No Enemy But Time

Chapter Eight

After my run-in with the Minid sentry, I walked back toward Lake Kiboko, venturing quite often into the savannah bordering the forest strip to the south. Other bands of habilines must be about, I told myself, as well as other specimens of A. robustus and surely a few of their ancestral cousins, A. africanus. It was impossible to know in what proportions to expect these three primate species to be coinhabiting the landscape, and because I saw only gazelles, antelopes, zebras, and a distant pride of lions, I was not likely to solve this problem in a single afternoon.

My transcordion did not work, and in the event of its failure Kaprow had advised me to return to the omnibus and signal my well-being by commanding the Backstep Scaffold to retract. However, I could not command what I could not see, and although at the lakeside the sun was dropping toward the violet ramparts of the western Rift, Kaprow and his cohorts had still not extruded the scaffold through the bomb-bay doors of the omnibus. The twilight sky was entire. I wanted a plug to be pushed out of it, exposing the copper and chromium viscera of our time machine—but what I wanted and what I got were two different things.

Because sunset traditionally marks a hair-trigger truce at an African watering site, I found that many large animals—elephants, rhinos, giraffids—were clustering out of the dusk to drink. Knowing that my nevertheless drew it. My vantage above the lake gave me a degree of safety, for the invasion was occurring on either side of my small promontory of tuff—but the scaffold still did not descend, and a hairy elephantine creature not sixty feet away had begun to writhe his trunk at me, as if my smell offended him.

There were trumpetings and snorts from other visitors to the lake, too, and the precariousness of my position would increase as the darkness thickened.

“I’ m waiting,” I tapped out on my transcordion. “It’s sunset, and I’ m waiting. Please drop the scaffold.”

No reply in my transcordion’s display window. No miraculous lambent parting of the Pleistocene air.

Had White Sphinx stranded me in this place? I had no one to talk to here, no one to tell my troubles to.

Even Kaprow and Blair, my liaisons to another reality, had tuned me out. A lost cog in the pitiless organic machinery of the veldt, I told the varieties of my fear the way a nun tells her rosary beads.

“This is getting you nowhere, Kampa.”

I clambered down from the lakeside promontory to the plain, where I spent the last twenty minutes before nightfall gathering brushwood, antelope chips, and stegodon patties for a fire. The malicious lavender sunset pitched over into darkness about the time I was piling this fuel at the base of a kopje, a broad outcropping of granite on the steppe, about a half mile from the lake, where I hoped to avoid the gathering animals. I lit the brushwood and dried animal droppings with a match from my Eddie Bauer stove-cum-survival-kit, then scooted high up onto the outcropping to enjoy my bonfire. Nocturnal predators would be instinctively wary of the blaze, and there was no way for them to leap up behind me from the plain. Plenty of fuel and an impregnable position—I was set for the night. Although I finally realized that I had eaten only once that day, my fatigue disciplined my hunger pangs and I abstained from a brief hunting trip into the savannah.

It was a long night, almost interminable. I could not let myself drift off into a deep sleep—into dreams of my own far-future past—for fear the fire would go out. My kopje was a lifeboat in an ocean of grass, and once the lantern in its prow was extinguished, strange creatures from the pelagic prairie would crawl aboard to devour me. I dozed, but always with an ear to the dangers of the night. Unless you have camped out in the bush, you have never heard such an eerie racket: the quarreling of hyraxes, the hose-pipe bleating of pachyderms, the madman laughter of hyenas. I huddled on my rock, trying to convince myself that this night was no different from the ones I had spent with Babington in Lolitabu.

The lesson did not take. At length I had recourse to my reduced-print Bible and field guide. With penlight and magnifying glass I spent an hour or so reading the Old Testament by the erratic fire flicker.

Although I could not keep my mind on the words, this activity helped pass the time, and when I finally ran across a passage in Proverbs that spoke to my heart, I committed it to memory and repeated it as a mantra until the frail breaking of dawn.

“The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks…”

The world quieted while I was repeating this passage, and I realized that I had lived almost an entire twenty-four-hour period in the Early Pleistocene. I had made prehistory. None of Kaprow’s other volunteers had ever gone back even a thousandth as far, and only the physicist himself had remained longer on a single drop-back than I had already been on mine. It struck me that there ought to be a party hat, a magnum of champagne (a domestic variety would do nicely), and a bullroarer in my survival kit.

There wasn’t even a pineapple Danish. To celebrate my accomplishment, I would have to hunt up my own breakfast and down it with gusto.

That was when I heard an otherworldly singing reverberating over the steppe, like the cries of disembodied saints. It came from the hills to the east, the general vicinity of Helensburgh. I got to my feet and cocked my head to listen to it. A wordless canticle of untrained habiline voices greeting the dawn. An aubade, call it. It was heartbreakingly fervid, not sweet or pristine, but rough-edged and full of raw conviction. An anthem.

The habilines—humanity’s ancestors—were singing.

After ten or fifteen minutes the singing stopped. Although I should have returned to the lake, I kept waiting for it to resume. Yesterday, apparently, I had arrived too late to hear it. The impression this singing left on me—a kind of awe, a tingling in the nerve ends—took a while to wear off. Eventually, though, it gave way to the engines of appetite, my nagging hunger.

I kicked the remains of my fire off the kopje, stamped them down to keep them from starting a grass fire, and headed for a stand of fig trees to the east. In the red-oat grass bordering this glade a flock of guinea fowl strutted. To test my survival skills, I took the time to trap one of these birds noiselessly, after the fashion of the !Kung, and by stealth and patience managed to accomplish this feat without scaring off the entire flock until my trap had actually sprung. Even Babington could not have done better.

Using fingers and pocketknife, as the old Wanderobo had taught me, I plucked, dismembered, and cleaned the bird, then fell to and devoured its flesh raw. My time in Lolitabu had prepared me for this primitive approach, and I actively enjoyed my meal, the first real one since my arrival. A dry rivercourse divided the fig thicket, but I found water by scooping out a hole in the arroyo’s sandy bottom and watching underground moisture seep slowly into view. Down on my hands and knees, spurning the use of my water-purification tablets, I drank directly from the stream bed, then washed the sticky blood of the guinea fowl from my face and fingers.

After that I sponged myself down with yesterday’s T-shirt and dug into my shaving bag for my toothbrush, razor, and blades. In retrospect, much of this attention to dress and cleanliness seems ridiculous to me, but in spite of my survival training I had not yet broken completely free of the twentieth century. My most sinful indulgence that morning was changing my underwear. This feat (although detailing it may invite ridicule) I accomplished without taking off my chukkas, for it seemed imperative to me to be able to run if danger threatened. I had trained barefoot with Babington, but I still did not trust myself to negotiate a landscape littered with acacia thorns. Keeping my shoes on meant stretching the elastic around the leg holes of my briefs, but that was a lesser evil than having to flee a leopard in my stocking feet. Actually, I was more worried about having only two packages of Fruit of the Looms left in my pack, and I devoted a good ten minutes to washing out yesterday’s pair in the stream bed. These I placed on a euphorbia bush to dry.

I probably should have spent my sunrise on the shores of Lake Kiboko. If Kaprow had dropped the scaffold to me at dawn, I had not been there to witness the event or to confirm for him the fact of my continuing existence. However, I could not convince myself that I had missed anything, and the singing of the habilines was a phenomenon worth at least another day in the Pleistocene. Our contingency plan, along with our matched set of transcordions, had temporarily broken down. White Sphinx would find a way to retrieve me, surely, but for the moment I had to hold my own.

As I fetched my Fruit of the Looms from the euphorbia on the edge of the glade, I saw marching single-file across the savannah, north-northeast toward Helensburgh, a pack of hyenas. Prodigious creatures, they were good, if frightening, examples of the extinct Pleistocene megafauna. I froze, hoping that some of the laughter I had heard intermittently all night—the nerve-racking cachinnations of brigands—had signified a successful hunt.

I counted fifteen slope-backed hyenas in all, each of the eleven adults as big as the biggest male lion. It being July, the wind was blowing gently from the southwest, from the hyenas to me, and upon it I could smell the unmistakable tang of carrion. The animals’ coarse, yellow-brown pelts were marbled with interlocking swirls of black, and their unlovely faces bespoke the smugness of—Ngai be praised—satiety. That, in them, was a condition I could gratefully stomach.

Alistair Patrick Blair often said of hyenas, “I wish the bloody buggers had never been born.” This giant variety—although he had obviously never had the chance to see one—he especially detested. Their great crime, in his eyes, was their nearly wholesale disposal of the bones of their two-legged contemporaries.

By this indiscriminate feeding behavior, they had eradicated from the fossil record an invaluable store of information about human origins. My distaste for hyenas was less lofty: they killed as well as scavenged, and they stank.

When the hyenas had gone, I gathered up my gear, including my freshly laundered shorts, and struck off into the bush to establish a home base much closer to Helensburgh.

Once, that second morning, I thought I saw bipedal creatures roaming the veldt to the north, as if stalking prey, but the heat haze and the intervening herds of antelope may have played tricks on my vision.

A short time later I arrived at the head of the Minids’ V-shaped clearing and squatted like a breakwater between the fingers of forest pointing into the savannah. The Minids saw me at once, and three or four children who had been tumbling in front of the huts together stopped to watch what I was doing. An elderly male hooted to his younger compatriots in alarm. Struggling to control the pounding of my heart, I dug nonchalantly at the grass. I examined individual sprigs, turned over rocks, sniffed my fingers appraisingly.

Quite by accident, a fortunate one, I discovered a scorpion. It lifted its stinger and moved on me in immemorial scorpion fashion. Meanwhile, I knew, the Minids had formed an attack group of their own and were advancing on me with upraised clubs. Deliberately ignoring the habilines, I made a show of rapidly striking the scorpion with my knuckles—a technique much beloved of baboons—until the odious little beastie was so dazed that a flick of my finger capsized it to its back. Next, I removed the stinger, along with the poison sac, and killed the scorpion with a squeeze.

By this time every Minid in Helensburgh was watching me. In fact, Helen had joined the males in their cautious war party. I saw her, club in hand, tiptoeing toward me along the left-hand side of the clearing.

The males were spread out in a sagging U, moving slowly but methodically forward. I tried not to betray my nervousness.

Making an involuntary moue, I put the best face I could on the eating of the scorpion. The idea was to demonstrate to my bipedal brethren that, all appearances to the contrary aside, I was one of them, a bona fide grass-grubbing, arachnid-crunching, down-to-earth habiline. Further, if permitted to, I could contribute to their food-gathering industry, as witness my success in finding the scorpion.

Nothing doing.

The menfolk closed on me more menacingly, the hair on their shoulders erect. Helen’s intentions appeared no more friendly than those of her male counterparts. She fell in behind a macho hombre with a tangled black beard and the astonishing tonsorial discrepancy of a Thin Man mustache. This dude, the largest in the band, was almost certainly the Minids’ alpha Romeo, for which reason I had already mentally dubbed him Alfie. Helen, however, had at least an inch in height on him, and it was interesting to note that she had not waited for his okay to join their assault group, a fearsome juggernaut of nationalistic feeling.

The taste of scorpion acrid on my palate, I stood up. I raised my hands. Because I was taller than the herbivorous australopithecines with whom they shared a portion of the bush-and-savannah habitat, the Minids stopped. Further, I was as nimble on my feet as the habilines. Come the crunch, fear and adrenaline fueling me to victory in spite of my chukka boots, I felt sure I could do a Jesse Owens on even their fleetest and most tenacious sprinter. For now, though, I spread my arms and showed them I was holding neither club nor stone.

The habilines, renewing their approach, stalked to within fifteen or twenty feet of me, perilously near.

Reluctantly, I unsnapped my holster, drew my pistol, and pointed it skyward. A single warning shot would probably send them scrambling for cover, but it would also set back my hopes of cementing a relationship of mutual acceptance and trust. In the face of this dilemma I began to talk, spilling out the Pledge of Allegiance, the Preamble to the Constitution, the entire text of a Crest toothpaste commercial, several nursery rhymes, and the lyrics to a goldie-oldie popular song, all in soothing, confidence-inspiring tones that I hoped would resolve the crisis in my favor. For a moment or two they listened attentively, then flashed one another a series of significant looks whose meaning—“Attack!”—I somehow intuited.

Desperate, I began to sing. I sang in a rich, lilting tenor, and I sang with feeling:

The sound of this plaintive melody spilling from my lips gave my attackers pause. Or maybe it was not so much the music itself—a simple ditty, heartfelt and direct—as the sheer unexpectedness of my singing it for them. Singing was even better than eating scorpions as a proof of my habilinity! Although virtually spellbound through the second refrain, my audience then began to tire of my performance. Exchanging a series of rapid glances and gestures, they resumed closing in on me. Their faces made it easy to decide what to do for an encore.

I fired my pistol.

The effect was dramatic. Three of the males fell to the ground as if I had poleaxed them, two others ran into the woods, and a sixth beshat himself and dove sideways with his arms over his head. Still in front of me, dazedly crouching, were Helen and the steadfast Alfie. In Helensburgh itself a pandemonium of shrieks and gibbering had broken out among the women and children, but this died away quickly as they hurried for shelter. With their menfolk routed, however, who would defend them? I was cutting a decidedly Genghis Khanish figure, but my assumption of this autocratic role gave me no pleasure. I had probably blown my chance of achieving a workable detente with the Minids.

Extending one hand, I took a step or two toward Helen and Alfie. They backed away. The remaining habiline males rolled over, leapt up, and hightailed it for the huts, there to make a stand if I chose to pursue them. The fellow who had lost control of his bowels oared himself backward over the grass, scraping fecal matter from his derriere, while the warriors who had run into the forest returned to see what was happening. A brave people. My pistol shot had signaled a shift in the balance of power in almost the way the explosion of an atomic device over Hiroshima had signaled a similar alteration between the Allies and the Japanese. At least, however, I had fired a warning—I had plenty of bullets.

“I’m not going to do it again,” I assured Helen and Alfie. “That was to save my life.”

But they, too, withdrew to the huts, where, among a congregation of fuddled, uncertain faces, they stared at me as if I were Death Incarnate. When I made no move to press my advantage, two or three of the males began gesticulating with their clubs, hooting belligerently, and indulging in ridiculous swagger, their hackles lifted along their shoulders and their chests puffed out.

In the thicket to my right, however, a young Minid male was scrutinizing me with almost chilling calm. He had large, limpid eyes and a professorial dignity. He and Alfie seemed more dangerous foes than the vainglorious gasbags dancing about before the huts, and I decided to get out of Helensburgh to avoid having to shed anyone’s blood.

“Goodbye,” I told them. “Look for me to make this up to you. All in all, I’m not such a bad dude. Goodbye…”