Munro said, looking at him steadily.
What had Munro seen? Certainly he had been around enough death to know a human skeleton when he saw one. Elliot’s glance fell on a curved bone. It looked a bit like a turkey wishbone, only much larger and broader, and white with age. He picked it up. It was a fragment of the zygomatic arch from a human skull. A cheekbone, from beneath the eye.
He turned the fragment in his hands. He looked back at the jungle floor, and the creepers that spread reaching tentacles over the white carpet of bones. He saw many very fragile bones,, some so thin they were translucent—bones that he assumed had come from small animals.
Now he was not sure.
A question from graduate school returned to him. What seven bones compose the orbit of the human eye? Elliot tried to remember. The zygoma, the nasal, the inferior orbital, the sphenoid—that was four—the ethmoid, five—something must come from beneath, from the mouth—the palatine, six—one more to go—he couldn’t think of the last bone. Zygoma, nasal, inferior orbital, sphenoid, ethmoid, palatine. . . delicate bones, translucent bones, small bones.
Human bones.
“At least these aren’t human bones,” Ross said.
“No,” Elliot agreed. He glanced at Amy.
Amy signed, People die here.
“What did she say?”
“She said people don’t benefit from the air here.”
“Let’s push on,” Munro said.
Munro led him a little distance ahead of the others. “Well done,” he said. “Have to be careful about the Kikuyu. Don’t want to panic them. What’d your monkey say?”
“She said people died there.”
“That’s more than the others know,” Munro said, nodding grimly. “Although they suspect.”
Behind them, the party walked single-file, nobody talking.
“What the hell happened back there?” Elliot said.
“Lots of bones,” Munro said. “Leopard, colobus, forest rat, maybe a bush baby, human. .
“And gorilla,” Elliot said.
“Yes,” Munro said. “I saw that, too. Gorilla.” He shook his head. “What can kill a gorilla, Professor?”
Elliot had no answer.
The consortium camp lay in ruins, the tents shredded and shattered, the dead bodies covered with dense black clouds of flies. In the humid air, the stench was overpowering, the buzzing of the flies an angry monotonous sound. Everybody except Munro hung back at the edge of the camp.
“No choice,” he said. “We’ve got to know what happened to these—” He went inside the camp itself, stepping over the flattened fence.
As Munro moved inside, the perimeter defenses were set off, emitting a screaming high-frequency signal. Outside the fence, the others cupped their hands over their ears and Amy snorted her displeasure.
Bad noise.
Munro glanced back at them. “Doesn’t bother me,” he said. “That’s what you get for staying outside.” Munro went to one dead body, turning it over with his foot. Then he bent down, swatting away the cloud of buzzing flies, and carefully examined the head.
Ross glanced over at Elliot. He seemed to be in shock, the typical scientist, immobilized by disaster. At his side, Amy covered her ears and winced. But Ross was not immobilized; she took a deep breath and crossed the perimeter. “I have to know what defenses they installed.”
“Pine,” Elliot said. He felt detached, light-headed, as if he might faint; the sight and the smells made him dizzy. He saw Ross pick her way across the compound, then lift up a black box with an odd baffled cone. She traced a wire back toward the center of the camp. Soon afterward the high-frequency signal ceased; she had turned it off at the source.
Amy signed, Better now.
With one hand, Ross rummaged through the electronics equipment in the center of the units in the camp, while with the other she held her nose against the stench.
Kahega said, “I’ll see if they have guns, Doctor,” and he, too, moved into the camp. Hesitantly, the other porters followed him.
Alone, Elliot remained with Amy. She impassively surveyed the destruction, although she reached up and took his hand. He signed, Amy what happened this place?
Amy signed, Things come.
What things?
Bad things.
What things?
Bad things come things come bad.
What things?
Bad things.
Obviously he would get nowhere with this line of questioning. He told her to remain outside the camp, and went in himself, moving among the bodies and the buzzing flies.
Ross said, “Anybody find the leader?”
Across the camp, Munro said, “Menard.”
“Out of Kinshasa?”
Munro nodded. “Yeah.”
“Who’s Menard?” Elliot asked.
“He’s got a good reputation, knows the Congo.” Ross picked her way through the debris. “But he wasn’t good enough.” A moment later she paused.
Elliot went over to her. She stared at a body lying face down on the ground.
“Don’t turn it over,” she said. “It’s Richter.” Elliot did not understand how she could be sure. The body was covered with black flies. He bent over.
“Don’t touch him!”
“Okay,” Elliot said.
“Kahega,” Munro shouted, raising a green plastic twenty-liter can. The can sloshed with liquid in his hand. “Let’s get this done.”
Kahega and his men moved swiftly, splashing kerosene over the tents and dead bodies. Elliot smelled the sharp odor.
Ross, crouched under a torn nylon supply tent, shouted, “Give me a minute!”
“Take all the time you want,” Munro said. He turned to Elliot, who was watching Amy outside the camp.
Amy was signing to herself: People bad. No believe people bad things come.
“She seems very calm about it,” Munro said.
“Not really,” Elliot said. “I think she knows what took place here.”
“I ‘hope she’ll tell us,” Munro said. “Because all these men died in the same way. Their skulls were crushed.”
The flames from the consortium camp licked upward into the air, and the black smoke bellowed as the expedition moved onward through the jungle. Ross was silent, lost in thought. Elliot said, “What did you find?”
“Nothing good,” she said. “They had a perfectly adequate peripheral system, quite similar to our ADP—animal defense perimeter. Those cones I found are audio-sensing units, and when they pick up a signal, they emit an ultrahigh-frequency signal that is very painful to auditory systems. Doesn’t work for reptiles, but it’s damn effective on mammalian systems. Send-a wolf or a leopard running for the hills.”
“But it didn’t work here,” Elliot said.
“No,” Ross said. “And it didn’t bother Amy very much.” Elliot said, “What does it do to human auditory systems?”
“You felt it. It’s annoying, but that’s all.” She glanced at Elliot. “But there aren’t any human beings in this part of the Congo. Except us.”
Munro asked, “Can we make a better perimeter defense?”
“Damn right we can,” Ross said. “I’ll give you the next generation perimeter—it’ll stop anything except elephants and rhinos.” But she didn’t sound convinced.
Late in the afternoon, they came upon the remains of the first ERTS Congo camp. They nearly missed it, for during the intervening eight days the jungle vines and creepers had already begun to grow back over it, obliterating all traces. There was not much left—a few shreds of orange nylon, a dented aluminum cooking pan, the crushed tripod, and the broken video camera, its green circuit boards scattered across the ground. They found no bodies, and since the light was fading they pressed on.
Amy was distinctly agitated, She signed, No go.
Peter Elliot paid no attention.
Bad place old place no go.
“We go, Amy,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later they came to a break in the overhanging trees. Looking up, they saw the dark cone of Mukenko rising above the forest, and the faint crossed green beams of the lasers glinting in the humid air. And directly beneath the beams were the moss-covered stone blocks, half concealed in jungle foliage, of the Lost City of Zinj.
Elliot turned to look at Amy.
Amy was gone.
4. WEIRD
HE COULD NOT BELIEVE IT.
At first he thought she was just punishing him, running off to make him sorry for shooting the dart at her on the river. He explained to Munro and Ross that she was capable of such things, and they spent the next half hour wandering through the jungle, calling her name. But there was no response, just the eternal silence of the rain forest. The half hour became an hour, then almost two hours.
Elliot was panic-stricken.
When she still did not emerge from the foliage, another possibility had to be considered. “Maybe she ran off with the last group of gorillas,” Munro said.
“Impossible,” Elliot said.
“She’s seven, she’s near maturity.” Munro shrugged.
“She is a gorilla.” –
“Impossible,” Elliot insisted.
But he knew what Munro was saying. Inevitably, people who raised apes found at a certain point they could no longer keep them. With maturity the animals became too large, too powerful, too much their own species to be controllable. It was no longer possible to put them in diapers and pretend they were cute humanlike creatures. Their genes coded inevitable differences that ultimately became impossible to overlook.
“Gorilla troops aren’t closed,” Munro reminded him. “They accept strangers, particularly female strangers.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Elliot insisted. “She couldn’t.”
Amy had been raised from infancy among human beings. She was much more familiar with the Westernized world of freeways and drive-ins than she was with the jungle. If Elliot drove his car past her favorite drive-in, she was quick to tap his shoulder and point out his error. What did she know of the jungle? It was as alien to her as it was to Elliot himself. And not only that— “We’d better make camp,” Ross said, glancing at her watch. “She’ll come back—if she wants to. After all,” she said, “we didn’t leave her. She left us.”
They had brought a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne but nobody was in a mood to celebrate. Elliot was remorseful over the loss of Amy; the others were horrified by what they had seen of the earlier camp; with night rapidly falling, there was much to do to setup the ERTS system known as WEIRD (Wilderness Environmental Intruder Response Defenses).
The exotic WEIRD technology recognized the fact that perimeter defenses were traditional throughout the history of Congo exploration. More than a century before, Stanley observed that “no camp is to be considered complete until it is fenced around by bush or trees.” In the years since there was little reason to alter the essential nature of that instruction.
But defensive technology had changed, and the WEIRD system incorporated all the latest innovations.
Kahega and his men inflated the silvered Mylar tents, arranging them close together. Ross directed the placement of the tubular infrared night lights on telescoping tripods. These were positioned shining outward around the camp.
Next the perimeter fence was installed. This was a lightweight metalloid mesh, more like cloth than wire. Attached to stakes, it completely enclosed the campsite, and when hooked to the transformer carried 10,000 volts of electrical current. To reduce drain on the fuel cells, the current was pulsed at four cycles a second, creating a throbbing, intermittent hum.
Dinner on the night of June 20 was rice with rehydrated Creole shrimp sauce. The shrimps did not rehydrate well, remaining little cardboard-tasting chunks in the mix, but nobody complained about this failure of twentieth-century technology as they glanced around them at the deepening jungle darkness.
Munro positioned the sentries. They would stand -four-hour watches; Munro announced that he, Kahega, and Elliot would take the first watch.
With night goggles in place, the sentries looked like mysterious grasshoppers peering out at the jungle. The night goggles intensified ambient light and overlaid this on the preexisting imagery, rimming it in ghostly green. Elliot found the goggles heavy, and the electronic view through them difficult to adjust to. He pulled them off after several minutes, and was astonished to see that the jungle was inky black around him. He put them back on hastily.
The night passed quietly, without incident.
DAY 9: ZINJ
June 21, 1979