Hammond Innes: Levkas man

He looked down at his hands, frowning. "Pieter's sensitivity was always his greatest weakness." He made a little movement of his hands, a gesture almost of helplessness. "And to choose a thesis like that. ." He shook his head, reaching for the packet of cigarettes I'd left on the desk, and when he had taken one, he sat staring out over the canal, his eyes half-closed, tapping it against the edge of the desk. "It was flying in the face of accepted thinking, and of the Cliurch, of course. Man the Tool-maker was one thing, Man the Weapon-maker. ." He smiled and lit the cigarette. "Now, after a second world war, after Korea, Vietnam, Nigeria, the Middle East, the pendulum has swung-from optimism we have switched to pessimism, forgetting Man the Thinker-that we have within us the power of good as well as of evil." The grey eyes, turned inwards, suddenly stared directly at me. "Eight years-that's a long time. Do you know what he looks like now?"

"He can't have changed all that much," I said.

"Perhaps not." He reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. "To me, of course, he has aged a great deal-beyond his years. And that in itself is disturbing. But it is the loneliness, the absorption …" He pulled two photographs from the envelope and passed them across to me. "They were taken in Greece last year by John Cassellis, a young American

who studied under me. Pieter had written to me that, after investigating a possible site in the Jannina area, he had worked his way down to the coast and found nothing, but that he was now engaged on a dig that might prove of considerable importance. He didn't say where it was, but his letter was postmarked Levkas. It's one of the Ionian islands on the west coast of Greece and I suggested to Cassellis, who was doing a tour of the Aegean and Asia Minor, that he try and locate him. I thought he might be of some use to Pieter since the boy had time to spare."

They were colour prints enlarged to postcard size. The first showed the curve of a cliff overhang, dark in shadow, with a glimpse of blue sea beyond. A figure was seated cross-legged in the foreground, bare to the waist, his thin body burned almost black by the sun. He had a piece of stone in his hand and he was examining it, his head bent, his face in shadow and half obscured by his white hair.

"Now look at the second," Gilmore said. "Cassellis was using a cine-camera and it's a frame from a shot taken at the moment when Pieter looked up to find a stranger intruding on his territory."

He had zoomed in on the figure itself. The old man was staring straight at the camera, his hands hovering protectively over the stone. "What is it?" I asked. "He's trying to conceal it."

"A stone lamp, I think."

But I barely heard him. I was staring at the face, so lined and aged, and the expression secretive, almost hostile, like a dog guarding a bone. "Is that stone important?" I asked.

"Perhaps-I don't know. And Cassellis didn't comment, or even say where he''d found him-only that he was on his own. A very lonely figure was the way he put it in the letter he wrote me, and that's not good. Not at his age and with his background."

I handed the photographs back to him. "What are you suggesting-that he's in danger of going mad?" It seemed the only

conclusion to be drawn from what he was saying, and it didn't altogether surprise me.

"Mad?" His eyes flicked open, staring at me, grey and direct. "You tell me what madness is. A man who is mad is only somebody who has moved on to a different mental plane. However. ." He gave a little shrug. "My thoughts are of no concern to you. You're young, full of life, and I'm old enough to dwell, a little unhealthily perhaps, on the final frontiers of the mind." He paused, still staring at me. "You're different. I can see that. You will be very good for him." He cocked an eyebrow at me, waiting.

I didn't say anything, and after a moment he went on, "Miss Winters has told me about a book he is writing. The self-analysis of his Journal forms the basis, and this has so coloured his view of world events, of the urges that produce mob violence in a world where man has proliferated to the limits of natural tolerance, that it is leading him inevitably to the conclusion that modern man is a rogue species and doomed. This gloomy view ignores the fact that man's aggressive instincts are the mainspring of all his achievements."

I thought of my own aggressive instincts, the way my fist, my whole body had moved, and the man going backwards over the edge of the oil pier, that last, thin, high-pitched cry, and the way the other man had closed in, his features distorted by the need to attack. "I can't help him," I said. "I've told you, we don't get on together. We've nothing in common."

"He's your father."

"By adoption."

He looked at me for a while, not saying anything, and the directness of his gaze gave me an uneasy feeling, as though there were something he hadn't told me. "I'm almost eighty," he said finally. "Too old to go out myself. Miss Winters has offered to go. But it would be difficult for a girl. Anyway, that isn't the answer. He needs your sort of strength. Particularly now, when he has made what may prove to be an important discovery. He will have great difficulty in convincing the academic world."

"Why, if he's as brilliant as you say?" I was thinking of the books on the shelf behind me. "He's published in Russia. If they recognize him. ."

But he shook his head. "The Russians backed him because his writing was helpful to the Soviet image. With their money he was able to lead expeditions to the Caucasian mountains, to Turkey and up through Georgia into Kazak, one I believe as far as Tashkent, and the books he wrote as a result both supported the view that Homo sapiens sapiens came from the east; in other words, that civilized man stemmed from the Soviet Union. But now he certainly hasn't the support of the Russians, for he's changed his line of thinking. As a result, he's had to go it alone, using his own resources."

"He's nothing left now," the girl said. "This is the third expedition he's financed. He's operating on a shoe-string and in such a hurry he's gone out into the mountains of Macedonia before the winter is over. He's killing himself."

"To prove what?" I asked.

"That modern man came north, from Africa."

"Does it matter?"

"Not to you," she said tartly.

Dr. Gilmore sighed. "I appreciate that it's difficult for you to understand, but Good God! If I were your age and gifted with a brilliant father. ."

"He's not my father," I said curtly. "He adopted me. That's all."

His eyebrows lifted and then he stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. "Very well. But at least I have told you what I felt you should know. What you do about it is your own affair. I can only repeat that in my view he needs you very badly indeed." He glanced at his watch and turned to the girl. "I have to go now. Professor Hecht is expecting me at noon." He got to his feet.

I opened the door for him and he paused momentarily, taking in the room again with that alert, bird-like glance of his. "A pity," he murmured. "If I could only have talked with him myself. ." He gave me a long, searching look, and I

thought for a moment he was going to appeal to me again. But then he turned and went down the stairs with astonishing agility.

I was lucky enough to find a taxi for him and as he stepped into it, he touched me on the arm. "Think about what I have told you. Pieter Van der Voort is a very remarkable man, but he shovdd not be too much alone." He got in then and the taxi drove off, leaving me standing there with the girl. It was a perfect spring morning, the canal a bright gleam under the arches of the bridge, the sky a cloudless blue. It was an awkward moment, the silence stretching between us like a gulf.

Finally she said, "You don't intend to do anything, do you-about your father?" "No."