Galapagos Part 9

Small world.

That the diesels still worked was to the Captain simply one more reason to make himself wild and stupid with cognac. He switched off the engines, and it was a good thing he did. If he had let them run long enough to get really hot, that temperature anomaly might have attracted the electronic attention of a Peruvian fighter-bomber in the stratosphere. In Vietnam, we had heat-sensing instruments so sensitive that could actually detect the presence of people, or at least big mammals of some kind, in the night-because their bodies were just a little bit warmer than their surroundings.

One time I called in an artillery barrage on a water buffalo. Usually it was people out there-trying to sneak up on us and kill us, if they could. What a life! I would have loved to put down all my weapons and become a fisherman instead.

And that was the sort of thing the Captain was thinking up there on the bridge: "What a life!" and so on. It was all very funny, except he didn't feel like laughing. He thought that life had now taken his measure, had found him not worth much of anything, and was now through with him. Little did he know!

He went out on the sun deck, which was aft of the bridge and the officers' cabins, his bare feet on bare steel. Now that the sun deck had been stripped of its carpeting, the plugged holes which were supposed to receive the mounts for weapons were plainly visible, even in starlight. I myself had welded four of the plates on the sun deck. Most of my work, and my finest work, however, was deep inside.

The Captain looked up at the stars, and his big brain told him that his planet was an insignificant speck of dust in the cosmos, and that he was a germ on that speck, and that nothing could matter less than what became of him. That was what those big brains used to do with their excess capacity: blather on like that. To what purpose? You won't catch anybody thinking thoughts like that today.

So then he saw a shooting star-a meteorite burning up on the edge of the atmosphere, up where Lieutenant Colonel Reyes in his s.p.a.ce suit had just received word that Peru was officially at war with Ecuador. The shooting star cued the Captain's big brain to have him marvel yet again about how unprepared people were for meteorites striking the Earth's surface.

And then there was this tremendous explosion out at the airport, as the rocket and the radar dish honeymooned.

The hotel bus, all painted up outside with the blue-footed b.o.o.bies and marine iguanas and penguins and flightless cormorants and so on, was at that moment parked in front of a hospital. The Captain's brother *Siegfried was about to go inside to get help for *James Wait, who had lost consciousness. *Wait's heart attack had necessitated this detour on the way to the airport, which had surely saved the lives of all on board.

The great bubble of the shock wave from that explosion was as dense as bricks. To those on the bus, it seemed that hospital itself had exploded. The windows and winds.h.i.+eld of the bus were blown inward, but turned out to have been shatterproof. They had not turned to shrapnel. Mary and Hisako and Selena and *Kazakh and poor *Wait and the Kanka-bono girls and the Captain's brother were pelted with seeming kernels of white corn instead.

This would happen on the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin as well. The windows would all be blown in, and white kernels would be underfoot everywhere. as well. The windows would all be blown in, and white kernels would be underfoot everywhere.

The hospital, so full of light only moments before, was blacked out now, as was the whole city, and there were cries for help coming from inside. The engine of the bus was still running, thank G.o.d, and its headlights illuminated a narrow pathway through the debris up ahead. So *Siegfried, becoming more palsied by the second, still managed to drive away from there. What help could he or anybody else on the bus be to the survivors, if any, in the blasted hospital?

And the logic of the maze of rubble directed the creeping bus away from the center of the explosion, the airport, and toward the waterfront. The road across the marsh from the edge of the city to the deepwater wharves was in fact almost clear of wreckage, there was so little for the shock wave to knock down out there.

*Siegfried von Kleist drove to the waterfront because it was the path of least resistance. Only he could see where they were going. The others were still on the floor of the bus. Mary Hepburn had dragged the unconscious *James Wait away from the Kanka-bono girls, so that he was lying flat on his back now, with her lap for a pillow. The big brains of the Kanka-bonos had shut down entirely, for want of even a wisp of a theory as to what was going on. Hisako Hiroguchi and Selena MacIntosh and *Kazakh were similarly immobilized.

And everybody was deaf, since the shock wave had done such violence to the bones in their inner ears, the tiniest bones in their bodies. Nor would any of them recover their sense of hearing entirely. With the exception of the Captain, the first colonists on Santa Rosalia would all be slightly deaf, so that a good deal of their conversations would consist, in one language or another, of "Eh?" and "Speak up" and so on.

This defect, fortunately, was not inheritable.

Like Andrew MacIntosh and Zenji Hiroguchi, they would never find out what hit them-unless there were answers to questions like that at the far end of the blue tunnel into the Afterlife. They would accept the Captain's theory that the explosion and another explosion still to come had been the impacts of white-hot boulders from outer s.p.a.ce-but not wholeheartedly, since the Captain would prove to be laughably mistaken about so many things.

The Captain's palsied younger brother, his ears ringing, some of his hearing returning, stopped the bus on the wharf near the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin. He had not expected her to be a haven. He was unsurprised to find her dark and apparently deserted, with her windows blown in, her lifeboats missing, and barely secured to the wharf by a single line at her stern. Her freed bow was some distance from the wharf, so that her gangplank dangled over water.

She had of course been looted, like the hotel. The wharf was littered with wrappings and cartons and other trash discarded by the scavengers.

*Siegfried did not expect to see his brother. He had heard that the Captain had left New York, but not that he had actually reached Guayaquil. If the Captain was somewhere in Guayaquil, he was very likely dead or injured, or, in any case, in no position to be of much help to anyone. n.o.body in Guayaquil at that point in history was in a position to be of much help to anyone else.

Quoth Mandarax: Help yourself, and heaven will help you.-JEAN DE LA FONTAINE (16211695) The most *Siegfried hoped to find was a peaceful stopping place in chaos. This he did. There did not seem to be anybody else around.

So he got out of the bus, to see if he couldn't somehow get the involuntary dancing movements caused by Huntington's ch.o.r.ea under control by doing exercises-jumping jacks and push-ups, and deep-knee bends and so on.

The moon was coming up.

And then he saw a human figure rising to its feet on the sun deck of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin.

It was his brother, but the Captain's face was in shadow, so *Siegfried did not recognize him.

*Siegfried had heard whispered stories about the s.h.i.+p's being haunted. He believed that he was beholding a ghost. He thought it was me. He thought he was seeing Leon Trout.

36.

THE CAPTAIN recognized his brother, though, and he shouted down to him what I might have been tempted to shout, had I been a materialized ghost up there. He shouted this: "Welcome to 'the Nature Cruise of the Century'!" recognized his brother, though, and he shouted down to him what I might have been tempted to shout, had I been a materialized ghost up there. He shouted this: "Welcome to 'the Nature Cruise of the Century'!"

The Captain, still holding on to his bottle, although it was empty now, came down to the main deck at the stern, so that he was nearly on a level with his brother, and *Siegfried, because he was so deaf, came as close as he could without falling into the narrow moat between them. That moat was bridged by the stern line, by that white umbilical cord.

"I'm deaf," said *Siegfried. "Are you deaf, too?"

"No," said the Captain. He had been much farther away than *Siegfried from the center of the explosion. He had a nosebleed, though, which he chose to find comical. He had bashed his nose when the shock wave knocked him down on the sun deck. The cognac had exacerbated his sense of humor to the point where everything was screamingly funny.

He thought that the exercises *Siegfried had done on the wharf were a lampoon on the dancing sickness they both might have inherited from their father. "I liked your imitation of Father," he said. The whole conversation was in German-the language of their infancy, the first language they had known.

"Adie!" said *Siegfried. "This isn't funny!"

"Everything is funny," said the Captain.

"Do you have any medicine? Do you have any food? Do you still have beds?" said *Siegfried.

The Captain replied with a quotation well known to Mandarax: I owe much; I have nothing. I give the rest to the poor.-FRANCOIS RABELAIS (14941553) "You're drunk!" said *Siegfried.

"Why not?" the Captain asked. "I'm nothing but a clown." The random damage done to his brain by cognac made him terribly self-centered. He could give no thought to the suffering others must be doing in the dark and blasted city in the distance. "You know what one of my own crewmen said to me when I tried to keep him from stealing the compa.s.s, Ziggie?"

"No," said *Siegfried, and he started to dance again.

"'Out of the way, you clown!'" said the Captain, and he laughed and laughed. "He dared to say that to an admiral, Ziggie. I would have had him hanged from the yardarm, hick hick-if somebody hadn't stolen the, hick hick, yard-arm, hick hick. At dawn, hick hick-if somebody hadn't stolen the dawn."

People still get the hiccups, incidentally. They still have no control over whether they do it or not. I often hear them hiccupping, involuntarily closing their glottises and inhaling spasmodically, as they lie on the broad white beaches or paddle around the blue lagoons. If anything, people hiccup more now than they did a million years ago. This has less to do with evolution, I think, than with the fact that so many of them gulp down raw fish without chewing them up sufficiently.

(PEOPLE).

And people still laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody else laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago.

37.

"HICK," THE THE C CAPTAIN WENT ON, "actually I have been vindicated, hick hick, *Siegfried," the Captain went on. "I have long said that we should expect to be hit by large meteorites from time to time. That has, hick hick, come to, hick hick, pa.s.s."

"It was the hospital that blew up," said *Siegfried. So it had seemed to him.

"No hospital ever blew up like that," said the Captain, and, to *Siegfried's dismay, he climbed up on the rail and prepared to jump to the wharf. It wasn't all that much of a jump, really-only about two meters across the moat, but the Captain was very drunk.

The Captain aviated successfully, cras.h.i.+ng to his knees on the wharf. This cured his hiccups.

"Is there anybody else on the s.h.i.+p?" said *Siegfried.

"n.o.body here but us chickens," said the Captain. He had no idea that he and *Siegfried were responsible for rescuing anybody but each other. Everybody on the bus was still on the floor. *Siegfried, incidentally, had entrusted Mary Hepburn with Mandarax, in case she had to communicate with Hisako Hiroguchi. Mandarax, as I've said, was useless as an interpreter for the Kanka-bonos.

The Captain put his arm across the quaking shoulders of *Siegfried, and said to him, "Don't be scared, little brother. We're from a long line of survivors. What's a little shower of meteorites to a von Kleist?"

"Adie-" said *Siegfried, "is there some way we can get the s.h.i.+p closer to the dock?" He thought the people on the bus might feel a little safer and surely less cramped on s.h.i.+pboard.

"f.u.c.k the s.h.i.+p. Nothing left on her," said the Captain. "I think they even stole old Leon." Again-Leon was me.

"Adie-" said *Siegfried, "there are ten people on that bus, and one of them is having a heart attack."

The Captain squinted at the bus. "What makes them so invisible?" he said. His hiccups were gone again.

"They're all on the floor, and they're scared to death," said *Siegfried. "You've got to sober up. I can't look after them. You're going to have to do whatever you can. I'm not in control of my own actions anymore, Adie. Of all the times for it to happen-I have Father's disease."

Time stopped, as far as the Captain was concerned. This was a familiar illusion for him. He could count on experiencing it several times a year-whenever he received news he could not joke about. He knew how to get time going again, which was to deny the bad news. "It isn't true," he said. "It cannot be."

"You think I dance for the fun of it?" said *Siegfried, and he was involuntarily dancing away from his brother.

He approached the Captain again, just as involuntarily, saying, "My life is over. It probably never should have been lived. At least I never reproduced, so that some poor woman might give birth to yet another monstrosity."

"I feel so helpless," said the Captain, and added wretchedly, "and so G.o.dd.a.m.n drunk. Jesus-I certainly expected no more responsibilities. I'm so drunk. I can't think. Tell me what to do, Ziggie."

He was too drunk to do much of anything, so he stood by, slack-jawed and goggle-eyed, while Mary Hepburn and Hisako and *Siegfried, whenever poor *Siegfried could stop dancing, hauled the stern of the s.h.i.+p right up to the wharf with the bus, and then parked the bus under the stern, so that it could be used as a ladder up to the lowest deck of the s.h.i.+p, which would have been unreachable otherwise.

And oh, yes, you could say, "Wasn't that ingenious of them?" and, "They could never have done that if they hadn't had great big brains," and, "You can bet n.o.body today could figure out how to do stuff like that," and so on. Then again, those people wouldn't have had to behave so resourcefully, wouldn't have been in such complicated difficulties, if the planet hadn't been made virtually uninhabitable by the creations and activities of other people's great big brains.

Quoth Mandarax: What's lost upon the roundabouts we pulls up on the swings!-PATRICK REGINALD CHALMERS (18721942) People expected the most trouble to come from the unconscious *James Wait. Actually, the most trouble would come from the Captain, who was too drunk to be trusted as a link in the human chain, who could only sit on the back seat of the bus and rue how drunk he was.

His hiccups had returned.

Here is how they got *James Wait up on the s.h.i.+p: There was enough extra stern line on the wharf for Mary Hepburn to make a harness for him at the free end of the line. This was all her idea, the harness. She was, after all, an experienced mountaineer. They laid him beside the bus with the harness on. Then she and Hisako and *Siegfried got on the roof and hauled him up as gently as possible. And then the three of them got him over the rail and onto the main deck. They would later move him up to the sun deck, where he would regain consciousness briefly-long enough for him and Mary Hepburn to become man and wife.

*Siegfried then came back down to tell the Captain that it was his turn to get aboard. The Captain, knowing he was going to make a fool of himself while trying to reach the roof, played for time. Jumping while drunk was easy. Climbing anything the least bit complicated was something else again. Why so many of us a million years ago purposely knocked out major chunks of our brains with alcohol from time to time remains an interesting mystery. It may be that we were trying to give evolution a shove in the right direction-in the direction of smaller brains.

So the Captain, playing for time, and trying to sound judicious and respectable, although he could scarcely stand up, said to his brother, "I'm not so sure that man was well enough to be moved."

*Siegfried was out of patience with him. He said, "That's too d.a.m.n bad, isn't it-because we just moved the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d anyway. Maybe we should have called a helicopter instead, and had him flown to the bridal suite at the Waldorf-Astoria."

And those would be the last words the brothers von Kleist would ever exchange, except for "Hup!" and "Allez oop!" and "Whoops!" and so on, as the Captain tried and failed to get up on the roof of the bus again and again.

But he finally did get up, although thoroughly humiliated. He was at least able to go from the roof to the s.h.i.+p without further a.s.sistance. And then *Siegfried told Mary to get on the s.h.i.+p with the rest of them, and to do what she could for *Wait, whom they believed to be Willard Flemming. She did as she was told, thinking it was a matter of manly pride for him to climb to the roof without a.s.sistance.

That left *Siegfried all alone on the wharf, looking up at the rest of them. And they expected him to join them, but that was not to be. He sat down in the driver's seat instead. Despite his limbs' jerking this way and that, he started up the engine. His plan was to head back for the city at top speed, and to kill himself by smas.h.i.+ng into something.

Before he could put the bus in gear, he was stunned by the shock wave from yet another tremendous explosion. This one wasn't in or near the city. This one was downstream, and out in the virtually uninhabited marsh somewhere.

38.

THE SECOND EXPLOSION was like the first one. A rocket had mated with a radar dish. The dish in this instance was atop the little Colombian freighter the was like the first one. A rocket had mated with a radar dish. The dish in this instance was atop the little Colombian freighter the San Mateo San Mateo. The Peruvian pilot who gave the rocket the spark of life, Ricardo Cortez, imagined that he had caused it to fall in love with the radar dish of the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, who no longer had radar and so, as far as that particular sort of rocket was concerned, was without s.e.x appeal.

Major Cortez had made what was called a million years ago "an honest mistake."

And let it be said, too, that Peru would never have ordered an attack on the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin if "the Nature Cruise of the Century" had gone ahead as planned, with a s.h.i.+pload of celebrities. Peru would not have been that insensitive to world opinion. But the cancellation of the cruise made the s.h.i.+p an entirely different kettle of fish, so to speak, a potential troop carrier manned, any reasonable person might a.s.sume, by persons who were effectively begging to be blown up or napalmed or machine-gunned or whatever, which is to say "naval personnel." if "the Nature Cruise of the Century" had gone ahead as planned, with a s.h.i.+pload of celebrities. Peru would not have been that insensitive to world opinion. But the cancellation of the cruise made the s.h.i.+p an entirely different kettle of fish, so to speak, a potential troop carrier manned, any reasonable person might a.s.sume, by persons who were effectively begging to be blown up or napalmed or machine-gunned or whatever, which is to say "naval personnel."

So these Colombianos were out there in the marsh in the moonlight, headed for the open ocean and home, eating the first decent meal they had had in a week, and imagining that their radar dish was watching over them like a revolving Virgin Mary. She would never allow any harm to come to them. Little did they know.

What they were eating, incidentally, was an old dairy cow who wasn't able to give all that much milk anymore. That was what had been under the tarpaulin on the lighter which had provisioned the San Mateo: San Mateo: that dairy cow, still very much alive. And she had been hoisted aboard on the side away from the waterfront, so that people ash.o.r.e couldn't see her. There were people ash.o.r.e desperate enough to kill for her. that dairy cow, still very much alive. And she had been hoisted aboard on the side away from the waterfront, so that people ash.o.r.e couldn't see her. There were people ash.o.r.e desperate enough to kill for her.

She was one h.e.l.l of a lot of protein to be leaving Ecuador.

It was interesting how they hoisted her. They didn't use a sling or a cargo net. They made a rope crown for her, wrapped around and around her horns. They embedded the steel hook at the end of the cable of the crane in the tangled crown. And then the crane operator up above reeled in the cable so that the cow was soon dangling in thin air-in an upright position for the first time in her life, with her hind legs splayed, her udder exposed, and with her front legs thrust out horizontally, so that she had the general configuration of a kangaroo.

The evolutionary process which had produced this huge mammal had never antic.i.p.ated that she might be in such a position, with the weight of her entire body depending from her neck. Her neck as she dangled was coming to resemble that of a blue-footed b.o.o.by or swan, or flightless cormorant.

To certain sorts of big brains back in those days, her experience with aviation might have been something to laugh about. She was anything but graceful.

And when she was set down on the deck of the San Mateo San Mateo, she was so severely injured that she could no longer stand. But that was to be expected, and perfectly acceptable. Long experience had shown sailors that cattle so treated could go on living for a week or more, would keep their own meat from rotting until it was time for them to be eaten. What had been done to that dairy cow was a shorter version of what used to be done to great land tortoises back in the days of sailing s.h.i.+ps.

In either case, there was no need for refrigeration.

The happy Colombianos were chewing and swallowing some of that poor cow's meat when they were blown to bits by the latest advance in the evolution of high explosives, which was called "dagonite." Dagonite was the son, so to speak, of a considerably weaker explosive made by the same company, and called "glacco." Glacco begat dagonite, so to speak, and both were descendants of Greek fire and gunpowder and dynamite and cordite and TNT.

So it might be said that the Colombianos had treated the cow abominably, but that retribution had been swift and terrible, thanks largely to the big-brained inventors of dagonite.

In view of how badly the Colombianos had treated the cow, Major Ricardo Cortez, flying faster than sound, might be seen as a virtuous knight as in days of yore. And he felt that way about himself, too, although he knew nothing about the cow or what his rocket had hit. He radioed back to his superiors that the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin was destroyed. He asked that his best friend, Lieutenant Colonel Reyes, who was back on the ground and who had turned a rocket loose on the airport that afternoon, be given this message in Spanish: was destroyed. He asked that his best friend, Lieutenant Colonel Reyes, who was back on the ground and who had turned a rocket loose on the airport that afternoon, be given this message in Spanish: It is true It is true.

Reyes would understand that he was agreeing that letting the rocket go had been as elating as s.e.xual intercourse. And he would never find out that he had not hit the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin, and the friends and relatives of the Colombianos who were blown to hamburger in the estuary would never learn what became of them.

The rocket which hit the airport was surely a lot more effective in Darwinian terms than the one that hit the San Mateo San Mateo. It killed thousands of people and birds and dogs and cats and rats and mice and so on, who would otherwise have reproduced their own kind.

The blast in the marsh killed only the fourteen crewmen and about five hundred rats on the s.h.i.+p, and a few hundred birds, and some crabs and fish and so on.

Mainly, though, it was an ineffectual a.s.sault on the very bottom of the food chain, the billions upon billions of microorganisms who, along with their own excrement and the corpses of their ancestors, comprised the muck of the marsh. The explosion didn't bother them much, since they weren't all that sensitive to sudden starts and stops. They could never have committed suicide in the manner as *Siegfried von Kleist, at the wheel of the bus, intended to commit suicide, with a sudden stop.

They were simply moved suddenly from one neighborhood to another one. They flew through the air, bringing a lot of the old neighborhood with them, and then came splattering down. Many of them even experienced great prosperity as a result of the explosion, feasting on what was left of the cow and the rats and the crew, and other higher life forms.

Quoth Mandarax: It is wonderful to see with how little nature will be satisfied.-MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE (15331592) The detonation of dagonite, son of glacco, direct descendant of n.o.ble dynamite, caused a tidal wave in the estuary, which was six meters high when it swept the bus off the wharf at the Guayaquil waterfront and drowned Siegfried von Kleist, who wanted to die anyway.

More importantly: It snapped the white nylon umbilical cord which tied the future of humankind to the mainland.

The wave carried the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin a kilometer upstream, then left her gently aground on a mudbank in the shallows there. She was illuminated not only by moonlight, but by sick, jazzy fires breaking out all over Guayaquil. a kilometer upstream, then left her gently aground on a mudbank in the shallows there. She was illuminated not only by moonlight, but by sick, jazzy fires breaking out all over Guayaquil.

The Captain arrived on the bridge. He started the twin diesel engines in the darkness far below. He engaged her twin propellers, and the s.h.i.+p slid off the mudbank. She was free.