for it. It was an intrusion, and it never came back after that first time. You know what that animal was?”
Blair and the colonel shook their heads.
“Snuffleupagus.” Joshua grimaced and flashed hot with embarrassment. “Yeah. Weird. I know.”
Zarakal’s Minister of Interior, uncomprehending, looked to Colonel Crawford for an explanation.
Joshua hurriedly said, “Snuffleupagus was this big, furry, elephanty creature on a PBS children’s program, Sesame Street. I don’t know whether it’s still on or not. Anyway, Snuffleupagus had silly cartoon eyes with long, flirty lashes and a voice like a bassoon’s, slow and deep and sad. His best friend was Big Bird, a seven-foot-tall featherbrain who could never convince any of the adults on the program that Snuffleupagus really existed. Every time Bird tried to introduce Snuffy to Maria or Mr. Hooper or somebody, Snuffy would go wandering off somewhere, swaying from side to side, and Bird ended up looking like the bozo who cried wolf.”
Joshua took a sip of Coke, put his glass back down on the wet circle it had made. Neither Blair nor Crawford took their eyes off him.
“That gave me the willies, that betrayal. It was the same goddamn thing that happened to me when I slipped and let somebody know about my spirit-traveling. Disbelief. Disbelief, indignation, sometimes even outrage. I couldn’t produce any evidence of what I was laying claim to, only some awkward drawings of the things I saw. Since the proof wouldn’t come, and since nobody knew what to make of my witness, I got labeled a liar. A liar and a freak. That’s why—before I was seven—I finally just shut up about it all.” Joshua grinned. “And that’s why I hated that goddamn, two-timin’ Snuffleupagus.”
The policeman at the counter had swiveled about on his stool, and Colonel Crawford bumped his chair back down and put a hand on Joshua’s wrist to warn him about speaking too loudly. His touch made Joshua start.
“Go ahead,” the colonel urged. “Finish about Snuffleupagus.”
Joshua drank off the remainder of his Coke and lowered his voice: “A group of hominids—black-hands-with-eyes, that’s the kind they were—scurried around in the watercourse where old Snuffy had fallen. They were getting ready to cut him up with tiny stone knives flaked from larger core tools. ‘Oh, nooo-ooo-ooh,’ moaned Snuffy, who wasn’t quite dead yet. ‘What’s going to become of me, Bird?’ The quasi-people set to work. They scored his shaggy belly with their flake tools and let the blood run. ‘Oh, dear me, Bird,’ Snuffleupagus said, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to die.’ Just like that. In that sappy, mournful voice of his. He wasn’t even struggling.”
“And then what happened?”
“Well, I guess he died, Colonel. And then the quasi-people probably ate him. I don’t know. My mother woke me up. I was sitting in the middle of my bed wrapped in a blanket—this was in our house, our basement apartment, in Cheyenne—and my eyes had probably rolled up in my head. My mother couldn’t stand to see that. She shook me out of it and held me, just held and rocked me.” Blair, Joshua saw, was fiddling with a paper napkin. “That was a tainted instance of spirit-traveling. A little of the here-and-now had leaked down and contaminated my long-ago soul. I knew it. I knew it even before Jeannette woke me up.”
Blair folded the napkin and patted it into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. “What kinds of hominids do you ordinarily see when . . . well, when you go back?”
“Three sorts, just like the Leakeys claim. When I kept my dream diary I used a black-hand pictogram for each of them. I put an eye in the palm of the symbol for the most human-seeming group. They have tools, crude shelters, the beginnings of a family system.”
“Habilis,” Blair said. “Go on.”
“Then there’s a more brutish bunch, bigger and less bright. I identified them in my dream diary by putting a mouth with thick, square teeth in the center of my black-hand symbol.”
“Australopithecus boisei or robustus, the robust ‘southern ape.’ ”
“Yes, sir, but I didn’t know the terms then. And, finally, the remaining species—little jokers like furry elves or hobbits. They’re about three and a half feet tall. For them I used a simple black-hand pictogram with nothing in the palm. That’s simply how they struck me when I was a kid.”
“Australopithecus africanus, the gracile ‘southern ape.’ Your symbolism may be completely appropriate, Mr. Kampa. It’s possible that habilis and robustus both derived from africanus. Even though it survived to be