“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.”
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“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....
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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
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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 remember 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.
Fred made a cooing sound and pointed into the underbrush. Rousing myself, I saw nothing, only thorn trees and desolation under a falling moon. Fred continued to coo, and a moment later a shadow emerged from a thicket to the northeast. At the sight of this figure my heart began
ker-chunking
like an engine block whose bolts have shaken loose.
It was Helen.
I repressed the urge to halloo, to scramble down to meet her. The Minids deserved to sleep, and my rushing to Helen would inevitably rouse and perplex more than a few of them. My heart laboring noisily, I waited for her to pick her way across the intervening territory to our water hole. Fred, having alerted her to our position, stopped cooing, but Helen did not seem to make good progress toward us. Ordinarily she was light-footed and quick. What was taking her so long? Had she sustained some terrible injury?
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No, she had not. Helen was carrying something, clutching it in front of her like an idol. It was a baby. I remembered the baboon infant that, some time ago, she had brought back from a foraging expedition.
That infant had not long survived its abduction, and if this was another stolen child, as it certainly appeared to be, the inarguable result of Helen's frustrated maternal longings would be the poor creature's death. Sweet Jesus, I thought, not again.
As quietly as I could, I went down to Helen and met her at the far side of the water hole. She handed me her darling, which was not a baboon but an australopithecine baby—from the
africanus
troop that had shadowed us all the way from New Helensburgh. The baby came willingly into my arms, and my first thought was that she resembled a human child in furry long johns. Her feet were more or less bare, and her knees—as if she had worn holes in her pajamas—were naked, calloused knots very like my own.
She refused to look at me, glancing instead at Helen before staring wistfully out into the darkness of the bush. She was slightly larger and slightly hairier than Fred and Nicole's A.P.B., probably more than a year old.
“At least you had the sense to steal one that's old enough to eat solid foods,” I told Helen.
Helen took the australopithecine child out of my arms and set her on the ground between us. Then, embracing me, she patted my back with both hands, all the while gibbering a series of syllables that had little relation to any I had taught her. Their unintelligibility did not obscure their binding import. As surely as if we had conceived this child ourselves, Helen and I were the australopithecine's mother and father. It was our responsibility to see that she grew into a healthy adult.
“This is crazy,” I protested. “Helen, she's not a habiline. She's a kidnapped southern ape. Even if we manage to shepherd her past adolescence, what kind of life do you suppose she'll have?”
Still patting my back, Helen mumbled a string of incoherent sweet nothings. With foolish-fond eyes she looked down at our daughter, who appeared to be lapsing into an autistic trance.
“Who's going to mate with her?” I continued. “She'll be lucky if the Minids tolerate her presence, much less accept her as one of their own. Nor are her own folks going to want to take her back. She'll be despised by
habilis
and
africanus
alike, Helen, just as if she were a half-breed. Can't you see what folly this is, what potential disaster?”
Helen was having no part of my faintheartedness. She hunkered beside the tiny girl-child and tenderly groomed her head. Now I saw that on her raid against the australopithecines Helen had not totally escaped injury. Blood from a series of claw marks striated her inner arm. And yet she had stolen this child with no worse hurt than that, a feat of such competent derring-do that I could only shake my head.
The look on Helen's face said that I should tend to the child while she took a few moments to see to her wounds. Awkwardly I knelt beside the little hominid and went nit-picking through her scalp, a courtesy that her trance did not permit her to acknowledge.
On the other side of the water hole Emily awoke, sat up, and looked at us. After yawning sleepily, she rose and ambled around the pond to satisfy her curiosity. Were we real or only a midnight apparition?
Squatting as Helen had, she touched the kidnap victim on the chin. Then, fascinated by the australopithecine's passivity, she pulled her finger back and stared. Helen and I scarcely dared to breathe—as if Emily's next decision would spell either life or death for the abducted child.
At last I said, “Her name is Mary.” I looked at Helen. “Is that all right with you? Mary?”
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“
Mai mwah
,” Helen said. “My mirror,” I thought, was a reasonable approximation of “Mary.” Let it stand. Let it stand.
“Good. That's settled.”
Satisfied that Emily intended Mary no harm, Helen left me in charge of the child and disappeared into the night again. When, ten or fifteen minutes later, she returned, she was carrying a good supply of
ol duvai
, wild sisal, with whose sticky balm she treated the claw marks on her arm. Emily helped her, smoothing Helen's sparse forearm hairs aside and squeezing the natural anodyne of the wild sisal into her cuts. Why such solicitude? I wondered. Maybe it was the late hour, the presence of the child whose head I was still desultorily searching for lice, or the all-pervasive quiet. Whatever the reason, I too was at peace, my misgivings about adopting the australopithecine routed by an army of fatuous hopes.
* * * *
In clusters on the plain, like cowlless monks at matins, sat the vultures that had settled on the corpse of the hyena impaled by the female rhino and gutted by its own fellows. The other hyena—the one I had shot—had been dragged down to the water's edge, out of the birds’ reach. Even so, the vultures kept their eyes peeled for an opportunity to move in.
Any troop of self-respecting baboons would have breakfasted before departing, but Alfie, along with Ham and Jomo, moved us out into the veldt with nothing in our stomachs but muddy water and the fluttery sensation that accompanies either doubt or encroaching illness. The idea was to get us going before the arrival of a lion or the return of the hyenas pinned us up for the better part of the morning.
Today Helen marched at the center of our procession, taking Mary with her. Now that she had a child she was indisputably entitled to give up her roles as outrider, sentry, and bodyguard in favor of those as veldtwife, mother, and ward. Dragging her acacia stave behind her like a broken rudder, she carried little Mary on her hip. A weapon in one hand, a baby in the other. If she was confused by the disparate allegiances embodied by these symbols, her heart—at least for now—was with the women. Nor did the women harass or cold-shoulder her for joining them.
Once the Minids had all become aware of her, Mary focused their occasional attention without provoking their hostility. I had expected angry faces, angry gestures, maybe even an assault. Instead, the habilines took turns examining the child, whom they seemed to delight in sniffing and gently poking. Helen allowed the Minids their inspections. If Mary were to survive, they must satisfy their curiosity about the kidnapped child and accept her as one of their own. Without once whimpering or struggling to get away, Mary clung to Helen with wide, terrified eyes, fatalistically enduring her ordeal.
During our march the child overcame some of her fear of the Minids, and on one occasion, when we stopped to rest, she toddled away to join Bonzo, Duchess, and Pebbles, who appeared to be experimentally tormenting a pair of coprid beetles left over from yesterday's encounter with the chalicotheres. The children did not prevent Mary from taking up with them. In fact, they allowed her to participate in the dismemberment of one of the insects, and both Helen and I looked on dotingly. After that, Mary, for all intents and purposes, was a habiline.