attention to them. One thing was certain: he was going to be good from now on. Gloria or no Gloria, heartbreak or no heartbreak, drowning your sorrows wasn’t good enough. If you felt like this and could imagine you’d been a werewolf—
But why should he have imagined it in such detail? So many fragmentary memories seemed to come back as he dressed. Going up Strawberry Canyon with the fringed beard, finding a desolate and isolated spot for magic, learning the words—
Hell, he could even remember the words. The word that changed you and the one that changed you back.
Had he made up those words, too, in his drunken imaginings? And had he made up what he could only barely recall—the wonderful, magical freedom of changing, the single, sharp pang of alteration and then the boundless happiness of being lithe and fleet and free?
He surveyed himself in the mirror. Save for the unwonted wrinkles in his conservative single-breasted gray suit, he looked exactly what he was: a quiet academician; a little better built, a little more impulsive, a little more romantic than most, perhaps, but still just that—Professor Wolf.
The rest was nonsense. But there was, that impulsive side of him suggested, only one way of proving the fact. And that was to say The Word.
“All right,” said Wolfe Wolf to his reflection. “I’ll show you.” And he said it.
The pang was sharper and stronger than he’d remembered.
Alcohol numbs you to pain. It tore him for a moment with an anguish like the descriptions of childbirth. Then it was gone, and he flexed his limbs in happy amazement. But he was not a lithe, fleet, free beast. He was a helplessly trapped wolf, irrevocably entangled in a conservative single-breasted gray suit.
He tried to rise and walk, but the long sleeves and legs tripped him over flat on his muzzle. He kicked with his paws, trying to tear his way out, and then stopped. Werewolf or no werewolf, he was likewise still Professor Wolf, and this suit had cost thirty-five dollars. There must be some cheaper way of securing freedom than tearing the suit to shreds.
He used several good, round Low German expletives. This was a complication that wasn’t in any of the werewolf legends he’d ever read. There, people just—boom!—became wolves or—bang!—became men again. When they were men, they wore clothes; when they were wolves, they wore fur. Just like Hyperman becoming Bark Lent again on top of the Empire State Building and finding his street clothes right there. Most misleading. He began to remember now how Ozymandias the Great had made him strip before teaching him the words—
The words! That was it. All he had to do was say the word that changed you back—Absarka!—and he’d be a man again, comfortably fitted inside his suit. Then he could strip and play what games he wished. You see? Reason solves all. “Absarka!” he said.
Or thought he said. He went through all the proper mental processes for saying Absarka! but all that came out of his muzzle was a sort of clicking whine. And he was still a conservatively dressed and helpless wolf.
This was worse than the clothes problem. If he could be released only by saying Absarka! and if, being a wolf, he could say nothing, why, there he was. Indefinitely. He could go find Ozzy and ask—but how could a wolf wrapped up in a gray suit get safely out of a hotel and set out hunting for an unknown address?
He was trapped. He was lost. He was—“Absarka!”
Professor Wolfe Wolf stood up in his grievously rumpled gray suit and beamed on the beard-fringed face of Ozymandias the Great.
“You see, colleague,” the little magician explained, “I figured you’d want to try it again as soon as you got up, and I knew darned well you’d have your troubles. Thought I’d come over and straighten things out for you.”
Wolf lit a cigarette in silence and handed the pack to Ozymandias. “When you came in just now,” he said at last, “what did you see?”
“You as a wolf.”
“Then it really—I actually—”
“Sure. You’re a full-fledged werewolf, all right.”
Wolf sat down on the rumpled bed. “I guess,” he ventured slowly, “I’ve got to believe it. And if I believe that—but it means I’ve got to believe everything I’ve always scorned. I’ve got to believe in gods and devils and hells and—”
“You needn’t be so pluralistic. But there is a God.” Ozymandias said this as calmly and convincingly as he had stated last night that there were