his deed. He rose from his cot, removed the coarse brown robe that normally he wore to bed as well as in his daily rounds so that his long-unwashed body stood naked. There must be no chance for tell-tale blood to stain his clothes, when his fierce talons and wolfish teeth tore and rended at human flesh.
Carrying his precious piece of scroll, he departed from his cell and groped his way down the stone corridor until the light improved enough for him to see his way. Luckily, a patch of moonlight illuminated the very space in front of the accursed Brother Lorenzo’s door. What fortune!
Brother Ambrose halted and stared at the door as though his eyes could see through it, at the sleeping form within. He sucked in a deep breath. His palms were sweaty; his heartbeat rapid. For a moment, he was almost ready to back out.
Then suddenly, the memory of all the hundreds of grudges he bore against Lorenzo surged through him. Hatred built up a massive reservoir, that broke out over his crumbling conscience and flooded his body with anger and wild resentment. His teeth gritted. What had he been thinking of—to retreat now, with revenge so nearly at hand!
He rapped. A moment later, he heard a creaking sound like Brother Lorenzo slipping out of bed.
Trembling, he lifted the phial of bat’s blood, drank it down. It tasted salty. He chewed on the wolfbane powder until it mixed with the saliva of his mouth, then he swallowed. Holding the ancient scroll-segment before him, he began to repeat the badly-written incantation: Ut fiat homo lupinus, pulvis arnicae facenda est et dum . . . .
A thousand jolts assailed his body, as if he had been struck by all the lightnings in heaven. Then, came a rushing paralysis, a distortion of time and space, a dread feeling of disintegration and death . . .
The door to Brother Lorenzo’s cell began to recede, swelling in volume as it did. The ceiling of the corridor likewise retreated at ever-increasing pace. Staring down at his own dwindling frame, Ambrose saw that the slug-white flesh was now covered with thick fur, even as the limbs were gnarling—
Then, suddenly the door opened. Brother Lorenzo stepped out, his kindly pious face wrinkled with sleep but otherwise showing no irritation or displeasure at being summoned from his rest. At first, the monk seemed not to have noticed Ambrose’s form, for he gazed above him and away.
Ambrose kept on shrinking.
Finally, Brother Lorenzo’s gaze chanced to glance downward. But still, his features mirrored no recognition or alarm; only puzzlement.
Now, thought Ambrose, now is the time for me to snarl.
But no snarl, nor semblance of a snarl, emerged from his lips. Rather, his lips had elongated into long sucking proboscises, while already a third pair of limbs had commenced growing from his furred-over abdomen.
This was not a wolf-like form, he was assuming, Ambrose suddenly realized in terror. But if it was not lupine, what was it? Had he misread the incantation? Had he mispronounced a simple word?
The weird crawling form into which he had metamorphosed was now hardly an inch higher than the surface of the floor. But Ambrose’s eyes had bulged into great many-faceted orbs capable of seeing objects with greater clarity than ever. Inches away from him, he made out the segment of scroll he had discarded after reading aloud from it. Crawling over to it, he perused the beginning words of the spell.
And it suddenly dawned on him (while what passed for a heart and ventricles within his pulpy form began simulating horror) that the ancient monk of centuries ago who had first copied the incantation must have been as careless of spelling as he. For the charm obviously did not convert its user into a werewolf, but rather some other animal . . .
Dredging up all the miserable Latin he knew, Ambrose fished for some word similar to lupinus.
And suddenly he had it!
Pulicus! That was the word the sloppy copyist of yesteryear had wrongly transcribed.
From the word pulex, meaning “flea.”
Not how to become a wolf-like man, but a flea-like man—that was what the formula had described.
Ambrose, the flea, braced himself. Gathering his powerful legs under him, he leaped in soaring flight to land upon the object of hatred—the giant Brother Lorenzo, who towered so high above him.
But the gentle and considerate Brother Lorenzo, who probably would not have hurt hair nor hide of any other creature on Earth—even he knew full well that there is only one thing you can do to discourage a flea.
Swat!
The Hoofer
by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A wayfarer’s return from a far country to his wife and family may be a shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed by Time’s relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.
A space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?
They all knew he was a spacer because of the white goggle marks on his sun-scorched face, and so they tolerated him and helped him. They even made allowances for him when he staggered and fell in the aisle of the bus while pursuing the harassed little housewife from seat to seat and cajoling her to sit and talk with him.
Having fallen, he decided to sleep in the aisle. Two men helped him to the back of the bus, dumped him on the rear seat, and tucked his gin bottle safely out of sight. After all, he had not seen Earth for nine months, and judging by the crusted matter about his eyelids, he couldn’t have seen it too well now, even if he had been sober. Glare-blindness, gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were excuses for a lot of things, when a man was just back from Big Bottomless. And who could blame a man for acting strangely?
Minutes later, he was back up the aisle and swaying giddily over the little housewife. “How!” he said. “Me Chief Broken Wing. You wanta Indian wrestle?”
The girl, who sat nervously staring at him, smiled wanly, and shook her head.
“Quiet li’l pigeon, aren’tcha?” he burbled affectionately, crashing into the seat beside her.
The two men slid out of their seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder. “Come on, Broken Wing, let’s go back to bed.”
“My name’s Hogey,” he said. “Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding about being a Indian.”
“Yeah. Come on, let’s go have a drink.” They got him on his feet, and led him stumbling back down the aisle.
“My ma was half Cherokee, see? That’s how come I said it. You wanta hear a war whoop? Real stuff.”
“Never mind.”
He cupped his hands to his mouth and favored them with a blood-curdling proof of his ancestry, while the female passengers stirred restlessly and hunched in their seats. The driver stopped the bus and went back to warn him against any further display.
