The Werewolf Principle Read Online Free PDF

snapped out its defenses and blotted out the place. It built itself into a pyramid, which was a solid state of being, and constructed about itself a sphere of isolation.
    It tested for the energy that it would need to power its life and spark its mentality and the energy was there, a surging tide of energy deriving from some source it could not detect.
    It found that now it could cogitate. Its mental processes were bright and clear, its logic like a knife. No longer was there a dream-like quality in its thinking. The unquestioned pyramidal body mass gave it stability and a theater in which its mind could operate.
    It directed its thinking toward the solution of what had happened to it—how, after an unknown period of time, during which it had only been marginally operative, if even marginally, it suddenly had come free and whole and efficient once again.
    It sought for a beginning and there was no beginning, or, perhaps, only a beginning so hazed and indistinct that it could not be sure. It sought and dug and hunted, sniffing through the dark tunnels of its mind, and there was no beginning it could peg down tight and solid.
    Although that, it told itself, was of no great consequence, for a beginning might not be essential. Had there ever, it wondered, been a beginning or had it always hunted thus, scrabbling in its mental mazes for an anchor post? A beginning, of course, was not necessary, nor was an ending necessary, either, but somewhere, somehow, there must be an approximation of a beginning and an end.
    Perhaps the question, rather, was had there been a past, and it was certain there must have been a past, for its mind was packed with the floating foam of flotsam that came drifting from the past—background bits of information, like the background radiation that could be found upon a planet. It tried to patch the foam into a pattern and no pattern came, for there was no way that the bits of information could be made to fit into one another.
    The data, it thought in panic—once there had been data. It was sure there had been data. Once there had been something with which its mind could work. And the data might still be present, but masked or under cover, appearing only in spots and patches, and some of it irrelevant, although one could not be sure, for there did not seem to be enough of it to establish relevance.
    It squatted in its pyramidal form and listened to the empty thrumming of its mind, a polished able mind, but without the facts to work on—a mind that was running wild and empty, with no accomplishment.
    It sought again in the jumbled tangle of the bits and pieces that floated from the past and it found the impression of a rocky, hostile land, out of the rock of which reared up a massive cylinder, black as the rock itself, soaring up into the greyness of the sky until it made one dizzy to try to follow it. And within the cylinder, it knew, was something that defied all imagination, something so great and wondrous that the mind recoiled at the thinking of it.
    It sought for the meaning, for some hint or recognition, but there was nothing but the image of the black and rocky land and the blackness and the bleakness of the cylinder that came soaring out of it.
    Reluctantly, it let the picture go and dredged for another piece and this time it was a flowery glen that opened on a meadow and the meadow was wild with the thousand hues of a billion blooming flowers. The sound of music shivered in the air and there were living things that romped among the flowers and again there was a meaning here, it knew, but there was no clue that it could find which would allow it to approach the meaning.
    There had been another, once. There had been another being and it had been this being which had snared and held the pictures and transmitted them—and not the pictures only, but the data that went with them. And still the pictures were filed within the mind, although jumbled all together, but the data that was tied