Triumphant in his contemplation of Blair and the colonel, Joshua hitched a ride on another support rod. About six feet from the ground, he released his grip and landed in a crouch directly under the tank. Even before he could straighten up, Hubbard was stalking circles around him, rebuking him for his carelessness and insubordination, telling him not to report for work on Monday. This was it, Joshua’s swan song, he was gone for good. Still in control, Joshua picked his way over the air and sand hoses to his visitors.
“If he’d cut his hand on a burr doing that,” Hubbard appealed to Blair and the colonel, tagging along, “his natural instinct would’ve been to let go of the rod. He’d be gone. My insurance rates are outrageous already, God knows. A dead man in my debit column sure as hell wouldn’t lower ’em none, either.”
The owner, president, and on-the-job foreman of Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., waved his hand about in exasperation, then turned the air compressor back on and sat down dejectedly on a stack of silicate-sand bags near the blast-cleaning machine.
Because of the noise Blair suggested that Joshua return with him and the colonel to Fort Walton Beach in the limousine. Joshua told the two men that he had transportation of his own. Besides, he wasn’t going anywhere with them until he had had a Coke with a double handful of crushed ice. His thirst was enormous.
As a consequence, Joshua and his visitors wound up in a corner booth at the Okaloosa Café, about a block and a half from the water tower. The only other customer in the place was a local policeman. A heavy-hipped waitress with a beehive hairdo and a dramatic streak of peroxide over one ear brought them their menus. Joshua felt that had not Blair and the colonel been with him, she would have used his paint-spattered boots and coveralls as an excuse to deny him service. Or maybe the fact that he was bleeding from his right palm.
“Are you all right?” Blair asked Joshua.
Exhilarated by the Great Man’s solicitude, Joshua said, “Sure. Sliced it on a burr skating that first rod, eighty feet up. Didn’t let go, though, did I? Just tipped my fingers over the bad spot and kept on comin’.”
Blair belatedly introduced the colonel, a full bird by the name of Crawford, the base commander at Eglin. He was a compact, round-faced man only slightly taller than Joshua, with a haircut that made him seem a refugee from Eisenhower’s 1950s. The light coming through the flyspecked front window of the Okaloosa Café glinted off his insignia and danced in his violet eyes.
“How did you find me?” Joshua asked.
“Telephoned the number on the slip of paper you gave Dr. Blair last night,” Colonel Crawford explained. “Got the manager of your motor court, Mrs.—”
“Mrs. Gelb.”
“Right, Mrs. Gelb. She, in turn, told us where you were working, and we drove up here.”
Nodding meaningfully at the cut in Joshua’s palm, Blair put the message slip on the table and smoothed it out with his fingers. “The name, address, and telephone number are self-explanatory, young man, but, pray, what is the significance of this tiny black hand with the eye in the middle?”
“I kept a diary when I was small. I kept it in code. That was one of the symbols I used.”
Colonel Crawford asked, “What did it stand for?”
“Homo habilis, I think.”
“Homo habilis!” Blair exclaimed. “Australopithecus habilis, you mean. The former was a term badly in need of overhaul even when you were a child. Nobody could ever quite agree which fossil specimens belonged in the category. As I tried to explain last night, habilis was decidedly more ape than man.”
“If the terminology’s screwed up,” Joshua said, “what better way to solve the problem than by a symbol? This hand with the eye in the middle means a certain kind of hominid, and only that kind.”
“But what criteria did you use to establish the category?”
“Observation.”
While Blair was trying to digest this claim, and perhaps to collate it with Joshua’s remarks about chalicotheres at last night’s lecture, Colonel Crawford asked, “What kind of diary was this, anyway?”
“A diary of my travels.”
The two men stared at Joshua.
“A dream diary,” he said in qualification. “When I was nine, my mother—my adoptive mother, I mean—suggested that I begin recording my dreams. So I did, in code. All my dreams were a kind of . . . well, I called it spirit-traveling. My spirit-traveling always took me to the same goddamn place. I’d had these special sorts of dream ever since I was a baby, but it wasn’t until I was seven or eight that I began to realize not only where I was going but when.”
Joshua chewed some of the ice from the Coke that the disapproving waitress had just brought him.
“It scared me shitless. It scared my mother shitless, too, to see me in one of these trances. Usually, you know, my eyelids skinned back and my eyeballs rolled in my head. Jeannette—my adoptive mother—she must have wondered if I was dying. But I wasn’t dying. I was only—spirit-traveling.”
“To Pleistocene Africa?” Blair asked.
Joshua nodded.
“What makes you so bloody positive that the”—Blair groped for a word “—that the testimony of your dreams isn’t rife with nonsense and false colors? Nightmares don’t often correlate with the substance of objective reality. Yours may not, either.”
“No, mine do. They almost always do. Except when they’re mixed up with real nightmares. I can almost always tell when my genuine spirit-traveling is being muddled by regular dreaming.” Joshua told the two men of the time he had crosswired a flight of B-52s into the world of prehistoric East Africa. The airplanes had pocked the landscape with bomb craters and sent all sorts of extinct creatures scurrying for cover. Of course, these images had filtered into his dreaming mind only a few days after Jeannette had read to the children a letter from their father, who was stationed on Guam and working as the chief of a B-52 ground crew during the saturation bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia. On an earlier occasion, right after the first U.S. moon landing, Joshua had even contrived—or, rather, his subconscious had—to introduce space-suited astronauts into the terrain of his dreams.
The colonel rocked back on the rear legs of his chair. “Did that—does that—happen often?”
“No, sir, it’s rare. I can think of only a few intrusions like that. Once, though, I watched a band of quasi-people scavenging a mastodont that had fallen off a ledge into a gully and—”
“A mastodont?” Blair interrupted.
“Well, some sort of elephanty critter. I was maybe eight or nine. I hadn’t yet started checking books to see what kinds of animals were popping up in my spirit-travels. Besides, I didn’t need names for my dream diary—I just made up a symbol for each different animal and used that.”
“What about this ‘mastodont’?”
Joshua closed his eyes and snorted in bemused self-contempt. “I didn’t need a name for it. It was an intrusion, and it never came back after that first time. You know what that animal was?”
Blair and the colonel shook their heads.
“Snuffleupagus.” Joshua grimaced and flashed hot with embarrassment. “Yeah. Weird. I know.”
Zarakal’s Minister of Interior, uncomprehending, looked to Colonel Crawford for an explanation.
Joshua hurriedly said, “Snuffleupagus was this big, furry, elephanty creature on a PBS children’s program, Sesame Street. I don’t know whether it’s still on or not. Anyway, Snuffleupagus had silly cartoon eyes with long, flirty lashes and a voice like a bassoon’s, slow and deep and sad. His best friend was Big Bird, a seven-foot-tall featherbrain who could never convince any of the adults on the program that Snuffleupagus really existed. Every time Bird tried to introduce Snuffy to Maria or Mr. Hooper or somebody, Snuffy would go wandering off somewhere, swaying from side to side, and Bird ended up looking like the bozo who cried wolf.”
Joshua took a sip of Coke, put his glass back down on the wet circle it had made. Neither Blair nor Crawford took their eyes off him.
The policeman at the counter had swiveled about on his stool, and Colonel Crawford bumped his chair back down and put a hand on Joshua’s wrist to warn him about speaking too loudly. His touch made Joshua start.
“Go ahead,” the colonel urged. “Finish about Snuffleupagus.”
Joshua drank off the remainder of his Coke and lowered his voice: “A group of hominids—black-hands-with-eyes, that’s the kind they were—scurried around in the watercourse where old Snuffy had fallen. They were getting ready to cut him up with tiny stone knives flaked from larger core tools. ‘Oh, nooo-ooo-ooh,’ moaned Snuffy, who wasn’t quite dead yet. ‘What’s going to become of me, Bird?’ The quasi-people set to work. They scored his shaggy belly with their flake tools and let the blood run. ‘Oh, dear me, Bird,’ Snuffleupagus said, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to die.’ Just like that. In that sappy, mournful voice of his. He wasn’t even struggling.”
“And then what happened?”
“Well, I guess he died, Colonel. And then the quasi-people probably ate him. I don’t know. My mother woke me up. I was sitting in the middle of my bed wrapped in a blanket—this was in our house, our basement apartment, in Cheyenne—and my eyes had probably rolled up in my head. My mother couldn’t stand to see that. She shook me out of it and held me, just held and rocked me.” Blair, Joshua saw, was fiddling with a paper napkin. “That was a tainted instance of spirit-traveling. A little of the here-and-now had leaked down and contaminated my long-ago soul. I knew it. I knew it even before Jeannette woke me up.”
Blair folded the napkin and patted it into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. “What kinds of hominids do you ordinarily see when . . . well, when you go back?”
“Three sorts, just like the Leakeys claim. When I kept my dream diary I used a black-hand pictogram for each of them. I put an eye in the palm of the symbol for the most human-seeming group. They have tools, crude shelters, the beginnings of a family system.”
“Habilis,” Blair said. “Go on.”
“Then there’s a more brutish bunch, bigger and less bright. I identified them in my dream diary by putting a mouth with thick, square teeth in the center of my black-hand symbol.”
“Australopithecus boisei or robustus, the robust ‘southern ape.’ ”
“Yes, sir, but I didn’t know the terms then. And, finally, the remaining species—little jokers like furry elves or hobbits. They’re about three and a half feet tall. For them I used a simple black-hand pictogram with nothing in the palm. That’s simply how they struck me when I was a kid.”
“Australopithecus africanus, the gracile ‘southern ape.’ Your symbolism may be completely appropriate, Mr. Kampa. It’s possible that habilis and robustus both derived from africanus. Even though it survived to be their contemporary, it antedates them in the fossil record.”
The waitress arrived at their table with the check, which she placed face down in a water spill. The policeman creaked about on his stool, saluted them sardonically, and banged out the front door into the withering July sunshine. When they were alone again, Colonel Crawford put his elbows on the table and leaned forward.
“Listen, Mr. Kampa, Dr. Blair interrupted an incredibly busy schedule to seek you out. We’re going to have to have answers to two more questions to know if the interruption was really worthwhile.”
The Great Man said, “Of course it’s been worthwhile, Hank.”
“What questions?”
“First, do you ever dream yourself back into the Pleistocene? By that I mean, are you yourself ever one of the identifiable figures in that ancient landscape?”
“Not really. I dolly in and out like a movie camera. I’m nothing but a pair of free-floating eyes. That’s why I call it spirit-traveling.”
“Good,” Colonel Crawford said.
Creasing his forehead, Blair asked, “Why is that good?”
“Woody could explain this much better than I can. It’s because he hasn’t contaminated the period with . . . well, with the anomaly of his own physical presence. His real body may be able to go back because his psyche has never permitted a dream image of himself to do so. You’ll have to sit down with Woody if you want a more cogent explanation.”
Joshua looked hard at the colonel. Up to this moment he had seemed to Joshua like a third wheel on a bicycle, an onlooker at a two-handed card game. Base commander or no base commander, he had accompanied Blair to Blackwater Springs in the capacity of chauffeur. Or had he? Joshua was beginning to reassess the terms and degree of the colonel’s real involvement. And who was Woody?
“What’s the second question?” he asked.
Tom Hubbard threw open the door of the Okaloosa Café, then eased it shut behind him. “Glass o’ water and a ham sandwich,” he told the waitress, crossing to Joshua’s table. Before Colonel Crawford could jockey aside to give him room, Hubbard had turned a chair around and straddled it backwards. “Goddamn it, Kampa, listen. You can’t leave me up here on this job with old R. K. Cofield and that new kid who thinks tank epoxy is some kind o’ disease.”
“You canned my ass.”
“Yeah, well, if you promise to quit pullin’ that rod-skatin’ crap, I’ll take you back on.”
Colonel Crawford said, “We’ve been trying to interest Mr. Kampa in a new line of employment.”
Joshua caught the colonel’s eye. “The hell you have.”
“That was my second question. I was just about to ask it.”
“You fellas recruiters?” Hubbard wanted to know.
“In a manner of speaking.” Colonel Crawford looked at Alistair Patrick Blair, then back at Joshua. “Mr. Kampa, how would you like to join the Air Force?”
“I’m too short.”
“Not for the assignment we have in mind.”
“Yeah,” Hubbard put in, “Uncle Sam can always use cannon fodder in Central America and the Persian Gulf. Africa, too. Sam likes to send darkies to jungle hot spots. Each side can tote up the other’s kills when it’s making out a body count.”
“This time, Tom, I intend to stay fired.”
Hubbard shook his head. “Suit yourself. Leave me in the lurch. Strand me with R. K. Cofield and the Help-me-I’m-fallin’ kid.”
In the end, a napkin clenched in his bleeding hand, Joshua embraced Hubbard in the middle of the Okaloosa Café, then followed Dr. Blair and Colonel Crawford out the door.
Ten minutes later, astride his Kawasaki, he was trailing the Air Force limousine down State Highway 85 through the desolate ordnance ranges of Hugo Monegal’s last base. Mouth wide open, his voice lost in a backwash of humid wind, he sang, at the top of his lungs, a sprightly old Beatles tune. . . .
Chapter Twenty-Two
Mary
WHEN MALCOLM TOUCHED MY SHOULDER, I nearly leapt from the acacia into the water hole. During my recitation he had climbed up beside me without my noticing. His goatee wobbled back and forth on his receding chin, for, altogether pointedly, he was “talking,” silently speechifying.
“Just trying to get us through a difficult night,” I told him. “What story are you trying to tell?”
The habiline nodded succinctly at the .45 on my hip. I had nearly forgotten it and did not wish to remember it now. My hope had been that the hyenas, either bored or insulted by my tale, would trot off haughtily into the night. No such luck. They were still out there, waiting.
“This is not the ultimate answer to every question, you know. Do you rem
ember what happened to Genly?”
Malcolm pointed his forefinger at a hyena whose agate eyes glittered greedily from a nearby clump of grass. He clicked his tongue. Like a ruminating goat, he waggled his chin whiskers. In light of our predicament, my scruples about using the pistol again at last struck me as misplaced.
“All right,” I said grudgingly.
And drew my pistol from my holster. And, as Pete Grier had once used a spotlight to murder a defenseless deer, took full advantage of the moon to shoot that offal-eating brigand between the eyes. The report, echoing away, had an orgasmic quality. I felt drained and unaccountably saddened by the hyena’s death.
The other hyenas, along with a pair of scruffy vultures that belatedly managed to get airborne had already hightailed it, but I fired off the remainder of my clip, anyway.
Malcolm clung almost cravenly to the tree during this fusillade, but afterward, our besiegers dispersed, swung to the ground and ran along the water’s edge like a man emancipated from bondage. I slid the hot machine back into its holster and watched the other Minids descend from the surrounding trees. Soon they were all on the ground. Some of them—mostly males—ventured out onto the prairie to examine the corpse of the hyena I had shot. I, however, stayed upstairs, determined to keep the watch that Malcolm had abandoned.
“Look, I’m not going to do this all the time,” I informed the Minids. “But it does work when we need it, doesn’t it?”
The women and children turned dubious, moonlit faces upward, while Roosevelt, Fred, and Malcolm squatted beside the hyena with lava cobbles and pieces of chert, flaking these into tools with which to butcher the carcass. Morning was still many hours off, but they seemed disinclined to surrender my kill to the vultures by coming back to the thicket for a little well-earned shuteye. I watched them working without envy or appetite.
More than likely I dozed. When I awoke, Fred was standing sentinel in another tree, and the remainder of our band had found sleeping spots on the ground. So many bodies lay about that the scene triggered thoughts of massacre or holocaust.
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