake.

The Brownie jigged in triumph. “I knew there were,” he crowed. “I made a bet with myself that there were three of you. One of you is warm and shaggy, but with a terrible temper. Can you tell me this is so?”

“Yes,” said Blake, “I would suppose it is.”

“But the other one of you,” the Brownie said, “baffles me entirely.”

“Welcome to the club,” said Blake. “He baffles me as well.”

24

When he topped the long, steep hill, Blake saw it in the valley, where the land dipped down and ran level for a mile or so, then climbed another hill. It rested on the level of the valley floor and it seemed to fill half the level space—a great, black bulging structure that looked amazingly like a monstrous bug, humped in its middle and blunted at both ends.

Blake stopped at the sight of it. He had never seen a cruiser, but there could be no doubt that the thing squatting at the bottom of the hill was the cruiser which had shaken up the diner.

Cars went whipping past Blake, the gush of wind from their humming jets beating at him.

The Brownie had left him an hour before and since that time he had trudged along, looking for someplace where he might hide away and sleep. But stretching on either side the road was nothing but fields, stripped by the harvest, now lying in their autumn garb of brown and gold. No habitations were located near the road, all of them sitting back from it half a mile or so. Blake wondered if the use of this highway by the cruisers and probably other large conveyances as well might have dictated the position of the homesteads, or if there were some other reason for their off-the-road location.

Far off to the southwest loomed a small group of shimmering towers—perhaps a complex of high-rise apartments, still within easy distance of Washington, but giving their occupants the advantages of a rural life.

Blake, staying well out on the shoulder of the road, went down the hill and finally reached the cruiser. It had pulled off to one side of the highway and had settled down, roosting on stubby, peg-like legs that held it six feet or so above the ground. Close up, it was even larger than it had appeared at a distance, rearing twenty feet or more above Blake's head.

At its forward end a man sat, leaning against the flight of steps that led up to the cab. He sat flat, with his legs stuck out in front of him and he wore a greasy engineer's cap pulled down almost to his eyes. His tunic was pulled up and bunched about his middle.

Blake stopped and stood looking down at him.

“Good morning, friend,” said Blake. “It looks to me that you are in trouble.”

“Greetings to you, Brother,” said the man, taking in Blake's black robe and knapsack. “You are seeing right. Burned out a jet and she began to whipsaw me. Lucky that I didn't pile it up.”

He spat derisively in the dust. “Now we have to sit and wait. I radioed in for a new jet component and a repair crew and they take their time, of course.”

“You said we.”

“There are three of us,” said the engineer. “Two others are up there, sacking out.”

He jerked his thumb upward toward the small living quarters installed behind the cab.

“We were on schedule, too,” he said. “That's the tough part of it. Made a good crossings—calm seas and we hit no coastal fog. But now we'll be hours late when we hit Chicago. There's overtime, of course, but who the hell wants any overtime.”

“You're headed for Chicago?”

“Yeah. This time. Always different places. Never the same place twice.”

He reached up and pulled at the beak of his cap.

“I keep thinking of Mary and the kids,” he said.

“Your family? Surely you can get in touch with them, let them know what happened.”

“Tried to. But they aren't home. Finally asked the operator to get someone to go out and tell them I wouldn't be along. Not right away, at least. You see, whenever I take this road, they know when I'll be coming and they go down to the road and stand there and wait and wave at me as I go through. The kids get an awful kick out of it, seeing their old man driving this monster.”

“You must live near here,” said Blake.

“Little town,” said the engineer. “Little backwater place a hundred miles or so from here. Old town, stuck out of the way. Just the way it was two hundred years ago. Oh, they put a new front on one of the buildings down on Main street every now and then, or someone remodels a house, but mostly the town just sits there, the way it always was. None of these big apartment complexes they are building everywhere. Nothing new at all. Good place to live. Easy-going place. No one doing any pushing. No Chamber of Commerce. No one lathering to get rich. Anyone who wants to get rich or get ahead or anything like that simply doesn't stay there. Lots of fishing, some hunting. Some horseshoe pitching.”

He glanced at Blake. “I guess you get the picture.”

Blake nodded,

“Good place to raise kids,” said the engineer.

He picked up a dried weed stalk off the ground, poked gently at the earth with it.

“Town by the name of Willow Grove,” he said. “You ever hear of it?”

“No,” said Blake, “I don't think I ever …”

But that was not correct, he realized suddenly. He had heard of it! That message on the P.G. that had been waiting for him when the guard had brought him home from the senator's house had mentioned Willow Grove.

“You have heard of it, then,” said the engineer.

“I guess I have,” said Blake. “Someone mentioned it to me.”

“A good place to live,” said the man.

What had that message said? Contact someone in the town of Willow Grove and he'd learn something to his interest. And there had been the name of the man he should contact. What was that name again? Blake sought for it frantically, winnowing through his mind, but it wasn't there.

“I must be getting on,” he said. “I hope the service crew shows up.”

The man spat in disgust. “Oh, they'll be along all right. When they are good and ready.”

Blake trudged on, facing the long hill which rose above the valley. At the top of the hill, he saw, were trees, a humped line of autumn color ranging above the high horizon line, a break at last in the brown and yellow fields. Perhaps somewhere among those trees he could find a place where he could get some sleep.

Thinking back, Blake tried to call up the fantasy of the night, but there was still about it all an air of unreality. It was almost as if it were a series of incidents which had happened, not to him, but to someone else.

The hunt for him still was on, of course, but momentarily he must have slipped the clutches of authority. By now, perhaps, Daniels would have figured out what must have happened and now they'd be looking, not for a wolf alone, but for him as well.

He reached the top of the hill and ahead of him, down the slope, he saw the trees, not just a little grove of trees, but a woods that covered the greater part of the steep hillside on either side of the road. Below, where the valley leveled out, were fields, but beyond the valley the farther slop also was clothed with trees. Here, he realized, the folded hills began to rise too steeply for cultivation and that this alternating of cultivated valleys and wooded hills might be a pattern that would go on for miles.