helium balloons.”
The sun visors, Joshua noted, were red and white. They were emblazoned with the trademark of an American soft drink.
“My goodness, Dr. Kaprow,” said Blair. “You’re awfully young for a curmudgeon.”
“What’s the special favor they want? We need to grant it, if possible, and get on into camp.”
“They want to look inside The Machine.”
“Look inside The Machine!”
“They’ve never seen so fat a motorcar before, and it arouses their curiosity.”
Kaprow turned the angry russet of a baked apple. “They can’t. It’s impossible. You know it’s impossible.”
“How badly do you want their cattle out of the road?” Blair put his hand on the physicist’s shoulder. “You don’t think they’re going to steal your Nobel Prize poking around in there, do you? I’ve never been able to make brain or bunion of the whole untidy scramble.”
“It’s not your specialty, Dr. Blair.”
“Oh, I see. You believe these Sambusai herders are secret graduates of MIT, magna cum laude?”
“No, of course I don’t. It’s just that White Sphinx—”
“I’ll show them around inside,” Joshua interrupted. “A tour guide who doesn’t speak their lingo isn’t going to spill much, is he?”
Because he had to, Kaprow acquiesced. Blair politely intervened in the Sambusai’s dancing, and a moment later Joshua was leading two of the warriors to The Machine, where he pulled himself into a control space behind the cab. In this cramped chamber the Sambusai towered over him like professional basketball players. Their bodies gave off a unique commingling of scents: dung and cowhide, ocher and tallow, dust and sweat. To Joshua’s surprise they seemed even more nervous than he.
“This way, gentlemen.”
Joshua turned a key and a door panel slid back into the insulated six inches of interior bulkhead. The Sambusai were delighted. They grinned, exchanged unintelligible commentary, and sauntered into the bizarre cargo section of The Machine. A metal rail outlined a rectangular catwalk around the inside of the vehicle. Opposite the three men was a small bell-shaped booth of smoky glass, and beside the booth stood an air policeman with a submachine gun.
“It’s all right, Rick. We’ve got Dr. Kaprow’s permission.”
“They don’t plan to use those spears, do they?”
“Not that I know of. We’ll take a quick look around and get out of your hair.”
“What’s going on?”
“Intercultural collision. Fill you in later.”
The air policeman—Rick, a blond Iowa farm kid—lowered his weapon but maintained the alert feet-apart posture of a sentinel. He had, Joshua knew, only a distorted inkling of the purpose of the arcane machinery inside Dr. Kaprow’s vehicle, believing it a variety of mobile intelligence-gathering equipment meant to bolster Zarakal’s military position in the Horn. Why Dr. Kaprow had driven The Machine inland to Lake Kiboko he had no clear idea, however. He was a GI who kept his nose clean by obeying orders.
Sometimes, though, he wondered. Several months back, in the barracks at Russell-Tharaka, Rick had told Joshua that he could not imagine why anyone would go to war over such godforsaken territory. Step outside Marakoi and the ritzier sections of Bravanumbi (Rick had found two ritzy sections there), and Zarakal was your typical desert hell hole. Its world-famous big-game animals were being hunted to extinction or dying off naturally, and in another hundred years the Sahara would have crept so far south that half of Africa would consist of nothing but sand dunes. By then, according to Rick, Zarakal would be a sort of subsilicate Atlantis, submerged if not forgotten, and Uncle Sam’s initial investment would be utterly lost.
Joshua gestured the Sambusai herdsmen to the left. He tried to see the apparatus hanging at the heart of The Machine through their eyes. This was not impossible because he himself did not fully understand either the placement of the various parts or the rationale behind their design. The Sambusai could scarcely be more baffled than he. Nor had the act of plugging himself into the components of this equipment—as the only living element in the assembly—revealed to him the mystery powering its weird gestalt. His dreams may have led him to this place—to this jumped-up dynamo of Woody Kaprow’s fevered invention—but his dreams had not yet enabled him to fathom the technology. He, Joshua Kampa, was not only a part of that technology but also its essential payload.
How did you explain these notions to a pair of spear-carrying herdsmen who had astutely pointed out that Western-style clothes were fart-confining? Yes, how?
“H. G. Wells revisited,” Joshua said. “It’s a time machine. Only trouble is, you have to be me to use it.”
At present most of