Midnight

'That explanation made some sort of crazy sense when we trapped Coombs in the theater and got a good look at him back in September. He was more ape than man, something in between.'

'It doesn't make crazy sense; it makes perfect sense.'

'But, Jesus, look at Sholnick. Look at him! When I gunned him down, he'd halfway transformed himself into some goddamned creature that's part man, part … hell, I don't know, part lizard or snake. You telling me that we evolved from reptiles, we're carrying lizard genes from ten million years ago?'

Shaddack thrust both hands in his coat pockets, lest they betray his apprehension with a nervous gesture or tremble. 'The first life on earth was in the sea, then something crawled onto the land — a fish with rudimentary legs — and the fish evolved into the early reptiles, and along the way mammals split off. If we don't contain actual fragments of the genetic material of those very early reptiles — and I believe we do — then at least we have racial memory of that stage of evolution encoded in us in some other way we don't really understand.'

'You're jiving me, Shaddack.'

'And you're irritating me.'

'I don't give a damn. Come here, come with me, take a closer look at Peyser. He was a friend of yours from way back, wasn't he? Take a good, long look at what he was when he died.'

Peyser was flat on his back, naked, right leg straight in front of him, left leg bent under him at an angle, one arm flung out at his side, the other across his chest, which had been shattered by a couple of shotgun blasts. The body and the face — with its inhuman muzzle and teeth, yet vaguely recognizable as Mike Peyser — were those of a shockingly horrific freak, a dog-man, a werewolf, something that belonged in either a carnival sideshow or an old horror movie. The skin was coarse. The patchy coat of hair was wiry. The hands looked powerful, the claws sharp.

Because his fascination exceeded his disgust and fear, Shaddack pulled up his topcoat to keep the hem of it from brushing the bloody corpse, and stooped beside Peyser's body for a closer look.

Watkins hunkered down on the other side of the cadaver.

While another avalanche of thunder rumbled down the night sky, the dead man stared at the bedroom ceiling with eyes that were too human for the rest of his twisted countenance.

'You going to tell me that somewhere along the way we evolved from dogs, wolves?' Watkins asked.

Shaddack did not reply.

Watkins pressed the issue. 'You going to tell me that we've got dog genes in us that we can tap when we want to transform ourselves? Am I supposed to believe God took a rib from some prehistoric Lassie and made man from it before he took man's rib to make a woman?'

Curiously Shaddack touched one of Mike Peyser's hands, which was designed for killing as surely as was a soldier's bayonet. It felt like flesh, just cooler than that of a living man.

'This can't be explained biologically,' Watkins said, glaring at Shaddack across the corpse. 'This wolf form isn't something Peyser could dredge up from racial memory stored in his genes. So how could he change like this? It's not just your biochips at work here. It's something else … something stranger.'

Shaddack nodded. 'Yes.' An explanation had occurred to him, and he was excited by it. 'Something a great deal stranger … but perhaps I understand it.'

'So tell me. I'd like to understand it. Damned if I wouldn't. I'd like to understand it real well. Before it happens to me.'

'There's a theory that form is a function of consciousness.'

'Huh?'

'It holds that we are what we think we are. I'm not talking pop psychology here, that you can be what you want to be if you'll only like yourself, nothing of that sort. I mean physically, we may have the potential to be whatever we think we are, to override the morphic stasis dictated by our genetic heritage.'

'Gobbledegook,' Watkins said impatiently.

Shaddack stood. He put his hands in his pockets again. 'Let me put it this way The theory says that consciousness is the greatest power in the universe, that it can bend the physical world to its desire.'

'Mind over matter.'

'Right.'

'Like some talk-show psychic bending a spoon or stopping a watch, ' Watkins said.

'Those people are usually fakes, I suspect. But, yes, maybe that power is really in us. We just don't know how to tap it because for millions of years we've allowed the physical world to dominate us. By habit, by stasis, and by preference for order over chaos, we remain at the mercy of the physical world. But what we're talking about here,' he said, pointing to Sholnick and Peyser, 'is a lot more complex and exciting than bending a spoon with the mind. Peyser felt the urge to regress, for reasons I don't understand, perhaps for the sheer thrill of it—'

'For the thrill.' Watkins's voice lowered, became quiet, almost hushed, and was filled with such intense fear and mental anguish that it deepened Shaddack's chill. 'Animal power is thrilling. Animal need. You feel animal hunger, animal lust, bloodthirst — and you're drawn toward that because it seems so … so simple and powerful, so natural. It's freedom.'

'Freedom?'

'Freedom from responsibility, from worry, from the pressure of the civilized world, from having to think too much. The temptation to regress is tremendously powerful because you feel life will be so much easier and exciting then,' Watkins said, evidently speaking about what he had felt when drawn toward an altered state. 'When you become a beast, life is all sensation, just pain and pleasure, with no need to intellectualize anything. That's part of it, anyway.'

Shaddack was silent, unsettled by the passion with which Watkins — not ordinarily an expressive man — had spoken of the urge to regress.

Another detonation rocked the sky, more powerful than any before it. The first hard crack of thunder reverberated in the bedroom windows.

Mind racing, Shaddack said, 'Anyway, the important thing is that when Peyser felt this urge to become a beast, a hunter, he didn't regress along the human genetic line. Evidently, in his opinion, a wolf is the greatest of all hunters, the most desirable form for a predatory beast, so he willed himself to become wolflike.'

'Just like that,' Watkins said skeptically.

'Yes, just like that. Mind over matter. The metamorphosis is mostly a mental process. Oh, certainly, there are physical changes. But we might not be talking complete alteration of matter … only of biological structures. The basic nucleotides remain the same, but the sequence in which they're read changes drastically. Structural genes are transformed into operator genes by a force of will….'

Shaddack's voice trailed off as his excitement rose to match his fear and left him breathless. He'd done far more than he'd hoped to do with the Moonhawk Project. The stunning accomplishment was the source of both his sudden joy and escalating fear: joy, because he had given men the ability to control their physical form and, eventually, perhaps all matter, simply by the exercise of will; fear, because he was not sure that the New People could learn to control and properly use their power … or that he could continue to control them.

'The gift I've given to you — computer-assisted physiology and release from emotion — unleashes the mind's power over matter. It allows consciousness to dictate form.'

Watkins shook his head, clearly appalled by what Shaddack was suggesting. 'Maybe Peyser willed himself to become what he did. Maybe Sholnick willed it too. But I'll be damned if I did. When I was overcome by the desire to change, I fought it like an ex-addict sweating out a craving for heroin. I didn't want it. it came over me … the way the force of the full moon comes over a werewolf.'

'No,' Shaddack said. 'Subconsciously, you did want to change, Loman, and you no doubt partially wanted it even on a conscious level. You must have wanted it to some extent because you spoke so forcefully about how attractive regression was. You resisted using your power of mind over body only because you found metamorphosis marginally more frightening than appealing. If you lose some of your fear of it….. or if an altered state becomes just a little more appealing….. well, then your psychological balance will shift, and you'll remake yourself. But it won't be some outside force at work. It'll be your own mind.'

'Then why couldn't Peyser come back?'

'As I said, and as you suggested, he didn't want to.'

'He was trapped.'

'Only by his own desire.'