Michael Bishop - No Enemy But Time

“Next slide.”

Several slope-backed animals with manes and horselike snouts appeared on the screen. The artist had made the manes dark brown and the bodies that luminous tawny color peculiar to African lions. The creatures all had moderately long necks, and Blair, after executing a hammy double-take, invited everyone to tell him what these unlikely quadrupeds actually were. “Giraffes!” some people shouted.

“Antelopes!” others called. “A kind of horse!” a child’s voice cried.

Blair, dimly visible beside the screen, raised his hand. “Well, they are a variety of ungulate—that’s a vegetarian mammal with hooves—as are all the animals you’ve just named. But take a closer look at these hippogriffic camelopards. No one seems to have remarked their most distinctive and perhaps oddest feature.”

“Claws,” Joshua said to himself. Someone in the rear of the auditorium emphatically shouted the word.

“Right you are.” Blair stepped into the ray of the slide projector and tapped the feet of one of the animals rippling on the screen. “Very good. Of course, no one has yet put a name to our… our camelopardian hippogriffs. What’s the matter? Doesn’t anyone out there wish to rescue these poor fellows from anonymity, if not extinction? They must have a name, you know.”

Joshua said, “They’re chalicotheres.” He pronounced the word clearly and correctly, KAL-uh-koh-THERZ. A lovely word, Joshua had always thought. His saying it took Blair by surprise.

“Ah, a full-fledged paleontologist in attendance,” the Great Man said, peering into the twilight grayness of the hall. “Or perhaps a crossword addict.”

The audience laughed.

“No, no, I don’t mean to joke. Who among you has done his homework, pray? That industrious and discerning soul deserves his own name spoken aloud. It would be fitting, I think, if he announced it for himself. Come on, then, speak up.”

Joshua said, “My name, address, and telephone number are in your pocket, sir.”

Discomfited by this intelligence and perhaps by his memory of the young man who had accosted him outside the hall, Blair was unable to find Joshua. “Sounds as if our expert handed me a bill of lading, doesn’t it?” The audience chuckled only tentatively at this riposte, and the Great Man turned back to the screen. Joshua noted that he was patting a trouser pocket, as if trying to reassure himself that he still had that address slip on his person. He seemed to fear that it had mutated into something unpleasant, like a hernia or a hand grenade.

“Chalicothere means ‘fossil beast,’” Blair gingerly resumed, facing the hall again. “I used to know a little ditty about the creature. ’T went, I believe, something like this:

This was well received. Blair had overcome a moment of perplexity by falling back on a show-biz schtick that had undoubtedly served him well in the past. It consigned the voice of Joshua Kampa to oblivion and permitted an effortless segue into pure lecture:

“Baron Cuvier, the father of modern paleontology, held that any animal with teeth shaped like the chalicothere’s and showing wear patterns indicative of vegetarianism—well, he said that any animal of that sort must certainly have hooves. The operative word here, of course, is ‘must,’ for it ultimately betrayed the poor Baron to the profligacy and the unpredictability of Mother Nature.

“Cuvier died in 1832. The discovery, soon thereafter, of the remains of a chalicothere proved him dead—D.E.A.D.—wrong. Here was a herbivore with monstrous claws on its feet, and no one could satisfactorily explain what the creature used them for. A standard speculation is that the chalicothere dug roots and tubers out of the ground with its nails and so occupied an ecological niche quite distinct from that of most of its fellow ungulates.”

“It also ate flesh,” Joshua said quite loudly.

“Oh, my goodness,” Blair murmured. At his insistent beckoning the lights were turned back on, and, shielding his eyes, he scanned the floor for his kibitzer. “That, I’m afraid, is quite a ridiculous assumption.”

“It’s a simple statement of fact.”

Blair, having finally found Joshua, dropped his hand from his brow and addressed the young man expert to upstart. “The microwear patterns on the chalicothere teeth available to us for examination don’t support that ‘simple statement of fact.’”

“Then maybe you’ve got the wrong damn chalicothere teeth, sir. I’ve seen them scavenging, using their claws as a civet or a hyena might.”

“Seen them?” The Great Man was broadly incredulous.

Joshua wrapped his arms around his middle, like a patient in a straitjacket. A photographer from the News-Journal rose from one of the metal folding chairs, crept forward from the front, and exploded a flash bulb in his eyes. From other angles the man took other photographs.

“Yes, sir,” Joshua said, blinking, an audible quaver in his voice. “What I mean is—” He had erred, saying that aloud, but he did not want to back down. The crowd, he could feel, was against him. Having one of the few black faces in the hall did little to endear him to Blair’s outraged partisans, but challenging the Great Man in public was the more heinous offense. Joshua could feel their stares going through him like unmetered dosages of radiation. A crazy nigger had interrupted their soirée. “All I’m saying,” he resumed, feeling the heat, “is that the chalicothere isn’t quite what you people with your microscopes and calipers have imagined it. That’s all I’m saying. Is that such an unspeakable heresy?”

“Sit down!” a man in the middle of the auditorium shouted. “Shut your mouth and sit down!” A low murmuring of approval greeted this suggestion. When Joshua refused to budge, however, the murmurs turned into catcalls.

“No insults or abuse!” Blair roared from the stage. “Insults and abuse are to be reserved for scientists attempting to sort out the implications of conflicting theories! This young man and I are scientists, and we are quite capable of insulting and abusing each other without your impertinent assistance!”

Grudgingly the hall quieted.

“Perhaps I should note,” Blair continued, the voice of Sweet Reason, “that many East African peoples, members of several different modern tribes, have legends about a creature called the ‘Nandi bear.’ It’s not supposed to be so large as the animals depicted here,” tapping the overilluminated images on the screen, “but it has the same downward-sloping back and, according to legend, eats flesh as well as vegetation. I’ve always felt there is a connection between the Nandi bear and these prehistoric creatures.

It is a fact, I’m afraid, that we’ll never know everything there is to know about animals that are extinct.”

“They’re the wrong color, too,” Joshua persisted, indicating the chalicotheres on the screen. “You never see them that corny lion color. They’re beautifully striped. Brown over beige in wavery Vs that point toward their butts.”

“Can’t we get him out of here?” another voice called, and the undercurrent of grumbling erupted into jeers and boos. Although Blair might choose to be sweet and forbearing, these people had paid three dollars apiece to listen to his lecture, not that of some no-name pygmy with delusions of paleoanthropological infallibility. Joshua did not blame them for wanting him out, but he was powerless to silence himself. These several hours in Pensacola were supposed to mark a turning point in his life, a turning point long deferred, and he was not going to surrender to their hostility.