Wolfbane by Frederick Pohl

Author:Frederick Pohl [Pohl, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-08-30T05:15:50.629000+00:00

11

Haendl was on the ragged edge of a nervous breakdown. It was something new in his life.

It was full hot summer, and the hidden colony of Wolves in Princeton should have been full of energy and life. The crops were growing on all the fields nearby; the drained storehouses were being replenished. The aircraft that had been so painfully rebuilt and fitted for the assault on Mount Everest were standing by, ready to be manned and to take off.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, was going right.

It looked as though there would be no expedition to Everest. Four times now Haendl had gathered his forces and been all ready. Four times a key man of the expedition had-- vanished.

Wolves didn't vanish!

And yet more than a score of them had.

First Tropile--then Innison--then two dozen more, by ones and twos; no one was immune. Take Innison, for example. There was a man who was Wolf through and through. He was a doer, not a thinker; his skills were the skills of an artisan, a tinkerer, a jackleg mechanic. How could a man like that succumb to the pallid lure of meditation?

But undeniably he had. Translated. Gone!

It had reached a point where Haendl himself was red-eyed and fretful. He had set curious alarms for himself--had enlisted the help of others of the colony to avert the danger of Translation from himself. When he went to bed at night, a lieutenant sat next to his bed, watchfully alert lest Haendl, in that moment of reverie before sleep, fall into meditation--

and himself be Translated. There was no hour of the day when Haendl permitted himself to be alone; and his companions, or guards, were ordered to shake him awake, as violently as need be, at the first hint of an abstracted look in the eyes or a reflective cast of the features. As time went on, Haendl's self-imposed regime of constant alertness began to cost him heavily in lost rest and sleep. And the consequences of that were: More and more occasions when the bodyguards shook him awake; less and less rest.

He was very close to breakdown indeed.

On a hot, wet morning a few days after his useless expedition to see Citizen Germyn in Wheeling, Haendl ate a tasteless breakfast and, reeling with fatigue, set out on a tour of inspection of Princeton. Warm rain dripped from low clouds; but that was merely one more annoyance to Haendl. He hardly noticed it.

There were upwards of a thousand Wolves in the Community; and there were signs of worry on the face of every one of them. Haendl was not the only man in Princeton who had begun laying traps for himself as a result of the unprecedented disappearances; he was not the only one who was short of sleep. A community of a thousand is closeknit.

When one member in forty disappears, the morale of the whole community receives a shattering blow. To Haendl it was clear, looking into the faces of his compatriots, that not only was it

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