A Werewolf Among Us

'How long have you lived with the gypsies?'

'Four years.'

'You're an archaeologist?'

'No.'

'But I understood you came here with—'

'I'm a roboticist by profession, an archaeologist by avocation. I came with the expedition to oversee their limited-response robots.'

'And you remained behind.'

Salardi said nothing.

'Why do you stay here, among those of another species, without any of the comforts of modern life?'

'I like them; that's it. As simple as that. I think they've gotten a lousy deal from the fedgov right down the line. I'd rather live among them than among my own kind. My own kind shame me.'

'How have they gotten a lousy deal?' St, Cyr asked.

Salardi folded his arms across his barrel chest and said, 'The fedgov always says that planets are colonized without war. I found, when I was with the diggers here, that there had been a war, a damn short and violent war, when the Darmanians were dispossessed. They were primitive, but with a high degree of artistic achievement and the most carefully structured social system I've ever seen. We knocked them down, killed more than half of them, and let another quarter die out from Earth-borne diseases. That's long in the past now, but it still haunts me. What we did here was inexcusable. Do you know that these people did not know anything of war before we came? There were perhaps half a billion of them across the globe, and they never once took arms against each other. The fedgov's war of annexation was grotesque. In two months, only two hundred thousand natives remained. And then the disease… And now that it's clear that violence against other intelligent creatures is beyond them, the fedgov lets them go, lets them wander in quasi-poverty on a planet made over for the rich. That is how they've gotten a lousy deal.'

The man spoke with the fiery eloquence of a fanatic on the subject. St, Cyr used his present lack of emotional balance to ask him: 'Then you aren't running from criminal prosecution in the Inner Galaxy, as everyone says?'

Salardi dropped his arms and balled his fists at his side. His face colored suddenly. 'I've heard enough questions,' he said. He turned and entered his tent, pulled the flap shut and tied it down from within.

* * *

Dane brooded on the ride down from the gypsy camp, drove too fast for the condition of the road. St. Cyr ignored him, trusting to Fate and the boy's own desire to live to get them safely home again.

When they had been driving for an hour, Dane suddenly spoke: 'What about the fits the boy threw when he was sick — snapping at people and growling like an animal?'

'It's a common symptom of the disease, according to Climicon. It sounds like a relative of an epileptic fit.'

'I knew that thing on your chest would keep you blind to the truth. It's trying to apply logic where logic wasn't meant to be.'

'But the logic is working,' St. Cyr observed.

'Who in hell do you suspect, St. Cyr? Who is a better potential killer than the du-aga-klava? Who would have reasons?'

'Several people,' St. Cyr said. 'And I'm adding Salardi to the list.'

'Why him?'

'Because he's a fanatic about the treatment accorded the natives by the fedgov. Understandable, of course, and all of it as deplorable as he thinks it is. But a fanatic might very well decide that the best way to strike back in behalf of the non-violent Darmanians is to start killing the wealthy people who have inherited this world.'

'He's had four years to start. Why begin now?'

'Perhaps it took four years to build up a keen edge of madness.'

Dane said nothing more.

Eventually they left the gray trees behind and passed through the lower foothills where the pines grew. The sunlight was welcome, the sky cheerfully cloudless.

St. Cyr's mood was considerably better than it had been that morning. He had even begun to enjoy the scenery again — until they came within sight of the five-level white mansion. Then he realized that, though he had ruled out the possibility of a werewolf to his own satisfaction, he had yet to explain the discovery of wolf hairs on two of the three corpses.

EIGHT: Encounter with a Wolf

Chief Inspector Rainy, whom St. Cyr called that same day, confirmed Salardi's means of arrival on Darma and the reasons he claimed for remaining there. Yes, they had checked with Inner Galaxy police. No, they had not turned up anything of interest Salardi was printed, as were all citizens, but he had no warrants outstanding against him. Similar calls to fedgov agencies produced the same results. No, the Darmanian police had not discounted the rumors altogether. It was still possible that Salardi was on the run from an industrial police force. The largest companies maintained their own protection systems — sometimes their own armies — and, when they employed a million or more people, often had their own sets of laws. Salardi could have been employed by a gargantuan industry, could have broken their plant laws somehow, and could be on the run from a private police force. That was next to impossible to check out, considering the hundreds of industrial worlds and the thousands of companies with their own laws and police. Besides, it was out of Rainy's jurisdiction. St. Cyr promised to call in a couple of days and hung up.

Two more days passed in which he did not achieve anything — except a better understanding of Tina Alderban, whom he found himself spending too much time with. She seemed, with every moment that he was around her, increasingly beautiful, stirring needs in him that he had ignored for quite a long while. At night, when nightmares came, she was not in them — but when he woke, it somehow seemed to him that she was nevertheless connected to them in some fashion. He knew that the stalker in his dream was not Tina, but some connection…

On the evening of the second day after he and Dane had returned from the gypsy camp, he was in Tina's studio looking over a new piece of work that she had almost finished. As they stood side-by-side before the canvas, he thought that he detected an attitude of longing in her that mirrored or at least resembled his own. He turned away from the painting — which she had evidenced disgust with — and took her in his arms, pulled her against him, kissed her. When she responded, her tongue moving between his lips, he let his hands slip slowly down her back until they cupped the full roundness of her buttocks. They stood that way for a long while, going no further, requiring nothing more than that. For St. Cyr it was a revelation, for he reacted to the girl in far more than a physcial way. He wanted to protect her, to hold her against him and share everything that was to come in the future. He was startled by the ferocity of his commitment (Avoid emotional ties.) and then, subsequently, hurt when she stepped away from him and adjusted her blouse, which had slipped out of her shorts.

She said, 'You still think I can care for someone, form a normal human relationship?'

'More than ever.'

She looked weary. 'Then it isn't you. I thought it might be you, but we can't ever be that close.'

His mouth was dry when he said, 'What? Why not?'

'You're — cold,' she said. 'Like all the rest of us in this house. You hold back; you don't give yourself. To care, I've got to have someone who can go more than halfway, who can teach me.'

'I can,' he insisted.

'No. You're too logical, too reserved. It's that bio-computer, I suppose, that makes you that way.'

'I can take it off.'

'Are you any different when you do?'

'Of course.'

'Perhaps you are, subtly,' she said, 'But I think that the basic coldness remains.'