Free The Werewolf Principle by Clifford D. Simak Page B

hearings …”
    She nodded. “They began this morning.”
    â€œYou’ll be attending some of them, I suppose.”
    â€œI suppose,” she said. “But it’s a painful thing. It’s hard to see my father take the beating he will take. I admire him, of course, for standing on the thing that he believes, but I could wish that, occasionally, he might plop for something that carried public approval. But he almost never does. He’s always on the wrong side, so far as the public is concerned. And this one is the one that can really hurt him.”
    â€œYou mean this business of unanimity. I was reading something about it just the other day. It seems to me a foolish setup.”
    â€œPerhaps it is,” she said, “but that’s the way it is. It is carrying the rule of the majority to unnecessary limits. It will half kill the senator if he has to retire from public life. It has been meat and bread to him for all the years he’s lived.”
    â€œI liked your father very much,” said Blake. “There’s something natural about him, something that corresponds to the house you live in.”
    â€œYou mean old-fashioned.”
    â€œWell, maybe. Although that’s not it exactly. There is something solid about the man, and yet he has an enthusiasm and an apparent dedication.…”
    â€œOh, yes,” she said. “He has dedication. And you must admire him for it and I think that mostly people do. But he manages somehow or other to irritate a lot of people by showing them they’re wrong.”
    Blake laughed. “I don’t know of a better way to irritate the people.”
    â€œPerhaps,” she said. “But how about yourself?”
    â€œI’m getting along quite well,” he said. “There really is no reason why I should be here. Before you came I was sitting here, listening to a tree ring a lot of bells. I couldn’t quite believe my senses. A man across the street brought one out of the house and set it by a pool and it began to ring.
    She leaned forward to stare across the street. The tree emitted a rippling peal of bonging bells.
    â€œA monastery tree,” she said. “There are not too many of them. A few of them are imported from a planet—one quite far out, I can’t recall which one.”
    â€œContinually,” said Blake, “I’m running up against these things that are entirely new to me. Things that are outside my entire circle of experience. Just the other day I met a Brownie.”
    She stared at him, delighted. “A Brownie! You mean you really did?”
    He nodded. “It ate all my lunch,” he said.
    â€œOh, how nice for you! Most people never see one.”
    â€œI’d never heard of them,” he said. “I thought that I was having another hallucination.”
    â€œLike the time you came to our house.”
    â€œThat’s right. I still don’t know what happened that night. There is no explaining it.”
    â€œThe doctors …”
    â€œThe doctors don’t seem to be much help. They are as puzzled as I am. I think, perhaps, the Brownie might have come the closest to a guess.”
    â€œThe Brownie? What would he have to do with it?”
    â€œHe asked me how many there were of me. He said he felt quite sure, when he first saw me, that there was more than one of me. Two men in one, three men in one … I wouldn’t know how many. More than one, he said.”
    â€œMr. Blake,” she said, “I think that every man is more than just one man. He has many sides to him.”
    He shook his head. “That’s not what the Brownie meant. I am sure it wasn’t. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it and I’m sure he wasn’t talking about different temperaments.”
    â€œYou’ve told this to your doctor?”
    â€œWell, no, I guess I haven’t. The poor guy has enough to worry him. This would be