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  --JEAN DE LA FONTAINE

  (1621-1695)

  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 chorea 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.

  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 ship'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'!"

  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 (1494-1553)

  "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 compass, 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--if somebody hadn't stolen the, hick, yardarm, hick. At dawn, 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 CAPTAIN WENT ON, "actually I have been vindicated, 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, come to, hick, pass."

  "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, crashing to his knees on the wharf. This cured his hiccups.

  "Is there anybody else on the ship?" said *Siegfried.

  "Nobody 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 ship closer to the dock?" He thought the people on the bus might feel a little safer and surely less cramped on shipboard.

  "Fuck the ship. 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 goddamn 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 ship 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 ship, 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 nobody 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

  (1872-1942)

  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 hicc
ups had returned.

  Here is how they got James Wait up on the ship: 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 damn bad, isn't it--because we just moved the poor bastard 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 ship without further assistance. And then Siegfried told Mary to get on the ship 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 assistance.

  *

  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 smashing 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 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, who no longer had radar and so, as far as that particular sort of rocket was concerned, was without sex 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 if "the Nature Cruise of the Century" had gone ahead as planned, with a shipload of celebrities. Peru would not have been that insensitive to world opinion. But the cancellation of the cruise made the ship an entirely different kettle of fish, so to speak, a potential troop carrier manned, any reasonable person might assume, 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: that dairy cow, still very much alive. And she had been hoisted aboard on the side away from the waterfront, so that people ashore couldn't see her. There were people ashore desperate enough to kill for her.

  She was one hell 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 anticipated 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 booby 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, 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 ships.

  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 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.

  Reyes would understand that he was agreeing that letting the rocket go had been as elating as sexual intercourse. And he would never find out that he had not hit the 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. 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 ship, and a few hundred birds, and some crabs and fish and so on.

  Mainly, though, it was an ineffectual assault 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 coul
d 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

  (1533-1592)

  The detonation of dagonite, son of glacco, direct descendant of noble 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 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 ship slid off the mudbank. She was free.

  The Captain steered downstream, toward the open ocean.

  Quoth Mandarax:

  The ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet.

  --JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924)

  And the Bahia de Darwin wasn't just any ship. As far as humanity was concerned, she was the new Noah's ark.

  BOOK TWO

  AND THE

  THING BECAME

  1

  THE THING became a new white motorship at night, without charts or a compass or running lights, but nonetheless slitting the cold, deep ocean at her maximum velocity. In the opinion of humankind, she no longer existed. The Bahia de Darwin and not the San Mateo, in the opinion of humankind, had been blown to smithereens.