No Enemy but Time (4 page)

In addition to my gear I had at least three other things going for me before I jumped from the scaffold to
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the ground. First, Air Force doctors had immunized me against every conceivable East African disease and several inconceivable ones. Second, I had spent eight months in the Lolitabu National Park with the old Wanderobo warrior Thomas Babington Mubia undergoing wilderness training. And third, I had visited this same untamed epoch thousands of times in my dreams. I could never believe that I might die in this distant realm of
ngoma
, or spirits.

I unfastened my harness, removed my earphones, and pulled away the electrodes taped to my temples and brow. After easing myself to a sitting position, I surveyed the landscape and jumped. The Beau Brummell of hominids debuting in an era of sartorial barbarism. I took my red bandanna from my pocket and tied it about my neck, thinking that surely it imparted to my diminutive figure a dashing, even piratical air. As if anyone here—and I saw no one—gave a damn. Despite being armed, or perhaps because of it, I felt like a paratrooper who has landed miles and miles behind enemy lines.

Beside me, a dazzling turquoise in the morning sun, the lake. It was larger than its twentieth-century self; a brief jog would have carried me into its shallows. The lake's oddest feature today was that, Joshua Kampa aside, it had no constituency. Despite its name, Lake Hippopotamus entertained no boisterous or sunbathing riverhorses. No skittish herds of gazelles or wildebeest braved its open shoreline to slake their thirst, and not a single crocodile knifed through the languid waters looking for breakfast. An eerie emptiness reigned.

Turning to the east, I found that the mosaic habitat of savannah, bush, thornveldt, and gallery forest afforded a similar glimpse of the native wildlife. None. No birds in the sky, and no animals out there among the trees and grasses. The wide, rolling plain was vacant, and the range of gentle, faraway hills over which the sun was now rising looked as uninhabited as the highlands of the moon. Had the project code-named White Sphinx translated me to primogenial Pangea rather than to preadamite Africa? I was utterly alone. For the first time in my life I did not know whether I was waking or dreaming!

From the breast pocket of my bush jacket I took the handheld communicator that was supposed to establish instantaneous contact with my colleagues in the twentieth century. A transcordion, Kaprow had dubbed it. Its
modus operandi
involved a piezoelectric correspondence among the crystals in the microcircuitry of each matched pair. Kaprow had the mate to mine, and, theoretically, all I had to do to communicate with him was type out a message on my instrument's tiny keyboard.

Previous tests, with travelers who had dropped back only a century or two, had shown that the transcordions performed reliably even under adverse weather conditions. Eventually, therefore, Kaprow had convinced himself that the size of the temporal gap separating a pair of transcordions had no bearing at all on their effectiveness. The energy expenditure involved in sending me to the Pleistocene had not permitted us to test this hypothesis in my case, however, and I quickly learned that Woodrow Kaprow, Genius Extraordinaire, had figured wrong. Marconi, Bell, and Edison no doubt had their off days, too.

But for those who collect First Words, Last Words, and/or Pithy Epigrams, here is the first message I fed into my transcordion: “
That
'
s one small leap for a man, one giant step backward for humanity.

” It pleased me to be typing rather than speaking this message—because I did not have to fear that radio static would garble my words and perhaps obscure or delete the altogether crucial article in my first clause.

Kaprow did not reply.

Maybe he had not found my opening gambit amusing. I got serious: “
The lake seems to be dead, and
the landscape is barren of all life but vegetation. Dr. Blair was right in assuring us that I would be
visiting a wetter, more hospitable period, though. The desert of Zarakal
'
s Northwest Frontier
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District is no desert this morning. It
'
s a big, gone-to-seed golf course with woods, sand traps,
water hazards, and overgrown fairways. The absence of wildlife scares me. It
'
s going to be
impossible to shoot a hyrax here, much less a birdie or an eagle.
”

I gave Kaprow a good five minutes to register and digest this information, but still he did not reply. I grew uneasy. Perhaps the enormous span of time separating the physicist and me
had
affected the transcordions. If it made for a small time lag between sending and receiving, well, that would entail inconvenience, certainly, but not catastrophe. Astronauts, after all, have to cope with this phenomenon.

Why not a chrononaut, then?

Walking a few steps along the shore, I keyed this in: “
The past
FEELS
different, Dr. Kaprow. At
least to me. It
'
s not a matter of misaligned geographies or molecules twisted sideways, really. It
'
s
even different from my perception of the Early Pleistocene in my spirit-traveling episodes. Let me
see if I can explain.
”

After clearing the transcordion's display area, I tried to explain: “
When I was small, probably about
ten or so, I was thumbing through a science book when I came across a strange photograph. It
showed a canary submerged on its perch in an aquarium. The bird was actually in the water, it
was wet, and there were guppies and goldfish swimming around it. How neat, I thought, how neat
and how weird. It reminded me of my own terrible out-of-placeness in my dreams.
”

My display area was nearly full. I cleared it again, knowing that Kaprow's unit was connected to a printout terminal that would preserve my messages on long sheets of computer paper. For portability's sake, of course, my transcordion had no such attachment, and Kaprow was therefore limited to messages of exactly ten lines at sixty-five characters a line. So far, though, he had not said, “
Boo.
”

I typed: “
You see, that canary was inside a cubic foot of water sheathed by an oxygen-permeable
membrane of laminated silicon. The canary was wet, but it could breathe. It was existing in an
alien physical medium. It looked bewildered, but it was existing, Dr. Kaprow, and that
'
s more or
less the way I
'
m experiencing the past. The past feels different, but it
'
s not impossible to breathe
and think here ... Does that give you any idea what the past feels like?
”

This time I waited. Surely, by now, Kaprow would have had time to receive and to respond to at least the first of my messages. I wanted his or Blair's advice about the absence of wildlife. Maybe I had leapt into the wrong past, and maybe our only viable course was to abort the mission.

“
That canary was surrounded by
FISH
,” I typed, surveying my creatureless paradise. “
I, on the
other hand, am totally alone. And I miss the fish. I miss them because I want the whole
Pleistocene, the complete experience of it. I've waited my entire life for this, Dr. Kaprow, and I'm
willing to wait a great deal longer to make those insidious, beautiful dreams of mine come true.

Do you read me?
”

No, I was not going to abort the mission. We had talked about the possibility of failing to establish or losing transcordion contact, but always with the tacit understanding that neither of these dreadful eventualities would befall us. The latter had occupied a bit more of our discussion time—after all, I could drop the transcordion on a rock or lose it in a stream bed or forfeit it to an envious and overbearing baboon—but because the transcordion was an instrument capable of withstanding a great deal of physical abuse, and because I fully understood its value, we had entertained the possibility of this danger only as a dutiful intellectual exercise.

“
DAMN IT, KAPROW! ANSWER ME, PLEASE!
”

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Our contingency plan was simple. In the event the transcordions failed, I was to assess my situation and either abort or continue the mission according to my intuitive assessment. If I opted to go ahead, I was to return the Backstep Scaffold to the interior of the omnibus (in order not to leave an anomalous hole in the prehistoric atmosphere) and come back to this lakeshore site at least once a day. At regular intervals Kaprow or one of his technicians would lower the scaffold so that I could either reject the invitation or clamber aboard for a trip back to the twentieth century. The appointed times for these rendezvous were dawn, noon, and sunset. Kaprow did not want to leave the scaffold out at night for fear of retracting into the omnibus's sensitive interior some rambunctious representative of a Pleistocene primate species. At all costs, it was necessary to avoid monkey fur in the works. Finally, Kaprow had dictated that I was not to remain longer than a week without direct transcordion contact.

Reaching over my head, I pushed the control on the scaffold and watched it withdraw upward through the bomb-bay doors of the omnibus. When these doors swung shut, hermetically sealing the guts of the time machine from Pleistocene eyes, the sky was whole again. I stood alone on the lakeshore; half-seen electric twinklings filled the air around me, like a caroling of microscopic fireflies. This phenomenon lasted only a moment or two. Staring at the place where the hole had been, I reflected that if anyone in the twentieth century successfully broke into the omnibus's equipment hold, the vehicle would either blow apart or lose the temporal pressure sustaining its prehistoric atmosphere. A violent explosion was the more likely of these two events, according to Kaprow, but in either case I would have to live out the remainder of my life in this desolate, primeval setting.

Returning the transcordion to my pocket, I murmured, “I miss the fish.”

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Seville, Spain

May 1963

Encarnación Consuelo Ocampo, whore and black-marketeer, had decided to take her son out of her dark second-floor apartment for the first time in his life. The child had spent his first winter sequestered in a pair of chilly tiled rooms. Within these walls he had slept, fed, excreted, crawled, babbled, played, caterwauled, and eventually, despite his extreme youth and smallness, learned to walk. By late spring, then, his mother had summoned the courage to take him upstairs into the sun.

Like Cantinflas in a movie comedy currently playing in a theatre near her tenement, Encarnación was an
analfebeto
, an illiterate. To complicate matters, she was also mute. If she had named her child, no one knew that name. Mute, she could not speak it; letterless, she could not write it. The infant, consequently, had grown to toddlerhood in a thunderstorm of nearly continuous silence. Only his own cries, the extraneous noises of the tenement, and the half-heard murmurings of his mother's clients had interrupted it.

Encarnación realized that if her son was ever to have a chance amid the terrible babel of adult life, she must remedy this situation. For too long she had kept him from feeling the afternoon sun on his pert, monkeyish face. That she had deprived him of this blessing, primarily because her neighbors regarded her as a fallen woman and a witch, shamed her deeply. Today she would articulate this shame by attempting
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to exorcise it.

Hoisting the boy onto her hip, Encarnación steeled herself to the ordeal of carrying him to the roof. Her dirty clothes she had knotted inside one of her cheap, capacious skirts, such as gypsy women wore, and this makeshift laundry bag provided a counterweight to the child. So laden, she left her apartment, walked along the gallery landing, and climbed a set of dingy interior stairs toward the building's concrete wash house.

Expressions of wonder and fear took turns passing across the child's face, but he hung on gamely and did not avert his eyes from a single challenge. Only the angry circle of sun peering down into the stairwell made him blink.

Near the roof Encarnación heard a sound like a single tiny fish frying in a skillet. Emerging into the open, she saw an old woman clad from pate to shoe tops in rusty ebony, all about her the sodden flags of wash day. This person gazed raptly at the Giralda, the tower of the great cathedral of Seville, while peeing into a tin can thrust beneath her concealing skirt.

The arrival of unexpected company startled the
vieja
, but, with a stoop and a whirl dazzling in one so ancient, she withdrew the can from between her legs, made a kind of toasting motion with it, and thereby salvaged both composure and pride.

Encarnación hesitated. Her child, his every didy in need of laundering, was wearing only a stained cotton jersey; and this old woman—hardly a friend, since no one in the building was—hurried forward to examine the boy. After easing her tin can onto the lid of the water drum beside the stairwell entrance, she poked the child with gnarly fingers, all the while gabbling furiously. Although he recoiled from these attentions, the pokes seemed to trouble him less than the spent air spiraling noisily from the
vieja
'
s
mouth. He had heard Encarnación give vent to many strange sounds, including, most often, tongue clicks meant to warn him away from mischief—but the crone's performance was of a different order, vigorous and patterned. It hypnotized as well as cowed him.

“
Qué alerto,
” declared the old woman, addressing the mother while studying the child. “Is it true that he has never heard the talk of other people? Is it true you have not taken him to the priests for christening?