“Give it time, Joshua. Give it time.”
“God forbid there should ever be that much time.”
Alistair Patrick Blair, riding between Kaprow and Joshua in the cab of the big vehicle, laughed. “God and Woody Kaprow, physicist supreme. They jointly hold the patent on all temporal properties.”
“Not so,” Kaprow replied. “Not so.”
Ahead of them, the lead vehicle in their caravan, cruised a Land Rover that had been modified to accommodate not only a swivel-mounted machine gun but also a hundred-gallon drum of drinking water. An American air policeman was driving this escort, a uniformed Zarakali security agent riding shotgun. Behind Joshua, Blair, and Kaprow, the caravan’s caboose was a huge truck with a covered flatbed pulling a generator more suggestive of a collapsible camper than a caisson. Both the Land Rover and the truck were a dusty olive-drab, chevroned with the doubtful camouflage of zebra striping.
Of the three vehicles in the caravan, the one in which Joshua and his companions rode had the strangest design and the most mysterious purpose. Half again as long as the truck, it resembled an Airstream trailer coated with a layer of protective plastic; its most aerodynamic-looking hull was as sleek as the skin of a porpoise, while its cab protruded like the nose of an immense electric iron with a wraparound windshield set into it. Six monstrous tires bore the weight of this vehicle, which Kaprow had recently taken to calling, with subtle bravado, The Machine. Only a month before this expedition to Lake Kiboko, it had arrived in Bravanumbi, Zarakal’s principal port city, aboard an American aircraft carrier; and Kaprow, who had accompanied it on that voyage, would let no one else drive it. Blair had offered to spell him at the wheel during their night-long trip from the air base, but Kaprow had firmly declined the offer. Although its development had been funded with U.S. tax monies, he regarded The Machine—if not Time itself—as his personal property.
“But I’m an excellent driver,” Blair had sweet-talked the physicist, “and you’ve done yeoman duty these last two hours.”
“It would be immoral for me to let anyone else sit here.”
“Immoral?”
“Absolutely. If you wrecked The Machine, Dr. Blair, I’d despise you forever. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”
“But if you wreck it . . .?”
“Well, if I wreck it, I’ll be damned pissed off, of course, but eventually I’ll forgive myself. To err is human, especially if it’s you who’s done the erring. Otherwise it’s intolerable.”
“Dr. Blair’s transcended the merely human,” Joshua had put in. “Everyone in Zarakal knows that. Maybe you could trust him for thirty minutes or so.”
“Demigods are always chauffeured. You can look it up. Try The Iliad, for instance.”
They had laughed at that, but Kaprow had not relinquished the wheel, and they had been traveling since midnight, a departure time settled upon to protect the caravan from midday temperatures and the possibility of aerial surveillance—although everyone understood that a sophisticated spy satellite would find mere darkness no impediment at all. On the other hand, a paleoanthropological expedition was hardly a prime target for the espionage operations of Zarakal’s Marxist enemies.
The sun had just risen. Joshua watched the hyena ahead of them on the salt flat turn sideways and break into a frightened lope. Hunting had apparently been none too good of late; the ugly creature was all bones and mangy to boot. Joshua leaned his head against the side window and closed his eyes.
Blair said, “You’re not having second thoughts, are you, Joshua?”
“Lately all my thoughts are second thoughts.”
“There’s still time to go back, of course.”
Joshua opened his eyes. “All right. Let’s go back.”
Blair shifted his pipe in his teeth, a meerschaum like the one Hugo had lost to the rhesus monkey at Ritki’s Animal Ranch. Kaprow shot him a swift sidelong glance. Both scientists, their pet projects in the balance, were visibly alarmed.
“Joke,” Joshua comforted them, patting Blair on the knee. “Didn’t mean to scare you shitless. I’m as obsessed as you two are. It’s just that I didn’t ask for my obsession.”
“Neither did I,” Kaprow countered.
“My saying we could take you back wasn’t an insincere formality, Joshua. If you want us to, we can.”
“It’s okay. Really. I’ve got a bad case of preflight jitters, that’s all.” A model of innocence, he lifted his eyebrows. “Only human, you know.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to—”
“Renege, Dr. Blair?”
“Pull out, I was going to say.”
“Of course you wouldn’t.” Joshua closed his eyes again, in spite of which he was hungry rather than sleepy.