19
The Jungle
Deepest, Darkest Africa
1940 C.E.
Jay Gridley, dressed only in a loincloth with a sheath knife strapped to his waist, swung through the trees on a thick and flexible vine. As the hot jungle air rushed past him, he did the yell:
“Uhhh-ahhh-uhhh-ahhh-uhhh-ahhh-uhhh!”
He grinned. He had gotten pretty good at the ape-man’s attention-getting cry. He had watched a lot of Tarzan movies growing up, and he had practiced the yell made famous by Johnny Weissmuller. Yeah, there had been other Tarzan actors, before and after, some good, some terrible, but as far as Jay was concerned, there was only one Tarzan—just as there was only one James Bond, Sean Connery. . . .
He reached a fat tree limb at the end of his swing and let go of the vine. He thought about doing the yell again, but decided that wasn’t necessary. The denizens of the jungle knew that Jay of the Apes was here, no question about that.
As he did for most his scenarios, Jay had blended fact with fiction into what he thought was a seamless whole. The yell, for instance. There were several stories on the genesis of it. Weissmuller’s version had it that he had come up with the cry based on being able to yodel as a boy. Pure fiction, that. Johnny Sheffield, who played “Boy” starting in 1939, remembered that a guy from the sound department hit a note on a piano and taped his voice, then fiddled with it. The truth was, the cry—the original MGM version—had been put together by Douglas Shearer, a technician who taped a shout, probably Weissmuller’s, though the verified identity was forever lost to anonymity, enhanced it using the crude electronics of the day—this was, after all, in the 1940s—spliced it, and then ran it backward. Since the second half of the yell was the reverse of the first part—like a wordless palindrome—it sounded the same from either direction.
Later, when the movies moved from MGM to RKO, Weissmuller did develop his own yell and actually did it on-screen. It didn’t sound the same, and although some preferred it to the original, Jay had always liked the MGM version. He got pretty good at, well, aping it—if you were going to swing through the trees, you had to sound right. . . .
But enough about that, Jay. There were evil hunters in the bush, and he needed to track them down and find out exactly where they were headed. He grabbed another vine, conveniently hanging there, and leaped into the air.
He wondered who had put all those vines in exactly the right spot. Did Cheetah get up every morning and go rig them? It would sure be bad if the ape-man landed on a branch and leaped into space and somebody had forgotten to leave a vine there for him. . . .
Oh, why not, he could do the yell one more time:
“Uhhh-ahhh-uhhh-ahhh-uhhh-ahhh-uhhh . . . !”
He was having way too much fun here. . . .
In due course, Jay achieved the jungle floor again. The spongy humus felt good under his bare feet. The evil hunters’ camp was not far, and he slipped through the trees with a practiced stealth.
One of the elements of his scenario was a lack of mosquitoes.
He’d always wondered about that—either feral jungle-men generally had a great natural chemical resistance to the things, or they would have looked like they had some kind of pox all the time, being bitten constantly. Jay also allowed some large, constrictor-type snakes, but didn’t populate the bush with itty-bitty poisonous ones. Stepping on an asp barefooted while slinking through the woods seemed like a good way to guarantee a bad afternoon:
“Uhhh-ahhh-uhhh—oh, crap, I’m snakebit—!”
Still, it was at least an approximation of the movie version of the jungle.
There was a huge boablike tree near the hunters’ camp, and Jay shinnied up it easily, perching on a broad branch that was three times his height above the ground. It was dusk and getting dark fast—night fell quickly in the tropics—and the hunters were gathered around a large fire, their native bearers hunched around a couple of smaller fires, roasting critters of some kind. In the gathering evening, Simba roared, and Jay was pleased to see the hunters and bearers tense against the lion’s cry. Although it was the female lion who did most of the hunting, the big-maned male was most impressive-looking and he did like to talk loudly.
In the twenty-first century, sitting on a big tree branch in the gathering night wouldn’t be much protection: There were infrared glasses, starlight scopes, heat detectors, FLIR, all kinds of ways to see a mostly naked man in a tree even in pitch darkness. But in the generic 1940s such toys weren’t available—and nobody thought to look up. That seemed fair to Jay, given that all he had were his wits and a knife, whereas the hunters had pistols, rifles, shotguns, and bearers to haul the hardware around.
The voices of the party—there were five of them—drifted up to Jay’s hiding place:
“And I’m telling you, I don’t believe in native curses.” That was from Stone, the leader. He was the most venal of them—just as soon shoot you as look at you, and he would do anything to get to the treasure. He had a pencil-thin moustache, and would be considered devilishly handsome in certain low circles.
“Yeah, but our bearers do.” That was Mackey, and his voice came out as a whine. He was mostly a coward, but he’d shoot you in the back if he had a chance. “Who is going to help us carry out all the treasure if the bearers melt away into the jungle?”
“We can all haul our own shares,” Stone said. “Or you can turn around and head back to Boombahbah now, if you are so worried.”
“Gentlemen, this isn’t getting us anywhere.” That was the Professor. He was the oldest, and most educated, of the lot. Gray-haired and -bearded, he was here for science, but he had allowed himself to be co-opted by the others. Not wise in the ways of the world, when it all came down the Professor would be stunned to find out how evil the men he traveled with actually were.
“The Professor is right.” That was Armstrong, the semi-good egg. A decent chap, as the Brits would say, and here primarily because of Josephine, the Professor’s daughter, who was beautiful and a bit on the wimpy side to be running around in the jungle in her khaki skirt and blouse.
“I keep thinking about that poor boy who was eaten by the crocodile.” And that was Jo, who really should be at home sewing or baking cookies or some such. The jungle was no place for a woman such as she. . . .
There was a shrug-it-off walla: “Yeah, too bad. Croc. Uh huh.”
In those old movies, the white men’s attitude toward the native bearers was something approximating who-gives-a-damn.
In the course of these things, only Jo was destined to make it out of the jungle alive, and then only with Jay’s help. They had seen lions and rhinos and crocs and gorillas and elephants, and would soon be meeting some pointy-teethed cannibals whose sole reason for existing seemed to be to guard the fabled Jewels of Alabara and to gobble up would-be thieves.
The native bearers, actually much smarter than the white hunters about such matters, had already figured out which way the wind was blowing out there in the dangerous woods, and would indeed scamper as soon as the hunters went to sleep.
Once they reached the cave, Mackey would get greedy trying to fill his pockets with treasure, and wind up sinking in quicksand. Armstrong would step in front of Jo and catch a thrown spear in the liver for his trouble. The Professor would go next, courtesy of a blowgun dart. Stone would empty his revolver into the charging cannibals, and last be seen quaking in a closing circle of the lean and hungry locals moving in for dinner. And Jo would be rescued by Jay of the Jungle, as the roof of the cave collapsed, burying the hidden treasure forever.
Jo would learn to like tree houses, chimpanzees, and swimming in the pool naked with Jay, only it would never get that far.
Jay smiled. It was all so . . . simple. Ah, those were the days, when nobody asked the hard questions, and the bad guys got their just deserts. . . .
What Jay was looking for was a link from the dead terrorist to his live friends. A hoard of jewels was as good a metaphor as any.
How had such a king’s ransom of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and assorted gold chalices and the like come to be in a mountain cave in the middle of the unnamed African country’s deepest, darkest jungle? Bother that. There never had been any civilization here higher than daub-and-wattle huts and subsistence natives—the Aztecs and Mayans had been in South America. The gems were all polished and set, requiring expert jewelers and gold workers, none of which had ever existed here. And why would people capable of producing such a hoard of priceless baubles haul it fifty miles through the deepest, darkest, animal-infested, malarial jungle to stash it in a cave anyhow?
Because the screenwriter willed it so, Jay knew. No other real reason, despite whatever throwaways the writer would toss off about ancient civilizations and other such rot. Jay was just using the setup, he hadn’t created it. . . .
Jay grinned. Well, realism wasn’t exactly primary in a scenario wherein he swung through the trees yodeling, knocking down bad guys, and rescuing fair damsels. . . .
But back to the conversation. Jay was here to learn something, and eventually it would come out. Where exactly was the cave? He didn’t know that, but if he stayed with this group long enough, he would.
As the five sat around the fire, front-lit by the orange glow, with fitful sparks flying into the darkness, Jay of the Jungle sat on his branch, master of it all, listening.
In the night some unseen creature went, “Ooh-wow! Ooh-wow! Ooh-wow!”
Nice touch that, if he did say so himself . . .
“Jay?”
It took him a second to track. Here was a voice that didn’t belong—
Thorn. One of two people with overrides to reach into Jay’s VR world.
He would have to get back to the evil hunters later. If the boss was calling and willing to interrupt Jay while he was in VR? That meant it had to be important.
“End scenario,” Jay said.
The jungle faded away, leaving Jay in his office, wired in his suit.
Thorn stood in the doorway.
“ ’Sup, Boss?”
Thorn said, “I just had a wonderful discussion with General Hadden,” he began.
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah, you got that part right . . .”