Recently certain of the UN Space Department agencies had begun to circulate the unofficial view that Colonel Spender had failed to select the correct attitude for re-entry and that the capsule had been vaporized on its final descent, but Connolly guessed that this was merely an attempt to pacify world opinion and prepare the way for the resumption of the space programme. Not only the Lake Maracaibo Dredging Project, but his own presence on the patrol boat, indicated that the Department still believed Colonel Spender to be alive, or at least to have survived the landing. His final re-entry orbit should have brought him down into the landing zone 500 miles to the east of Trinidad, but the last radio contact before the ionization layers around the capsule severed transmission indicated that he had under-shot his trajectory and come down somewhere on the South American land-mass along a line linking Lake Maracaibo with Brasilia.
Footsteps sounded down the companionway, and Captain Pereira lowered himself into the cabin. He tossed his hat onto the chart table and sat with his back to the fan, letting the air blow across his fading hair, carrying across to Connolly a sweet unsavoury odour of garlic and cheap pomade.
‘You’re a sensible man, Lieutenant. Anyone who stays up on deck is crazy. However,’ — he indicated Connolly’s pallid face and hands, a memento of a long winter in New York — ‘in a way it’s a pity you couldn’t have put in some sunbathing. That metropolitan pallor will be quite a curiosity to the Indians.’ He smiled agreeably, showing the yellowing teeth which made his olive complexion even darker. ‘You may well be the first white man in the literal sense that the Indians have seen.’
‘What about Ryker? Isn’t he white?’
‘Black as a berry now. Almost indistinguishable from the Indians, apart from being 7 feet tall.’ He pulled over a collection of cardboard boxes at the far end of the seat and began to rummage through them. Inside was a collection of miscellaneous oddments — balls of thread and raw cotton, lumps of wax and resin, urucu paste, tobacco and seedbeads. ‘These ought to assure them of your good intentions.’
Connolly watched as he fastened the boxes together. ‘How many search parties will they buy? Are you sure you brought enough? I have a fifty-dollar allocation for gifts.’
‘Good,’ Pereira said matter-of-factly. ‘We’ll get some more beer. Don’t worry, you can’t buy these people, Lieutenant. You have to rely on their good-will; this rubbish will put them in the right frame of mind to talk.’
Connolly smiled dourly. ‘I’m more keen on getting them off their hunkers and out into the bush. How are you going to organize the search parties?’
‘They’ve already taken place.’
‘What?’ Connolly sat forward. ‘How did that happen? But they should have waited’ — he glanced at the heavy monitoring equipment — ‘they can’t have known what—’
Pereira silenced him with a raised hand. ‘My dear Lieutenant. Relax, I was speaking figuratively. Can’t you understand, these people are nomadic, they spend all their lives continually on the move. They must have covered every square foot of this forest a hundred times in the past five years. There’s no need to send them out again. Your only hope is that they may have seen something and then persuade them to talk.’
Connolly considered this, as Pereira unwrapped another parcel. ‘All right, but I may want to do a few patrols. I can’t just sit around for three days.’
‘Naturally. Don’t worry, Lieutenant. If your astronaut came down anywhere within 500 miles of here they’ll know about it.’ He unwrapped the parcel and removed a small teak cabinet. The front panel was slotted, and lifted to reveal the face of a large ormolu table clock, its Gothic hands and numerals below a gilded belldome. Captain Pereira compared its time with his wrist-watch. ‘Good. Running perfectly, it hasn’t lost a second in forty-eight hours. This should put us in Ryker’s good books.’
Connolly shook his head. ‘Why on earth does he want a clock? I thought the man had turned his back on such things.’
Pereira packed the tooled metal face away. ‘Ah, well, whenever we escape from anything we always carry a memento of it with us. Ryker collects clocks; this is the third I’ve bought for him. God knows what he does with them.’
The launch had changed course, and was moving in a wide circle across the river, the current whispering in a tender rippling murmur across the hull. They made their way up onto the deck, where the helmsman was unshackling several sections of the wire mesh in order to give himself an uninterrupted view of the bows. The two sailors climbed through the aperture and took up their positions fore and aft, boat-hooks at the ready.
They had entered a large bow-shaped extension of the river, where the current had overflowed the bank and produced a series of low-lying mud flats. Some two or three hundred yards wide, the water seemed to be almost motionless, seeping away through the trees which defined its margins so that the exit and inlet of the river were barely perceptible. At the inner bend of the bow, on the only firm ground, a small cantonment of huts had been built on a series of wooden palisades jutting out over the water. A narrow promontory of forest reached to either side of the cantonment, but a small area behind it had been cleared to form an open campong. On its far side were a number of wattle storage huts, a few dilapidated shacks and hovels of dried palm.
The entire area seemed deserted, but as they approached, the cutwater throwing a fine plume of white spray across the glassy swells, a few Indians appeared in the shadows below the creepers trailing over the jetty, watching them stonily. Connolly had expected to see a group of tall broad-shouldered warriors with white markings notched across their arms and cheeks, but these Indians were puny and degenerate, their pinched faces lowered beneath their squat bony skulls. They seemed undernourished and depressed, eyeing the visitors with a sort of sullen watchfulness, like pariah dogs from a gutter.
Pereira was shielding his eyes from the sun, across whose inclining path they were now moving, searching the ramshackle bungalow built of woven rattan at the far end of the jetty.
‘No signs of Ryker yet. He’s probably asleep or drunk.’ He noticed Connolly’s distasteful frown. ‘Not much of a place, I’m afraid.’
As they moved towards the jetty, the wash from the launch slapping at the greasy bamboo poles and throwing a gust of foul air into their faces, Connolly looked back across the open disc of water, into which the curving wake of the launch was dissolving in a final summary of their long voyage up-river to the derelict settlement, fading into the slack brown water like a last tenuous thread linking him with the order and sanity of civilization. A strange atmosphere of emptiness hung over this inland lagoon, a fiat pall of dead air that in a curious way was as menacing as any overt signs of hostility, as if the crudity and violence of all the Amazonian jungles met here in a momentary balance which some untoward movement of his own might upset, unleashing appalling forces. Away in the distance, down-shore, the great trees leaned like corpses into the glazed air, and the haze over the water embalmed the jungle and the late afternoon in an uneasy stillness.
They bumped against the jetty, rocking lightly into the palisade of poles and dislodging a couple of water-logged outriggers lashed together. The helmsman reversed the engine, waiting for the sailors to secure the lines. None of the Indians had come forward to assist them. Connolly caught a glimpse of one old simian face regarding him with a rheumy eye, riddled teeth nervously worrying a pouch-like lower lip.
He turned to Pereira, glad that the Captain would be interceding between himself and the Indians. ‘Captain, I should have asked before, but — are these Indians cannibalistic?’