A Werewolf Among Us

'I'm as emotional as any other man, outside of my cyberdetective role.' It had been a long time since anyone had made him feel defensive.

'When you aren't wearing that shell?'

'Yes,' he said.

'How often do you wear it?'

'Only when I'm working.'

'How often are you on a case?'

'Oh — on the average, three weeks a month or so.'

'And you never wear it between assignments?'

'Hardly ever.'

'Hardly ever? What does that mean? Sometimes you wear it when you aren't working?'

He remembered the way the customs men had looked at him, their certainty that he depended on the bio- computer shell for his very existence. He did not want to see the same expression on her face. Yet he could not tell her anything but the truth. 'Sometimes — I leave it on a day or two past the conclusion of a case.'

She turned away from him and looked back at her new painting. 'That shell you wear makes you as hollow as the rest of us, as flat and selfish as someone who has been hypno-keyed.'

After that, there had been no opportunity to get her in his arms again. He had left her studio shaken, and had experienced the worst nightmare in many years toward the dawn of the next morning.

Rising early because of the nightmare, he bathed and dressed and went into the gardens to inspect the site of Dorothea's murder. He had been there before, as had the police, but he planned this time to make concentric circles around the spot, constantly widening his search pattern until he either found something they had overlooked before or had been from one end of the gardens to the other without luck. Besides, it was something to do while he waited for the killer to make his next move.

The place where the girl's body had been found was still marked by the chemicals the police had used to force the earth to give up secrets — before they discovered it had none to give up. The grass was dead, though tiny green shoots from new seeds had begun to peek out of the ugly stain. St. Cyr moved quickly around the site, covering the ground that he had been over once before, then slowed his pace as he came upon untrodden flowerbeds and walkways where neither he nor the police had done much work.

It was tedious work, but at least it kept his mind occupied while the sun climbed into the sky and began to eat away the empty hours.

Just when he was beginning to miss the breakfast he had not taken time to eat, his legs weary from more than two hours of continuous pacing, the killer made his next move. Something stung St. Cyr in the center of his back, sent warmth through the upper half of his body.

He fell forward to avoid a second shot, if there happened to be one; he hit the earth hard, the shock against the bio-computer shell carried swiftly against his ribs. Unfortunately, the shell was far tougher than he was and did not cushion any of the blow. He scrambled forward toward a line of hedges behind which he could have a little bit of shelter. As he was scrambling through the hedgerow, scratching his face and hands on the brambles, a second dart pricked his right buttock.

On the other side of the hedge, he plucked the long, slim needles from his back and looked at them closely. They were thicker in the middle than on either end and had only a single point, with an almost microscopic hole in the very tip. The charge was held in the middle, in the rounded bulge no wider than a quarter of an inch and about one inch long.

Charge of what, though? Narcotics? If that were the case, then he was in a damn bad way. Strangely, he had not passed out immediately, as he should have. But if he had just been narco-darted, he only had a few precious seconds to do something to save himself.

Had Leon, Dorothea and Betty been snapped full of narcotics before the killer made his move against them? No, that would have showed up in an autopsy.

Perhaps he had not just been sedated, but poisoned. Perhaps in a moment he would go into violent convulsions.

He rolled onto his stomach and wriggled a dozen feet along the hedgerow, spread some of the tightly-packed branches and surveyed the trees and flowers and shrubs across the way. He could not see anyone lurking there. He thought he would have heard them if they had tried to circle him, but he looked behind anyway. The gardens there were also serene.

St. Cyr was still not sleepy.

That worried him.

What the hell was going on?

Your perceptions seem to be deteriorating, the bio-computer said.

'I feel all right.'

He should not have spoken so loudly. He did not even need to vocalize communications with the bio-computer pack. Besides, his voice carried remarkably well in the heavily-grown gardens, echoing down the sheltered flagstone walkways.

It is currently only a subtle deterioration.

Poison, he thought.

He got to his knees and stood without much trouble, though for a second or two it seemed to him that the ground had rippled, risen towards him in an effort to keep him from getting away. That was imagination, of course. Looking quickly around, he tried to gauge the nearest exit from the artificial jungle. If he could make the open lawn around the mansion, someone might see him and come to him before it was too late.

Behind him, a pathway led toward the perimeter of the garden, arched over with green leaves and red blossoms that smelled like oranges. He started for that and was halfway to the walk entrance when he saw the leaves snake quickly forward, growing at a fantastic rate. In two seconds the exit had been sealed off by vegetation.

'What the hell—'

He turned right, starred for another walkway, watched the same thing happen, except that this time it was the grass that grew swiftly to cover the entrance. The blades widened as they grew, toughened, twined rapidly in and out of the side-poles of the rose arbor which framed the entrance to the walk, forming an impassable barrier.

St. Cyr turned and faced the other way.

The hedge behind which he had hidden only a few minutes ago had begun to join in with the harmony of growth — no, the cacophony. It sprouted new branches. Actually, they looked more like vines, highly flexible vines covered with wicked inch-long thorns. A dozen of these ropy tentacles had almost reached him. As he watched, they rose from the ground like snakes responding to the music of a flute, stood higher and higher still until they towered over him.

At the last instant he realized what they intended. They would fall and embrace him, squeeze him firmly in a crosshatch of thorns. He screamed, fell, rolled to the left barely fast enough to avoid them as they dropped where he had been.

The vines thrashed agitatedly.

He could hear things growing all around him, bursting forth like gardens he had seen filmed with stop-action photography.

He got up and ran.

He passed through the entrance to another walkway before he noticed it, and he was elated that, unconsciously, he had fooled the garden. He was on his way out of it.

Hallucinations.

He paid no attention to the bio-computer now. He was in no mood to listen to anything except the incredible roar of growing things, which he fancied was as loud as the continuous explosion at the base of a major waterfalls.

Be calm. Hallucination.

On both sides the trees shot up, growing so fast that they would soon punch out the sky.

'Sky' is basically an abstract term. You are hallucinating.

He had gone a hundred feet down the flagstone path when, immediately before him in the leaping, dancing