Galápagos Read online

Actually, his formal education had stopped after two years of instruction in automobile repair and maintenance at the vocational high school in his native city of Midland City, Ohio. He was then living in the fifth of a series of foster homes, essentially an orphan, since he was the product of an incestuous relationship between a father and a daughter who had run away from town, forever and together, soon after he was born.

  When he himself was old enough to run away, he hitchhiked to the island of Manhattan. A pimp there befriended him and taught him how to be a successful homosexual prostitute, to leave price tags on his clothes, to really enjoy lovers whenever possible, and so on. Wait was once quite beautiful.

  When his beauty began to fade, he became an instructor in ballroom dancing at a dance studio. He was a natural dancer, and he had been told back in Midland City that his parents had been very good dancers, too. His sense of rhythm was probably inherited. And it was at the dance studio that he met and courted and married the first of his seventeen wives so far.

  All through his childhood, Wait was severely punished by foster parents for nothing and everything. It was expected by them that, because of his inbred parentage, he would become a moral monster.

  So here that monster was now--in the Hotel El Dorado, happy and rich and well, as far as he knew, and keen for the next test of his survival skills.

  Like James Wait, incidentally, I, too, was once a teenage runaway.

  4

  THE ANGLO-SAXON CHARLES DARWIN, underspoken and gentlemanly, impersonal and asexual and blankly observant in his writings, was a hero in teeming, passionate, polyglot Guayaquil because he was the inspiration for a tourist boom. If it weren't for Darwin, there would not have been a Hotel El Dorado or a Bahia de Darwin to accommodate James Wait. There would have been no boutique to clothe him so comically.

  If Charles Darwin had not declared the Galapagos Islands marvelously instructive, Guayaquil would have been just one more hot and filthy seaport, and the islands would have been worth no more to Ecuador than the slag heaps of Staffordshire.

  Darwin did not change the islands, but only people's opinion of them. That was how important mere opinions used to be back in the era of great big brains.

  Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people's actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galapagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next--and on and on.

  Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinions anymore.

  White people discovered the Galapagos Islands in 1535 when a Spanish ship came upon them after being blown off course by a storm. Nobody was living there, nor were remains of any human settlement ever found there.

  This unlucky ship wished nothing more than to carry the Bishop of Panama to Peru, never losing sight of the South American coast. There was this storm, which rudely hustled it westward, ever westward, where prevailing human opinion insisted there was only sea and more sea.

  But when the storm lifted, the Spaniards found that they had delivered their bishop into a sailor's nightmare where the bits of land were mockeries, without safe anchorage or shade or sweet water or dangling fruit, or human beings of any kind. They were becalmed, and running out of water and food. The ocean was like a mirror. They put a longboat over the side, and towed their vessel and their spiritual leader out of there.

  They did not claim the islands for Spain, any more than they would have claimed hell for Spain. And for three full centuries after revised human opinion allowed the archipelago to appear on maps, no other nation wished to own it. But then in 1832, one of the smallest and poorest countries on the planet, which was Ecuador, asked the peoples of the world to share this opinion with them: that the islands were part of Ecuador.

  No one objected. At the time, it seemed a harmless and even comical opinion. It was as though Ecuador, in a spasm of imperialistic dementia, had annexed to its territory a passing cloud of asteroids.

  But then young Charles Darwin, only three years later, began to persuade others that the often freakish plants and animals which had found ways to survive on the islands made them extremely valuable, if only people would look at them as he did--from a scientific point of view.

  Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical.

  Yes, and by the time of James Wait's arrival in Guayaquil so many persons with an interest in natural history had come there, on their way to the islands to see what Darwin had seen, to feel what Darwin had felt, that three cruise ships had their home port there, the newest of which was the Bahia de Darwin. There were several modern tourist hotels, the newest of which was the El Dorado, and there were souvenir shops and boutiques and restaurants for tourists all up and down the Calle Diez de Agosto.

  The thing was, though: When James Wait got there, a worldwide financial crisis, a sudden revision of human opinions as to the value of money and stocks and bonds and mortgages and so on, bits of paper, had ruined the tourist business not only in Ecuador but practically everywhere. So that the El Dorado was the only hotel still open in Guayaquil, and the Bahia de Darwin was the only cruise ship still prepared to sail.

  The El Dorado was staying open only as an assembly point for persons with tickets for "the Nature Cruise of the Century," since it was owned by the same Ecuadorian company which owned the ship. But now, less than twenty-four hours before the cruise was to begin, there were only six guests, including James Wait, in the two-hundred-bed hotel. And the other five guests were:

  *Zenji Hiroguchi, twenty-nine, a Japanese computer genius;

  Hisako Hiroguchi, twenty-six, his very pregnant wife, who was a teacher of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging;

  *Andrew MacIntosh, fifty-five, an American financier and adventurer of great inherited wealth, a widower;

  Selena MacIntosh, eighteen, his congenitally blind daughter;

  And Mary Hepburn, fifty-one, an American widow from Ilium, New York, whom practically nobody in the hotel had seen because she had stayed in her room on the fifth floor, and had taken all her meals up there, since arriving all alone the night before.

  The two with stars by their names would be dead before the sun went down. This convention of starring certain names will continue throughout my story, incidentally, alerting readers to the fact that some characters will shortly face the ultimate Darwinian test of strength and wiliness.

  I was there, too, but perfectly invisible.

  5

  THE BAHIA DE DARWIN was also doomed, but not yet ready for a star by her name. It would be five more sundowns before her engines quit forever, and ten more years before she sank to the ocean floor. She was not only the newest and largest and fastest and most luxurious cruise ship based in Guayaquil. She was the only one designed specifically for the Galapagos tourist trade, whose destiny, from the moment her keel was laid, was understood to be a steady churning out to the islands and back again, out to the islands and back again.

  She was built in Malmo, Sweden, where I myself worked on her. It was said by the skeleton crew of Swedes and Ecuadorians who delivered her from Malmo to Guayaquil that a storm she passed through in the North Atlantic would be the last rough water or cold weather she would ever know.

  She was a floating restaurant and lecture hall and nightclub and hotel for one hundred paying guests. She had radar and sonar, and an electronic navigator which gave continuously her position on the face of the earth, to the nearest hundred meters. She was so thoroughly automated that a person all alone on the bridge, with no one in the engine room or on deck, could start her up, hoist her anchor, put her
in gear, and drive her off like a family automobile. She had eighty-five flush toilets and twelve bidets, and telephones in the staterooms and on the bridge which, via satellite, could reach other telephones anywhere.

  She had television, so people could keep up with the news of the day.

  Her owners, a pair of old German brothers in Quito, boasted that their ship would never be out of touch with the rest of the world for an instant. Little did they know.

  She was seventy meters long.

  The ship on which Charles Darwin was the unpaid naturalist, the Beagle, was only twenty-eight meters long.

  When the Bahia de Darwin was launched in Malmo, eleven hundred metric tons of saltwater had to find someplace else to go. I was dead by then.

  When the Beagle was launched in Falmouth, England, only two hundred and fifteen metric tons of saltwater had to find someplace else to go.

  The Bahia de Darwin was a metal motor ship.

  The Beagle was a sailboat made out of trees, and carried ten cannons for repelling pirates and savages.

  The two older cruise ships with which the Bahia de Darwin was meant to compete had gone out of business before the struggle could begin. Both had been booked to capacity for many months to come, but then, because of the financial crisis, they had been swamped with cancellations. They were anchored in backwaters of the marshland now, out of sight of the city, and far from any road or habitation. Their owners had stripped them of their electronic gear and other valuables--in anticipation of a prolonged period of lawlessness.

  Ecuador, after all, like the Galapagos Islands, was mostly lava and ash, and so could not begin to feed its nine million people. It was bankrupt, and so could no longer buy food from countries with plenty of topsoil, so the seaport of Guayaquil was idle, and the people were beginning to starve to death.

  Business was business.

  Neighboring Peru and Colombia were bankrupt, too. The only ship at the Guayaquil waterfront other than the Bahia de Darwin was a rusty Colombian freighter, the San Mateo, stranded there for want of the means to buy food or fuel. She was anchored offshore, and had been there so long that an enormous raft of vegetable matter had built up around her anchor line. A baby elephant might have reached the Galapagos Islands on a raft that size.

  Mexico and Chile and Brazil and Argentina were likewise bankrupt--and Indonesia and the Philippines and Pakistan and India and Thailand and Italy and Ireland and Belgium and Turkey. Whole nations were suddenly in the same situation as the San Mateo, unable to buy with their paper money and coins, or their written promises to pay later, even the barest essentials. Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizens as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for money. They were suddenly saying to people with nothing but paper representations of wealth, "Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?"

  There was still plenty of food and fuel and so on for all the human beings on the planet, as numerous as they had become, but millions upon millions of them were starting to starve to death now. The healthiest of them could go without food for only about forty days, and then death would come.

  And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

  It was all in people's heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg.

  6

  THIS FINANCIAL CRISIS, which could never happen today, was simply the latest in a series of murderous twentieth century catastrophes which had originated entirely in human brains. From the violence people were doing to themselves and each other, and to all other living things, for that matter, a visitor from another planet might have assumed that the environment had gone haywire, and that the people were in such a frenzy because Nature was about to kill them all.

  But the planet a million years ago was as moist and nourishing as it is today--and unique, in that respect, in the entire Milky Way. All that had changed was people's opinion of the place.

  To the credit of humanity as it used to be: More and more people were saying that their brains were irresponsible, unreliable, hideously dangerous, wholly unrealistic--were simply no damn good.

  In the microcosm of the Hotel El Dorado, for example, the widow Mary Hepburn, who had been taking all her meals in her room, was cursing her own brain sotto voce for the advice it was giving her, which was to commit suicide.

  "You are my enemy," she whispered. "Why would I want to carry such a terrible enemy inside of me?" She had been a biology teacher in the public high school in Ilium, New York, now defunct, for a quarter of a century, and so was familiar with the very odd tale of the evolution of a then-extinct creature named by human beings the "Irish elk." "Given a choice between a brain like you and the antlers of an Irish elk," she told her own central nervous system, "I'd take the antlers of the Irish elk."

  These animals used to have antlers the size of ballroom chandeliers. They were fascinating examples, she used to tell her students, of how tolerant nature could be of clearly ridiculous mistakes in evolution. Irish elk survived for two and a half million years, in spite of the fact that their antlers were too unwieldy for fighting or self-defense, and kept them from seeking food in thick forests and heavy brush.

  Mary had also taught that the human brain was the most admirable survival device yet produced by evolution. But now her own big brain was urging her to take the polyethylene garment bag from around a red evening dress in her closet there in Guayaquil, and to wrap it around her head, thus depriving her cells of oxygen.

  Before that, her wonderful brain had entrusted a thief at the airport with a suitcase containing all her toilet articles and clothes which would have been suitable for the hotel. That had been her carry-on luggage on a flight from Quito to Guayaquil. At least she still had the contents of the suitcase she had checked through rather than carried, which included the evening dress in the closet, which was for parties on the Bahia de Darwin. She was also still in possession of a wet suit and flippers and mask for diving, two bathing suits, a pair of rugged hiking boots, and a set of war surplus United States Marine Corps combat fatigues for trips ashore, which she was wearing now. As for the pants suit she had worn on the flight from Quito: Her big brain had persuaded her to send it to the hotel laundry, to believe the sad-eyed hotel manager when he said she could surely have it back by morning, in time for breakfast. But, much to the embarrassment of the manager, that, too, had disappeared.

  But the worst thing her brain had done to her, other than recommending suicide, was to insist that she come to Guayaquil despite all the news about the planetary financial crisis, despite the near certainty that "the Nature Cruise of the Century," booked to capacity only a month before, would be called off for want of passengers.

  Her colossal thinking machine could be so petty, too. It would not let her go downstairs in her combat fatigues on the grounds that everybody, even though there was practically nobody in the hotel, would find her comical in such a costume. Her brain told her: "They'll laugh at you behind your back, and think you're crazy and pitiful, and your life is over anyway. You've lost your husband and your teaching job, and you don't have any children or anything else to live for, so just put yourself out of your misery with the garment bag. What could be easier? What could be more painless? What could make more sense?

  To give her brain its due: It wasn't entirely its fault that 1986 really had been a perfectly awful year so far. The year had started out so promisingly, too, with Mary's husband, Roy, in seemingly perfect health and secure in his job as a millwright at GEFFCo, the principal industry in Ilium, and with the Kiwanis giving her a banquet and a plaque celebrating her twenty-five years of distinguished teaching, and the students naming her the most popular teacher for the twelfth year in a row.

  At the start of 1986, she said, "Oh, Roy--we have so much to be thankful for: we're so lucky compared to most peop
le. I could cry for happiness."

  And he said, putting his arms around her, "Well now, you just go ahead and cry." She was fifty-one and he was fifty-nine, and they were great lovers of the out-of-doors, hiking and skiing and mountain-climbing and canoeing and running and bicycling and swimming, so they both had lean and youthful bodies. They did not smoke or drink, and they ate mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, with a little fish from time to time.

  They had also handled their money well, giving their savings, in financial terms, the same sort of sensible nourishment and exercise that they gave themselves.

  The tale of fiscal wisdom which Mary could tell about herself and Roy, of course, would be a thrill to James Wait.

  And, yes, Wait, that eviscerator of widows, was speculating about Mary Hepburn as he sat in the bar of the El Dorado, although he had not met her yet, nor learned for certain how well fixed she was. He had seen her name on the hotel register, and had asked the young manager about her.

  Wait liked what little the manager was able to tell him. This shy and lonesome schoolteacher upstairs, although younger than any of the wives he had ruined so far, sounded to him like his natural prey. He would stalk her at leisure during "the Nature Cruise of the Century."

  If I may insert a personal note at this point: When I was alive, I often received advice from my own big brain which, in terms of my own survival, or the survival of the human race, for that matter, can be charitably described as questionable. Example: It had me join the United States Marines and go fight in Vietnam.

  Thanks a lot, big brain.

  7

  THE NATIONAL CURRENCIES of all six guests at the El Dorado, the four Americans, one claiming to be a Canadian, and the two Japanese, were still as good as gold everywhere on the planet. Again: The value of their money was imaginary. Like the nature of the universe itself, the desirability of their American dollars and yen was all in people's heads.