'Wait a minute,' Dr. Bedoian said. 'This is my patient'.
'Is he sick?'
'No.'
'Then he is not your patient. And do not talk.'
Pan Satyrus reached out and took the doctor's hand, gently, in his own big one. He clung to it as though he were frightened, but how could he be, a big chimpanzee who had flown faster than light?
The cars rolled on, the siren moaning monotonously.
Eventually the little motorcade left the main highway, and followed a paved road off into non-coastal Florida, a land of sandhills and swamps and small, muggy lakes, cattle and poor farms and the rich mucklands of the commercial tomato men.
Pan Satyrus looked out at the green and red globes on the plants, and said, 'I am getting hungry.'
The security man glowered.
Dr. Bedoian said, 'He requires several meals a day.'
'That's right,' Pan said. 'Because I'm a vegetarian. Even the legumes Jack the concentration of energy of the animal proteins.'
The security man looked frustrated. 'You're not supposed to talk,' he said.
Dr. Bedoian said, 'Pan, you have read the strangest things.'
'I have been tended by some very strange people. Night watchmen in the Primate House, or in an animal laboratory, are very often studying to be something else. Better, you men would say. And then, when I've been ill, I've been nursed by medical students.'
'Please stop talking,' the security man said.
'Not until I am fed,' Pan Satyrus answered. 'Talking takes my mind off my stomach.'
'Well be — where we're going — in half an hour.'
Then I shall talk for half an hour.'
The security man said, 'Oh, all right. What can I do about it?'
'Shoot a capsule into me,' Pan Satyrus said. 'Queer. Yesterday I was in a capsule, today a capsule may be in me. Dr. Bedoian, your language lacks definition.'
'I am a doctor, not a linguist. And call me Aram. It makes me feel comforted in a world that is about to go bleak and grim. Couldn't you have picked some other time to be subversive?'
Pan Satyrus said, 'You have handled chimpanzees before. At a certain age don't they all become difficult, no, impossible to handle? No, not impossible; positively perverse. Maybe I'm reaching that age.'
'Oh, lay off,' Dr. Bedoian said.
'Alone in a friendless world. Do you think I could join the FBI?'
Both the men in the front seat chuckled. 'You have to have a law degree,' the driver said, over his shoulder.
'You had to go to law school to be a chauffeur to an ape?' Pan Satyrus asked.
'Sometimes I do other things,' the driver said.
'We're not supposed to talk, or let them talk,' his companion said.
'I could always get a job in a filling station,' the driver said.
Dr. Bedoian sighed. 'There's something about you, Pan. You make friends easier than anyone I ever met.'
'Everybody loves chimpanzees,' Pan Satyrus said, 'Chimpanzees, however, do not love everyone. That's the trouble with the human world. Everybody goes around trying to make everybody else love him. When a chimpanzee comes along, people are refreshed.'
The senior man in the front seat spoke up. 'By God, you're right. When I pinch anybody, nine times out of ten he'd never get convicted if he didn't talk. But he wants to make me like him. He has to tell me why he did it, so I'll forgive him. So I'll like him. And he can't tell why he did it without saying he did it, so I nail him. What's wrong with people?'
'Not completely evoluted,' Pan Satyrus said. 'There's a theory called teleology, which maintains that evolution has a purpose, and when the ideal being is created, evolution will cease. The chimpanzee? I don't know too much about teleology, as the keeper who had the book got bored and never looked at it after the first night, and then only for a few minutes.'
'Chimps are not completely independent,' Dr. Bedoian said. 'They live a group fife, they need love to be happy.'
'We were talking about men, not chimps,' Pan Satyrus said with dignity.
The driver laughed again, and then sat up straighter in his seat and turned the car off the secondary road they had been travelling, onto a dirt, or tertiary road that wound between hummocks and through patches of discouraged-looking palmettos.
'Dr. Bedoian, you should have taught me to eat an animal diet,' Pan said.
Dr. Bedoian said nothing.
The car bumped along. Occasionally it would pass a raggedy-looking man in blue jeans and a straw hat. They would have been more convincingly bucolic if the straw hats had not all been of the same type and degree of wear. Still, a super straw hat salesman might have passed through there once, about four years before, and never returned.
'I shall refuse to be questioned if you aren't present,' Pan Satyrus said.
Dr. Bedoian said nothing.
'Aram,' Pan Satyrus asked, 'what have I done to make you angry?'
'Who can live without love, who needs no friends?' Dr. Bedoian asked. 'I was just trying you out. After all, I am a scientist.'
Ahead of them a woven wire gate was marked with a big sign: pumping station, and the name of a natural gas company. But there were no pipelines anywhere around there.
A uniformed man, carrying a rifle, opened the gate, and the three cars bumped through and fined up alongside each other. Some more men with rifles came out, and the passengers disembarked, each car also disgorging its pair of security men.
Mr. MacMahon appeared from somewhere, and took charge. The terms in which he did it were ominous: 'Take all four of the prisoners into the office together. They are not to talk.'
From the outside the building resembled a corrugated iron shed for the protection of oil drums or pumping machinery. Inside, it was every government office in the country; waist high walls for the lower officers, ceiling high walls for their superiors, two bull pens full of desks for their inferiors.
Mr. MacMahon led the four culprits — prisoners-guests — to what any bureaucrat would have recognized as the most important of the offices.
Inside, a civil-service faced woman was typing. She did not look up as they went through to the inner office, which was marked, simply, private.
There was a huge desk in the office. Three men sat behind it. Though they wore their shirts and flowered ties and pleated slacks, at least two of them had the unmistakable look of military men in what used to be called mufti.
The one in the center had a closely cropped mustache, a deep suntan, and a jaw that rivalled Pan Satyrus'. He said, 'Just line the people up, MacMahon, and leave us alone.'
MacMahon said, 'Sir, as a matter of physical security—'
'We've got two able bodied Navy men here, if we need them.'
MacMahon looked unconvinced but he went out.
Pan said, 'My name is Satyrus, sir. And yours?'
'You can call me Mr. Armstrong. And your name is Mem, a chimpanzee.'
'Quite so, sir, but I do not care for the name of Mem.'
Mr. Armstrong stretched his arms up above his head, then brought them down and caressed Ms shoulders with strong fingertips. 'This damned air conditioning,' he said. 'Why, Mem, I do not care what you care for. To me, you are just an ape who is trying to make a monkey out of the United States.' He let his stern glance rake the two sailors and the doctor.
'That's pretty good,' Pan Satyrus said. 'Make a note of it, Happy. Radioman Bronstein is my secretary,' he
