No Enemy But Time

Chapter Seventeen

Joshua careered through five o’clock traffic on his battered red Kawasaki, leaning first this way and then that, the beach a stinging blur of whiteness to his left and, when too many automobiles and campers blocked the asphalt, the sandy right-hand shoulder of the highway—his private corridor to Pensacola. He was dirty, sweat and paint-stained, but if he tried to stop by the trailer for a change of clothes and a bite to eat, he would probably miss Blair’s arrival at the auditorium. He had to get there not merely in time to hear the Great Man’s opening remarks, but early enough to waylay him outside the building and let him know that Blair was not the only expert on East African Pleistocene ecology in the Florida panhandle.

Joshua Kampa—a.k.a. John-John Monegal—was another, an expert with no formal training but a great deal of eyewitness experience. Indeed, he had convinced himself that his entire previous life had been pointing him toward this meeting with Blair.

Alistair Patrick Blair, the noted hominid paleontologist from the African state of Zarakal.

Weaving in and out of traffic, Joshua repeated the name almost as if it were an incantation, a mantra: Ali stair Patrick Blair, Ali stair Patrick Blair, Ali stair Patrick Blair… By repeating the name to himself he convinced himself of the reality of the man’s visit and of the inevitability of his meeting Blair. The chant emptied his mind of every distraction, every possible impediment to his goal. The Kawasaki, at the bidding of some implacable Higher Power, was directing itself to Pensacola….

Three days ago Joshua had read in the News-Journal that Blair was going to speak tonight at one of the local high schools. To raise funds for his researches at Lake Kiboko in the Northwest Frontier District of Zarakal, he was in the United States under the auspices of the American Geographic Foundation for a series of public lectures. This stop in Pensacola, a city not on his original itinerary, was reputedly owing to his friendship with an American military man who had once visited the Lake Kiboko digs with a contingent from the United States embassy in Marakoi, Zarakal’s capital. Whatever the rationale, Alistair Patrick Blair was in northern Florida, almost within shouting distance even now, and soon he and Joshua would be face to face on the walkway outside the auditorium.

After all, how often did a world-renowned authority on human evolution—not to mention Zarakal’s only white cabinet minister—condescend to show his slides and deliver his spiel to an audience of Escambia Countians? Never before, the paper had said. Blair had visited Miami before, but never Pensacola, and Joshua shot toward this rendezvous like a madman.

For twelve years, ever since he had begun to record his spirit-traveling episodes on tape, Joshua had read and thoroughly digested every book about Pleistocene East Africa, paleoanthropological research, and human taxonomy that he could lay his hands on. In most of these tomes Blair was mentioned as the coequal of all the most prominent fossil hunters and cataloguers to emerge after World War I, and only last year the Great Man had consolidated this position, at least in popular terms, by being the host of the controversial television series Beginnings. Who better than Alistair Patrick Blair, then, to answer Joshua’s questions, the questions of one who had actually visited the temporal landscapes that Blair’s work attempted to reconstruct? Why, no one. No one but the Zarakali paleoanthropologist was likely to confirm the legitimacy of Joshua’s dreams.

He arrived at the school nearly an hour ahead of time and sat on his bike at a point on the broad, palm-lined boulevard from which he could clearly see both of the doors by which Blair would be likely to enter the auditorium. His plan would be foiled only if the Great Man was already inside. Surely that was not possible. Blair’s time was too valuable to spend exercising his vocal cords with local school officials in an unair-conditioned building. He would arrive from elsewhere, probably under escort.

The school’s parking lot began to fill, and people in loose-fitting summer clothes clustered in groups beneath the breezeway fronting the auditorium. Joshua’s digital watch said 7:43. Seventeen more minutes.

Twilight was congealing. From the pocket of his fatigue pants Joshua removed a small notepad. On its topmost sheet he wrote his name, address, and telephone number. Then, beneath the telephone number, he drew a tiny, five-fingered hand and blackened its interior—except for a stylized eye in the very center of the palm—with hurried crosshatchings. A signature from his childhood, one that he believed altogether appropriate to his impending encounter with Alistair Patrick Blair. He tore the sheet from the notepad, wiped his sweaty hands on his ribbed T-shirt, and folded his message to the paleontologist with care.

Many of the people arriving at the school for Blair’s talk stared at him, and he suddenly understood why.

A gnomish black man in dirty clothes sitting on a Japanese-made motorbike and fluttering a piece of paper between his fingers as if to dry it. He did not look very much like your typical paleontology buff, and his presence near the school was probably vaguely threatening to some of these people. A security guard in the auditorium’s breezeway—a heavyset black man—kept giving him the eye, too.

Five minutes later an old Cadillac convertible—a species of automobile so rare these days that Joshua could hardly believe this one existed—pulled up to the auditorium’s side door. Even in the thickening dusk, Blair was a recognizable figure in the convertible’s back seat. Joshua knew him by his high, tanned forehead; his dramatic white mustachios; and, his trademark on tour, a loose-fitting cotton shirt embroidered with tribal designs. Joshua kicked his bike to life and gunned it across the boulevard to the sidewalk parallel to the parked Cadillac. He put himself between the convertible and the steps leading up to the auditorium’s side door.

“Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, Dr. Blair. I’ve got to talk to you.”

The other man in the back seat—an Air Force colonel in a wrinkled summer uniform—half rose to scrutinize Joshua. “If you’ve got a ticket, young man, you can—”

“I’m going to buy one at the door.”

“Good. That’s the way to do it. You can hear Dr. Blair talk without presuming upon his time out here.”

“But I—”

“Come on, now. Move that contraption. He’s got a program to deliver, and you’re holding us up.”

Joshua pulled away from the convertible, stationed his bike under one of the palms lining the sidewalk, and darted back through the crowd to intercept the paleontologist on his way into the building. Before anyone could screen him off from Blair or scold him for his unmannerliness, he thrust his message into the Great Man’s hand and hurried back down the steps to the sidewalk.

“Don’t throw that away!” he called. “Keep it, sir! Keep it!”

Blair glanced down at him curiously, touched his brow with the slip of folded paper, and, to the admonitory murmurs of the Air Force colonel and a second escort in civilian clothes, disappeared through the door at the top of the steps.

Inside, Joshua took up a position against the auditorium’s eastern wall. His heart was pounding. Blair and his companions had probably believed him a political activist, possibly one of the opponents of the controversial arrangement whereby the United States had funded, built, and acquired access to a pair of modern military facilities on Zarakali soil, a naval base at Bravanumbi on the Indian Ocean, and an air base in the desert interior. Global politics was not on Joshua’s mind, however; he wanted to survive the evening and exchange a few words in private with the paleontologist. He was beginning to be sorry that he had not taken the time to change clothes and eat. Most of those in the metal folding chairs on the auditorium’s hardwood floor—during the school year, a basketball court—were either pointedly ignoring him or trying to figure out where he had stowed his broom.

Eventually, Blair, the Air Force colonel, and several other people filed onto the stage, and an official with the American Geographic Foundation—an attractive woman in a multicolored summer dress—took the lectern to introduce the Great Man, who stared at his knees or whispered with the colonel throughout her remarks. When she had concluded, the audience applauded warmly and Blair sauntered forward with outstretched arms and an engaging smile. He was in his early seventies, but still vigorous, still a glutton for adulation and work. The stage had been carefully set before his arrival, with props and portable movie screen, and he stalked back and forth along its apron as he reeled off an informal prologue to his program.

For better than twenty minutes, his bald pate shining, his mustachios sweat-dampened and bedraggled, Blair held forth on the differences between his assessments of recent African finds and the assessments of his chief on-the-scene rivals in paleoanthropological research, the Leakeys of Kenya. He and the Leakeys were good friends, he confided, but he liked to rib them for their excesses of enthusiasm. They liked to rib him, too. Blair and the Leakeys were members of one big, opinionated, and diverse family: the clan of hominid paleontologists.

“Although some of our colleagues in other fields have violently disputed the fact, hominid paleontologists are likewise members of another important family. Homo sapiens it’s called.”

This drew a laugh. Joshua laughed along with everybody else, and Blair, encouraged, moved on to the next segment of his performance. The highlight of this segment was an eloquent apostrophe to a plaster replica of the skull of a hominid that Blair, amid much controversy, had named Homo zarakalensis. He had discovered the original of this skull two years ago in his Kiboko digs, and his frequently ridiculed claim was that Homo zarakalensis, or Zarakali Man, represented a distinct form of hominid immediately ancestral to Homo erectus, the form that had mutated gradually into the first bona-fide representatives of Homo sapiens. In other words, Zarakali Man, an ancient inhabitant of Blair’s own country, was the earliest hominid deserving the unscientific description “human.” The Leakeys believed that H. zarakalensis—a term that Richard invariably placed in quotes as well as italics—actually belonged to the species already known as Homo habilis. Indeed, Richard Leakey had argued persuasively that Blair had created an entire species out of a shattered cranium, a jigger of Irish whiskey, and a dash of Zarakali chauvinism. If so, Blair was hardly the first. Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented.

Now, like Hamlet in the churchyard scene, Blair was flourishing a plaster-of-Paris death’s-head and addressing it feelingly:

The Great Man paused, stared into the vacant sockets of the skull, and then began to declaim again, his deep bass voice resonating in the old auditorium like the singing of the sea:

Showmanship. Even though this pseudo-Shakespearean rant could not have made perfect sense to everyone there, it inspired intermittent laughter and finally a cascade of applause.

Blair kissed the skull on its brow, replaced it tenderly on the table from which he had first picked it up, and signaled for the dousing of the auditorium’s lights. He then narrated a colorful and comprehensive slide program interspersing panoramic shots of the Lake Kiboko digs with close-ups of recent fossil discoveries, the native wildlife, and many of his assistants at the site. He confessed that much of the work at even a fruitful paleoanthropological site was downright boring, and that he was not one of those people who actively enjoyed roaming the lava beds in temperatures of 102°F. In addition, he no longer had the patience for the painstaking work of cleaning a fossil discovery still perilously in situ. Younger hands were steadier than his.

Next—something Joshua had not expected—a series of slides devoted to the paintings of a prominent Zarakali artist’s fastidious reconstructions of Pleistocene animals. Despite the heat, Joshua began to shiver. It was strange realizing that this artist, working from bone fragments and imaginative taxidermal hunch, had attempted to objectify the persistent subject matter of his dreams. How accurately had she accomplished the task? Indeed, had she accomplished it at all? Joshua was the only one on hand, not excepting Alistair Patrick Blair, who would be able to tell.

“First slide, please.”

There jumped onto the screen a fanciful genus of sheep or buffalo called Pelorovis olduvaiensis. It had enormous curling horns that measured, according to Blair, ten feet from tip to tip. Joshua had read about this animal, but he had never encountered it during his recurring thalamic jaunts into the Pleistocene and so could reach no conclusion about the accuracy of its depiction. He felt lightheaded, though, as if he had surrendered the burden of those horns to the creature in the painting.

“Next slide.”

This one was Hippopotamus gorgops, with its projecting brow ridges and periscopic eyes. Joshua recognized it from his dreams, and the artist had expertly rendered the goggle-eyed strabismus typical of this hippo’s entire clan.

More slides followed. Giraffes with headgear reminiscent of the antlers of North American moose. Giant baboons, giant warthogs, giant hyenas. Primitive elephants known as Dinotherium, with abbreviated trunks and backward-curving tusks. If the paintings of these animals fell short of total accuracy—and sometimes they did—they usually failed by misrepresenting some aspect of the skin or fur: color, texture, markings, length. Wholly understandable errors. All in all, Joshua was astonished by the artist’s clairvoyance.

“Next slide.”

Several slope-backed animals with manes and horselike snouts appeared on the screen. The artist had made the manes dark brown and the bodies that luminous tawny color peculiar to African lions. The creatures all had moderately long necks, and Blair, after executing a hammy double-take, invited everyone to tell him what these unlikely quadrupeds actually were. “Giraffes!” some people shouted.

“Antelopes!” others called. “A kind of horse!” a child’s voice cried.

Blair, dimly visible beside the screen, raised his hand. “Well, they are a variety of ungulate—that’s a vegetarian mammal with hooves—as are all the animals you’ve just named. But take a closer look at these hippogriffic camelopards. No one seems to have remarked their most distinctive and perhaps oddest feature.”

“Claws,” Joshua said to himself. Someone in the rear of the auditorium emphatically shouted the word.

“Right you are.” Blair stepped into the ray of the slide projector and tapped the feet of one of the animals rippling on the screen. “Very good. Of course, no one has yet put a name to our… our camelopardian hippogriffs. What’s the matter? Doesn’t anyone out there wish to rescue these poor fellows from anonymity, if not extinction? They must have a name, you know.”

Joshua said, “They’re chalicotheres.” He pronounced the word clearly and correctly, KAL-uh-koh-THERZ. A lovely word, Joshua had always thought. His saying it took Blair by surprise.

“Ah, a full-fledged paleontologist in attendance,” the Great Man said, peering into the twilight grayness of the hall. “Or perhaps a crossword addict.”

The audience laughed.

“No, no, I don’t mean to joke. Who among you has done his homework, pray? That industrious and discerning soul deserves his own name spoken aloud. It would be fitting, I think, if he announced it for himself. Come on, then, speak up.”

Joshua said, “My name, address, and telephone number are in your pocket, sir.”

Discomfited by this intelligence and perhaps by his memory of the young man who had accosted him outside the hall, Blair was unable to find Joshua. “Sounds as if our expert handed me a bill of lading, doesn’t it?” The audience chuckled only tentatively at this riposte, and the Great Man turned back to the screen. Joshua noted that he was patting a trouser pocket, as if trying to reassure himself that he still had that address slip on his person. He seemed to fear that it had mutated into something unpleasant, like a hernia or a hand grenade.

“Chalicothere means ‘fossil beast,’” Blair gingerly resumed, facing the hall again. “I used to know a little ditty about the creature. ’T went, I believe, something like this:

This was well received. Blair had overcome a moment of perplexity by falling back on a show-biz schtick that had undoubtedly served him well in the past. It consigned the voice of Joshua Kampa to oblivion and permitted an effortless segue into pure lecture:

“Baron Cuvier, the father of modern paleontology, held that any animal with teeth shaped like the chalicothere’s and showing wear patterns indicative of vegetarianism—well, he said that any animal of that sort must certainly have hooves. The operative word here, of course, is ‘must,’ for it ultimately betrayed the poor Baron to the profligacy and the unpredictability of Mother Nature.

“Cuvier died in 1832. The discovery, soon thereafter, of the remains of a chalicothere proved him dead—D.E.A.D.—wrong. Here was a herbivore with monstrous claws on its feet, and no one could satisfactorily explain what the creature used them for. A standard speculation is that the chalicothere dug roots and tubers out of the ground with its nails and so occupied an ecological niche quite distinct from that of most of its fellow ungulates.”

“It also ate flesh,” Joshua said quite loudly.

“Oh, my goodness,” Blair murmured. At his insistent beckoning the lights were turned back on, and, shielding his eyes, he scanned the floor for his kibitzer. “That, I’m afraid, is quite a ridiculous assumption.”

“It’s a simple statement of fact.”

Blair, having finally found Joshua, dropped his hand from his brow and addressed the young man expert to upstart. “The microwear patterns on the chalicothere teeth available to us for examination don’t support that ‘simple statement of fact.’”

“Then maybe you’ve got the wrong damn chalicothere teeth, sir. I’ve seen them scavenging, using their claws as a civet or a hyena might.”

“Seen them?” The Great Man was broadly incredulous.

Joshua wrapped his arms around his middle, like a patient in a straitjacket. A photographer from the News-Journal rose from one of the metal folding chairs, crept forward from the front, and exploded a flash bulb in his eyes. From other angles the man took other photographs.

“Yes, sir,” Joshua said, blinking, an audible quaver in his voice. “What I mean is—” He had erred, saying that aloud, but he did not want to back down. The crowd, he could feel, was against him. Having one of the few black faces in the hall did little to endear him to Blair’s outraged partisans, but challenging the Great Man in public was the more heinous offense. Joshua could feel their stares going through him like unmetered dosages of radiation. A crazy nigger had interrupted their soirée. “All I’m saying,” he resumed, feeling the heat, “is that the chalicothere isn’t quite what you people with your microscopes and calipers have imagined it. That’s all I’m saying. Is that such an unspeakable heresy?”

“Sit down!” a man in the middle of the auditorium shouted. “Shut your mouth and sit down!” A low murmuring of approval greeted this suggestion. When Joshua refused to budge, however, the murmurs turned into catcalls.

“No insults or abuse!” Blair roared from the stage. “Insults and abuse are to be reserved for scientists attempting to sort out the implications of conflicting theories! This young man and I are scientists, and we are quite capable of insulting and abusing each other without your impertinent assistance!”

Grudgingly the hall quieted.

“Perhaps I should note,” Blair continued, the voice of Sweet Reason, “that many East African peoples, members of several different modern tribes, have legends about a creature called the ‘Nandi bear.’ It’s not supposed to be so large as the animals depicted here,” tapping the overilluminated images on the screen, “but it has the same downward-sloping back and, according to legend, eats flesh as well as vegetation. I’ve always felt there is a connection between the Nandi bear and these prehistoric creatures.

It is a fact, I’m afraid, that we’ll never know everything there is to know about animals that are extinct.”

“They’re the wrong color, too,” Joshua persisted, indicating the chalicotheres on the screen. “You never see them that corny lion color. They’re beautifully striped. Brown over beige in wavery Vs that point toward their butts.”

“Can’t we get him out of here?” another voice called, and the undercurrent of grumbling erupted into jeers and boos. Although Blair might choose to be sweet and forbearing, these people had paid three dollars apiece to listen to his lecture, not that of some no-name pygmy with delusions of paleoanthropological infallibility. Joshua did not blame them for wanting him out, but he was powerless to silence himself. These several hours in Pensacola were supposed to mark a turning point in his life, a turning point long deferred, and he was not going to surrender to their hostility.

“And another thing, Dr. Blair, Homo zarakalensis is a figment of your imagination, just as Richard Leakey says.” Joshua could see that the security guard who had been standing at the rear of the hall was now strolling down the aisle toward him. “Zarakalensis is a habiline, just like the hominids discovered by Louis Leakey’s son at Koobi Fora in Kenya. You know this yourself, sir.”

The booing intensified, and the security guard, the same imposing black man who had eyed him earlier, took him by the arm. “That’s enough,” he said quietly. “I think you’ve had your say.” His grip a remorseless shackle, the guard led Joshua out of the auditorium to the goose-stepping cadence of hand clapping.

“Not only does the young man see into the past,” Blair called out to the audience, apparently attempting to quiet it again, “he also sees into the minds of ancient monuments like myself!”

Those were the last of Blair’s words that Joshua heard that night.