This time the needle on the radiometer flickered.
‘What do you know? Rebecca seems to be giving off ionizing radiation. Only a small amount. Not much. But it’s there, all right. The question is why, when none of the rest of us is showing a reading? Perhaps you have a theory about that, Boyd?’
‘I really couldn’t say. Look, I only just remembered I had this little machine.’ Boyd was looking apologetic. ‘It’s like I say, I wanted to check us out. I just didn’t want to alarm anyone, that’s all. Radioactivity is a scary thing. People go funny around it. I should have explained what I was doing. I’m sorry.’
‘You know, it’s a pity this little machine can’t detect lies as easily as it picks up ionizations,’ said Swift. ‘Anywhere near your mouth and I bet it’d go right off the scale.’
‘Swift,’ protested Jameson.
‘He’s right, you know,’ said Boyd, his smile waning, and his face colouring a little. ‘You’re way out of line. You should hear yourself.’
‘Can I see that thing?’ asked Cody.
Swift handed him the radiometer.
‘Go ahead — check her yourself.’
Cody checked the radiometer against the luminous dial of his wrist-watch. The needle flickered slightly as he approached the squeeze cage.
‘Maybe it’s because Rebecca’s been more in the open air than the rest of us,’ Jameson offered by way of explanation. ‘I believe that granite is mildly radioactive.’
‘Boyd’s the geologist,’ said Swift. ‘Let’s ask him.’
‘That sounds like a reasonable hypothesis,’ agreed Boyd.
Rebecca stared at Cody and shifted slowly on her behind as he returned with the machine.
‘Hey, it’s okay, okay,’ he said to her soothingly.
‘You know, it’s a funny thing,’ said Swift. ‘The skull that Jack brought back to Berkeley? From a cave somewhere up on the rock face?’ She shrugged. ‘Professor Stewart Ray Sacher ran all kinds of tests on it in the lab. It wasn’t the least bit radioactive.’
Nodding and speaking gently, Cody pushed his own arm through the bars and took his own reading. Rebecca was nodding back at him.
‘Okay, it’s okay.’
‘Perhaps some kind of tektite field,’ said Warner. ‘Or a small uranium deposit.’
‘Again, another reasonable hypothesis,’ said Boyd.
‘So why lie about it?’
Boyd shook his head with exasperation. ‘Lie about what? For Christ’s sake. Jesus, what is going on with you, Swifty?’ He punched the palm of his hand. ‘Altitude sickness, that must be it. Maybe you should take something.’
‘Altitude sickness?’ Swift grinned. ‘Maybe that’s why I’m seeing Rebecca now. Wasn’t that your first theory to account for the yeti, Boyd? When we first arrived? And stop calling me Swifty.’
Next to the squeeze cage, Cody frowned as he seemed to see an expression of inquiry in Rebecca’s calm-looking face. The radiometer needle moved with greater speed than it had done next to his watch.
‘There’s no doubt about it,’ he said. ‘She’s showing a reading.’
Rebecca gave an excited bounce on her behind. She was puckering her lips.
‘...Crazy bitch are you,’ Boyd muttered.
‘Don’t worry, Rebecca. Everything’s okay.’
‘Oh-oh-oh.’
The sound was simian enough, half bark, half chuckle even. It was the second sound that took everyone by surprise. Even Boyd.
‘Keh-keh-keh.’
Cody felt the hair rising on his head and face.
‘Bloody hell,’ whispered Mac.
Jutta was standing up. Warner too.
‘Oh-keh! Oh-keh! Oh-keh!’
‘She’s talking,’ breathed Swift. ‘Rebecca can talk.’
‘Oh-keh! Oh-keh!’
‘Okay,’ repeated a delighted Cody. ‘Okay.’
‘Oh man,’ breathed Jack.
‘Precisely,’ said Swift.
Twenty-six
‘If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.’
Boyd had left the clamshell, almost unnoticed now in all the excitement, and returned to his lodge. Jack, Jutta, Warner, and the sirdar watched, fascinated, as Swift, Cody, and Jameson spoke to Rebecca, encouraging her to try another word. Mac was hurriedly reloading the video camera with another Hi-8 cassette.
‘Let’s see how you are with some breakfast,’ said Swift, and offered Rebecca a bowl of muesli. ‘Food,’ Swift pronounced clearly. ‘Food.’
Hugging Esau closely, Rebecca clicked her teeth and remained obstinately silent, even when she took the bowl from Swift’s outstretched hand.
‘No one’s ever been able to do more than teach an ape a few voiceless approximations of words,’ said Cody. ‘Of course, there are anatomical restrictions of a large primate’s vocal tract that prevent it from talking. But they can understand words easily enough. Apes seem to have at least a receptive competence for language if not an expressive one.’
Swift recalled the virtual-reality model of fossil Esau’s brain that Joanna Giardino had created back at UCMC in San Francisco, and the small but distinct Broca’s area they found. Paul Broca was chiefly remembered for establishing that destruction of a small area of brain matter not much larger than a silver dollar made a person unable to speak.
‘Food.’ Swift repeated the word several times, using different intonations: surprise, delight, questioning, and tempting. ‘Food.’
But as well as discovering that the expression of ideas through words could be established in this area, Broca had also been a paleoanthropologist of note, being the first to describe Cro-Magnon and Aurignacian, or Paleolithic man. It was Broca who had lent the new science of anthropology its whole critical method.
‘Hoo-hooo-hoooo-hoooo!’
‘She’s certainly got the right vowel sound,’ Jameson said hopefully.
‘But not the diphthong,’ said Cody. ‘Maybe it was just coincidence after all.’
‘Like hell it was,’ said Swift. ‘Come on, Byron. We all know exactly what we heard. Didn’t we, Rebecca?’ Swift put some of the dry muesli into her mouth and, chewing, began to rub her stomach contentedly. ‘Food. You say it. Food.’
Rebecca put a handful of muesli into her own mouth and began to crunch it loudly.
‘Just look at that face,’ said Warner. ‘Do you think if Descartes had seen Rebecca he might have arrived at a different conclusion?’ He glanced uncertainly at Jutta and Mac and added, ‘He said that animals are unable to think. That they are machines without a soul, mind, or consciousness. The animal mind is like a clock made up of wheels and springs.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Cody. ‘But the fact is that if Rebecca were a human — say a feral human — we would probably have a similar difficulty in teaching her to talk. For apes, just as much as us, infancy is the time of maximum social learning. If you haven’t acquired language by the time you’re age nine or ten, then it’s probably too late.’
Swift remembered that back in Berkeley she had said much the same thing to her class. But faced with the real-life situation she felt rather different about it. She anticipated a vicarious satisfaction in proving Cody, and her earlier self, wrong.
‘Give her a chance, will you?’ said Swift. ‘Food, fooo-oood.’
Rebecca turned her head away. She had a bored, slightly sad air about her, as if wishing that she and baby Esau could be elsewhere. Sighing loudly, she scratched herself for a moment and, catching Swift’s eye, took another handful of muesli.
‘Food,’ nodded Swift.
Rebecca started to nod back, almost as if she were agreeing with Swift. Swallowing, she tucked her lower lip behind her front teeth and started to blow.