The Annihilators (7 page)

I was a little startled by the request. “Nice how?”

She said rather breathlessly, “It’s terribly important, you know. You could spoil everything for us down there, you and your cameras and your magazine connections. I really didn’t want to let you come along—I guess you sensed that—but the institute insisted that we needed all the publicity we could get. What they meant, of course, was all the
good
publicity. But I saw you in that room when I was talking yesterday, sneering at me like the rest because I was willing to go down there with blinders on, disregarding all the human suffering just so I’d be allowed to dig up a few moldering old artifacts… But this is
significant
material we’re uncovering, Felton. I can’t begin to tell you how significant!”

“You could try,” I said.

She shook her head sharply, dismissing that. “Look,” she said, “look, I don’t mind a bit if you make fun of the stuffy professor-lady or take pictures that make her look ridiculous. You can even, if you want to be mean, use your cameras to make a… a cruel joke of a bunch of mostly older people who are childishly eager to absorb beautiful culture in romantic jungle surroundings. Go ahead, if you’re that kind of a man and want to do it. But please, please, don’t publish anything—please, no starving children with flies on their faces; no overbearing policemen with submachineguns pushing people around; no trigger-happy soldiers getting a big kick out of delaying every vehicle with an endless, pointless search, just showing off their petty authority; no sneak shots of arrogant officials accepting a little
mordida
to look the other way from the way they’re supposed to be looking. It’s there, of course it’s there, it’s always been there, and we can hope that someday maybe it won’t be, but don’t destroy an important—you can’t possibly understand how important!—scientific project for your damn social consciousness. Please.” She drew a long, shaky breath. “Oh, God! One secondhand soapbox, never driven over thirty-five, prefer cash.”

She was becoming quite human in her desperate concern, and I was liking her better all the time; but I said as if unimpressed: “What’s so important about a few rock carvings?”

She stared at me bleakly. “All right. I suppose you’ll go snooping around, and maybe you’re a good enough investigator to find out for yourself, now I’ve said this much. What do you know about Central American history?”

“Not much, yet,” I said. “You’re supposed to tell me.”

She gave that shake of her fine head that indicated annoyance at my stupidity. “You must have heard of the Mayas, and you must know that they died out very suddenly and mysteriously, leaving their magnificent cities to fall into ruins. Well, the Olmecs before them went through exactly the same gradual rise and the same abrupt fall. And now we’re discovering the same strange cycle among the even earlier Melmecs; but there’s a difference. We have some clues. Certain records have thrown a new light… Well, anyway, we hope that some-day, if we’re allowed to search long enough in this new area, if we handle the political situation very carefully and don’t get ourselves booted out, we’ll find the answer. We’re quite sure it’s there.”

“What answer?”

She didn’t reply directly. She said, “You’ll hear all kinds of theories. The latest, very comfortable indeed for those who can believe in it, is that none of these people
really
died out, there was no great catastrophe, no sudden exodus, no panicky flight from the great cities; there was only a gradual erosion of the old religious beliefs, a slow degeneration of the old social structures, that finally made the temples and palaces superfluous; and we’ve still got the direct descendants of the Mayas, at least, if not of their predecessors, living humbly and happily in their wattle-and-daub huts in the land of their glorious pyramid-building ancestors. Well, of course we have.
Everybody
didn’t die. But Archie and I don’t believe in the theory of gradual decline. We’re convinced, like many archaeologists before us, that these civilizations, and maybe others on this continent—maybe even elsewhere—met with sudden overwhelming disasters from which only a few pitiful stragglers escaped to form the basis of the present-day native populations of the area.”

When she stopped, I asked in my dumb way, “So what, to put it crudely? What makes all this of such earthshaking significance, doctor?”

She sighed. “You’re really an impossible man, aren’t you? I don’t know why I’m fool enough to try to…
Think
, damn you! Three very advanced and complex civilizations on this continent destroyed, each in a matter of a few years! Aren’t you a bit curious about what did it? Do you think it has absolutely no application to our own time, our own civilization? Do you feel that you live in a society that’s so beautifully safe and stable that nothing can touch it except, perhaps, the nuclear bomb? What if I should tell you that we’ve uncovered some very interesting, potentially very disturbing, religious records from the end of the Melmec reign foreshadowing the disaster to come?—”

I frowned. “You mean, they knew they were going to die?”

She said sharply, “The Sleeping Beauty wakes. Yes, Mr. Felton, they knew their doom, they knew what shape it would take. At least the priests did. We’re trying very hard to decipher the records now, but we need a great deal more material before we can even begin to read all the glyphs… No, that’s enough! And you’ll probably run right out and make a wonderful laugh-piece of it, won’t you? The crazy scientific dame who thinks our world is going to be destroyed tomorrow, as the Mayas’ world was destroyed yesterday, by little pink men from Canopus who’ve also visited America on a couple of earlier occasions with their little rayguns and signed their stellar names in beautiful Melmec hieroglyphs! Shades of Erich von Daniken, correct?” She licked her lips. “I don’t suppose it’s any use my asking you to keep this in confidence.”

“You might try,” I said.

“Please, Mr. Felton, will you keep… no, will you
try
to keep what I’ve told you off the record until we’ve had a chance to carry our research a little further? Just try, that’s all I ask?”

“Yes,” I said.

The two great snowcapped volcanic peaks—Popocatapetl, the smoking mountain, and Ixtlachuatl, the sleeping woman—slid past the plane windows, and the Anahuac plateau was below us, ringed by lower mountains to form the high Valley of Mexico in which the city of the same name was supposed to lie. I could only hope the rumors were correct, because there was absolutely nothing to be seen down there but a brown cloud of smog that made a bad day in Los Angeles look like a light morning mist by comparison. Trapped by the surrounding mountain ranges, the grungy pollution-cover filled the entire valley, so that the sprawling metropolis below us, the former city of Tenochtitlan, Montezuma’s pride and joy until Cortez, the spoiler, came along, was totally invisible from the air. As we descended through it bravely, civilization appeared with startling suddenness only a few thousand feet below.

Then we were on the ground. Our competent leader got us past customs and immigration in record time. Since she was busy seeing to our luggage and organizing our transportation, it was up to me to do the wheelchair bit, coming to the assistance of the son of a man I was probably going to kill—as soon as I determined that his country could spare him, since I wouldn’t want to distress the small ghost that haunted me.

A chartered bus took us away through the mad Mexican traffic. Please understand, I like people who drive as if they mean it; but after the timid road behavior of the American drivers with whom I’d been associating the past couple of days, the determined aggressiveness of the Mexicans, while theoretically admirable by my own driving standards, took a little getting used to, even on a bus.

But it’s a fine city, if you don’t mind viewing it through eyes smarting from the acrid air; and our hotel was located on the Reforma, the handsome main boulevard. More wheelchair-juggling got us inside the lobby, where rooms and luggage were dealt out with admirable efficiency under Frances Dillman’s stern supervision. I escorted Ricardo Jimenez as far as the fourth floor and worked the elevator doors for him although he protested that he was an old elevator hand by now and could manage by himself—it was just those lousy steps and stairs that people kept putting in his way that he found insurmountable. I didn’t risk offending his pride by insisting on taking him to his door and helping him inside. He made it clear that he’d rather do that on his own.

“See you tomorrow, Dick,” I said.

“Thanks much, fella,” he said. “
De nada
, as we say in our fluent Spanish.”

He grinned. “At least you know a couple of words, which is more than I can say.”

Standing over him, looking down at his fake blond hair, I reflected grimly that he’d never make it. He wasn’t much of an actor; and concealing your knowledge of the language to which you were born is one of the hardest cover jobs you can tackle. However, there is one harder: actually mangling that language clumsily without betraying how well you actually know it. He’d made the best choice available to him.

I said, “If you know
cerveza
and
baño
, you’ve got it made. The intake and outgo are all taken care of. Be good.”

“Hell, not much else I can do, is there?”

But he grinned again as he said it; he wasn’t complaining. Well, I’d never kidded myself that cowardice ran in that family. I took my camera bag from young Jimenez’s lap, where he’d been nursing it for me, nodded good-night to him, stepped back into the elevator, rode up one more floor, and headed for my own room. It was marked by my suitcase, which had already been brought up and set outside the door.

“Mr. Felton. Sam.”

It was the scientific tour-guide lady herself, in the open doorway of the adjoining room. She had dispensed with her suit jacket, but she still looked tall and smart in her moderately high-heeled shoes and her severely tailored blouse and skirt, which had survived the long journey from Chicago reasonably unmussed and unwrinkled. Any travel damage to her hairdo had been neatly repaired; and her firm mouth had been lightly touched with fresh lipstick, which made her less forbidding and more feminine.

“May I reward your labors with a drink, Sam?” she asked. “I happen to have a little Scotch, a luxury that’s practically unknown in this part of the world. It’ll cost you well over thirty dollars a bottle if you try to buy it.”

I laughed. “I hate to consume such a priceless commodity when my tastes are not terribly refined.” Then I saw the carefully lipsticked mouth tighten a bit at the hint of rejection. There was no need to hurt her feelings, and I hadn’t really looked forward to having a lonely drink in the bar or, as an alternative, discussing the finer aspects of Central American archaeology, which I hadn’t yet had time to read up on, with other members of the tour who happened to have gravitated there. I said quickly, “Sure, I’d love a drink. Just let me shove this ten-ton photographic outfit, and my suitcase, into my room, and make a quick inspection of the facilities. I’ll be right back.”

When I returned, the door to her room was ajar and her voice said, “Come in and tell me how you like this… Oh, close it, unless you’re afraid of being compromised. I’d rather not have any of the others wandering in casually. I’ve had enough of playing the jolly housemother for the day. Being a managing woman is kind of a strain.” She turned, holding out a glass. “Taste that and see if it’s to your liking.”

“Satisfactory,” I reported. After a moment, I said, “You’re very good at it.”

She didn’t answer at once. She moved to the windows and looked out. It was dark now and the lights of the city were spread out below, with endless streams of cars moving both ways along the Reforma. Frances Dillman turned abruptly and pulled the cord that closed the drapes. She went back to pick up the drink she’d made for herself, and gestured to me to sit down in one of the big chairs in the corner. She took the other.

“Good at it?” she murmured. “Being a managing woman, you mean? Well, I’ve had lots of practice, Sam. My husband is, well, kind of a vague genius type. You know, the kind who forgets where he put his glasses when they’re right on his nose. Somebody’s got to keep things organized around the place. But thanks for the compliment. And thank you for watching over Dick Anderson for me. When you start working with your cameras, I’ll see if I can’t recruit some of the less decrepit male members of the group to help him around so you can get on with your job.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said! “In the meantime, it’s not really much trouble, and he’s a pleasant enough guy.”

“Yes, it’s too bad, isn’t it, a nice young man like that.”

I grinned at her, so superior and condescending about her half-dozen years’—maybe—advantage over Ricardo Jimenez.

“Yes, grandma,” I said.

It startled her. It was the first really personal thing that had been said between us. We’d conversed politely as scientist and photojournalist, as efficient tour director and helpful client; but we’d said absolutely nothing as person to person or man to woman, as Samuel Felton to Frances Ransome Dillman or vice versa.

Now she glanced at me with sudden awareness in her eyes, as if realizing abruptly that she, a married woman with a reputation to cherish, a career to protect, and the responsibilities of this tour to consider, was actually entertaining in her hotel room a lone male who was not her husband. She was also, her eyes said, becoming very much aware of the fact that she was not really old enough to refer to Dick Anderson as a nice young man; and that I, while no chicken, wasn’t exactly in the final, safe stages of senility, either.

In fact, her eyes said, there was absolutely no excuse for the two of us to be having a cozy drink in her room like this, alone and with the door closed, even if the Victorian niceties were not always scrupulously observed, not even by perfectly decent and respectable people of the opposite gender, these relaxed modern days. Her eyes said that she couldn’t understand how she, of all people, could possibly have got herself into such an awkward predicament and she hoped to God I wouldn’t embarrass both of us by misconstruing the situation.