Keep The Giraffe Burning (5 page)

Finally, Cobb talked to one of the rescue workers who’d been digging for the body.

‘Everywhere we went down, we struck rock. I didn’t know it was rock right away, I thought maybe the guy was wearing a suit of armour or something, see? Anyway, I went down around the head, and more rock. I says, Hell, where is the rest of this guy?

‘So then I got down with a trowel, cleared the soil around the head, and got my hand under it, see, to lift it up. So I’m like this, see, with my right hand under the head, and my left on the face. I can feel the guy’s breath on the back of my hand. I start to lift, and then I look.

‘I couldn’t believe it. I can feel the guy’s breath. I’m lifting, and I’m looking right where the guy’s brain ought to be. And I’m seeing a handful of room and dirt, with slugs and things crawling around in it.
There’s no back to his head.
Just a face!’

Slugs and things. Any chance of heading off public hysteria was now gone. Wire services repeated Cobb’s story, heating it up. Within hours, police and army spokesmen had denied it, confirmed it and refused to comment. The medical examiner cleared his throat and admitted to sixty million viewers that, well, yes, he would have to say the face was alive, in a way. Medically speaking. Well, yes, it was breathing. And no, he had no explanation at the moment. But the experts were no doubt looking into it …

The
experts
? How many experts could there be on bodiless, living faces? Within days, however, there were dozens of expert opinions in the air. A botanist said the thing was no human face at all, but a peculiar species of mushroom. (He hadn’t actually seen it when he said this.) A famous plastic surgeon spoke of little-known advances in transplants. A zoologist spoke of protective camouflage. A religious leader mentioned
the imprint of Christ’s face on the veil of Veronica. Everyone spoke of the veil of secrecy that was keeping back the truth from the public.

In time, the government allowed a few photos to be published. The face was variously identified as Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Bormann, Amelia Earhart …

By now citizens in every part of the nation were spotting faces in their back yards, especially in the shadows of foliage. Others scanned the sky and found faces in the clouds, which they connected with the imminent flying saucer invasion. Unscrupulous or uncaring magazines dug up the fantasies of the Schmidt boy. By the end of the month, even the newsmen were getting tired of calls from spirit media (‘I have contacted the Face by ouija. It is Christian and vegetarian …’), from pranksters (‘Listen, I got this nose growing in my window box …’) and from prophets of doom. One day the
Sentinel
editor threw out letters from three people claiming the face as their own, one man from Mars, and one man who explained that the face was controlling his thoughts by means of a ‘death dream laser’. The editor then wrote an open letter asking for a special Presidential Commission to investigate:

We’ve had enough of official silence and scientific double-talk. The public is concerned and alarmed. The only way to put a stop to these crank letters and Halloween-mask hoaxes is to answer these questions: What is the Face? Where did it come from? How did it get planted in the park? Is it human and conscious? Can it speak? Can it think?

Actually a special project was already set up to investigate the object. Not appointed by the President or Congress (who were probably afraid of looking foolish), but by the Office of Naval Research jointly with University Hospital. As a lab technician from the hospital, I played a humble part in the project My duties were washing glassware and reading dials. Dull work, yes, but necessary. A vital part of the search for truth.

I arrived in town the day of the open letter. I cut it out of the
Sentinel
and pinned it on my wall at ‘home’. I intended to check off the editor’s questions one by one, as we found the answers.

‘Home’ for now was a disused Army barracks on the edge of the city, where most of the staff were quartered. I pinned up the letter and took a bus straight to Hill Park, hoping to glimpse the object itself. I didn’t even stop to unpack, which is why I forgot to bring my pass.

It was a warm June day, 27ºC. Most of the people on my bus seemed to be headed for the beach. As I later learned, most of them had no jobs to go to. I stepped off the bus and stood shading my eyes to look up at the hill in Hill Park. Near the top they were setting up the metal walls of our laboratory. The park gates were closed, and guarded by two Marines. Too late, I remembered the pass in my suitcase.

As I stood there, a man wearing a white armband with crude lettering on it handed me a leaflet.

‘I haven’t got any change,’ I said.

‘It’s free,’ he said. ‘Read it, mister. Find out what the Face really means. Come to our rally tonight and hear the truth.’

‘The truth?’

‘The real truth. Not what these government bastards want us to believe. The truth they’re afraid of.’

I didn’t tell him I was working for the government bastards; it would only have provoked him. He stared at me until I smiled and put the leaflet in my pocket. I forgot all about it for the time being.

From the window of the bus back to the barracks, I saw several wall graffiti I didn’t understand. But they all seemed to refer to the object. One was a face divided by a bolt of lightning. One was a face surrounded by sun rays. I remember these two only because I’ve seen them so often since, but there were many others. The object in the park had already become the focus of several movements, both political and mystical. Most of them, like the Society of the Peaceful Face, the American Vigilante Volunteers and the Space Brotherhood, either disbanded or merged, but anyhow dropped out of sight. Only two evolved and lived on.

The Guardians of the Mask emphasized the fact that the object was a white face. They believed it to be only part of the body to come. Any day now, the hands would turn up in, say, Britain, and the feet in Scandinavia, and the rest in other Caucasian countries. (Medical students often played cruel tricks with these pathetic hopes.) Finally the complete Messiah-Fuhrer would assemble himself and lead them into the final, racial Armageddon, in which all but the white race would certainly die.

The New Universologists on the other hand believed the object to be an oracle. They reckoned it had now been sleeping for nearly a thousand years. Soon it would awaken, to tell them what to do next, to achieve a world of lasting peace and brotherhood.

Normally both movements might have appealed only to a fringe of unhappy people, but these were far from normal times. The nation was undergoing great economic and political upheavals, and the government almost daily proved itself unequal to the problems of unemployment and unrest. Both movements attracted thousands in this city alone, and perhaps hundreds of thousands more were sympathetic to their causes. Other cities were close behind.

The Communist Party saw which way the wind blew, and lent some support to the New Universologists (NU), to help them organize. In return, over the next few months, the NU began to lay more stress on workers’ control of industry, and less on miracles. Reacting, ultra-conservative groups threw in their lot – and their considerable money – with the Guardians of the Mask (GM). Up and down the country there were demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, rallies and rally-smashers, protest marches and torchlight processions. And a sense of urgency. A sense that power was now within reach of those who most needed it. Power was just inside the gates of Hill Park.

Or so they must have thought. At different times, both groups tried
storming the park to rescue their idol. The police, even with state police reinforcements, were almost overwhelmed by the second attack. Next day the edge of the park was barricaded with sandbags, and several hundred Marines were billeted inside. From now on until the end of our project, no one could ever be allowed to come into the park.

The end of our project? It dragged its long, slow, serpent’s body through the summer, with no end in sight. One day in October I looked up at the news clipping on my wall. Not a single vital question had been answered. We knew nothing important, and it looked as though we never would. Our work had disintegrated into endless proofs and disproofs of secondary theories. The serpent had no end, it had swallowed it, and now chewed on itself …

Who am I, a lab technician, to make this judgement? I speak, not of the scientific facts, but of the human differences within the project. I wasn’t just washing glassware and reading dials, not all the time. I kept my eyes open.

There was a fundamental split from the very beginning, between Dr Lowell, our project director, and Dr Grauber, head of the medical section. The medical people wanted to move the object to University Hospital and place it under intensive care. Dr Lowell supported the biologists who argued against this, saying that it might be dangerous to uproot it from its present environment. Dr Grauber replied that this was entirely a medical decision, hence his to make. Dr Lowell said that depended entirely on whether or not the object was truly human.

‘How on earth can we find out what it is unless we get it into a proper laboratory? Do you expect my men to do biopsies out
here
?’ Grauber had to stand on tiptoe to shout this into Lowell’s face. The director was a head taller than Grauber, and, like many big men, bland and almost friendly in an argument. He liked to pose as a big, jolly, absent-minded professor, slow of speech and always fishing for his pipe in one packet of his baggy tweed jacket. In reality he was a ruthless executive. Whatever he knew or didn’t know about science, he knew how to command. Most of us came to respect him, even like him.

Grauber was generally unliked. I knew him from the hospital, where they called him Napoleon. A cold, logical little man, a brilliant scientist, but he threw tantrums when he didn’t get his way.

He tore off his pince-nez and shook them under Lowell’s nose – as though he wanted to shake a fist at him. ‘Is that what you expect? Is it? Is it?’

Lowell sighed. ‘Dr Grauber, I expect you to follow my direction. We’ll get along better if you do, okay?’

It was not okay. The arguments grew worse as the project dragged on through the summer. The staff were all upset; we all found ourselves taking sides. I would hear:

‘Grauber just wants to get control of the project himself. So he wants to drag the thing off to his own lab, and then gradually ease Lowell out of the driver’s seat. I’ve seen his kind before.’

‘Are you crazy? Grauber’s ten times the scientist Lowell ever will be. And I’ll tell you something else. He really cares about that “thing” out there. It’s no “thing” to him, it’s a human being in need of medical treatment.’

There was something in both sides; I didn’t know what to believe. After one shattering evening of this, I quit work early. I had to drag myself on the bus, and then I sat with closed eyes, wishing away my throbbing headache. The engine vibration and bright lights were still getting through to me, so finally I got out and walked.

It was quiet and dark. Just my footsteps and the occasional streetlight. I noticed my headache going.

Then I turned a corner and found myself at a rally of the New Universologists. There were maybe fifty people listening, and one white-haired man speaking from the back of a pickup truck. The banner behind him said
THE FACE OF PEACE
, and showed the sun-ray symbol. Most of the people looked poor, but more or less respectable. One exception was the dirty, unshaven man who was taking pictures.

‘… a face of peace,’ said the speaker. ‘Brothers, do you know what peace means? Do any of us know? Have they ever let us find out? Not a chance.

‘Of course peace will be hard on same people. Think of all those rich arms manufacturers that’ll have to go out and get an honest job! Think of all the generals who might have to work for a living! Think of the paid-off politicians who get a piece of every big arms contract – on relief! We all know who’s against peace, don’t we?
And they’ve got a steel ring around Hill Park right now!

‘What are they so afraid of, brothers? I’ll tell you …’

But he never did tell us, for just then a man in a Halloween mask jumped up and pulled him down off the tuck. There were more men in masks with baseball bats, hitting people in the front of the crowd.

Someone screamed, ‘The GMs!’

We ran. I looked back from a safe distance. Two of the invaders were kicking the white-haired man as he lay in the street. Others were tying to turn over the truck. My headache was back, and now I felt sick to my stomach besides.

At work the Grauber-Lowell arguments went on. Medical staff monitored the object’s temperature, pulse and respiration (dials for me to read), all below normal. They took tissue samples (a biopsy) and found it had human flesh. Radiologists found that the face contained normal human face bones and teeth. The jaw was fused, unworkable. Three of the teeth had metal fillings. All this enabled Grauber to say:

‘It’s human, for God’s sake! It’s in a coma. Probably dying!’

‘
Part
-human,’ Lowell replied, lighting his pipe. ‘A symbiosis, I think. And we’re in a unique position to study it in its natural environment. Let’s not plop it in a hospital bed just yet, shall we?’

And there was evidence for his side, too. The back of the object was connected to the soil through masses of tiny thread-like roots. Vegetation
seemingly living in symbiosis with a human face. Just how the two worked together was unclear. An ultrasonic probe showed clusters of tiny sacs attached to some of these roots. The sacs pulsated together, providing the object’s pseudo-breathing.