by Alan Nayes
“You busy”” she asked when John answered.
“I’m at Eielson. How are you?”
Depressed. Frustrated. “I’m okay. Working on preparing the Okpilak remains for an exhibit.”
John seemed to read between the lines. “You’re good, but not great.”
“That about sums it up. Goliath did reach Canada according to Reddic.”
“So you’re preparing the skeletons for a public exhibit but the Center did not want Goliath. Makes no sense.”
Shelby sighed. “Actually if they’d put Goliath down, I don’t think I’d have wanted to work on the exhibit. It would have been too weird and hard—like putting down your favorite dog and then having him stuffed in your living room. No thanks.”
She could picture John’s smile. “See your point.”
“What are you doing at Eielson?” she asked.
“Heading back out to the Little Okpilak offshoot before the cold weather gets here.”
“Gets here? What’s it now—upper thirties?”
“Forty-four and overcast.”
“Warm.”
“Alaskan balmy. Mendle has orders to sonar the last hundred meters of that entire glacier.”
“Let me guess. You’re looking for more UCOs.”
“You nailed it. The military, NASA, and SETI are all involved. You heard what happened to the object they removed from Goliath’s brain.”
“Bonds told me.”
“Well, the theory is there might be more out there.”
Shelby straightened up. “More Goliaths?”
“Not necessarily Goliaths but more alien objects or material. They think they’ve got it figured out.”
“I have a theory, too. You first.”
John said, “Circuit breakers.”
“Circuit breakers, as in electricity?”
“Yes, but plainly light years more advanced. They think something we did—the laser or active manipulation or change in elevation, for instance the cargo plane—caused a circuit to break and this triggered a ‘return cascade.’ In other words, everything these aliens made was preprogrammed to return to its original point of conception, so to speak, if certain criteria were violated. Like a drone we send out that is programmed to return to base.”
“It was a security reflex.”
“Exactly. We triggered their return.”
Shelby started to ask why it didn’t return with Goliath but surmised the “return cascade” had not been triggered yet. Obviously.
“Your turn,” John said. She could hear the amusement in his tone and this lightened her mood.
Shelby replied, “It sounds crazy.”
John laughed. “And NASA’s isn’t?”
Shelby couldn’t pinpoint when this scenario evolved in her mind, but it was sometime after Goliath had been trucked to Los Angeles. “Time travel,” she said. “What if at some time in the distant future, humans invented the means to go back in time?”
“I’m seeing where you’re going. So they send someone back to the Ice Age, capture Goliath, and…then what?”
“Something went wrong. Whoever captured Goliath—possibly to take back to some futuristic zoo, who knows—but they kill his mate and offspring, then go back to the period whence they came. Leaving Goliath frozen in time.”
“And twenty-eight thousand years after the capture, we stumble across the ice and find the UCO. I like it. Can I relay it to Mendle?”
This elicited a grin. “Sure. But my theory doesn’t cast Homo sapiens in a real good light.”
Shelby conversed a few minutes more, promising to get back up there once her work here was further along. He reminded her about him taking her out and seeing the aurora borealis. This would be an anticipation she would enjoy experiencing.
Shelby locked up the lab for the evening and was on her way out when the vet assistant summoned her. “Dr. Hollister, there’s something I want to show you in Goliath’s enclosure.”
Shelby met the woman at the large one-way viewing window. As she looked inside, the gloom and frustration returned at seeing the empty cell. She tried not to think of what the giant primate’s situation was at this moment. “When does the new arrival get here?” Shelby had been informed the newest occupant would be a juvenile female orangutan from Borneo whose parents had been killed by poachers. She would be quarantined for a week at the Center prior to moving into her new home at the Los Angeles Zoo.
The assistant had set up her laptop on a shelf next to the window. She pulled up the video feeds. Shelby noticed the date—August 24th. The night before they came for Goliath.
“I was checking to ensure all the in-cell monitors were working,” the woman explained. “Here on the twenty-third you see Goliath seated at the bars.” She fast forwarded to the 24th. “Still working fine in the morning.”
Fast forward twenty-four hours. Shelby lost the pictures. Or rather the image turned a solid opaque yellow. “What about a different camera?”
The veterinary assistant tapped some keys. “All the same,” the woman commented. “Yellow, though the shades vary.”
Shelby looked up, studying the camera mounts from the viewing window. “Let’s go inside. And we’ll need a ladder.”
Ten minutes later with the ladder in place, Shelby watched a maintenance worker use a rag to clean the lens of the ceiling security camera behind the pool. He climbed down and showed her the rag. “What do you make of that? It’s on all the lenses,” he said.
Shelby touched the thick dried yellow goo and then smelled it. No mistake. It was ripe banana. She exchanged a sidelong glance with the assistant. Slowly both women smiled in mutual understanding.
Shelby stepped away from the ladder to the middle of the enclosure. The inside temperature was no longer cold. She gazed up at each mounted HD camcorder in turn. “Goliath, you smart devious rascal,” she murmured. “You got tired of being spied on.”
The giant primate had reached up and blocked each camera by smearing the lenses with squished banana.
CHAPTER 34
The rain had not let up for two days. On the afternoon of the third day the ferry barge had been moored at the Bear Island estate dock, it fell with a renewed vengeance. Ahmen stalked the huge estate in a foul, impatient mood. The men he’d hired to monitor the ape steered clear of the irascible collector. They knew him well enough to interact only when addressed. Even Cezini, who shared his bedroom, kept to herself. She’d been offered one view of the huge primate that first evening and decided that would be her last—until the ape was dead and mounted in the Arctic diorama. The white giant was just too damn big to look at without threatening to precipitate her underlying panic attacks.
Even the estate staff—cooks, housekeepers, landscapers—had observed the monster only once, then stayed clear of the dock as if the ape harbored some primordial curse.
The barge sat tethered to the wide dock where it’d been moored after crossing the Strait of Georgia from the mainland. Three men manned the bridge, changing shifts every eight hours, ensuring the powerful spotlight remained on the trailer. A fourth took turns monitoring the video feed from inside the trailer. Though equipped with a crane and winch, the barge captain had recommended not risking hoisting the trailer onto the dock’s wide platform. The enclosure was pushing the weight limits of the crane’s specifications and he feared if the cargo inside the trailer moved, the weight shift could destabilize the crane’s attempts to swing the trailer over the dock. Especially in the constant downpour.
Sipping his scotch and ale, Ahmen studied the trailer from a wide bay window overlooking the estate marina. He filtered out the ribald banter from the other men in the large television room watching a preseason football game. He was thankful the sea was relatively calm, though he hadn’t counted on the inclement weather system hugging Bear Island like a gray overcoat. Nor did he foresee the issue with the crane. By this time he would have predicted the ape would already be dead and on his wa
y to the taxidermist for final preservation.
More than once he’d been tempted to open the trailer’s roof slate where the giant’s meals were dropped in and crossbow the beast where he slept. But how sporting would that be? When Ahmen walked into his House of Primates, he knew every specimen had either been trapped or shot in its indigenous environment—by him. Hunting down Goliath where he’d once thrived was beyond the realm of possibility—it would have been far riskier and more expensive to transport the giant fourteen hundred miles further north to the Arctic—but he at least wanted to feel he shot the monster in a semi-natural environment. Another point of contention—shit…literally. The damn odor from the soiled trailer was picked up on the breeze whenever the wind shifted out of the east. They needed to give the ape a good washing down, but Ahmen figured that would all be tended to once the ape was vanquished.
The plan was simple, secure, failproof—and would satisfy his need to hunt the ape down. Sure, any hunt carried a modicum of risk, but where would he be if he’d never taken any risks?
He heard the pad of shoes on the plush carpet. Ralston had been helping himself to Ahmen’s stock of expensive Diamond Crown cigars and though no one smoked in the mansion, Ahmen could smell the sweetly rich aroma on the man’s jacket. “Any change in the forecast?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
Ralston gazed down the double-tiered stone stairs to the dock and boathouse holding Ahmen’s sixty-foot Tiara yacht since the barge had taken up residence in the private marina. “More rain tomorrow,” adding, “No snow.” He started to grin but stopped when he realized his quip went over like a loud fart in a mosque at prayer time.
Ahmen finished off the last of his drink. “Grab some rain gear from the closet.”
“Where are we going?”
“Outside.”
Ahmen ducked into the rain, pulling the hood over his head and tucking his chin into his chest. It felt colder than fifty-one. He silently cursed at the leaking skies. Everything had been going so damn well—from the discovery of the prehistoric ape to its capture and especially to the creature creating its own demise by killing the only other species of primates on this planet that would have made any difference, forcing the sale—and now this!
“Fuck,” he shouted at the barge as he stepped past the kennels, where the dogs sat quietly, and up on the wood dock platform. “Careful,” he muttered to Ralston. Sure he was pissed but he didn’t want his point man, the orchestrator of Goliath’s transfer out of the hands of science into the hands of a private collector, to slip and bust an ankle or worse, fall into the forty-nine-degree water and drown. Ralston was going to be there with him as they ran the giant to ground—all his team would be there to celebrate and watch Ahmen put the beast down. It was evolution’s survival of the fittest all over again—the superior primate taking down the weaker.
The rain fell vertically in linear sparkles in the floodlight’s wide beam. No wind, which was fortuitous. As Ahmen approached the moored barge, he thought he heard a loud sneeze. He looked back at Ralston.
“Allergies,” the APA man said, wiping the rain from his eyes.
“Put your hood on,” Ahmen said. “Want to catch pneumonia?”
“I’m fine.” He followed Ahmen to where the barge gently nudged the heavy marine dock bumpers.
Again Ahmen mouthed a silent prayer to Allah the seas remained calm, almost preternaturally so.
The two men leaped across the half-foot gap and landed on the slick barge deck.
A voice from the bridge called down, “Fine Vancouver weather we are having, Mr. Ahmen. Yes?”
Ahmen bit off a caustic retort, instead asking, “How is our Prime Minister?” Ever since watching a short clip of the giant ape playing with himself with his back to the security lens, he’d started calling the behemoth “Prime Minister” or PM for short. The men thought it entertaining and Ahmen thought the moniker appropriate. Even Cezini was calling the monster “Mr. PM” now.
All four men of the second-shift team tugged their windbreakers around them and descended the steps of the bridge to the deck, following their commander back to the viewing slat on the trailer door. After two days of this weather shit, Ahmen had flown the barge’s captain back to the mainland on the estate’s private chopper with a guarantee of an extra five thousand Canadian dollars a day if he would allow Ahmen to keep the barge moored at Bear Island until the trailer was empty. No one had counted on the multiday rain storm settling in over the Strait as long as it had.
“He still quiet?” Ralston asked one of the bridge sentries. Ahmen had introduced the burly man as one of his team leaders.
The thick man shrugged. “Only seems to eat and shit. Even when Sayed here”—he indicated a thin heavily tattooed man walking with the portable radio device in his hand—“attempts to rouse the fuck, that big baboon just stares at the viewing window likes he’s stoned out of his mind.” He smirked. “This ain’t going to be no hunt. What’s that idiom—‘shooting monkeys in a barrel’? Well, that’s what we’ll have here.”
Fish in a barrel. But Ralston didn’t correct him.
Ahmen pounded the side of his fist against the trailer, creating a loud metallic twang. “That should wake Mr. PM up.”
The surveillance team laughed. Tattoo man held out the radio device. “The tracker works like a charm.”
Ahmen doubted they would even need the tracking technology. He paused long enough to wipe the moisture from the small screen. A solid red blip stood out against the darker background. The number in a separate smaller window registered twelve feet.
The tracker explained, “The target is stationary but once he moves that signal will beep and begin to blink.”
Ahmen understood. “And he’s twelve feet away, Sayed.”
“Exactly.”
Ralston replied, “Makes it convenient.”
Ahmen moved down the side of the trailer, pounding the side and checking the tracker. “Still not a rise. And I thought he’d be a challenge…”
“Maybe he’s jacking off again,” Ralston commented.
Ahmen simply stated, “I’ll end that soon enough.”
They reached the rear door and one of the men flipped a latch and slid the metal slat aside, revealing a one-half-foot-by-one-foot horizontal opening protected by four thick vertical stainless steel bars. The man glanced in. “Whoa,” and then stepped back, wincing. “Staying in the same place. He seems to like lounging against the hay bales,” adding, “You might want to hold your breath, sir. The smell is worse than a pile of camel feces baking in the sun.”
Ahmen adjusted his hood out of his eyes and leaned in for a look. Fuck. Definitely worse. Even not breathing, the shit smell permeated his olfactory senses. He ignored it. The interior was virtually dark. “Give me a flashlight.” Someone had one ready and set it in his palm. Ahmen aimed the LED beam through the bars. The huge ape’s eyes were shut but he could see his massively robust chest rising in regular respirations. Resting recumbently with his knees tucked under him, he’d wedged his wrists and ankles beneath his massive frame. The white coat appeared darker and was not as luxuriant as back in California. Feces stains did that to hair, he thought, disgusted. It wouldn’t be an issue with the taxidermist though. The monster would clean up beautifully. Again, he quashed the urge to shoot him where he slept. He shouted, “Wake up!” No response to his command or the light. “Hell, if I didn’t see him breathing, I would think he was dead.”
The thick man quipped, “The dead don’t eat as much fruit as that bastard scarfs down. Or shit as much.”
Ahmen began to reply when the beam reflected the metallic top of the attached storage box. He moved aside a little for a better look. “What the hell happened there?”
He stepped aside so the others could observe the deep random gouges along one corner of the heavy metal lid. The men only shrugged. “Probably there before.”
Ralston looked, holding his breath while commenting, “
God, that’s bad.” He studied the deep scratches a moment. “Don’t recall those in Los Angeles, but everyone was so busy watching the ape, they could have been there and no one would’ve have noticed.” He moved back. “That’s where I saw him masturbating,” he offered.
The thick man quipped sarcastically, “Wish my cock was hard enough to scratch metal.”
Everyone laughed and began to move away.
Ahmen reached to slide the metal slat closed and jumped back with a loud, “Holy fuck!” just after a monotonous beep began emitting from the tracker. A uniform gasp erupted from all the men.
Goliath squatted just inside the door, staring out between the bars. His eyes darted to each man before settling on the one closest, Ahmen.
“I never even heard him move,” Ralston said, sounding somewhat unnerved. “And he’s shackled.”
“He’s like a fucking ghost.” The thick man had his rifle aimed at the window. In fact, everyone armed did. The radio signal ceased.
Ahmen held the motionless ape’s gaze. There was something preternaturally unsettling about the manner in which the primate just stared, no other movement. For the second time, Ahmen wondered if the crossbow was the correct weapon. He could see how moist his large flat nostrils were and how unnaturally thick his gargoyle-like eye ridges protruded. More disconcerting, he noted though his eyes had always seemed so narrowly spaced on his big head, a portion of each still overreached the side borders of the foot-wide window. Damn, his skull is fucking huge! The monster continued sniffing the air.
Ahmen forced a grin and shined the beam directly in the ape’s eyes. The resulting growl sounded like it came from a deep well. “That got a rise out of him,” the collector said. He maintained the light in the ape’s pale pinkish eyes, expecting him to duck away or perhaps make another guttural sound of protest. But the ape did neither. He simply stared out, sniffing, until one of the men slid the slat shut.
Seconds later the beeping commenced, ending moments later as Ahmen assumed the ape had returned to the opposite end of the trailer. This time he picked up the clinking of the shackle chains.