Midnight

down on the other side of the cadaver.
    While another avalanche of thunder rumbled down the night sky, the dead man stared at the bedroom ceiling with eyes that were too human for the rest of his twisted countenance.
    "You going to tell me that somewhere along the way we evolved from dogs, wolves?" Watkins asked.
    Shaddack did not reply.
    Watkins pressed the issue. "You going to tell me that we've got dog genes in us that we can tap when we want to transform ourselves? Am I supposed to believe God took a rib from some prehistoric Lassie and made man from it before he took man's rib to make a woman?"
    Curiously Shaddack touched one of Mike Peyser's hands, which was designed for killing as surely as was a soldier's bayonet. It felt like flesh, just cooler than that of a living man.
    "This can't be explained biologically," Watkins said, glaring at Shaddack across the corpse. "This wolf form isn't something Peyser could dredge up from racial memory stored in his genes. So how could he change like this? It's not just your biochips at work here. It's something else … something stranger."
    Shaddack nodded. "Yes." An explanation had occurred to him, and he was excited by it. "Something a great deal stranger … but perhaps I understand it."
    "So tell me. I'd like to understand it. Damned if I wouldn't. I'd like to understand it real well. Before it happens to me."
    "There's a theory that form is a function of consciousness."
    "Huh?"
    "It holds that we are what we think we are. I'm not talking pop psychology here, that you can be what you want to be if you'll only like yourself, nothing of that sort. I mean physically , we may have the potential to be whatever we think we are, to override the morphic stasis dictated by our genetic heritage."
    "Gobbledegook," Watkins said impatiently.
    Shaddack stood. He put his hands in his pockets again. "Let me put it this way The theory says that consciousness is the greatest power in the universe, that it can bend the physical world to its desire."
    "Mind over matter."
    "Right."
    "Like some talk-show psychic bending a spoon or stopping a watch, " Watkins said.
    "Those people are usually fakes, I suspect. But, yes, maybe that power is really in us. We just don't know how to tap it because for millions of years we've allowed the physical world to dominate us. By habit, by stasis, and by preference for order over chaos, we remain at the mercy of the physical world. But what we're talking about here," he said, pointing to Sholnick and Peyser, "is a lot more complex and exciting than bending a spoon with the mind. Peyser felt the urge to regress, for reasons I don't understand, perhaps for the sheer thrill of it—"
    "For the thrill." Watkins's voice lowered, became quiet, almost hushed, and was filled with such intense fear and mental anguish that it deepened Shaddack's chill. "Animal power is thrilling. Animal need. You feel animal hunger, animal lust, bloodthirst—and you're drawn toward that because it seems so … so simple and powerful, so natural. It's freedom."
    "Freedom?"
    "Freedom from responsibility, from worry, from the pressure of the civilized world, from having to think too much. The temptation to regress is tremendously powerful because you feel life will be so much easier and exciting then," Watkins said, evidently speaking about what he had felt when drawn toward an altered state. "When you become a beast, life is all sensation, just pain and pleasure, with no need to intellectualize anything. That's part of it, anyway."
    Shaddack was silent, unsettled by the passion with which Watkins—not ordinarily an expressive man—had spoken of the urge to regress.
    Another detonation rocked the sky, more powerful than any before it. The first hard crack of thunder reverberated in the bedroom windows.
    Mind racing, Shaddack said, "Anyway, the important thing is that when Peyser felt this urge to become a beast, a hunter, he didn't regress along the human genetic line. Evidently, in his opinion, a wolf is the greatest of all hunters, the most desirable form for a predatory beast, so he willed himself to become wolflike."
    "Just like that," Watkins said skeptically.
    "Yes, just like that. Mind over matter. The metamorphosis is mostly a mental process. Oh, certainly, there are physical changes. But we might not be talking complete alteration of matter … only of biological structures. The basic nucleotides remain the same, but the sequence in which they're read changes drastically.