“Because it’s a hell of a big story that will put this town on the map!” Pete said eagerly. “And even if you don’t believe it, dammit, we’ve got the pictures! And not just of the skulls—I’ve gotten IDs on three scientists from Washington, D.C. It’s all there in the story.”
“Mmmph. And I notice how you’ve cast the story so it’ll all fall on this Grossington’s head, and then you put in a plug for creationism, as if that would keep the locals from going crazy. Nice fence sitting. Did you call Grossington up for comment?”
“No sir, I didn’t. I don’t want him to know anyone is on to him until the story hits. He’s been keeping this whole thing secret for some reason—why should we give him the warning he needs to put the kibosh on it?”
Teems reached out to the story on his desk and tapped it. “Do you think it’s a hoax in the making?”
Pete shrugged. “It’s possible, but I don’t believe it. Right there in the story, Professor Volsky says it’s quite normal for scientists to take the time to do some thinking and analyzing before they report their findings publicly—sometimes it takes as much as a year or more. But if it isn’t a hoax, he might well ask us not to publish until he’s ready. If we went ahead and published anyway at that point, he might have grounds for a suit, claiming he had only agreed to talk because we agreed to delay. And this thing is sure to leak again sooner or later. If we do get asked to delay, and politely wait until Grossington says it’s okay to print, someone else will break the news and we’ll lose the scoop. Besides, if it is a hoax he’s preparing, we want to catch him with his pants down, don’t we?”
“The point being that, in either event, you don’t think it’d be such a swift idea to talk with him,” Teems said. “Okay, fair enough. What about this Volsky woman?” he asked. He picked up the best photo of the skulls. “Your story flat out says she identified the skulls as some kind of ape-man. Was she really that certain? They’re strange-looking skulls, but was she really that positive?”
“All she wondered about was if the pictures were genuine. She checked the pictures against a lot of sources, and she was flat-out certain by the time she was finished.”
Teems dropped the photo on the table. “I want to know how you got on to this,” he said suspiciously. “You haven’t actually admitted to taking these photos, and I’m not going to ask if you did. If the sheriff decides to arrest you for trespassing, I don’t want to be in the middle of it. So we’ll leave the photos. But you’d better tell me how you knew to go looking for this.”
Pete Ardley shook his head. If Teems didn’t remember Livingston Jones coming into the office, didn’t recognize Livingston in the little group examining the skull in the outdoor shots, couldn’t put two and two together, that was his problem. Pete intended to write follow-ups on this story, but he didn’t plan on writing them for Teems. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you just yet. I’ve got to protect that source for a while.”
“You’ve been seeing too many movies about reporters on TV,” Teems said irritably. “But don’t think for a moment you’re fooling me for a moment, boy. This is the biggest story ever to come out of Gowrie—if it’s true—and I’d bet anything you like that you’ve got your resignation all typed up if I spike this story. You’d be in Jackson trying to freelance it this afternoon. No loyalty. Which means I can’t really trust you, can I?”
Teems glared at him and then went on. “That’s bad for you, because it’s up to me to decide if it would be good for the Gazette to run this story, up to me to decide if it’s true. And I’ve just concluded I can’t trust you. And I’ll tell you something else. You’ve got more information than you put in this story. You’re holding back, hoping to parley it into a big follow-up, maybe keep other reporters from getting ahead of you on this story.” Teems smiled abruptly and nastily, exposing his scraggly yellow teeth in all their ugliness, and Pete felt as if the old man were staring right through him. Suddenly the smile vanished, replaced by an angry, suspicious glare. “Except it’s your ass on the line too, and you couldn’t have put a hoax like this together by yourself, and if you did put it together, you fooled that lady professor, and you ought to be able to fool the rest of us for long enough so it won’t look bad for me when it blows up in your face. And I don’t want to force you to quit so I have to break in a new reporter. Cut the last two ‘graphs and run it. Page one. And then recast it for a non-local audience, get rid of the weasel-worded creationism fence-sitting stuff so that we sound like big-city folks who believe in evolution, and put it on the goddamn wire, while you’re at it.”
But Pete had bigger plans than just getting on the wire. Two hours later he had packages mailed off Express Mail to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. He wanted this story to break wide. He sent a third package to Dr. Jeffery Grossington, care of the Smithsonian Institution. He also wanted to control this story.
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Livingston leaned back in his unsteady chair and stared at the far wall of the tiny café. Makokou was like Booué, he decided, only more so—smaller, rougher, smellier, rawer. It was also duller, if such a thing were possible. And it was a rotten place to do the one thing he was able to do at the moment—wait. So far as finding the australopithecines, nothing further was possible until they learned the present whereabouts of the Utaani tribe. Livingston, who spoke no French, was of no help in the researches. Rupert and Clark, accompanied by M. Ovono to translate the tribal tongues for them, were busily scouring the countryside for miles around, following up this rumor and that. Barbara couldn’t speak French either, but she at least had brought work along to keep her busy. She was constantly borrowing Rupert’s portable computer, finishing up a routine paper she had been working on before Thanksgiving had brought so much excitement.
There was little for Livingston to do but wander the town and drink too much cafe noir at the two grotty little restaurants and this depressing little café. The only other amusement was to be astonished at how fast the plants grew, how heavy the rains were, how humid and muggy the nights were, how ferocious the mosquitoes were.
The jungle seemed closer here, more powerful and determined, as if it would conquer the town overnight if humankind turned its back for a moment. It was a point driven home on the ride here, when they reached the rear guard of the rail-building crew and then had slowly driven past the army of men who were cutting back the jungle to lay the steel road. They had passed the supply wagons, the camps, the mess tents, the supply dumps, driven past the track-laying machines—the whole elaborate army needed to fight through the jungle. M. Ovono had maneuvered his Land Rover past bulldozers and the earthmoving gear, huge machines grinding and hacking away at the sinews of the forest, a nightmare noise of diesel engines and trees falling and men shouting—and then they were past the head of earthmoving team, ahead of the lead work gang.
M. Ovono followed the old dirt path to Makokou, driving straight into the wall of trees. In the moment they entered the trees, the sound of men working on the railroads stopped, abruptly, sharply, like a switch being thrown, the world of men swallowed up by the jungle and its own sounds.
When they had started out on the trip, Liv had been shocked by the railroad’s violation of the forest, the cruel clear-cutting. He had given a silent cheer when he saw some evidence of the jungle’s fighting back—a stand of saplings popping up inside the clear-cut line, a wall of bamboo growing back where it had been cut down, new-growth vines and creepers swarming over the felled trees, reaching out tendrils toward the track.
Not anymore. Not after they arrived in Makokou and M. Ovono pointed out an abandoned house with trees growing through the porch, sprouting up out of holes the branches had punched in the roof. The foundation of the house had collapsed, churned up and thrown over by termites, so that the entire structure twisted and sagged drunkenly. The remains of the roof were barely visible under heavy mats of moss and tangles of vines. Birds and lizards lived in it—and M. Ovono told them the house had been occupi
ed eighteen months before! Liv had always thought of Nature as the underdog, a subdued and fragile entity, and thought of humanity as having her on the ropes. But slogging through the virgin rain forest, wandering the overgrown streets of Makokou, living in a world where it seemed all light was filtered to dark green by the endless foliage—all of that had changed his mind. Nature was no delicate and fading thing of beauty here, but a tough, vigorous opponent who could defeat and destroy all humanity’s work in a moment if she so chose.
It was, Livingston decided as he finished his coffee and dug out a wad of CFA francs to pay for it, one hell of a depressing town.
<>
Barbara was concentrating hard on writing her paper, not really listening to the world around, not registering the banging noise behind her. Finally she came to herself enough to realize that someone was pounding on her door. She turned around. “Come in!” she said.
Rupert, Clark, and Ovono came bursting into her room. “Found ‘em!” Rupert announced triumphantly. He dropped gratefully into a chair and sighed. “At least we’ve got directions that should bring us to them. Mister Ovono found these guys who were hiking along about a month ago and stumbled into some slash-and-burn fields. They saw their camp and were able to find the spot on a map.”
“And you know how to get there?” Barbara asked.
“Piece of cake. Drive three blocks, come to the traffic light, and turn green. About three days from here.”
“Perhaps less, depending on how far M. Ovono can get his Land Rover,” Clark said. “But our informants were very sure it was the Utaani. They didn’t know until they asked the tribesmen, and they were plenty scared when they found out. These fellows we talked to wander around trading, selling pots and pans and so on. You can bet they got the devil out of there as soon as they could, didn’t even try to make a sale. One of them even claimed to have seen a tranka on the way out, though since he claimed the thing was hovering in mid-air I’m not sure I’ll believe that part. Probably just a lemur that they spooked. But I’m thoroughly convinced they saw the Utaani village. Too many details matched—the language the villagers spoke, the slash-and-burn farming. Besides, after all the research we’ve done around here, the Utaani were just about the one tribe we hadn’t accounted for. And the village site they pointed out is nowhere near any of the other tribal villages around here. We’ve found them. If we can get packed up and ready, we should be able to leave tomorrow at first light.”
Barbara shut off the computer and stood up. “Then let’s get moving. This place is driving me nuts.” She turned to Monsieur Ovono and smiled. “Merci, M’sieu Ovono,” she said carefully, using up a significant fraction of her store of French.
Ovono grinned delightedly. “You ess welcome much!” he replied, using up all of his English.
They both laughed and Barbara shook his hand. “You guys start packing up,” she said. “I’m going to go find Liv and give him the good news.” She took her leave of her friends and hurried out into the night.
<>
M. Ovono yanked the distributor cap off the engine and slammed the hood shut. There was a hasp set into the front of the hood. Ovono closed it, put a heavy lock through it, turned the key, and pocketed it. He wrapped the distributor cap up in a bit of clean rag, then put it in a drawstring bag with the sparkplugs.
“People in the jungle can be quite honest, but now we are certain no one will find my Rover and drive off with it, eh?” he asked Rupert in French as he handed him the bag. Ovono walked once more around the Rover, making sure all the doors were locked against thieves, all the windows were sealed against the weather. The exhaust pipe was plugged to prevent anything from making a nest there, the radio aerial was stowed away, the spare tire and other external gear were locked up inside the Rover. Ovono took the bag of parts back from Rupert, placed it carefully in his backpack, and put the backpack on.
They had gone a fair distance along the road, which had slowly dwindled to a trail, a game path, and now, finally, to a single-file track through the jungle. The rest of the party shouldered their packs and set off down the trail, following Ovono.
This was it, Barbara thought. The last leg of the journey, the end of the road she had started down when she had broken open Grandfather Zebulon’s trunk. She rearranged her pack straps more comfortably and kept on walking.
<>
This might be the last leg of the trip, Barbara thought, but it was certainly also the longest. So far it had been three days of slogging through the jungle, making barely perceptible progress down the overgrown path, swatting flies, pulling off leeches if they chanced to cross a stream, sweating endlessly, their backpacks growing heavier with every step, the virulent-green jungle reaching out with its endless leaves and thorns and vines and mud to stop them. The dim light would suddenly darken, a sign of thick clouds forming overhead, and the heavens would open almost without warning, drenching the miserable travelers. When the skies cleared, they could scarcely tell under the blanketing foliage, and when the rains were over, the water would drip and pour off the trees and leaves long after the downpour had ended, so they could scarcely tell sunshine from shower.
The nights were more miserable still. Ovono, knowing with how little warning the sunset came, would stop them in the day’s march when it was still full light, as soon as he found some sort of clearing. He would set them to work clearing the underbrush and setting the mosquito netting while he built a fire. No sooner was the blaze going when the dim, shadowless daylight, filtered and diffused through the interminable layers of green above, gave way to impenetrable darkness, and the night cries of the forest began. Each night passed with infinite slowness, one person on watch, the others curled up in their sleeping bags in exquisite discomfort, restless on the hard ground, caught in a murky half-sleep, half-wakefulness as exhaustion battled with the mosquitoes, the night cries, and bodies aching in every bone and joint. Finally, the night would depart as suddenly as it had come, the halfhearted light of morning would sift down through the trees and waken them, and another weary day would begin.
In the morning, at the midday rest break, in the evening, Ovono forced them to eat no matter how tired or unhungry they were. They needed food to battle the heat and the exertion of the journey. Barbara gave thanks more than once that Ovono had volunteered to come with them on the final leg of the journey. They never could have managed this trip on their own.
Now, on the afternoon of the third day, they were so tired they didn’t realize it at first when they came across the edge of an old slash-and-burn field, so overgrown that the furrows and rows were barely visible. It was Ovono who called out and pointed to the burn-over. “We are most close now,” Ovono announced in French. “All is just as our two informants said it was.” Instantly, Barbara felt the adrenaline pumping through her veins. They had to be close!
Ovono grinned mischievously for a moment. “So let us keep an eye out for the tranka they warned us of.” Then he turned and started walking again.
Rupert cleared his throat and glanced at Clark. They had never really managed to make it clear to Ovono that the tranka were presumably real, and were the animals they were after. He shrugged to Clark and followed Ovono down the path.
Half an hour later, Barbara held up a hand for silence. As soon as they stopped walking, they could all hear it—the unmistakable sound of wood being chopped, shouts carried by the wind, a fire crackling, and a dozen other tiny noises that only came from a human settlement. Barbara sniffed and realized she had been smelling cooking meat, and the slightest hint of wood smoke carried by the wind.
There was a tiny flicker of movement visible through the endless wall of trees, and the travelers instinctively crouched down and froze.
Another flicker of motion. Another. Now it was clear that something was moving down a path that ran parallel to their own. A man. No, several men, the leader clothed in a simple breechclout and carrying a walking stick, the others naked—
—No, not men. Just one man. Bar
bara gasped. The figures behind the leader weren’t human. On two legs, yes, but not human. Not human at all.
Chapter Fifteen
Jeffery Grossington opened the package marked Strictly Personal with no particular emotion or premonition. He noticed the Gowrie postmark and thought perhaps Barbara’s great-aunt was sending along some papers he had left behind. It was with a dull, leaden sense of shock that he pulled out the photographs and realized what they were, and it was with a feeling of something close to despair that he read the story this Peter Ardley person had written. Grossington had expected the story to leak some time, but not this soon, and not this completely. And with the telegram that had arrived from Barbara yesterday saying they were off to find the Utaani and might be out of touch for weeks—it was the worst possible time for this to happen.
But had it really happened? Had the news really gotten out far enough so the whole world would pay attention? This Ardley character just seemed to be a reporter for the local paper down there. Maybe the story would stay local. Perhaps it would be some time before the national press got hold of the story—if they believed it all it.
With a shock, Grossington realized he was treating the story as if it wasn’t true, as if it was a rumor he could and should deny, squelch before it reached widespread attention. The trouble was, Ardley’s story told nothing but the exact truth, though God only knew how he had arrived at that truth. So what to do now? He felt as if his brain were stuck, with no useful thought or idea able to find its way out. He stared long and hard at the exterior pictures of his examination of Tail-End Charlie, trying to think of a way to undo the damage that had been done. He found the only notion he could summon up, ridiculously enough, was that the photos really were very good likenesses of him.
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