CONGO

by

MICHAEL CRICHTON

For Bob Gottlieb

       Introduction

    Only prejudice, and a trick of the Mercator projection, prevents us from recognizing the enormity of the African continent. Covering nearly twelve million square miles, Africa is almost as large as North America and Europe combined. It is nearly twice the size of South America. As we mistake its dimensions, we also mistake its essential nature: the Dark Continent is mostly hot desert and open grassy plains.

In fact, Africa is called the Dark Continent for one reason only: the vast equatorial rain forests of its central region. This is the drainage basin of the Congo River, and one-tenth of the continent is given over to it—a million and a half square miles of silent, damp, dark forest, a single uniform geographical feature nearly half the size of the continental United States. This primeval forest has stood, unchanged and unchallenged, for more than sixty million years.

Even today, only half a million people inhabit the Congo Basin, and they are mostly clustered in villages along the banks of the slow muddy rivers that flow through the jungle. The great expanse of the forest remains inviolate, and to this day thousands of square miles are still unexplored.

This is true particularly of the northeastern corner of the Congo Basin, where the rain forest meets the Virunga volcanoes, at the edge of the Great Rift Valley. Lacking established trade routes or compelling features of interest, Virunga was never seen by Western eyes until less than a hundred years ago.

The race to make “the most important discovery of the 1980s” in the Congo took place during six weeks of 1979. This book recounts the thirteen days of the last American expedition to the Congo, in June, 1979—barely a hundred years after Henry Morton Stanley first explored the Congo in 1874—77. A comparison of the two expeditions reveals much about the changing—and unchanging—nature of African exploration in the intervening century.

Stanley is usually remembered as the newsman who found Livingstone in 1871, but his real importance lay in later exploits. Moorehead calls him “a new kind of man in Africa. . . a businessman-explorer.. . . Stanley was not in Africa to reform the people nor to build an empire, and he was not impelled by any real interest in such matters as anthropology, botany or geology. To put it bluntly, he was out to make a name for himself.”

When Stanley set out again from Zanzibar in 1874, he was again handsomely financed by newspapers. And when he emerged from the jungle at the

Atlantic Ocean 999 days later, having suffered incredible hardships and the loss of more than two-thirds of his original party, both he and his newspapers had one of the great stories of the century: Stanley had traveled the entire length of the Congo River.

But two years later, Stanley was back in Africa under very different circumstances. He traveled under an assumed name; he made diversionary excursions to throw spies off his trail; the few people who knew he was in Africa could only guess that he had in mind “some grand commercial scheme.”

In fact, Stanley was financed by Leopold II of Belgium, who intended to acquire personally a large piece of Africa. “It is not a question of Belgian colonies,” Leopold wrote Stanley. “It is a question of creating a new State, as big as possible. . . . The King, as a private person, wishes to possess properties in Africa. Belgium wants neither a colony nor territories. Mr. Stanley must therefore buy lands or get them conceded to him  

This incredible plan was carried out. By 1885, one American said that Leopold “possesses the Congo just as Rockefeller possesses Standard Oil.” The comparison was apt in more ways than one, for African exploration had become dominated by business.

It has remained so to this day. Stanley would have approved the 1979 American expedition, which was conducted in secrecy, with an emphasis on speed. But the differences would have astonished him. When Stanley passed near Virunga in 1875, it had taken him almost a year to get there; the Americans got their expedition on-site in just over a week. And Stanley, who traveled with a small army of four hundred, would have been amazed at an expedition of only twelve—and one of them an ape. The territories through which the Americans moved a century later were autonomous political states; the Congo was now Zaire, and the Congo River the Zaire River. In fact, by 1979 the word “Congo” technically referred only to the drainage basin of the Zaire River, although Congo was still used in geological circles as a matter of familiarity, and for its romantic connotations.

Despite these differences, the expeditions had remarkably similar outcomes. Like Stanley, the Americans lost two-thirds of their party, and emerged from the jungle as desperately as Stanley’s men a century before. And like Stanley, they returned with incredible tales of cannibals and pygmies, ruined jungle civilizations, and fabulous lost treasures.

I would like to thank R. B. Travis, of Earth Resources Technology Services in Houston, for permission to use videotaped debriefings; Dr. Karen Ross, of ERTS, for further background on the expedition; Dr. Peter Elliot, of the Department of Zoology, University of California at Berkeley, and the Project Amy staff, including Amy herself; Dr. William Wens, of Kasai Mining & Manufacturing, Zaire; Dr. Smith Jefferson, of the Department of Medical Pathology, University of Nairobi, Kenya; and Captain Charles Munro, of Tangier, Morocco.

I am further indebted to Mark Warwick, of Nairobi, for his initial interest in

this project; Alan Binb, of Nairobi, for graciously offering to take me Into the Virunga region of Zaire; Joyce Small for arranging my transport, usually at short notice, to obscure parts of the world; and finally my special thanks to my assistant, Judith Lovejoy, whose untiring efforts through very difficult times were crucial to the completion of this book.

M.C.

Prologue:

The Place of Bones

DAWN CAME TO THE CONGO RAIN FOREST.

The pale sun burned away the morning chill and the clinging damp mist, revealing a gigantic silent world. Enormous trees with trunks forty feet in diameter rose two hundred feet overhead, where they spread their dense leafy canopy, blotting out the sky and perpetually dripping water to the ground below. Curtains of gray moss, and creepers and lianas, hung down in a tangle from the trees; parasitic orchids sprouted from the trunks. At ground level, huge ferns, gleaming with moisture, grew higher than a man’s chest and held the low ground fog. Here and there was a spot of color: the red acanthema blossoms, which were deadly poison, and the blue dicindra vine, which only opened in early morning. But the basic impression was of a vast, oversized, gray-green world— an alien place, inhospitable to man.

Jan Kruger put aside his rifle and stretched his stiff muscles. Dawn came quickly at the equator; soon it was quite light, although the mist remained. He glanced at the expedition campsite he had been guarding: eight bright orange nylon tents, a blue mess tent, a supply tarp lashed over boxed equipment in a vain attempt to keep them dry. He saw the other guard, Misulu, sitting on a rock; Misulu waved sleepily. Nearby was the transmitting equipment: a silver dish antenna, the black transmitter box, the snaking coaxial cables running to the portable video camera mounted on the collapsible tripod. The Americans used this equipment to transmit daily reports by satellite to their home office in Houston.

Kruger was the bwana mukubwa, hired to take the expedition into the Congo. He had led expeditions before: oil companies, map-survey parties, timber-mining teams, and geological parties like this one. Companies sending teams into the field wanted someone who knew local customs and local dialects well enough to handle the porters and arrange the travel. Kruger was well suited for this job; he spoke Kiswahili as well as Bantu and a little Bagindi, and he had been to the Congo many times, although never to Virunga.

Kruger could not imagine why American geologists would want to go to the Virunga region of Zaire, in the northeast corner of the Congo rain forest. Zaire was the richest country in black Africa, in minerals—the world’s largest producer of cobalt and industrial diamonds, the seventh largest producer of copper. In addition there were major deposits of gold, tin, zinc, tungsten and uranium. But most of the minerals were found in Shaba and Kasai, not in Virunga.

Kruger knew better than to ask why the Americans wanted to go to Virunga, and in any case he had his answer soon enough. Once the expedition passed Lake Kivu and entered the rain forest, the geologists began scouring rivers and streambeds. Searching placer deposits meant that they were looking for gold, or diamonds. It turned out to be diamonds.

But not just any diamonds. The geologists were after what they called Type IIb diamonds. Each new sample was immediately submitted to an electrical test. The resulting conversations were beyond Kruger—talk of dielectric gaps, lattice ions, resistively. But he gathered that it was the electrical properties of the diamonds that mattered. Certainly the samples were useless as gemstones. Kruger had examined several, and they were all blue from impurities.

For ten days, the expedition had been tracing back placer deposits. This was standard procedure: if you found gold or diamonds in streambeds, you moved upstream toward the presumed erosive source of the minerals. The expedition had moved to higher ground along the western slopes of the Virgunga volcanic chain. It was all going routinely until one day around noon when the porters flatly refused to proceed further.

This part of Virunga, they said, was called kanyamagufa,

which meant “the place of bones.” The porters insisted that any men foolish enough to go further would have their bones broken, particularly their skulls. They kept touching their cheekbones, and repeating that their skulls would be crushed.

The porters were Bantu-speaking Arawanis from the nearest large town, Kisangani. Like most town-dwelling natives, they had all sorts of superstitions about the Congo jungle. Kruger called for the headman.

“What tribes are here?” Kruger asked, pointing to the jungle ahead.

“No tribes,” the headman said.

“No tribes at all? Not even Bambuti?” he asked, referring to the nearest group of pygmies.

“No men come here,” the headman said. “This is kanyamagufa.”

“Then what crushes the skulls?”

“Dawa,” the headman said ominously, using the Bantu term for magical forces. “Strong dawa here. Men stay away.”

Kruger sighed. Like many white men, he was thoroughly sick of hearing about dawa. Dawa was everywhere, in plants and rocks and storms and enemies of all kinds. But the belief in dawa was prevalent throughout much of Africa and strongly held in the Congo.

Kruger had been obliged to waste the rest of the day in tedious negotiation. In the end, he doubled their wages and promised them firearms when they returned to Kisangani, and they agreed to continue on. Kruger considered the incident an irritating native ploy. Porters could generally be counted on to invoke some local superstition to increase their wages, once an expedition was deep enough into the field to be dependent on them. He had budgeted for this eventuality and, having agreed to their demands, he thought no more about it.

Even when they came upon several areas littered with shattered fragments of bone—which the porters found frightening—Kruger was not concerned. Upon examination, he found the bones were not human but rather the small delicate bones of colobus monkeys, the beautiful shaggy black-and-

white creatures that lived in the trees overhead. It was true that there were a lot of bones, and Kruger had no idea why they should be shattered, but he had been in Africa a long time, and he had seen many inexplicable things.

Nor was he any more impressed with the overgrown fragments of stone that suggested a city had once stood in this area. Kruger had come upon unexplored ruins before, too. In Zimbabwe, in Broken Hill, in Maniliwi, there were the remains of cities and temples that no twentieth-century scientist had ever seen and studied.

He camped the first night near the ruins.

The porters were panic-stricken, insisting that the evil forces would attack them during the night. Their fear was caught by the American geologists; to pacify them, Kruger had posted two guards that night, himself and the most trustworthy porter, Misulu. Kruger thought it was all a lot of rot, but it had seemed the politic thing to do.

And just as he expected, the night had passed quietly. Around midnight there had been some movement in the bush, and some low wheezing sounds, which he took to be a leopard. Big cats often had respiratory trouble, particularly in the jungle. Otherwise it was quiet, and now it was dawn: the night was over.

A soft beeping sound drew his attention. Misulu heard it too, and glanced questioningly at Kruger. On the transmitting equipment, a red light blinked. Kruger got up and crossed the campsite to the equipment. He knew how to operate it; the Americans had insisted that he learn, as an “emergency procedure.” He crouched over the black transmitter box with its rectangular green LED.

He pressed buttons, and the screen printed TX HX, meaning a transmission from Houston. He pressed the response code, and the screen printed CAM LO K. That meant that Houston was asking for video camera transmission. He glanced over at the camera on its tripod and saw that the red light on the case had blinked on. He pressed the carrier button and the screen printed SATLOK, which meant that a satellite transmission was being Locked in. There would now be a six-minute delay, the time required to lock the satellite-bounced signal.

He’d better go wake Driscoll, the head geologist, he thought. Driscoll would need a few minutes before the transmission came through. Kruger found it amusing the way the Americans always put on a fresh shirt and combed their hair before stepping in front of the camera. Just like television reporters.

Overhead, the colobus monkeys shrieked and screamed in the trees, shaking the branches. Kruger glanced upward, wondering what had set them going. But it was normal for colobus monkeys to fight in the morning.

Something struck him lightly in the chest. At first he thought it was an insect but, glancing down at his khaki shirt, he saw a spot of red, and a fleshy bit of red fruit rolled down his shirt to the muddy ground. The damned monkeys were throwing berries. He bent over to pick it up. And then he realized that it was not a piece of fruit at all. It was a human eyeball, crushed and slippery in his fingers, pinkish white with a shred of white optic nerve still attached at the back.

He swung his gun around and looked over to where Misulu was sitting on the rock. Misulu was not there.

Kruger moved across the campsite. Overhead, the colobus monkeys fell silent. He heard his boots squish in the mud as he moved past the tents of sleeping men. And then he heard the wheezing sound again. It was an odd, soft sound, carried on the swirling morning mist. Kruger wondered if he had been mistaken, if it was really a leopard.

And he saw Misulu. Misulu lay on his back, in a kind of halo of blood. His skull had been crushed from the sides, the facial bones shattered, the face narrowed and elongated, the mouth open in an obscene yawn, the one remaining eye wide and bulging. The other eye had exploded outward with the force of the impact.

Kruger felt his heart pounding as he bent to examine the body. He wondered what could have caused such an injury. And then he heard the soft wheezing sound again, and this

time he felt quite sure it was not a leopard. Then the colobus monkeys began their shrieking, and Kruger leapt to his feet and screamed.

DAY 1: HOUSTON

June 13,1979

1. ERTS Houston

TEN THOUSAND MILES AWAY, IN THE COLD, Windowless main data room of Earth Resources Technology Services, Inc., of Houston, Karen Ross sat hunched over a mug of coffee in front of a computer terminal, reviewing the latest Landsat images from Africa. Ross was the ERTS Congo Project Supervisor, and as she manipulated the satellite images in artificial contrast colors, blue and purple and green, she glanced at her watch impatiently. She was waiting for the next field transmission from Africa.

It was now 10:15 P.M. Houston time, but there was no indication of time or place in the room. Day or night, the main data facility of ERTS remained the same. Beneath banks of special kalon fluorescent lights, programming crews in sweaters worked at long rows of quietly clicking computer terminals, providing real-time inputs to the field parties that ERTS maintained around the world. This timeless quality was understood to be necessary for the computers, which required a constant temperature of 60 degrees, dedicated electrical lines, special color-corrected lights that did not interfere with circuitry. It was an environment made for machines; the needs of people were secondary.

But there was another rationale for the main facility design. ERTS wanted programmers in Houston to identify with the field parties, and if possible to live on their schedules. Inputting baseball games and other local events was discouraged; there was no clock which showed Houston time, although on the far wall eight large digital clocks recorded local time for the various field parties.

The clock marked CONGO FIELD PARTY read 06:15 A.M. when the overhead intercom said, “Dr. Ross, CCR bounce.”

She left the console after punching in the digital password blocking codes. Every ERTS terminal had a password control, like a combination lock. It was part of an elaborate system to prevent outside sources tapping into their enormous data bank. ERTS dealt in information, and as R. B. Travis, the head of ERTS, was fond of saying, the easiest way to obtain information was to steal it.

She crossed the room with long strides. Karen Ross was nearly six feet tall, an attractive though ungainly girl. Only twenty-four years old, she was younger than most of the programmers, but despite her youth, she had a self-possession that most people found striking—even a little unsettling. Karen Ross was a genuine mathematical prodigy.

At the age of two, while accompanying her mother to the supermarket, she had worked out in her head whether a ten-ounce can at 19C was cheaper than a one-pound-twelve-ounce can at 79C. At three, she startled her father by observing that, unlike other numbers, zero meant different things in different positions. By eight, she had mastered algebra and geometry; by ten, she had taught herself calculus; she entered M.I.T. at thirteen and proceeded to make a series of brilliant discoveries in abstract mathematics, culminating in a treatise, “Topological Prediction in n-Space,” which was useful for decision matrices, critical path analyses, and multidimensional mapping. This interest had brought her to the attention of ERTS, where she was made the youngest field supervisor in the company.

Not everyone liked her. The years of isolation, of being the youngest person in any room, had left her aloof and rather distant. One co-worker described her as “logical to a fault.” Her chilly demeanor had earned her the title “Ross Glacier,” after the Antarctic formation.

And her youth still held her back—at least, age was Travis’s excuse when he refused to let her lead the Congo expedition into the field, even though she had derived all the Congo database, and by rights should have been the onsite team leader. “I’m sorry,” Travis had said, “but this con-

tract’s too big, and I just can’t let you have it.” She had pressed, reminding him of her successes leading teams the year before to Pahang and Zambia. Finally he had said, “Look, Karen, that site’s ten thousand miles away, in four-plus terrain. We need more than a console hotdogger out there.”

She bridled under the implication that that was all she was—a console hotdogger, fast at the keyboard, good at playing with Travis’s toys. She wanted to prove herself in a four-plus field situation. And the next time she was determined to make Travis let her go.

Ross pressed the button for the third-floor elevator, marked “CX Access Only.” She caught an envious glance from one of the programmers while she waited for the elevator to arrive. Within ERTS, status was not measured by salary, title, the size of one’s office, or the other usual corporate indicators of power. Status at ERTS was purely a matter of access to information—and Karen Ross was one of eight people in the company who had access to the third floor at any time.

She stepped onto the third-floor elevator, glancing up at the scanner lens mounted over the door. At ERTS the elevators traveled only one floor, and all were equipped with passive scanners; it was one way that ERTS kept track of the movements of personnel while they were in the building. She said “Karen Ross” for the voice monitors, and turned in a full circle for the scanners. There was a soft electronic bleep, and the door slid open at the third floor.

She emerged into a small square room with a ceiling video monitor, and faced the unmarked outer door of the Communications Control Room. She repeated “Karen Ross,” and inserted her electronic identicard in the slot, resting her fingers on the metallic edge of the card so the computer could record galvanic skin potentials. (This was a refinement instituted three months earlier, after Travis learned that Army experiments with vocal cord surgery had altered voice characteristics precisely enough to false-positive Voiceident programs.) After a cycling pause, the door buzzed open. She went inside.

With its red night lights, Communications Control was

like a soft, warm womb—an impression heightened by the cramped, almost claustrophobic quality of the room, packed with electronic equipment. From floor to ceiling, dozens of video monitors and LEDs flickered and glowed as the technicians spoke in hushed tones, setting dials and twisting knobs. The CCR was the electronic nerve center of ERTS:

all communications from field parties around the world were routed through here. Everything in the CCR was recorded, not only incoming data but room voice responses, so the exact conversation on the night of June 13, 1979, is known.

One of the technicians said to her, “We’ll have the transponders hooked in in a minute. You want coffee?”

“No,” Ross said.

“You want to be out there, right?”

“I earned it,” she said. She stared at the video screens, at the bewildering display of rotating and shifting forms as the technicians began the litany of locking in the bird bounce, a transmission from a satellite in orbit, 720 miles over their heads.

“Signal key.”

“Signal key. Password mark.”

“Password mark.”

“Carrier fix.”

“Carrier fix. We’re rolling.”

She paid hardly any attention to the familiar phrases. She watched as the screens displayed gray fields of crackling static.

“Did we open or did they open?” she asked.

“We initiated,” a technician said. “We had it down on the call sheet to check them at dawn local time. So when they didn’t initiate, we did.”

“I wonder why they didn’t initiate,” Ross said. “Is something wrong?”

“I don’t think so. We put out the initiation trigger and they picked it up and locked in within fifteen seconds, all the appropriate codes. Ah, here we go.”

At 6:22 A.M. Congo time, the transmission came through:

there was a final blur of gray static and then the screens cleared. They were looking at a part of the camp in the

Congo, apparently a view from a tripod-mounted video camera. They saw two tents, a low smoldering fire, the lingering wisps of a foggy dawn. There was no sign of activity, no people.

One of the technicians laughed. “We caught them still sleeping. Guess they do need you there.” Ross was known for her insistence on formalities.

“Lock your remote,” she said.

The technician punched in the remote override. The field camera, ten thousand miles away, came under their control in Houston.

“Pan scan,” she said.

At the console, the technician used a joystick. They watched as the video images shifted to the left, and they saw more of the camp. The camp was destroyed: tents crushed and torn, supply tarp pulled away, equipment scattered in the mud. One tent burned brightly, sending up clouds of black smoke. They saw several dead bodies.

“Jesus,” one technician said.

“Back scan,” Ross said. “Spot resolve to six-six.”

On the screens, the camera panned back across the camp. They looked at the jungle. They still saw no sign of life.

“Down pan. Reverse sweep.”

Onscreen, the camera panned down to show the silver dish of the portable antenna, and the black box of the transmitter. Nearby was another body, one of the geologists, lying on his back.

“Jesus, that’s Roger    

“Zoom and T-lock,” Ross said. On the tape, her voice sounds cool, almost detached.

The camera zoomed in on the face. What they saw was grotesque, the head crushed and leaking blood from eyes and nose, mouth gaping toward the sky.

“What did that?”

At that moment, a shadow fell across the dead face onscreen. Ross jumped forward, grabbing the joystick and hitting the zoom control. The image widened swiftly; they could see the outline of the shadow now. It was a man. And he was moving.

“Somebody’s there! Somebody’s still alive!”

“He’s limping. Looks wounded.”

Ross stared at the shadow. It did not look to her like a limping man; something was wrong, she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

“He’s going to walk in front of the lens,” she said. It was almost too much to hope for. “What’s that audio static?”

They were hearing an odd sound, like a hissing or a sighing.

“It’s not static, it’s in the transmission.”

“Resolve it,” Ross said. The technicians punched buttons, altering the audio frequencies, but the sound remained peculiar and indistinct. And then the shadow moved, and the man stepped in front of the lens.

“Diopter,” Ross said, but it was too late. The face had already appeared, very near the lens. It was too close to focus without a diopter. They saw a blurred, dark shape, nothing more. Before they could click in the diopter, it was gone.

“A native?”

“This region of the Congo is uninhabited,” Ross said.

“Something inhabits it.”

“Pan scan,” Ross said. “See if you can get him onscreen again.”

The camera continued to pan. She could imagine it sitting on its tripod in the jungle, motor whirring as the lens head swung around. Then suddenly the image tilted and fell sideways.

“He knocked it over.”

“Damn!”

The video image crackled, shifting lines of static. It became very difficult to see.

“Resolve it! Resolve it!”

They had a final glimpse of a large face and a dark hand as the silver dish antenna was smashed. The image from the Congo shrank to a spot, and was gone.

2. Interference Signature

DURING JUNE OF 1979, EARTH RESOURCES TECHNOLOGY had field teams studying uranium deposits in Bolivia, copper deposits in Pakistan, agricultural field utilization in Kashmir, glacier advance in Iceland, timber resources in Malaysia, and diamond deposits in the Congo. This was not unusual for ERTS; they generally had between six and eight groups in the field at any time.

Since their teams were often in hazardous or politically unstable regions, they were vigilant in watching for the first signs of “interference signatures.” (In remote-sensing terminology, a “signature” is the characteristic appearance of an object or geological feature in a photograph or video image.) Most interference signatures were political. In 1977, ERTS had airlifted a team out of Borneo during a local Communist uprising, and again from Nigeria in 1978 during a military coup. Occasionally the signatures were geological; they had pulled a team from Guatemala in 1976 after the earthquake there.

In the opinion of R. B. Travis, called out of bed in the late hours of June 13, 1979, the videotapes from the Congo were “the worst interference signature ever,” but the problem remained mysterious. All they knew was that the camp had been destroyed in a mere six minutes—the time between the signal initiation from Houston and the reception in the Congo. The rapidity was frightening; Travis’s first instruction to his team was to figure out “what the hell happened out there.”

A heavyset man of forty-eight, Travis was accustomed to crises. By training he was an engineer with a background in satellite construction for RCA and later Rockwell; in his thirties he had shifted to management, becoming what aerospace engineers called a “rain dancer.” Companies manufacturing satellites contracted eighteen to twenty-four months in advance for a launch rocket to put the satellite in orbit—and then hoped that the satellite, with its half-million working parts, would be ready on the assigned day. If it was not, the only alternative was to pray for bad weather delaying the launch, to dance for rain.

Travis had managed to keep a sense of humor after a decade of high-tech problems; his management philosophy was summarized by a large sign mounted behind his desk, which read “S.D.T.A.G.W.” It stood for “Some Damn Thing Always Goes Wrong.”

But Travis was not amused on the night of June 13. His entire expedition had been lost, all the ERTS party killed— eight of his people, and however many local porters were with them. The worst disaster in ERTS history, worse even than Nigeria in ‘78. Travis felt fatigued, mentally drained, as he thought of all the phone calls ahead of him. Not the calls he would make, but those he would receive. Would so-and-so be back in time for a daughter’s graduation, a son’s Little League playoff? Those calls would be routed to Travis, and he would have to listen to the bright expectation in the voices, the hopefulness, and his own careful answers—he wasn’t sure, he understood the problem, he would do his best, of course, of course. . . . The coming deception exhausted him in advance.

Because Travis couldn’t tell anyone what had happened for at least two weeks, perhaps a month. And then he would be making phone calls himself, and visits to the homes, and attending the memorial services where there would be no casket, a deadly blank space, a gap, and the inevitable questions from families and relatives that he couldn’t answer while they scrutinized his face, looking for the least muscle twitch, or hesitation, or sign.

What could he tell them?

That was his only consolation—perhaps in a few weeks, Travis could tell them more. One thing was certain: if he were to make the dreadful calls tonight, he could tell the

families nothing at all, for ERTS had no idea what had gone wrong. That fact added to Travis’s sense of exhaustion. And there were details: Morris, the insurance auditor, came in and said, “What do you want to do about the terms?” ERTS took Out term life insurance policies for every expedition member, and also for local porters. African porters received U.S. $15,000 each in insurance, which seemed trivial until one recognized that African per capita income averaged U.S. $180 per year. But Travis had always argued that local expedition people should share risk benefits—even if it meant paying widowed families a small fortune, in their terms. Even if it cost ERTS a small fortune for the insurance.

“Hold them,” Travis said.

“Those policies are costing us per day—”

“Hold them,” Travis said.

“For how long?”

“Thirty days,” Travis said.

“Thirty more days?”

“That’s right.”

“But we know the holders are dead.” Morris could not reconcile himself to the waste of money. His actuarial mind rebelled.

“That’s right,” Travis said. “But you'd better slip the porters’ families some cash to keep them quiet.”

“Jesus. How much are we talking about?”

“Five hundred dollars each.”

“How do we account that?”

“Legal fees,” Travis said. “Bury it in legal, local disposition.’’

“And the American team people that we’ve lost?”

“They have MasterCard,” Travis said. “Stop worrying.”

Roberts, the British-born ERTS press liaison, came into his office. “You want to open this can up?”

“No,” Travis said. “I want to kill it.”

“For how long?”

“Thirty days.

“Bloody hell. Your own staff will leak inside thirty days,” Roberts said. “I promise you.”

“If they do, you’ll squash it,” Travis said. “I need another thirty days to make this contract.”

“Do we know what happened out there?”

“No,” Travis said. “But we will.”

“How?”

“From the tapes.”

“Those tapes are a mess.”

“So far,” Travis said. And he called in the specialty teams of console hotdoggers. Travis had long since concluded that although ERTS could wake up political advisers around the world, they were most likely to get information in-house. “Everything we know from the Congo field expedition,” he said, “is registered on that final videotape. I want a seven-band visual and audio salvage, starting right now. Because that tape is all we have.”

The specialty teams went to work.

       3. Recovery

ERTS REFERRED TO THE PROCESS AS “DATA RECOVERY,” or sometimes as “data salvage.” The terms evoked images of deep-sea operations, and they were oddly appropriate.

To recover or salvage data meant that coherent meaning was pulled to the surface from the depths of massive electronic information storage. And, like salvage from the sea, it was a slow and delicate process, where a single false step meant the irretrievable loss of the very elements one was trying to bring up. ERTS had whole salvage crews skilled in the art of data recovery. One crew immediately went to work on the audio recovery, another on the visual recovery.

But Karen Ross was already engaged in a visual recovery.

The procedures she followed were highly sophisticated, and only possible at ERTS.

Earth Resources Technology was a relatively new company, formed in 1975 in response to the explosive growth of information on the Earth and its resources. The amount of material handled by ERTS was staggering: just the Landsat imagery alone amounted to more than five hundred thousand pictures, and sixteen new images were acquired every hour, around the clock. With the addition of conventional and draped aerial photography, infrared photography, and artificial aperture side-looking radar, the total information available to ERTS exceeded two million images, with new input on the order of thirty images an hour. All this information had to be catalogued, stored, and made available for instantaneous retrieval. ERTS was like a library which acquired seven hundred new books a day. It was not surprising that the librarians worked at fever pitch around the clock.

Visitors to ERTS never seemed to realize that even with computers, such data-handling capacity would have been impossible ten years earlier. Nor did visitors understand the basic nature of the ERTS information—they assumed that the pictures on the screens were photographic, although they were not.

Photography was a nineteenth-century chemical system for recording information using light-sensitive silver salts. ERTS utilized a twentieth-century electronic system for recording information, analogous to chemical photographs, but very different. Instead of cameras, ERTS used multi-spectral scanners; instead of film, they used CCTs—computer compatible tapes. In fact, ERTS did not bother with “pictures” as they were ordinarily understood from old-fashioned photographic technology. ERTS bought “data scans” which they converted to “data displays,” as the need arose.

Since the ERTS images were just electrical signals recorded on magnetic tape, a great variety of electrical image manipulation was possible. ERTS had 837 computer programs to alter imagery: to enhance it, to eliminate unwanted elements, to bring out details. Ross used fourteen programs on the Congo videotape—particularly on the static-filled section in which the hand and face appeared, just before the antenna was smashed.

First she earned out what was called a “wash cycle,” getting rid of the static. She identified the static lines as occurring at specific scan positions, and having a specific gray-scale value. She instructed the computer to cancel those lines.

The resulting image showed blank spaces where the static was removed. So she did “fill-in-the-blanks”—instructing the computer to introject imagery, according to what was around the blank spaces. In this operation the computer made a logical guess about what was missing.

She now had a static-free image, but it was muddy and indistinct, lacking definition. So she did a “high-priced spread”—intensifying the image by spreading the gray-scale values. But for some reason she also got a phase distortion that she had to cancel, and that released spiking glitches previously suppressed, and to get rid of the glitches she had to run three other programs.

Technical details preoccupied her for an hour, until suddenly the image “popped,” coming up bright and clean. She caught her breath as she saw it. The screen showed a dark, brooding face with heavy brows, watchful eyes, a flattened nose, prognathous lips.

Frozen on the video screen was the face of a male gorilla.

Travis walked toward her from across the room, shaking his head. “We finished the audio recovery on that hissing noise. The computer confirms it as human breathing, with at least four separate origins. But it’s damned strange. According to the analysis, the sound is coming from inhalation, not exhalation, the way people usually make sounds.”

“The computer is wrong,” Ross said. “It’s not human.” She pointed to the screen, and the face of the gorilla.

Travis showed no surprise. “Artifact,” he said.

“It’s no artifact.”

“You did fill-in-the-blanks, and you got an artifact. The tag team’s been screwing around with the software at lunch again.” The tag team—the young software programmers— had a tendency to convert data to play highly sophisticated versions of pinball games. Their games sometimes got sub-routed into other programs.

Ross herself had complained about it. “But this image is real,” she insisted, pointing to the screen.

“Look,” Travis said, “last week Harry did fill-in-the-blanks on the Karakorum Mountains and he got back a lunar landing game. You’re supposed to land next to the McDonald's stand, all very amusing.” He walked off. “You’d better meet the others in my office. We’re setting advance times to get back in.”

“I’m leading the next team.”

Travis shook his head. “Out of the question.”

“But what about this?” she said, pointing to the screen.

“I’m not buying that image,” Travis said. “Gorillas don’t behave that way. It’s got to be an artifact.” He glanced at his watch. “Right now, the only question I have is how fast we can put a team back in the Congo.”

4. Return Expedition

TRAVIS HAD NEVER HAD ANY DOUBTS IN HIS MIND

about going back in; from the first time he saw the videotapes from the Congo, the only question was how best to do it. He called in all the section heads: Accounts, Diplo, Remote, Geo, Logistics, Legal. They were all yawning and rubbing their eyes. Travis began by saying, “I want us back in the Congo in ninety-six hours.”

Then he leaned back in his chair and let them tell him why it couldn’t be done. There were plenty of reasons.

“We can’t assemble the air cargo units for shipment in less than a hundred and sixty hours,” Cameron, the logistics man said.

“We can postpone the Himalaya team, and use their units,” Travis said.

“But that’s a mountain expedition.”

“You can modify the units in nine hours,” Travis said.

“But we can’t get equipment to fly it out,” Lewis, the transport master, said.

“Korean Airlines has a 747 cargo jet available at SFX. They tell me it can be down here in nine hours.”

“They have a plane just sitting there?” Lewis said, incredulous.

“I believe,” Travis said, “that they had a last-minute cancellation from another customer.”

Irwin, the accountant, groaned. “What’d that cost?”

“We can’t get visas from the Zaire Embassy in Washington in time,” Martin, the diplomatic man, said. “And there is serious doubt they’d issue them to us at all. As you know, the first set of Congo visas were based on our mineral exploration rights with the Zaire government, and our MERs are non-exclusive. We were granted permission to go in, and so were the Japanese, the Germans, and the Dutch, who’ve formed a mining consortium. The first ore-body strike takes the contract. If Zaire suspects that our expedition is in trouble, they’ll just cancel us out and let the Euro-Japanese consortium try their luck. There are thirty Japanese trade officials in Kinshasa right now, spending yen like water.”

“I think that’s right,” Travis said. “If it became known that our expedition is in trouble.”

“It’ll become known the minute we apply for visas.”

“We won’t apply for them. As far as anybody knows,” Travis said, “we still have an expedition in Virunga. If we put a second small team into the field fast enough, nobody will ever know that it wasn’t the original team.”

“But what about the specific personnel visas to cross the borders, the manifests—”

“Details,” Travis said. “That’s what liquor is for,” referring to bribes, which were often liquor. In many parts of the world, expedition teams went in with crates of liquor and

boxes of those perennial favorites, transistor radios and Polaroid cameras.

“Details? How’re you going to cross the border?”

“We’ll need a good man for that. Maybe Munro.”

“Munro? That’s playing rough. The Zaire government hates Munro.”

“He’s resourceful, and he knows the area.”

Martin, the diplomatic expert, cleared his throat and said, “I’m not sure I should be here for this discussion. It looks to me as if you are proposing to enter a sovereign state with an illegal party led by a former Congo mercenary soldier    

“Not at all,” Travis said. “I’m obliged to put a support party into the field to assist my people already there. Happens all the time. I have no reason to think anybody is in trouble; just a routine support party. I haven’t got time to go through official channels. I may not be showing the best judgment in whom I hire, but it’s nothing more serious than that.”

By 11:45 P.M. on the night of June 13, the main sequencing of the next ERTS expedition had been worked out and confirmed by the computer. A fully loaded 747 could leave Houston at 8 P.M. the following evening, June 14; the plane could be in Africa on June 15 to pick up Munro “or someone like him”; and the full team could be in place in the Congo on June 17.

In ninety-six hours.

From the main data room, Karen Ross could look through the glass walls into Travis’s office and see the arguments taking place. In her logical way, she concluded that Travis had ”Q’d” himself, meaning that he had drawn false conclusions from insufficient data, and had said Q.E.D. too soon. Ross felt there was no point in going back into the Congo until they knew what they were up against. She remained at her console, checking the image she had recovered.

Ross bought this image—but how could she make Travis buy it?

In the highly sophisticated data-processing world of ERTS, there was a constant danger that extracted information would begin to “float”—that the images would cut loose from reality, like a ship cut loose from its moorings. This was true particularly when the database was put through multiple manipulations—when you were rotating 106 pixels in computer-generated hyperspace.

So ERTS evolved other ways to check the validity of images they got back from the computer. Ross ran two check programs against the gorilla image. The first was called APNF, for Animation Predicted Next Frame.

It was possible to treat videotape as if it were movie film, a succession of stills. She showed the computer several “stills” in succession, and then asked it to create the Predicted Next Frame. This PNF was then checked against the actual next frame.

She ran eight PNFs in a row, and they worked. If there was an error in the data handling, it was at least a consistent error.

Encouraged, she next ran a “fast and dirty threespace.” Here the flat video image was assumed to have certain three-dimensional characteristics, based on gray-scale patterns. In essence, the computer decided that the shadow of a nose, or a mountain range, meant that the nose or mountain range protruded above the surrounding surface. Succeeding images could be checked against these assumptions. As the gorilla moved, the computer verified that the flat image was, indeed, three-dimensional and coherent.

This proved beyond a doubt that the image was real.

She went to see Travis.

“Let’s say I buy this image,” Travis said, frowning. “I still don’t see why you should take the next expedition in.”

Ross said, “What did the other team find?”

“The other team?” Travis asked innocently.

“You gave that tape to another salvage team to confirm my recovery,” Ross said.

Travis glanced at his watch. “They haven’t pulled any-

thing out yet.” And he added, “We all know you’re fast with the database.”

Ross smiled. “That’s why you need me to take the expedition in,” she said. “I know the database, because I generated the database. And if you intend to send another team in right away, before this gorilla thing is solved, the only hope you have is for the team leader to be fast onsite with the data. This time, you need a console hotdogger in the field. Or the next expedition will end up like the last one. Because you still don’t know what happened to the last expedition.”

Travis sat behind his desk, and stared at her for a long time. She recognized his hesitation as a sign that he was weakening.

“And I want to go outside,” Ross said.

“To an outside expert?”

“Yes. Somebody on our grant list.”

“Risky,” Travis said. “I hate to involve outside people at this point. You know the consortium is breathing down our necks. You up the leak averages.”

‘‘It’s important,’’ Ross insisted.

Travis sighed. “Okay, if you think it’s important.” He sighed again. “Just don’t delay your’team.”

Ross was already packing up her hard copy.

Alone, Travis frowned, turning over his decision in his mind. Even if they ran the next Congo expedition slambam, in and out in less than fifteen days, their fixed costs would still exceed three hundred thousand dollars. The Board was going to scream—sending an untried, twenty-four-year-old kid, a girl, into the field with this kind of responsibility. Especially on a project as important as this one, where the stakes were enormous, and where they had already fallen behind on every timeline and cost projection. And Ross was so cold, she was likely to prove a poor field leader, alienating the others in the team.

Yet Travis had a hunch about the Ross Glacier. His management philosophy, tempered in his rain-dancing days, was always to give the project to whoever had the most to gain from success—or the most to lose from failure.

He turned to face his console, mounted beside his desk. “Travis,” he said, and the screen glowed.

“Psychograph file,” he said.

The screen showed call prompts.

“Ross, Karen,” Travis said.

The screen flashed THINKING A MOMENT. That was the programmed response which meant that information was being extracted. He waited.

Then the psychograph summary printed out across the screen. Every E RI S employee underwent three days of intensive psychological testing to determine not only skills but potential biases. The assessment of Ross would, he felt, be reassuring to the Board.

HIGHLY INTELLIGENT / LOGICAL / FLEXIBLE / RESOURCEFUL / DATA INTUITIVE / THOUGHT PROCESSES SUITED TO RAPIDLY CHANGING REAL-TIME

CONTEXTS / DRIVEN TO SUCCEED AT DEFINED GOALS / CAPABLE SUSTAINED MENTAL EFFORT /

It looked like the perfect description of the next Congo team leader. He scanned down the screen, looking for the negatives. These were less reassuring.

YOUTHFUL-RUTHLESS / TENUOUS HUMAN RAPPORT /

DOMINEERING / INTELLECTUALLY ARROGANT / INSENSITIVE / DRIVEN TO SUCCEED AT ANY COST /

And there was a final “flopover” notation. The very concept of personality flopover had been evolved through ERTS testing. It suggested that any dominant personality trait could be suddenly reversed under stress conditions: parental personalities could flop over and turn childishly petulant, hysterical personalities could become icy calm—or logical personalities could become illogical.

FLOPOVER MATRIX: DOMINANT (POSSIBLY UNDESIRABLE ) OBJECTIVITY MAY BE LOST ONCE DESIRED GOAL IS PERCEIVED CLOSE AT HAND / DESIRE FOR SUCCESS MAY PROVOKE DANGEROUSLY ILLOGICAL RESPONSES / PARENTAL FIGURES WILL BE ESPECIALLY DENIGRATED / SUBJECT MUST BE MONITORED IN LATE

STAGE GOAL—ORIENTED PROCEDURES /

Travis looked at the screen, and decided that such a circumstance was highly unlikely in the coming Congo expedition. He turned the computer off.

Karen Ross was exhilarated by her new authority. Shortly before midnight, she called up the grant lists on her office terminal. ERTS had animal experts in various areas whom they supported with nominal grants from a non-profit foundation called the Earth Resources Wildlife Fund. The grant lists were arranged taxonomically. Under “Primates” she found fourteen names, including several in Borneo, Malaysia, and Africa as well as the United States. In the United States there was only one gorilla researcher available, a primatologist named Dr. Peter Elliot, at the University of California at Berkeley.

The file onscreen indicated that Elliot was twenty-nine years old, unmarried, an associate professor without tenure in the Department of Zoology. Principal Research Interest was listed as “Primate Communications (Gorilla).” Funding was made to something called Project Amy.

She checked her watch. It was just midnight in Houston, 10 P.M. in California. She dialed the home number on the screen.

“Hello,” a wary male voice said.

“Dr. Peter Elliot?”

“Yes . . .“ The voice was still cautious, hesitant. “Are you a reporter?”

“No,” she said. “This is Dr. Karen Ross in Houston; I’m associated with the Earth Resources Wildlife Fund, which supports your research.”

“Oh, yes . . .“ The voice remained cautious. “You’re sure you’re not a reporter? It’s only fair to tell you I’m recording this telephone call as a potential legal document.”

Karen Ross hesitated. The last thing she needed was some paranoid academic recording ERTS developments. She said nothing.

“You’re American?” he said.

“Of course.”

Karen Ross stared at the computer screens, which flashed

VOICE IDENTIFICATION CONFIRMED: ELLIOT, PETER, 29 YEARS.

“State your business,” Elliot said.

“Well, we’re about to send an expedition into the Virunga region of the Congo, and—”

“Really? When are you going?” The voice suddenly sounded excited, boyish.

“Well, as a matter of fact we’re leaving in two days, and—”

“I want to go,” Elliot said.

Ross was so surprised she hardly knew what to say. “Well, Dr. Elliot, that’s not why I’m calling you, as a matter of fact—”

“I’m planning to go there anyway,” Elliot said. “With Amy.”

“Who’s Amy?”

“Amy is a gorilla,” Peter Elliot said.

DAY 2:

SAN FRANCISCO

June 14, 1979

1. Project Amy

IT IS UNFAIR TO SUGGEST, AS SOME PRIMATOLOGISTS later did, that Peter Elliot had to “get out of town” in June, 1979. His motives, and the planning behind the decision to go to the Congo, are a matter of record. Professor Elliot and his staff had decided on an African trip at least two days before Ross called him.

But it is certainly true that Peter Elliot was under attack:

from outside groups, the press, academic colleagues, and even members of his own department at Berkeley. Toward the end, Elliot was accused of being a “Nazi criminal” engaged in the “torture of dumb  animals.” It is no exaggeration to say that Elliot had found himself, in the spring of 1979, fighting for his professional life.

Yet his research had begun quietly, almost accidentally. Peter Elliot was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley when he first read about a year-old gorilla with amoebic dysentery who had been brought from the Minneapolis zoo to the San Francisco School of Veterinary Medicine for treatment. That was in 1973, in the exciting early days of primate language research.

The idea that primates might be taught language was very old. In 1661, Samuel Pepys saw a chimpanzee in London and wrote in his diary that it was “so much like a man in most things that. . . I do believe that it already understands much English, and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs.” Another seventeenth-century writer went further, saying, “Apes and Baboons. . . can speak but will not for fear they should be imployed, and set to work.”

Yet for the next three hundred years attempts to teach apes to talk were notably unsuccessful. They culminated in an ambitious effort by a Florida couple, Keith and Kathy Hayes, who for six years in the early 1950s raised a chimpanzee named Vicki as if she were a human infant. During that time, Vicki learned four words—”mama,” “papa,” “cup,” and “up.” But her pronunciation was labored and her progress slow. Her difficulties seemed to support the growing conviction among scientists that man was the only animal capable of language. Typical was the pronouncement of George Gaylord Simpson: “Language is. . . the most diagnostic single trait of man: all normal men have language; no other now living organisms do.”

This seemed so self-evident that for the next fifteen years nobody bothered to try teaching language to an ape. Then in 1966, a Reno, Nevada, couple named Beatrice and Allen Gardner reviewed movies of Vicki speaking. It seemed to them that Vicki was not so much incapable of language as incapable of speech. They noticed that while her lip movements were awkward, her hand gestures were fluid and expressive. The obvious conclusion was to try sign language.

In June, 1966, the Gardners began teaching American Sign Language (Ameslan), the standardized language of the deaf, to an infant chimpanzee named Washoe. Washoe’s progress with ASL was rapid; by 1971, she had a vocabulary of 160 signs, which she used in conversation. She also made up new word combinations for things she had never seen before: when shown watermelon for the first time, she signed it “water fruit.”

The Gardners’ work was highly controversial; it turned out that many scientists had an investment in the idea that apes were incapable of language. (As one researcher said, “My God, think of all those eminent names attached to all those scholarly papers for all those decades—and everyone agreeing that only man had language. What a mess.”)

Washoe’s skills provoked a variety of other experiments in teaching language. A chimpanzee named Lucy was taught to communicate through a computer; another, Sarah, was

taught to use plastic markers on a board. Other apes were studied as well. An orangutan named Alfred began instruction in 1971; a lowland gorilla named Koko in 1972; and in 1973 Peter Elliot began with a mountain gorilla, Amy.

At his first visit to the hospital to meet Amy, he found a pathetic little creature, heavily sedated, with restraining straps on her frail black arms and legs. He stroked her head and said gently, “Hello, Amy, I’m Peter.”

Amy promptly bit his hand, drawing blood.

From this inauspicious beginning emerged a singularly successful research program. In 1973, the basic teaching technique, called molding, was well understood. The animal was shown an object and the researcher simultaneously molded the animal’s hand into the correct sign, until the association was firmly made. Subsequent testing confirmed that the animal understood the meaning of the sign.

But if the basic methodology was accepted, the application was highly competitive. Researchers competed over the rate of sign acquisition, or vocabulary. (Among human beings, vocabulary was considered the best measure of intelligence.) The rate of sign acquisition could be taken as a measure of either the scientist’s skill or the animal’s intelligence.

It was by now clearly recognized that different apes had different personalities. As one researcher commented, “Pongid studies are perhaps the only field in which academic gossip centers on the students and not the teachers.” In the increasingly competitive and disputatious world of primate research, it was said that Lucy was a drunk, that Koko was an ill-mannered brat, that Lana’s head was turned by her celebrity (“she only works when there is an interviewer present”), and that Nim was so stupid he should have been named Dim.

At first glance, it may seem odd that Peter Elliot should have come under attack, for this handsome, rather shy man—the son of a Manin County librarian—had avoided controversy during his years of work with Amy. Elliot’s publications were modest and temperate; his progress with Amy

was well documented; he showed no interest in publicity, and was not among those researchers who took their apes on the Carson or the Griffin show.

But Elliot’s diffident manner concealed not only a quick intelligence, but a fierce ambition as well. If he avoided controversy, it was only because he didn’t have time for it—he had been working nights and weekends for years, and driving his staff and Amy just as hard. He was very good at the business of science, getting grants; at all the animal behaviorist conferences, where others showed up in jeans and plaid lumberjack shirts, Elliot arrived in a three-piece suit. Elliot intended to be the foremost ape researcher, and he intended Amy to be the foremost ape.

Elliot’s success in obtaining grants was such that in 1975, Project Amy had an annual budget of $160,000 and a staff of eight, including a child psychologist and a computer programmer. A staff member of the Bergren Institute later said that Elliot’s appeal lay in the fact that he was “a good investment; for example, Project Amy got fifty percent more computer time for our money because he went on line with his time-sharing terminal at night and on weekends, when the time was cheaper. He was very cost-effective. And dedicated, of course: Elliot obviously cared about nothing in life except his work with Amy. That made him a boring conversationalist but a very good bet, from our standpoint. It’s hard to decide who’s truly brilliant; it’s easier to see who’s driven, which in the long run may be more important. We anticipated great things from Elliot.”

Peter Elliot’s difficulties began on the morning of February 2, 1979. Amy lived in a mobile home on the Berkeley campus; she spent nights there alone, and usually provided an effusive greeting the next day. However, on that morning the Project Amy staff found her in an uncharacteristic sullen mood; she was irritable and bleary-eyed, behaving as if she had been wronged in some fashion.

Elliot felt that something had upset her during the night. When asked, she kept making signs for “sleep box,” a new

word pairing he did not understand. That in itself was not unusual; Amy made up new word pairings all the time, and they were often hard to decipher. Just a few days before, she had bewildered them by talking about “crocodile milk.” Eventually they realized that Amy’s milk had gone sour, and that since she disliked crocodiles (which she had only seen in picture books), she somehow decided that sour milk was “crocodile milk.”

Now she was talking about “sleep box.” At first they thought she might be referring to her nestlike bed. It turned out she was using “box” in her usual sense, to refer to the television set.

Everything in her trailer, including the television, was controlled on a twenty-four-hour cycle by the computer. They ran a check to see if the television had been turned on during the night, disturbing her sleep. Since Amy liked to watch television, it was conceivable that she had managed to turn it on herself. But Amy looked scornful as they examined the actual television in the trailer. She clearly meant something else.

Finally they determined that by “sleep box” she meant “sleep pictures.” When asked about these sleep pictures, Amy signed that they were “bad pictures” and “old pictures,” and that they “make Amy cry.”

She was dreaming.

The fact that Amy was the first primate to report dreams caused tremendous excitement among Elliot’s staff. But the excitement was short-lived. Although Amy continued to dream on succeeding nights, she refused to discuss her dreams; in fact, she seemed to blame the researchers for this new and confusing intrusion into her mental life. Worse, her waking behavior deteriorated alarmingly.

Her word acquisition rate fell from 2.7 words a week to 0.8 words a week, her spontaneous word formation rate from 1.9 to 0.3. Monitored attention span was halved. Mood swings increased; erratic and unmotivated behavior became commonplace; temper tantrums occurred daily. Amy was four and a half feet tall, and weighed 130 pounds. She was an immensely strong animal. The staff began to wonder if they could control her.

Her refusal to talk about her dreams frustrated them. They tried a variety of investigative approaches; they showed her pictures from books and magazines; they ran the ceiling-mounted video monitors around the clock, in case she signed something significant while alone (like young children, Amy often “talked to herself”); they even administered a battery of neurological tests, including an EEG.

Finally they hit on finger painting.

This was immediately successful. Amy was enthusiastic about finger painting, and after they mixed cayenne pepper with the pigments, she stopped licking her fingers. She drew images swiftly and repetitively, and she seemed to become somewhat more relaxed, more her old self.

David Bergman, the child psychologist, noted that “what Amy actually draws is a cluster of apparently related images:

inverted crescent shapes, or semicircles, which are always associated with an area of vertical green streaks. Amy says the green streaks represent ‘forest,’ and she calls the semi-circles ‘bad houses’ or ‘old houses.’ In addition she often draws black circles, which she calls ‘holes.’

Bergman cautioned against the obvious conclusion that she was drawing old buildings in the jungle. “Watching her make drawings one after another, again and again, convinces me of the obsessive and private nature of the imagery. Amy is troubled by these pictures, and she is trying to get them out, to banish them to paper.”

In fact, the nature of the imagery remained mysterious to the Project Amy staff. By late April, 1979, they had concluded that her dreams could be explained in four ways. In order of seriousness, they were:

1.     The dreams are an attempt to rationalize events in her daily life. This was the usual explanation of (human) dreams, but the staff doubted that it applied in Amy’s case.

2.     The dreams are a transitional adolescent manifestation.

At seven years of age, Amy was a gorilla teenager, and for nearly a year she had shown many typical teenage traits, including rages and sulks, fussiness about her appearance, a new interest in the opposite sex.

3.     The dreams are a species-specific phenomenon. It was possible that all gorillas had disturbing dreams, and that in the wild the resultant stresses were handled in some fashion by the behavior of the group. Although gorillas had been studied in the wild for the past twenty years, there was no evidence for this.

4.     The dreams are the first sign of incipient dementia. This was the most feared possibility. To train an ape effectively, one had to begin with an infant; as the years progressed, researchers waited to see if their animal would grow up to be bright or stupid, recalcitrant or pliable, healthy or sickly. The health of apes was a constant worry; many programs collapsed after years of effort and expense when the apes died of physical or mental illness. Timothy, an Atlanta chimp, became psychotic in 1976 and committed suicide by coprophagia, choking to death on his own feces. Maurice, a Chicago orang, became intensely neurotic, developing phobias that halted work in 1977. For better or worse, the very intelligence that made apes worthwhile subjects for study also made them as unstable as human beings.

But the Project Amy staff was unable to make further progress. In May, 1979, they made what turned out to be a momentous decision: they decided to publish Amy’s drawings, and submitted her images to the Journal of Behavioral Sciences.

2. Breakthrough

“DREAM BEHAVIOR IN A MOUNTAIN GORILLA” WAS

never published. The paper was routinely forwarded to three scientists on the editorial board for review, and one copy somehow (it is still unclear just how) fell into the hands of the Primate Preservation Agency, a New York group formed in 1975 to prevent the “unwarranted and illegitimate exploitation of intelligent primates in unnecessary laboratory research.” *

On June 3, the PPA began picketing the Zoology Department at Berkeley, and calling for the “release” of Amy. Most of the demonstrators were women, and several young children were present; videotapes of an eight-year-old boy holding a placard with Amy’s photograph and shouting “Free Amy! Free Amy!” appeared on local television news.

In a tactical error, the Project Amy staff elected to ignore the protests except for a brief press release stating that the PPA was “misinformed.” The release went out under the Berkeley Information Office letterhead.

On June 5, the PPA released comments on Professor Elliot's work from other primatologists around the country. (Many later denied the comments or claimed they were misquoted.) Dr. Wayne Turman, of the University of Oklahoma at Norman, was quoted as saying that Elliot’s work was “fanciful and unethical.” Dr. Felicity Hammond, of the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, said that “neither Elliot nor his research is of the first rank.” Dr. Richard Aronson at the University of Chicago called the research “clearly fascist in nature.”

None of these scientists had read Elliot’s paper before commenting; but the damage, particularly from Aronson, was incalculable. On June 8, Eleanor Vries, the spokesperson for the PPA, referred to the “criminal research of Dr. Elliot and his Nazi staff”; she claimed Elliot’s research caused Amy to have nightmares, and that Amy was being subjected to torture, drugs, and electroshock treatments.

Belatedly, on June 10, the Project Amy staff prepared a lengthy press release, explaining their position in detail and

*The Following account of Elliot's persecution draws heavily on J. A. Peebles, “Infringement of Academic Freedom by Press Innuendo and Hearsay: The Experience of Dr. Peter Elliot,” in the Journal of Academic Law and Psychiatry 52. no. 12 (1979): 19—38.

referring to the unpublished paper. But the University Information Office was now “too busy” to issue the release.

On June 11, the Berkeley faculty scheduled a meeting to consider “issues of ethical conduct” within the university. Eleanor Vries announced that the PPA had hired the noted San Francisco attorney Melvin Bell “to free Amy from subjugation.” Bell’s office was not available for comment.

On the same day, the Project Amy staff had a sudden, unexpected breakthrough in their understanding of Amy’s dreams.

Through all the publicity and commotion, the group had continued to work daily with Amy, and her continued distress—and flaring temper tantrums—was a constant reminder that they had not solved the initial problem. They persisted in their search for clues, although when the break finally came, it happened almost by accident.

Sarah Johnson, a research assistant, was checking prehistoric archaeological sites in the Congo, on the unlikely chance that Amy might have seen such a site (“old buildings in the jungle”) in her infancy, before she was brought to the Minneapolis zoo. Johnson quickly discovered the pertinent facts about the Congo: the region had not been explored by Western observers until a hundred years ago; in recent times, hostile tribes and civil war had made scientific inquiry hazardous; and finally, the moist jungle environment did not lend itself to artifact preservation.

This meant remarkably little was known about Congolese prehistory, and Johnson completed her research in a few hours. But she was reluctant to return so quickly from her assignment, so she stayed on, looking at other books in the anthropology library—ethnographies, histories, early accounts. The earliest visitors to the interior of the Congo were Arab slave traders and Portuguese merchants, and several had written accounts of their travels. Because Johnson could read neither Arabic nor Portuguese, she just looked at the plates.

And then she saw a picture that, she said, “sent a chill up my spine.”

It was a Portuguese engraving originally dated 1642 and reprinted in an 1842 volume. The ink was yellowing on frayed brittle paper, but clearly visible was a ruined city in the jungle, overgrown with creeper vines and giant ferns. The doors and windows were constructed with semicircular arches, exactly as Amy had drawn them.

“It was,” Elliot said later, “the kind of opportunity that comes to a researcher once in his lifetime—if he’s lucky. Of course we knew nothing about the picture; the caption was written in flowing script and included a word that looked like ‘Zinj,’ and the date 1642. We immediately hired translators skilled in archaic Arabic and seventeenth-century Portuguese, but that wasn’t the point. The point was we had a chance to verify a major theoretical question. Amy’s pictures seemed to be a clear case of specific genetic memory.”

Genetic memory was first proposed by Marais in 1911, and it has been vigorously debated ever since. In its simplest form, the theory proposed that the mechanism of genetic inheritance, which governed the transmission of all physical traits, was not limited to physical traits alone. Behavior was clearly genetically determined in lower animals, which were born with complex behavior that did not have to be learned. But higher animals had more flexible behavior, dependent on learning and memory. The question was whether higher animals, particularly apes and men, had any part of their psychic apparatus fixed from birth by their genes.

Now, Elliot felt, with Amy they had evidence for such a memory. Amy had been taken from Africa when she was only seven months old. Unless she had seen this ruined city in her infancy, her dreams represented a specific genetic memory which could be verified by a trip to Africa. By the evening of June 11, the Project Amy staff was agreed. If they could arrange it—and pay for it—they would take Amy back to Africa.

On June 12, the team waited for the translators to complete work on the source material. Checked translations were expected to be ready within two days. But a trip to Africa for Amy and two staff members would cost at least thirty thousand dollars, a substantial fraction of their total annual operating budget. And transporting a gorilla halfway around the world involved a bewildering tangle of customs regulations and bureaucratic red tape.

Clearly, they needed expert help, but they were not sure where to turn. And then, on June 13, a Dr. Karen Ross from one of their granting institutions, the Earth Resources Wildlife Fund, called from Houston to say that she was leading an expedition into the Congo in two days’ time. And although she showed no interest in taking Peter Elliot or Amy with her, she conveyed—at least over the telephone—a confident familiarity with the way expeditions were assembled and managed in far-off places around the world.

When she asked if she could come to San Francisco to meet with Dr. Elliot, Dr. Elliot replied that he would be delighted to meet with her, at her convenience.

3. Legal Issues.

PETER ELLIOT REMEMBERED JUNE 14, 1979, AS A day of sudden reverses. He began at 8 A.M. in the San Francisco law firm of Sutherland, Morton & O’Connell, because of the threatened custody suit from the PPA—a suit which became all the more important now that he was planning to take Amy out of the country.

He met with John Morton in the firm’s wood-paneled library overlooking Grant Street. Morton took notes on a yellow legal pad. “I think you’re all right,” Morton began, “but let me get a few facts. Amy is a gorilla?”

“Yes, a female mountain gorilla.”

“Age?”

“She’s seven now.”

“So she’s still a child?”

Elliot explained that gorillas matured in six to eight years, so that Amy was late adolescent, the equivalent of a sixteen-year-old human female.

Morton scratched notes on a pad. “Could we say she’s still a minor?”

“Do we want to say that?”

“I think so.”

“Yes, she’s still a minor,” Elliot said.

“Where did she come from? I mean originally.”

“A woman tourist named Swenson found her in Africa, in a village called Bagimindi. Amy’s mother had been killed by the natives for food. Mrs. Swenson bought her as an infant.”

“So she was not bred in captivity,” Morton said, writing on his pad.

“No. Mrs. Swenson brought her back to the States and donated her to the Minneapolis zoo.”

“She relinquished her interest in Amy?”

“I assume so,” Elliot said. “We’ve been trying to reach Mrs. Swenson to ask about Amy’s early life, but she’s out of the country. Apparently she travels constantly; she’s in Borneo. Anyway, when Amy was sent to San Francisco, I called the Minneapolis zoo to ask if I could keep her for study. The zoo said yes, for three years.”

“Did you pay any money?”

‘‘No.

“Was there a written contract?”

“No, I just called the zoo director.”

Morton nodded. “Oral agreement. . .“ he said, writing. “And when the three years were up?”

“That was the spring of 1976. 1 asked the zoo for an extension of six years, and they gave it to me.”

“Again orally?”

“Yes. I called on the phone.”

“No correspondence?”

“No. They didn’t seem very interested when I called. To tell you the truth, I think they had forgotten about Amy. The zoo has four gorillas, anyway.”

Morton frowned. “Isn’t a gorilla a pretty expensive animal? I mean, if you wanted to buy one for a pet or for the circus.”

“Gorillas are on the endangered list; you can’t buy them as pets. But yes, they’d be pretty expensive.”

“How expensive?”

“Well, there’s no established market value, but it would be twenty or thirty thousand dollars.”

“And all during these years, you have been teaching her language?”

“Yes,” Peter said. “American Sign Language. She has a vocabulary of six hundred and twenty words now.”

“Is that a lot?”

“More than any known primate.”

Morton nodded, making notes. “You work with her every day in ongoing research?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Morton said. “That’s been very important in the animal custody cases so far.”

For more than a hundred years, there had been organized movements in Western countries to stop animal experimentation. They were led by the anti-vivisectionists, the RSPCA, the ASPCA. Originally these organizations were a kind of lunatic fringe of animal lovers, intent on stopping all animal research.

Over the years, scientists had evolved a standard defense acceptable to the courts. Researchers claimed that their experiments had the goal of bettering the health and welfare of mankind, a higher priority than animal welfare. They pointed out that no one objected to animals being used as beasts of burden or for agricultural work—a life of drudgery to which animals had been subjected for thousands of years. Using animals in scientific experiments simply extended the idea that animals were the servants of human enterprises.

In addition, animals were literally brutes. They had no self-awareness, no recognition of their existence in nature. This meant, in the words of philosopher George H. Mead, that “animals have no rights. We are at liberty to cut off their lives; there is no wrong committed when an animal’s life is taken away. He has not lost anything    

Many people were troubled by these views, but attempts to establish guidelines quickly ran into logical problems. The most obvious concerned the perceptions of animals further down the phylogenetic scale. Few researchers operated on dogs, cats, and other mammals without anesthesia, but what about annelid worms, crayfish, leeches, and squid? Ignoring these creatures was a form of “taxonomic discrimination.” Yet if these animals deserved consideration, shouldn’t it also be illegal to throw a live lobster into a pot of boiling water?

The question of what constituted cruelty to animals was confused by the animal societies themselves. In some countries, they fought the extermination of rats; and in 1968 there was the bizarre Australian pharmaceutical case. * In the face of these ironies, the courts hesitated to interfere with animal experimentation. As a practical matter, researchers were free to do as they wished. The volume of animal research was extraordinary: during the 1970s, sixty-four million animals were killed in experiments in the United States each year.

But attitudes had slowly changed. Language studies with dolphins and apes made it clear that these animals were not only intelligent but self-aware; they recognized themselves in mirrors and photographs. In 1974, scientists themselves formed the International Primate Protection League to monitor research involving monkeys and apes. In March, 1978, the Indian government banned the export of rhesus monkeys to research laboratories around the world. And there were court cases which concluded that in some instances animals did, indeed, have rights.

The old view was analogous to slavery: the animal was the property of its owner, who could do whatever he wished. But now ownership became secondary. In February, 1977,

*A new pharmaceutical factory was built in Western Australia. In this factory all the pills came out on a conveyor bell; a person had to watch the belt, and press buttons to sort the pills into separate bins by size and color. A Skinnenan animal behaviorist pointed out that it would be simple to teach pigeons to watch the pills and peck colored keys to do the sorting process. Incredulous factory managers agreed to a test; the pigeons indeed performed reliably, and were duly placed on the assembly line. Then the RSPCA stepped in and put a stop to it on the grounds that it represented cruelty to animals; the job was turned over to a human operator. for whom it did not, apparently, represent cruelty.

there was a case involving a dolphin named Mary, released by a lab technician into the open ocean. The University of Hawaii prosecuted the technician, charging loss-of a valuable research animal. Two trials resulted in hung juries; the case was dropped.

In November, 1978, there was a custody case involving a chimpanzee named Arthur, who was fluent in sign language. His owner, Johns Hopkins University, decided to sell him and close the program. His trainer, William Levine, went to court and obtained custody on the grounds that Arthur knew language and thus was no longer a chimpanzee.

“One of the pertinent facts,” Morton said, “was that when Arthur was confronted by other chimpanzees, he referred to them as ‘black things.’ And when Arthur was twice asked to sort photographs of people and photographs of chimps, he sorted them correctly except that both times he put his own picture in the stack with the people. He obviously did not consider himself a chimpanzee, and the court ruled that he should remain with his trainer, since any separation would cause him severe psychic distress.”

“Amy cries when I leave her,” Elliot said.

“When you conduct experiments, do you obtain her permission?”

“Always.” Elliot smiled. Morton obviously had no sense of day-to-day life with Amy. It was essential to obtain her permission for any course of action, even a ride in a car. She was a powerful animal, and she could be willful and stubborn.

“Do you keep a record of her acquiescence?”

“Videotapes.”

“Does she understand the experiments you propose?” He shrugged. “She says she does.”

“You follow a system of rewards and punishments?” “All animal behaviorists do.”

Morton frowned. “What forms do her punishments take?”

“Well, when she’s a bad girl I make her stand in the corner facing the wall. Or else I send her to bed early without her peanut-butter-and-jelly snack.”

“What about torture and shock treatments?”

"Ridiculous.”

“You never physically punish the animal?”

“She’s a pretty damn big animal. Usually I worry that she’ll get mad and punish me.”

Morton smiled and stood. “You’re going to be all right,” he said. “Any court will rule that Amy is your ward and that you must decide any ultimate disposition in her case.” He hesitated. “I know this sounds strange, but could you put Amy on the stand?”

“I guess so,” Elliot said. “Do you think it will come to that?”

“Not in this case,” Morton said, “but sooner or later it will. You watch: within ten years, there will be a custody case involving a language-using primate, and the ape will be in the witness-box.”

Elliot shook his hand, and said as he was leaving, “By the way, would I have any problem taking her out of the country?”

“If there is a custody case, you could have trouble taking her across state lines,” Morton said. “Are you planning to take her out of the country?”

“Yes.”

“Then my advice is to do it fast, and don’t tell anyone,” Morton said.

Elliot entered his office on the third floor of the Zoology Department building shortly after nine. His secretary, Carolyn, said: “A Dr. Ross called from that Wildlife Fund in Houston; she’s on her way to San Francisco. A Mr. Morikawa called three times, says it’s important. The Project Amy staff meeting is set for ten o’clock. And Windy is in your office.”

“Really?”

James Weldon was a senior professor in the Department, a weak, blustery man. “Windy” Weldon was usually portrayed in departmental cartoons as holding a wet finger in the air: he was a master at knowing which way the wind was blowing. For the past several days, he had avoided Peter Elliot and his staff.

Elliot went into his office.

“Well, Peter my boy,” Weldon said, reaching out to give his version of a hearty handshake. “You’re in early.”

Elliot was instantly wary. “I thought I’d beat the crowds,” he said. The picketers did not show up until ten o’clock, sometimes later, depending on when they had arranged to meet the TV news crews. That was how it worked these days:

protest by appointment.

“They’re not coming anymore.” Weldon smiled.

He handed Elliot the late city edition of the Chronicle, a front-page story circled in black pen. Eleanor Vries had resigned her position as regional director of the PPA, pleading overwork and personal pressures; a statement from the PPA in New York indicated that they had seriously misconstrued the nature and content of Elliot’s research.

“Meaning what?” Elliot asked.

“Belli’s office reviewed your paper and Vries’s public statements about torture, and decided that the PPA was exposed to a major libel suit,” Weldon said. “The New York office is terrified. They’ll be making overtures to you later today. Personally, I hope you’ll be understanding.”

Elliot dropped into his chair. "What about the faculty meeting next week?”

“Oh, that’s essential,” Weldon said. “There’s no question that the faculty will want to discuss unethical conduct—on the part of the media, and issue a strong statement in your support. I’m drawing up a statement now, to come from my office.”

The irony of this was not lost on Elliot. “You sure you want to go out on a limb?” he asked,

“I’m behind you one thousand percent, I hope you know that,” Weldon said. Weldon was restless, pacing around the office, staring at the walls, which were covered with Amy’s finger paintings. Windy had something further on his mind. “She’s still making these same pictures?” he asked, finally.

“Yes,” Elliot said.

“And you still have no idea what they mean?”

Elliot paused; at best it was premature to tell Weldon what they thought the pictures meant. “No idea,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Weldon asked, frowning. “I think somebody knows what they mean.”

“Why is that?”

“Something very strange has happened,” Weldon said. “Someone has offered to buy Amy.”

“To buy her? What are you talking about, to buy her?”

“A lawyer in Los Angeles called my office yesterday and offered to buy her for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“It must be some rich do-gooder,” Elliot said, “trying to save Amy from torture.”

“I don’t think so,” Weldon said. “For one thing, the otter came from Japan. Someone named Morikawa—he’s in electronics in Tokyo. I found that out when the lawyer called back this morning, to increase his offer to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” Elliot said. “For Amy?” Of course it was out of the question. He would never sell her. But why would anyone offer so much money?

Weldon had an answer. “This kind of money, a quarter of a million dollars, can only be coming from private enterprise. Industry. Clearly, Morikawa has read about your work and found a use for speaking primates in an industrial context.” Windy stared at the ceiling, a sure sign he was about to wax eloquent. “I think a new field might be opening up here, the training of primates for industrial applications in the real world.”

Peter Elliot swore. He was not teaching Amy language in order to put a hard hat on her head and a lunch pail in her hand, and he said so.

“You’re not thinking it through,” Weldon said. “What if we are on the verge of a new field of applied behavior for the great apes? Think what it means. Not only funding to the Department, and an opportunity for applied research. Most important, there would be a reason to keep these animals alive. You know that the great apes are becoming extinct.

The chimps in Africa are greatly reduced in number. The orangs of Borneo are losing their natural habitat to the timber cutters and will be extinct in ten years. The gorilla is down to three thousand in the central African forests. These animals will all disappear in our lifetime—unless there is a reason to keep them alive, as a species. You may provide that reason, Peter my boy. Think about it.”

Elliot did think about it, and he discussed it at the Project Amy staff meeting at ten o’clock. They considered possible industrial applications for apes, and possible advantages to employers, such as the lack of unions and fringe benefits. In the late twentieth century, these were major considerations. (In 1978, for each new automobile that rolled off the Detroit assembly lines, the cost of worker health benefits exceeded the cost of all the steel used to build the car.)

But they concluded that a vision of “industrialized apes”

was wildly fanciful. An ape like Amy was not a cheap and stupid version of a human worker. Quite the opposite: Amy was a highly intelligent and complex creature out of her element in the modern industrial world. She demanded a great deal of supervision; she was whimsical and unreliable; and her health was always at risk. It simply didn’t make sense to use her in industry. If Morikawa had visions of apes wielding soldering irons on a microelectronic assembly line, building TVs and hi-fl sets, he was sorely misinformed.

The only note of caution came from Bergman, the child psychologist. “A quarter of a million is a lot of money,” he said, “and Mr. Morikawa is probably no fool. He must have learned about Amy through her drawings, which imply she is neurotic and difficult. If he’s interested in her, I’d bet it’s because of her drawings. But I can’t imagine why those drawings should be worth a quarter of a million dollars.”

Neither could anyone else, and the discussion turned to the drawings themselves, and the newly translated texts. Sarah Johnson, in charge of research, started out with the flat comment “I have bad news about the Congo.”*

For most of recorded history, she explained, nothing was

*Johnson's principal reference was the definitive work by A. J. Parkinson. The Congo Delta in Myth and History (London; Peters. 1904).

known about the Congo. The ancient Egyptians on the upper Nile knew only that their river originated far to the south, in a region they called the Land of Trees. This was a mysterious place with forests so dense they were as dark as night in the middle of the day. Strange creatures inhabited this perpetual gloom, including little men with tails, and animals half black and half white.

For nearly four thousand years afterward, nothing more substantial was learned about the interior of Africa. The Arabs came to East Africa in the seventh century A.D., in search of gold, ivory, spices, and slaves. But the Arabs were merchant seamen and did not venture inland. They called the interior Zinj—the Land of the Blacks—a region of fable and fantasy. There were stories of vast forests and tiny men with tails; stories of mountains that spewed fire and turned the sky black; stories of native villages overwhelmed by monkeys, which would have congress with the women; stories of great giants with hairy bodies and flat noses; stories of creatures half leopard, half man; stories of native markets where the fattened carcasses of men were butchered and sold as a delicacy.

Such stories were sufficiently forbidding to keep the Arabs on the coast, despite other stories equally alluring: mountains of shimmering gold, riverbeds gleaming with diamonds, animals that spoke the language of men, great jungle civilizations of unimaginable splendor. In particular, one story was repeated again and again in early accounts: the story of the Lost City of Zinj.

According to legend, a city known to the Hebrews of Solomonic times had been a source of inconceivable wealth in diamonds. The caravan route to the city had been jealously guarded, passed from father to son, as a sacred trust for generation after generation. But the diamond mines were exhausted and the city itself now lay in crumbling ruins, somewhere in the dark heart of Africa. The arduous caravan routes were long since swallowed up by jungle, and the last trader who remembered the way had carried his secret with him to the grave many hundreds of years before.

This mysterious and alluring place the Arabs called the Lost City of Zinj. * Yet despite its enduring fame, Johnson could find few detailed descriptions of the city. In 1187 Ibn Baratu, an Arab in Mombasa, recorded that “the natives of the region tell. . . of a lost city far inland, called Zinj. There the inhabitants, who are black, once lived in wealth and luxury, and even the slaves decorated themselves with jewels and especially blue diamonds, for a great store of diamonds is there.”

In 1292, a Persian named Mohammed Zaid stated that “a large [the size] diamond of a man’s clenched fist . . was exhibited on the streets of Zanzibar, and all said it had come from the interior, where the ruins of a city called Zinj may be found, and it is here that such diamonds may be found in profusion, scattered upon the ground and also in rivers    

In 1334, another Arab, Ibn Mohammed, stated that “our number made arrangements to seek out the city of Zinj, but quitted our quest upon learning that the city was long since abandoned, and much ruined. It is said that the aspect of the city is wondrous strange, for doors and windows are built in the curve of a half-moon, and the residences are now overtaken by a violent race of hairy men who speak in whispers no known language    

Then the Portuguese, those indefatigable explorers, arrived. By 1544, they were venturing inland from the west coast up the mighty Congo River, but they soon encountered all the obstacles that would prevent exploration of central Africa for hundreds of years to come. The Congo was not navigable beyond the first set of rapids, two hundred miles inland (at what was once Léopoldville, and is now Kinshasa). The natives were hostile and cannibalistic. And the hot steaming jungle was the source of disease—malaria, sleeping sickness, bilharzia, blackwater fever—which decimated foreign intruders.

The Portuguese never managed to penetrate the central

*The fabled city of Zinj formed the basis for H. Rider Haggard’s popular novel King Solomon’s Mines, first published in 1885. Haggard, a gifted linguist, had served on the staff of the Governor of Natal in 1875. and he presumably heard of Zinj from the neighboring Zulus at that time.

Congo. Neither did the English, under Captain Brenner, in 1644; his entire party was lost. The Congo would remain for two hundred years as a blank spot on the civilized maps of the world.

But the early explorers repeated the legends of the interior, including the story of Zinj. A Portuguese artist, Juan Diego de Valdez, drew a widely acclaimed picture of the Lost City of Zinj in 1642. “But,” Sarah Johnson said, “he also drew pictures of men with tails, and monkeys having carnal knowledge of native women.”

Somebody groaned.

“Apparently Valdez was crippled,” she continued. “He lived all his life in the town of Settibal, drinking with sailors and drawing pictures based on his conversations.”

Africa was not thoroughly explored until the mid— nineteenth century, by Burton and Speke, Baker and Living-stone, and especially Stanley. No trace of the Lost City of Zinj was found by any of them. Nor had any trace of the apocryphal city been found in the hundred years since.

The gloom that descended over the Project Amy staff meeting was profound. “I told you it was bad news,” Sarah Johnson said.

“You mean,” Peter Elliot said, “that this picture is based on a description, and we don’t know whether the city actually exists or not.”

“I’m afraid so,” Sarah Johnson said. “There is no proof that the city in the picture exists at all. It’s just a story.”

              4. Resolution

PETER ELLIOT’S UNQUESTIONED RELIANCE ON twentieth-century hard data—facts, figures, graphs—left him unprepared for the possibility that the 1642 engraving, in all its detail, was merely the fanciful speculation of an uninhibited artist. The news came as a shock.

Their plans to take Amy to the Congo suddenly appeared childishly naïve; the resemblance of her sketchy, schematic drawings to the 1642 Valdez engraving was obviously coincidental. How could they ever have imagined that a Lost City of Zinj was anything but the stuff of ancient fable? In the seventeenth-century world of widening horizons and new wonders, the idea of such a city would have seemed perfectly reasonable, even compelling. But in the computerized twentieth century, the Lost City of Zinj was as unlikely as Camelot or Xanadu. They had been fools ever to take it seriously. “The lost city doesn’t exist,” he said.

“Oh, it exists, all right,” she said. “There’s no doubt about that.”

Elliot glanced up quickly, and then he saw that Sarah Johnson had not answered him. A tall gangly girl in her early twenties stood at the back of the room. She might have been considered beautiful except for her cold, aloof demeanor. This girl was dressed in a severe, businesslike suit, and she carried a briefcase, which she now set on the table, popping the latches.

“I’m Dr. Ross,” she announced, “from the Wildlife Fund, and I’d like your opinion of these pictures.”

She passed around a series of photographs, which were viewed by the staff with an assortment of whistles and sighs. At the head of the table, Elliot waited impatiently until the photographs came down to him.

They were grainy black-and-white images with horizontal scanning line streaks, photographed off a video screen. But the image was unmistakable: a ruined city in the jungle, with curious inverted crescent-shaped doors and windows.

5. Amy

“BY SATELLITE?” ELLIOT REPEATED, HEARING THE tension in his voice.

“That’s right, the pictures were transmitted by satellite from Africa two days ago.”

“Then you know the location of this ruin?”

“Of course.”

“And your expedition leaves in a matter of hours?”

“Six hours and twenty-three minutes, to be exact,” Ross said, glancing at her digital watch,

Elliot adjourned the meeting, and talked privately with Ross for more than an hour. Elliot later claimed that Ross had “deceived” him about the purpose of the expedition and the hazards they would face. But Elliot was eager to go, and probably not inclined to be too fussy about the reasons behind Ross’s coming expedition, or the dangers involved. As a skilled grantsman, he had long ago grown comfortable with situations where other peoples’ money and his own motivations did not exactly coincide. This was the cynical side of academic life: how much pure research had been funded because it might cure cancer? A researcher promised anything to get his money.

Apparently it never occurred to Elliot that Ross might be using him as coldly as he was using her. From the start Ross was never entirely truthful; she had been instructed by Travis to explain the ERTS Congo mission “with a little data dropout.” Data dropout was second nature to her; everyone at ERTS had learned to say no more than was necessary. Elliot treated her as if she were an ordinary funding agency, and that was a serious mistake.

In the final analysis, Ross and Elliot misjudged each other, for each presented a deceptive appearance, and in the same way. Elliot appeared so shy and retiring that one Berkeley faculty member had commented, “It’s no wonder he’s devoted his life to apes; he can’t work up the nerve to talk to people.” But Elliot had been a tough middle linebacker in college, and his diffident academic demeanor concealed a head-crunching ambitious drive.

Similarly, Karen Ross, despite her youthful cheerleader beauty and soft, seductive Texas accent, possessed great intelligence and a deep inner toughness. (She had matured early, and a high-school teacher had once appraised her as “the very flower of virile Texas womanhood.”) Ross felt responsible for the previous ERTS expedition, and she was determined to rectify past errors. It was at least possible that Elliot and Amy could help her when she got onsite; that was reason enough to take them with her. Beyond that, Ross was concerned about the consortium, which was obviously seeking Elliot, since Morikawa was calling. If she took Elliot and Amy with her, she removed a possible advantage to the consortium—again, reason enough to take them with her. Finally, she needed a cover in case her expedition was stopped at one of the borders—and a primatologist and an ape provided a perfect cover.

But in the end Karen Ross wanted only the Congo diamonds—and she was prepared to say anything, do anything, sacrifice anything to get them.

In photographs taken at San Francisco airport, Elliot and Ross appeared as two smiling, youthful academics, embarking on a lark of an expedition to Africa. But in fact, their motivations were different, and grimly held. Elliot was reluctant to tell her how theoretical and academic his goals were—and Ross was reluctant to admit how pragmatic were hers.

In any case, by midday on June 14, Karen Ross found herself riding with Peter Elliot in his battered Fiat sedan along Hallowell Road, going past the University athletic field. She had some misgivings: they were going to meet Amy.

Elliot unlocked the door with its red sign DO NOT DISTURB ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION IN PROGRESS. Behind the door, Amy was grunting and scratching impatiently. Elliot paused.

“When you meet her,” he said, “remember that she is a gorilla and not a human being. Gorillas have their own etiquette. Don’t speak loudly or make any sudden movements until she gets used to you. If you smile, don’t show your teeth, because bared teeth are a threat. And keep your eyes downcast, because direct stares from strangers are considered hostile. Don’t stand too close to me or touch me, be-cause she’s very jealous. If you talk to her, don’t lie. Even though she uses sign language, she understands most human speech, and we usually just talk to her. She can tell when you’re lying and she doesn’t like it.”

“She doesn’t like it?”

“She dismisses you, won’t talk to you, and gets bitchy.”

“Anything else?”

“No, it should be okay.” He smiled reassuringly. “We have this traditional greeting, even though she’s getting a little big for it.” He opened the door, braced himself, and said, “Good morning, Amy.”

A huge black shape came leaping out through the open door into his arms. Elliot staggered back under the impact. Ross was astonished by the size of the animal. She had been imagining something smaller and cuter. Amy was as large as an adult human female.

Amy kissed Elliot on the cheek with her large lips, her black head seeming enormous alongside his. Her breath steamed his glasses. Ross smelled a sweetish odor, and watched as he gently unwrapped her long arms from around his shoulders. “Amy happy this morning?” he asked.

Amy’s fingers moved quickly near her cheek, as if she were brushing away flies.

“Yes, I was late today,” Elliot said.

She moved her fingers again, and Ross realized that Amy was signing. The speed was surprising; she had expected something much slower and more deliberate. She noticed that Amy’s eyes never left Elliot’s face. She was extraordinarily attentive, focusing on him with total animal watchfulness. She seethed to absorb everything, his posture, his expression, his tone of voice, as well as his words.

“I had to work,” Elliot said. She sighed again quickly, like human gestures of dismissal. “Yes, that’s right, people work.” He led Amy back into the trailer, and motioned for Karen Ross to follow. Inside the trailer, he said, “Amy, this is Dr. Ross. Say hello to Dr. Ross.”

Amy looked at Karen Ross suspiciously.

“Hello, Amy,” Karen Ross said, smiling at the floor. She felt a little foolish behaving this way, but Amy was large enough to frighten her.

Amy stared at Karen Ross for a moment, then walked away, across the trailer to her easel. She had been finger-painting, and now resumed this activity, ignoring them.

“What’s that mean?” Ross said. She distinctly felt she was being snubbed.

“We’ll see,” Elliot said.

After a few moments, Amy ambled back, walking on her knuckles. She went directly to Karen Ross, sniffed her crotch, and examined her minutely. She seemed particularly interested in Ross’s leather purse, which had a shiny brass clasp. Ross said later that “it was just like any cocktail party in Houston. I was being checked out by another woman. I had the feeling that any minute she was going to ask-me where I bought my clothes.”

That was not the outcome, however. Amy reached up and deliberately streaked globs of green finger paint on Ross’s skirt.

“I don’t think this is going too well,” Karen Ross said.

Elliot had watched the progress of this first meeting with more apprehension than he was willing to admit. Introducing new humans to Amy was often difficult, particularly if They were women.

Over the years, Elliot had come to recognize many distinctly “feminine” traits in Amy. She could be coy, she responded to flattery, she was preoccupied with her appearance, loved makeup, and was very fussy about the color of the sweaters she wore in the winter. She preferred men to women, and she was openly jealous of Elliot’s girl friends. He rarely brought them around to meet her, but sometimes in the morning she would sniff him for perfume, and she always commented if he had not changed his clothing overnight.

This situation might have been amusing if not for the fact that Amy made occasional unprovoked attacks on strange women. And an attack by Amy was never amusing.

Amy returned to the easel and signed, No like woman no like Amy no like go away away.

“Come on, Amy, be a good gorilla,” Peter said.

“What did she say?” Ross asked, going to the sink to wash the finger paint from her dress. Peter noticed that she did not squeal and shriek as many visitors did when they received an unfriendly greeting from Amy.

“She said she likes your dress,” he said.

Amy shot him a look, as she always did whenever Elliot mistranslated her. Amy not lie. Peter not lie.

“Be nice, Amy,” he said. “Karen is a nice human per-son.”

Amy grunted, and returned to her work, painting rapidly.

“What happens now?” Karen Ross said.

“Give her time.” He smiled reassuringly. “She needs time to adjust.”

He did not bother to explain that it was much worse with chimpanzees. Chimps threw feces at strangers, and even at workers they knew well; they sometimes attacked to establish dominance. Chimpanzees had a strong need to determine who was in charge. Fortunately, gorillas were much less formal in their dominance hierarchies, and less violent.

At that moment, Amy ripped the paper from the easel and shredded it noisily, flinging the pieces around the room.

“Is this part of the adjustment?” Karen Ross asked. She seemed more amused than frightened.

“Amy, cut it out,” Peter said, allowing his tone to convey irritation. “Amy. .

Amy sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by the paper. She tore it angrily and signed, This woman. This woman. It was classic displacement behavior. Whenever gorillas did not feel comfortable with direct aggression, they did something symbolic. In symbolic terms, she was now tearing Karen Ross apart.

And she was getting worked up, beginning what the Project Amy staff called “sequencing.” Just as human beings first became red-faced, and then tensed their bodies, and then shouted and threw things before they finally resorted to direct physical aggression, so gorillas passed through a stereotyped behavioral sequence on the way to physical aggression. Tearing up paper, or grass, would be followed by lateral crablike movements and grunts. Then she would slap the ground, making as much noise as possible.

And then Amy would charge, if he didn’t interrupt the sequence.

“Amy,” he said sternly. “Karen button woman.”

Amy stopped shredding. In her world, “button” was the acknowledged term for a person of high status.

Amy was extremely sensitive to individual moods and behavior, and she had no difficulty observing the staff and deciding who was superior to whom. But among strangers, Amy as a gorilla was utterly impervious to formal human status cues; the principal indicators—clothing, bearing, and speech—had no meaning to her.

As a young animal, she had inexplicably attacked policemen. After several biting episodes and threatened lawsuits,

they finally learned that Amy found police uniforms with their shiny buttons clown like and ridiculous; she assumed that anyone so foolishly dressed must be of inferior status and safe to attack. After they had taught her the concept of “button,” she treated anyone in uniform with deference.

Amy now stared at “button” Ross with new respect. Surrounded by the torn paper, she seemed suddenly embarrassed, as if she had made a social error. Without being told, she went and stood in the corner, facing the wall.

“What’s that about?” Ross said.

“She knows she’s been bad.”

“You make her stand in the corner, like a child? She didn’t mean any harm.” Before Elliot could warn against it, she went over to Amy. Amy stared steadfastly at the corner.

Ross unshouldered her purse and set it on the floor within Amy’s reach. Nothing happened for a moment. Then Amy took the purse, looked at Karen, then looked at Peter.

Peter said, “She’ll wreck whatever’s inside.”

“That’s all right.”

Amy immediately opened the brass clasp, and dumped the contents on the floor. She began sifting through, signing, Lipstick lipstick, Amy like Amy want lipstick want.

“She wants lipstick.”

Ross bent over and found it for her. Amy removed the cap and smeared a red circle on Karen’s face. She then smiled and grunted happily, and crossed the room to her mirror, which was mounted on the floor. She applied lipstick.

“I think we’re doing better,” Karen Ross said.

Across the room, Amy squatted by the mirror, happily making a mess of her face. She grinned at her smart image, then applied lipstick to her teeth. It seemed a good time to ask her the question. “Amy want take trip?” Peter said.

Amy loved trips, and regarded them as special treats. After an especially good day, Elliot often took her for a ride to a nearby drive-in, where she would have an orange drink, sucking it through the straw and enjoying the commotion she caused among the other people there. Lipstick and an offer of a trip was almost too much pleasure for one morning. She signed, Car trip?

“No, not in the car. A long trip. Many days.”

Leave house?

“Yes, leave house. Many days.”

This made her suspicious. The only times she had left the house for many days had been during hospitalizations for pneumonia and urinary-tract infections; they had not been pleasant trips. She signed, Where go trip?

“To the jungle, Amy.”

There was a long pause. At first he thought she had not understood, but she knew the word for jungle, and she should be able to put it all together. Amy signed thoughtfully to herself, repetitively as she always did when she was mulling things over: Jungle trip trip jungle go trip jungle go. She set aside her lipstick. She stared at the bits of paper on the floor, and then she began to pick them up and put them in the wastebasket.

“What does that mean?” Karen Ross asked.

“That means Amy wants to take a trip,” Peter Elliot said.

       6. Departure

THE HINGED NOSE OF THE BOEING 747 CARGO JET lay open like a jaw, exposing the cavernous, brightly lit interior. The plane had been flown up from Houston to San Francisco that afternoon; it was now nine o’clock at night, and puzzled workers were loading on the large aluminum travel cage, boxes of vitamin pills, a portable potty, and cartons of toys. One workman pulled out a Mickey Mouse drinking cup and stared at it, shaking his head.

Outside on the concrete, Elliot stood with Amy, who covered her ears against the whine of the jet engines. She signed to Peter, Birds noisy.

“We fly bird, Amy,” he said.

Amy had never flown before, and had never seen an airplane at close hand. We go car, she decided, looking at the plane.

“We can’t go by car. We fly.” Fly where fly? Amy signed.

“Fly jungle.”

This seemed to perplex her, but he did not want to explain further. Like all gorillas, Amy had an aversion to water, refusing to cross even small streams. He knew she would be distressed to hear that they would be flying over large bodies of water. Changing the subject, he suggested they board the plane and look around. As they climbed the sloping ramp up the nose, Amy signed, Where button woman?

He had not seen Ross. for the last five hours, and was surprised to discover that she was already on board, talking on a telephone mounted on a wall of the cargo hold, one hand cupped over her free ear to block the noise. Elliot overheard her say, “Well, Irving seems to think it’s enough.

Yes, we have four nine-oh-seven units and we are prepared to match and absorb. Two micro HUDs, that’s all. . . Yes, why not?” She finished the call, turned to Elliot and Amy.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Fine. I’ll show you around.” She led him deeper into the cargo hold, with Amy at his side. Elliot glanced back and saw the chauffeur coming up the ramp with a series of numbered metal boxes marked INTEC, INC. followed by serial numbers.

“This,” Karen Ross said, “is the main cargo hold.” It was filled with four-wheel-drive trucks, Land Cruisers, amphibious vehicles, inflatable boats, and racks of clothing, equipment, food—all tagged with computer codes, all loaded in modules. Ross explained that ERTS could outfit expeditions to any geographical and climatic condition in a matter of hours. She kept emphasizing the speed possible with computer assembly.

“Why the rush?” Elliot asked.

“It’s business,” Karen Ross said. “Four years ago, there were no companies like ERTS. Now there are nine around the world, and what they all sell is competitive advantage, meaning speed. Back in the sixties, a company—say, an oil company—might spend months or years investigating a possible site. But that’s no longer competitive; business decisions are made in weeks or days. The pace of everything has speeded up. We’re already looking to the nineteen-eighties, where we’ll provide answers in hours. Right now the average ERTS contract runs a little under three weeks, or five hundred hours. But by 1990 there will be ‘close of business’ data—an executive can call us in the morning for information anywhere in the world, and have a complete report transmitted by computer to his desk before close of business that evening, say ten to twelve hours.”

As they continued the tour, Elliot noticed that although the trucks and vehicles caught the eye first, much of the aircraft storage space was given over to aluminum modules marked “C3I.”

“That’s right,” Ross said. “Command-Control Communications and Intelligence. They’re micronic components, the most expensive budget item we carry. When we started outfitting expeditions, twelve percent of the cost went to electronics. Now it’s up to thirty-one percent, and climbing every year. It’s field communications, remote sensing, defense, and soon.”

She led them to the rear of the plane, where there was a modular living area, nicely furnished, with a large computer console, and bunks for sleeping.

Amy signed, Nice house.

‘‘Yes, it is nice.’’

They were introduced to Jensen, a young bearded geologist, and to Irving, who announced that he was the “triple B.” The two men were running some kind of probability study on the computer but they paused to shake hands with Amy, who regarded them gravely, and then turned her attention to the screen. Amy was captivated by the colorful screen images and bright LEDs, and kept trying to punch the keys herself. She signed, Amy play box.

“Not now, Amy,” Elliot said, and swatted her hands away.

Jensen asked, “Is she always this way?”

“I’m afraid so,” Elliot- said. “She likes computers. She’s worked around them ever since she was very young, and she thinks of them as her private property.” And then he added, “What’s a triple E?”

“Expedition electronic expert,” Irving said cheerfully. He was a short man with an impish quick smile. “Doing the best I can. We picked up some stuff from Intec, that’s about all. God knows what the Japanese and the Germans will throw at us.”

“Oh, damn, there she goes,” Jensen said, laughing as Amy pushed the keyboard.

Elliot said, “Amy, no!”

“It’s just a game. Probably not interesting to apes,” Jensen said. And he added, “She can’t hurt anything.”

Amy signed, Amy good gorilla, and pushed the keys on the computer again. She appeared relaxed, and Elliot was grateful for the distraction the computer provided. He was always amused by the sight of Amy’s heavy dark form before a computer console. She would touch her lower lip thoughtfully before pushing the keys, in what seemed a parody of human behavior.

Ross, practical as always, brought them back to mundane matters. “Will Amy sleep on one of the bunks?”

Elliot shook his head. “No. Gorillas expect to make a fresh bed each night. Give her some blankets, and she’ll twist them into a nest on the floor and sleep there.”

Ross nodded. “What about her vitamins and medications? Will she swallow pills?”

“Ordinarily you have to bribe her, or hide the pills in a piece of banana. She tends to gulp banana, without chewing it

“Without chewing.” Ross nodded as if that were important. “We have a standard issue,” she said. “I’ll see that she gets them.”

“She takes the same vitamins that people do, except that she’ll need lots of ascorbic acid.”

“We issue three thousand units a day. That’s enough? Good. And she’ll tolerate anti-malarials? We have to start them right away.”

“Generally speaking,” Elliot said, “she has the same reaction to medication as people.”

Ross nodded. “Will the cabin pressurization bother her? It’s set at five thousand feet.”

Elliot shook his head. “She’s a mountain gorilla, and they live at five thousand to nine thousand feet, so she’s actually altitude-adapted. But she’s acclimated to a moist climate and she dehydrates quickly; we’ll have to keep forcing fluids on her.”

“Can she use the head?”

“The seat’s probably too high for her,” Elliot said, “but I brought her potty.”

“She’ll use her potty?”

“Sure.”

“I have a new collar for her; will she wear it?”

“If you give it to her as a gift.”

As they reviewed other details of Amy’s requirements, Elliot realized that something had happened during the last  few hours, almost without his knowing it: Amy’s unpredictable, dream-driven neurotic behavior had fallen away. It was as if the earlier behavior was irrelevant; now that she was going on a trip, she was no longer moody and introspective, her interests were outgoing; she was once again a youthful female gorilla. He found himself wondering whether her dreams, her depression—finger paintings, everything—were a result of her confined laboratory environment for so many years. At first the laboratory had been agreeable, like a crib for young children. But perhaps in later years it pinched. Perhaps, he thought, Amy just needed a little excitement.

Excitement was in the air: as he talked with Ross, Elliot felt something remarkable was about to happen. This expedition with Amy was the first example of an event primate researchers had predicted for years—the Pearl thesis.

Frederick Pearl was a theoretical animal behaviorist. At a meeting of the American Ethnological Society in New York in 1972, he had said, “Now that primates have learned sign language, it is only a matter of time until someone takes an animal into the field to assist the study of wild animals of the same species. We can imagine language-skilled primates acting as interpreters or perhaps even as ambassadors for mankind, in contact with wild creatures.”

Pearl’s thesis attracted considerable attention, and funding from the U.S. Air Force, which had supported linguistic research since the l960s. According to one story, the Air Force had a secret project called CONTOUR, involving possible contact with alien life forms. The official military position was that UFOs were of natural origin—but the military was covering its bets. Should alien contact occur, linguistic fundamentals were obviously critically important. And taking primates into the field was seen as an example of contact with “alien intelligence”; hence the Air Force funding.

Pearl predicted that fieldwork would be undertaken before 1976, but in fact no one had yet done it. The reason was that on closer examination, no one could figure out quite what the advantages were—most language-using primates were as baffled by wild primates as human beings were. Some, like the chimpanzee Arthur, denied any association with their own kind, referring to them as “black things.” (Amy, who had been taken to the zoo to view other gorillas, recognized them but was haughty, calling them “stupid gorillas” once she found that when she signed to them, they did not reply.)

Such observations led another researcher, John Bates, to say in 1977 that “we are producing an educated animal elite which demonstrates the same snobbish aloofness that a Ph.D. shows toward a truck driver. . . . It is highly unlikely that the generation of language-using primates will be skillful ambassadors in the field. They are simply too disdainful.”

But the truth was that no one really knew what would happen when a primate was taken into the field. Because no one had done it: Amy would be the first.

At eleven o’clock, the ERTS cargo plane taxied down the runway at San Francisco International, lifted ponderously into the air, and headed east through the darkness toward

Africa.

DAY 3: TANGIER

June 15,1979

1. Ground Truth

PETER ELLIOT HAD KNOWN AMY SINCE INFANCY. He prided himself on his ability to predict her responses, although he had only known her in a laboratory setting. Now, as she was faced with new situations, her behavior surprised him.

Elliot had anticipated Amy would be terrified of the takeoff, and had prepared a syringe with Thoralen tranquilizer. But sedation proved unnecessary. Amy watched Jensen and Levine buckle their seat belts, and she immediately buckled herself in, too; she seemed to regard the procedure as an amusing, if simpleminded, game. And although her eyes widened when she heard the full mar of the engines, the human beings around her did not seem disturbed, and Amy imitated their bored indifference, raising her eyebrows and sighing at the tedium of it all.

Once airborne, however, Amy looked out the window and immediately panicked. She released her seat belt and scurried back and forth across the passenger compartment, moving from window to window, knocking people aside in whimpering terror while she signed, Where ground ground where ground? Outside, the ground was black and indistinct. Where ground? Elliot shot her with Thoralen and then began grooming her, sitting her down and plucking at her hair.

In the wild, primates devoted several hours each day to grooming one another, removing ticks and lice. Grooming behavior was important in ordering the group’s social dominance structure—there was a pattern by which animals groomed each other, and with what frequency. And, like back rubs for people, grooming seemed to have a soothing, calming effect. Within minutes, Amy had relaxed enough to notice that the others were drinking, and she promptly demanded a “green drop drink”—her term for a martini with an olive—and a cigarette. She was allowed this on special occasions such as departmental parties, and Elliot now gave her a drink and a cigarette.

But the excitement proved too much for her: an hour later, she was quietly looking out the window and signing Nice picture to herself when she vomited. She apologized abjectly, Amy sorry Amy mess Amy Amy sorry.

“It’s all right, Amy,” Elliot assured her, stroking the back of her head. Soon afterward, signing Amy sleep now, she twisted the blankets into a nest on the floor and went to sleep, snoring loudly through her broad nostrils. Lying next to her, Elliot thought, how do other gorillas get to sleep with this racket?

Elliot had his own reaction to the journey. When he had first met Karen Ross, he assumed she was an academic like himself. But this enormous airplane filled with computerized equipment, the acronymic complexity of the entire operation suggested that Earth Resources Technology had powerful resources behind it, perhaps even a military association.

Karen Ross laughed. “We’re much too organized to be military.” She then told him the background of the ERTS interest in Virunga. Like the Project Amy staff, Karen Ross had also stumbled upon the legend of the Lost City of Zinj. But she had drawn very different conclusions from the story.

During the last three hundred years, there had been several attempts to reach the lost city. In 1692, John Marley, an English adventurer, led an expedition of two hundred into the Congo; it was never heard from again. In 1744, a Dutch expedition went in; in 1804, another British party led by a Scottish aristocrat, Sir James Taggert, approached Virunga from the north, getting as far as the Rawana bend of the Ubangi River. He sent an advance party farther south, but it never returned.

In 1872, Stanley passed near the Virunga region but did not enter it; in 1899, a German expedition went in, losing more than half its party. A privately financed Italian expedition disappeared entirely in 1911. There had been no more recent searches for the Lost City of Zinj.

“So no one has ever found it,” Elliot said.

Ross shook her head. “I think several expeditions found the city,” she said. “But nobody ever got back out again.”

Such an outcome was not necessarily mysterious. The early days of African exploration were incredibly hazardous. Even carefully managed expeditions lost half of their party or more. Those who did not succumb to malaria, sleeping sickness, and blackwater fever faced rivers teeming with crocodiles and hippos, jungles with leopards and suspicious, cannibalistic natives. And, for all its luxuriant growth, the rain forest provided little edible food; a number of expeditions had starved to death.

“I began,” Ross said to Elliot, “with the idea that the city existed, after all. Assuming it existed, where would I find it?”

The Lost City of Zinj was associated with diamond mines, and diamonds were found with volcanoes. This led Ross to look along the Great Rift Valley—an enormous geological fault thirty miles wide, which sliced vertically up the eastern third of the continent for a distance of fifteen hundred miles. The Rift Valley was so huge that its existence was not recognized until the 1890s, when a geologist named Gregory noticed that the cliff walls thirty miles apart were composed of the same rocks. In modern terms the Great Rift was actually an abortive attempt to form an ocean, for the eastern third of the continent had begun splitting off from the rest of the African land mass two hundred million years ago; for some reason, it had stopped before the break was complete.

On a map the Great Rift depression was marked by two features: a series of thin vertical lakes—Malawi, Tanganyika, Kivu, Mobutu—and a series of volcanoes, including the only active volcanoes in Africa at Virunga. Three volcanoes in the Virunga chain were active: Mukenko, Mubuti, and Kanagarawi. They rose 11,000— 15,000 feet above the Rift Valley to the east, and the Congo Basin to the west. Thus Virunga seemed a good place to look for diamonds. Her next step was to investigate the ground truth.

“What’s ground truth?” Peter asked.

“At ERTS, we deal mostly in remote sensing,” she explained. “Satellite photographs, aerial run-bys, radar side scans. We carry millions of remote images, but there’s no substitute for ground truth, the experience of a team actually on the site, finding out what’s there. I started with the preliminary expedition we sent in looking for gold. They found diamonds as well.” She punched buttons on the console, and the screen images changed, glowing with dozens of flashing pinpoints of light.

“This shows the placer deposit locations in streambeds near Virunga. You see the deposits form concentric semicircles leading back to the volcanoes. The obvious conclusion is that diamonds were eroded from the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes, and washed down the streams to their present locations.”

“So you sent in a party to look for the source?”

“Yes.” She pointed to the screen. “But don’t be deceived by what you see here. This satellite image covers fifty thousand square kilometers of jungle. Most of it has never been seen by white men. It’s hard terrain, with visibility limited to a few meters in any direction. An expedition could search that area for years, passing within two hundred meters of the city and failing to see it. So I needed to narrow the search sector. I decided to see if I could find the city.”

“Find the city? From satellite pictures?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I found it.”

The rain forests of the world had traditionally frustrated remote-sensing technology. The great jungle trees spread an impenetrable canopy of vegetation, concealing whatever lay beneath. In aerial or satellite pictures, the Congo rain forest appeared as a vast, undulating carpet of featureless and monotonous green. Even large features, rivers fifty or a hundred feet wide, were hidden beneath this leafy canopy, invisible from the air.

So it seemed unlikely she would find any evidence for a lost city in aerial photographs. But Ross had a different idea: she would utilize the very vegetation that obscured her vision of the ground. -

The study of vegetation was common in temperate regions, where the foliage underwent seasonal changes. But the equatorial rain forest was unchanging: winter or summer, the foliage remained the same. Ross turned her attention to another aspect, the differences in vegetation albedo.

Albedo was technically defined as the ratio of electromagnetic energy reflected by a surface to the amount of energy incident upon it. In terms of the visible spectrum, it was a measure of how “shiny” a surface was. A river had a high albedo, since water reflected most of the sunlight striking it. Vegetation absorbed light, and therefore had a low albedo. Starting in 1977, ERTS developed computer programs which measured albedo precisely, making very fine distinctions.

Ross asked herself the question: If there was a lost city, what signature might appear in the vegetation? There was an obvious answer: late secondary jungle.

The untouched or virgin rain forest was called primary jungle. Primary jungle was what most people thought of when they thought of rain forests: huge hardwood trees, mahogany and teak and ebony, and underneath a lower layer of ferns and palms, clinging to the ground. Primary jungle was dark and forbidding, but actually easy to move through. However, if the primary jungle was cleared by man and later abandoned, an entirely different secondary growth took over. The dominant plants were softwoods and fast-growing trees, bamboo and thorny tearing vines, which formed a dense and impenetrable barrier.

But Ross was not concerned about any aspect of the jungle except its albedo. Because the secondary plants were different, secondary jungle had a different albedo from primary jungle. And it could be graded by age: unlike the hardwood trees of primary jungle, which lived hundreds of years, the softwoods of secondary jungle lived only twenty years or so. Thus as time went on, the secondary jungle was replaced by another form of secondary jungle, and later by still another form.

By checking regions where late secondary jungle was generally found—such as the banks of large rivers, where innumerable human settlements had been cleared and abandoned—Ross confirmed that the ERTS computers could, indeed, measure the necessary small differences in reflectivity.

She then instructed the ERTS scanners to search for albedo differences of .03 or less, with a unit signature size of a hundred meters or less, across the fifty thousand square kilometers of rain forest on the western slopes of the Virunga volcanoes. This job would occupy a team of fifty human aerial photographic analysts for thirty-one years. The computer scanned 129,000 satellite and aerial photographs in under nine hours.

And found her city.

In May, 1979, Ross had a computer image showing a very old secondary jungle pattern laid out in a geometric, gridlike form. The pattern was located 2 degrees north of the equator, longitude 3 degrees, on the western slopes of the active volcano Mukenko. The computer estimated the age of the secondary jungle at five hundred to eight hundred years.

“So you sent an expedition in?” Elliot said.

Ross nodded. “Three weeks ago, led by a South African named Kruger. The expedition confirmed the placer diamond deposits, went on to search for the origin, and found the ruins of the city.,,

“And then what happened?” Elliot asked.

He ran the videotape a second time.

Onscreen he saw black-and-white images of the camp, destroyed, smoldering. Several dead bodies with crushed skulls were visible. As they watched, a shadow moved over the dead bodies, and the camera zoomed back to show the outline of the lumbering shadow. Elliot agreed that it looked like the shadow of a gorilla, but he insisted, “Gorillas couldn’t do this. Gorillas are peaceful, vegetarian animals.”

They watched as the tape ran to the end. And then they reviewed her final computer-reconstituted image, which clearly showed the head of a male gorilla.

“That’s ground truth,” Ross said.

Elliot was not so sure. He reran the last three seconds of videotape a final time, staring at the gorilla head. The image was fleeting, leaving a ghostly trail, but something was wrong with it. He couldn’t quite identify what. Certainly this was atypical gorilla behavior, but there was something else. -

He pushed the freeze-frame button and stared at the frozen image. The face and the fur were both gray: unquestionably gray.

“Can we increase contrast?” he asked Ross. “This image is washed out.”

“I don’t know,” Ross said, touching the controls. “I think this is a pretty good image.” She was unable to darken it.

“It’s very gray,” he said. “Gorillas are much darker.”

“Well, this contrast range is correct for video.”

Elliot was sure this creature was too light to be a mountain gorilla. Either they were seeing a new race of animal, or a new species. A new species of great ape, gray in color, aggressive in behavior, discovered in the eastern Congo.

He had come on this expedition to verify Amy’s dreams—a fascinating psychological insight—but now the stakes were suddenly much higher.

Ross said, “You don’t think this is a gorilla?”

“There are ways to test it,” he said. He stared at the screen, frowning, as the plane flew onward in the night.

2. B-8 Problems

“YOU WANT ME TO WHAT’?” TOM SEAMANS SAID, cradling the phone in his shoulder and rolling over to look at his bedside clock. It was 3 A.M.

“Go to the zoo,” Elliot repeated. His voice sounded garbled, as if coming from under water.

“Peter, where are you calling from?”

“We’re somewhere over the Atlantic now,” Elliot said. “On our way to Africa.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine,” Elliot said. “But I want you to go to the zoo first thing in the morning.”

“And do what?”

“Videotape the gorillas. Try to get them in movement. That’s very important for the discriminant function, that they be moving.”

“I’d better write this down,” Seamans said. Seamans handled the computer programming for the Project Amy staff, and he was accustomed to unusual requests, but not in the middle of the night. “What discriminant function?”

“While you’re at it, run any films we have in the library of gorillas—any gorillas, wild or in zoos or whatever. The more specimens the better, so long as they’re moving. And for a baseline, you’d better use chimps. Anything we have on chimps. Transfer it to tape and put it through the function.”

“What function?” Seamans yawned.

“The function you’re going to write,” Elliot said. “I want a multiple variable discriminant function based on total imagery—”

“You mean a pattern-recognition function?” Seamans had written pattern-recognition functions for Amy’s language use, enabling them to monitor her signing around the clock. Sea-mans was proud of that program; in its own way, it was highly inventive.

“However you structure it,” Elliot said. “I just want a function that’ll discriminate gorillas from other primates like chimps. A species-differentiating function.”

“Are you kidding?” Seamans said. “That’s a B-8 problem.” In the developing field of pattern-recognition computer programs, so-called B-8 problems were the most difficult; whole teams of researchers had devoted years to trying to teach computers the difference between “B” and “8’ ‘—precisely because the difference was so obvious. But what was obvious to the human eye was not obvious to the computer scanner. The scanner had to be told, and the specific instructions turned out to be far more difficult than anyone anticipated, particularly for handwritten characters.

Now Elliot wanted a program that would distinguish between similar visual images of gorillas and chimps. Seamans could not help asking, “Why? It’s pretty obvious. A gorilla is a gorilla, and a chimp is a chimp.”

“Just do it,” Elliot said.

“Can I use size?” On the basis of size alone, gorillas and chimps could be accurately distinguished. But visual functions could not determine size unless the distance from the recording instrument to the subject image was known, as well as the focal length of the recording lens.

“No, you can’t use size,” Elliot said. “Element morphology only.”

Seamans sighed. “Thanks a lot. What resolution?”

“I need ninety-five-percent confidence limits on species assignment, to be based on less than three seconds of black-and-white scan imagery.”

Seamans frowned. Obviously, Elliot had three seconds of videotape imagery of some animal and he was not sure whether it was a gorilla or not. Elliot had seen enough gorillas over the years to know the difference: gorillas and chimps were utterly different animals in size, appearance, movement, and behavior. They were as different as intelligent oceanic mammals—say, porpoises and whales. In making such discriminations, the human eye was far superior to any computer program that could be devised. Yet Elliot apparently did not trust his eye. What was he thinking of?

“I’ll try,” Seamans said, “but it’s going to take a while. You don’t write that kind of program overnight.”

“I need it overnight, Tom,” Elliot said. “I’ll call you back in twenty-four hours.”

3. Inside the Coffin

IN ONE CORNER OF THE 747 LIVING MODULE WAS A sound-baffled fiberglass booth, with a hinged hood and a small CRT screen; it was called “the coffin” because of the claustrophobic feeling that came from working inside it. As the airplane crossed the mid-Atlantic, Ross stepped inside the coffin. She had a last look at Elliot and Amy—both asleep, both snoring loudly—and Jensen and Irving playing “submarine chase” on the computer console, as she lowered the hood.

Ross was tired, but she did not expect to get much sleep for the next two weeks, which was as long as she thought the expedition would last. Within fourteen days—336 hours— Ross’s team would either have beaten the Euro-Japanese consortium or she would have failed and the Zaire Virunga mineral exploration rights would be lost forever.

The race was already under way, and Karen Ross did not intend to lose it.

She punched Houston coordinates, including her own sender designation, and waited while the scrambler interlocked. From now on, there would be a signal delay of five seconds at both ends, because both she and Houston would be sending in coded burst transmissions to elude passive listeners.

The screen glowed: TRAVIS.

She typed back: R OS S. She picked up the telephone receiver.

“It’s a bitch,” Travis said, although it was not Travis’s voice, but a computer-generated flat audio signal, without expression.

“Tell me,” Ross said.

“The consortium’s rolling,” Travis’s surrogate voice said. “Details,” Ross said, and waited for the five-second delay. She could imagine Travis in the CCR in Houston, hearing her own computer-generated voice. That flat voice required a change in speech patterns; what was ordinarily conveyed by phrasing and emphasis had to be made explicit.

“They know you’re on your way,” Travis’s voice whined. “They are pushing their own schedule. The Germans are behind it—your friend Richter. I’m arranging a feeding in a matter of minutes. That’s the good news.”

“And the bad news?”

“The Congo has gone to hell in the last ten hours,” Travis said. “We have a nasty GPU.”

“Print,” she said.

On the screen, she saw printed GEOPOLITICAL UPDATE, followed by a dense paragraph. It read:

ZAIRE EMBASSY WASHINGTON STATES EASTERN BORDERS VIA RWANDA CLOSED / NO EXPLANATION / PRESUMPTION 101 AMIN TROOPS FLEEING TANZANIAN

INVASION UGANDA INTO EASTERN ZAIRE / CONSEQUENT DISRUPTION / BUT FACTS DIFFER / LOCAL TRIBES {KIGANI} ON RAMPAGE / REPORTED ATROCITIES AND CANNIBALISM ETC / FOREST—DWELLING PYGMIES UNRELIABLE / KILLING ALL VISITORS CONGO RAIN FOREST / ZAIRE GOVERNMENT DISPATCHED GENERAL MUGURU (AKA BUTCHER OF STAN— LEYVILLE) / PUT DOWN KIGANI REBELLION ‘AT ALL COSTS’ / SITUATION HIGHLY UNSTABLE / ONLY LEGAL ENTRY INTO ZAIRE NOW WEST THROUGH KINSHASA / YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN / ACQUISITION WHITE HUNTER

MUNRO NOW PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE WHATEVER COST / KEEP HIM FROM CONSORTIUM WILL PAY ANYTHING / YOUR SITUATION EXTREME DANGER / MUST HAVE MUNRO TO SURVIVE /

She stared at the screen. It was the worst possible news. She said, “Have you got a time course?”

EURO—JAPANESE CONSORTIUM NOW COMPRISES MORIKAWA (JAPAN) / GERLICH (GERMANY) / VOORSTER (AMSTERDAM) / UNFORTUNATELY HAVE RESOLVED

DIFFERENCES NOW IN COMPLETE ACCORD / MONITORING US CANNOT ANTICIPATE SECURE TRANSMISSIONS ANYTIME HENCEFORTH / ANTICIPATE ELECTRONIC

COUNTERMEASURES AND WARFARE TACTICS IN PURSUIT OF TWO—B GOAL / THEY WILL ENTER CONGO (RELIABLE SOURCE) WITHIN 48 HOURS NOW SEEKING MUNRO /

“When will they reach Tangier?” she asked.

“In six hours. You?”

“Seven hours. And Munro?”

“We don’t know about Munro,” Travis said. “Can you booby him?”

“Absolutely,” Ross said. “I’ll arrange the booby now. If Munro doesn’t see things our way, I promise you it’ll be seventy-two hours before he’s allowed out of the country.”

“What’ve you got?” Travis asked.

“Czech submachine guns. Found on the premises, with his prints on them, carefully applied. That should do it.”

“That should do it,” Travis agreed. “What about your passengers?” He was referring to Elliot and Amy.

“They’re fine,” Ross said. “They know nothing.”

“Keep it that way,” Travis said, and hung up.

4. Feeding Time

“IT’S FEEDING TIME,” TRAVIS CALLED CHEERFULLY. “Who’s at the trough?”

“We’ve got five tap dancers on Beta dataline,” Rogers said. Rogers was the electronic surveillance expert, the bug catcher.

“Anybody we know?”

“Know them all,” Rogers said, slightly annoyed. “Beta line is our main cross-trunk line in-house, so whoever wants to tap in to our system will naturally plug in there. You get more bits and pieces that way. Of course we aren’t using Beta anymore except for routine uncoded garbage—taxes and payroll, that stuff.”

“We have to arrange a feed,” Travis said. A feed meant putting false data out over a tapped line, to be picked up. It was a delicate operation. “You have the consortium on the line?”

“Sure. What do you want to feed them?”

“Coordinates for the lost city,” Travis said.

Rogers nodded, mopping his brow. He was a portly man who sweated profusely. “How good do you want it?”

“Damned good,” Travis said. “You won’t fool the Japanese with static.”

“You don’t want to give them the actual co-ords?”

“God, no. But I want them reasonably close. Say, within two hundred kilometers.”

“Can do,” Rogers said.

“Coded?” Travis said.

‘Of course. “

“You have a code they can break in twelve to fifteen hours?”

Rogers nodded. “We’ve got a dilly. Looks like hell, but then when you work it, it pops out. Got an internal weakness in concealed lettering frequency. At the other end, looks like we made a mistake, but it’s very breakable.”

“It can’t be too easy,” Travis warned.

“Oh, no, they’ll earn their yen. They’ll never suspect a feed. We ran it past the army and they came back all smiles, teaching us a lesson. Never knew it was a setup.”

“Okay,” Travis said, “put the data out, and let’s feed them. I want something that'll give them a sense of confidence for the next forty-eight hours or more—until they figure out that we’ve screwed them.”

“Delighted,” Rogers said, and he moved off to Beta terminal.

Travis sighed. The feeding would soon begin, and he hoped it would protect his team in the field—long enough for them to get to the diamonds first.

5. Dangerous Signatures

THE SOFT MURMUR OF VOICES WOKE HIM.

“How unequivocal is that signature?”

“Pretty damn unequivocal. Here’s the pissup, nine days ago, and it’s not even epicentered.”

“That’s cloud cover?”

“No, that’s not cloud cover, it’s too black. That’s ejecta from the signature.”

“Hell.”

Elliot opened his eyes to see dawn breaking as a thin red line against blue-black through the windows of the passenger compartment. His watch read 5:11—five in the morning, San Francisco time. He had slept only two hours since calling Seamans. He yawned and glanced down at Amy, curled up in her nest of blankets on the floor. Amy snored loudly. The other bunks were unoccupied.

He heard soft voices again, and looked toward the computer console. Jensen and Irving were staring at a screen and talking quietly. “Dangerous signature. We got a computer projection on that?”

“Coming. It’ll take a while. I asked for a five-year run-back, as well as the other pissups.”

Elliot climbed out of his cot and looked at the screen. “What’s pissups?” he said.

“PSOPs are prior significant orbital passes by the satellite,” Jensen explained. “They’re called pissups because we usually ask for them when we’re already pissing upwind. We’ve been looking at this volcanic signature here,” Jensen said, pointing to the screen. “It’s not too promising.”

“What volcanic signature?” Elliot asked.

They showed him the billowing plumes of smoke—dark green in artificial computer-generated colors—which belched from the mouth of Mukenko, one of the active volcanoes of the Virunga range. “Mukenko erupts on the average of once every three years,” Irving said. “The last eruption was March, 1977, but it looks like it’s gearing up for another full eruption in the next week or so. We’re waiting now for the probability assessment.”

“Does Ross know about this?”

They shrugged. “She knows, but she doesn’t seem worried. She got an urgent GPU—geopolitical update—from Houston about two hours ago, and she went directly into the cargo bay. Haven’t seen her since.”

Elliot went into the dimly lit cargo bay of the jet. The cargo bay was not insulated and it was chilly: the trucks had a thin frost on metal and glass, and his breath hissed from his mouth. He found Karen Ross working at a table under low pools of light. Her back was turned to him, but when he approached, she dropped what she was doing and turned to face him.