Trollburg was a mere few miles from our position. I saw it as a vague sprawling mass, blacked out against our cannon and bombers. It would have been nice to have an atomic weapon just then, but as long as the Tibetans keep those antinuclear warfare prayer wheels turning, such thoughts must remain merely science-fictional. I felt my belly muscles tighten. The cat bottled out his tail and swore. Virginia sent the broomstick slanting down.
We landed in a clump of trees and she turned to me. “Their outposts must be somewhere near,” she whispered. “I didn’t dare try landing on a rooftop; we could have been seen too easily. We’ll have to go in” from here.’
I nodded. “Okay. Gimme a minute.’
I turned the flash on myself. How hard to believe that transforming had depended on a bright full moon till only ten years ago! Then Wiener showed that the process was simply one of polarized light of the right wavelengths, triggering the pineal gland, and the Polaroid Corporation made another million dollars or so from its WereWish Lens. It’s not easy to keep up with this fearful and wonderful age we live in, but I wouldn’t trade.
The usual rippling, twisting sensations, the brief drunken dizziness and half‑ecstatic pain, went through me. Atoms reshuffled into whole new molecules, nerves grew some endings and lost others bone was briefly fluid and muscles like stretched rubber. Then I stabilized, shook myself, stuck my tail out the flap of the skin‑tight pants, and nuzzled Virginia’s hand.
She stroked my neck, behind the helmet. “Good boy,” she whispered. “Go get ’em.”
I turned and faded into the brush.
A lot of writers have tried to describe how it feels to be were, and every one of them has failed, because human language doesn’t have the words. My vision was no longer acute, the stars were blurred above me and the world took on a colorless flatness. But I heard with a clarity that made the night almost a roar, way into the supersonic; and a universe of smells roiled in my nostrils, wet grass and teeming dirt, the hot sweet little odor of a scampering field mouse, the clean tang of oil and guns, a faint harshness of smoke‑Poor stupefied humanity, half‑dead to such earthy glories!
The psychological part is the hardest to convey. I was a wolf, with a wolf’s nerves and glands and instincts, a wolfs sharp but limited intelligence. I had a man’s memories and a man’s purposes, but they were unreal, dreamlike. I must make an effort of trained will to hold to them and not go hallooing off after the nearest jackrabbit. No wonder weres had a bad name in the old days, before they themselves understood the mental changes involved and got the right habits drilled into them from babyhood.
I weigh a hundred and eighty pounds, and the conservation of mass holds good like any other law of nature, so I was a pretty big wolf. But it was easy to flow through the bushes and meadows and gullies, another drifting shadow. I was almost inside the town when I caught a near smell of man.
I flattened, the gray fur bristling along my spine, and waited. The sentry came by. He was a tall bearded fellow with gold earrings that glimmered wanly under the stars. The turban wrapped around his helmet bulked monstrous against the Milky Way.
I let him go and followed his path until I saw the next one. They were placed around Trollburg, each pacing a hundred‑yard arc and meeting his opposite number at either end of it. No simple task to?
Something murmured in my ears. I crouched. One of their aircraft ghosted overhead. I saw two men and a couple of machine guns squatting on top of the carpet. It circled low and lazily, above the ring of sentries. Trollburg was well guarded’
Somehow, Virginia and I had to get through that picket. I wished the transformation had left me with I full human reasoning powers. My wolf‑impulse was simply to jump on the nearest man, but that would bring the whole garrison down on my hairy ears.
Wait‑maybe that was what was needed!