Fellowship of Fear

entire history of the world.”

Gideon breathed deeply again. He was tired. The site held deep meaning for his conception of man, and he had tried his best to convey it for thirty minutes. From the glazed, worn looks of the students, he had been successful.

“To sum it up then,” he said a little wearily, “what makes Torralba epochal in the history of mankind is that here, for the first time, a project was undertaken that required two, or maybe even three family groups of twenty or thirty individuals to cooperate—to trust each other, to take risks. It was the beginning of everything—language, mathematics, laws. Here we took that first tentative step from caring only for blood kin toward being members of a society of man.”

The beginnings of a breeze ruffled their hair and made a soft sound in the dry brush on the hill. For perhaps twenty seconds, a respectful silence endured. Gideon’s words echoed in his own mind, as he knew they did in the minds of his students. Two or three of them bent toward the gravelly ground and contemplatively picked at embedded fragments with their fingers. Gideon knew exactly what they were wondering: Is this stone right here in my hand one of the rocks they threw at the elephants so long ago? Has it lain here undisturbed for three thousand centuries, until I, here and now, picked it up? Was the last person to touch it a naked, savage ape-man?

It was precisely the kind of near-mystic musing that had first attracted Gideon to anthropology, and it still sent chills down his spine.

The mood was broken by one of the less receptive students, a glib, bearded civilian from the personnel office.

“A couple of questions, Dr. Oliver.” From his tone, Gideon knew they would be arguments, not questions. He steeled himself. “One, from what you say, was this the start of civilization, or wasn’t it really the start of our rape of the environment? Just what do we mean by ‘civilization’?—The ability to kill animals by the hundreds?”

Gideon glowered at him, to no effect.

“And I keep wondering about the anthropologist’s usage of ‘man’ and ‘mankind.” Shouldn’t it be ’people‘ and ’personkind‘? Were there only cavemen? Weren’t there any cavewomen?“ He looked quickly around the circle for approval but got only bleak stares.

Gideon was half-heartedly putting together his response when one of the women, a uniformed lieutenant down on her knees in the dirt, saved him.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dennis, I don’t want to deal with that crap now.”

There were several muttered “Right on’s.” Mentally, Gideon applauded. He couldn’t have said it better. Dennis opened his mouth to speak, but the lieutenant cut him off.

“Dr. Oliver, what kinds of things would we have seen in the museum if we’d gotten in?”

“I’m not really sure, Donna,” Gideon said. “Possibly, some of the elephant bones in situ. There wouldn’t be any human bones, because none were found. Probably some of the stone tools from the site. Maybe some spear fragments; the oldest known weapons in the world were found here, you know.”

“Now, you see, that’s my point,” said Dennis, warming up for a speech. Again he was interrupted, this time by a shout from a student who had wandered over to the squat building.

“Hey, the museum’s unlocked!”

With the others, Gideon walked over to the structure. When they had first arrived, several of the men had stood on each other’s shoulders to peer through the high windows into the dark interior, but no one had thought of trying the door. Now Gideon could see that there was no padlock on the rusty hasp. The student who had called out had pushed the green metal door open an inch or two and was looking at Gideon for approval to open it all the way.

Instinctively law-abiding, Gideon hesitated for a moment, but only for a moment. This was Torralba, and he might never come this way again. Besides, the incident with the old caretaker had brought out his refractory side. He nodded, and the student pushed the door farther open.

“Something’s blocking it,” the student said, leaning his body against it. Suddenly, he stiffened and jumped back. “Hey, there’s a guy in there!”

The door remained about three-quarters open. Spotlighted in the shaft of soft sunlight that streamed through it, a body lay on its left side on the earthen floor, its back toward the doorway. Its legs were bent at the knees so that the feet prevented the door from opening completely. It was a dark-haired man wearing a tan windbreaker. Where his right ear should have been was a hideous mess of torn flesh and sinew. A great, red-brown stain glistened dully on the jacket’s back and had discolored the pale earth around the man’s shoulders and head.

Two of the students, a man and a woman, dropped to the ground and put their heads between their knees. The others stared in dumb, greedy shock. Gideon’s courage failed him. He felt an overpowering sense of onrushing doom, an urge to turn and run, to leave undisturbed whatever lay within.

“Well, let’s see what this is about,” he heard himself saying quietly.

The students wordlessly parted for him. At the entrance he was caught by a terrific smell of blood, a slaughterhouse stench. He steadied himself momentarily with a hand on each side of the doorway, closed his eyes, and willed himself not to be sick. The warm perspiration on his body had turned cold; an icy globule ran freezing from his armpit down his side. He forced himself to breathe in the fetid atmosphere. Then he stepped over the body, carefully avoiding the blood, and turned firmly to look at the man’s face.

It wasn’t John.

Until then, he hadn’t even realized what the irrational fear had been, but now the flood of relief dropped him to his knees, heedless of the blood and the gaping students. He closed his eyes again and thanked the ancient primitive gods that had hovered there since mankind’s dawn.

But behind his lowered eyelids a flicker of recognition sprang up, an uneasy memory…

To his mind came a long-forgotten anecdote of Sartre’s in Being and Nothingness: You are late for an appointment with your friend Pierre in a cafe. You are not sure if he has waited for you. As you come in, you quickly scan all the customers in the crowded room, and you see that he is not there. But what exactly have you seen? Would you know any of the hundred customers if you were to see them again? No. You have not really seen them. You know they are not Pierres, that is all. Only when you have given up the search for Pierre will