A werewolf among us

begun to enjoy the scenery again—until they came within sight of the five-level white mansion. Then he realized that, though he had ruled out the possibility of a werewolf to his own satisfaction, he had yet to explain the discovery of wolf hairs on two of the three corpses.
     

EIGHT:
Encounter with a Wolf
     
    Chief Inspector Rainy, whom St. Cyr called that same day, confirmed Salardi's means of arrival on Darma and the reasons he claimed for remaining there. Yes, they had checked with Inner Galaxy police. No, they had not turned up anything of interest Salardi was printed, as were all citizens, but he had no warrants outstanding against him. Similar calls to fedgov agencies produced the same results. No, the Darmanian police had not discounted the rumors altogether. It was still possible that Salardi was on the run from an industrial police force. The largest companies maintained their own protection systems—sometimes their own armies—and, when they employed a million or more people, often had their own sets of laws. Salardi could have been employed by a gargantuan industry, could have broken their plant laws somehow, and could be on the run from a private police force. That was next to impossible to check out, considering the hundreds of industrial worlds and the thousands of companies with their own laws and police. Besides, it was out of Rainy's jurisdiction. St. Cyr promised to call in a couple of days and hung up.
    Two more days passed in which he did not achieve anything—except a better understanding of Tina Alderban, whom he found himself spending too much time with. She seemed, with every moment that he was around her, increasingly beautiful, stirring needs in him that he had ignored for quite a long while. At night, when nightmares came, she was not in them—but when he woke, it somehow seemed to him that she was nevertheless connected to them in some fashion. He knew that the stalker in his dream was not Tina, but some connection…
    On the evening of the second day after he and Dane had returned from the gypsy camp, he was in Tina's studio looking over a new piece of work that she had almost finished. As they stood side-by-side before the canvas, he thought that he detected an attitude of longing in her that mirrored or at least resembled his own. He turned away from the painting—which she had evidenced disgust with—and took her in his arms, pulled her against him, kissed her. When she responded, her tongue moving between his lips, he let his hands slip slowly down her back until they cupped the full roundness of her buttocks. They stood that way for a long while, going no further, requiring nothing more than that. For
St. Cyr it was a revelation, for he reacted to the girl in far more than a physcial way. He wanted to protect her, to hold her against him and share everything that was to come in the future. He was startled by
the ferocity of his commitment
(Avoid emotional ties.)
and then, subsequently, hurt when she stepped away from him and adjusted her blouse, which had slipped out of her shorts.
    She said, "You still think I can care for someone, form a normal human relationship?"
    "More than ever."
    She looked weary. "Then it isn't you. I thought it might be you, but we can't ever be that close."
    His mouth was dry when he said, "What? Why not?"
    "You're—cold," she said. "Like all the rest of us in this house. You hold back; you don't give yourself. To care, I've got to have someone who can go more than halfway, who can teach me."
    "I can," he insisted.
    "No. You're too logical, too reserved. It's that bio-computer, I suppose, that makes you that way."
    "I can take it off."
    "Are you any different when you do?"
    "Of course."
    "Perhaps you are, subtly," she said, "But I think that the basic coldness remains."
    "I'm as emotional as any other man, outside of my cyberdetective role." It had been a long time since anyone had made him feel defensive.
    "When you aren't wearing that shell?"
    "Yes," he said.
    "How often do you wear it?"
    "Only when I'm working."
    "How often are you on a case?"
    "Oh—on the average, three weeks a month or so."
    "And you never wear it between assignments?"
    "Hardly ever."
    "Hardly ever? What does that mean? Sometimes you wear it when you aren't working?"
    He remembered the way the customs men had looked at him, their certainty that he depended on the bio-computer shell for his very existence. He did not want to see the same expression on her face. Yet he