pedophilia or peach-flavored soda pop. For sixteen years he had been her personal experimental subject. It was past time to end his mother’s experiment and to discover who he was without her aid or intervention.
“Do whatever you want,” he told the woman at the drafting-board desk. “Publish it, don’t publish it. You’re never going to see me again, anyway. Not ever, mujer.”
“You’re sixteen, Johnny. You’ve got another year of school. Do you think you’re ever going to—”
As if constrained by weight limits other than those dictated by his own size and strength, he packed light. His mother—the woman named Jeannette Monegal—watched him, but he had nothing more to say to her and got out of the apartment as quickly as he could.
* * *
Dressed for the mid-morning chill of April, he caught a taxi across the George Washington Bridge into Jersey. This trip cost him dearly, so he hitchhiked into Paterson, riding high in the cab of a West Point Pepperel semi. The driver, a burly man with a soft southern accent, had a rattlesnake skin stretched across the dashboard. The skin resembled a dingy cellophane scabbard, and the hitchhiker put his hands between his legs to keep from accidentally touching the discarded sheath.
The driver grinned a great deal but talked only intermittently. In Paterson he agreed to carry the hitchhiker right down the turnpike into Dixie, if only his passenger would sing to keep him awake. The driver preferred songs that were either sprightly or obscene. Or both. “La Cucaracha” proved to be one of his particular favorites, and the hitchhiker sang it virtually without letup for the first sixty miles on the turnpike.
“That’s pretty,” the driver told him. “What’s your name?”
“Kampa,” said the hitchhiker. “Joshua Kampa.”
“Right,” the driver responded, wringing the steering wheel as if it were a dishrag. “Only a Mexican could sing ‘La Cucaracha’ the way you do. . . .”
Chapter Twenty
A Disappearance
HELEN WAS THE ONE WHO FINALLY MADE a clear sighting of the creatures that had been following us for the past two days, and she informed the rest of us by throwing back her head and emitting a single ear-splitting bark. To the east, not more than two hundred yards away, I saw three small figures looking at us from the lip of a wedge-shaped kopje. They scrambled out of view as soon as Helen’s cry reached them, but I no longer had any serious doubts about the identity of our pursuers.
A large band of gracile australopithecines—A. africanus—had been moving almost parallel to our own line of march, using the high patches of savannah grass and the oasis-like islands of thorn trees and acacias as blinds. Since my arrival in the Pleistocene I had seen only a few representatives of this supposedly well-distributed hominid species, always at a great distance. Although I had seen members of the allegedly rarer A. robustus at closer range, circumstantial evidence suggested that both species were rapidly dying out.
Alfie and the other Minids wasted no pity on the australopithecines. Now that they understood how close our tag-tails had drawn, they seemed to be considering the wisdom of a sally against them. A nervous alertness informed everyone’s behavior; the men kept exchanging glances and making noisy feints in the direction of the graciles, who, after skeedaddling to deeper cover, remained altogether out of sight for the next hour or so. As I had not wanted to shoot a chalicothere, neither did I wish to join a war party against our hobbity shadows to the east.
Helen came to me and peered into my eyes as if trying to communicate a profound or frustratingly complex notion. We had paused for a moment on the edge of an arroyo, and I stared down into the cracked stream bed trying to arrange my intuitions into a sensible pattern. What did Helen want to convey? I had no idea. She, as if to prompt me to comprehension, patted one lean, hairy breast and made a mewling sound. Again, shrugging my shoulders and opening my hands to demonstrate my bewilderment, I wished fervently that she could speak. Charades have never been my forte.
“Helen—Helen, I don’t know what you want.”
Helen retreated from me, leapt down into the stream bed, and began following it northward, back the way we had come.
“Helen, what are you doing?” I cried. “Where are you going?”
The other Minids seemed unperturbed. I jumped down into the gully and trotted after her, but she waved me back without ceasing to retreat from us. When she