Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1960s

The trundler was switched to transmission, and Balank wondered with whom it was in touch. With Headquarters, possibly, asking for fresh orders, sending in their report.

‘I’m taking an hour with my fresher,’ he said. ‘Okay by you?’

‘Go ahead. I shall stand guard,’ the trundler’s speech circuit said.

Balank went back inside, sat down at the table, and clipped the fresher across his forehead. He fell instantly into unconsciousness, an unconsciousness that force-fed him enough sleep and dream to refresh him for the next seventy-two hours. At the end of the timed hour, he awoke, annoyingly aware that there had been confusion in his skull.

Before he had lifted his head from the table, the thought came: we never saw any human beings in that chilly future.

He sat up straight. Of course, it had been an accidental omission from a brief programme. Humans were not so important as the machines, and that would apply even more in the distant time. But none of the news flashes had shown humans, not even in the immense cities. That was absurd; there would be lots of human beings. The machines had covenanted, at the time of the historic Emancipation, that they would always protect the human race.

Well, Balank told himself, he was talking nonsense. The subversive comments Cyfal had uttered had put a load of mischief into his head. Instinctively, he glanced over at the timber officer.

Cyfal was dead in his bunk. He lay contorted with his head lolling over the side of the mattress, his throat torn out. Blood still welled up from the wound, dripping very slowly from one shoulder onto the floor.

Forcing himself to do it, Balank went over to him. In one of Cyfal’s hands, a piece of grey fur was gripped.

The werewolf had called! Balank gripped his throat in terror. He had evidently roused in time to save his own life, and the creature had fled.

He stood for a long time staring down in pity and horror at the dead man, before prising the piece of fur from his grasp. He examined it with distaste. It was softer than he had imagined wolf fur to be. He turned the hairs over in his palm. A piece of skin had torn away with the hair. He looked at it more closely.

A letter was printed on the skin.

It was faint, but he definitely picked out an ‘S’ to one edge of the skin. No, it must be a bruise, a stain, anything but a printed letter. That would mean that this was synthetic, and had been left as a fragment of evidence to mislead Balank…

He ran over to the door, grabbing up the laser gun as he went, and dashed outside. The moon was high now. He saw the trundler moving across the clearing toward him.

‘Where have you been?’ he called.

‘Patrolling. I heard something among the trees and got a glimpse of a large grey wolf, but was not able to destroy it. Why are you frightened? I am registering surplus adrenalin in your veins.’

‘Come in and look. Something killed the timber man.’

He stood aside as the machine entered the hut and extended a couple of rods above the body on the bunk. As he watched, Balank pushed the piece of fur down into his pocket.

‘Cyfal is dead. His throat has been ripped out. It is the work of a large animal. Balank, if you are rested, we must now pursue the werewolf Gondalug, identity number YB5921 stroke AS25061. He committed this crime.’

They went outside. Balank found himself trembling. He said, ‘Shouldn’t we bury the poor fellow?’

‘If necessary, we can return by daylight.’

Argument was impossible with trundlers. This one was already off, and Balank was forced to follow.

They moved downhill toward the River Pracha. The difficulty of the descent soon drove everything else from Balank’s mind. They had followed Gondalug this far, and it seemed unlikely he would go much farther. Beyond here lay gaunt bleak uplands, lacking cover. In this broken tumbling valley, Gondalug would go to earth, hoping to hide from them. But their instruments would track him down, and then he could be destroyed. With good luck, he would lead them to caves where they would find and exterminate other men and women and maybe children who bore the deadly lycanthropic gene and refused to live in cities.

It took them two hours to get down to the lower part of the valley. Great slabs of the hill had fallen away, and now stood apart from their parent body, forming cubic hills in their own right, with great sandy cliffs towering up vertically, crowned with unruly foliage. The Pracha itself frequently disappeared down narrow crevices, and the whole area was broken with caves and fissures in the rock. It was ideal country in which to hide.

‘I must rest for a moment,’ Balank gasped. The trundler came immediately to a halt. It moved over any terrain, putting out short legs to help itself when tracks and wheels failed.

They stood together, ill-assorted in the pale night, surrounded by the noise of the little river as it battled over its rocky bed.

‘You’re sending again, aren’t you? Whom to?’

The machine asked, ‘Why did you conceal the piece of wolf fur you found in the timber officer’s hand?’

Balank was running at once, diving for cover behind the nearest slab of rock. Sprawling in the dirt, he saw a beam of heat sizzle above him and slewed himself round the corner. The Pracha ran along here in a steep-sided crevasse. With fear lending him strength, Balank took a run and cleared the crevasse in a mighty jump, and fell among the shadows on the far side of the gulf. He crawled behind a great chunk of rock, the flat top of which was several feet above his head, crowned with a sagging pine tree.

The trundler called to him from the other side of the river.

‘Balank, Balank, you have gone wrong in your head!’

Staying firmly behind the rock, he shouted back, ‘Go home, trundler! You’ll never find me here!’

‘Why did you conceal the piece of wolf fur from the timber officer’s hand?’

‘How did you know about the fur unless you put it there? You killed Cyfal because he knew things about machines I did not, didn’t you? You wanted me to believe the werewolf did it, didn’t you? The machines are gradually killing off the humans, aren’t they? There are no such things as werewolves, are there?’

‘You are mistaken, Balank. There are werewolves, all right. Because man would never really believe they existed, they have survived. But we believe they exist, and to us they are a greater menace than mankind can be now. So surrender and come back to me. We will continue looking for Gondalug.’

He did not answer. He crouched and listened to the machine growling on the other side of the river.

Crouching on the top of the rock above Balank’s head was a sinewy man with a flat skull. He took more than human advantage of every shade of cover as he drank in the scene below, his brain running through the possibilities of the situation as efficiently as his legs could take him through wild grass. He waited without stirring, and his face was grey and grave and alert.

The machine came to a decision. Getting no reply from the man, it came gingerly round the rock and approached the edge of the crevasse through which the river ran. Experimentally, it sent a blast of heat across to the opposite cliff, followed by a brief hail of armoured pellets.

‘Balank?’ it called.

Balank did not reply, but the trundler was convinced it had not killed the man. It had somehow to get across the brink Balank had jumped. It considered radioing for aid, but the nearest city, Zagrad, was a great distance away.

It stretched out its legs, extending them as far as possible. Its clawed feet could just reach the other side, but there the edge crumbled slightly and would not support its full weight. It shuffled slowly along the crevasse, seeking out the ideal place.