“How do you do that?” I asked.
“It’s a matter of practice. Eye-foot coordination.”
“No, I mean how do you change back and forth? You can’t take molecules of metal and turn them into organic material.”
“I suppose you can,” he said. “I do it all the time.”
“What I mean is, it’s inconsistent with physical law.”
“No, it’s not. Your version of physics is inconsistent with reality.”
I was starting to get an Alice-in-Wonderland dizziness. Maybe Lewis Carroll had been one of them.
“Let me turn it around,” he continued. “How do you turn food into flesh? Eating.”
I thought for a second. “Your body breaks down the food into simpler compounds. Amino acids, fats, carbohydrates. Components that aren’t burned for energy may turn into flesh.”
“That’s your opinion,” he said. “I had a friend a few thousand years ago, not far from here, who said that you took part of the spirit of the animal or plant that you ate, and it became part of your own spirit. Explains all kinds of sickness.”
“Very poetic,” I said, “but wrong.”
“You likewise. You just have different ideas about what poetry is, and what `right’ is.”
“Okay. So tell me how you do it.”
“I don’t have the faintest idea. I was born being able to do it, just as you were born able to metabolize. My Timucuan friend was able to metabolize as well as you, even if he described it differently.”
“In nine thousand years, you haven’t tried to find out how your body works?”
“Not everybody’s a scientist.” He changed from John Wayne to a man I vaguely recognized from the kids’ schoolwork, an artist whose medium was body sculpture. He had four and six fingers, and a heat-sensing eye installed in his forehead. “I’m a kind of historian.”
“You’ve lived alongside humans since prehistory,” Cat said, “and no one ever suspected?”
“We don’t keep real good records,” he said, “but I think that at first, we were open about what we were, and co-existed. Somewhere along the line, I think when you got language and society, we started to hide out.”
“So you became myths,” Diane said.
“Yeah; I can do a great werewolf,” he said. “And I think we were taken for angels and gods sometimes. Every now and then I’d be a plain human for a lifetime, appearing to age. But that’s kind of boring and sad.”
“You’ve been Man as well?” the sheriff asked. “You’ve tapped into the Tree?”
“Not as tricky as you might think. I have a lot of control over my neural organization. The Tree can’t tell me from a human–and you guys are just humans, with a hole in your skull and some odd ideas.” He turned into Wayne again, and said with the actor’s drawl, “Buncha god-damn Commies, if ya ask me.”
“Did you do it?” The sheriff and the Omni made an odd tableau in the middle of us: the two biggest men standing there, both with guns holstered on their hips. “Did you make them disappear?”
John Wayne didn’t invite him to slap leather, a challenge I don’t think he would have understood. He just shook his head sadly. “I don’t know what happened. I was in an elevator with two people, two Men, and they just plain disappeared. There was a little `pop’ and their clothes fell to the floor. The elevator doors opened and I rolled out–I was in the shape of a food-dispensing robot–and the whole office building was empty, except for clothes.
“There was a huge racket outside, thousands of traffic accidents. A floater crashed through a picture window; I took human shape and ran down the stairs to the basement until things calmed down.”
“Where were you at the time?” I asked.
“Titusville sector. It’s part of Spaceport Administration. We went near it on our way here.” He took the shape of an oversized statue of Albert Einstein, and sat in the dust, cross-legged, his eyes at our level. “It was a convenient coincidence, since I would have headed for a spaceport no matter where I’d been at the time. Waiting for someone to come explain what has happened.”
“I don’t think we know any more than you,” Marygay said.