intercept the paleontologist on his way into the building. Before anyone could screen him off from Blair or scold him for his unmannerliness, he thrust his message into the Great Man’s hand and hurried back down the steps to the sidewalk.
“Don’t throw that away!” he called. “Keep it, sir! Keep it!”
Blair glanced down at him curiously, touched his brow with the slip of folded paper, and, to the admonitory murmurs of the Air Force colonel and a second escort in civilian clothes, disappeared through the door at the top of the steps.
* * *
Inside, Joshua took up a position against the auditorium’s eastern wall. His heart was pounding. Blair and his companions had probably believed him a political activist, possibly one of the opponents of the controversial arrangement whereby the United States had funded, built, and acquired access to a pair of modern military facilities on Zarakali soil, a naval base at Bravanumbi on the Indian Ocean, and an air base in the desert interior. Global politics was not on Joshua’s mind, however; he wanted to survive the evening and exchange a few words in private with the paleontologist. He was beginning to be sorry that he had not taken the time to change clothes and eat. Most of those in the metal folding chairs on the auditorium’s hardwood floor—during the school year, a basketball court—were either pointedly ignoring him or trying to figure out where he had stowed his broom.
Eventually, Blair, the Air Force colonel, and several other people filed onto the stage, and an official with the American Geographic Foundation—an attractive woman in a multicolored summer dress—took the lectern to introduce the Great Man, who stared at his knees or whispered with the colonel throughout her remarks. When she had concluded, the audience applauded warmly and Blair sauntered forward with outstretched arms and an engaging smile. He was in his early seventies, but still vigorous, still a glutton for adulation and work. The stage had been carefully set before his arrival, with props and portable movie screen, and he stalked back and forth along its apron as he reeled off an informal prologue to his program.
For better than twenty minutes, his bald pate shining, his mustachios sweat-dampened and bedraggled, Blair held forth on the differences between his assessments of recent African finds and the assessments of his chief on-the-scene rivals in paleoanthropological research, the Leakeys of Kenya. He and the Leakeys were good friends, he confided, but he liked to rib them for their excesses of enthusiasm. They liked to rib him, too. Blair and the Leakeys were members of one big, opinionated, and diverse family: the clan of hominid paleontologists.
“Although some of our colleagues in other fields have violently disputed the fact, hominid paleontologists are likewise members of another important family. Homo sapiens it’s called.”
This drew a laugh. Joshua laughed along with everybody else, and Blair, encouraged, moved on to the next segment of his performance. The highlight of this segment was an eloquent apostrophe to a plaster replica of the skull of a hominid that Blair, amid much controversy, had named Homo zarakalensis. He had discovered the original of this skull two years ago in his Kiboko digs, and his frequently ridiculed claim was that Homo zarakalensis, or Zarakali Man, represented a distinct form of hominid immediately ancestral to Homo erectus, the form that had mutated gradually into the first bona-fide representatives of Homo sapiens. In other words, Zarakali Man, an ancient inhabitant of Blair’s own country, was the earliest hominid deserving the unscientific description “human.” The Leakeys believed that H. zarakalensis—a term that Richard invariably placed in quotes as well as italics—actually belonged to the species already known as Homo habilis. Indeed, Richard Leakey had argued persuasively that Blair had created an entire species out of a shattered cranium, a jigger of Irish whiskey, and a dash of Zarakali chauvinism. If so, Blair was hardly the first. Paleoanthropologists were congenitally media-oriented.
Now, like Hamlet in the churchyard scene, Blair was flourishing a plaster-of-Paris death’s-head and addressing it feelingly:
“Alas, poor Richard!
Thy skull has lain enearth’d
three million years,
And several trifling centuries besides.
Thou wast a fellow of finite braininess,
But sufficiently sharp to o’ershadow quite
The brilliant Leakeys’ well-beloved habilis,
Whom we now perceive to have been a jilt,
And no thoughtful precursor of ourselves,
No germ for genius, no model for Rodin—
But merely, this habilis, an upright ape
Of the australopithecine kind.”
The Great Man paused, stared into the vacant sockets of the skull, and then began to declaim again, his deep bass voice resonating