The Despoblado
by Steven Utley

 
Within the big gray ship's boat bay, they had simply driven the truck down a ramp onto the barge. On its bow, the barge's civilian owners, Walton & Wicket, had emblazoned the name Karen in gilt-edged script. Now, as Navy men lowered the rest of the cargo, the mate, a big, blocky man who was in fact the subordinate half of Walton & Wicket, secured it. Throughout, another man, about forty years old, of average size and trim-looking in a tropical suit, took particular interest in the treatment accorded the truck and several crates stenciled with various caveats; he stood watching with his hands thrust into the pockets of his jacket and occasionally issued an instruction which the mate blithely ignored. The third man aboard Karen, Walton himself, middle-aged, very spare of frame, very sparse and white of hair, watched from the pilothouse. 

The mate suddenly paused halfway through the motion of manhandling a crate into position; his expression of intense concentration did not change, but his gaze became fixed on a point beyond the pilothouse. Walton turned and saw a woman standing on the lowest rung of the access ladder. She called out to him, "Permission to come aboard?" 

Without thinking, momentarily incapable of doing so, Walton nodded assent, and she stepped down lightly onto the deck. There she paused and posed for his inspection. She wore canvas shorts, a faded blue work shirt, and scuffed hiking boots. A seabag rested against her slim leg, a professional's battered camera case swung against her opposite hip. Beneath a broad-brimmed hat pulled down tight over close-cropped hair, she had a full, round face, almost high-school-girlish in its unfinished prettiness. Her dark hair and eyes contrasted nicely with her fair skin. She sounded all of nineteen years old when she asked, "Are you Mister Walton?" 

"Yes," he said slowly and after a moment more, "I am." 

"My name's Michelle Kelly." She offered her right hand, which he automatically shook, then her left to present an envelope with his name written upon it. "I have a letter of introduction. Kevin Barnet recommended you very highly." 

Walton said, "Ah," and grimaced, "Kevo," and peered upward expecting to see the man himself grinning down at him from the catwalk. He saw only the Navy men who had been loading cargo onto Karen; now they regarded the young woman with obvious and approving interest. Walton snatched the envelope from her. He split it open with his thumb and frowned as he read: 


Bud— 
This is to introduce Michelle Kelly, another damn nature photographer, but she's bright, opinionated as only someone her age can be, and as you'll undoubtedly notice has a behind like a good fresh peach. She wants to have a look-see upriver, and you owe me a favor, so please take her away with you and return her in one piece. 
Best, Kevo 
Walton's frown etched itself deeper into his face. He sighed profoundly. "I'll just go have a word with Mister Barnet," he said. 

"Oh, he's back at Stinktown." 

Walton worked his frown into a full scowl. "Miz Kelly, as you can plainly see, this is not really an excursion boat. As for sightseeing, there's not much more to look at upriver than there is here. We are going into the despoblado. The unpeopled land. There're no electric lights, no showers, no mess tents, no amenities. And no handsome young Navy men." 

Now she scowled. It should have made her look like a balked child but did not. Instead, hard angles revealed themselves within the creamy unblemished skin, and the lips, rather than distending into a pout, compressed into a firm straight line. "I'm not just sightseeing, I'm working. I'll pay for my passage, of course, and I've already signed a dozen waivers relieving everybody of responsibility for me." She nudged her seabag with the side of her foot. "I've got a gallon of sunscreen and my own food and everything else I'll need right here. I just want to hitch a ride. Sort of like Darwin." 

"Darwin." 

"On the Beagle." 

"Darwin was invited to go along on that trip." 

"Oh, let her come along, Walton." This was the man in the tropical suit, who stood leaning against one of his worrisome crates. He had sand-colored hair and a good profile, and he looked amused. He stepped forward and introduced himself as John Moen. He gave her a conspiratorial wink and said to Walton, "She doesn't look like she'll take up much space at all. Let her come." 

Encouraged, she said, "I can even make myself useful if you need me to be. Swab the bo'sun, squeegee the fo'c'sle, whatever." 

"A comedienne," Walton growled. "My insurance doesn't cover passengers who try to be helpful—or funny." He had no sooner spoken these words than he realized that he had ceased to scowl. He tried not to look abashed as he said, "But if you'll promise to behave yourself, come on, stow your gear below." 

She stepped past him. Moen turned in place to watch as she went by, then gave Walton a look of astonished delight. Wicket looked at her and then turned quickly away as she passed. 

"It'll be nice," Moen said to Walton, "to have someone to talk to on this beamy scow of yours." He inclined his head ever so slightly to indicate Wicket. "For a change." 

"I should've asked her if she had a note from her mother." 

"Oh, I dunno," Moen said easily, "that jilleroo is older than she looks." 

The frown began to reassert itself on Walton's face. "If I were you," he snapped, "I'd make damn sure she's of legal age." He turned away from Moen and told Wicket to finish securing the cargo and called out for the lines to be cast off. Then he went to the wheel, and with a thrum of diesels the boat moved smoothly out of the bay and away from the ship. 

Without, the view disappointed. The peneplained land appeared only as an off-white band separating the sea from the sky; the single emphatic note was provided by bright orange buoys marking a navigable channel among the delta's myriad braided courses. The Navy ship had stood well offshore to avoid the risk of running aground, for there was no abyssal ocean deep here, but inundated continental interior, with a gradient so slight that the land seemed simply to slip beneath the edge of the water like one sheet of paper under another. 




· · · · ·  


Michelle Kelly came back on deck and found herself a place to sit among some crates. A camera hung suspended on a strap encircling her neck, and from time to time she raised it, peered through the viewfinder, and snapped the shutter. 
Moen appeared beside her and held out a bottle of water beaded with condensation. She hesitated, then accepted it and thanked him. She rolled the cool plastic across her forehead before she drank. "I could've stayed in Stinktown and been this hot and sticky. May I ask how far upriver you're going, Mister Moen?" 

"Please call me John. We'll reach my camp tomorrow. We make better time once we're out of this swamp." He regarded her with frank curiosity. "You can't just be rattling around loose here." 

"I'm not. What do you do, John?" 

Her using his first name evidently made up for her evasiveness, for he smiled at her and said, "I'm a geologist." 

She nodded toward the great yellow truck lashed to the deck. "So that's yours?" 

"Yes. Fair being fair, tell me what you're doing here." 

"I'm working, too. Seeing as much of this world as I can, while I can." 

"Who's your sponsor?" 

"I'm privately funded." 

"So'm I." 

"I'm here because my father has the money and my Uncle Ivan has the clout. Ivan Kelly?" 

Moen shook his head. 

"Before your time, I guess. He was the first man to go through the hole. And my dad's a Hollywood screenwriter, so the pressure was really on me to make something of my life. So here I am." 

"Here you are." 

"Once I leave, I'll never get to come back. You don't get to come back unless some multinational's footing the bill. You, for instance, will get to come back all you like. You're looking for oil." 

He was taken aback but recovered quickly. "Yes, I'm looking for oil." 

She nodded gravely. "What else would you be doing? I've seen aircraft flying around everywhere towing those little gliders with the magnetometers. And that"—she nodded at the truck again—"is a vibrator truck." 

He looked at the truck as though it had suddenly materialized from thin air. "Why, so it is. And that salesman swore it was a rec vehicle." 

She made a visible effort not to smile. "You jack it up on a central pedestal and make it vibrate, and then you use the sound waves in rock to make subsurface maps." 

"You don't say." 

Now she did smile, excellently. 

The boat entered the mouth of the channel. The brown, turbid water was choked with broad algal mats, some of them more than a yard across. Built of delicate interlaced filaments, they looked more solid than they were; they disintegrated into their constituent strands as the boat eased through them. Here and there low muddy islets supported other algal growth. The air was heavy with a stench of decomposition. 

"A pomander would be handy right about now," she said. 

Moen nodded. "Or nose plugs. But it smells ten times worse when the tide's out. The mud here's of such fine consistency that it feels like oil when you rub it between your fingertips. You'd sink right into it, over your head. The particles in it are all that's left of a mountain range. It's all been worn away and dumped here in a geosyncline. And it's full of decaying stuff." 

"Charles Darwin said a wide expanse of muddy water has neither grandeur nor beauty." 

"Smart old Charlie." 

They saw a large, honey-colored arthropod, with bristly black grasping appendages outstretched, that had pulled itself onto an islet. It lay perfectly still among intorted tendrils of foliage and might have been looking around or listening or simply basking. Moen observed unnecessarily that there was little for it to see and nothing for it to hear. He opined that the creature's eyes probably did not work very well, and he expressed doubt that it even possessed ears. 

She asked, "Are you an expert on sea scorpions?" 

He shook his head. "No, not really. I was just repeating what some paleontologist said. I know my forams and conodonts—those are the index fossils I use in my work—but I don't know all that much about other Paleozoic life-forms and don't have much interest in them, frankly." 

"Just in oil." 

"Oil's fascinating. It's a product of a chain of improbable occurrences." 

Michelle crossed her arms, leaned against the rail with her hip, and faced him. "I don't understand," she said, "how you propose to get the oil back even if you do find it. You can't pump it through the hole, and taking it out by the barrel would be prohibitively expensive." 

He shrugged. "I'm sure there're people trying to figure that out. My job is just to find it. So. Can't we be friends in spite of everything?" 

She gave him an appraising look. "I'm not sure I could be friends with anybody who thinks the way you do." 

He laughed pleasantly. "Well, you're young, and I work for a big old evil multinational. We're supposed to have extremely definite opinions. But wait till we get to my camp and you meet Dews. You'll love Dews. Dews," and he laughed again, "is pure unreconstructed slash-and-burn, suck-it-dry, throw-it-away." 

"Can't wait," she murmured. 




· · · · ·  


Walton glumly watched Moen and the young woman from the pilothouse. He noted how Moen had moved closer to her without appearing to realize that he was doing so. For a moment, both of them stood leaning on the rail, arms folded, elbows almost touching. Then Michelle casually turned away and incidentally increased the distance between Moen and herself without appearing to realize that she had done so. It struck Walton that Moen almost succeeded at covering his disappointment. 



· · · · ·  


The two people at the rail were quiet for a time. The unchanging landscape glided past. Then Michelle asked where the facilities were, and Moen directed her belowdecks. 
When she returned, she indicated the pilothouse and its occupant with a nod and said, "Give me your extremely definite opinion of Walton and Wicket. There's more to them than meets the eye." 

"You might better ask Walton about Walton. I've known him a while now. I've spent maybe eight years here, if you add up my field time, and in all that time I don't think I've ever seen or heard of him venturing more than a quarter mile from water. He's got the boatman's view of the world—a navigable body of water bounded on one to three sides by terra incognita. There're probably sea scorpions with drier feet than Walton's." 

"What about Wicket?" 

"I've never been able to decide if he's not all there or if he just tunes me out. Or some combination of the two. He may be mentally handicapped or something. I'm surprised he got past screening." 

"Interesting library they've got on this tub." 

"Mm?" 

"Books. Voltaire. The Wind in the Willows. Someone on this barge reads books." 

"Well, what else is there for someone to do on a barge?" 




· · · · ·  


Behind them, the big gray ship shrank to an insignificant speck on the landscape and was finally lost to view. Ahead, the highest visible point was a particular patch of orange rising slightly above the succession of swampy mounds. The patch resolved itself into the roof of a small prefabricated storage building at the base camp. Moored amid the islets, the base camp itself was a floating platform supporting the storage shed and smaller structures. A small motorboat tied up at a low pier sat motionless in the water, and there was no movement on or around the platform until Walton brought Karen close. Then the motorboat bobbed in the backwash, and a tall, thin, sun-darkened woman stepped out of the operations shack and stood watching and waiting until the barge was secured. 
Moen gave Michelle a grin and gestured expansively. "Our home away from home! And there's our charming and lovely hostess, the Dame Paleontologist herself." 

Walton, carrying a handful of mail, stepped onto the platform, with Michelle and Moen right behind. Walton gruffly introduced Michelle to Merry Grenon, who regarded her with undisguised amazement. After a moment, the older woman said, "What brings you this way?" 

"I hope to get a book of photos out of this." 

"Well, I hope you don't break a nail or anything." 

Michelle's smile never wavered. "Would you mind if I took pictures and asked questions?" 

"Not at all." 

Close by, Moen favored the two women with a smile, and to the older he said, "Be careful what you say to her, Merry, she's got a sociopolitical agenda." 

Merry Grenon said to Michelle, "Come on, I'll show you around," and then, by some means the young woman did not quite understand but had to admire, effortlessly detached her from Moen and, preceded by Walton, steered her toward a shed used as both laboratory and operations center. Moen obviously wanted to follow, but then he noticed that Wicket had begun unloading supplies onto the platform, and he quickly reboarded Karen to watch over his crates like a mother hen. 

On one side within the shed sat radio equipment, and a small cabinet in a corner held cooking utensils. Two dented but clean-looking refrigerators stood in opposite corners; the door of one bore an emphatically hand-lettered sign: NO FOOD!!!, and an excellent reproduction of Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte; the door of the other bore an equally emphatic sign: FOOD ONLY !!!, and an equally good reproduction of a van Gogh, The Potato Eaters. The rest of the cramped space was given over to a long workbench and racks of specimen trays. 

Walton asked, "Where're the others?" 

"Helen's ashore. Pete took the other boat upriver to try and catch himself some sharks." 

Surprise and alarm struggled for supremacy in Walton's expression. "There are sharks here?" 

Grenon plainly savored the moment. "Spiny freshwater sharks." 

"Well, I wish to hell somebody'd told me. I've been known to dangle my feet in this river." 

Merry Grenon offered him a pitying look. "We didn't know there were sharks here until about an hour ago. There're tons of things we don't know about this place, Bud. That's why we're here. Anyway, Pete found a decomposing spiny shark washed up on the bank, and now he's all excited. Here, I'll show you." She went to the refrigerator marked NO FOOD!!!, opened it, withdrew a metal tray. There was a thick odor of decomposition and preservative. In the tray lay a desiccated fish carcass about six inches long, blunt-headed, with ganoid scales and paired rows of spikelike fins along its belly. 

"What's this," Walton demanded, "the chihuahua of the shark family?" 

"It's Climatius," Grenon said proudly, "or a first cousin. The order of Climatiiformes, in any case. Not really sharks at all, but the earliest vertebrates with jaws that we know about." 

"Well, I'll be go to hell," Walton drawled. He looked askance at the mouth, frozen in a fierce toothy miniature grimace. "What does it eat?" 

"Invertebrates and maybe small jawless fish. Sea scorpions probably consider it a delicacy." 

A thickset middle-aged woman entered, set down her collecting case, removed a sun hat. Michelle was introduced to Helen Wheeler, who greeted her warmly and said, "It's always a pleasure to see a new face." 

"I've just been admiring your sharklet," Michelle said, "and the art collection. Is this the Paleozoic version of the Louvre?" 

"I'm afraid so. There're more in the bunkhouse. Merry and I wouldn't let Pete put up girlie pictures in there, so we got him a Modigliani nude instead. Now he claims he's in love." Wheeler gestured at the Seurat picture and said, "I saw the original once. It's stunning. You know about pointillism? Up close, it's just all these individual points of color that seem unconnected with one another. Step back, and you notice two things. First you notice that all those dots become a whole greater than its parts. Then you notice that each figure, each group of figures seems to have its own light source. You think it shouldn't work, and yet somehow it does work." She turned and indicated The Potato Eaters and gave a soft little laugh. "And that's my idea of a religious print. I first came to the Paleozoic when I was a grad student, probably not much older than you. I kept coming back, and then one time I found God here. I mean God the source, the everywhere-spirit. I'm not talking about Jesus and religion. Some people turn to holy books and fairy stories—I don't know how else to put it. I don't care if Jesus walked on water or rose from the dead. Even if I did care, I still wouldn't believe it. I don't need to hear about miracles like those. The real miracles are life and spacetime and art. I can feel God's presence in art. Literature, too, sometimes. And music." 

"Oh, yes," Michelle managed to say; she had been unprepared for the turn Helen Wheeler's monologue had taken. While she tried to think of something to say, she peered at the picture as though seeking out hidden meaning. Then memory came to her rescue. "My mother told me once she'd always thought Bach and Mozart must've felt the presence of God." 

The other woman nodded. "Absolutely. But I'm partial to painters. God spoke through the great painters, at least into the twentieth century." 

"My guess would be that God lost interest after Cubism." 

"Maybe. But, oh, the Impressionists." 

"Van Gogh," Michelle murmured, "was very disturbed, of course, but how could God's presence not be disturbing?" 

Wheeler shook her head. "No. God's presence brings peace and joy. Poor van Gogh was mentally ill." 

"Can't mentally ill people know God?" 

"I believe anybody can know God. But looking at it realistically, I've got to admit that it seems easier for some people than for others." 

Michelle and Walton returned to the barge. As Karen pulled away from the platform, Michelle, standing next to the pilot house, exchanged waves with the two women on the platform, then turned to Walton and asked, "Is Helen Wheeler always like that? Kind of, you know—" 

"Goofy and mystical?" Walton snorted with amusement. "Helen's a case." 

Michelle frowned slightly. "I liked her, but—" 

"I like her, too, but she's still a case." 

"Does she always start talking about God with people she's just met?" 

"Well, it's not like she's decided that it's her personal mission in life to lead all her hell-bent colleagues to Jesus Christ. She isn't trying to convert anybody. I think God is just one of the really interesting things in her life, like bugs and plants." Walton shrugged. "God's presence is disturbing. You said so yourself." 




· · · · ·  


Gradually, as they entered the estuary's upper reaches, the character of the vegetation changed. The delta's winding channels converged, separated, and reconverged, at last merging into a single broad channel, brown and sluggish, with low banks overgrown in tangles of creeping, curlicued greenery, some with stems topped with buttonlike sporangia. The sun was descending behind them toward the now unseen sea when they made their first stop upriver from the base camp. Walton brought the barge in close to the bank, and Wicket ran out a gangplank and maneuvered a heavily-loaded dolly ashore. There was no one there to greet him and no sign of a camp, only a neat stack of specimen crates. Michelle looked questioningly at Moen, who told her, "Couple of scientists are off back there scraping lichens from rocks or some such. Baxter and Sterling. Husband-and-wife team. They can lug their own supplies into camp when they get back. Walton'll pick up their crates on the way back downriver." 
"It's okay to leave stuff sitting there on the bank like that?" 

"Who is there to steal it? Nothing's going to come along and eat it." 

Vegetation on the floodplain gradually retreated from the land to the splash zones along either bank, exposing barren flatlands that stretched away to the horizon. The silvery phantom pools shimmering out on the baking white surfaces looked more inviting than the muddy water at hand. 

Wicket occasionally replaced Walton in the pilothouse for substantial lengths of time, during which Walton might disappear below or needlessly inspect the cargo or simply watch the land as it rolled by. Whenever he passed near Moen or Michelle, which was as rarely as possible, he acknowledged their presence with a nod and tried not to make eye contact and to hurry on without seeming to hurry. Once, however, when he did inadvertently meet Moen's look, he was certain that he saw a glint of smugness in it, and he felt his eyebrows draw together. The reaction puzzled and annoyed him. What the hell does it matter to me, he thought fiercely, what these two get themselves into? Don't approve of shipboard romances or workplace romances, and here it's practically the same thing. He retreated quickly to the pilothouse and sent Wicket to do busywork. 

He put the boat in close to shore for the evening. When the diesel engines were shut off, the silence was almost stunning. Wicket busied himself in the galley, filling the tiny space from side to side and front to back; he seemed to have room only for his hands, which worked expertly at transforming dried vegetables and meat bar into stew. 

"You are welcome to join us for dinner," Walton said to Michelle, so stiffly that she visibly recoiled. 

"We're having Walton's speciality," said Moen. "Meat bar in fusel oil." 

"Thank you," she said, "but I brought my own food." 

Moen grinned. "Coward." 

She seemed to relax. "But if I can bring my veggie bars, I'd be delighted to sit with you." 

There was little conversation at table, though. After dinner, the three of them paused on deck amid the quietude and watched the great cold moon's stately emergence from a vast bank of clouds. No mosquitoes vexed them. There were no insect noises, no frog choruses, no sounds at all but that of the backwash. There was not a breath of air. Wicket sat quietly by himself on a stack of pallets, reading a book by the light of a lantern. 

Walton said, "Will you please read to me, Wicket?" The mate ducked his head sheepishly. "Please? No?" Walton gave Michelle an apologetic glance. "I like him to read to me before I turn in at night, but—in front of company …" 

Before he retired, Walton showed Michelle where she could string a hammock. Moen, a frequent passenger, had a bunk belowdecks as well; he was still on deck with her, however, and the two of them were listening to music from a chip pack when Walton made to go below. He paused and listened and decided that it was one of Brahms's overtures, the Festival or the Tragic—it had been some time since he had heard either, and they always had tended to run together in his mind. The music was punctuated by laughter. Michelle Kelly had a rich, uninhibited laugh, but it had the effect of making Walton go to his bed muttering about foolish young women. But he suddenly knew, and was not surprised to know, that the real problem was jealousy, pure and simple, and both the knowledge and its unsurprising nature only made him angrier. Dammit, he told himself, I refuse to feel jealousy over some little thing who's half my age, if that. Before he fell asleep, however, he heard Moen come below—alone—and turn in—alone—and, strangely gratified, he thought, Well, at least she's not a pushover. 




· · · · ·  


The following morning, everyone on the barge was awake and had eaten breakfast by the time the violet sky began to lighten. Even as they watched, that quadrant faded to a deep-sea blue, streaks of rust-colored clouds appeared low above a backlit irregular line of highlands far to the east, and then the filmiest hint of pink suffused the sky behind the clouds. But for that glimpse of distant hills it would have been impossible to say that the land was rising before them, and as the sun continued its swift ascent the highlands faded and blended into the indefinite demarcation of earth and sky. 
As they moved upriver, Michelle pointed out a small fish swimming at the surface. "Spiny shark," she said. 

Moen peered over the side. "There're sharks here?" 

"That seems to be the standard reaction. These are freshwater spiny sharks. Merry Grenon showed me a dead one at the base camp yesterday. She told me the scientific name, but I don't think I can pronounce it right." 

They reached the oil geologists' camp before noon. It consisted of a few tents and an area marked off as a helipad, and total present population evidently comprised three more or less sunburnt men. Two were dressed in old clothes; the third, wearing only boxer shorts and boots, darted into a tent when he saw Michelle and promptly re-emerged wearing a more nearly complete ensemble. Moen displayed his previous particularity about his crates, and this time Wicket appeared to heed his instructions during the unloading. Then, laughing, boyishly happy, Moen personally drove the vibrator truck onto the bank, leaving deep tracks in the loose, crumbly marl. He invited Walton and Michelle to stay for dinner, and they accepted. Wicket's exclusion seemed to Michelle to be taken as a given. 

Moen was clearly in charge and in his element. The camp's working day ended when he said so. This, as it turned out, was an hour before sundown, which gave the junior member of the geology team, a sweating red-faced man named Bloodworth, little time to wash up and prepare some kind of meal—"for up to a dozen people," Moen explained, "depending on whether the helicopter's brought some in or taken some out"—and seemed to leave Moen himself and his guests barely enough time to wash up and have drinks in hand when the edge of the sun dipped behind the far edge of the world. They sat with the other two members of Moen's crew, Dews and McCampbell, at a long camp table in the mess tent; the tent flaps were turned back so that they could watch the sun set. 

"All I want out of life," Moen said as the harried Bloodworth placed a steaming tureen on the table, "is to be able to sip good whiskey and watch spectacular sunsets. No, actually, I want a good deal else. I want this team to produce the results I want to take back to my bosses. I want to be ten times richer than I am and ten years younger than I am, and to weigh ten pounds less than I do. I want to have back all the hair I've lost." He paused as Bloodworth set dinner before him. "I want a decent meal." He regarded the food. "Meat bar in fusel oil," he said, "my favorite," and laughed. 

Bloodworth looked apologetic and backed away. Dinner was eaten with a minimum of talk, most of it having to do with the arcana of oil geology. Michelle dutifully chewed overcooked reconstituted vegetables and made no attempt to join in the conversation, nor did Moen's men make any attempt to draw her into it. It was obvious to Walton that she was conscious of the appraising looks they gave her whenever they thought she was not looking. Moen seemed thoroughly amused by the effect she was having on them. 

 
My responsibility ends at the gangplank, Walton thought, and forced his attention to his food. He ate with such resolute single-mindedness that a second or two elapsed before he realized that the conversation had suddenly and unexpectedly taken a combative turn, that Dews had said something to which Michelle objected; he looked up and saw her regarding Dews piercingly, saw Dews return her look with one of happy belligerence, heard Moen say blandly, "Dews, I don't think our young guest approves of any of this—do you, Miz Kelly?" 

"I don't. Call me an eco-maniac, but I don't like the idea of raiding the past to keep the present going. A lot of people don't." 

Dews leaned back in his chair and knitted his blunt red fingers over his midsection; Michelle did not flinch from his gaze. "The quantum-mechanics boys," he drawled, "say we haven't traveled into our own Earth's prehistoric past at all. They say there must be duplicate Earths, parallel Earths—each more or less different from our own. So nothing we do here can make any difference in our own timeline." 

"It's certainly a convenient theory. But there's nothing here that contradicts anything we already knew for certain about mid-Paleozoic times. We knew about maybe two percent of the whole story from what we found in the fossil record. Now we can at least glimpse the other ninety-eight percent, and it's roughly what we imagined it would be. Even if the physicists're right, even if this isn't our own Earth, it might as well be. What about this planet's future? Even if it's only a duplicate Earth, what if, four hundred million years from now, humans arise but can't invent technological civilization all over again because the resources needed to do so aren't there?" 

"There's no guarantee," Dews said, "that humans necessarily arise on Earth-type planets. Maybe humans don't make it here. Maybe the dinosaurs never go extinct, no big meteor crash, and the mammals never get their shot at greatness. Maybe there never are even dinosaurs here, just bugs and shellfish until the sun expands and the planet fries. We can't see into the future of this world and find out if it's a good thing or a bad thing to exploit its resources. Meanwhile, we need the oil." 

"What we need is a replacement for the internal-combustion engine." 

"You may not believe me, but I agree. I've been waiting all my life for one of those hydrogen-powered buckets. And you, Bud," Dews said to Walton, "how much'd that tub of yours save you if you didn't have to use diesel fuel?" 

Walton did not look up from his dinner; he said, without enthusiasm, "A bundle." 

"Right!" Dews returned his attention to Michelle. "But the fact of the matter is, we don't have a replacement, and—meanwhile—the internal-combustion engines we do have need the oil!" 

Michelle said nothing but shook her head emphatically. 

Dews rolled his eyes. "Eco-maniacs give me a highly localized pain. Because people like me know how to take what the earth has to offer, everybody, including you, lives better and longer than any people in history. But people like you don't want us to hurt their precious goddamn salamanders and bugs." 

"Time out," Moen interjected, "for a sunset," and everybody relaxed as one and turned as one to watch the sun go down. 

Conversation, slow to resume, restricted itself to requests for condiments, then died altogether. After the silence had stretched out across half an eternity Michelle suddenly said, "Well, everybody, how about some music?" and took her chip pack from her shirt pocket. 

Simultaneously, Dews said, "What?" and Moen exclaimed, "Excellent idea!" 

"I've got Mozart and the three Bees," she said, "plus bop, pop, hop, drop, and truckstop." 

"Lady's a poet," said McCampbell, and Bloodworth asked, "You got the Shiners?" 

She gave him a regretful look. "Sorry, fresh out. Oh, I know." She did something with the chip pack. "What I'm about to inflict on you is an actual top-ten country-and-western hit back in the twenty-first century," and at the touch a button there came a twangy guitar introduction, and then a woman sang, in a nasal but good-humored voice, 


Baby, come on back with me, 
let's skinny-dip in the Tethys Sea. 
Let's pack a bag and leave today 
four hundred million years away, 
and marvel at exotic fauna 
living in or near Gondwana— 
trilobites and placoderms 
and seven thousand kinds of worms. 
During an instrumental interlude, McCampbell said, "Sure's hell don't write songs like they used to." 

"That's for damn sure," Dews said. 

Moen laughed. "It's wonderful, boys. A top-ten hit, she says. I bet it's playing at truck stops all over America." 


We'll pitch a tent, and through the door 
we'll watch those creatures flop ashore 
and bet on how well each one waddles— 
we'll be excellent role models, 
we'll leave our tracks along the shore 
and demonstrate what feet are for. 
We'll brew some psilophytic tea 
and make love by the Tethys Sea. 
Moen laughed again as the song ended. "I bet there's not a trucker or a waitress in a hundred who knows what the hell it's even about." 

"Course they will," McCampbell said. "It's about having sex in the great outdoors." 

Michelle gestured with the chip pack. "Want to hear it in some other style?" 

"Once is enough," Dews muttered. 

Moen gave Michelle a sidelong look and asked, "What other delights've you got in that little box of yours?" 

Walton flushed and frowned, and though he looked at Moen when he spoke, he clearly meant his words for Michelle. "I don't want to be a party-pooper, but I have to get an early start tomorrow. We're—I'm on a tight schedule." 

Michelle leaned back in her seat, looked first at Walton, then at Moen. She slipped the chip pack back into her shirt pocket. She looked around the table and said, "It's been nice meeting you fellows." 

"Come back any time," McCampbell ventured jocosely, "and bring your girlfriends." 

"Listen to you," Michelle said as she stood up. "Wouldn't it be more fun if you had some women geologists here all the time?" 

"Yep," McCampbell conceded, "even if they were tree-huggers. Maybe especially if they were tree-huggers." 

Michelle gave him a look of politest inquiry. 

McCampbell said, "Gal who'll hug a tree'll hug anything," and laughed uproariously. After a moment, Dews followed his lead. Bloodworth joined in, but halfheartedly. Moen smiled thinly. 

Walton rose and nodded to Moen, whose smile was suddenly replaced by a disappointed and slightly desperate expression; the geologist almost overturned his own chair as he pushed to his feet. Walton cast a final look around the table, let his gaze rest for a moment on the grinning McCampbell, and murmured, "Gentlemen." As he turned away, he heard Moen utter Michelle's name, but without waiting to see if she would follow he began walking toward the river. He felt embarrassed and angry and vaguely unclean. 

He did not look back until he had reboarded the barge, and he had no sooner done so than he saw her emerge from darkness into the light of Karen's lamps, looking as cool and casual as though she had been for a stroll around the block. Moen trailed one or two paces behind her with the air of someone trying to salvage an unexpectedly and rapidly deteriorating situation. She turned at the gangplank and told him gaily, "Thank you for a perfectly lovely evening," and came on board, and as she passed Walton she called out, "Perhaps we'll have time to visit again on the way back downriver." 

Moen wilted on the bank. He did not set his foot on the gangplank. "Well," he said. "I guess I should say good night." 

"Good night," she said, and Walton seconded her. The geologist smiled wanly and went back to his camp. 

"I thought you might be thinking of spending the night ashore," Walton told Michelle in an even tone, without quite looking at her. 

"So did he. In fact, I believe he had his whole weekend planned out. Straight-ahead romantic plunge on a boat, followed by hours of grunting and bucking. I guess setting me and Dews on each other was his idea of foreplay." She had plainly meant for him to laugh or at least smile. 

Walton did not respond; he still would not look at her. "If you don't mind my asking, what're your plans for when we get back to the base camp? All I do is come upriver and go downriver. Occasionally, I hug the coast to Wegener Point and back, but not anytime soon." 

The edge in his voice was matched in hers. "I might try to hitch a ride to someplace else. Or I could just walk." 

"Walk? Walk where?" 

Her tone became defiant. "Wegener Point's only about a hundred klicks north of the base camp, right? Stinktown's another few hundred." 

"But walk?" 

She raised a foot and waggled it for a moment. "I may've grown up in car culture, but I know what these things on the end of my legs are for. If hiking through hills and canyons in southern California didn't prepare me—" 

"It's mostly evaporite flats between here and Wegener Point. Truly grisly places." 

"I'm sure. But there's a great tradition in my family of walking through hostile environments. One of my ancestors walked from Berlin to the south of France to get away from Nazis when he was fifteen." 

"Well, then, I must say I am impressed. With you and your ancestor both. But you can't possibly carry enough food to last you till you reached the point." 

"I wouldn't have to carry it. I can always find it lying around." 

Walton shook his head—admiringly, in spite of himself, for though her cocksure attitude grated, he found himself liking her adventurousness and apparent fearlessness. He suppressed his irritation and said, "Nature girl." 

"Why don't you let me make dinner tomorrow and see for yourself?" He looked dubious. "I promise not to poison you. I'd like you to try some of my food." 

"Exactly what do you eat?" Walton said warily. 

"Whatever there is. My Uncle Ivan was one of the first scientists to study Paleozoic life-forms and ecosystems in the Paleozoic. He told me what I'd be able to eat here and what not to eat. Um, Wicket is invited, of course." 

Walton shook his head emphatically. "It'd just disturb him." Neither of them spoke for a good part of a minute. Then: "I mean, set something aside for him if you want, and I'll give it to him, but—everything considered, he's done quite well these past few days. He's doing the best he can. He can't do any better than he does." 

Presently, from the direction of the camp came the sound of a diesel engine cranking up. 

Michelle gazed off into the darkness. "Boys with toys," she said. 




· · · · ·  


At last they left the floodplain astern, and the river changed its character, ceasing its languid meandering, becoming a great broad current coursing with seeming purpose. The landscape changed as well. The undulations of the peneplain had gradually become perceptible as such, next as low mounds of marl studded with broken rock, and then the land abruptly crumpled itself into a succession of barren knolls. The banks rose until it was often impossible to see what lay beyond them. The rocks above the splash zone were spotted with lichens; below it, they glistened with slimy greenery. Karen made another stop at midday to leave a cache of dried foodstuffs and mail. Michelle went ashore to take pictures and, as she told Walton, collect some specimens of her own. 
That evening, in the cramped cubicle that served as Karen's formal mess area, Michelle set before Walton a serving of what seemed to be snap beans and brown rice. There was also a small mound of what could have been black beans or caviar. He said, "Is it a good idea to ask what this stuff is before I put it in my mouth?" 

"Probably not, if you have irrational food prejudices." 

He thought of her collecting sortie. "Then don't tell me afterward, either, okay?" He slipped his fork into the black beans or caviar and put three or four of them into his mouth. They were neither black beans nor caviar, but he allowed after chewing them a couple of times that they tasted pretty good. She beamed at him and dug into her own food. 

When they had finished eating, he sat back and told her, "Michelle Kelly, I salute you. In you are met all the best of French and Irish." 

"German, too. The name's just the legacy of my ethnically bewildered parents. I'm only very attenuated anything." 

Walton started to gather up his tableware. 

"No," she said, rising, "don't get up, I'll take care of the dishes." 

He watched her putter in the tiny galley for a minute. Then he said, seriously, "Tomorrow we go on as far as we can. The last outpost this side of Gondwana. I'll appreciate your staying on the boat then. I can't be sure how he'll take to you being there." He thought, but did not say, I don't want you getting into anything with him the way you almost did with Dews. 

Kelly glanced over her shoulder at him. "How who'll take what?" 

"How the hermit'll take to you being there. The old man of the mountain, as I call him." 

"Who is he, and what's his story?" 

"He's part of the paleoclimate survey. Mans the radio station out here." 

"What's his story?" 

"I don't know. Maybe he doesn't have a story." 

"Nobody just becomes a hermit." 

"No? Most people know or feel—even if they don't know they know it, or don't know they feel this—for most people, selfhood exists not in isolation from other people but in relationships to other people. But there're always some men who want solitude. In pioneer days, they were the ones who pulled up stakes and moved on because they felt crowded by their closest neighbors, five miles away." 

Michelle dried the last dish and put it away. She turned, leaned against the tiny sink, began carefully drying her fingers. Without looking at Walton, she said, "Is that how it is with you?" 

"God, no. I'm gregarious as hell." 

Now she did look at him. "You know, Mister Walton, I believe there's a good deal more to you than meets the eye. You're not just some old river rat." 

"No," he said slowly, "I guess I'm not." 

"What's your story? Or don't you have one either?" 

"I have a degree from UCLA School of Philosophy. It's true. In another life, another time. On another world. I was the complete philosophy wonk. Even to having a tall, fair, Nordic girlfriend who liked to dress in black. She did look fine in a leotard, too. The stuff of being and meaning was our breakfast conversation and our pillow talk. She was doing her thesis on Kierkegaard, which may explain why she was about as lively in bed as a Norwegian cheese. Well, here's the best part of her story—her name was Joy! So. I had my degree in hand, I was all set to start teaching the next generation of philosophy wonks everything I'd just been taught about ethical formalism and intuitionism and what all, when the news came out about the spacetime anomaly. Time-travel, expeditions to prehistoric times! Then and there, in an instant, my life turned itself inside out. I told myself, told my girlfriend, Dammit, I want to go on one of those expeditions! Of course, as far as the National Science Foundation was concerned, a degree in philosophy wasn't all that relevant to Paleozoic research. So I hooked up with an uncle who plied the Intercoastal Waterway out of Mobile and learned how to handle a boat. Hired out to one of the private companies. Now I'm a private enterprise in my own right, with my own damn government contract. Ferrying supplies and delivering mail. Never regretted it for a second." 

"And Wicket?" 

"My sister Karen's boy. I became his legal guardian after she died. He's terminally shy, in case you haven't noticed, but he's quite intelligent, never forgets anything, whiz at math. So I made him the company accountant. When they said I couldn't bring him along in my capacity as an equal-opportunity employer helping somebody overcome a handicap, I made him my business partner. And some people went to bat for me. Kevin Barnet, for one." Walton paused, then said carefully, "By the way, do you know Kevo well?" 

"Well enough to know he's a character." 

"He's hardly what you'd call an unimpeachable character reference." 

"I think this was in the way of one character recommending another. I distinctly heard him call you colorful." 

"You should take everything that man says with a five-pound block of salt. He's a drunken old bum and a lecher. I really don't care much for the man. But I owe him on Wicket's account. Anyway, I believe Wicket's happy here. He likes being on the boat, likes his work. He doesn't have to deal with anyone but me and the occasional lower life-form." 

"Such as me." 

"You know perfectly well what I mean." 




· · · · ·  


The next morning as they went upriver, Walton called to her, and she saw him point to starboard. Well back from the bank the land was puckered into a line of rough hills, and set at intervals along the ridgeline were the improbable spindly forms of windmills. "Powers his generator. The old man of the mountain's. You'll see him around the next bend in the river." 
"I don't even see the mountain." 

"It's a metaphorical mountain. And he's a metaphorical old man." He tugged on the whistle cord, and Karen let out a piercing shriek. "That'll let him know to expect us. I don't want to scare him into the underbrush by just showing up. Metaphorical underbrush, you understand." 

They rounded the bend, and Walton brought the barge in close to the bank. The radio station consisted of a shed fashioned of corrugated metal sheets, dominated by a dish antennae. A smaller shed with one open side housed the generator. The three people on the water waited. Nothing moved on the land. 

"What do we do," Michelle said, "just toss everything onto the shore like before and leave?" 

Walton shook his head. "I always like to see him. They always ask me when I get back, 'How'd he look?' And I have to tell 'em. He'll show himself. He knows I won't leave until he does." 

"How does he look, usually?" 

"Like a Neanderthal who's down on his luck." 

Wicket ran out the gangplank, took up a gigantic armload of cartons, and went ashore. Walton followed, carrying a carton under each arm. After a moment's hesitation, Michelle picked up a carton and followed as well. 

Walton glared back at her, "Asked you to stay on the barge." 

"I think your hermit's off hiding someplace." 

Wicket deposited his armload of cartons by the door to the shed and immediately turned back toward the barge. The door was ajar. Michelle set the carton on the ground, then, overcome with curiosity and helpless to do otherwise, stepped to the doorway and peered within. Her nose was crinkled in anticipation of squalor served up, perhaps, with the thick, sickening smell of dirty socks and foodstuffs gone bad; instead she found only an inconsistent sort of untidiness—a cluttered table, a disheveled cot, and radio equipment that looked well-maintained and clean. A rude shelf mounted at eye level on the near wall contained not tapes or chips but old-fashioned books. She was not certain what she would have expected to find in the cabin of a hermit—Robinson Crusoe, perhaps, or Heart of Darkness—but it disappointed her that the only titles she could read were those of electronics maintenance manuals. 

She suddenly sensed someone behind her and turned. 

The old man of the mountain wore cutoff jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap—all frayed and rather dirty—and a pair of sandals that appeared to have been repaired with insulated electrical wire. His long, matted hair covered his head like the hood of a parka, and his beard grew up his face almost to the lower eyelids, yet the face in the midst of this unkempt hyperpilosity was that of a man in his mid-thirties. His eyes, clear blue, alert, nervous, never quite met hers. He gave the impression of an animal that found itself cut off from its burrow. 

Walton hove into view behind and to one side of the man and said, "Hello." The hermit shot him a startled glance, and Michelle took the opportunity to step aside, out of the doorway. She made an apologetic sound as the man pushed by, trailing a sour smell. He stopped just inside the door, turned, stood there blinking and fidgeting as Walton continued speaking. "You remember Wicket, don't you?" he said, gesturing over his shoulder at the big man standing stock still on the path. "Of course you do. This"—indicating Michelle—"is our new friend, Miz Kelly. Say hello." 

"Hello," said Michelle. 

The man looked as though he were about to speak but settled for nodding. 

"We've put everything here by the door for you," Walton said. 

"Good. Good. That's good." The man spoke as though it amazed him to discover that he still possessed a voice, and he seemed to repeat words as though to make certain they sounded right when he spoke them. "Thank you. That's good. Good." 

"We'll be going now. Till next time. Michelle." 

Michelle hurried to rejoin Walton, and then the hermit practically herded them back to the boat and watched until Walton had backed the barge away from the bank, brought it about, pointed its blunt bow downriver. Then he disappeared into his shed and did not show himself again. She imagined a couple of times that she glimpsed his face at the window, but could not be certain of it. The boat followed the bend of the river, and the radio station passed from view. 




· · · · ·  


For some time after they had left the hermit's camp, Walton, in his pilot house with the windows opened to create the impression of a breeze moving through the confined space, watched Michelle as she moved restlessly about the deck. Occasionally she paused at the rail to peer at something unapparent to him. Finally, though, heat and glare drove her into such shade as the superstructure had to offer. He heard her back thump against the pilot house as she sat down by it, but he saw and heard nothing more of her for several minutes. Then, above the rhythm of the diesels, there came music. He recognized it after a moment as the emotive second movement of Bach's Violin Concerto in A Minor. It was followed in short order by "Pas d'action," from Swan Lake. Ah, Christ, he thought unhappily, we're going to be awash with melancholy all the way back downriver. She surprised him, however, by next playing the "Dance of the Swans," and Walton could not help smiling, could not resist picturing for a moment a row of sprightly tutu-clad young women prancing and whirling along the stony bank. 
After dinner, they sat looking up at the dark purple sky. Walton stretched, crossed his arms tightly across his chest, and made a contented sound. She looked around at him and said, "How'd he get past screening? The old man of the mountain." 

Walton shrugged. "I guess he was well enough to get through screening. Living in the Paleozoic brought out the craziness in him. It's some kind of progressive disorder." 

"What happens to him if everybody else here just folds up and goes home?" 

"Well, that's not very likely to happen, is it? Listen, he's not the only one. There're several more just like him, living off in the badlands with just a radio set and some crates of canned goods and a case of whiskey. That one we visited today, he told me once that man is the ape that lives like a cockroach." 

"I guess he's the living proof of that." 

"He meant that we tend to pack ourselves together in confined spaces and live in our own dirt, and we eat anything and breed like crazy." 

"That man needs professional help." 

Walton shrugged again. "Nobody can help him." 

"Not here they can't." 

"Not back in the twenty-first century, either. Where could he go there, what could he do, to find the kind of isolation and seclusion he wants? Here, at least, he's happy, or content, or whatever the hell he is. You can't get much more secluded and isolated than four hundred million years in the past and way off in the hinterlands." 

"He looked at me like I was—like I was I don't know what." 

"Like you were just another member of the whole damned human race he came here to get away from. It's nothing personal. There's nothing personal about any of it. I'm not sure he really thinks of himself as a member of our species any more. Somebody who needs isolation that bad must've been born without the ape gene for gregariousness. I'm not sure what he thinks at all, to tell the truth. We may be just symbionts to him. We bring him food and whiskey, he transmits data to us. It's about the same kind of relationship you have with the bacteria in your guts." 

"It sounds sociopathic." 

"Maybe. It's antisocial at the very least. But maybe sociopaths are really mutants adapted for life off by themselves. Preadapted for life in the unknown places. It's always the loners who're the trailblazers, the first ones to go out into the unknown. Probably wherever the human race goes, out in space to other worlds, back in time, there'll always be some seriously unsocialized character way out ahead on the edge of everything. Maybe men like that are our ace in the hole. Maybe they guarantee the survival of our species." 

"Not if they are all men and don't take along girlfriends." 

"There're women hermits, too." 

"Out here?" 

Walton shrugged. "Who knows?" 

They said no more for several minutes. Then Michelle made an amused sound. "What do you suppose courtship between a male and a female hermit is like?" 

"Maybe like scorpions mating. Hell, I don't know. Maybe hermits aren't our ace in the hole. It's just a hypothesis." 

"Well, I've had it up to here with hypotheses. Can a person buy something to drink on this beamy scow?" 

"If it's Scotch, and if a person doesn't call this beautiful and versatile craft of mine a beamy scow." He glanced at her sharply. "And I should probably ask to see some identification." 

"I turned twenty-five in November." 

"Moen was right. You are older than you look." 

Walton fetched a bottle and two glasses, and he and Michelle settled into a comfortable silence. After a minute or two, however, he realized that he was unaccountably quite happy, and then after a moment more that he was perhaps not quite so happy after all, that he wanted to say to her and, moreover, that he probably would never dare to say to her, I think I shall miss you terribly when you've gone. He was grateful when Wicket, who had been sitting on a stack of palettes at the bow, reading a book, suddenly got up and came and stood about six feet from Walton and Michelle. Walton looked at him in frank astonishment and murmured, "Well, well." Wicket looked from Walton to a point in space near Michelle and then back at Walton, who told Michelle, "Looks like you've finally been sort of kind of accepted." 

She made a visible effort not to look directly at the big man. "I thought he was never going to make up his mind about me." 

"Moen distracted him for a bit. He's not crazy about Moen." 

"Imagine that." 

Walton gave Wicket an expectant look and said, "Will you please read from your book now?" 

The big man softly cleared his throat and began to read aloud. He had a surprisingly sweet voice; he read with passable enunciation and made a respectable attempt at inflection. "Fanny had the pleasure of seeing Edmund continue at the window with her, in spite of the expected glee, and of having his eyes soon turned like hers toward the scene without, where all that was solemn and soothing, and lovely, appeared in the brilliancy of an unclouded night, and the deep shade of the woods. 'Here's harmony!' said she. 'Here's repose! Here's what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry can only attempt to describe. Here's what may tranquilize every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.' " 

Michelle laughed her good laugh and said, "Whoa!" 

Walton regarded him with wonder. "What are you reading from?" Wicket shyly held the book out to him. "Mansfield Park. Jane Austen. Jesus Christ. You are such a romantic." 




· · · · ·  


The barge moved with the current and put in at each of the camps previously visited to take on crates of specimens. The landscape smoothed itself out, and the river slowed and began to meander. In the amber light of a late afternoon, they approached the oil geologists' camp and saw gouged and furrowed marl along the bank. Its yellow sides caked with mud, the vibrator truck sat dormant amid a crazy pattern of treadmarks. There was no sign of the men. Walton reached for the whistle cord, then withdrew his hand. To Michelle, who stood leaning against the pilot house, he said, "Might be taking their naps." 
"Looks like they've been cutting doughnuts." 

"What else is there for them to do for fun around here?" 

"Maybe they've been celebrating. Maybe they've found what they were looking for. Are we going ashore now?" 

Walton shook his head. "Not unless you want to." 

"I don't want to." 

"Then not till we have to." 


The End 

Special thanks to Jessica Reisman and her pals.