An Earthman, in those days, would use “You cur!” as an indication of contempt; to a Martian, anyone acidressed as “You primate!” was not only contemptible but utterly ridiculous.
By the time the First Conference was over, and the more brilliant linguists of each group had managed to master something of the verbal language of the other, traces of a reluctant mutual respect had begun to dawn. This was particularly true of the Earthmen, who had at heart a genuine, if somewhat patronizing, fondness for dogs (and even wolves), whereas the Martians had never possessed any warmth of feeling for monkeys (and certainly not for great apes).
Possibly because he had first put his finger on the cause, it was Professor Hunyadi who was especially preoccupied, on the return voyage, with the nagging thought that some fresh device must be found if the two races were to establish their interplanetary intercourse on a solid footing. It is fortunate indeed that the Professor had, as he tells us in his Memoirs, spent so many happy hours at the feet of his Transylvanian grandmother; for thus he alone, of that crew of superb specialists, was capable of conceiving the solution that was to revolutionize the history of two planets.
The world press alternated between roars of laughter and screams of rage when the returned zoologist issued his eloquent plea, on a world-wide video hookup, for volunteer werewolves as ambassadors to the wolves of Mars.
Barbarous though it may seem to us now, mankind was at that time divided into three groups: those who disbelieved in werewolves; those who hated and feared werewolves; and, of course, those who were werewolves.
The fortunate position of three hitherto unsuspected individuals of this last category served to still both the laughter and the rage of the press.
Professor Garou of Duke University received from Hunyadi’s impassioned plea the courage at last to publish his monumental thesis (based on the earlier researches of Williamson) proving once and for all that the lycanthropic metamorphosis involves nothing supernatural, but a strictly scientific exercise of psychokinetic powers in the rearrangement of molecular structure—an exercise at which, Garou admitted, he was himself adept.
This revelation in turn emboldened Cardinal Mezzoluppo, a direct descendant of the much misinterpreted Wolf of Gubbio, to confess the sting of the flesh which had long buffeted him, and taking his text from II Corinthians 11:30, pro me autem nihil gloriabor nisi in infirmitatibus meis, magnificently to proclaim the infinite wisdom of God in establishing on Earth a long misunderstood and persecuted race which could now at last serve man in his first great need beyond Earth.
But it was neither the scientific demonstration that one need not disbelieve nor the religious exhortation that one need not hate and fear that converted the great masses of mankind. That conversion came when Streak, the Kanine King of the Kinescope, the most beloved quadruped in the history of show business, announced that he had chosen an acting career as a wolf-dog only because the competition was less intense than among human video-actors (“and besides,” he is rumored to have added privately, “you meet fewer bitches. . . and their sons”).
The documentary which Streak commissioned for his special use, A day in the life of the average werewolf removed the last traces of disbelief and fear, and finally brought forth the needed volunteers, no longer hesitant to declare themselves lest they be shot down with silver bullets or even forced to submit to psychoanalysis.
As a matter of fact, this new possibility of public frankness cured immediately many of the analysts’ most stubborn cases, hitherto driven to complex escapes by the necessity of either frustrating their very nature by never changing or practicing metamorphosis as a solitary vice.
The problem now became one, not of finding volunteers, but of winnowing them. Fortunately, a retired agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (whose exploits as a werewolf of good will have been recounted elsewhere) undertook the task of cleaning out the criminal element, which statistico-psychology has since established as running no higher (allowing for the inevitable historical effects of repression and discrimination) than in other groups; and Professor Garou devised the requisite aptitude tests.
One minor misfortune of the winnowing process may be mentioned: A beautiful Australian actress, whose clarity of diction (in either form) and linguistic talent strongly recommended her, proved to metamorphose not into the European wolf (Canis lupus) but into the Tasmanian (Thylacinus cynocephalus)-, and Professor Garou, no doubt rightly, questioned the effect upon the Martians of her marsupial pouch, highly esteemed though it was by connoisseurs of such matters.
The rest is history. There is no need to detail here the communicative triumphs of that embassy and its successors; the very age of interplanetary amity in which we live is their monument.
Nor should we neglect to pay tribute to the brilliant and charming wereapes who so ably represent their mother planet in the Martian embassies here on Earth.
For once the Martians had recognized the perfection of the Hunyadi solution, their folklorists realized that they too had long suffered a minority problem of which the majority had never suspected the existence; and Cardinal Mezzoluppo’s tribute to divine wisdom was echoed by the High Vrakh himself as that monster of legend, the were-primate, took his rightful place among the valued citizens of Mars.
It would be only fitting if this brief sketch could end with a touching picture of the contented old age of Professor Hunyadi, to whom two worlds owe so infinitely much. But that restless and unfulfilled genius has once more departed on an interplanetary expedition, trusting ever that the God of the Cardinal and the Vrakh has somewhere designed a planet peopled by a bat-like race (Vampyrus sapiensj to which he will be the ideal first ambassador.
Q.U.R.
It’s got so the
