Galápagos Page 10

  There were no woodpeckers on the islands, but there was a finch which ate what woodpeckers would have eaten. It couldn't peck wood, and so it took a twig or a spine from a cactus in its blunt little beak, and used that to dig insects out of their hiding places.

  Another sort of finch was a bloodsucker, surviving by pecking at the long neck of an unheeding booby until it had raised little beads of blood. Then it sipped that perfect diet to its heart's content. This bird was called by human beings: Geospiza difficilis.

  The principal nesting place of these queer finches, their Garden of Eden, was the Island of Santa Rosalia. She would probably never have heard of that island, so removed from the rest of the archipelago, and so rarely visited by anyone, if it weren't for its swarms of Geospiza difficilis. And she surely wouldn't have lectured so much about it if the bloodsuckers hadn't been the only finches she could make her students give much of a damn about.

  Great teacher that she was, she would go along with her students by describing the birds as "... ideal pets for Count Dracula." This entirely fictitious count, she knew, was a far more significant person to most of her students than George Washington, for instance, who was merely the founder of their country.

  They were better informed about Dracula, too, so that Mary could expand her joke admitting that he might not enjoy Geospiza difficilis as a pet after all, since he, whom she then called "Homo transylvaniensis," slept all through the daytime, whereas Geospiza difficilis slept all through the night. "So perhaps," she would decide with mock sadness, "the best pet for Count Dracula remains a member of the family Desmodontidae--which is a scientific way of saying: 'vampire bat.'"

  And then she would top that joke by saying, "If you should find yourself on Santa Rosalia, and you have killed a specimen of Geospiza difficilis, what must you do to make sure that it stays dead forever?" Her answer was this: "You must bury it at a crossroads, of course, with a little stake driven through its heart."

  What was so thought provoking about all sorts of Galapagos finches to young Charles Darwin, though, was that they were behaving as best they could like a wide variety of much more specialized birds on the continents. He was still prepared to believe, if it turned out to make sense, that God Almighty had created all the creatures just as Darwin found them on his trip around the world. But his big brain had to wonder why the Creator in the case of the Galapagos Islands would have given every conceivable job for a small land bird to an often ill-adapted finch? What would have prevented the Creator, if he thought the islands should have a woodpecker-type bird, from creating a real woodpecker? If he thought a vampire was a good idea, why didn't he give the job to a vampire bat instead of a finch, for heaven's sakes? A vampire finch?

  And Mary used to state the same intellectual problem to her students, concluding: "Your comments, please."

  When she went ashore for the first time on the black peak where the Bahia de Darwin had been run aground, Mary stumbled. She broke her fall in such a way as to abrade the knuckles on her right hand. It wasn't a painful event. She made the most cursory examination of her injuries. There were these scratches from which beads of blood arose.

  But then a finch, utterly fearless, lit on her finger. She was unsurprised, since she had heard many stories of finches landing on people's heads and hands and drinking cups or whatever. So she resolved to enjoy this welcome to the islands, and held her hand still, and spoke sweetly to the bird. "And which of the thirteen sorts of finch are you?" she said.

  As though it understood her question, the bird now showed her what sort it was by sipping up the red beads on her knuckles.

  So she took another look around at the island, never imagining that she was going to spend the rest of her life there, providing thousands of meals for vampire finches. She said to the Captain, for whom she had lost all respect, "You say this is Rabida Island?"

  "Yes," he said. "I'm quite sure of it."

  "Well, I hate to tell you this after all you've been through, but you're wrong again," she said. "This has to be Santa Rosalia."

  "How can you be so sure?" he said.

  And she said, "This little bird just told me so."

  25

  ON THE ISLAND OF MANHATTAN, Bobby King turned out the light in his office atop the Chrysler Building, said good-night to his secretary, and went home. He will not appear in this tale again. Nothing more he did from that moment on until, many busy years later, he entered the blue tunnel into the Afterlife, would have the slightest bearing on the future of the human race.

  In Guayaquil at the same moment that Bobby King reached home, *Zenji Hiroguchi was leaving his room at the Hotel El Dorado, angry with his pregnant wife. She had said unforgivable things about his motives in creating Gokubi and then Mandarax. He pressed the button for the elevator, and snapped his fingers and breathed very shallowly.

  And then out into the corridor came the person he least wanted to see, the cause of all his troubles as far as he was concerned, who was *Andrew MacIntosh.

  "Oh--there you are," said *MacIntosh. "I was just going to tell you that there is some sort of trouble with the telephones. As soon as they're fixed, I will have very good news for you."

  *Zenji, whose genes live on today, was so jangled by his wife and now by MacIntosh that he could not speak. So he punched out this message on the keys of Mandarax in Japanese, and had Mandarax display the words to MacIntosh on its little screen: I do not wish to talk now. I am very upset. Please leave me alone.

  Like Bobby King, incidentally, *MacIntosh would have no further influence on the future of the human race. If his daughter had agreed ten years later to be artificially inseminated on Santa Rosalia, it might have been a very different story. I think it's safe to say that he would have liked very much to participate in Mary Hepburn's experiments with the Captain's sperm. If Selena had been more venturesome, everybody today might then have been descended as he was, from the stout-hearted Scottish warriors who had repelled invading Roman legions so long ago. What a missed opportunity! As Mandarax would have it:

  For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

  The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

  --JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892)

  "What can I do to help?" said *MacIntosh. "I'll do anything to help. Just name it."

  Zenji found that he couldn't even shake his head. The best he could do was to close his eyes tight. And then the elevator arrived, and Zenji thought the top of his head would blow off when *MacIntosh got into it with him.

  "Look--" said *MacIntosh on the way down, "I'm your friend. You can tell me anything. If I'm what's bothering you, you can tell me to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, and I'll be the first to sympathize. I make mistakes. I'm human."

  When they got down to the lobby, Zenji's big brain gave him the impractical, almost infantile advice that he should somehow run away from MacIntosh--that he could beat this athletic American in a footrace.

  So right out the front door of the hotel he went, and onto the cordoned-off section of the Calle Diez de Agosto, with *MacIntosh right beside him.

  The two of them were across the lobby and out into the sunset so quickly that the unlucky von Kleist brother, *Siegfried, behind the bar in the cocktail lounge, couldn't even shout a warning to them in time. Too late, he cried, "Please! Please! I wouldn't go out there, if I were you!" And then he ran after them.

  Many events which would have repercussions a million years later were taking place in a small space on the planet in a very short time. While the unlucky von Kleist brother was running after MacIntosh and Hiroguchi, the lucky one was taking a shower in his cabin just aft of the bridge of the Bahia de Darwin. He wasn't doing anything particularly important to the future of humankind, other than surviving, other than staying alive, but his first mate, whose name was Hernando Cruz, was about to take a radically influential action.

  Cruz was outside on the sun deck, gazing, as it happened, at the only other ship in sight, the Colombian freighter San Mateo, long
anchored in the estuary. Cruz was a stocky, bald man about the Captain's age, who had made fifty cruises out to the islands and back on other ships. He had been part of the skeleton crew which brought the Bahia de Darwin from Malmo. He had supervised her outfitting in Guayaquil, while the nominal captain had made a publicity tour of the United States. This man had stocked his big brain with a perfect understanding of every part of the ship, from the mighty diesels below to the ice-maker behind the bar in the main saloon. He moreover knew the personal strengths and weaknesses of every crewman, and had earned his respect.

  This was the real captain, who would really run the ship while Adolf von Kleist, potching around in the shower now and singing, would charm the passengers at mealtimes, and dance with each and every one of the ladies at night.

  Cruz was least concerned with what he happened to be looking at, the San Mateo and the great raft of vegetable matter which had accumulated around her anchor line. That rusty little ship had become such a permanent fixture that it might as well have been a lifeless rock out there. But now he saw that a small tanker had come alongside the San Mateo, and was nursing it as a whale might have nursed a calf. It was excreting diesel fuel through a flexible tube. That would be mother's milk to the engine of the San Mateo.

  What had happened was that the San Mateo's owners had received a large number of United States dollars in exchange for Colombian cocaine, and smuggled those dollars into Ecuador, where they were traded not only for diesel fuel, but for the most precious commodity of all, which was food, which was fuel for human beings. So there was still a certain amount of international commerce going on.

  Cruz could not divine the details of the corruption which had made the fueling and provisioning of the San Mateo possible, but he surely meditated on corruption in general, to wit: Anybody who had liquid wealth, whether he deserved it or not, could have anything he wanted. The captain in the shower was such a person, as Cruz was not. The painstakingly accumulated lifetime savings of Cruz, all in sucres, had turned to trash.

  He envied the elation the San Mateo's crewmen were feeling, now that they were going home. Since rising at dawn, Cruz himself had been thinking seriously about going home. He had a pregnant wife and eleven children in a nice house out by the airport, and they were scared. They certainly needed him, and yet, until now, abandoning a ship to which he was duty bound, no matter for what reason, had seemed to him a form of suicide, an obliteration of all that was admirable in his character and reputation.

  But now he decided to walk off the Bahia de Darwin anyway. He patted the rail around the sun deck, and he said this softly in Spanish: "Good luck, my Swedish princess. I shall dream of you."

  His case was very much like that of Jesus Ortiz, who had disconnected the El Dorado's telephones. His big brain had concealed from his soul until the last possible moment its conclusion that it was now time for him to act antisocially.

  That left Adolf von Kleist completely in charge, although he did not know shit from Shinola about navigation, the Galapagos Islands, or the operation and maintenance of a ship that size.

  The combination of the Captain's incompetence and the decision of Hernando Cruz to go to the aid of his own flesh and blood, although the stuff of low comedy at the time, has turned out to be of incalculable value to present-day humankind. So much for comedy. So much for supposedly serious stuff.

  If "the Nature Cruise of the Century" had come off as planned, the division of duties between the Captain and his first mate would have been typical of the management of so many organizations a million years ago, with the nominal leader specializing in sociable balderdash, and with the supposed second-in-command burdened with the responsibility of understanding how things really worked, and what was really going on.

  The best-run nations commonly had such symbiotic pairings at the top. And when I think about the suicidal mistakes nations used to make in olden times, I see that those polities were trying to get along with just an Adolf von Kleist at the top, without an Hernando Cruz. Too late, the surviving inhabitants of such a nation would crawl from ruins of their own creation and realize that, throughout all their self-imposed agony, there had been absolutely nobody at the top who had understood how things really worked, what it was all about, what was really going on.

  26

  THE LUCKY VON KLEIST BROTHER, the common sire of everybody alive today, was tall and thin, and had a beak like an eagle's. He had a great head of curly hair which had once been golden, which now was white. He had been put in command of the Bahia de Darwin, with the understanding that his first mate would do all the serious thinking, for the same reason *Siegfried had been put in charge of the hotel: His uncles in Quito had wanted a close relative to watch over their famous guests and valuable property.

  The Captain and his brother had beautiful homes in the chilly mists above Quito, which they would never see again. They had also inherited considerable wealth from their murdered mother and both sets of grandparents. Almost none of it was in worthless sucres. Almost all of it was managed by the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City, which had caused it to be represented by U.S. dollars and Japanese yen.

  Dancing there in the shower stall, the Captain did not think he had much to worry about, as troubled as things seemed to be in Guayaquil. No matter what happened, Hernando Cruz would know what to do.

  His big brain came up with what he thought might be a good idea to pass on to Cruz after he had dried himself off. If it looked like crewmen were about to desert, he thought, Cruz could remind them that the Bahia de Darwin was technically a ship of war, which meant that deserters would be subject to strict punishment under regulations of the Navy.

  This was bad law, but he was right that the ship on paper was a part of the Ecuadorian Navy. The Captain himself, in his role as admiral, had welcomed her to that fighting force when she arrived from Malmo during the summer. Her decks had yet to be carpeted, and the bare steel was dotted here and there with plugged holes which could accept the mounts for machine guns and rocket launchers and racks of depth charges and so on, should war ever come.

  She would then become an armored troop carrier, with, as the Captain had said on The Tonight Show, "... ten bottles of Dom Perignon and one bidet for every hundred enlisted men."

  The Captain had some other ideas in the shower, but they had all come from Hernando Cruz. For instance: If the cruise was canceled, which seemed almost a certainty, then Cruz and a few men would anchor the ship out on the marsh somewhere, away from looters. Cruz could think of no reason for the Captain to come along on a trip like that.

  If all hell broke loose, and there seemed no safe place for the ship anywhere near the city, then Cruz planned to take her out to the naval base on the Galapagos Island of Baltra. Again, Cruz hadn't been able to think of a reason for the Captain to come along.

  Or, if the celebrities from New York City were still, incredibly, going to arrive the next morning, then it would be vital that the Captain be aboard to greet and reassure them. While waiting for them, Cruz would anchor the Bahia de Darwin offshore, like the Colombian freighter San Mateo. He would bring the ship back to the wharf only when the celebrities were right there, ready to board. He would get them out into the safety of the open ocean as quickly as possible, and then, depending on the news, he might actually take them on the promised tour of the islands.

  More likely, though: He would deliver them to some safer port than Guayaquil, but surely no port in Peru or Chile or Colombia, which was to say the entire west coast of South America. The citizens in all those countries were at least as desperate as those of Ecuador.

  Panama was a possibility.

  If necessary, Hernando Cruz intended to take the celebrities all the way to San Diego. There was certainly more than enough food and fuel and water on the ship for a trip that long. And the celebrities could telephone their friends and relatives en route, telling them that, no matter how bad the news from the rest of the world might be, they were living high on the hog as usual.


  One emergency plan the Captain didn't consider there in the shower was that he himself take full charge of the ship, with only Mary Hepburn to help him--and that he run it aground on Santa Rosalia, which would become the cradle of all humankind.

  Here is a quotation well known to Mandarax:

  A little neglect may breed great mischief ... for

  want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the

  horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost.

  --BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790)

  Yes, and a little neglect can breed good news just as easily. For want of Hernando Cruz aboard the Bahia de Darwin, humanity was saved. Cruz would never have run the ship aground on Santa Rosalia.

  And now he was driving away from the waterfront in his Cadillac El Dorado, its trunk packed solid with delicacies intended for "the Nature Cruise of the Century." He had stolen all that food for his family at dawn that day, long before the troops and the hungry mob arrived.

  His vehicle, which he had bought with graft from the outfitting and provisioning of the Bahia de Darwin, had the same name as the hotel--the same name as the legendary city of great riches and opportunity which his Spanish ancestors had sought but never found. His ancestors used to torture Indians--to make them tell where El Dorado was.

  It is hard to imagine anybody's torturing anybody nowadays. How could you even capture somebody you wanted to torture with just your flippers and your mouth? How could you even stage a manhunt, now that people can swim so fast and stay underwater for so long? The person you were after would not only look pretty much like everybody else, but could also be hiding out at any depth practically anywhere.

  Hernando Cruz had done his bit for humanity.