their contemporary, it antedates them in the fossil record.”
The waitress arrived at their table with the check, which she placed face down in a water spill. The policeman creaked about on his stool, saluted them sardonically, and banged out the front door into the withering July sunshine. When they were alone again, Colonel Crawford put his elbows on the table and leaned forward.
“Listen, Mr. Kampa, Dr. Blair interrupted an incredibly busy schedule to seek you out. We’re going to have to have answers to two more questions to know if the interruption was really worthwhile.”
The Great Man said, “Of course it’s been worthwhile, Hank.”
“What questions?”
“First, do you ever dream yourself back into the Pleistocene? By that I mean, are you yourself ever one of the identifiable figures in that ancient landscape?”
“Not really. I dolly in and out like a movie camera. I’m nothing but a pair of free-floating eyes. That’s why I call it spirit-traveling.”
“Good,” Colonel Crawford said.
Creasing his forehead, Blair asked, “Why is that good?”
“Woody could explain this much better than I can. It’s because he hasn’t contaminated the period with . . . well, with the anomaly of his own physical presence. His real body may be able to go back because his psyche has never permitted a dream image of himself to do so. You’ll have to sit down with Woody if you want a more cogent explanation.”
Joshua looked hard at the colonel. Up to this moment he had seemed to Joshua like a third wheel on a bicycle, an onlooker at a two-handed card game. Base commander or no base commander, he had accompanied Blair to Blackwater Springs in the capacity of chauffeur. Or had he? Joshua was beginning to reassess the terms and degree of the colonel’s real involvement. And who was Woody?
“What’s the second question?” he asked.
Tom Hubbard threw open the door of the Okaloosa Café, then eased it shut behind him. “Glass o’ water and a ham sandwich,” he told the waitress, crossing to Joshua’s table. Before Colonel Crawford could jockey aside to give him room, Hubbard had turned a chair around and straddled it backwards. “Goddamn it, Kampa, listen. You can’t leave me up here on this job with old R. K. Cofield and that new kid who thinks tank epoxy is some kind o’ disease.”
“You canned my ass.”
“Yeah, well, if you promise to quit pullin’ that rod-skatin’ crap, I’ll take you back on.”
Colonel Crawford said, “We’ve been trying to interest Mr. Kampa in a new line of employment.”
Joshua caught the colonel’s eye. “The hell you have.”
“That was my second question. I was just about to ask it.”
“You fellas recruiters?” Hubbard wanted to know.
“In a manner of speaking.” Colonel Crawford looked at Alistair Patrick Blair, then back at Joshua. “Mr. Kampa, how would you like to join the Air Force?”
“I’m too short.”
“Not for the assignment we have in mind.”
“Yeah,” Hubbard put in, “Uncle Sam can always use cannon fodder in Central America and the Persian Gulf. Africa, too. Sam likes to send darkies to jungle hot spots. Each side can tote up the other’s kills when it’s making out a body count.”
“This time, Tom, I intend to stay fired.”
Hubbard shook his head. “Suit yourself. Leave me in the lurch. Strand me with R. K. Cofield and the Help-me-I’m-fallin’ kid.”
In the end, a napkin clenched in his bleeding hand, Joshua embraced Hubbard in the middle of the Okaloosa Café, then followed Dr. Blair and Colonel Crawford out the door.
Ten minutes later, astride his Kawasaki, he was trailing the Air Force limousine down State Highway 85 through the desolate ordnance ranges of Hugo Monegal’s last base. Mouth wide open, his voice lost in a backwash of humid wind, he sang, at the top of his lungs, a sprightly old Beatles tune. . . .
Chapter Twenty-Two
Mary
WHEN MALCOLM TOUCHED MY SHOULDER, I nearly leapt from the acacia into the water hole. During my recitation he had climbed up beside me without my noticing. His goatee wobbled back and forth on his receding chin, for, altogether pointedly, he was “talking,” silently speechifying.
“Just trying to get us through a difficult night,” I told him. “What story are you trying to tell?”
The habiline nodded succinctly at the .45 on my hip. I had nearly forgotten it and did not wish to remember it now. My hope had been that the hyenas, either bored or insulted by my tale, would trot off haughtily into the night. No such luck. They were still out there, waiting.
“This is not the ultimate answer