other, and those children of theirs who had the smallest wings became evern better fisherpeople, and so on.
Now the very same sort of thing has happened to people, but not with respect to their wings, of course, since they never had wings—but with respect to their hands and brains instead. And people don’t have to wait any more for fish to nibble on baited hooks or blunder into nets or whatever. A person who wants a fish nowadays just goes after one like a shark in the deep blue sea.
It’s so easy now.
8
EVEN BACK IN JANUARY, there were any number of reasons Roy Hepburn should not have signed up for that cruise. It wasn’t evident then that a world economic crisis was coming, and that the people of Ecuador would be starving when the ship was supposed to sail. But there was the matter of Mary’s job. She did not yet know that she was about to be laid off, to be forced into early retirement, so she could not see how she, in good conscience, could take off three weeks in late November and early December, right in the middle of a semester.
Also, although she had never been there, she had grown very bored with the Galápagos Archipelago. There was such a wealth of films and slides and books and articles about the islands, which she had used over and over in her courses, that she could not imagine any surprise that might await her there. Little did she know.
She and Roy hadn’t been out of the United States during their entire marriage. If they were going to kick up their heels and take a really glamorous trip, she thought, she would much rather go to Africa, where the wildlife was so much more thrilling, and the survival schemes were so much more dangerous. When all was said and done, the creatures of the Galápagos Islands were a pretty listless bunch, when compared with rhinos and hippos and lions and elephants and giraffes and so on.
The prospect of the voyage, in fact, made her confess to a close friend, “All of a sudden I have this feeling that I never want to see another blue-footed booby as long as I live!”
Little did she know.
Mary muted her misgivings about the trip, though, when talking to Roy, confident that he would perceive on his own that he had suffered a mild brain malfunction. But by March, Roy was out of his job, and Mary knew she was going to be let go in June. The timing of the cruise, anyway, became practical. And the cruise loomed huge in Roy’s increasingly erratic imagination as “… the only good thing we’ve got to look forward to.”
Here was what had happened to their jobs: GEFFCo had furloughed almost its entire work force, blue-collar and white-collar alike, in order to modernize the Ilium operation. A Japanese company, Matsumoto, was doing the job. Matsumoto was also automating the Bahía de Darwin. This was the same company which employed *Zenji Hiroguchi, the young computer genius who would be staying with his wife at the Hotel El Dorado the same time that Mary was there.
When the Matsumoto Corporation got through installing computers and robots, only twelve human beings would be able to run everything. So people young enough to have children, or at least ambitious dreams for the future, left town in droves. It was, as Mary Hepburn would say on her eighty-first birthday, two weeks before a great white shark ate her, “… as though the Pied Piper had passed through town.” Suddenly, there were almost no children to educate, and the city was bankrupt for want of taxpayers. So Ilium High School would graduate its last class in June.
In April Roy was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumor. “The Nature Cruise of the Century” thereupon became what he was staying alive for. “I can hang on that long at least, Mary. November—that’s not far away, is it?”
“No,” she said.
“I can hang on that long.”
“You could have years, Roy,” she said.
“Just let me take that cruise,” he said. “Let me see penguins on the equator,” he said. “That’ll be good enough for me.”
While Roy was mistaken about more and more things, he was right about there being penguins on the Galápagos Islands. They were skinny things underneath their headwaiters’ costumes. They had to be. If they had been swaddled in fat like their relatives on the ice floes to the south, half a world away, they