Congo Read online

  “Hell,” Ross said. She felt suddenly tired. Because if there really had been a piggyback slurp, their chances of winning the race were vanishing—before any of them had even set foot in the rain forests of central Africa.

  2. Piggyback Slurp

  TRAVIS FELT LIKE A FOOL.

  He stared at the hard copy from Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

  ERTS WHY ARE YOU SENDING US ALL THIS MUKENKO DATA WE DON’T REALLY CARE THANKS ANYWAY.

  That had arrived an hour ago from GSFC/Maryland, but it was already too late by more than five hours.

  “Damn!” Travis said, staring at the telex.

  The first indication to Travis that anything was wrong was when the Japanese and Germans broke off negotiations with Munro in Tangier. One minute they had been willing to pay anything; the next minute they could hardly wait to leave. The break-off had come abruptly, discontinuously; it implied the sudden introduction of new data into the consortium computer files.

  New data from where?

  There could be only one explanation—and now it was confirmed in the GSFC telex from Greenbelt.

  ERTS WHY ARE YOU SENDING ALL THIS MUKENKO DATA

  There was a simple answer to that: ERTS wasn‘t sending any data. At least, not willingly. ERTS and GSFC had an arrangement to exchange data updates—Travis had made that deal in 1978 to obtain cheaper satellite imagery from orbiting Landsats. Satellite imagery was his company’s single greatest expense. In return for a look at derived ERTS data, GSFC agreed to supply satellite CCTs at 30 percent below gross rate.

  It seemed like a good deal at the time, and the coded locks were specified in the agreement.

  But now the potential drawbacks loomed large before Travis; his worst fears were confirmed. Once you put a line over two thousand miles from Houston to Greenbelt, you begged for a piggyback data slurp. Somewhere between Texas and Maryland someone had inserted a terminal linkup—probably in the carrier telephone lines—and had begun to slurp out data on a piggyback terminal. This was the form of industrial espionage they most feared.

  A piggyback-slurp terminal tapped in between two legitimate terminals, monitoring the back and forth transmissions. After a time, the piggyback operator knew enough to begin making transmissions on line, slurping out data from both ends, pretending to be GSFC to Houston, and Houston to GSFC. The piggyback terminal could continue to function until one or both legitimate terminals realized that they were being slurped.

  Now the question was: how much data had been slurped out in the last seventy-two hours?

  He had called for twenty-four-hour scanner checks, and the readings were disheartening. It looked as though the ERTS computer had yielded up not only original database elements, but also data-transformation histories—the sequence of operations performed on the data by ERTS over the last four weeks.

  If that was true, it meant that the Euro-Japanese consortium piggyback knew what transformations ERTS had carried out on the Mukenko data—and therefore they knew where the lost city was located, with pinpoint accuracy. They now knew the location of the city as precisely as Ross did.

  Timelines had to be adjusted, unfavorably to the ERTS team. And the updated computer projections were unequivocal—Ross or no Ross, the likelihood of the ERTS team reaching the site ahead of the Japanese and Germans was flow almost nil.

  From Travis’s viewpoint, the entire ERTS expedition was mow a futile exercise, and a waste of time. There was no hope of success. The only unfactorable element was the gorilla Amy, and Travis’s instincts told him that a gorilla named Amy would not prove decisive in the discovery of mineral deposits in the northeastern Congo.

  It was hopeless.

  Should he recall the ERTS team? He stared at the console by his desk. “Call cost-time,” he said.

  The computer blinked COST—TIME AVAILABLE.

  “Congo Field Survey,” he said.

  The screen printed out numbers for the Congo Field Survey: expenditures by the hour, accumulated costs, committed future costs, cutoff points, future branch-point deletions. . . . The project was now just outside Nairobi, and was running at an accumulated cost of slightly over

  $189,000.

  Cancellation would cost $227,455.

  “Factor BF,” he said.

  The screen changed. B F. He now saw a series of probabilities. “Factor BF” was bona fortuna, good luck—the imponderable in all expeditions, especially remote, dangerous expeditions.

  THINKING A MOMENT, the computer flashed.

  Travis waited. He knew that the computer would require several seconds to perform the computations to assign weights to random factors that might influence the expedition, still five or more days from the target site.

  His beeper buzzed. Rogers, the tap dancer, said, “We’ve traced the piggyback slurp. It’s in Norman, Oklahoma, nominally at the North Central Insurance Corporation of America. NCIC is fifty-one percent owned by a Hawaiian holding company, Halekuli, Inc., which is in turn owned by mainland Japanese interests. What do you want?”

  “I want a very bad fire,” Travis said.

  “Got you,” Rogers said. He hung up the phone.

  The screen flashed ASSESSED FACTOR B F and a probability: .449. He was surprised: that figure meant that ERTS had an almost even chance of attaining the target site befure the consortium. Travis didn’t question the mathematics; .449 was good enough.

  The ERTS expedition would continue to the Congo, at least for the time being. And in the meantime he would do whatever he could to slow down the consortium. Off the top of his head, Travis could think of one or two ideas to accomplish that.

  3. Additional Data

  THE JET WAS MOVING SOUTH OVER LAKE RUDOLPH in northern Kenya when Tom Seamans called Elliot.

  Seamails had finished his computer analysis to discriminate gorillas from other apes, principally chimpanzees. He had then obtained from Houston a videotape of three seconds of a garbled video transmission which seemed to show a gorilla smashing a dish antenna and staring into a camera.

  “Well?” Elliot said, looking at the computer screen. The data flashed up:

  DISCRIMINANT FUNCTION GORILLA/CHIMP

  FUN CT IONAL GROUPINGS DISTRIBUTED AS:

  GORILLA: .9934

  CHIMP: .1132

  TEST VIDEOTAPE (HOUSTON): .3349

  “Hell,” Elliot said. At those figures, the study was equivocal, useless.

  “Sorry about that,” Seamans said over the phone. “But part of the trouble comes from the test material itself. We had to factor in the computer derivation of that image. The image has been cleaned up, and that means it’s been regularized; the critical stuff has been lost. I’d like to work with the original digitized matrix. Can you get me that?”

  Karen Ross was nodding yes. “Sure,” Elliot said.

  “I’ll go another round with it,” Seamans said. “But if you want my gut opinion, it is never going to turn out. The fact is that gorillas show a considerable individual variation in facial structure, just as people do. If we increase our sample base, we’re going to get more variation, and a larger population interval. I think you’re stuck. You can never prove it’s not a gorilla—but for my money, it’s not.”

  “Meaning what?” Elliot asked.

  “It’s something new,” Seamans said. “I’m telling you, if this was really a gorilla, it would have showed up .89 or .94, somewhere in there, on this function. But the image comes out at .39. That’s just not good enough. It’s not a gorilla, Peter.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s a transitional form. I ran a function to measure where the variation was. You know what was the major differential? Skin color. Even in black-and-white, it’s not dark enough to be a gorilla, Peter. This is a whole new animal, I promise you.”

  Elliot looked at Ross. “What does this do to your timeline?”

  “For the moment, nothing,” she said. “Other elements are more critical, and this is unfactorable.”

 
The pilot clicked on the intercom. “We are beginning our descent into Nairobi,” he said.

  4. Nairobi

  FIVE MILES OUTSIDE NAIROBI, ONE CAN FIND WILD game of the East African savannah. And within the memory of many Nairobi residents the game could be found closer still—gazelles, buffalo, and giraffe wandering around backyards, and the occasional leopard slipping into one’s bedroom. In those days, the city still retained the character of a wild colonial station; in its heyday, Nairobi was a fast-living place indeed: “Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” went the standard question. The men were hard-drinking and rough, the women beautiful and loose, and the pattern of life no more predictable than the fox hunts that ranged over the rugged countryside each weekend.

  But modern Nairobi is almost’ unrecognizable from the time of those freewheeling colonial days. The few remaining Victorian buildings lie stranded in a modem city of half a million, with traffic jams, stoplights, skyscrapers, supermarkets, same-day dry cleaners, French restaurants, and air pollution.

  The ERTS cargo plane landed at Nairobi International Airport at dawn on the morning of June 16, and Munro contacted porters and assistants for the expedition. They intended to leave Nairobi within two hours—until Travis called from Houston to inform them that Peterson, one of the geologists on the first Congo expedition, had somehow made it back to Nairobi.

  Ross was excited by the news. “Where is he now?” she asked.

  “At the morgue,” Travis said.

  Elliot winced as he came close: the body on the stainless steel table was a blond man his own age. The man’s arms had been crushed; the skin was swollen, a ghastly purple color. He glanced at Ross. She seemed perfectly cool, not blinking or turning away. The pathologist stepped on a foot petal, activating a microphone overhead. “Would you state your name, please.”

  “Karen Ellen Ross.”

  “Your nationality and passport number?”

  “American, F 1413649.”

  “Can you identify the man before you, Miss Ross?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He is James Robert Peterson.”

  “What is your relation to the deceased James Robert Peterson?”

  “I worked with him,” she said dully. She seemed to be examining a geological specimen, scrutinizing it unemotionally. Her face showed no reaction.

  The pathologist faced the microphone. “Identity confirmed as James Robert Peterson, male Caucasian, twenty-nine years old, nationality American. “ He turned back to Ross. “When was the last time you saw Mr. Peterson?”

  “In May of this year. He was leaving for the Congo.”

  “You have not seen him in the last month?”

  “No,” she said. “What happened?”

  The pathologist touched the puffy purple injuries on his arms. His fingertips sank in, leaving indentations like teeth in the flesh. “Damned strange story,” the pathologist said.

  The previous day, June 15, Peterson had been flown to Nairobi airport aboard a small charter cargo plane, in end-stage terminal shock. He died several hours later without regaining consciousness. “Extraordinary he made it at all. Apparently the aircraft made an unscheduled stop for a mechanical problem at Garona field, a dirt track in Zaire. And then this fellow comes stumbling out of the woods, collapsing at their feet.” The pathologist pointed out that the bones had been shattered in both arms. The injuries, he explained, were not new; they had occurred at least four days earlier, perhaps more. “He must have been in incredible pain.”

  Elliot said, “What could cause that injury?”

  The pathologist had never seen anything like it. “Superficially, it resembles mechanical trauma, a crush injury from an automobile or truck. We see a good deal of those here; but mechanical crush injuries are never bilateral, as they are in this case.”

  “So it wasn’t a mechanical injury?” Karen Ross asked.

  “Don’t know what it was. It’s unique in my experience,” the pathologist said briskly. “We also found traces of blood under his nails, and a few strands of gray hair. We’re running a test now.”

  Across the room, another pathologist looked up from his microscope. “The hair is definitely not human. Cross section doesn’t match. Some kind of animal hair, close to human.”

  “The cross section?” Ross said.

  “Best index we have of hair origin,” the pathologist said. “For instance, human pubic hair is more elliptical in cross section than other body hair, or facial hair. It’s quite characteristic—admissible in court. But especially in this laboratory, we come across a great deal of animal hair, and we’re expert in that as well.”

  A large stainless-steel analyzer began pinging. “Blood’s coming through,” the pathologist said.

  On a video screen they saw twin patterns of pastel-colored streaks. “This is the electrophoresis pattern,” the pathologist explained. “To check serum proteins. That’s ordinary human blood on the left. On the right we have the blood sample from under the nails. You can see it’s definitely not human blood.”

  “Not human blood?” Ross said, glancing at Elliot.

  “It’s close to human blood,” the pathologist said, staring at the pattern. “But it’s not human. Could be a domestic or farm animal—a pig, perhaps. Or else a primate. Monkeys and apes are very close serologically to human beings. We’ll have a computer analysis in a minute.”

  On the screen, the computer printed ALPHA AND BETA SERUM GLOBULINS MATCH: GORILLA BLOOD.

  The pathologist said, “There’s your answer to what he had under his nails. Gorilla blood.”

  5. Examination

  “SHE WON’T HURT YOU,” ELLIOT TOLD THE frightened orderly. They were in the passenger compartment of the 747 cargo jet. “See, she’s smiling at you.”

  Amy was indeed giving her most winning smile, being careful not to expose her teeth. But the orderly from the private clinic in Nairobi was not familiar with these fine points of gorilla etiquette. His hands shook as he held the syringe.

  Nairobi was the last opportunity for Amy to receive a thorough checkup. Her large, powerful body belied a constitutional fragility, as her heavy-browed, glowering face belied a meek, rather tender nature. In San Francisco, the Project Amy staff subjected her to a thorough medical regimen— urine samples every other day, stool samples checked weekly for occult blood, complete blood studies monthly, and a trip to the dentist every three months for removal of the black tartar that accumulated from her vegetarian diet.

  Amy took it all in stride, but the terrified orderly did not know that. He approached her holding the syringe in front of him like a weapon. “You sure he won’t bite?”

  Amy, trying to be helpful, signed, Amy promise no bite. She was signing slowly, deliberately, as she always did when confronted by someone who did not know her language.

  “She promises not to bite you,” Elliot said.

  “So you say,” the orderly said. Elliot did not bother to explain that he hadn’t said it; she had.

  After the blood samples were drawn, the orderly relaxed a little. Packing up, he said, “Certainly is an ugly brute.”

  “You’ve hurt her feelings,” Elliot said.

  And, indeed, Amy was signing vigorously, What ugly? “Nothing, Amy,” Elliot said. “He’s just never seen a gorilla before.”

  The orderly said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’ve hurt her feelings. You’d better apologize.”

  The orderly snapped his medical case shut. He stared at Elliot and then at Amy. “Apologize to him?”

  “Her,” Elliot said. “Yes. How would you like to be told you’re ugly?”

  Elliot felt strongly about this. Over the years, he had come to feel acutely the prejudices that human beings showed toward apes, considering chimpanzees to be cute children, or­angs to be wise old men, and gorillas to be hulking, dangerous brutes. They were wrong in every case.

  Each of these animals was unique, and did not fit the human stereotypes at all. Chimps, for example, were much more ca
llous than gorillas ever were. Because chimps were extroverts, an angry chimp was far more dangerous than an angry gorilla; at the zoo, Elliot would watch in amazement as human mothers pushed their children closer to look at the chimps, but recoiled protectively at the sight of the gorillas. These mothers obviously did not know that wild chimpanzees caught and ate human infants—something gorillas never did.

  Elliot had witnessed repeatedly the human prejudice against gorillas, and had come to recognize its effect on Amy. Amy could not help the fact that she was huge and black and heavy-browed and squash-faced. Behind the face people considered so repulsive was an intelligent and sensitive consciousness, sympathetic to the people around her, It pained her when people ran away, or screamed in fear, or made cruel remarks.

  The orderly frowned. “You mean that he understands English?”

  “Yes, she does.” The gender change was something else

  Elliot didn’t like. People who were afraid of Amy always assumed she was male.

  The orderly shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Amy, show the man to the door.”

  Amy lumbered over to the door and opened it for the orderly, whose eyes widened as he left. Amy closed the door behind him.

  Silly human man, Amy signed.

  “Never mind,” Elliot said. “Come, Peter tickle Amy.” And for the next fifteen minutes, he tickled her as she rolled on the floor and grunted in deep satisfaction. Elliot never noticed the door open behind him, never noticed the shadow falling across the floor, until it was too late and he turned his head to look up and saw the dark cylinder swing down, and his head erupted with blinding white pain and everything went black.

  6. Kidnapped

  HE AWOKE TO A PIERCING ELECTRONIC SHRIEK.