since he was never sick, not for anything.
She asked him if he was sick, and he said that he had never felt better in his life. He was proud of himself in what seemed to Mary the manner of an adolescent who was tired of being thought a good boy all the time. This was a man whose words were few and well-chosen, never silly or immature. But now he said incredibly, and with an inane expression to match, as though she were his disapproving mother: “I played hookey.”
It had to have been the tumor that said that, Mary now thought in Guayaquil. And the tumor couldn’t have picked a worse day for carefree truancy, for there had been an ice storm the night before, and then wind-driven sleet all day. But Roy had gone up and down Clinton Street, the main street of Ilium, stopping in store after store and telling the salespeople that he was playing hookey.
So Mary tried to be happy about that, to say and mean that it was time he loosened up and had some fun—although they had always had a lot of fun on weekends and during vacations, and at work, as far as that went. But a miasma overlay this unexpected escapade. And Roy himself, during their early supper, seemed puzzled by the afternoon. So that was that. He didn’t think he would do it again, and they could forget the incident, except maybe to laugh about it now and then.
But then, right before bedtime, while they were staring at the glowing embers in the fieldstone fireplace which Roy had built with his own two horny hands, Roy said, “There’s more.”
“There’s more of what?” said Mary.
“About this afternoon,” he said. “One of the places I went was the travel agency.” There was only one such establishment in Ilium, and not doing well.
“So?” she said.
“I signed us up for something,” he said. It was as though he were remembering a dream. “It’s all paid for. It’s all taken care of. It’s done. In November, you and I are flying to Ecuador, and we are going to take ‘the Nature Cruise of the Century.’”
Roy and Mary Hepburn were the very first persons to respond to the advertising and publicity program for the maiden voyage of the Bahía de Darwin, which ship was nothing but a keel and a pile of blueprints in Malmö, Sweden, at the time. The Ilium travel agent had just received a poster announcing the cruise. He was just Scotch-taping it to his wall when Roy Hepburn walked in.
If I may interject a personal note: I myself had been working as a welder in Malmö for about a year, but the Bahía de Darwin had not yet materialized sufficiently so as to require my services. I would literally lose my head to that steel maiden only when springtime came. Question: Who hasn’t lost his or her head in the springtime?
But to continue:
The travel poster in Ilium depicted a very strange bird standing on the edge of a volcanic island, looking out at a beautiful white motor ship churning by. This bird was black and appeared to be the size of a large duck, but it had a neck as long and supple as a snake. The queerest thing about it, though, was that it seemed to have no wings, which was almost the truth. This sort of bird was endemic to the Galápagos Islands, meaning that it was found there and nowhere else on the planet. Its wings were tiny and folded flat against its body, in order that it might swim as fast and deep as a fish could. This was a much better way to catch fish than, as so many fish-eating birds were required to do, to wait for fish to come to the surface and then crash down on them with beaks agape. This very successful bird was called by human beings a “flightless cormorant.” It could go where the fish were. It didn’t have to wait for fish to make a fatal error.
Somewhere along the line of evolution, the ancestors of such a bird must have begun to doubt the value of their wings, just as, in 1986, human beings were beginning to question seriously the desirability of big brains.
If Darwin was right about the Law of Natural Selection, cormorants with small wings, just shoving off from shore like fishing boats, must have caught more fish than the greatest of their aviators. So they mated with each