Hazy in the harsh light of dawn, emptiness. Once, long ago, this part of Zarakal had been fertile grasslands; today it looked like a petrified sea, broken here and there with combers of thorn scrub, grit kicking up in spray at the unpredictable bidding of the wind. A lone hyena stood on the salt flat watching a caravan of three vehicles moving northwestward along the highway connecting Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base in the country’s heartland with the Lake Kiboko Protectorate in the Great Rift Valley. The highway had been built over the past two years with American money, machinery, and supervision, although the Zarakali Minister of Interior, Alistair Patrick Blair, had insisted on a large management role for himself and a coolie work force of indigenes. One part of the highway linked Marakoi, the capital, with the air base thirty miles northeast, but the remaining three hundred miles of macadam struck many observers, both native and American, as Blair’s private expressway to nowhere. The Great Man had grown weary of replenishing the supplies of his field workers at the Lake Kiboko digs by helicopter or light aircraft. Hence this ribbon of asphalt through the awesome emptiness of the Zarakali desert.
Joshua murmured, “Not a used-car dealership in sight.”
“Our military still hasn’t been here all that long,” replied Woody Kaprow, who was driving the second vehicle in the caravan. “Give it time, Joshua. Give it time.”
“God forbid there should ever be that much time.”
Alistair Patrick Blair, riding between Kaprow and Joshua in the cab of the big vehicle, laughed. “God and Woody Kaprow, physicist supreme. They jointly hold the patent on all temporal properties.”
“Not so,” Kaprow replied. “Not so.”
Ahead of them, the lead vehicle in their caravan, cruised a Land Rover that had been modified to accommodate not only a swivel-mounted machine gun but also a hundred-gallon drum of drinking water.
An American air policeman was driving this escort, a uniformed Zarakali security agent riding shotgun.
Behind Joshua, Blair, and Kaprow, the caravan’s caboose was a huge truck with a covered flatbed pulling a generator more suggestive of a collapsible camper than a caisson. Both the Land Rover and the truck were a dusty olive-drab, chevroned with the doubtful camouflage of zebra striping.
Of the three vehicles in the caravan, the one in which Joshua and his companions rode had the strangest design and the most mysterious purpose. Half again as long as the truck, it resembled an Airstream trailer coated with a layer of protective plastic; its most aerodynamic-looking hull was as sleek as the skin of a porpoise, while its cab protruded like the nose of an immense electric iron with a wraparound windshield set into it. Six monstrous tires bore the weight of this vehicle, which Kaprow had recently taken to calling, with subtle bravado, The Machine. Only a month before this expedition to Lake Kiboko, it had arrived in Bravanumbi, Zarakal’s principal port city, aboard an American aircraft carrier; and Kaprow, who had accompanied it on that voyage, would let no one else drive it. Blair had offered to spell him at the wheel during their night-long trip from the air base, but Kaprow had firmly declined the offer. Although its development had been funded with U.S. tax monies, he regarded The Machine—if not Time itself—as his personal property.
“But I’m an excellent driver,” Blair had sweet-talked the physicist, “and you’ve done yeoman duty these last two hours.”
“It would be immoral for me to let anyone else sit here.”
“Immoral?”
“Absolutely. If you wrecked The Machine, Dr. Blair, I’d despise you forever. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”
“But if you wreck it…?”
“Well, if I wreck it, I’ll be damned pissed off, of course, but eventually I’ll forgive myself. To err is human, especially if it’s you who’s done the erring. Otherwise it’s intolerable.”
“Dr. Blair’s transcended the merely human,” Joshua had put in. “Everyone in Zarakal knows that. Maybe you could trust him for thirty minutes or so.”
“Demigods are always chauffeured. You can look it up. Try The Iliad, for instance.”
They had laughed at that, but Kaprow had not relinquished the wheel, and they had been traveling since midnight, a departure time settled upon to protect the caravan from midday temperatures and the possibility of aerial surveillance—although everyone understood that a sophisticated spy satellite would find mere darkness no impediment at all. On the other hand, a paleoanthropological expedition was hardly a prime target for the espionage operations of Zarakal’s Marxist enemies.
The sun had just risen. Joshua watched the hyena ahead of them on the salt flat turn sideways and break into a frightened lope. Hunting had apparently been none too good of late; the ugly creature was all bones and mangy to boot. Joshua leaned his head against the side window and closed his eyes.
Blair said, “You’re not having second thoughts, are you, Joshua?”
“Lately all my thoughts are second thoughts.”
“There’s still time to go back, of course.”
Joshua opened his eyes. “All right. Let’s go back.”
Blair shifted his pipe in his teeth, a meerschaum like the one Hugo had lost to the rhesus monkey at Ritki’s Animal Ranch. Kaprow shot him a swift sidelong glance. Both scientists, their pet projects in the balance, were visibly alarmed.
“Joke,” Joshua comforted them, patting Blair on the knee. “Didn’t mean to scare you shitless. I’m as obsessed as you two are. It’s just that I didn’t ask for my obsession.”
“Neither did I,” Kaprow countered.
“My saying we could take you back wasn’t an insincere formality, Joshua. If you want us to, we can.”
“It’s okay. Really. I’ve got a bad case of preflight jitters, that’s all.” A model of innocence, he lifted his eyebrows. “Only human, you know.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to—”
“Renege, Dr. Blair?”
“Pull out, I was going to say.”
“Of course you wouldn’t.” Joshua closed his eyes again, in spite of which he was hungry rather than sleepy. Mentally he superimposed a segment of Florida’s Miracle Strip on the desolate African landscape sliding past him outside. “What Zarakal needs out here, I think, is a good International House of Pancakes.”
“Come now, Joshua. A moment ago you were applauding the absence of used-car lots.”
“Or a Burger King.”
Blair chuckled appreciatively. “In a place where many of the people, not omitting the local police, poach elephants for a living?”
“Burger King would fry ’em, Dr. Blair.”
“Jesus,” said Kaprow. “At a time like this.”
The Great Man mumbled something about the delicious banality of Joshua’s wit, and their conversation concluded. The Machine hummed along the highway until the highway itself ran out, and the Land Rover ahead of them eased down into the thornveldt, its wheels negotiating the bumpy track to Lake Kiboko like four pallbearers on uneven ground. Then Kaprow committed The Machine to this same formidable course, and the truck with the generator came rattling and clanging after. The caravan was now deep within the two hundred square miles of eastern lakeshore territory that Blair had persuaded President Tharaka to designate a “paleontological protectorate.”
During his training at Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base, Joshua had heard conflicting stories about the prevailing Zarakali attitude toward the Lake Kiboko Protectorate. People in Marakoi and Bravanumbi regarded the area as a national treasure, the site of the discovery of Homo zarakalensis, and they supported Blair’s work there as a means of thrusting their country into the world spotlight. These folks never set foot within the protectorate, however, and probably had no wish to. Let the interior minister dig to his heart’s content, until the camels came home from Ethiopia and the sand flea went extinct.