“Got the manager of your motor court, Mrs.—”
“Mrs. Gelb.”
“Right, Mrs. Gelb. She, in turn, told us where you were working, and we drove up here.”
Nodding meaningfully at the cut in Joshua’s palm, Blair put the message slip on the table and smoothed it out with his fingers. “The name, address, and telephone number are self-explanatory, young man, but, pray, what is the significance of this tiny black hand with the eye in the middle?”
“I kept a diary when I was small. I kept it in code. That was one of the symbols I used.”
Colonel Crawford asked, “What did it stand for?”
“Homo habilis, I think.”
“Homo habilis!” Blair exclaimed. “Australopithecus habilis, you mean. The former was a term badly in need of overhaul even when you were a child. Nobody could ever quite agree which fossil specimens belonged in the category. As I tried to explain last night, habilis was decidedly more ape than man.”
“If the terminology’s screwed up,” Joshua said, “what better way to solve the problem than by a symbol? This hand with the eye in the middle means a certain kind of hominid, and only that kind.”
“But what criteria did you use to establish the category?”
“Observation.”
While Blair was trying to digest this claim, and perhaps to collate it with Joshua’s remarks about chalicotheres at last night’s lecture, Colonel Crawford asked, “What kind of diary was this, anyway?”
“A diary of my travels.”
The two men stared at Joshua.
“A dream diary,” he said in qualification. “When I was nine, my mother—my adoptive mother, I mean—suggested that I begin recording my dreams. So I did, in code. All my dreams were a kind of… well, I called it spirit-traveling. My spirit-traveling always took me to the same goddamn place. I’d had these special sorts of dream ever since I was a baby, but it wasn’t until I was seven or eight that I began to realize not only where I was going but when.”
Joshua chewed some of the ice from the Coke that the disapproving waitress had just brought him.
“It scared me shitless. It scared my mother shitless, too, to see me in one of these trances. Usually, you know, my eyelids skinned back and my eyeballs rolled in my head. Jeannette—my adoptive mother—she must have wondered if I was dying. But I wasn’t dying. I was only—spirit-traveling.”
“To Pleistocene Africa?” Blair asked.
Joshua nodded.
“What makes you so bloody positive that the”—Blair groped for a word “—that the testimony of your dreams isn’t rife with nonsense and false colors? Nightmares don’t often correlate with the substance of objective reality. Yours may not, either.”
“No, mine do. They almost always do. Except when they’re mixed up with real nightmares. I can almost always tell when my genuine spirit-traveling is being muddled by regular dreaming.” Joshua told the two men of the time he had crosswired a flight of B-52s into the world of prehistoric East Africa. The airplanes had pocked the landscape with bomb craters and sent all sorts of extinct creatures scurrying for cover. Of course, these images had filtered into his dreaming mind only a few days after Jeannette had read to the children a letter from their father, who was stationed on Guam and working as the chief of a B-52 ground crew during the saturation bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia. On an earlier occasion, right after the first U.S. moon landing, Joshua had even contrived—or, rather, his subconscious had—to introduce space-suited astronauts into the terrain of his dreams.
The colonel rocked back on the rear legs of his chair. “Did that—does that—happen often?”
“No, sir, it’s rare. I can think of only a few intrusions like that. Once, though, I watched a band of quasi-people scavenging a mastodont that had fallen off a ledge into a gully and—”
“A mastodont?” Blair interrupted.
“Well, some sort of elephanty critter. I was maybe eight or nine. I hadn’t yet started checking books to see what kinds of animals were popping up in my spirit-travels. Besides, I didn’t need names for my dream diary—I just made up a symbol for each different animal and used that.”
“What about this ‘mastodont’?”
Joshua closed his eyes and snorted in bemused self-contempt. “I didn’t need a name for it. It was an intrusion, and it never came back after that first time. You know what that animal was?”
Blair and the colonel shook their heads.
“Snuffleupagus.” Joshua grimaced and flashed hot with embarrassment. “Yeah. Weird. I know.”
Zarakal’s Minister of Interior, uncomprehending, looked to Colonel Crawford for an explanation.
Joshua hurriedly said, “Snuffleupagus was this big, furry, elephanty creature on a PBS children’s program, Sesame Street. I don’t know whether it’s still on or not. Anyway, Snuffleupagus had silly cartoon eyes with long, flirty lashes and a voice like a bassoon’s, slow and deep and sad. His best friend was Big Bird, a seven-foot-tall featherbrain who could never convince any of the adults on the program that Snuffleupagus really existed. Every time Bird tried to introduce Snuffy to Maria or Mr. Hooper or somebody, Snuffy would go wandering off somewhere, swaying from side to side, and Bird ended up looking like the bozo who cried wolf.”
Joshua took a sip of Coke, put his glass back down on the wet circle it had made. Neither Blair nor Crawford took their eyes off him.
“That gave me the willies, that betrayal. It was the same goddamn thing that happened to me when I slipped and let somebody know about my spirit-traveling. Disbelief. Disbelief, indignation, sometimes even outrage. I couldn’t produce any evidence of what I was laying claim to, only some awkward drawings of the things I saw. Since the proof wouldn’t come, and since nobody knew what to make of my witness, I got labeled a liar. A liar and a freak. That’s why—before I was seven—I finally just shut up about it all.” Joshua grinned. “And that’s why I hated that goddamn, two-timin’ Snuffleupagus.”
The policeman at the counter had swiveled about on his stool, and Colonel Crawford bumped his chair back down and put a hand on Joshua’s wrist to warn him about speaking too loudly. His touch made Joshua start.
“Go ahead,” the colonel urged. “Finish about Snuffleupagus.”
Joshua drank off the remainder of his Coke and lowered his voice: “A group of hominids—black-hands-with-eyes, that’s the kind they were—scurried around in the watercourse where old Snuffy had fallen. They were getting ready to cut him up with tiny stone knives flaked from larger core tools. ‘Oh, nooo-ooo-ooh,’ moaned Snuffy, who wasn’t quite dead yet. ‘What’s going to become of me, Bird?’ The quasi-people set to work. They scored his shaggy belly with their flake tools and let the blood run. ‘Oh, dear me, Bird,’ Snuffleupagus said, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to die.’ Just like that. In that sappy, mournful voice of his. He wasn’t even struggling.”
“And then what happened?”
“Well, I guess he died, Colonel. And then the quasi-people probably ate him. I don’t know. My mother woke me up. I was sitting in the middle of my bed wrapped in a blanket—this was in our house, our basement apartment, in Cheyenne—and my eyes had probably rolled up in my head. My mother couldn’t stand to see that. She shook me out of it and held me, just held and rocked me.” Blair, Joshua saw, was fiddling with a paper napkin. “That was a tainted instance of spirit-traveling. A little of the here-and-now had leaked down and contaminated my long-ago soul. I knew it. I knew it even before Jeannette woke me up.”