Michael Bishop: No Enemy But Time

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 preadamite 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 a good five minutes to register and digest this information, but still he did not reply. I grew uneasy. Perhaps the enormous span of time separating the physicist and me had affected the transcordions. If it made for a small time lag between sending and receiving, well, that would entail inconvenience, certainly, but not catastrophe. Astronauts, after all, have to cope with this phenomenon.

Why not a chrononaut, then?

Walking a few steps along the shore, I keyed this in: “ The past FEELS different, Dr. Kaprow. At least to me. It’s not a matter of misaligned geographies or molecules twisted sideways, really. It’s even different from my perception of the Early Pleistocene in my spirit-traveling episodes. Let me see if I can explain.”

After clearing the transcordion’s display area, I tried to explain: “ When I was small, probably about ten or so, I was thumbing through a science book when I came across a strange photograph. It showed a canary submerged on its perch in an aquarium. The bird was actually in the water, it was wet, and there were guppies and goldfish swimming around it. How neat, I thought, how neat and how weird. It reminded me of my own terrible out-of-placeness in my dreams.”

My display area was nearly full. I cleared it again, knowing that Kaprow’s unit was connected to a printout terminal that would preserve my messages on long sheets of computer paper. For portability’s sake, of course, my transcordion had no such attachment, and Kaprow was therefore limited to messages of exactly ten lines at sixty-five characters a line. So far, though, he had not said, “ Boo.”

I typed: “ You see, that canary was inside a cubic foot of water sheathed by an oxygen-permeable membrane of laminated silicon. The canary was wet, but it could breathe. It was existing in an alien physical medium. It looked bewildered, but it was existing, Dr. Kaprow, and that’s more or less the way I ’ m experiencing the past. The past feels different, but it’s not impossible to breathe and think here… Does that give you any idea what the past feels like?”

This time I waited. Surely, by now, Kaprow would have had time to receive and to respond to at least the first of my messages. I wanted his or Blair’s advice about the absence of wildlife. Maybe I had leapt into the wrong past, and maybe our only viable course was to abort the mission.

“ That canary was surrounded by FISH,” I typed, surveying my creatureless paradise. “ I, on the other hand, am totally alone. And I miss the fish. I miss them because I want the whole Pleistocene, the complete experience of it. I’ve waited my entire life for this, Dr. Kaprow, and I’m willing to wait a great deal longer to make those insidious, beautiful dreams of mine come true. Do you read me?”

No, I was not going to abort the mission. We had talked about the possibility of failing to establish or losing transcordion contact, but always with the tacit understanding that neither of these dreadful eventualities would befall us. The latter had occupied a bit more of our discussion time—after all, I could drop the transcordion on a rock or lose it in a stream bed or forfeit it to an envious and overbearing baboon—but because the transcordion was an instrument capable of withstanding a great deal of physical abuse, and because I fully understood its value, we had entertained the possibility of this danger only as a dutiful intellectual exercise.