The Best of Gene Wolfe

The Hero as Werwolf

An owl shrieked, and Paul flinched. Fear, pavement, flesh, death, stone, dark, loneliness, and blood made up Paul’s world; the blood was all much the same, but the fear took several forms, and he had hardly seen another human being in the four years since his mother’s death. At a night meeting in the park he was the red-cheeked young man at the end of the last row, with his knees together and his scrupulously clean hands (Paul was particularly careful about his nails) in his lap.

The speaker was fluent and amusing; he was clearly conversant with his subject—whatever it was—and he pleased his audience. Paul, the listener and watcher, knew many of the words he used; yet he had understood nothing in the past hour and a half, and sat wrapped in his stolen cloak and his own thoughts, seeming to listen, watching the crowd and the park—this, at least, was no ghost-house, no trap; the moon was up, night-blooming flowers scented the park air, and the trees lining the paths glowed with self-generated blue light; in the city, beyond the last hedge, the great buildings new and old were mountains lit from within.

Neither human nor master, a policeman strolled about the fringes of the audience, his eyes bright with stupidity. Paul could have killed him in less than a second, and was enjoying a dream of the policeman’s death in some remote corner of his mind even while he concentrated on seeming to be one of them. A passenger rocket passed just under the stars, trailing luminous banners.

The meeting was over and he wondered if the rocket had in some way been the signal to end it. The masters did not use time, at least not as he did, as he had been taught by the thin woman who had been his mother in the little home she had made for them in the turret of a house that was once (she said) the Gorous’—now only a house too old to be destroyed. Neither did they use money, of which he like other old-style Homo sapiens still retained some racial memory, as of a forgotten god—a magic once potent that had lost all force.

The masters were rising, and there were tears and laughter and that third emotional tone that was neither amusement nor sorrow—the silken sound humans did not possess, but that Paul thought might express content, as the purring of a cat does, or community, like the cooing of doves. The policeman bobbed his hairy head, grinning, basking in the recognition, the approval, of those who had raised him from animality. See (said the motions of his hands, the writhings of his body) the clothing you have given me. How nice! I take good care of my things because they are yours. See my weapon. I perform a useful function—if you did not have me, you would have to do it yourselves.

If the policeman saw Paul, it would be over. The policeman was too stupid, too silly, to be deceived by appearances as his masters were. He would never dare, thinking Paul a master, to meet his eye, but he would look into his face seeking approval, and would see not what he was supposed to see but what was there. Paul ducked into the crowd, avoiding a beautiful woman with eyes the color of pearls, preferring to walk in the shadow of her fat escort where the policeman would not see him. The fat man took dust from a box shaped like the moon and rubbed it between his hands, releasing the smell of raspberries. It froze, and he sifted the tiny crystals of crimson ice over his shirtfront, grunting with satisfaction then offered the box to the woman, who refused at first, only (three steps later) to accept when he pressed it on her.

They were past the policeman now. Paul dropped a few paces behind the couple, wondering if they were the ones tonight—if there would be meat tonight at all. For some, vehicles would be waiting. If the pair he had selected were among these, he would have to find others quickly.

They were not. They had entered the canyons between the buildings; he dropped farther behind, then turned aside.

Three minutes later he was in an alley a hundred meters ahead of them, waiting for them to pass the mouth. (The old trick was to cry like an infant, and he could do it well, but he had a new trick—a better trick, because too many had learned not to come down an alley when an infant cried. The new trick was a silver bell he had found in the house, small and very old. He took it from his pocket and removed the rag he had packed around the clapper. His dark cloak concealed him now, its hood pulled up to hide the pale gleam of his skin. He stood in a narrow doorway only a few meters away from the alley’s mouth.)

They came. He heard the man’s thick laughter, the woman’s silken sound. She was a trifle silly from the dust the man had given her, and would be holding his arm as they walked, rubbing his thighs with hers. The man’s black-shod foot and big belly thrust past the stonework of the building—there was a muffled moan.

The fat man turned, looking down the alley. Paul could see fear growing in the woman’s face, cutting, too slowly, through the odor of raspberries. Another moan, and the man strode forward, fumbling in his pocket for an illuminator. The woman followed hesitantly (her skirt was of flowering vines the color of love, and white skin flashed in the interstices; a serpent of gold supported her breasts).

Someone was behind him. Pressed back against the metal door, he watched the couple as they passed. The fat man had gotten his illuminator out and held it over his head as he walked, looking into corners and doorways.

They came at them from both sides, a girl and an old, gray-bearded man. The fat man, the master, his genetic heritage revised for intellection and peace, had hardly time to turn before his mouth gushed blood. The woman whirled and ran, the vines of her skirt withering at her thought to give her legroom, the serpent dropping from her breasts to strike with fangless jaws at the flying-haired girl who pursued her, then winding itself about the girl’s ankles. The girl fell; but as the pearl-eyed woman passed, Paul broke her neck. For a moment he was too startled at the sight of other human beings to speak. Then he said, “These are mine.”

The old man, still bent over the fat man’s body, snapped: “Ours. We’ve been here an hour and more.” His voice was the creaking of steel hinges, and Paul thought of ghost-houses again.

“I followed them from the park.” The girl, black haired, gray eyed when the light from the alley mouth struck her face, was taking the serpent from around her legs—it was once more a lifeless thing of soft metal mesh. Paul picked up the woman’s corpse and wrapped it in his cloak. “You gave me no warning,” he said. “You must have seen me when I passed you.”

The girl looked toward the old man. Her eyes said she would back him if he fought, and Paul decided he would throw the woman’s body at her.

“Somebody’ll come soon,” the old man said. “And I’ll need Janie’s help to carry this one. We each take what we got ourselves—that’s fair. Or we whip you. My girl’s worth a man in a fight, and you’ll find I’m still worth a man myself, old as I be.”

“Give me the picking of his body. This one has nothing.”

The girl’s bright lips drew back from strong white teeth. From somewhere under the tattered shirt she wore, she had produced a long knife, and sudden light from a window high above the alley ran along the edge of the stained blade; the girl might be a dangerous opponent, as the old man claimed, but Paul could sense the femaleness, the woman rut, from where he stood. “No,” her father said. “You got good clothes. I need these.” He looked up at the window fearfully, fumbling with buttons.

“His cloak will hang on you like a blanket.”

“We’ll fight. Take the woman and go away, or we’ll fight.”

He could not carry both, and the fat man’s meat would be tainted by the testicles. When Paul was young and there had been no one but his mother to do the killing, they had sometimes eaten old males; he never did so now. He slung the pearl-eyed woman across his shoulders and trotted away.

Outside the alley the streets were well lit, and a few passersby stared at him and the dark burden he carried. Fewer still, he knew, would suspect him of being what he was—he had learned the trick of dressing as the masters did, even of wearing their expressions. He wondered how the black-haired girl and the old man would fare in their ragged clothes. They must live very near.

His own place was that in which his mother had borne him, a place high in a house built when humans were the masters. Every door was nailed tight and boarded up; but on one side a small garden lay between two wings, and in a corner of this garden, behind a bush where the shadows were thick even at noon, the bricks had fallen away. The lower floors were full of rotting furniture and the smell of rats and mold, but high in his wooden turret the walls were still dry and the sun came in by day at eight windows. He carried his burden there and dropped her in a corner. It was important that his clothes be kept as clean as the masters kept theirs, though he lacked their facilities. He pulled his cloak from the body and brushed it vigorously.

“What are you going to do with me?” the dead woman said behind him.

“Eat,” he told her. “What did you think I was going to do?”

“I didn’t know.” And then: “I’ve read of you creatures, but I didn’t think you really existed.”

“We were the masters once,” he said. He was not sure he still believed it, but it was what his mother had taught him. “This house was built in those days—that’s why you won’t wreck it: you’re afraid.” He had finished with the cloak; he hung it up and turned to face her, sitting on the bed. “You’re afraid of waking the old times,” he said. She lay slumped in the corner, and though her mouth moved, her eyes were only half-open, looking at nothing.

“We tore a lot of them down,” she said.

“If you’re going to talk, you might as well sit up straight.” He lifted her by the shoulders and propped her in the corner. A nail protruded from the wall there; he twisted a lock of her hair on it so her head would not loll; her hair was the rose shade of a little girl’s dress, and soft but slightly sticky.

“I’m dead, you know.”

“No, you’re not.” They always said this (except, sometimes, for the children) and his mother had always denied it. He felt that he was keeping up a family tradition.

“Dead,” the pearl-eyed woman said. “Never, never, never. Another year, and everything would have been all right. I want to cry, but I can’t breathe to.”

“Your kind lives a long time with a broken neck,” he told her. “But you’ll die eventually.”

“I am dead now.”

He was not listening. There were other humans in the city; he had always known that, but only now, with the sight of the old man and the girl, had their existence seemed real to him.

“I thought you were all gone,” the pearl-eyed dead woman said thinly. “All gone long ago, like a bad dream.”

Happy with his new discovery, he said, “Why do you set traps for us, then? Maybe there are more of us than you think.”

“There can’t be many of you. How many people do you kill in a year?” Her mind was lifting the sheet from his bed, hoping to smother him with it; but he had seen that trick many times.

“Twenty or thirty.” (He was boasting.)

“So many.”

“When you don’t get much besides meat, you need a lot of it. And then I only eat the best parts—why not? I kill twice a month or more except when it’s cold, and I could kill enough for two or three if I had to.” (The girl had had a knife. Knives were bad, except for cutting up afterward. But knives left blood behind. He would kill for her—she could stay here and take care of his clothes, prepare their food. He thought of himself walking home under a new moon, and seeing her face in the window of the turret.) To the dead woman he said, “You saw that girl? With the black hair? She and the old man killed your husband, and I’m going to bring her here to live.” He stood and began to walk up and down the small room, soothing himself with the sound of his own footsteps.

“He wasn’t my husband.” The sheet dropped limply now that he was no longer on the bed. “Why didn’t you change? When the rest changed their genes?”

“I wasn’t alive then.”

“You must have received some tradition.”

“We didn’t want to. We are the human beings.”

“Everyone wanted to. Your old breed had worn out the planet; even with much better technology we’re still starved for energy and raw materials because of what you did.”

“There hadn’t been enough to eat before,” he said, “but when so many changed there was a lot. So why should more change?”

It was a long time before she answered, and he knew the body was stiffening. That was bad, because as long as she lived in it the flesh would stay sweet; when the life was gone, he would have to cut it up quickly before the stuff in her lower intestine tainted the rest.

“Strange evolution,” she said at last. “Man become food for men.”

“I don’t understand the second word. Talk so I know what you’re saying.” He kicked her in the chest to emphasize his point, and knocked her over; he heard a rib snap. . . . She did not reply, and he lay down on the bed. His mother had told him there was a meeting place in the city where men gathered on certain special nights—but he had forgotten (if he had ever known) what those nights were.

“That isn’t even metalanguage,” the dead woman said, “only children’s talk.”

“Shut up.”

After a moment he said, “I’m going out. If you can make your body stand, and get out of here, and get down to the ground floor, and find the way out, then you may be able to tell someone about me and have the police waiting when I come back.” He went out and closed the door, then stood patiently outside for five minutes.

When he opened it again, the corpse stood erect with her hands on his table, her tremors upsetting the painted metal circus figures he had had since he was a child—the girl acrobat, the clown with his hoop and trained pig. One of her legs would not straighten. “Listen,” he said. “You’re not going to do it. I told you all that because I knew you’d think of it yourself. They always do, and they never make it. The farthest I’ve ever had anyone get was out the door and to the top of the steps. She fell down them, and I found her at the bottom when I came back. You’re dead. Go to sleep.”

The blind eyes had turned toward him when he began to speak, but they no longer watched him now. The face, which had been beautiful, was now entirely the face of a corpse. The cramped leg crept toward the floor as he watched, halted, began to creep downward again. Sighing, he lifted the dead woman off her feet, replaced her in the corner, and went down the creaking stairs to find the black-haired girl.

There has been quite a few to come after her,” her father said, “since we come into town. Quite a few.” He sat in the back of the bus, on the rearmost seat that went completely across the back like a sofa. “But you’re the first ever to find us here. The others, they hear about her, and leave a sign at the meetin’.”

Paul wanted to ask where it was such signs were left, but held his peace.

“You know there ain’t many folks at all anymore,” her father went on. “And not many of them is women. And damn few is young girls like my Janie. I had a fella here that wanted her two weeks back—he said he hadn’t had no real woman in two years; well, I didn’t like the way he said real, so I said what did he do, and he said he fooled around with what he killed, sometimes, before they got cold. You never did like that, did you?”

Paul said he had not.

“How’d you find this dump here?”

“Just look around.” He had searched the area in ever-widening circles, starting at the alley in which he had seen the girl and her father. They had one of the masters’ cold boxes to keep their ripe kills in (as he did himself), but there was the stink of clotted blood about the dump nonetheless. It was behind a high fence, closer to the park than he would have thought possible.

“When we come, there was a fella living here. Nice fella, a German. Name was Curtain—something like that. He went sweet on my Janie right off. Well, I wasn’t too taken with having a foreigner in the family, but he took us in and let us settle in the big station wagon. Told me he wanted to wed Janie, but I said no, she’s too young. Wait a year, I says, and take her with my blessing. She wasn’t but fourteen then. Well, one night the German fella went out and I guess they got him, because he never come back. We moved into this here bus then for the extra room.”

His daughter was sitting at his feet, and he reached a crooked-fingered hand down and buried it in her midnight hair. She looked up at him and smiled. “Got a pretty face, ain’t she?” he said.

Paul nodded.

“She’s a mite thin, you was going to say. Well, that’s true. I do my best to provide, but I’m feared, and not shamed to admit to it.”

“The ghost-houses,” Paul said.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what I’ve always called them. I don’t get to talk to many other people.”

“Where the doors shut on you—lock you in.”

“Yes.”

“That ain’t ghosts—now don’t you think I’m one of them fools don’t believe in them. I know better. But that ain’t ghosts. They’re always looking, don’t you see, for people they think ain’t right. That’s us. It’s electricity does it. You ever been caught like that?”

Paul nodded. He was watching the delicate swelling Janie’s breasts made in the fabric of her filthy shirt, and only half-listening to her father; but the memory penetrated the young desire that half-embarrassed him, bringing back fear. The windows of the bus had been set to black, and the light inside was dim—still it was possible some glimmer showed outside. There should be no lights in the dump. He listened, but heard only katydids singing in the rubbish.

“They thought I was a master—I dress like one,” he said. “That’s something you should do. They were going to test me. I turned the machine over and broke it, and jumped through a window.” He had been on the sixth floor, and had been saved by landing in the branches of a tree whose bruised twigs and torn leaves exuded an acrid incense that to him was the very breath of panic still; but it had not been the masters, or the instrument-filled examination room, or the jump from the window that had terrified him, but waiting in the ghost-room while the walls talked to one another in words he could sometimes, for a few seconds, nearly understand.

“It wouldn’t work for me—got too many things wrong with me. Lines in my face; even got a wart—they never do.”

“Janie could.”

The old man cleared his throat; it was a thick sound, like water in a downspout in a hard rain. “I been meaning to talk to you about her, about why those other fellas I told you about never took her—not that I’d of let some of them: Janie’s the only family I got left. But I ain’t so particular I don’t want to see her married at all—not a bit of it. Why, we wouldn’t of come here if it weren’t for Janie. When her monthly come, I said to myself, she’ll be wantin’ a man, and what’re you goin’ to do way out here? Though the country was gettin’ bad anyway, I must say. If they’d of had real dogs, I believe they would have got us several times.”

He paused, perhaps thinking of those times, the lights in the woods at night and the running, perhaps only trying to order his thoughts. Paul waited, scratching an ankle, and after a few seconds the old man said, “We didn’t want to do this, you know, us Pendeltons. That’s mine and Janie’s name—Pendelton. Janie’s Augusta Jane, and I’m Emmitt J.”

“Paul Gorou,” Paul said.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gorou. When the time come, they took one whole side of the family. They were the Worthmore Pendeltons; that’s what we always called them, because most of them lived thereabouts. Cousins of mine they was, and second cousins. We was the Evershaw Pendeltons, and they didn’t take none of us. Bad blood, they said—too much wrong to be worth fixing, or too much that mightn’t get fixed right, and then show up again. My ma—she’s alive then—she always swore it was her sister Lillian’s boy that did it to us. The whole side of his head was pushed in. You know what I mean? They used to say a cow’d kicked him when he was small, but it wasn’t so—he’s just born like that. He could talk some—there’s those that set a high value on that—but the slobber’d run out of his mouth. My ma said if it wasn’t for him we’d have got in sure. The only other thing was my sister Clara that was born with a bad eye—blind, you know, and something wrong with the lid of it too. But she was just as sensible as anybody. Smart as a whip. So I would say it’s likely Ma was right. Same thing with your family, I suppose?”

“I think so. I don’t really know.”

“A lot of it was die-beetees. They could fix it, but if there was other things too they just kept them out. Of course when it was over there wasn’t no medicine for them no more, and they died off pretty quick. When I was young, I used to think that was what it meant: die-beetees—you died away. It’s really sweetening of the blood. You heard of it?”

Paul nodded.

“I’d like to taste some sometime, but I never come to think of that while there was still some of them around.”

“If they weren’t masters—”

“Didn’t mean I’d of killed them,” the old man said quickly. “Just got one to gash his arm a trifle so I could taste of it. Back then—that would be twenty aught nine; close to fifty years gone it is now—there was several I knowed that was just my age. . . . What I was meaning to say at the beginning was that us Pendeltons never figured on anythin’ like this. We’d farmed, and we meant to keep on, grow our own truck and breed our own stock. Well, that did for a time, but it wouldn’t keep.”

Paul, who had never considered living off the land, or even realized that it was possible to do so, could only stare at him.

“You take chickens, now. Everybody always said there wasn’t nothing easier than chickens, but that was when there was medicine you could put in the water to keep off the sickness. Well, the time come when you couldn’t get it no more than you could get a can of beans in those stores of theirs that don’t use money or cards or anything a man can understand. My dad had two hundred in the flock when the sickness struck, and it took every hen inside of four days. You wasn’t supposed to eat them that had died sick, but we did it. Plucked ’em and canned ’em—by that time our old locker that plugged in the wall wouldn’t work. When the chickens was all canned, Dad saddled a horse we had then and rode twenty-five miles to a place where the new folks grew chickens to eat themselves. I guess you know what happened to him, though—they wouldn’t sell, and they wouldn’t trade. Finally he begged them. He was a Pendelton, and used to cry when he told of it. He said the harder he begged them the scareder they got. Well, finally he reached out and grabbed one by the leg—he was on his knees to them—and he hit him alongside the face with a book he was carryin’.”

The old man rocked backward and forward in his seat as he spoke, his eyes half-closed. “There wasn’t no more seed but what was saved from last year then, and the corn went so bad the ears wasn’t no longer than a soft dick. No bullets for Dad’s old gun, nowhere to buy new traps when what we had was lost. Then one day just afore Christmas these here machines just started tearing up our fields. They had forgot about us, you see. We threw rocks, but it didn’t do no good, and about midnight one come right through the house. There wasn’t no one living then but Ma and Dad and brother Tom and me and Janie. Janie wasn’t but just a little bit of a thing. The machine got Tom in the leg with a piece of two-by-four—rammed the splintery end into him, you see. The rot got to the wound and he died a week after; it was winter then, and we was living in a place me and Dad built up on the hill out of branches and saplings.”

“About Janie,” Paul said. “I can understand how you might not want to let her go—”

“Are you sayin’ you don’t want her?” The old man shifted in his seat, and Paul saw that his right hand had moved close to the crevice where the horizontal surface joined the vertical. The crevice was a trifle too wide, and Paul thought he knew what was hidden there. He was not afraid of the old man, and it had crossed his mind more than once that if he killed him there would be nothing to prevent his taking Janie.

“I want her,” he said. “I’m not going away without her.” He stood up without knowing why.

“There’s been others said the same thing. I would go, you know, to the meetin’ in the regular way; come back next month, and the fella’d be waitin’.”

The old man was drawing himself to his feet, his jaw outthrust belligerently. “They’d see her,” he said, “and they’d talk a lot, just like you, about how good they’d take care of her, though there wasn’t a one brought a lick to eat when he come to call. Me and Janie, sometimes we ain’t et for three, four days—they never take account of that. Now here, you look at her.”

Bending swiftly, he took his daughter by the arm; she rose gracefully, and he spun her around. “Her ma was a pretty woman,” he said, “but not as pretty as what she is, even if she is so thin. And she’s got sense too—I don’t keer what they say.”

Janie looked at Paul with frightened, animal eyes. He gestured, he hoped gently, for her to come to him, but she only pressed herself against her father.

“You can talk to her. She understands.”

Paul started to speak, then had to stop to clear his throat. At last he said, “Come here, Janie. You’re going to live with me. We’ll come back and see your father sometimes.”

Her hand slipped into her shirt; came out holding a knife. She looked at the old man, who caught her wrist and took the knife from her and dropped it on the seat behind him, saying, “You’re going to have to be a mite careful around her for a bit, but if you don’t hurt her none she’ll take to you pretty quick. She wants to take to you now—I can see it in the way she looks.”

Paul nodded, accepting the girl from him almost as he might have accepted a package, holding her by her narrow waist.

“And when you get a mess of grub she likes to cut them up, sometimes, while they’re still movin’ around. Mostly I don’t allow it, but if you do—anyway, once in a while—she’ll like you better for it.”

Paul nodded again. His hand, as if of its own volition, had strayed to the girl’s smoothly rounded hip, and he felt such desire as he had never known before.

“Wait,” the old man said. His breath was foul in the close air. “You listen to me now. You’re just a young fella and I know how you feel, but you don’t know how I do. I want you to understand before you go. I love my girl. You take good care of her or I’ll see to you. And if you change your mind about wanting her, don’t you just turn her out. I’ll take her back, you hear?”

Paul said, “All right.”

“Even a bad man can love his child. You remember that, because it’s true.”

Her husband took Janie by the hand and led her out of the wrecked bus. She was looking over her shoulder, and he knew that she expected her father to drive a knife into his back.

They had seen the boy—a brown-haired, slightly freckled boy of nine or ten with an armload of books—on a corner where a small, columniated building concealed the entrance to the monorail, and the streets were wide and empty. The children of the masters were seldom out so late. Paul waved to him, not daring to speak, but attempting to convey by his posture that he wanted to ask directions; he wore the black cloak and scarlet-slashed shirt, the gold sandals and wide-legged black film trousers proper to an evening of pleasure. On his arm Janie was all in red, her face covered by a veil dotted with tiny synthetic bloodstones. Gem-studded veils were a fashion now nearly extinct among the women of the masters, but one that served to conceal the blankness of eye that betrayed Janie, as Paul had discovered, almost instantly. She gave a soft moan of hunger as she saw the boy, and clasped Paul’s arm more tightly. Paul waved again.

The boy halted as though waiting for them, but when they were within five meters he turned and dashed away. Janie was after him before Paul could stop her. The boy dodged between two buildings and raced through to the next street; Paul was just in time to see Janie follow him into a doorway in the center of the block.

He found her clear-soled platform shoes in the vestibule, under a four-dimensional picture of Hugo de Vries. De Vries was in the closing years of his life and, in the few seconds it took Paul to pick up the shoes and conceal them behind an aquarium of phosphorescent cephalopods, had died, rotted to dust, and undergone rebirth as a fissioning cell in his mother’s womb with all the labyrinth of genetics still before him.

The lower floors, Paul knew, were apartments. He had entered them sometimes when he could find no prey on the streets. There would be a school at the top.

A confused, frightened-looking woman stood in an otherwise empty corridor, a disheveled library book lying open at her feet. As Paul pushed past her, he could imagine Janie knocking her out of the way, and the woman’s horror at the savage, exultant face glimpsed beneath her veil.

There were elevators, a liftshaft, and a downshaft, all clustered in an alcove. The boy would not have waited for an elevator with Janie close behind him. . . .

The liftshaft floated Paul as springwater floats a cork. Thickened by conditioning agents, the air remained a gas; enriched with added oxygen, it stimulated his whole being, though it was as viscous as corn syrup when he drew it into his lungs. Far above, suspended (as it seemed) in crystal and surrounded by the books the boy had thrown down at her, Paul saw Janie with her red gown billowing around her and her white legs flashing. She was going to the top, apparently to the uppermost floor, and he reasoned that the boy, having led her there, would jump into the downshaft to escape her. He got off at the eighty-fifth floor, opened the hatch to the downshaft, and was rewarded by seeing the boy only a hundred meters above him. It was a simple matter then to wait on the landing and pluck him out of the sighing column of thickened air.

The boy’s pointed, narrow face, white with fear under a tan, turned up toward him. “Don’t,” the boy said. “Please, sir, good master—,” but Paul clamped him under his left arm, and with a quick wrench of his right broke his neck.

Janie was swimming head down with the downshaft current, her mouth open and full of eagerness, and her black hair like a cloud about her head. She had lost her veil. Paul showed her the boy and stepped into the shaft with her. The hatch slammed behind him, and the motion of the air ceased.

He looked at Janie. She had stopped swimming and was staring hungrily into the dead boy’s face. He said, “Something’s wrong,” and she seemed to understand, though it was possible that she only caught the fear in his voice. The hatch would not open, and slowly the current in the shaft was reversing, lifting them; he tried to swim against it, but the effort was hopeless. When they were at the top, the dead boy began to talk; Janie put her hand over his mouth to muffle the sound. The hatch at the landing opened, and they stepped out onto the 101st floor.

A voice from a loudspeaker in the wall said, “I am sorry to detain you, but there is reason to think you have undergone a recent deviation from the optional development pattern. In a few minutes I will arrive in person to provide counseling; while you are waiting it may be useful for us to review what is meant by ‘optimal development.’ Look at the projection.

“In infancy the child first feels affection for its mother, the provider of warmth and food . . .” There was a door at the other end of the room, and Paul swung a heavy chair against it, making a din that almost drowned out the droning speaker.

“Later one’s peer group becomes, for a time, all-important—or nearly so. The boys and girls you see are attending a model school in Armstrong. Notice that no tint is used to mask the black of space above their airtent.”

The lock burst from the door frame, but a remotely actuated hydraulic cylinder snapped it shut each time a blow from the chair drove it open. Paul slammed his shoulder against it, and before it could close again put his knee where the shattered bolt socket had been. A chrome-plated steel rod as thick as a finger had dropped from the chair when his blows had smashed the wood and plastic holding it; after a moment of incomprehension, Janie dropped the dead boy, wedged the rod between the door and the jamb, and slipped through. He was following her when the rod lifted, and the door swung shut on his foot.

He screamed and screamed again, and then, in the echoing silence that followed, heard the loudspeaker mumbling about education, and Janie’s sobbing, indrawn breath. Through the crack between the door and the frame, the two-centimeter space held in existence by what remained of his right foot, he could see the livid face and blind, malevolent eyes of the dead boy, whose will still held the steel rod suspended in air. “Die,” Paul shouted at him. “Die! You’re dead!” The rod came crashing down.

“This young woman,” the loudspeaker said, “has chosen the profession of medicine. She will be a physician, and she says now that she was born for that. She will spend the remainder of her life in relieving the agonies of disease.”

Several minutes passed before Paul could make Janie understand what it was she had to do.

“After her five years’ training in basic medical techniques, she will specialize in surgery for another three years before—”

It took Janie a long time to bite through his Achilles tendon; when it was over, she began to tear at the ligaments that held the bones of the tarsus to the leg. Over the pain he could feel the hot tears washing the blood from his foot.

Ever since this story appeared, I have been getting heat for my spelling of werewolf. I reverted to the original spelling to point up the meaning of the word: “manwolf.” We would be more apt to say “wolfman,” though the ideas conveyed are distinctly different. Our werewolf is a man who becomes a wolf. The manwolf envisioned by the Anglos and Saxons was a man to be feared as wolves were feared, and for the same reasons.

Wer was the original Anglo-Saxon word for the male of the human species. (Man designated a human being. We see the ghostly traces of this when we say, for example, that Molly Pitcher manned a gun at Monmouth.) I wanted the old original import, and so titled the story you have just read as I did.