«One of them might. You just did. But Max, what if our drop of water is on the slide of a microscope or some equivalent of a microscope and what if Something is looking at us right now?»
«Let it look,» I said. «As long as it behaves itself. And if it doesn’t, I’ll slap it down.»
Back to Los Angeles, back to maintenance, back to study.
Not quite so strict a regime this time, now that I was down to one subject, with the degree in sight. Ellen convinced me that all work and no play would make me a dull boy and I didn’t want to be a dull boy. I studied four evenings a week, two of them solo and two of them with coaching. Two evenings a week I saw Ellen or Klocky or both of them, one evening I just read and rested. Usually my evenings with Ellen were quiet ones at her apartment but occasionally we took in a show or a concert. It didn’t matter if we were seen together once in a while as long as we avoided the plush places frequented by the gossip columnists and commentators; we didn’t want our names coupled in print or on the viddy because even a suggestion of romance between us would be bad when the time came for Ellen to use pressure to get me on the project.
July, August, September.
I was making a new friend, too, in the man who was coaching me in unified field theory. His name was improbable, Chang M’bassi, but he himself was much more improbable than his name.
Chang M’bassi was the last, or believed to be the last, of the Masai tribesmen who, until the late sixties, had lived in east equatorial Africa. They don’t live there any more because they’re all dead except M’bassi; at least there is no other authenticated case of a survivor among them. They were perhaps the most colorful of all the African tribes and the fiercest and bravest warriors. They were the tall ones, averaging well over six feet in height. Their sport was hunting lions with spears; no youth became a full member of the tribe until he had killed his lion. They did not hunt other game and seldom ate meat; they were herders as well as warriors. They had great herds of cattle and their staple diet, almost the only food they ate, was a mixture of milk and cattle blood. That diet proved fatal to them in the great plague, the sudden disaster that struck equatorial Africa in, if I have the year right, 1969, killing fifteen or sixteen million people within a few weeks. The plague came the year following the first large-scale attempt to exterminate the tsetse fly in that area. The attempt was almost but not completely successful; a few of the tsetses proved immune or developed immunity to the new «wondercide» that was being used against them. They came back the next year greatly diminished in number but they had in them a new or hitherto unknown virus with which they infected cattle, and a strange triple-play death struck the region. The cattle showed no outward signs of illness from the infection, nor did human beings who were infected directly by the tsetse flies. But in the blood and in the milk of infected cattle the virus underwent a change that made it deadly to humans. Eating meat, blood or milk from an infected cow was fatal. Vomiting started in hours, helplessness within a day, death within three to four days.
When the plague struck, less than a week after the tsetses had swarmed in from their breeding places, the Masai hadn’t had a chance. They’d all been infected, almost simultaneously; all of them, except a boy named M’bassi, were ill before the epidemiologists could get there, all of them except M’bassi were dead before an effective treatment could be found. The epidemiologists had quickly isolated the virus and its source and had immediately spread the warning to avoid beef and milk. Because of these warnings and because within a week the epidemiologists had found an effective treatment for the disease itself, no other tribes had casualties higher than half their numbers. Not even those tribes who were also primarily herdsmen; their herds had not been as quickly and as thoroughly infected as those of the Masai.
M’bassi’s survival had been accidental or providential, whichever way you want to look at it. A Chinese medical missionary, one Chang Wo Sing, a Buddhist, had just arrived among them to try to convert them to the Eightfold Path. He would have had a tough job doing it because his particular sect of Buddhism, besides being evangelical, preached rigid vegetarianism and was against the killing of animals. To embrace the philosophy he brought to them, the Masai—well, it’s anybody’s guess now whether they would have been more horrified at the thought of eating vegetables or the thought of giving up their passionate devotion for hunting lions. He might have had more luck making non-violent vegetarians out of the lions.
But in a limited way—limited to one person—Chang Wo Sing had actually succeeded in converting the entire Masai people to his way of thinking. M’bassi, last of the Masai, was a Buddhist.
M’bassi had been eleven years old then, a son of the chief of the particular Masai village upon which Dr. Chang had benevolently descended. And on the very day of the good doctor’s arrival there M’bassi had been badly mauled by a lion about half a mile outside the village. He had been brought in mercifully unconscious but more nearly dead than alive, with very little blood left in him. His father the chief, no doubt giving the boy up for dead in any case, had shown no hesitancy in letting the Chinaman try to save his life.
Dr. Chang had tried and succeeded. But M’bassi a few days later was still an awfully sick Masai boy, and being sick saved his life. His throat had been injured badly—a claw had just missed the jugular vein—and he was being fed intravenously, with a nutrient solution that was purely vegetable in origin.
The other Masai in the village, in all the Masai villages, fell ill and began to die. Dr. Chang guessed at least part of the answer even before the arrival of the epidemiologists and tried to save them, or some of them, but the disease was new to him and he wasn’t a bacteriologist. His advice to them to stop eating food from cattle was good advice but it came too late—and would have been ignored even had it come in time. Most of the victims were too far gone to be eating anyway and the entire tribe, except for one badly damaged boy, was already infected and doomed. The medical reinforcements that arrived found Dr. Chang in a village peopled by the dead and the dying.
But M’bassi lived. After the last other Masai in the village had died and had been buried and after the other doctors had moved on to where they hoped they might still be useful, the Buddhist medical missionary stayed on, alone with the boy, for two weeks longer, until M’bassi could be moved. First to Nairobi for a month in the hospital there, then, convalescent, by rail to Mombasa and by ship back to China.
Back in his native land the good doctor had prospered. He had raised the boy like a son and had been able to send him abroad for an education. To London, to Tibet, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Meet M’bassi. Six feet five inches tall, and slender. Black as the Venusian night. About forty years old now. Quiet, contemplative eyes set in a fierce African face made fiercer looking by deep scars from the claws of a lion, claw marks that run from up in his kinky hair the full length of his face, having miraculously missed both eyes. A soft gentle voice that makes any language it speaks sound sweet and melodious. Buddhist, mystic mathematician, and a wonderful guy.
I’d been steered to him by Ellen. She knew him because he had been a friend of Brad’s and had suggested him months before, when I’d first mentioned that field theory was one of the subjects I’d need coaching in. Chang M’Bassi—he’d taken his foster father’s name and, in the Chinese manner, put it ahead of his given name—was an instructor in higher mathematics at the University of Southern California.