A Werewolf Among Us

things a man could be.

'I know,' he said. 'I guess it was the drug.'

'No one else was so affected by it that they couldn't get off at least one burst,' Hirschel insisted. He was not exactly angry — more concerned than anything.

'I was the first hit,' St. Cyr reminded the hunter.

Hirschel shrugged and did not push the subject any more.

'What now?' Jubal asked. His words were slurred. He sat with Alicia on the couch, beside Dane, massaging his own temples in slow, circular movements of his fingertips. Dane looked thinner, darker, and more confused than ever. The superstitious folderol had been proved false, suddenly and violently. He had not yet gotten used to facing reality.

'Now,' St. Cyr said, 'we find another room on this level, one that doesn't have any windows large enough for Teddy to break through.'

'You think he's still outside the house?' Hirschel asked. Clearly, he did not think so.

St. Cyr explained the trek he had made down to the manual programming chamber and what he had accomplished there.

'I underestimated you again,' the hunter said, smiling.

'But don't get your hopes up,' St. Cyr said. 'Teddy may have gotten back into the house before I issued those orders to the house computer.'

'We'd have seen him before this,' Jubal said.

'I doubt it. He knows that we have the vibra-guns. He's not going to attack straight-on unless he has absolutely no other choice. That's why I want to get us established in another room that can only be breached through a single door. We're going to limit his alternatives until he has no choice but to confront us at a disadvantage.'

'If he's not in the house?' Jubal asked.

'Then we have an easy night ahead of us.'

'He could kill the Worldwide Communications deliveryman and gain another day. Or, if it's a mechanical deliveryman, he could simply smash it up.'

'No. The port office would wonder what had happened to their man. They'd try calling. Then they'd send someone else. If they lost two men in a couple of hours, the police would be swarming all over the mansion.'

'The library has no windows and one door,' Hirschel said. 'That ought to be the kind of room you're looking for.'

By a quarter of three that morning they had cycled open the library door, using the master key that St. Cyr had brought up from the basement — with the house computer 'deaf,' the locks could no longer be vocally coded — had left the door open as an invitation to the master unit, and had used books and furniture to form defended firing positions in the middle of the room. Then they had nothing to do but wait.

At twenty minutes past three in the morning, as they waited quietly in the library, Tina crept across the dimly lighted room and sat beside him where he was hunched behind an overturned writing desk. She said, 'I have a suggestion to make.'

'That is?'

'Take off the bio-computer shell.'

'Now?'

Illogical.

'Yes. It almost caused your death once.'

He grinned and looked away from the open door for a moment. He said, 'How do you figure that?'

'You said yourself that you were so slow in recognizing the killer's identity only because the bio-computer kept rejecting the possibility of a robot criminal.'

'But now it understands, has the data stored.'

'The way I understand it,' she said, 'is that you have the data stored in your own brain cells. The bio-computer never retains any data beyond that which is put in it by the maker. It taps your own store of information, too, and makes use of that, but it never adds to its own.'

'It's the same thing,' he said.

'No, it isn't.' She bit her lip, spoke rapidly, as if she were afraid he would stop her at any moment. 'The bio- computer is programmed to reject in its considerations anything that appears to be unfactual, based on emotions. It might very well still reject the idea of a murderous robot.'

'Where did you get all this theory on bio-computers?' he asked, glancing at the still-empty doorway, then back at the girl. Her eyes were terribly dark, beautiful.

She looked down at her delicate hands and said, 'I've been reading about them.'

'Recently?'

'Today.'

'Where'd you get the information?'

She motioned at the books around them. 'Here. There was more than enough. You know, too, that the fedgov has often thought of issuing injunctions against further sales or use of bio-computers?'

'Yes,' he said. 'But they're always twenty years behind the times. Give them a few more years and they will require bio-computer shells for all federal police.'

She looked up again and leaned forward, as if putting the musculature of her fine small body behind the words: 'There are times where cold, logical reasoning does not work as well as emotionalism.'

Illogical.

'Name one time,' he said.

She looked at her hands again. 'Between us.'

'I guess so,' he said. 'But we were talking about how best to solve a case, with or without a bio-computer. That's something different again. And I still say it's safer and easier wearing a shell.'

'What is your repeating nightmare about?' she asked.

He was startled by the abrupt change of subject. He had gone from a topic he knew he could win to one that he had never understood. 'I don't know,' he said.

'Of course you do.'

'I'm being chased down a broken road,' he said. He hesitated, and then, keeping his eyes on the door, he told her the entire dream.

'Do you know what's behind it? Have you ever submitted to psychoanalysis?'

'No.'

'Doesn't the bio-computer try to help you understand the nightmare?'

'It tries.'

'And can't?'

'Can't,' he said.

'Then that's because you won't let it. The bio-computer isn't a sentient creature itself, you know. It isn't even half of a symbiote, in the true sense of that word. It's just something you use, like a tool. If you wanted to know what that dream meant, the bio-computer could help you learn.'

'You've done a great deal of reading, haven't you?'

'Yes,' she said.

'Then you know about the paranoid spells.'

She nodded. 'When you think it's actually taking over your mind; when you have a feeling there's something physical and living crawling around inside of you.'

'That's it,' he said, shivering at the exactness of the description.

She shifted her position, crossed her lovely, slim legs in Indian fashion and leaned with her palms against the cool, supple mounds of her knees. 'Surely, if you understand that those attacks are only paranoid, you can't be saying that they prove the bio-computer is, in fact, sentient.'

For a while he did not answer. When he realized she was not going to leave, that she was waiting, he said, 'Most of the time it feels as if I'm not alone, as if it's someone to be with, share with, live with.'

'And you can't bear to be alone?'