Free The Werewolf Principle by Clifford D. Simak

assistance.
    DR. LUKAS: Yes, I did.
    SENATOR STONE: Could a considerable part of that assistance have come from Senator Horton?
    SENATOR HORTON: Since the question concerns me, I’ll answer if Dr. Lukas will consent. I am quite happy to admit that I did lend him some assistance.
    SENATOR STONE: All right, that’s all I wanted. Just so it’s on the record.
    SENATOR HORTON: Dr. Lukas, if you’ll please continue.
    DR. LUKAS: The records showed that two hundred and twenty one years ago—2266, to be exact—two synthetic beings had been made. They were in the shape of humans and they had human minds, but they were constructed for a very special purpose. They were to be used in initial contacts with life on other planets, to be carried aboard exploratory and survey ships and used to gather data on the dominant life on whatever new planets might be found.
    SENATOR HORTON: Now, Dr. Lukas, without going into details at the present moment, can you tell us exactly how it was planned they were to do this sort of job?
    DR. LUKAS: I’m not sure I can make myself entirely clear, but I’ll try. These synthetic humans were highly adaptable. You might have described them, for want of a better term, as plastic. The concept of open-endedness was employed—it couldn’t have been developed earlier than ten years or so before, and it is unusual, to say the least, to find a concept as intricate as this bent to practical purpose in such a length of time. All the basic components of the constructed human bodies involved open-endedness—completed, you understand, and yet, in a sense, essentially incomplete. The amino acids …
    SENATOR HORTON: Perhaps, for the moment, you will only tell us what these bodies were intended to do, without going into the principles involved.
    DR. LUKAS: You mean simply how they were intended to function?
    SENATOR HORTON: If you will, please.
    DR. LUKAS: The idea was that once an exploratory ship landed on a planet one of the dominant species of that planet would be captured and be scanned. You are familiar, I think, with the biological scanning process. The structure, the chemistry, the metabolic processes—all the data which made the creature what it was—would be determined. This data would be stored in a memory core. Once this was done, the data would be transmitted to the simulated human which, because of the uniqueness of its biological open-endedness, would change into an exact copy of the creature which was described by the data in the tapes. This would not have been a slow process. Any delay would have been fatal. It must have been an uncanny thing to watch—a human being almost instantaneously changing into an alien creature.
    SENATOR HORTON: You say the human would have changed into the alien creature. Does that mean in every respect—mental, intellectual, if the term implies, as well as …
    DR. LUKAS: The human would, in fact, become the creature. Not one of the creatures, you understand, but an exact copy of the creature from which it had been patterned. It would have that creature’s memories and its mind. It would be able to pick up immediately where the other creature had left off. Released from the ship, it could seek out that creature’s fellows and rejoin them and could carry out its investigations …
    SENATOR HORTON: You mean it still would retain the human mind as well?
    DR. LUKAS: Well, that would be hard to say. The human mentality and memory and identity and all the rest of it would still be there, although perhaps deeply sublimated. It would exist as a subconscious that could be triggered to the surface. A compulsion would be planted for the human-turned-creature to return to the ship after a stated interval of time and once returned, it would be induced to revert to its human form. Once back in human form, it would be able to recall the memories of its existence as an alien creature and data which otherwise might have been