A Werewolf Among Us

'Just the same,' St. Cyr said, 'I'll get off a light-telegram to my contact on Ionus tomorrow morning, see what he can dig up. The last thing any detective can afford to do is ignore even the smallest lead.'

As the group split up to go back to bed, St. Cyr checked the house map and found that Tina lived on the second level, the only member of the family with quarters that far down. He started after her, aware again of the gently rounded curves of her body, of the richness of her black hair; he caught up with her at the end of the corridor and took her elbow in his hand.

She looked up, eyes black, lips pursed. When he had been asking questions, she was just another subject for interrogation; the bio-computer made certain of his impartiality like that. Now, however, she was much more than a suspect.

He said, 'May I see you back to your rooms?'

She looked at the gun in her hand but said, 'Okay.'

In the elevator, when they were alone, he asked, 'Why do you have rooms so far away from the rest of the family?'

'The fourth and fifth levels are pretty much broken up into the regular suites for family and guests, a few small art galleries and music rooms. The third level is where father has his den, mother her retreat. The library is also on the third level, as well as the recreation room and the drawing room, the motion picture theater and the pool. The studio level contains the storage rooms, kitchens, dining room — and my studio. I'm a painter, you know. I need plenty of space. The second level was the only place where I could have the studio the way I wanted it. You'll see soon enough what I mean.'

The elevator doors opened, and the hall lights came up in quick response.

They were alone, or seemed to be.

'This way,' she said.

She led him to her door, talked it open, went into her studio.

He followed.

The chamber was impressive, especially in that the ceiling was a good fifty feet overhead, arched by stained beams that criss-crossed in a neat geometric pattern. The walls were all white, almost dazzlingly white, broken only by a dozen of her own paintings. Two doors led to other rooms in the suite, and a barred window, forty feet long, was set in the far wall, providing quite a splash of sunlight during the day. The room itself measured approximately sixty by sixty feet.

'See?' she asked, turning to face him, smiling tentatively.

'Very nice.'

'I'm glad you think so.'

'Your work?' he asked, walking to the nearest painting, though he knew it was hers, recognized the style from the signed paintings in the fifth floor corridor.

'Yes,' she said. Her abrupt tone held no pride.

He examined the painting, saw that it was a portrait of her father, Jubal, done entirely in shades of blue and green — and as if seen through a thousand small fragments of glass, some fragments crack-webbed. 'I like it very much,' he said.

'Then you haven't much taste for art,' she said. When he turned and looked at her, he found that she was serious, though there was a grim humor in her voice.

'Oh?'

'You like the colors, the shapes,' she said. 'But if you could go beyond that, if you knew some of the criteria for judging art, you'd know what a flop it is.'

'And these others?'

'Flops too.'

He said: 'Upstairs, in the corridors—'

'Disasters,' she said, chuckling, though there was little mirth in her chuckle.

'Well,' he said, 'I disagree. You've got a great deal of talent, so far as I can see.'

'Bullshit.'

He turned and looked at her and was suddenly caught up by the way the overhead lights gleamed in her black eyes and revealed unsuspected depths, by the way the same light shimmered on the long slide of her hair and turned the black to a very dark, dark blue.

Unconsciously, he let his gaze wander down her slim neck to the pert roundness of the breasts. He felt his hands coming up from his sides, driven by an urge to cup her breasts, and he wondered what she made of his movements.

Somehow he remembered the nightmare from which the bio-computer had wakened him that afternoon, and he felt that it had bearing here, though he could not say how…

His gaze traveled downward still, to the pinch of her waist, the gentle flair of hips, to the long, well-shaped legs that were now all revealed by the shorts she wore. She was barefooted. Somehow this last detail intrigued him more than any other.

Re-direct your attention.

He told the other half of the cyberdetective to go to hell.

You cannot risk physical involvement. That may lead to emotional ties, and you are aware of what that would do to your ability to function at optimum efficiency as a cyberdetective.

St. Cyr still felt the urge to reach for her, to draw her gently to him, to see if that olive skin felt as soft and smooth as it looked. At the same rime, the bio-computer had subtly influenced him, even while he recognized its influence, and he raised his eyes to look only at her face.

He said, 'If you really think you're a terrible artist, why do you continue to work?'

She laughed bitterly, laughed so hard that it ended in a choking cough. When she could speak again, she said, 'I haven't any choice. There's nothing else I can do but paint, draw, sculpt, watercolor, sketch…'

'Surely you have—'

'No,' she interrupted. 'Remember, I've undergone hypno-keying — at the age of three, at my father's direction. Do you know what that does to you?'

'Not exactly,' he said. 'Somehow, it makes certain that you reach your full creative potential.'

'And locks you into that.'

'I don't understand,' he said.

'Each of us seems born with certain abilities,' Tina said, turning and crossing to the window, leaning with her back against it. Her black hair and dark complexion paled the night. 'Dane, for instance, has an hereditary facility with words, as did Betty and Dorothea. Mother has a solid musical ability. Father, like me, excels in the manual arts.'

St. Cyr waited.

'Once you've been through psychiatric hypno-keying, once you've had them in your head nudging your creative talents, you're almost—possessed by whatever one ability you have. I have to paint. My whole world is painting, drawing; I even gain satisfaction from cleaning my brushes at the end of a day.'

She walked away from the window and stood before a self-portrait done in shades of orange and yellow.

She said, 'When I try to get away from it— Oh, there are times I get so goddamned disgusted with myself, with my clumsy fingers, with my limited vision, that I never want to think about painting again! But when I run away from it for a while, a few days, the anger goes. And I begin to grow nervous… I find myself anxious to be back at it again, anxious to try to do better at it. I know that I cannot do better, that my talent simply stops at a certain point of achievement, that I'm very good but not great. Yet I always go back. I always pick up the brush again. Over and over I make a fool of myself. I never manage to hold out against the urge for more than a week or two. Sometimes three.'

'Maybe, with all this drive—'

She talked over him as if she had not heard him begin to speak. 'Everyone who has gone through hypno- keying, unless his creative talent is enormous, supreme, lives in a gentle sort of hell ever after that. He cannot do anything but what the hypno-keying has freed him to do — and he knows he can never do it as well as it can be done. And then the drive, as you said.' It was the first indication that she had heard him. 'The motivation is somehow stimulated by the hypno-keying. In the end, you can do only one thing, you