Galapagos

25.

ON THE ISLAND OF M 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 b.u.t.ton 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 j.a.panese, 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 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 (18071892) "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 f.u.c.k 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 s.p.a.ce 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 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 San Mateo, long anch.o.r.ed 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 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. 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 pa.s.sengers 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 San Mateo and the great raft of vegetable matter which had acc.u.mulated 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 and the great raft of vegetable matter which had acc.u.mulated 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 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 San Mateo.

What had happened was that the San Mateo" 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 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 acc.u.mulated lifetime savings of Cruz, all in sucres, had turned to trash. 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 acc.u.mulated lifetime savings of Cruz, all in sucres, had turned to trash.

He envied the elation the San Mateo" 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 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." 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 s.h.i.t 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 n.o.body at the top who had understood how things really worked, what it was all about, what was really going on.

26.

THE LUCKY VON K 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 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 j.a.panese 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 pa.s.s 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 Bahia de Darwin was technically a ship of war, which meant that deserters would be subject to strict punishment under regulations of the Navy. 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 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 h.e.l.l 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 rea.s.sure them. While waiting for them, Cruz would anchor the Bahia de Darwin Bahia de Darwin offsh.o.r.e, like the Colombian freighter offsh.o.r.e, like the Colombian freighter San Mateo 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 (17061790) Yes, and a little neglect can breed good news just as easily. For want of Hernando Cruz aboard the Bahia de Darwin 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 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.

The Peruvian Air Force would soon do its bit, as well, but not until six o"clock that evening, after *Andrew MacIntosh and *Zenji Hiroguchi were dead-at which time Peru would declare war on Ecuador. Peru had been bankrupt for fourteen days longer than Ecuador, so that hunger was that much more advanced there. Ground soldiers were going home, and taking their weapons with them. Only the small Peruvian Air Force was still reliable, and the military junta was keeping it that way by giving its members the best of whatever food was still around.

One thing which made the Air Force such a high morale unit was that its equipment, bought on credit and delivered before the bankruptcy, was so up to date. It had eight new French fighter-bombers and each of these planes, moreover, was equipped with an American air-to-ground missile with a j.a.panese brain which could home in on radar signals, or on heat from an engine, depending on instructions from the pilot. The pilot was in turn being instructed by computers on the ground and in his c.o.c.kpit. The warhead of each missile carried a new Israeli explosive which was capable of creating one fifth as much devastation as the atomic bomb the United States dropped on the mother of Hisako Hiroguchi during World War Two. This new explosive was regarded as a great boon to big-brained military scientists. As long as they killed people with conventional rather than nuclear weapons, they were praised as humanitarian statesmen. As long as they did not use nuclear weapons, it appeared, n.o.body was going to give the right name to all the killing that had been going on since the end of the Second World War, which was surely "World War Three."

The Peruvian junta gave this as its official reason for going to war: that the Galapagos Islands were rightfully Peru"s, and that Peru was going to get them back again.

n.o.body today is nearly smart enough to make the sorts of weapons even the poorest nations had a million years ago. Yes, and they were being used all the time. During my entire lifetime, there wasn"t a day when, somewhere on the planet, there weren"t at least three wars going on.

And the Law of Natural Selection was powerless to respond to such new technologies. No female of any species, unless, maybe, she was a rhinoceros, could expect to give birth to a baby who was fireproof, bombproof, or bulletproof.

The best that the Law of Natural Selection could come up with in my time was somebody who wasn"t afraid of anything, even though there was so much to fear. I knew a few people like that in Vietnam-to the extent that such people were knowable. And such a person was *Andrew MacIntosh.

27.

SELENA M MACINTOSH would never know for certain that her father was dead until she was reunited with him at the far end of the blue tunnel into the Afterlife. All she could be sure of was that he had departed her room at the El Dorado, and exchanged some words with *Zenji Hiroguchi out in the corridor. Then the two went down together in the elevator. After that, she would never again receive news about either one of them. would never know for certain that her father was dead until she was reunited with him at the far end of the blue tunnel into the Afterlife. All she could be sure of was that he had departed her room at the El Dorado, and exchanged some words with *Zenji Hiroguchi out in the corridor. Then the two went down together in the elevator. After that, she would never again receive news about either one of them.

Here is the story on her blindness, by the way: She had retinitis pigmentosa, caused by a defective gene inherited on the female side. She had got it from her mother, who could see perfectly well, and who had concealed from her husband the certainty that this was a gene she carried.

This was another disease with which Mandarax was familiar, since it was one of the top one thousand serious diseases of h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens. Mandarax, when asked about it by Mary on Santa Rosalia, would p.r.o.nounce Selena"s case a severe one, since she was blind at birth. It was more usual for retinitis pigmentosa, said Mandarax, son of Gokubi, to let its hosts and hostesses see the world clearly for as long as thirty years sometimes. Mandarax confirmed, too, what Selena herself had told Mary: that if she had a baby, there was a fifty-fifty chance that it would be blind. And if that baby was a female, whether it went blind or not, and that baby grew up and reproduced, there would be a fifty-fifty chance that its child would be blind.

It is amazing that two such relatively rare hereditary defects, retinitis pigmentosa and Huntington"s ch.o.r.ea, should have been causes for worry to the first human settlers of Santa Rosalia, since the settlers numbered only ten.

As I have already said, the Captain luckily turned out not to be a carrier. Selena was surely a carrier. If she had reproduced, though, I think humankind would still be free of retinitis pigmentosa now-thanks to the Law of Natural Selection, and sharks and killer whales.

Here is how her father and *Zenji Hiroguchi died, incidentally, while she and her dog Kazakh listened to the noise of the crowd outside: They were shot in their heads from behind, so they never knew what hit them. And the soldier who shot them is another person who should be credited with having done a little something whose effects are still visible after a million years. I am not talking about the shootings. I am talking about his breaking into the back door of a shuttered souvenir shop which faced the El Dorado.

If he had not burglarized that shop, there would almost certainly be no human beings on the face of the earth today. I mean it. Everybody alive today should thank G.o.d that this soldier was insane.

His name was Private Geraldo Delgado, and he had deserted his unit, taking his first-aid kit and canteen and trenchknife, automatic a.s.sault rifle and two grenades and several clips of ammunition and so on with him. He was only eighteen years old, and was a paranoid schizophrenic. He should never have been issued live ammunition.

His big brain was telling him all sorts of things that were not true-that he was the greatest dancer in the world, that he was the son of Frank Sinatra, that people envious of his dancing ability were attempting to destroy his brains with little radios, and on and on.

Delgado, facing starvation like so many other people in Guayaquil, thought his big problem was enemies with little radios. And when he broke in through the back door of what was plainly a defunct souvenir shop, it wasn"t a souvenir shop to him. To him it was the headquarters of the Ecuadorian Ballet Folklorico, and he was now going to get his chance to prove that he really was the greatest dancer in the world.

There are still plenty of hallucinators today, people who respond pa.s.sionately to all sorts of things which aren"t really going on. This could be a legacy from the Kanka-bonos. But people like that can"t get hold of weapons now, and they"re easy to swim away from. Even if they found a grenade or a machine gun or a knife or whatever left over from olden times, how could they ever make use of it with just their flippers and their mouths?

When I was a child in Cohoes, my mother took me to see the circus in Albany one time, although we could not afford it and Father did not approve of circuses. And there were trained seals and sea lions there who could balance b.a.l.l.s on their noses and blow horns and clap their flippers on cue and so on.

But they could never have loaded and c.o.c.ked a machine gun, or pulled the pin on a hand grenade and thrown it any distance with any accuracy.

As to how a person as crazy as Delgado got into the army in the first place: He looked all right and he acted all right when he talked to the recruiting officer, just as I did when I enlisted in the United States Marines. And Delgado was taken in during the previous summer, about the time Roy Hepburn died, for short-term service specifically a.s.sociated with "the Nature Cruise of the Century." His unit was to be a spit-and-polish drill team which was to strut its stuff before Mrs. Ona.s.sis and the rest of them. They were going to have a.s.sault rifles and steel helmets and all that, but surely not live ammunition.

And Delgado was a wonderful marcher and polisher of bra.s.s b.u.t.tons and shiner of shoes. But then Ecuador was convulsed by this economic crisis, and live ammunition was pa.s.sed out to the soldiery.

He was a harrowing example of quick evolution, but then so was any soldier. When I was through with Marine boot camp, and I was sent to Vietnam and issued live ammunition, I bore almost no resemblance to the f.e.c.kless animal I had been in civilian life. And I did worse things than Delgado.

Now, then: The store that Delgado broke into was in a block of locked business establishments facing the El Dorado. The soldiers who had strung barbed wire around the hotel considered the stores as part of their barrier. So that when Delgado broke open the back door of one, and then unlocked its front door just a hair and peeked out, he had made a hole in the barrier, through which somebody else might pa.s.s. This breach was his contribution to the future of humankind, since very important people would pa.s.s through it in a very short while, and reach the hotel.

When Delgado looked out through the crack in the door, he saw two of his enemies. One of them was flourishing a little radio which could scramble his brains-or so he thought. This wasn"t a radio. It was Mandarax, and the two supposed enemies were *Zenji Hiroguchi and *Andrew MacIntosh. They were walking briskly along the inside of the barricade, as they were ent.i.tled to do, since they were guests at the hotel.

*Hiroguchi was still boiling mad, and *MacIntosh was joshing him about taking life too seriously. They went right past the store where Delgado was lurking. So Delgado stepped out through the front door and shot them both in what he believed to be self-defense.

So I don"t have to put stars in front of the names of Zenji Hiroguchi and Andrew MacIntosh anymore. I only did that to remind readers that they were the two of the six guests at the El Dorado who would be dead before the sun went down.

They were dead now, and the sun was going down on a world where so many people believed, a million years ago, that only the fit survived.

Delgado, the survivor, disappeared into the store again, and headed for the back door, where he expected to find more enemies to outsurvive.

But there were only six little brown beggar children out there-all girls. When this horrifying military freak leapt out at the little girls with all his killing equipment, they were too hungry and too resigned to death to run away. They opened their mouths instead-and rolled their brown eyes, and patted their stomachs, and pointed down their gullets to show how hungry they were.

Children all over the world were doing that back then, and not just in that one back alley in Ecuador.

So Delgado just kept going, and he was never caught and punished or hospitalized or whatever. He was just one more soldier in a city teeming with soldiers, and n.o.body had gotten a good look at his face, which, in the shadow of his steel helmet, wasn"t all that different from anybody else"s face anyway. And, like the great survivor he was, he would rape a woman the next day and become the father of one of the last ten million children or so to be born on the South American mainland.

After he was gone, the six little girls went into the shop, seeking food or anything which might be traded for food. These were orphans from the Ecuadorian rain forest across the mountains to the east-from far, far away. Their parents had all been killed by insecticides sprayed from the air, and a bush pilot had brought them to Guayaquil, where they had become children of the streets.

These children were predominantly Indian, but had Negro ancestors as well-African slaves who had escaped into the rain forest long ago.

These were Kanka-bonos. They would grow to womanhood on Santa Rosalia, where, along with Hisako Hiroguchi, they would become the mothers of all modern humankind.

Before they could get to Santa Rosalia, though, they would first have to reach the hotel. And the soldiers and the barricades would surely have stopped them from getting there, if Private Geraldo Delgado had not opened up that pathway through the store.

28.

THESE CHILDREN would become six Eves to Captain von Kleist"s Adam on Santa Rosalia, and they wouldn"t have been in Guayaquil if it weren"t for a young Ecuadorian bush pilot named Eduardo Ximenez. During the previous summer, on the day after Roy Hepburn was buried, in fact, Ximenez was flying his own four-pa.s.senger amphibious plane over the rain forest, near the headwaters of the Tiputini River, which flowed to the Atlantic rather than the Pacific Ocean. He had just delivered a French anthropologist and his survival equipment to a point downstream, on the border of Peru, where the Frenchman planned to begin a search for the elusive Kanka-bonos. would become six Eves to Captain von Kleist"s Adam on Santa Rosalia, and they wouldn"t have been in Guayaquil if it weren"t for a young Ecuadorian bush pilot named Eduardo Ximenez. During the previous summer, on the day after Roy Hepburn was buried, in fact, Ximenez was flying his own four-pa.s.senger amphibious plane over the rain forest, near the headwaters of the Tiputini River, which flowed to the Atlantic rather than the Pacific Ocean. He had just delivered a French anthropologist and his survival equipment to a point downstream, on the border of Peru, where the Frenchman planned to begin a search for the elusive Kanka-bonos.

Ximenez was headed next for Guayaquil, five hundred kilometers away and across two high and rugged mountain barriers. In Guayaquil, he was to pick up two Argentinian millionaire sportsmen, and take them to the landing field on the Galapagos island of Baltra, where they had chartered a deep-sea fishing boat and crew. They would not be going after just any sort of fish, either. They hoped to hook great white sharks, the same creatures who, thirty-one years later, would swallow Mary Hepburn and Captain von Kleist and Mandarax.

Ximenez saw from the air these letters trampled in the mud of the riverbank: SOS SOS. He landed on the water and then made his plane waddle ash.o.r.e like a duck.

He was greeted by an eighty-year-old Roman Catholic priest from Ireland named Father Bernard Fitzgerald, who had lived with the Kanka-bonos for half a century. With him were the six little girls, the last of the Kanka-bonos. He and they had trampled the letters in the river-bank.

Father Fitzgerald, incidentally, had a great-grandfather in common with John F. Kennedy, the first husband of Mrs. Ona.s.sis and the thirty-fifth president of the United States. If he had mated with an Indian, which he never did, everybody now alive might claim to be an Irish blue blood-not that anybody today claims to be much of anything.

After only about nine months of life, people even forget who their mothers were.

The girls had been at choir practice with Father Fitzgerald when everybody else in the tribe got sprayed. Some of the victims were still dying, so the old priest was going to stay with them. He wanted Ximenez, though, to take the girls someplace where somebody could look after them.

So in only five hours those girls were flown from the Stone Age to the Electronics Age, from the freshwater swamps of the jungle to the brackish marshes of Guayaquil. They spoke only Kanka-bono, which only a few dying relatives in the jungle and, as things would turn out, one dirty old white man in Guayaquil could understand.

Ximenez was from Quito, and had no place of his own where he could put up the girls in Guayaquil. He himself hired a room at the Hotel El Dorado, the same room which would later be occupied by Selena MacIntosh and her dog. On the advice of police he took the girls to an orphanage next door to the cathedral downtown, where nuns gladly accepted responsibility for them. There was still plenty of food for everyone.

Ximenez then went to the hotel, and he told the story to the bartender there, who was Jesus Ortiz, the same man who would later disconnect all the telephones from the outside world.

So Ximenez was one aviator who had quite a lot to do with the future of humanity. And another one was an American named Paul W. Tibbets. It was Tibbets who had dropped an atomic bomb on Hisako Hiroguchi"s mother during World War Two. People would probably be as furry as they are today, even if Tibbets hadn"t dropped the bomb. But they certainly got furrier faster because of him.

The orphanage put out a call for anybody who could speak Kanka-bono, to serve as an interpreter. An old drunk and petty thief appeared, a purebred white man who, amazingly, was a grandfather of the lightest of the girls. When a youngster, he had gone prospecting for valuable minerals in the rain forest, and had lived with the Kanka-bonos for three years. He had welcomed Father Fitzgerald to the tribe when the priest first arrived from Ireland.

His name was Domingo Quezeda, and he was from excellent stock. His father had been head of the Philosophy Department of the Central University in Quito. If they were so inclined, then, people today might claim to be descended from a long line of aristocratic Spanish intellectuals.

When I was a little boy in Cohoes, and could detect nothing in the life of our little family about which I could be proud, my mother told me that I had the blood of French n.o.blemen flowing in my veins. I would probably be living in a chateau on a vast estate over there, she said, if it hadn"t been for the French Revolution. That was on her side of the family. I was also somehow related through her, she went on, to Carter Braxton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. I should hold my head up high, she said, because of the blood flowing in my veins.