When night came, the car moved again, and stopped alongside one of the biggest of the strange machines. The back door of the car opened, and Barbara urged Thursday to step out and come with her.
Thursday saw a door in the big machine, and realized they wanted her to go through it. She climbed inside it, with Barbara following after. Barbara sat down on the floor of the machine, and patted the floor next to her, signaling Thursday to sit down next to her.
Thursday did, and shivered, for the strange floor was made of something very cold and hard. She wondered what would happen next.
Then she felt a jabbing in her rear, like a bee sting.
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She was asleep before she knew to be afraid, thank God. Barbara reached over and stroked the coarse fur on her head, and did her best to arrange the unconscious creature into a comfortable position. She wrapped a blanket around Thursday’s body and took the hard, callused hand in her own.
The old DC-3 coughed into life, and the well-bribed pilot took them up into the night sky, out of the seedy airstrip of Makokou toward Libreville, and whatever transport Clark could improvise there.
Chapter Nineteen
TOP SCIENTISTS AGREE:
APE-MAN SKULL IS HOAX
(UPI) Is Ambrose the ape-man skull for real? The first reactions from the worldwide scientific community are in, and the answer is a resounding “No.” While few scientists were willing to comment on the record, a dozen experts in the field interviewed for this report expressed incredulity at least, with most suspecting outright fraud. It proved impossible to locate a disinterested researcher who believed in Ambrose.
Several independent sources speculated that the “skull,” presented to the press by Dr. Jeffery Grossington of the Smithsonian Institution three days ago, was actually a forgery made of dental plaster or a plastic composite. “If it’s for real, why hasn’t Dr. Grossington let outside scientists see it, examine it closely?” asked Dr. William Lowell of Harvard’s biology department, the only scientist who agreed to talk on the record. “Where are the other skulls and post-cranial bones Grossington reported? Why have there been no follow-ups to the first press conference?” A planned follow-up session, at which Dr. Grossington claimed he would display voluminous evidence to prove his claim, was cancelled without explanation.
Other critics were even harsher. “Not only is it a hoax, but Dr. Grossington must be an active participant in the hoax, and no mere dupe, much as it grieves me to say that,” one scientist said, on condition that he not be identified. “It is flat-out impossible that a genuine skull of that kind could exist, and while it might be possible to manufacture a fake that would look believable from a few feet away, no working scientist would be fooled if he touched it, or even got reasonably close to it. You’d have trouble fooling most of the general public, for that matter. Jeffery Grossington had to know Ambrose was fake when he presented the skull in that press conference.”
Dr. Grossington declined to be interviewed for this story, and has not spoken publicly since his press conference.
Observers agreed that the showman-like nature of Grossington’s press conference weighed against him in their evaluation of the skull. “The first people to see that skull should have been Grossington’s colleagues—people qualified to examine it and understand its significance. Instead of such legitimate peer-review, we had to read about it over our cornflakes in the morning papers. He leaks it to the press and then stages a dog-and-pony show for the media,” Lowell said.
“There’s really only one mystery involved here,” another researcher commented. “Why on earth would anyone try to pass this off? How could they dream of getting away with it? There is no way this fraud could hope to survive public scrutiny. Australopithecines in Mississippi? It’s absurd. Why not dinosaurs grazing in front of Grossington’s museum? It’s like trying to pass your kid’s drawings on the refrigerator as the Mona Lisa. I hear they were staging an expedition to Africa to bring back a live one. I just wonder who they’re going to get into the gorilla suit for that press conference.”
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The Air Force made lousy coffee. Barbara shivered slightly as she took another sip of the foul brew, wishing to be anywhere but on the windswept flight line of Andrews Air Force Base. At least the overcooked battery acid was warm, and heat was something she could use right now. Twenty-four hours after sweating in the humid furnace of Makokou, Washington in February was cold. Sleep was something else she could use, but that would have to wait.
The big C-130 transport that had carried them from Libreville squatted on the hardstand while the maintenance crew swarmed over it, a lumbering sky-god being tended by its acolytes. Jeffery Grossington humped up his shoulders against the cold and puffed out a cloud of smoky breath. “Why haven’t they brought her out yet?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Barbara said. “Soon. Things always take a long time to get on and off airplanes. Law of nature. Don’t worry. Livingston and Rupert are in there, keeping an eye on her. She should be all right. But she’s been sedated for most of the last day or so, and I don’t want to give her another shot if we don’t have to.”
Neither of them took their eyes off the airplane, watching and waiting. “So how did you get out?” Jeffery asked. “All I got was a message to be here, brought over by a State Department courier.”
Barbara shook her head. “I don’t know, exactly, myself. Give Clark White the credit—he’s quite a guy. Our guide, Monsieur Ovono, drove us into Makokou, the closest town with an airfield. Thursday wasn’t too afraid of the Land Rover, thank God. We got to the airfield and bought a ride on some old rustbucket that flew us to the coast. We landed in Libreville about midnight, and then just sat there on the tarmac while Clark took our passports, went into town, and did his thing. Eight hours later, a USAF Military Airlift Command aircraft lands and taxis up next to us. Flown in from West Germany. Clark reappears with our passports all properly stamped and a license to transport ‘one ape of uncertain species’ out of the country. He hands us the papers, herds us onto the MAC bird and waves goodbye. We refueled in the Azores and landed here. And let me tell you, the Air Force has one surprised doctor aboard that airplane.” She took another sip of her coffee and made a face. February had already sucked every drop of warmth from the cup. She poured the rest of it onto the immaculate concrete of the tarmac, crumpled up the styrofoam cup, and jammed it into the pocket of her borrowed coat.
“It hasn’t been much more fun around here,” Jeffery said. “I don’t know how much you’ve heard, but our cover got blown but good.” He pulled a newspaper out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Page one story all about what a charlatan I am. A reporter from Mississippi broke the story, and like a fool, I decided to go public. The sharks have been circling ever since. I’m a fraud, or a gullible senile fool taken in by hoaxers. You name it, I’ve been called it. I was going to lay out every single bone on the trestle tables in the Digger’s Pit—ah, that is, in the main anthropology office,” Grossington said, plainly embarrassed to have used the office slang. “I was going to set up a slide show of your excavation, have photocopies of Zebulon’s journal and the ad from the 1851 Gowrie Gazette available—the whole chain of evidence. But then the reporter who broke the story in the first place found out you were in Gabon and announced it, and I got the cable that you were headed home. I decided to keep mum until you were back. All I’ve said was ‘no comment.’ I realized the publicity was going to be so heavy that I couldn’t let you in for it without consulting you. It’s going to be rough, and you need to decide how to handle it. Besides, who knows what sort of trouble you would be in it if the Gabonese knew what you were doing? Oh, one other thing—the secretary of the Smithsonian let it be known my resignation would be accepted, until I barged into his office with Ambrose this morning—just the way you barged into my office. He’s starting to believe. He’ll back us. I think.”
“I’m sorry, Jeffery. Truly.” She shut her eyes and rubbed them for a moment, and
then looked back at the big airplane. “Have you figured out where we’re going to put her?”
“I think so,” Grossington said. “I don’t know if you’ll like it, though.”
“Where?”
“St. Elizabeth’s.”
“A mental hospital? Jeffery, she’s not crazy or dangerous—”
“I’m sure that’s true, but that’s not the point,” Grossington said wearily. “Saint E.’s is at least partially a federal facility, which makes it a bit easier for another part of the federal government to prevail upon them. It’s here in Washington, but secluded. It has good security, and a staff that’s used to dealing with the press—they still have John Hinkley locked up there. It’s a big medical facility, spread out over a large, secluded campus. They have labs, observation equipment, all that sort of thing—and the staff there is experienced in some of the things you’re going to need help in. Cognitive studies, motor coordination, language skills, that sort of thing. It makes sense for us.” He nodded to an Air Force Medevac van waiting behind them. “I’ve got an ambulance waiting to take her there.”
Barbara let her shoulders droop, and she let out a deep, heavy sigh. Livingston and Rupert came off the plane, carrying Thursday’s still figure on a stretcher between them. Barbara tried to get a look at her, but she was so wrapped in blankets that no part of her was clearly visible. Thick straps held her to the stretcher. If she should wake, she would not be able to move at all. “Okay, okay. I guess you’re right. Let’s go lock her up.”
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Now, Jenny-Sue, I know all the good folks out there watching our special prayer-vigil broadcast today are just as concerned as we are with the need for a decent, Christian education for their children. That’s why I want to take a moment from our usual fundraising this morning to talk about a challenge to all of us—a mighty challenge that could well produce an equally mighty triumph against the creeping secular humanism that pervades this nation’s classrooms. (Applause.) Now, we’ve all seen and heard the reports of this amazing new skull that’s been found right here in America. The scientist who found this skull tells us it belongs to a species of so-called ape-men that he says has been dead a million years, a species of ape-man that’s supposed to be your grandparent. The scientists say it proves their theory of evolution. Certainly this new evidence looks like a challenge to all the study and research of our friends at the Creation Science Institute who have proven the Earth to be a mere ten thousand years old, who have laid that old devil evolution to rest with all their work.
You might think this report means that slippery old devil evolution has risen yet again, but it’s not really so. That’s what they want you to think, but friends, it’s just not true. They are putting a new set of clothes on that naked old emperor evolution, but we can see it’s really just the same old rags. Think again. Think, friends, for a moment, of the disarray, the dirty old mess, the evolutionist secular humanists have gotten themselves into here. You almost have to admire them for trying to use this amazing discovery to ‘prove’ evolution. They try to hide the obvious truth behind a smokescreen of complicated logic, but it just won’t work. How could it be, friends, that humans are the descendants of a monkey that died just before the Civil War?
You know it can’t be, and so do I, and so do they. And they’re ready for a fight. Are we? Are all you good Christians ready for a fight? I’d like you all to listen to Jenny-Sue now, and then contribute to the Defense Fund she’s going to describe, to be used in the fight to scourge every textbook in the land, cleanse them all of the lies of evolution. So do contribute whatever you can . . . .
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Firmly, resolutely, pointlessly, Barbara decided not only that she had to be with Thursday when the australopithecine woke, but that she, Barbara had to remain awake until then. Now she sat in a spare but comfortable room, all whites and dulled grey linoleum, in a small outbuilding at St. E’s. It wasn’t a luxurious room, but it was not an unpleasant one either. Indeed, it would have seemed almost homey if not for the bars on the windows and the too-solid door that locked from the outside.
Thursday lay on a bed in the corner, right where the baffled orderlies had left her. They had wrapped a sheet and a blanket around her, for want of something more to do for her. Her breathing was regular, her heartbeat seemed strong, and there really was nothing to be done until she woke up. Logically, Barbara should have been resting herself, but she had gotten it into her head that Thursday should not awaken all alone, and that was all there was to it. She would not eat, would not sleep, until Thursday was awake in this new world.
Barbara even knew, deep inside, that what she was really doing was performing a penance—punishing herself with hunger and sleeplessness for the sin of kidnapping Thursday and transporting her across the seas. Guilt had always been a powerful motivator for Barbara—so strong that she sometimes invented a cause for it when none was around. Was that the case now?
Should she feel this guilty? Not if she had simply brought another kind of ape from Africa back for study. Most paleoanthropologists worked with chimps or gorillas at one time or another, and Barbara saw the necessity of such study. So long as the animals were treated well, and not caused needless fear and pain, she felt no great shame in using them. But as engaging as the great apes could be, as bright and personable as they often were, they were indisputably animals, not people.
She had bought Thursday as a slave, and every other slave in history had been a person someone had treated like an animal. How could she be so sure she wasn’t doing the same thing?
Her great-grandfather Zebulon was the only other person in history to report any real information about the creatures, and he had flatly stated they were not people.
So, Barbara thought, All I have to do is decide if she’s a person or not.
But there was another question to answer first, of course.
What, exactly, makes a person a person?
Thursday whimpered in her sleep, thrashed about for a moment, and kicked the blankets off before she settled back down and began to snore.
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Pete knew they had found themselves an australopithecine. and also where they had stashed it. He had stumbled onto that one by tailing Grossington for three days when the story seemed to be dying as suddenly as it had appeared, when he had run out of leads. Grossington’s press conference had started out to be all that Pete could have hoped it to be, but when Grossington had stalked out, and then shut down any further access to his evidence, canceling the follow-up conference as well, that had smelled enough like fraud to convince everyone. By the second day, even Pete was starting to wonder if Ambrose was for real.
But there was no turning back now. Ambrose had to be real, or Pete was dead. He’d be out of a job, a laughingstock in his profession if anyone remembered him at all, suited only for work on the National Enquirer—and working there was his worst nightmare. So he set off on the desperate chance of tailing Grossington, with no clear goal in mind.
But sometimes even desperation pays off. Pete was on his tail when Grossington drove out to Andrews. Pete sat in his rental at the main entrance gate, and then, grinning with relief, tailed Grossington’s car on the way out as it followed an Air Force ambulance through the unfamiliar city, to some place called Saint Elizabeth’s—a mental hospital, apparently.
Obviously, Grossington had met a plane, but why would he be interested in a plane landing at an Air Force base, and why would they need an ambulance, and why drive directly to an insane asylum? He had collected the Gabon expedition and their cargo. What else could it be? What better place than a mental institution to stash a wild ape-man? Either someone had really cracked up, or they had found something. Pete sat in his rental and stared at the entrance to the expansive grounds of Saint Elizabeth’s. He knew that the ape-man was in there.
There was something else he knew—knew by feel and not by fact: Grossington was not the real key to this story. Barbara Marchando was. Pete had missed that because Grossin
gton had the rank and the reputation—and because Marchando was a black woman and that still counted against her in Pete’s southern male-chauvinist subconscious.
But she had found the skull—and found it on her own family’s property. She had gone off to Africa to search for more, had been the one Grossington had singled-out for praise. All of which meant she was inside those gates in some outbuilding with the ape-man right now. He knew it, but he couldn’t prove it. And he couldn’t get much further staring at this gate.
And no one outside the operation besides himself would know where she was. That was an interesting point, and it gave him interesting ideas. He turned the key, started the car, threw it into gear and headed back downtown.
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Thursday woke up. She felt weak, sick, stiff, as if she had not moved in a long time. Slowly, she sat up and tried to stand. She nearly fell—not because she was dizzy, but because she was sleeping on a strange, soft sort of ledge or box, and not on the ground. Carefully, she swung her feet around and put them on the floor.
Nothing smelled right. The ground here was grey-white, impossibly flat and smooth, lifeless. She was in a hut—a big, empty hut, and quite alone but for a human who was staring at her. Where were the others? Where was the keeper, and why wasn’t he crying out for them to get to work—
With a shock, she remembered. The newcomers, the journey, the strange machines and wondrous things. Where was she? She looked again at the human who was watching her. B—B... Barbara! She remembered. And she remembered, no, more than remembered, she knew her own name. She knew it to be a part of herself, like her hands. She stood up and looked at Barbara. “Urs-ay” she announced. Barbara smiled and nodded, and Thursday felt better. Thursday walked across the room to the window. She remembered the idea of windows—clear stuff that was still there even though you could see through it—though she could not remember the word. She looked out across the flat, barren, cold fields of February, the grounds of the institution looking grey and forbidding. She reached up and wrapped her hands around the iron bars set into the window frame. Bars on doors and windows were something else she knew without having to remember.
Orphan of Creation Page 28
