carried in a nylon pack strapped to my chest. Once down from the Backstep Scaffold, I would shift this pack to my shoulders.
In addition to my gear I had at least three other things going for me before I jumped from the scaffold to the ground. First, Air Force doctors had immunized me against every conceivable East African disease and several inconceivable ones. Second, I had spent eight months in the Lolitabu National Park with the old Wanderobo warrior Thomas Babington Mubia undergoing wilderness training. And third, I had visited this same untamed epoch thousands of times in my dreams. I could never believe that I might die in this distant realm of ngoma, or spirits.
I unfastened my harness, removed my earphones, and pulled away the electrodes taped to my temples and brow. After easing myself to a sitting position, I surveyed the landscape and jumped. The Beau Brummell of hominids debuting in an era of sartorial barbarism. I took my red bandanna from my pocket and tied it about my neck, thinking that surely it imparted to my diminutive figure a dashing, even piratical air. As if anyone here—and I saw no one—gave a damn. Despite being armed, or perhaps because of it, I felt like a paratrooper who has landed miles and miles behind enemy lines.
Beside me, a dazzling turquoise in the morning sun, the lake. It was larger than its twentieth-century self; a brief jog would have carried me into its shallows. The lake’s oddest feature today was that, Joshua Kampa aside, it had no constituency. Despite its name, Lake Hippopotamus entertained no boisterous or sunbathing riverhorses. No skittish herds of gazelles or wildebeest braved its open shoreline to slake their thirst, and not a single crocodile knifed through the languid waters looking for breakfast. An eerie emptiness reigned.
Turning to the east, I found that the mosaic habitat of savannah, bush, thornveldt, and gallery forest afforded a similar glimpse of the native wildlife. None. No birds in the sky, and no animals out there among the trees and grasses. The wide, rolling plain was vacant, and the range of gentle, faraway hills over which the sun was now rising looked as uninhabited as the highlands of the moon. Had the project code-named White Sphinx translated me to primogenial Pangea rather than to pre-adamite Africa? I was utterly alone. For the first time in my life I did not know whether I was waking or dreaming!
From the breast pocket of my bush jacket I took the handheld communicator that was supposed to establish instantaneous contact with my colleagues in the twentieth century. A transcordion, Kaprow had dubbed it. Its modus operandi involved a piezoelectric correspondence among the crystals in the microcircuitry of each matched pair. Kaprow had the mate to mine, and, theoretically, all I had to do to communicate with him was type out a message on my instrument’s tiny keyboard.
Previous tests, with travelers who had dropped back only a century or two, had shown that the transcordions performed reliably even under adverse weather conditions. Eventually, therefore, Kaprow had convinced himself that the size of the temporal gap separating a pair of transcordions had no bearing at all on their effectiveness. The energy expenditure involved in sending me to the Pleistocene had not permitted us to test this hypothesis in my case, however, and I quickly learned that Woodrow Kaprow, Genius Extraordinaire, had figured wrong. Marconi, Bell, and Edison no doubt had their off days, too.
But for those who collect First Words, Last Words, and/or Pithy Epigrams, here is the first message I fed into my transcordion: “That’s one small leap for a man, one giant step backward for humanity.” It pleased me to be typing rather than speaking this message—because I did not have to fear that radio static would garble my words and perhaps obscure or delete the altogether crucial article in my first clause.
Kaprow did not reply.
Maybe he had not found my opening gambit amusing. I got serious: “The lake seems to be dead, and the landscape is barren of all life but vegetation. Dr. Blair was right in assuring us that I would be visiting a wetter, more hospitable period, though. The desert of Zarakal’s Northwest Frontier District is no desert this morning. It’s a big, gone-to-seed golf course with woods, sand traps, water hazards, and overgrown fairways. The absence of wildlife scares me. It’s going to be impossible to shoot a hyrax here, much less a birdie or an eagle.”
I gave Kaprow