No Enemy But Time

Chapter Two

“An inability to distinguish between waking and dreaming may be an index of madness, or it may be a gift.”

I am in the African country of Zarakal taking part in an experiment—a mission, I ought to call it—that would not be possible without my talent as a dreamer. The American physicist Woodrow Kaprow has just strapped me into an apparatus suspended inside a closed vehicle resembling a windowless omnibus.

This large vehicle rests on the outer edge of an ancient stretch of beach about four hundred feet from the southeastern shore of Lake Kiboko, one of several large lakes in East Africa’s Great Rift Valley. We have positioned the omnibus according to Alistair Patrick Blair’s calculations. Blair has cautioned Kaprow that Lake Kiboko in Early Pleistocene times had a more extensive surface area than it does today, and that if the omnibus is parked too close to its twentieth-century shore, I am likely to emerge from my next spirit-traveling episode into several feet of tepid, brackish water. Kiboko, Blair has reminded us, means hippopotamus, but crocodiles also cotton to this great lake, and my life would probably be forfeit even if I did not drown. Therefore we have left ourselves a margin for error.

Outside the sun is rising. It is July, and very hot. Inside, however, a pair of interlocking rotary blades have begun to spin just above my outstretched body; the breeze they make evaporates the sweat from my forehead. Kaprow hunches inside a bell-shaped glass booth punching buttons and flipping switches. I can see him if I turn my head, but he has asked me to lie completely still, close my eyes, and concentrate on the recorded human heartbeat drumming in my earphones. The hypnagogic rhythms of this sound will soothe me toward slumber and induce the kind of dreaming necessary to shift my body into the Early Pleistocene.

“You’re drifting,” Kaprow intones. “You’re drifting, Joshua. Drifting…”

I am at the eye of a compact hurricane, the toroidal field generated by the rotors. Waking and dreaming begin to interthread. Although my eyes are closed, my inward vision brings me images that alternate between a primeval landscape of gazelles and the twentieth-century interior of the omnibus. Pretty soon these images are coterminous, and I am in two places at once. In the throes of dream I drift for nearly two thousand millennia.

At last the rhythm of the heartbeat ceases, and I open my eyes to find that the rotors above my scaffold have almost stopped turning. The booth in which Kaprow has monitored my dropback appears to be empty; its transparent hood has taken on a decidedly smoky cast. The trouble of course is that Kaprow has remained in humanity’s consensus present whereas I have retreated to only Ngai knows precisely what year. (For Ngai presides over the Kikembu spirit world.) The inside of the omnibus exists at a set of temporal coordinates different from those of the remainder of the machine, and my dreaming has been instrumental in affecting this dislocation. Glancing about, bewildered, I apply a tentative forward pressure to the control beside my hand.

This control maneuvers my scaffold up and down on the pneumatic struts attaching it to the ceiling.

Obediently, then, the scaffold begins to drop through a bay in the floor of the vehicle. The rotors that have half-encircled me remain where they are, like a bird cage that someone has cracked open on the edge of my platform. I am being hatched into a “simulacrum” of our planet’s prehistory.

Blair and Kaprow have planned my exit wisely, for when I emerge from the belly of the omnibus I will not descend into a solid mass of rock or find myself forty feet above the surface with no easy way down.

No indeed. The ground is only a body length below me. For the present, though, I gaze upward into a column of space furnished with the arcane equipment that has helped me make this transfer. The rest of the omnibus—the tires, the chassis, the body—is utterly invisible, for it exists in material fact only in the final fifth of the twentieth century. Briefings and simulations have not prepared me for the weirdness of this effect, and I peer into this hovering hole in the Pleistocene sky like a fretful Alice regretting her introduction to Wonderland.

Although I missed the lake, what sort of splash did I make in that ancient timescape?

Initially, not much. Had there been any sort of fashion-conscious creature there to observe my arrival, though, it would have had to regard me as the Beau Brummell of hominids. Although I was still in harness (on the apparatus that Kaprow called the Backstep Scaffold), I had brought with me not only the clothes on my back but several changes and a small cornucopia of survival items. The point of all this gear was to keep me alive for the duration of my mission, which was supposed to last anywhere from two weeks to a month.

Beyond the bush jacket, bush shorts, and chukkas in which I arrived, here is what I had with me in the way of clothing: three pairs of cotton jockey shorts (Fruit of the Loom); three white, V-necked, cotton undershirts (Hanes); three pairs of white, calf-length tube socks (Gold Cup); and a red bandanna that my sister Anna had given me as a talisman on my eighth birthday. My bush jacket and shorts had come from a safari outfitter in Marakoi, but my chukkas were from the Eddie Bauer firm of Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. They had rubber soles and heels, cushioned scree-guards at the ankles, and uppers of rugged Maple Cuddy leather. Even if they were not exactly designed for East African landscapes and hot weather, I liked the way they felt.

In the way of necessary in-the-field gear I had brought the following: a canteen (Army surplus, government issue); a Swiss Army pocketknife with a lanyard chain (L.L. Bean, Inc., Freeport, Maine); an Eddie Bauer combination stove and survival kit; a shaving bag with a Gillette Track-II razor, a small can of Colgate shaving cream (lime scented), and a collapsible mirror; a first-aid kit with bandages, malaria pills, water-purification tablets, and a modest contingency supply of latex prophylactics; a penlight with a handful of additional batteries (Duracell); a.45-caliber automatic pistol (Colt, government issue); a canvas bandolier with two hundred rounds of ammunition (Army surplus, government issue); a leather holster and belt (Cheyenne Leatherworx; Manitou Springs, Colorado); a combination reduced-print Bible and guide to Pleistocene ecology (the American Geographic Foundation in conjunction with the Gideons); a magnifying glass; thirty feet of heavy-duty nylon rope; and an expensive intertemporal communicator (KaprowKorn Instruments, Ltd.) that almost immediately failed me. Much of this equipment I wore, stowed in my pockets, or carried in a nylon pack strapped to my chest. Once down from the Backstep Scaffold, I would shift this pack to my shoulders.

In addition to my gear I had at least three other things going for me before I jumped from the scaffold to 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 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!”

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.”