The Werewolf Principle (6 page)

Finally he got out of the floater and from its back unstrapped the hamper of lunch to get at his fishing tackle. He set the hamper to one side on the grassy bank from which the clump of birches grew.

Something scrabbled in the dam of twisted tree trunks that lay across the stream. At the sound, Blake spun about. A pair of beady eyes stared out at him from beneath a log.

A mink, he thought. Or perhaps an otter. Peering out at him from its den inside the log jam.

“Hello, there,” said Blake. “Do you mind if I try my luck.”

“Hello, there,” said the otter-mink, in a high and piping voice. “What is this luck that you wish to try? Please elucidate.”

“What was that you …” Blake's voice ran down to a stop.

The otter-mink emerged from beneath the log. It was neither an otter nor a mink. It was a bipedal being—like something that had stepped from the pages of a children's book. A hairy rodent snout was topped by a high domed skull from which flared a pair of pointed ears with tassels on the tips of them. It stood two feet high or so and its body was covered with a smooth, brown coat of fur. It wore a pair of bright red trousers that were mostly pockets and its hands were equipped with long and slender fingers.

Its snout twitched. “Would you, perhaps,” it asked in its squeaking voice, “have food inside that basket?”

“Why, yes,” said Blake. “I take it you are hungry.”

It was absurd, of course. In just a little while—in another minute, if not less—this illustration from a children's book would simply go away and he could get on with his fishing.

“I'm starving,” said the illustration. “The people who usually set out food for me have gone on a vacation. I've been scrounging ever since. Have you, perhaps, sometime in your life, tried scrounging for your food?”

“I don't think,” said Blake, “that I ever have.”

It did not disappear. It kept on staying and it kept on talking and there was no getting rid of it.

Good God, thought Blake, here I go again!

“If you are hungry,” he said, “we should get at the hamper. Is there anything, especially, that you like to eat?”

“I eat,” said the creature, “anything that
Homo sapiens
can. I am not fussy in the least. My metabolism seems to match most admirably with the denizens of Earth.”

Together they walked over to the hamper and Blake lifted off the cover.

“You seem unconcerned,” said the creature, “by my appearance from the log jam.”

“It's no concern of mine,” said Blake, trying to think fast, but unable to prod his mind out of its jog. “We have sandwiches here and some cake and a bowl of, I believe—yes, a bowl of potato salad, and some deviled eggs.”

“If you don't mind, I will take a couple of those sandwiches.”

“Go right ahead,” invited Blake.

“You do not intend to join me?”

“I had breakfast just a while ago.”

The creature sat down with a sandwich in each hand and began eating ravenously.

“You must pardon my poor table manners,” it said to Blake, “but I have not had any decent food for almost two weeks. I suppose that I expect too much. These people that take care of me set out real food for me. Not like a lot of people do—just a bowl of milk.”

Crumbs clung to its trembling whiskers and it went on eating. It finished the two sandwiches and reached out a hand, halted with it poised above the hamper.

“You do not mind?” it asked.

“Not at all,” said Blake.

It took another sandwich.

“You will pardon me,” it asked, “but how many of you are there?”

“How many of me?”

“Yes, of you. How many of you are there?”

“Why,” said Blake, “there is only one of me. How could there be more?”

“It was foolish of me, of course,” said the creature, “but when I first saw you, I could have sworn there were more than one of you.”

He began eating the sandwich, but at a somewhat slower rate than he'd employed on the other two.

He finished it and dabbed delicately at his whiskers, knocking off the crumbs.

“I thank you very much,” he said.

“You are most welcome,” said Blake. “Are you sure you won't have another one?”

“Not a sandwich, perhaps. But if you had some cake to spare.”

“Help yourself,” said Blake.

The creature helped itself.

“And now,” said Blake, “you've asked me a question. Would you say it might be fair if I asked you one.”

“Very fair, indeed,” the creature said. “Go ahead and ask it.”

“I have found myself wondering,” said Blake, “exactly who and what you are.”

“Why bless you,” said the creature, “I thought that you would know. It never occurred to me that you wouldn't recognize me.”

Blake shook his head. “I'm sorry, but I don't.”

“I am a Brownie,” said the creature, bowing. “At your service, sir.”

9

Dr. Michael Daniels was waiting at his desk when Blake was ushered into his office.

“How are you feeling this morning?” Daniels asked.

Blake grinned bleakly. “Not too badly, after the going over you gave me yesterday. Were there any tests that you left out?”

“We sort of threw the book at you,” Daniels admitted. “There's still a test or two, if …”

“No, thank you.”

Daniels gestured at a chair. “Make yourself comfortable. We have some things to talk about.”

Blake took the indicated chair. Daniels pulled a fat folder in front of him and opened it.

“I would assume,” said Blake, “that you have been doing some checking on what might have happened out in space—what happened to me, I mean. Any luck at all?”

Daniels shook his head. “None. We've gone over the passenger and crew lists of all missing ships. That is, Space Administration has. They're as interested in this as I am, perhaps even more so.”

“Passenger lists wouldn't tell you much,” said Blake. “I'd be just a name and we don't know …”

“True,” said Daniels, “but there are also fingerprints and voice prints. And you aren't there.”

“Somehow I got out into space.…”

“Yes, we know you did. Also someone froze you. Someone took the trouble to freeze you. If we could find out why someone did that, we'd know a lot more than we do. But, of course, when a ship is lost, the records are lost.”

“I've been doing some thinking myself,” said Blake. “We have been presuming all the time that I was frozen so that my life would be spared. Which means it was done before whatever happened to the ship had come about. How could anyone know what was going to happen? Oh, I suppose there would be situations where they would. Have you ever thought that I was frozen and thrown off the ship because they didn't want me aboard, because I'd done something or they were afraid of me or something of the sort?”

“No,” said Daniels, “I had never thought of that. I had thought, however, that you may not have been the only one frozen and encapsulated, that it might have been done to others and that they still are out there. You just happened to be the one that was found. Given time, it could be a way in which a long shot could be taken to save some lives—I would suspect important lives.”

“Let's get back to this business of them giving me the old heave-ho off the ship. If I had been such a louse that they felt they had to pitchfork me into space, why the elaborate attempt to save my life?”

Daniels shook his head. “I couldn't even guess. All we're doing is dealing in assumptions. You may have to resign yourself to the possibility that you will never know. I had hoped that you would be able to dig back to a recognition of your past, but you haven't so far. There's a fairly good chance you may never be able to. After a while we can resort to some psychiatric treatment that could help. Although I'll tell you quite frankly that it may not.”

“Are you telling me to give up?”

“No. Just trying to tell you the truth. We'll keep on trying so long as you're willing to go along with us. But I thought we owed it to you to tell you there is a chance we'll never get an answer.”

“That's fair enough,” said Blake.

“How did the fishing go the other day?” asked Daniels.

“All right,” said Blake. “I caught six trout and had a good day in the open. Which, I suspect, was what you wanted.”

“Any hallucinations?”

“Yes,” said Blake. “There was a hallucination. I didn't tell you about it. Just held it back. Decided this morning I'd tell you. What's one hallucination more or less? When I was out fishing I met a Brownie.”

“Oh,” said Daniels.

“Didn't you hear what I said? I met a Brownie. I talked with him. He ate up most of my lunch. You know what I mean. One of those little folks that appear in children's stories. With big pointed ears and a high, peaked cap. Only this one didn't have a cap. And he had a rodent face.”

“You were fortunate. It's not many people who ever see a Brownie. Fewer yet who talk with them.”

“You mean there are such things!”

“Why, yes, of course there are. A migrant people from the Coonskin stars. Not very many of them. The root stock was brought to earth … oh, I'd guess a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago. One of the exploration ships. The idea was that the Brownies would visit us for a short while—a sort of cultural exchange, I gather—then would go back home. But they liked it here and formally applied for permission to stay. After that they scattered, disappeared gradually. They took to the woods. There they found places to live—burrows, caves, hollow trees.”

He shook his head in some perplexity.

“A strange people. They rejected most of the material advantages that we offered them. Wanted nothing to do with our civilization, were unimpressed with our culture, but they liked the planet. Liked it as a place to live, but in their own way, of course. We don't know too much about them. Highly civilized, it would appear, but in a different way than we. Intelligent, but with different values from the ones we hold. Some of them, I understand, have attached themselves to certain families or individuals who set out food for them, or supply them cloth for clothing, or other needs they may have from time to time. It is a curious relationship. The Brownies aren't pets of these people. Maybe you could call them good luck talismen. Much the relationship that the literary Brownies were assigned.”

“Well, I'll be damned,” said Blake.

“You thought your Brownie was another hallucination?”

“Yes, I did. I expected him to go away all the time, to simply vanish from my sight. But he didn't. He sat there eating and wiping the crumbs off his whiskers and telling me where to place the flies. Over there, he'd say, there's a big one over there just between that swirl of water and the bank. And there would be. He seemed to know where the fish were.”

“He was paying you back for the lunch. He was giving you good luck.”

“You think he actually did know where the fish were? I know, it seemed to me he did, but …”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” said Daniels. “As I told you, we don't know too much about the Brownies. They probably have abilities we lack. Knowing where to find the fish might be one of them.” He glanced sharply at Blake. “You'd never heard about the Brownies? The real ones, I mean.”

“No, I never had.”

“I think that gives us a good time peg,” said Daniels. “If you had been here, on Earth, at that time, you would have heard about it.”

“Maybe I did, but don't remember.”

“I don't think so. The incident, to judge from the writings at the time, made a great public impression. It's something that you would have recalled if you'd ever heard of it. It would have made a deep impression on your mind.”

“We have other time pegs,” said Blake. “This get-up that we wear is new to me. Robes and shorts and sandals. I can recall that I wore some sort of trousers and a jerkin. And the ships. The gravity grids are new to me. I can remember that we used nuclear power.…”

“We still do.”

“Nuclear power alone in my day. Now it is an auxiliary force to build up greater velocity, but the real power comes from the control and manipulation of gravitational forces.”

“There are a number of other things that are new to you, too,” said Daniels. “The houses …”

“They almost drove me crazy to start with,” Blake said. “But I'm relieved about that Brownie. It substracts one potential incident from my situation.”

“These hallucinations. You don't think they are, of course. You told me yesterday.”

“I can't see how they can be,” said Blake. “I remember everything that happens up to a certain point, then there is a blank and finally I'm myself again. I can't remember a thing that happened during that blank period, although there is abundant evidence that something did transpire. And there is a definite period of time to account for it.”

“The second one,” said Daniels, “happened while you slept.”

“True. But the Room observed a certain phenomena, which transpired over a definite period of time.”

“What kind of house do you have?”

“A Norman-Gilson B258.”

“One of the newer and better models,” Daniels told him. “Beautifully instrumented and computerized. Practically fool-proof. Not much that could go wrong with one of them.”

“I don't think anything did go wrong,” said Blake. “I think the Room told the truth. I think something was happening in that room. When I woke up I was on the floor …”

“But with no idea of what had happened, not until the Room told you. No idea as to why these things happen?”

“None at all. I had hoped you might have some idea.”

“Not, actually,” said Daniels. “No real idea, that is. There are two things about you—how do I say this?—well, that are confusing. Your physical condition, for one thing. You look like a man of thirty, perhaps the middle thirties. There are some lines in your face. You have the appearance of maturity. And yet your body is the body of a youth. There is no breakdown, no sign that breakdown is beginning. You're a perfect physical specimen. And if you're that, why the facial appearance of thirty?”