The Werewolf Principle Read Online Free PDF Page B

in with them had somehow disappeared.
    It crouched lower and deeper and more massively into its pyramidal form and within its brain the emptiness and the chaos ached and it tried gropingly to go back into its twilit past to find that other creature which had supplied the picture and the data.
    But there was nothing to be found. There was no way to reach out and touch this other one. And it wept in loneliness, deep inside itself, without tears or sobbing, for it was not equipped for either tears or sobbing.
    And in the bareness of its grief it drove back deeper into time and found a time when there had been no creature, when it still had worked with data and with abstract pictures based upon the data, but there had been no color in either the data or the concept and the pictures so erected had been stiff and prim and at times even terrifying.
    There was no use, it thought. There was no use of trying. It still was inefficient, it was only half itself, and it could not function properly because it lacked the material to perform its function. It sensed the blackness drifting in upon it and it did not fight against it. It stayed and waited and let the blackness come.

7
    Blake awoke and the Room was screaming at him.
    â€œWhere did you go?” it screamed at him. “Where did you go? What happened to you?”
    He was sitting on the floor in the center of the room, sitting with his legs pulled underneath him. And it was not right, for he should have been in bed.
    The Room began again. “Where did you go?” it bellowed. “What happened to you? What did …”
    â€œOh, shut up,” said Blake.
    The Room shut up.
    Morning sunlight was streaming through the window and somewhere outside a bird was singing. The room was ordinary. Nothing had been changed. It was all exactly as he remembered it when he had gone to bed.
    â€œNow tell me,” he said. “Exactly what did happen?”
    â€œYou went away!” wailed the Room. “And you built a wall around you …”
    â€œA wall!”
    â€œA nothingness,” said the Room. “A blob of nothingness. You filled me with a cloud of nothingness.”
    Blake said, “You are crazy. How could I do a thing like that?”
    But even as he said the words, he knew that the Room was right. The Room could only report the phenomenon that it had sensed. It had no such thing as imagination. It was only a machine, although a sophisticated one, and in its experience there was no such thing as superstition, or myth or fairy tale.
    â€œYou disappeared,” declared the Room. “You wrapped yourself in nothing and you disappeared. But before you began to wrap yourself, you changed.”
    â€œHow could I change?”
    â€œI don’t know, but you did. You melted and you took another form, or began to take another form, and then you wrapped yourself.”
    â€œAnd you couldn’t sense me? That’s why you thought that I had gone away.”
    â€œI could not sense you,” said the Room. “I could not penetrate the nothingness.”
    â€œThis nothingness?”
    â€œJust nothingness,” said the Room. “I could not analyze it.”
    Blake picked himself up off the floor, reached for the pair of shorts he had dropped upon the floor when he’d gotten into bed the night before. He pulled them on and picked up the robe draped across a chair back.
    He lifted it and it was heavy and it was brown and it was wool—and suddenly he remembered the night before, the strange stone house and the senator and his daughter.
    You changed, the Room had said. You changed and built around yourself a shell of nothingness. But he had no memory of it, not a whisper of a memory.
    Nor had he any memory of what had happened the night before in that interval between when he’d walked on the patio and the moment he had found himself standing in the storm, a good five miles from home.
    My God, he asked himself, what is going