Ted Strickland looked down at the savaged corpse of Dr. Pollack, which Saul Carson was in the process of covering with a white sheet -- something of a futile effort, as his body parts were scattered haphazardly all over the laboratory floor.

"Betty, can you check and see if we have any more doilies in the hall closet?" called Saul over his left shoulder. "If you find any, just poke them in through the door; you girls shouldn't see this."

Ted sighed. "Look, Saul, I know you want to preserve the crime scene, but I think we all know what killed Dr. Pollack, so let's just move what's left of him into a pile, use the one sheet, and save ten dollars on the laundry bill."

Saul's muscles tensed; his brow furrowed. "How do we know what killed him? How can any of us know? None of us were here!"

"One of us was here," said Ted, reverentially kicking one of Dr. Pollack's severed hands into the pile in the center of the room. Saul's face hardened and his eyes narrowed, but he re-covered the mass that was once Dr. Pollack with the blood-stained sheet and gingerly tucked the edges in with his toes.

"All right," said Ted, "You girls can come in. The room's clear, now."

Betty Winsor and Donna Perkins entered the laboratory cautiously.

"It was such a dreadful tragedy, about Dr. Pollack, wasn't it?" Betty said nervously, her eyes sweeping the room. "So soon after that horrible business with the first crew of the -- AAAAAAAAAAAAIGH!"

"Oh, right, forgot about that one," Ted groaned, and slapped his forehead. He quickly picked Dr. Pollack's severed head up off of the table and stashed it under the sheet. "I just got used to it sitting up there, staring at us..."

"This isn't getting us anywhere!" Saul growled. "That thing could come back at any time!"

"Not any time," said Ted calmly. He walked to the window, where the comforting light of day was slowly retreating into deepening shadow. He raised his hand and tapped on the glass, gesturing skyward.

"Only under the light of the full moon," he said.

Donna looked at Ted, then to Saul and Betty.

"Ted, do you realize what you're saying?" she asked. "It's the same nonsense Dr. Pollack was theorizing about yesterday evening! You're talking about monsters and superstition!"

Ted looked balefully at the purple sky. "Superstition," he said quietly. "Yes, I thought it was superstition, just like we all did, when we heard the first report back from Lycanthrope One. After all, what else would you expect from a mission launching a band of gypsy astronauts into space? And when we heard about the first attacks, naturally, we assumed that there'd simply been some sort of scuffle on-board the rocket, some disagreement between gypsies over pipe tobacco or splitting pickpocketing proceeds. But now, now I'm beginning to think that Dr. Pollack was right!"

"Do you hear yourself?" Saul demanded angrily. "You're talking about a living, breathing werewolf, here in the Space Age!"

Ted looked back at him calmly, and puffed on his pipe.

"Maybe I am talking about a werewolf." He put up his hands in response to looks of incredulity that suddenly sprang up on his companions' faces. "Oh, I don't mean in the traditional, folk-tale sense, where a man bitten by a werewolf becomes one, himself, stalking human prey under the light of the full moon. We're grown men, we've no time for fairy tales. What I'm talking about is a nuclear aberration, born from cosmic radiation. The gypsy astronauts no doubt took some of their wolf-skin blankets up into the rocket with them -- once they reached orbit, it was inevitable that some amount of cosmic radiation would leak into their cabin, contaminating their own genetic structures, mixing it with the wolf essence, resulting in men who become space werewolves, stalking human prey under the light of the full moon, and infecting everyone they happen to bite."

"Great Scott," said Saul. "Thank goodness the gypsies' shoddily-constructed rocket collapsed and killed them as they were preparing for a second mission, this time carrying bear skins!"

"But wait," said Betty, suddenly alarmed. "That happened the day before yesterday, and Dr. Pollack was bitten last night! That means that it couldn't have been the gypsies who did it!"

"Exactly," said Ted, regarding the three scientists seriously. "Which leaves us with a question -- how many of us did the gypsies bite while they were here? I got bitten on the nose by Petrovik during his post-orbit medical inspection -- he was apparently displeased by what he perceived as a lower-than-comfortable hand temperature during the latter part of the inspection."

Saul cast his eyes downward, but timidly raised his left hand, revealing three bandaged fingers. "I had a card game with a couple of 'em the night before."

Betty pulled back her sleeve to show a bandage on her forearm. "We had an altercation in the changing room," she said.

Donna pointed to marks on her ankle. "That was from Helga, the navigator. I was just trying to complain about this cheap clock radio I bought from her husband..."

There was silence as the four scientists looked amongst each other.

"It could be any one of us," Saul said at last.

"Exactly what I was thinking," said Ted. "But I have a plan."

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