Galápagos Page 9

  And at least he wouldn't have to talk about getting back their money for them. The trip wasn't to have cost them a nickel--and they had already received free matched luggage and toiletries, and Panama hats besides.

  For the sad amusement of himself and his secretary, King now played his joke with the stuffed marine iguana. He picked it up and held it alongside his head as though it were a telephone, and he said, "Mrs. Onassis? I am afraid I have some disappointing news for you. You're not going to get to see the courtship dance of the blue-footed boobies after all."

  King's apologetic telephoning was a gallant formality. No one still expected to board the plane at ten that night. By ten that night, incidentally, Andrew MacIntosh, Zenji Hiroguchi, and the Captain's brother Siegfried would all be dead, and would all have completed their short journeys through the blue tunnel into the Afterlife.

  All the people on the passenger list that King talked to had already made new plans for the coming two weeks. Many would go skiing within the safe boundaries of the United States instead. At one dinner party for six, everybody had already decided to go to a combination fat farm and tennis camp in Phoenix, Arizona.

  And the last call King made before leaving his office was to a man who had become a very close friend during the past ten months, who was Dr. Teodoro Donoso, a poet and physician from Quito, who was Ecuador's ambassador to the United Nations. He had earned his medical degree at Harvard, and several other Ecuadorians King had dealt with had been educated in the United States. The Captain of the Bahia de Darwin, Adolf von Kleist, was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. The Captain's brother *Siegfried was a graduate of the Cornell Hotel School at Ithaca, New York.

  There was a lot of noise from what sounded like a wild party going on at the embassy, which Dr. Donoso suppressed by closing a door.

  "What are those people celebrating?" King asked.

  "It's the Ballet Folklorico," said the Ambassador, "rehearsing the fire dance of the Kanka-bonos."

  "They don't know the trip's been called off?" said King.

  It turned out that they did know, and that they intended to stay in the United States in order to earn dollars for their families back home by performing in nightclubs and theaters a dance Bobby King had made so famous in his publicity--the fire dance of the Kanka-bonos.

  "Are there any real Kanka-bonos in the bunch?" said King.

  "My guess is that there aren't any real Kanka-bonos anywhere," said the Ambassador. He had in fact written a twenty-six-line poem called "The Last Kanka-bono," about the extinction of a little tribe in the Ecuadorian rain forest. At the start of the poem, there were eleven Kanka-bonos. At the end there was just one, and he wasn't feeling well. This was an exercise in fiction, however, since the poet, like most Ecuadorians, had never seen a Kanka-bono. He had heard that the tribe was down to only fourteen members, so that their final extinction by the encroachments of civilization seemed inevitable.

  Little did he know that in a matter of less than a century the blood of every human being on earth would be predominantly Kanka-bono, with a little von Kleist and Hiroguchi thrown in.

  And this astonishing turn of events would be made to happen, in large part, by one of the only two absolute nobodies on the original passenger list for "the Nature Cruise of the Century." That was Mary Hepburn. The other nobody was her husband, who himself played a crucial role in shaping human destiny by booking, when facing his own extinction, that one cheap little cabin below the waterline.

  22

  AMBASSADOR DONOSO'S twenty-six lines of mourning for "The Last Kanka-bono" were premature, to say the least. He should have wept on paper for "The Last Mainland South American" and "The Last Mainland North American" and "The Last Mainland European" and "The Last Mainland African" and "The Last Mainland Asian" instead.

  He guessed right, at any rate, as to what was going to happen to the morale of the people of Ecuador within the next hour or so, when he said to Bobby King on the telephone: "Everybody down there is just going to fall apart when they find out that Mrs. Onassis isn't coming after all."

  "Things can change so much in just thirty days," said King. "'The Nature Cruise of the Century' was supposed to be just one of many things Ecuadorians had to look forward to. Suddenly it became the only thing."

  "It is as though we prepared a great crystal bowl of champagne punch," said Donoso, "and then, overnight, it turned into a rusty bucket of nitroglycerin." He said that "the Nature Cruise of the Century" had at least postponed Ecuador's facing up to its insoluble economic problems for a week or two. The governments of Colombia to the north and Peru to the south and east had already been overthrown, and were now military dictatorships. The new leaders of Peru, in fact, in order to divert the big brains of their people from all their troubles, were just about to declare war on Ecuador.

  "If Mrs. Onassis were to go there now," said Donoso, "people would receive her as though she were a rescuer, a worker of miracles. She would be expected to summon ships laden with food to Guayaquil--and to have United States bombers drop cereal and milk and fresh fruit for the children by parachute!"

  Nobody nowadays, I must say, expects to be rescued from anything, once he or she is more than nine months old. That's how long human childhood lasts nowadays.

  I myself was rescued from folly and carelessness until I was ten years old--until Mother walked out on Father and me. I was on my own after that. Mary Hepburn didn't become independent of her parents until she received her master's degree at the age of twenty-two. Adolf von Kleist, the Captain of the Bahia de Darwin, was regularly bailed out by his parents from gambling debts and charges of drunken driving and assault and resisting arrest and vandalism and so on until he was twenty-six--when his father came down with Huntington's chorea and murdered his mother. Only then did he begin to assume responsibility for mistakes he made.

  Back when childhoods were often so protracted, it is unsurprising that so many people got into the lifelong habit of believing, even after their parents were gone, that somebody was always watching over them--God or a saint or a guardian angel or the stars or whatever.

  People have no such illusions today. They learn very early what kind of a world this really is, and it is a rare adult indeed who hasn't seen a careless sibling or parent eaten alive by a killer whale or shark.

  A million years ago, there were passionate arguments about whether it was right or wrong for people to use mechanical means to keep sperm from fertilizing ova or to dislodge fertilized ova from uteri--in order to keep the number of people from exceeding the food supply.

  That problem is all taken care of nowadays, without anybody's having to do anything unnatural. Killer whales and sharks keep the human population nice and manageable, and nobody starves.

  Mary Hepburn used to teach not only general biology at Ilium High School, but a course in human sexuality, too. This necessitated her describing various birth-control devices which she herself had never used, since her husband was the only lover she had ever had, and she and Roy had wanted to have babies from the very first.

  She, who had failed to get pregnant despite years of profound sexual intimacies with Roy, had to admonish her students about how easy it was for a human female to get pregnant from the most fleeting, insensate, seemingly inconsequential contact with a male. And after she had been teaching a few years, most of her cautionary tales involved students she had known personally--right there at Ilium High.

  Scarcely a semester passed at the high school without at least one unwanted pregnancy, and during the memorable spring semester of 1981 there were six. And, true enough, about half of these babies having babies spoke of true love for those with whom they had mated. But the other half swore, in the face of contradictory evidence which could only be described as overwhelming, that they had never, to the best of their recollection, engaged in any activity which could result in the birth of a child.

  And Mary would say to a female colleague at the end of the memorable spring semest
er of 1981, "For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.

  After ten years on Santa Rosalia Island, Mary Hepburn would discover firsthand exactly how easily a teenage virgin could be made pregnant by the seed of a male who was seeking sexual release and nothing else, who did not even like her.

  23

  SO, WITHOUT ANY IDEA that he was going to become the sire of all humankind, I got into the head of Captain Adolf von Kleist as he rode in a taxicab from Guayaquil International Airport to the Bahia de Darwin. I did not know that humanity was about to be diminished to a tiny point, by luck, and then, again by luck, to be permitted to expand again. I believed that the chaos involving billions of big-brained people thrashing around every which way, and reproducing and reproducing, would go on and on. It did not seem likely that an individual could be significant in such an unplanned uproar.

  My choosing the Captain's head for a vehicle, then, was the equivalent of putting a coin in a slot machine in an enormous gambling casino, and hitting a jackpot right away.

  It was his uniform which attracted me as much as anything. He was wearing the white-and-gold uniform of a Reserve admiral. I myself had been a private, and so was curious to know what the world looked like to a person of very high military rank and social standing.

  And I was mystified to find his big brain thinking about meteorites. That was often my experience back then: I would get into the head of somebody in what to me was a particularly interesting situation, and discover that the person's big brain was thinking about things which had nothing to do with the problem right at hand.

  Here was the thing about the Captain and meteorites: He had paid little attention to most of his instructors at the United States Naval Academy, and had graduated at the very bottom of his class. He in fact would have been expelled for cheating in an examination on celestial navigation, if his parents hadn't interceded through diplomatic channels. But he had been impressed by one lecture on the subject of meteorites. The instructor said that showers of great boulders from outer space had been quite common over the eons, and their impacts had been so terrific, possibly, as to have caused the extinction of many life forms, including the dinosaurs. He said that human beings had every reason to expect more such planet smashers at any time, and should devise apparatus for distinguishing between enemy missiles and meteorites.

  Otherwise, utterly meaningless wrath from outer space could trigger World War Three.

  And this apocalyptic warning so suited the wiring of the Captain's brain, even before his father came down with Huntington's chorea, that he would ever after believe that that was indeed the most likely way in which humanity would be exterminated: by meteorites.

  To the Captain, it was such a much more honorable and poetical and even beautiful way for humanity to die than World War Three would be.

  When I got to know his big brain better, I understood that there was a certain logic to his thinking about meteorites while he was looking out at Guayaquil with its hungry crowds under martial law. Even without the glamor of a meteorite shower, the world appeared to be ending for the people of Guayaquil.

  In a sense, too, this man had already been hit by a meteorite: by the murder of his mother by his father. And his feeling that life was a meaningless nightmare, with nobody watching or caring what was going on, was actually quite familiar to me.

  That was how I felt after I shot a grandmother in Vietnam. She was as toothless and bent over as Mary Hepburn would be at the end of her life. I shot her because she had just killed my best friend and my worst enemy in my platoon with a single hand-grenade.

  This episode made me sorry to be alive, made me envy stones. I would rather have been a stone at the service of the Natural Order.

  The Captain went straight from the airport to his ship, without stopping off at the hotel to see his brother. He had been drinking champagne during the long flight from New York City, and so had a splitting headache.

  And when we got aboard the Bahia de Darwin, it was obvious to me that his functions as captain, like his functions as a Reserve admiral, were purely ceremonial. Others would be doing the navigating and engineering and maintaining crew discipline and so on while he socialized with the distinguished passengers. He knew very little about the operation of the ship, nor did he feel he needed to know much about it. His familiarity with the Galapagos Islands was likewise sketchy. He had made ceremonial visits as an admiral to the naval base on the island of Baltra and the Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz--again as essentially a passenger on board a ship of which he was nominally the commander. But all the rest of the islands were terra incognita to him. He would have been a more instructive guide on the ski slopes of Switzerland, say, or on the carpets of the casino at Monte Carlo, or to the stables serving at Palm Beach polo fields.

  But again--what did that matter? On "the Nature Cruise of the Century," there would be guides and lecturers trained at the Darwin Research Station and holding graduate degrees in the natural sciences. The Captain intended to listen to them carefully, and learn about the islands right along with the rest of the passengers.

  Riding in the Captain's skull, I had hoped to find out what it was like to be a supreme commander. I found out, instead, what it was like to be a social butterfly. We were received with all possible signs of military respect when we came up the gangplank. But, once aboard, no officers or crewmen asked us for instructions about anything as they made the final preparations for the arrival of Mrs. Onassis and the rest of them.

  So far as the Captain knew, the ship was still going to sail the next day. He had not been told otherwise. Since he had been back in Ecuador for only an hour, and still had a bellyful of good New York food and a champagne headache, it had yet to dawn on him what awful trouble he and his ship were in.

  There is another human defect which the Law of Natural Selection has yet to remedy: When people of today have full bellies, they are exactly like their ancestors of a million years ago: very slow to acknowledge any awful troubles they may be in. Then is when they forget to keep a sharp lookout for sharks and whales.

  This was a particularly tragic flaw a million years ago, since the people who were best informed about the state of the planet, like *Andrew MacIntosh, for example, and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed.

  So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned.

  For all the computers and measuring instruments and news gatherers and evaluators and memory banks and libraries and experts on this and that at their disposal, their deaf and blind bellies remained the final judges of how urgent this or that problem, such as the destruction of North America's and Europe's forests by acid rain, say, might really be.

  And here was the sort of advice a full belly gave and still gives, and which the Captain's full belly gave him when the first mate of the Bahia de Darwin, Hernando Cruz, told him that none of the guides had shown up or been heard from, and that a third of the crewmen had deserted so far, feeling that they had better look after their families: "Be patient. Smile. Be confident. Everything will turn out for the best somehow."

  24

  MARY HEPBURN had seen and appreciated the Captain's comical performance on The Tonight Show, and then another one on Good Morning America. To that extent, she felt she already knew him some before her big brain made her come to Guayaquil.

  He was on The Tonight Show two weeks after Roy died, and he was the first person to make her laugh out loud after that sad event. There she was in the living room of her little house, with the houses on all sides of hers empty and for sale, and heard herself laugh out loud about the ridiculous Ecuadorian submarine fleet, whose tradition was to go underwater and never come up again.

  She supposed then that von Kleist was a lot like Roy in loving nature and machinery. Otherwise, why would he have be
en chosen to be the Captain of the Bahia de Darwin?

  Now her big brain had her say out loud to the Captain's image on the cathode-ray tube, to the considerable embarrassment of her soul, although there was no one to hear her: "Would you by any chance like to marry me?"

  It would turn out that she knew at least a little bit more about machinery than he did, just from living with Roy. After Roy died, and the lawn mower wouldn't start, for example, she was able to change the spark plug and get it going--something the Captain could never have done.

  And she knew a whole lot more about the islands. It was Mary who correctly identified the island on which they would be marooned. The Captain, grasping for shreds of self-respect and authority after his big brain had made such a mess of things, declared the island to be Rabida, which it surely wasn't and which, in any case, he had never seen.

  And what allowed Mary to recognize Santa Rosalia were the dominant sorts of finches there. These drab little birds, incidentally, so uninteresting to most tourists and to Mary's students, had been as exciting to young Charles Darwin as the great land tortoises or the boobies or marine iguanas, or any other creatures there. The thing was: The finches looked very much alike, but they were in fact divided into thirteen species, each species with its own peculiar diet and method for getting food.

  None had close relatives on the mainland of South America or anywhere. Their ancestors might, too, have arrived on Noah's ark or a natural raft, since it was wholly out of character for a finch to set out on a flight of a thousand kilometers over open ocean.