Barry Longyear - L.A. in L.A.

Lyle Bennet tried to hide his facial expression from Dr. Raeder by looking down at his notes. He needed a moment to think. Lyle had always envisioned himself as a future psychological explorer blazing new paths in the treatment of mental disorders. He had found himself, however, contemplating a master’s thesis comparing the performances of two breeds of lab rats running a slight modification of the Hauser Maze. After hearing a description of the project, his thesis advisor had suggested he look for something else. That’s what Lyle had thought even before the suggestion had been made, and that was what he was doing that morning in Dr. Raeder’s office. But Raeder had to be kidding.

Lyle looked up from his notes, stifled a giggle, and leveled his gaze at his thesis advisor. “Let me get this straight, Dr. Raeder. You’re telling me wolfmen are real? Silver bullets, full moons, bad hair days, and all that?”

Janos Raeder returned the gaze and didn’t change expression as he tapped the tip of a freshly sharpened pencil against his desk blotter. Abruptly he tossed down the pencil, leaned forward in his chair, and clasped his hands in front of him, his wrists on the edge of his desk. “No, that is not what I said. What I said was that you should check out a meeting of that new twelve step program.” He glanced at a sheet of paper on the desk. “Let’s see. This is the thirty-first, right? Friday?”

“That’s right.”

Dr. Raeder moved a finger down the list. “Here it is. There’s an L.A. meeting tonight on Alameda. I think you should at least go and check it out.”

Lyle’s eyebrows went up. “L.A.? Lycanthropics Anonymous? Werewolves, right?”

“Look, Lyle, you were the one who came to me for suggestions regarding a new thesis topic.”

“Yeah, but werewolves? Give me a break.”

Dr. Raeder slowly shook his head. “I don’t know, Lyle. Perhaps I made a mistake. This is the kind of subject that, properly handled, could make your career take off from a standing start. Your mind seems a little too shut down, though, to take on a subject as radical and controversial as this.”

Lyle held up his hands. “OK, look, I’m coming at this cold, Dr. Raeder. This is all new to me, as long as you ignore a bunch of bad Lon Chaney, Jr. movies that rotted out my mind years ago.” He lowered his hands to his lap and tried to hold his face expressionless. “Why not let me hear the whole thing and then I’ll decide ”

His advisor took a pained breath then continued. “First, Lyle, forget all about Lon Chaney, Jr., silver bullets, full moon freakouts, and Hollywood horrors. Lycanthropy is a very real, quite painful, condition. I’m not only referring to the well-known psychotic belief in being an animal. The variation of lycanthropy to which I refer also manifests itself in physical symptoms, such as measurable increases in body and facial hair, dentition, bone mass, musculature, and alterations in saliva and blood chemistry. Are you familiar with Kuchilan’s recent paper on hysteria?”

Lyle nodded. “Yes. Fanatics tapping into forces on the quantum level, miracle cures, religious freaks who go into a frenzy and begin squirting blood from their palms. But this—”

“This is the same sort of thing, Lyle,” interrupted his advisor. Dr. Raeder held up a finger, nodded, and said, “Hold on. There’s something I want you to see.”

He got up from his desk, went to an old wooden filing cabinet in the corner of his cluttered office, and opened the middle drawer. “It’s in here somewhere… here.” He pulled out a thick accordion file that had obviously seen a lot of wear. Almost reverently the doctor placed the file on his desk, opened it, and began thumbing through the contents. “Yes.” He pulled out a dog-eared eight-by-ten glossy print and handed it across the desk to Lyle. “Look at that.”

Lyle took the print and frowned as he examined it. It was a print of six different stages in the transformation of a man, in his early twenties, into something very much resembling a latter-day Hollywood wolfman. In all six stages the man was clad in sixtyish hippie garb: headband, peasant shirt, patched flares, and sandals. In each stage there was a definite increase in body and facial hair, an elongation of the upper and lower mandibles into a shape resembling a muzzle, an incredible enlargement of the canine teeth, and a tongue that would be the envy of any Doberman. The increase in upper body mass had been sufficient to split open the baggy shirt’s seams. On the final frame the enlarged hairy toes sticking out of the sandals each carried what looked to be a two-inch-long claw. Similar armaments graced the fingertips. Time and date signatures appeared on each of the frames. The date on all of the frames was 4 May 1967. The elapsed time indicated that the subject had made the trans formation from young adult to drooling beast in just under three minutes. Lyle raised an eyebrow and handed back the print. “Jack Nicholson did it better in Wolf. ”

Ignoring the comment, Raeder took the glossy and tapped it with his finger. “The subject’s name was Roger Westlake. He was a psych student at Pepperdine working on his master’s. This series of shots was taken under faculty supervised laboratory conditions just before he was committed to Pescadero.”

“ Was Roger Westlake?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You used the past tense, Doctor.”

“Oh.” Dr. Raeder nodded, his expression quite wooden. “He was reported dead in October of ’sixty-nine. The story was that he attacked some other patients and, in the process of subduing him, he was accidentally killed.” Raeder held out a photocopy of a newspaper clipping. The headline read: “Three killed, eleven mauled at Pescadero.”

Janos Raeder dropped the clipping back into the file. “Westlake’s body was cremated before anyone could get a look at it. The two patients and the guard who were killed, however, looked as through they had been savaged by timber wolves.” He looked up at nothing in particular. “They were all cremated, as well.” He faced Lyle. “It might be very interesting to find out what happened to all of the patients who survived. The belief among most lycanthropics is that a virus in the saliva is what transmits the disease.” Dr. Raeder tapped the glossy and said, “In any event, this is one of the most well documented modern cases of lycanthropic hysteria that exists.”

Lyle gestured at the photo with his hand. “Look at that increase in body mass, doctor. All that has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it? What’d he do, snack on an ox while they took the snapshots?”

Dr. Raeder looked up from the file and fixed Lyle with his eyes. “Here is a theory for you to consider: the quantum field is a Universe-wide matrix of energy and information. We are all parts of this matrix and you cannot alter any part of it without altering every other part in some manner. Changing or reinforcing a thought pattern is just such an alteration. The upshot of this is that if you believe strongly enough, your body will use every power available to it within the field to fulfill that belief. Energy convertible into mass can be drawn from the field. Are you familiar with the works of Deepak Chopra?”

“No.”

“In just one of his works, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, he shows how one’s intentions can affect the quantum field such that an individual can increase or even reverse aging. Imagine the physiological changes—”

“Is this the guy who was on Oprah Winfrey’ some time back? I’m supposed to take pop science seriously?”

“No. As a scientist, Lyle, I expect you to investigate first, and only then form your conclusions.”