azdak

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to aneuhaus, who put up with MONTHS of whinging about how this story didn't work, and finally took me in hand and told me exactly what did work and what didn't. Without her, it would never have been finished.


Rating : Gen

Summary: What makes you think you know who you are?



The Mind's Construction


You've got to start somewhere - I know, I know, just call me Cliché Connolly - but I have to admit it came as something of a surprise when my very first job, on my very first day as a newly-fledged UNCLE agent, involved playing Bad Cop at a Thrush interrogation. They certainly believe in thrusting you in at the deep end in this place. Not that Bad Cop is a particularly difficult role. You just have to look as if ten minutes alone with the suspect and a length of rubber hose is your idea of a wet dream, and frankly, with this particular suspect, it wasn't all that hard. No, the tricky part falls to Good Cop. He may look to outsiders as if he's just the fellow who offers cigarettes from time to time, and occasionally tells Bad Cop to lay off, but he's got to have a real nose for psychological fault lines, and know exactly when to be sympathetic and when to turn the screw. Carson was one of the best, so I was chuffed as hell when I got the assignment, and looked forward to an incomparable on-the-job learning experience.

I got it, and a whole lot more besides. I learned, for instance, that the most important quality in an interrogator is stamina. You can't let up, even for a second, because the moment you take the pressure off, it's like a holiday for the chap you're leaning on. Carson and I took it in turns to go off for a coffee break or a snack every once in a while, and Carson did a star turn of eating his sandwiches very slowly and with evident enjoyment in front of our starving Thrushie, but basically after twenty four hours I was feeling like there was nothing on earth I wanted more than to go to sleep. That's the point, of course. The interrogators may feel like death warmed up, but the interrogatee feels like death would be an improvement - to die, to sleep, and all that. Carson let me off to get four hours' kip at 2am, and when I came back, my suit once again sharp and my shirt freshly pressed, it was to find our man a shadow of his former self and apparently on the verge of spilling the beans.

Even ground down to his essence, he was a nasty piece of work. Raphael Jarry, 42 years old, and Victor Marton's right hand man. He had that well-groomed air that a lot of these continental fellows cultivate, the kind of toothbrush moustache that seems to be standard European issue, and a vaguely French accent, although there was a certain lack of clarity about his actual country of origin. He'd started off oozing self-confidence from every pore, in the happy certainty that UNCLE wouldn't be allowed to use the kind of techniques he'd doubtless applied himself as a serving member of Thrush, but a couple of hours in Carson's capable hands - aided, I like to think, by my own impression of a rabid Doberman - soon reduced that confidence to rubble. After that it was a matter of chipping away at him, levering open his defences, and catching him out in contradictions, until he'd given away so much that his fear of Thrush started working in our favour. And shortly after I got back from my snooze, he cracked.

It didn't happen the way I'd imagined it, though. He didn't break down and sob out the information we needed, or put his head in his hands and whisper secrets between his fingers. Instead, he suddenly sat up straight, squared his shoulders and said haughtily "Give me a cigarette, Monsieur Carson, and perhaps I will make you a deal."

Personally, I would have refused him the cigarettes, and let Bad Cop loose on him to push him over the edge, but this was where Carson's years of experience came into play. He pushed the packet silently across the table, never taking his eyes off Jarry as the fellow pulled out a cigarette and stuffed it into his mouth. In spite of the mask of arrogance, his hands were shaking so badly that he fumbled the transfer the first time and the cigarette fell on the floor, but Carson didn't make him pick it up. He let him take another one and then leant across the table and lit it for him. "Let's hear the offer," he said quietly.

Jarry looked at him with hooded eyes and took two quick drags on the cigarette, then exhaled so much smoke that most of his face was wreathed in it. From behind the safety of this temporary shield, he said something so unexpected that it took me a moment to parse it.

"Let me go and I'll give you an UNCLE agent."

Beside me, Carson went very still. Whatever he'd been expecting Jarry to say, it wasn't this. But his voice, when he spoke, was as flat as a pond's surface on a windless day. "Let a big man like you go, Jarry? That's asking a lot. I'm not sure it's worth it. Who exactly are we talking about?"

Jarry shrugged gallically. For all Carson's cool reaction, I think Jarry knew he'd hooked his fish, because all the little Frenchy mannerisms were returning, a sure indication that he'd regained some of his confidence.

"I can tell you that he disappeared in Rome three months ago. Work it out for yourself."

Carson blinked, shaken out of even his icy self-control. "Jesus," he said, and looked over at me. "Kuryakin!"

Jarry took another drag on his cigarette. "Valuable enough for you, yes? And I can assure you that he would be very grateful if you were to exchange my wretched carcase for his."

Carson got to his feet. "Don't let him out of your sight, Zack," he said, limping towards the door - you only notice his leg when he's trying to move fast - "I'm getting Mr Waverly down here."

I knew who Kuryakin was, of course. The whole of UNCLE had talked of nothing else for months. News of his disappearance had even made it as far as that remote and inhospitable island known as Survival School, and the entire organisation was still being rocked by the political afterquakes. Kuryakin, you see, wasn't just an agent - though by all accounts he'd been a damned good one - he was a symbol of the future of UNCLE, of a world order that could transcend NATO and the Warsaw Pact, of democracy and communism coming together in the service of humanity. When he vanished, that fragile cooperation was shaken to its roots. The CIA accused him in camera of having been a serving KGB officer, now recalled to the Motherland; and in return the Soviets openly accused the Americans of a politically-motivated assassination. It all got very nasty, and our boss, Mr Waverly, had to cope with the public humiliation of watching his dream crumble around his ears, in addition to the personal distress of having lost one of his best agents. Given the extreme sensitivity of the situation, the Old Man had had to declare Kuryakin missing in action, pending investigation, but we all knew what he privately believed, and the fact that every trail he attempted to follow up ended in sand did little to dispel that belief.

So you see, if Jarry was telling the truth - and I was reserving judgment on that - then I had been privileged to experience, on my very first day on the job, how Carson had extracted the information that could salvage UNCLE's reputation, and with it, its future. Talk about a learning experience.

The Old Man arrived so fast I was tempted to believe he had run all the way, except that he wasn't out of breath. He had someone with him, a dark-haired man with looks striking enough for a movie star, and a fastidious air that was so out of place in an interrogation cell that for a moment I thought he was an actor come to do research for a role. Then I realised who this must be - Napoleon Solo, head of Section Two. I'd been at New York HQ for two months learning the ropes before I graduated, but in all that time I'd never seen him, because he'd been constantly on the move trying to sort out the Kuryakin mess. He blew in from time to time, to confer with Waverly and McCone and the White House and all the other major players, but mostly he was out chasing leads. It was a freak of chance that he should happen to be in-house when the big break finally came, but as I was to learn, Lady Luck looked on Solo with as much favour as did every other female he ever came across.

After so many hours of interrogation, Jarry looked more like a corpse than a living human being. His eyes were dull, and his cheeks had sunken back into the hollows above his jaw, so that his nose, as Shakespeare so accurately observes, stood out "as sharp as a pen." But he must have had reserves of energy somewhere, for as soon as he saw his illustrious audience he perked up and developed a verbose theatricality. I'm amazed he managed to keep mum for so long under interrogation, because he turned out to be the kind of fellow who can talk the hind leg off a donkey.

"Mr Waverly. And Mr Solo! What a delightful surprise! To think that my humble self is worthy of a visit from the very flower of UNCLE! But of course, it is not on my account that you are here. It is your natural and proper concern for the fate of your colleague, n'est ce pas? And maybe also for your organisation. But whatever your motives, I am honoured by your visit, and since you have come all this way from the upper floor to see me, I will not waste your time with pleasantries. I will be candid with you, Mr Waverly. As soon as Marton learns I have sold out to UNCLE, I am a dead man. So my price for the information you seek is not only my freedom, but a new identity and lifelong protection from Thrush. Otherwise I have purchased only the freedom to die, which would be a bad bargain indeed. But I think it is worth the price, eh? Victor did not know what an impact it would have when he snatched your Mr Kuryakin. Killed in the line of duty is one thing, but defection, or assassination by your friends, that is something else. That leaves a bad taste in the mouth of the world. Preserving my miserable existence will cost you very little compared to that."

If I really had been a Doberman, I'd have been curled up on the floor fast asleep by that point, salivating gently as I dreamt of cracking the Frenchman's neck in my jaws. Waverly, by contrast, could not have been more brief and to the point.

"Very well, Mr Jarry, you shall have your new life, just as soon as we have Mr Kuryakin back. Where can we find him?"

"Romania. There is a - how do you call it? - a bedlam. Where they lock up the lunatics. Romania has many lunatics - too many isolated villages, too much in-breeding, it makes for bad blood. The government does not like to see these people on the streets, so they provide for them. To each according to his need, eh? This particular bedlam is in a castle. Many years ago it belonged to a noble family, very aristocratic, very wealthy, but bad blood ran in their veins too. The family dwindled away to nothing and the last Countess went crazy. Before she died she cursed the castle, and said that as long as it stood, only crazy people would live in it. And so now it is a lunatic house, because anyone who lives there who is not a lunatic soon goes mad."

"And Illya is in this lunatic asylum?"

"Yes, Mr Solo. You see, Victor has a poetic soul. It is not enough for him that the ends justify the means; the means themselves must have some artistic value. And he had taken an insuperable dislike to your Mr Kuryakin, over some doubtless trifling incident, that perhaps would not have bruised a less sensitive nature. So when he fell into his hands in Rome - quite by accident; we were not expecting that particular courier at all - he chose not to have him killed but to give him over instead to a living death."

"You seem to have quite a poetic turn of phrase yourself."

"Me? Oh no, I am a pragmatic man. You see, if Victor had opted for efficiency over revenge, I would not now be able to betray him. Of course, he did not tell anyone of his plans, but I have some clout with the Romanian authorities, thanks to certain small services I was able to render in the aftermath of the war, and it is always wise to keep an ear to the floor where Marton is concerned, so..." Here he shrugged again.

"Well, you had better get on the next flight to Romania, Mr Solo," said Waverly, clearly as fed up with this case of logorrhoea as I was. "And, gentlemen, this affair is to be treated in strictest confidence until we know the outcome - which means, Mr Connolly, that you'd better be the one to accompany Mr Solo. Mr Carson, be so kind as to get Mr Jarry a map of the region, so he can pinpoint the exact location for us."

And thus I found myself, on my third day of full employment at UNCLE, and after four hours of sleep, on a night flight to Romania as partner to the CEA of North America. They certainly believe in thrusting you in at the deep end in this place.

~~

B1 was scrambling as fast as he could through the forest in a downwards direction. He had no idea who he was or where he was going, but he knew vaguely what he was running from – metal restraints and needles and nightmares - and that was enough. The moon was fat and cold and so bright that he could just make out the path ahead of him, in spite of the shadows cast by the trees, but the terrain was rough and he was out of condition. His progress seemed painfully slow. From somewhere above him and to the left an animal howled. He shivered at the faint silvery sound, then reminded himself firmly that wolves wouldn't attack a human unless they were starving. Another howl, slightly louder than the first, mingled with the moonlight, and it struck him that these might not, in fact, be wolves, but tracker dogs. A stab of panic sent him running off down and to the west, where the trees were thicker, the shadows deeper, and the cliff edge invisible, until he found himself too close to thin air to stop his forward momentum.

~~

I had no illusions about my chosen line of work sometimes being the the stuff of nightmares - Survival School alone introduces everyone at some point to the compelling power of bad dreams - but I never expected them to take a form so determinedly grotesque. But then, I'd never been in a Romanian mental asylum before, let alone one in such a bizarre setting. It was as if some demented filmmaker, raised on a diet of Dracula, had brought the full armory of Todd AO, Dolby Surround and Smell-O-Vision to bear on the task of bringing the old Countess's visions to life. And he had good material to work with. Vlad the Impaler would have felt right at home in the building, although the gothic thrill took on a very different quality once you met the people who actually had to live within its stone walls. Even now, at the height of summer, the interior was chilly, and depressingly dark, thanks to the thick walls and heavy iron bars that obscured even the smallest windows. The general effect was less of a noble castle than a dungeon, an association furthered by the doors, which were of solid wood, several inches thick, their bolts the size of a man's wrist.

The director informed us that there had been a number of inmates admitted in April. Turnover in the asylum was high. He did not say where the departing inmates moved on to, and Solo didn't ask; the large graveyard visible from the director's office was answer enough. Of those admitted at the relevant time, four were male, but none of them, the director assured us, could be the man we were looking for. All four were hopeless cases and one, Vasile Kazaku, had had to be placed in solitary confinement for persistently violent behaviour. That set alarm bells ringing, of course, and I glanced over at Solo, but failed to catch his eye. I continued to fail to catch his eye as we set off into the bowels of the building, accompanied by a burly male nurse as a guide and, as the director anxiously explained, protector.

The smell was the worst thing. I associate hospitals with the omnipresent tang of disinfectant, but when the hospital is a damp building with no running water, occupied by people whose idea of personal hygiene is to wipe excrement from their hands onto the walls, who sleep two or three to a mattress, and wear the same filthy tunic day in, day out, then you get a different kind of pervasive smell. I suppose if you work there, your nose eventually shuts down. The unfortunate visitor, however, unaccustomed to being assaulted by a stench so vile, may find himself retching, as discreetly as possible, into his handkerchief.

Then there were the noises. Howls and sobbing echoed down the corridors, like a soundtrack composed by someone who had spent his early life locked in a cellar watching an endless loop of cheap horror movies. Close up, the inmates muttered and shuffled, or whimpered between their fingers at our approach. And they looked like ghosts, their heads universally shaven, their once white tunics - and what clown of a bureaucrat had chosen to order a consignment of white material? - hanging off their skinny bodies. I hid behind my handkerchief, feeling as if I were being given a guided tour around Belsen, ashamed of my own reluctance to look these people in the eyes, and hating myself for my impotence in the face of their suffering. Solo, for his part, looked as if it were sheer strength of will that was preventing him from being sick. To be honest, I found it almost impossible to tell the faces apart. They were all thin and drawn, their eyes sunken, and the shaven heads gave them a look of kinship, a ghastly family resemblance. But Solo studied them all, even those who shrank away, peeling their hands back from their faces and tipping their chins up to look them in the eye. And none of them, he declared, was Kuryakin, not even Kazaku, who I had been certain would turn out to be our man.

It should have been sickeningly disappointing, after all my visions of returning in triumph as the Man Who Saved UNCLE On His Fourth Day On The Job, but in truth it was a relief. The longer the search lasted, the more afraid I became of what we would find. Because, to be perfectly blunt, I didn't think I could survive two weeks in that place without losing my mind, let alone three months. And, to continue this rare moment of perfect honesty, I was frightened of looking into one of those faces and seeing someone who had once been an UNCLE agent. Someone who had once been like me. I don't think Solo felt the same, because the longer the search lasted, the more carefully he scrutinised each face, but it made no difference. Kuryakin was nowhere to be found.

By the time he had dismissed the very last inmate, I was willing to sell my soul for a fag. I don't usually smoke - shortness of breath isn't a survival characteristic in my profession - but cigarettes are useful for oiling the wheels of human interaction, so most agents carry them. Solo saw me patting my pockets and said "You go wait in the car. I want to have another word with the director."

There was something in his eyes that hadn't been there before - or maybe it was that something that had previously been there had gone. There's a line in Nietzsche, "When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you." Solo came out of that place with a touch of the abyss about him, though at the time I put it down to him having had his new-born hopes knocked brutally on the head. It's not so far-fetched a metaphor as it sounds, because he rang with a kind of steely grief, like the father of a murdered child.

"Right-ho!" I said, too grateful at the prospect of getting out into the fresh air to feel humiliated that he didn't want me with him. I trotted off to the car, and he trotted off towards the office, and I was just lighting up, when our guide came out of a side door, peering around him in the manner of a man who doesn't want to be seen. He sidled up to me, and the wave of asylum smell he brought with him made me want to heave, but I was careful not to let it show.

"Cigarette?" I offered, holding out the packet. He took it greedily and for a while we puffed side by side in amicable silence, until I lost patience and said "Any particular reason for seeking me out, or do you just like my face?"

The nurse looked at his feet, and mumbled something.

"Sorry, didn't catch that. Speak up and I'll let you have another ciggie."

The next utterance was somewhat clearer, but not much.

"Kazaku."

"What about him?"

"He is not the first Kazaku."

Damn Romanians and their cryptic utterances. It sounded important, but I had no idea what he meant.

"Could you try and sound a little less oracular? I mean, what do you mean?"

"When I went off duty he was another man. When I came back, he was this one."

Only by the grace of God did I avoid choking on my own cigarette smoke. Wait till Solo heard this!

"When did this happen?"

"Six days ago."

"What happened to the other man?"

"It was none of my business."

"Did you tell the director about it?"

"It was none of my business."

"Then why are you telling me?"

"I think maybe this is your business. This other man, when he first arrived, he thought he was a spy. Once he tried to kill a guard, that is why they put him in solitary. He was mad, of course. He talked of Napoleon and Alexander. But now you have come, I think maybe it was a different kind of madness from the rest. And then one day he was gone, and there was a new Kazaku."

He glanced around sharply, as if he had heard something, and then added hastily, "I think, if you find him, you will not forget that I told you this? Ingratitude is sharper than a serpent's tooth, and I am a poor man." And with that he slunk off back to the castle, while I fidgeted and paced, and ended up smoking two more cigarettes waiting for Solo to turn up so I could tell him my news.

~~

On my fifth day in Section Two, after my second night flight in 48 hours, I found myself sitting in on a discussion between the the Number Ones of Sections One and Two, North America. Unfortunately, I was still too dizzy with the speed of events, not to mention lack of sleep, to feel properly cocky about this glorious development in my career. In fact, if I'm honest, I had my work cut out just staying on the ball.

"My guess is Jarry was telling the truth as far as he knew," reported Solo, who looked fresh as a daisy, thanks to doing a much better job than me of sleeping on the plane. "It looks as if Illya was there for a couple of months. And then someone sprang him six days ago. I'd guess it was Marton, but it's possible that it was an unknown third party."

"Maybe he managed to get a message out?" I volunteered.

Waverly frowned. "But why not to us?" he said. "No, let's avoid multiplying the entities, Mr Connolly. The only people who knew his whereabouts were Jarry and Marton, and Jarry was unaware of his "escape". Which leaves Marton, and he wouldn't have ended the incarceration without very good reason, not when he could enjoy laughing up his sleeve at the trouble he had inadvertently caused us."

"You mean he wanted Mr Kuryakin for something, sir?" I was full of good ideas today.

"Some kind of experiment," suggested Solo. "It wouldn't be the first time Thrush has tried to use UNCLE agents as guinea pigs."

"It's possible. But Victor isn't much of a team player. For him to give up his charming little revenge like that, it would have to be something very special."

"Something very special?" I echoed, rather foolishly. "That sounds ominous."

"It does indeed. But bear with me. Perhaps we can draw some conclusions from this. It seems unlikely, does it not, that they would use someone like Mr Kuryakin for the the early stages of their experiments? For the stages when things might easily go wrong? In which case they must have done the initial testing on less remarkable subjects. People whose disappearance would attract no great attention. I wonder..." - into the microphone on his desk -" Miss Johnson, please get me the data on all unexplained human disappearances in, oh, the last two years."

"Yes, sir. Which region?"

"Might as well start with Europe,"- and to us - "By the way, Victor Marton has done a bunk. He cleared out of Paris as soon as they realised Jarry was missing. I have a team going through what we can salvage of his papers, but I doubt they'll find anything."

It took Sarah less than an hour to come up with the goods. There had been occasional vanishing acts all over Europe, of course, but the distribution was entirely random. In Austria, however, there had been a cluster of cases, increasing in frequency over the last six months, and centering on the Zillertal region in the Tyrol. It seemed to me the slimmest of leads, but five hours later we were on the plane to Innsbruck.

~~

“Oh, you're awake after all,” said a woman's voice, “and here was me thinking I'd have to leave the cows to themselves and go for a doctor. Thank goodness you've come round, it's a day's walk down to the village.”

Groggy.

Blink. And again blink. The blurred shapes resolving themselves into clarity. Cloudy blue eyes. Female. Face looming up close. Breath.

“Where am I?”

“In the Steinalm hut. You fell off the cliff. What were you doing crawling around there in the dark anyway?”

Good question. Falling? No memory. Not even of -

“Who am I?”

An astonished stare, then a look of cunning fluttering briefly across the looming face.

“You mean you don't remember who you are? You don't even know that you're my -” a faint blush - “my husband? My Hansi? And I'm your wife, Helga.”

He didn't remember. Neither her face, nor her name, nor his name – Hansi? – aroused any emotional response in him whatsoever. For all the connection he felt to them, they could have been characters off the dust jacket of a book he'd never found time to read. And as she bent over him, with a curiously possessive gleam in her eyes, he felt a sudden scrape of fear along his spine. How was it possible for a man to lose all connection to his life?

~~

On board the plane, Solo handed me an envelope. "Read this," he said. "It came in last night. Found among Marton's papers. And Section 4 intercepted this" - he handed me another envelope - "en route to Thrush Central a couple of weeks ago, but didn't know what to make of it then."

Envelope One contained a single sheet of paper, apparently part of a longer document:



... debated whether nature or nurture are responsible for shaping who we are. Is a child born as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, on which experience inscribes his personality? Or is the personality already present at birth, and the child processes experience in accordance with that pre-existing self?

In recent years, Thrush has funded a great deal of research into the roots of identity, uncovering the mechanisms by which the brain determines who we are.

Most of this work has concentrated on mental conditioning and has ignored the role that memory plays in shaping identity. It has proven possible to induce conditioned responses that directly contradict subjects' normal behavior in the short term without tampering with the memory mechanisms, and yet, pace Locke, we are what we remember. How much more efficient and long-lasting to change a subject's reponses by manipulating his memory! The bravest man can be rendered fearful by memories of catastrophe. Similarly, the coward can learn courage if he experiences (or remembers experiencing) situations in which courage saved his neck.

Thrush technology is now sufficiently advanced to allow us to obliterate a man's memories entirely, and to rebuild him as a different person, by inducing a new set of artificial memories. This is a very impressive scientific achievement, but it has as yet no practical application, since it is cheaper and easier to find workers who already possess the qualities we desire than it is to build such people from scratch.

However, thanks to Thrush's generosity, I have been able to develop and refine an innovative technique which will be of immense practical value. My new methods allow me to remove only conscious and affective memories, leaving automatisms and kinaesthetic memories intact. In practical terms, this means that we can leave untouched all that makes a man valuable to us - his acquired skills, his professional knowledge, his natural abilities - and yet instil in him memories of years of devoted service to Thrush. Imagine the potential! Satesmen who currently oppose us would turn their political talents to our cause; scientists and engineers would deliver to us their most cutting-edge research; generals would put their military expertise at our disposal.

Regrettably, the process is, at present, cumbersome and rather slow. It would hardly be feasible to disappear, say, a NATO general, and then have him resume his post three months later. I am therefore asking Thrush Central for an increase in funding levels, in order to undertake a pilot project. The aim of this is to refine the process to the point where it is speedy enough - a matter of a week or so - to be feasibly applied to top-level figures of international importance. In order to achieve a short-term as well as a long-term gain on the investment, we need a subject who possesses a broad range of skills and knowledge that would be valuable to Thrush, and who can be disappeared without causing an outcry. Computer projections suggest an UNCLE agent would be ideal material, if one can be acquired without attracting undue...


It took me a while to make sense of all that, not least because there appeared to be several pages missing, but the next envelope contained something much shorter:


WILL DELIVER ITEM REQUESTED BY RETURN POST DELIVERY WHERE AND WHEN QUERY INSIST ON CHAIRMANSHIP OF STEERING COMMITTEE VM


I'm often accused of putting two and two together to make five, but this time I was certain there was a big fat FOUR staring me in the face. "Crikey, guv," I said, in my best Dick van Dyke accent, "You reckon that's what they wanted Kuryakin for?"

"Maybe. It's undated, so it's hard to tell." Solo didn't really sound as if he was paying much attention to the conversation. He was staring at the back of the seat in front of him as if he could see right through it, and the shadows of the abyss had crept back into his eyes.

"Tell me, Zack," he said suddenly, "What makes you think you know who you are?"

"Huh?" I said. It wasn't up to my usual standards of repartee, but I was a bit thrown by the sudden tangent.

Solo's eyes flickered briefly away from the seat back, like a man pursuing an elusive thought. "Those people in Romania," he said after a while, "Their minds were so broken... The kindest thing you could have done for them was to shoot them all."

I saw well enough what he was getting at there. "'No Tyrant could invent a Death into which I would not run with Pleasure from such a Life," I offered.

"Exactly. But what if you weren't broken, what if you were remade? Into someone else. Would that still hold true?"

"You mean would I rather die than be different from who I am now? No, no way. I mean, I'd still feel as if I was me, wouldn't I?"

"Yes, I imagine so. But suppose the person you were turned into was the very opposite of you. Let's say, for the sake of argument, you were turned into Hitler. Is that a fate worse than death? Would you blow your own brains out to avoid it?"

Normally I like a good philosophical puzzle to chew over, but not at three in the morning, and not with someone who looks at you as if how you answer is a matter of life and death. I mean, suppose the answer you give is wrong? So I shrugged it off.

"To thine own self be true," I said, hoping it didn't sound facetious. "But how you do that when you don't know who you are is beyond me."

"Me too," said Solo, turning off the reading light and rolling over with his back to me as if he wanted to go to sleep. He didn't, though, because his body stayed perfectly still, without any of that twitching people do when they're dropping off. I know, because I was awake for ages myself, struggling with the question he'd raised. Losing your identity. Isn't that what the myth of the werewolf is about, when it comes down to it? By day you're an honest citizen and a loving family man, and then the moon rises, and suddenly you're prowling the forests and tearing out the throats of your own children. And, according to legend, the only cure is a silver bullet.

I really hoped it wouldn't come to that.

Part 2