Congo (Page 58)

"Don’t turn it over," she said. "It’s Richter." Elliot did not understand how she could be sure. The body was covered with black flies. He bent over.

"Don’t touch him!"

"Okay," Elliot said.

"Kahega," Munro shouted, raising a green plastic twenty-liter can. The can sloshed with liquid in his hand. "Let’s get this done."

Kahega and his men moved swiftly, splashing kerosene over the tents and dead bodies. Elliot smelled the sharp odor.

Ross, crouched under a torn nylon supply tent, shouted, "Give me a minute!"

"Take all the time you want," Munro said. He turned to Elliot, who was watching Amy outside the camp.

Amy was signing to herself: People bad. No believe people bad things come.

"She seems very calm about it," Munro said.

"Not really," Elliot said. "I think she knows what took place here."

"I ‘hope she’ll tell us," Munro said. "Because all these men died in the same way. Their skulls were crushed."

The flames from the consortium camp licked upward into the air, and the black smoke bellowed as the expedition moved onward through the jungle. Ross was silent, lost in thought. Elliot said, "What did you find?"

"Nothing good," she said. "They had a perfectly adequate peripheral system, quite similar to our ADP – animal defense perimeter. Those cones I found are audio-sensing units, and when they pick up a signal, they emit an ultrahigh-frequency signal that is very painful to auditory systems. Doesn’t work for reptiles, but it’s damn effective on mammalian systems. Send-a wolf or a leopard running for the hills."

"But it didn’t work here," Elliot said.

"No," Ross said. "And it didn’t bother Amy very much." Elliot said, "What does it do to human auditory systems?"

"You felt it. It’s annoying, but that’s all." She glanced at Elliot. "But there aren’t any human beings in this part of the Congo. Except us."

Munro asked, "Can we make a better perimeter defense?"

"Damn right we can," Ross said. "I’ll give you the next generation perimeter – it’ll stop anything except elephants and rhinos." But she didn’t sound convinced.

Late in the afternoon, they came upon the remains of the first ERTS Congo camp. They nearly missed it, for during the intervening eight days the jungle vines and creepers had already begun to grow back over it, obliterating all traces. There was not much left – a few shreds of orange nylon, a dented aluminum cooking pan, the crushed tripod, and the broken video camera, its green circuit boards scattered across the ground. They found no bodies, and since the light was fading they pressed on.

Amy was distinctly agitated, She signed, No go.

Peter Elliot paid no attention.

Bad place old place no go.

"We go, Amy," he said.

Fifteen minutes later they came to a break in the overhanging trees. Looking up, they saw the dark cone of Mu?kenko rising above the forest, and the faint crossed green beams of the lasers glinting in the humid air. And directly beneath the beams were the moss-covered stone blocks, half concealed in jungle foliage, of the Lost City of Zinj.

Elliot turned to look at Amy.

Amy was gone.

4. WEIRD

HE COULD NOT BELIEVE IT.

At first he thought she was just punishing him, running off to make him sorry for shooting the dart at her on the river. He explained to Munro and Ross that she was capable of such things, and they spent the next half hour wandering through the jungle, calling her name. But there was no response, just the eternal silence of the rain forest. The half hour became an hour, then almost two hours.

Elliot was panic-stricken.

When she still did not emerge from the foliage, another possibility had to be considered. "Maybe she ran off with the last group of gorillas," Munro said.

"Impossible," Elliot said.

"She’s seven, she’s near maturity." Munro shrugged.

"She is a gorilla." –

"Impossible," Elliot insisted.

But he knew what Munro was saying. Inevitably, people who raised apes found at a certain point they could no longer keep them. With maturity the animals became too large, too powerful, too much their own species to be controllable. It was no longer possible to put them in diapers and pretend they were cute humanlike creatures. Their genes coded inevitable differences that ultimately became impossible to overlook.

"Gorilla troops aren’t closed," Munro reminded him. "They accept strangers, particularly female strangers."

"She wouldn’t do that," Elliot insisted. "She couldn’t."

Amy had been raised from infancy among human beings. She was much more familiar with the Westernized world of freeways and drive-ins than she was with the jungle. If Elliot drove his car past her favorite drive-in, she was quick to tap his shoulder and point out his error. What did she know of the jungle? It was as alien to her as it was to Elliot himself. And not only that –  "We’d better make camp," Ross said, glancing at her watch. "She’ll come back – if she wants to. After all," she said, "we didn’t leave her. She left us."

They had brought a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne but nobody was in a mood to celebrate. Elliot was remorseful over the loss of Amy; the others were horrified by what they had seen of the earlier camp; with night rapidly falling, there was much to do to setup the ERTS system known as WEIRD (Wilderness Environmental Intruder Response Defenses).

The exotic WEIRD technology recognized the fact that perimeter defenses were traditional throughout the history of Congo exploration. More than a century before, Stanley observed that "no camp is to be considered complete until it is fenced around by bush or trees." In the years since there was little reason to alter the essential nature of that instruction.