Congo

1. Descent

EVERYONE SLEPT LATE ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 20. They had a leisurely breakfast, taking the time to cook a hot meal. They relaxed in the sun, and played with Amy, who was delighted by this unexpected attention. It was past ten o’clock before they started down Mukenko to the jungle.

Because the western slopes of Mukenko are sheer and impassible, they descended inside the smoking volcanic crater to a depth of half a mile. Munro led the way, carrying a porter’s load on his head; Asari, the strongest porter, had to carry Amy, because the rocks were much too hot for her bare feet.

Amy was terrified, and regarded the human persons trekking single-file down the steep inner cone to be mad. Elliot was not sure she was wrong: the heat was intense; as they approached the lava lake, the acrid fumes made eyes water and nostrils burn; they heard the lava pop and crackle beneath the heavy black crust.

Then they reached the formation called Naragema-the Devil’s Eye. It was a natural arch 150 feet high, and so smooth it appeared polished on the inside. Through this arch a fresh breeze blew, and they saw the green jungle below. They paused to rest in the arch, and Ross examined the smooth inner surface. It was part of a lava tube formed in some earlier eruption; the main body of the tube had been blown away, leaving just the slender arch.

“They call it the Devil’s Eye,” Munro said, “because from below, during an eruption, it glows like a red eye.”

From the Devil’s Eye they descended rapidly through an alpine zone, and from there across the unworldly jagged terrain of a recent lava flow. Here they encountered black craters of scorched earth, some as deep as five or six feet. Munro’s first thought was that the Zaire army had used this field for mortar practice. But on closer examination, they saw a scorched pattern etched into the rock, extending like tentacles outward from the craters. Munro had never seen anything like it; Ross immediately set up her antenna, hooked in the computer, and got in touch with Houston. She seemed very excited.

The party rested while she reviewed the data on the little screen; Munro said, “What are you asking them?”

“The date of the last Mukenko eruption, and the local weather. It was in March-Do you know somebody named Seamans?”

“Yes,” Elliot said. "Tom Seamans is the computer programmer for Project Amy. Why?”

“There’s a message for you,” she said, pointing to the screen.

Elliot came around to look: SEMNS MESG FOR ELYT STNDBY.

“What’s the message?” Elliot asked.

“Push the transmit button,” she said.

He pushed the button and the message flashed: REVUWD ORGNL TAPE HUSTNNUN

“I don’t understand,” Elliot said. Ross explained that the “M” meant that there was more message, and he had to press the transmit button again. He pushed the button several times before he got the message, which in its entirety read:

REVUWO ORGNL TAPE HUSTN NU FINDNG RE AURL SIGNL INFO-COMPUTR ANLYSS COMPLTE THNK ITS LNGWGE.

Elliot found he could read the compressed shortline language by speaking it aloud: “Reviewed original tape Houston, new finding regarding aural signal information, computer analysis complete think it’s language.” He frowned. “Language?”

Ross said, “Didn’t you ask him to review Houston’s original tape material from the Congo?”

“Yes, but that was for visual identification of the animal on the screen. I never said anything to him about aural information.” Elliot shook his head. “I wish I could talk to him.”

“You can,” Ross said. “If you don’t mind waking him up.” She pushed the interlock button, and fifteen minutes later Elliot typed, Hello Tom How Are You? The screen printed HLO TOM HOURU.

“We don’t usually waste satellite time with that kind of thing,” Ross said.

The screen printed SLEPY WHRERU.

He typed, Virunga. VIRNGA.

“Travis is going to scream when he sees this transcript,” Ross said. “Do you realize what the transmission costs are?”

But Ross needn’t have worried; the conversation soon became technical:

RECVD MESG AURL INFO PLS XPLN.

AXIDENTL DISKVRY VRY XCITNG-DISCRIMNT FUNXN COMPT ANLSS 99 CONFDNCE LIMTS TAPD AURL INFO {BRETHNG SOUNS} DEMNSTRTS CHRCTRISTX SPECH.

SPSFY CHRCTRISTX.

REPETNG ELMNTS-ARBTRARY PATRN-STRXRAL RLATNSHPS-PROBLY THRFOR SPOKN LNGWGE.

KN U TRNSLTE?

NOT SOFR.

WHT RESN?

COMPUTR HAS INSFSNT INFO IN AURL MESG-WNT NOR DATA-ST WORKNG-MAYB NOR TOMORO-FINGRS X.

RLY THNK GORILA LNGWGE?

YES IF GORILA.

“I’ll be damned,” Elliot said. He ended the satellite transmission, but the final message from Seamans remained on the screen, glowing bright green:

YES IF GORILA.

2. The Hairy Men

WITHIN TWO HOURS OF RECEIVING THIS unexpected news, the expedition had its first contact with gorillas.

They were by now back in the darkness of the equatorial rain forest. They proceeded directly toward the site, following the overhead laser beams. They could not see these beams directly, but Ross had brought a weird optical track guide, a cadmium photocell filtered to record the specific laser wavelength emission. Periodically during the day, she inflated a small helium balloon, attached the track guide with a wire, and released it. Lifted by the helium, the guide rose into the sky above the trees. There it rotated, sighted one of the laser lines, and transmitted coordinates down the wire to the computer. They followed the track of diminishing laser intensity from a single beam, and waited for the “blip reading,” the doubled intensity value that would signal the intersection of two beams above them.

This was a slow job and their patience was wearing thin when, toward midday, they came upon the characteristic three-lobed feces of gorilla, and they saw several nests made of eucalyptus leaves on the ground and in the trees.

Fifteen minutes later, the air was shattered by a deafening roar. “Gorilla,” Munro announced. “That was a male telling somebody off.”

Amy signed, Gorillas say go away.

“We have to continue, Amy,” he said.

Gorilla no want human people come.

“Human people won’t harm gorillas,” Elliot assured her. But Amy just looked blank at this, and shook her head, as if Elliot had missed the point.

Days later he realized that he had indeed missed the point.

Amy was not telling him that the gorillas were afraid of being harmed by people. She was saying that the gorillas were afraid that the people would be harmed, by gorillas.

They had progressed halfway across a small jungle clearing when the large silverback male reared above the foliage and bellowed at them.

Elliot was leading the group, because Munro had gone back to help one of the porters with his pack. He saw six animals at the edge of the clearing, dark black shapes against the green, watching the human intruders. Several of the females cocked their heads and compressed their lips in a kind of disapproval. The dominant male roared again.

He was a large male with silver hair down his back. His massive head stood mote than six feet above the ground, and his barrel chest indicated that he weighed more than four hundred pounds. Seeing him, Elliot understood why the first explorers to the Congo had believed gorillas to be “hairy men,” for this magnificent creature looked like, a gigantic man, both in size and shape.

At Elliot’s back Ross whispered, “What do we do?”

“Stay behind me,” Elliot said, “and don’t move.”

The silverback male dropped to all fours briefly, and began a soft ho-ho-ho sound, which grew more intense as he leapt to his feet again, grabbing handfuls of grass as he did so. He threw the grass in the air, and then beat his chest with flat palms, making a hollow thumping sound.

“Oh, no,” Ross said.

The chest-beating lasted five seconds, and then the male dropped to all fours again. He ran sideways across the grass, slapping the foliage and making as much noise as possible, to frighten the intruders off. Finally he began the ho-ho-ho sound once more.

The male stared at Elliot, expecting that this display would send him running. When it did not, the male leapt to his feet, Pounded his chest, and roared with even greater fury.

And then he charged.

With a howling scream he came crashing forward at frightening speed, directly toward Elliot. Elliot heard Ross gasp behind him. He wanted to turn and run, his every bodily instinct screamed that he should run, but he forced himself to stand absolutely still-and to look down at the ground.

Staring at his feet while he listened to the gorilla crashing through the tall grass toward him, he had the sudden sensation that all his abstract book knowledge was wrong, that everything that scientists around the world thought about gorillas was wrong. He had a mental image of the huge head and the deep chest and the long arms swinging wide as the powerful animal rushed toward an easy kill, a stationary target foolish enough to believe all the academic misinformation sanctified by print.

The gorilla (who must have been quite close) made a snorting noise, and Elliot could see his heavy shadow on. the grass near his feet. But he did not look up until the shadow moved away.

When Elliot raised his head, he saw the male gorilla retreating backward, toward the far edge of the clearing. There the male turned, and scratched his head in a puzzled way, as if wondering why his terrifying: display had not driven off the intruders. He slapped the ground a final time, and then he and the rest of the troop melted away into the tall grass. It was silent in the clearing until Ross collapsed into Elliot’s arms.

“Well,” Munro said as he came up, “it seems you know a thing or two about gorillas after all.” Munro patted Ross’s arm. “It’s all right. They don’t do anything unless you run away. Then they bite you on the ass. That’s the mark for cowardice in these regions-because it means you ran away.”

Ross was sobbing quietly, and Elliot discovered that his own knees were shaky; he went to sit down. It had all happened so fast that it was a few moments before he realized that these gorillas had behaved in exactly the textbook manner, which included not making any verbalizations even remotely like speech.

3. The Consortium

AN HOUR LATER THEY FOUND THE WRECKAGE OF the C-130 transport. The largest airplane in the world appeared in correct scale as it lay half buried in the jungle, the gigantic nose crushed against equally gigantic trees, the enormous tail section twisted toward the ground, the massive wings buckled casting shadows on the jungle floor.

Through the shattered cockpit windshield, they saw the body of the pilot, covered with black flies. The flies buzzed and thumped against the glass as they peered in. Moving aft, they tried to look into the fuselage windows, but even on crumpled landing gear the body of the plane stood too high above the jungle floor.

Kahega managed to climb an overturned tree, and from there moved onto one wing and looked into the interior. “No people,” he said.

“Supplies?”

“Yes, many supplies. Boxes and containers.” Munro left the others, walking beneath the crushed tail section to examine the far side of the plane. The port wing, concealed from their view, was blackened and shattered, the engines gone. That explained why the plane crashed-the last FZA missile had found its target, blowing away most of the port wing. Yet the wreck remained oddly mysterious to Munro; something about its appearance was wrong. He looked along the length of the fuselage, from the crushed nose, down the line of windows, past the stump of wing, past the rear exit doors…

“I’ll be damned,” Munro said softly.

He hurried back to the others, who were sitting on one of the tires, in the shadow of the starboard wing The tire was so enormous that Ross could sit on it and swing her feet in the air without touching the ground.

“Well,” Ross said, with barely concealed satisfaction.

“They didn’t get their damn supplies.”

“No,” Munro said. “And we saw this plane the night before last, which means it’s been down at least thirty-six hours.”

Munro waited for Ross to figure it out.

“Thirty-six hours?”

“That’s right. Thirty-six hours.”

“And they never came back to get their supplies

“They didn’t even try to get them,” Munro said. “Look at the main cargo doors, fore and aft-no one has tried to open them. I wonder why they never came back?”

In a section of dense jungle, the ground underfoot

crunched and crackled. Pushing aside the palm fronds, they saw a carpeting of shattered white bones.

“Kanyamagufa," Munro said. The place of bones. He glanced quickly at the porters to see what their reaction was, but they showed only puzzlement, no fear. They were East African Kikuyu and they had none of the superstitions of the tribes that bordered the rain forest.

Amy lifted her feet from the sharp bleached fragments. She signed, Ground hurt.

Elliot signed, What place this?

We come bad place.

What bad place?

Amy had no reply.

“These are bones!” Ross said, staring down at the ground.

“That’s right,” Munro said quickly, “but they’re not human bones. Are they, Elliot?”

Elliot was also looking at the ground. He saw bleached skeletal remains from several species, although he could not immediately identify any of them.

“Elliot? Not human?”

“They don’t look human,” Elliot agreed, staring at the ground. The first thing he noticed was that the majority of the bones came from distinctly small animals-birds, monkeys, and tiny forest rodents. Other small pieces were actually fragments from larger animals, but how large was hard to say. Perhaps large monkeys-but there weren’t any large monkeys in the rain forest.

Chimpanzees? There were no chimps in this part of the Congo. Perhaps they might be gorillas: he saw one fragment from a cranium with heavy frontal sinuses, and he saw the beginning of the characteristic sagittal crest.

“Elliot?” Munro said, his voice tense, insistent. “Nonhuman?”

“Definitely non-human,” Elliot said, staring. What could shatter a gorilla skull? It must have happened after death, he decided. A gorilla had died and after many years the bleached skeleton had been crushed in some fashion. Certainly it could not have happened during life.

“Not human,” Munro said, looking at the ground. “Hell of a lot of bones, but nothing human.” As he walked past Elliot, he gave him a look. Keep your mouth shut. “Kahega and his men know that you are expert in these matters,”

Munro said, looking at him steadily.

What had Munro seen? Certainly he had been around enough death to know a human skeleton when he saw one. Elliot’s glance fell on a curved bone. It looked a bit like a turkey wishbone, only much larger and broader, and white with age. He picked it up. It was a fragment of the zygomatic arch from a human skull. A cheekbone, from beneath the eye.

He turned the fragment in his hands. He looked back at the jungle floor, and the creepers that spread reaching tentacles over the white carpet of bones. He saw many very fragile bones,, some so thin they were translucent-bones that he assumed had come from small animals.

Now he was not sure.

A question from graduate school returned to him. What seven bones compose the orbit of the human eye? Elliot tried to remember. The zygoma, the nasal, the inferior orbital, the sphenoid-that was four-the ethmoid, five-something must come from beneath, from the mouth-the palatine, six-one more to go-he couldn’t think of the last bone. Zygoma, nasal, inferior orbital, sphenoid, ethmoid, palatine… delicate bones, translucent bones, small bones.

Human bones.

“At least these aren’t human bones,” Ross said.

“No,” Elliot agreed. He glanced at Amy.

Amy signed, People die here.

“What did she say?”

“She said people don’t benefit from the air here.”

“Let’s push on,” Munro said.

Munro led him a little distance ahead of the others. “Well done,” he said. “Have to be careful about the Kikuyu. Don’t want to panic them. What’d your monkey say?”

“She said people died there.”

“That’s more than the others know,” Munro said, nodding grimly. “Although they suspect.”

Behind them, the party walked single-file, nobody talking.

“What the hell happened back there?” Elliot said.

“Lots of bones,” Munro said. “Leopard, colobus, forest rat, maybe a bush baby, human..

“And gorilla,” Elliot said.

“Yes,” Munro said. “I saw that, too. Gorilla.” He shook his head. “What can kill a gorilla, Professor?”

Elliot had no answer.

The consortium camp lay in ruins, the tents shredded and shattered, the dead bodies covered with dense black clouds of flies. In the humid air, the stench was overpowering, the buzzing of the flies an angry monotonous sound. Everybody except Munro hung back at the edge of the camp.

“No choice,” he said. “We’ve got to know what happened to these-” He went inside the camp itself, stepping over the flattened fence.

As Munro moved inside, the perimeter defenses were set off, emitting a screaming high-frequency signal. Outside the fence, the others cupped their hands over their ears and Amy snorted her displeasure.

Bad noise.

Munro glanced back at them. “Doesn’t bother me,” he said. “That’s what you get for staying outside.” Munro went to one dead body, turning it over with his foot. Then he bent down, swatting away the cloud of buzzing flies, and carefully examined the head.

Ross glanced over at Elliot. He seemed to be in shock, the typical scientist, immobilized by disaster. At his side, Amy covered her ears and winced. But Ross was not immobilized; she took a deep breath and crossed the perimeter. “I have to know what defenses they installed.”

“Pine,” Elliot said. He felt detached, light-headed, as if he might faint; the sight and the smells made him dizzy. He saw Ross pick her way across the compound, then lift up a black box with an odd baffled cone. She traced a wire back toward the center of the camp. Soon afterward the high-frequency signal ceased; she had turned it off at the source.

Amy signed, Better now.

With one hand, Ross rummaged through the electronics equipment in the center of the units in the camp, while with the other she held her nose against the stench.

Kahega said, “I’ll see if they have guns, Doctor,” and he, too, moved into the camp. Hesitantly, the other porters followed him.

Alone, Elliot remained with Amy. She impassively surveyed the destruction, although she reached up and took his hand. He signed, Amy what happened this place?

Amy signed, Things come.

What things?

Bad things.

What things?

Bad things come things come bad.

What things?

Bad things.

Obviously he would get nowhere with this line of questioning. He told her to remain outside the camp, and went in himself, moving among the bodies and the buzzing flies.

Ross said, “Anybody find the leader?”

Across the camp, Munro said, “Menard.”

“Out of Kinshasa?”

Munro nodded. “Yeah.”

“Who’s Menard?” Elliot asked.

“He’s got a good reputation, knows the Congo.” Ross picked her way through the debris. “But he wasn’t good enough.” A moment later she paused.

Elliot went over to her. She stared at a body lying face down on the ground.

“Don’t turn it over,” she said. “It’s Richter.” Elliot did not understand how she could be sure. The body was covered with black flies. He bent over.

“Don’t touch him!”

“Okay,” Elliot said.

“Kahega,” Munro shouted, raising a green plastic twenty-liter can. The can sloshed with liquid in his hand. “Let’s get this done.”

Kahega and his men moved swiftly, splashing kerosene over the tents and dead bodies. Elliot smelled the sharp odor.

Ross, crouched under a torn nylon supply tent, shouted, “Give me a minute!”

“Take all the time you want,” Munro said. He turned to Elliot, who was watching Amy outside the camp.

Amy was signing to herself: People bad. No believe people bad things come.

“She seems very calm about it,” Munro said.

“Not really,” Elliot said. “I think she knows what took place here.”

“I ‘hope she’ll tell us,” Munro said. “Because all these men died in the same way. Their skulls were crushed.”

The flames from the consortium camp licked upward into the air, and the black smoke bellowed as the expedition moved onward through the jungle. Ross was silent, lost in thought. Elliot said, “What did you find?”

“Nothing good,” she said. “They had a perfectly adequate peripheral system, quite similar to our ADP-animal defense perimeter. Those cones I found are audio-sensing units, and when they pick up a signal, they emit an ultrahigh-frequency signal that is very painful to auditory systems. Doesn’t work for reptiles, but it’s damn effective on mammalian systems. Send-a wolf or a leopard running for the hills.”

“But it didn’t work here,” Elliot said.

“No,” Ross said. “And it didn’t bother Amy very much.” Elliot said, “What does it do to human auditory systems?”

“You felt it. It’s annoying, but that’s all.” She glanced at Elliot. “But there aren’t any human beings in this part of the Congo. Except us.”

Munro asked, “Can we make a better perimeter defense?”

“Damn right we can,” Ross said. “I’ll give you the next generation perimeter-it’ll stop anything except elephants and rhinos.” But she didn’t sound convinced.

Late in the afternoon, they came upon the remains of the first ERTS Congo camp. They nearly missed it, for during the intervening eight days the jungle vines and creepers had already begun to grow back over it, obliterating all traces. There was not much left-a few shreds of orange nylon, a dented aluminum cooking pan, the crushed tripod, and the broken video camera, its green circuit boards scattered across the ground. They found no bodies, and since the light was fading they pressed on.

Amy was distinctly agitated, She signed, No go.

Peter Elliot paid no attention.

Bad place old place no go.

“We go, Amy,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later they came to a break in the overhanging trees. Looking up, they saw the dark cone of Mukenko rising above the forest, and the faint crossed green beams of the lasers glinting in the humid air. And directly beneath the beams were the moss-covered stone blocks, half concealed in jungle foliage, of the Lost City of Zinj.

Elliot turned to look at Amy.

Amy was gone.

4. WEIRD

HE COULD NOT BELIEVE IT.

At first he thought she was just punishing him, running off to make him sorry for shooting the dart at her on the river. He explained to Munro and Ross that she was capable of such things, and they spent the next half hour wandering through the jungle, calling her name. But there was no response, just the eternal silence of the rain forest. The half hour became an hour, then almost two hours.

Elliot was panic-stricken.

When she still did not emerge from the foliage, another possibility had to be considered. “Maybe she ran off with the last group of gorillas,” Munro said.

“Impossible,” Elliot said.

“She’s seven, she’s near maturity.” Munro shrugged.

“She is a gorilla.” -

“Impossible,” Elliot insisted.

But he knew what Munro was saying. Inevitably, people who raised apes found at a certain point they could no longer keep them. With maturity the animals became too large, too powerful, too much their own species to be controllable. It was no longer possible to put them in diapers and pretend they were cute humanlike creatures. Their genes coded inevitable differences that ultimately became impossible to overlook.

“Gorilla troops aren’t closed,” Munro reminded him. “They accept strangers, particularly female strangers.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” Elliot insisted. “She couldn’t.”

Amy had been raised from infancy among human beings. She was much more familiar with the Westernized world of freeways and drive-ins than she was with the jungle. If Elliot drove his car past her favorite drive-in, she was quick to tap his shoulder and point out his error. What did she know of the jungle? It was as alien to her as it was to Elliot himself. And not only that- “We’d better make camp,” Ross said, glancing at her watch. “She’ll come back-if she wants to. After all,” she said, “we didn’t leave her. She left us.”

They had brought a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne but nobody was in a mood to celebrate. Elliot was remorseful over the loss of Amy; the others were horrified by what they had seen of the earlier camp; with night rapidly falling, there was much to do to setup the ERTS system known as WEIRD (Wilderness Environmental Intruder Response Defenses).

The exotic WEIRD technology recognized the fact that perimeter defenses were traditional throughout the history of Congo exploration. More than a century before, Stanley observed that “no camp is to be considered complete until it is fenced around by bush or trees.” In the years since there was little reason to alter the essential nature of that instruction.

But defensive technology had changed, and the WEIRD system incorporated all the latest innovations.

Kahega and his men inflated the silvered Mylar tents, arranging them close together. Ross directed the placement of the tubular infrared night lights on telescoping tripods. These were positioned shining outward around the camp.

Next the perimeter fence was installed. This was a lightweight metalloid mesh, more like cloth than wire. Attached to stakes, it completely enclosed the campsite, and when hooked to the transformer carried 10,000 volts of electrical current. To reduce drain on the fuel cells, the current was pulsed at four cycles a second, creating a throbbing, intermittent hum.

Dinner on the night of June 20 was rice with rehydrated Creole shrimp sauce. The shrimps did not rehydrate well, remaining little cardboard-tasting chunks in the mix, but nobody complained about this failure of twentieth-century technology as they glanced around them at the deepening jungle darkness.

Munro positioned the sentries. They would stand -four-hour watches; Munro announced that he, Kahega, and Elliot would take the first watch.

With night goggles in place, the sentries looked like mysterious grasshoppers peering out at the jungle. The night goggles intensified ambient light and overlaid this on the preexisting imagery, rimming it in ghostly green. Elliot found the goggles heavy, and the electronic view through them difficult to adjust to. He pulled them off after several minutes, and was astonished to see that the jungle was inky black around him. He put them back on hastily.

The night passed quietly, without incident.