in his doorway, like a two-dimensional figure jerked suddenly onstage by hidden pulleys. A vulture lit in front of the hut and stared at van Wijk. Mondaugen himself acquired motion; jumped down off the cart, moved toward the hut.
Van Wijk waved a bottle of homemade beer at him. 'I know,' he shouted across the parched earth between them, 'I know. I've been up all night with it. You think I don't have more to worry about?'
'My antennas,' Mondaugen cried.
'Your antennas, my Warmbad district,' the Boer said. He was half drunk. 'Do you know what happened yesterday? Get worried. Abraham Morris has crossed the Orange.'
Which, as had been intended, shook Mondaugen. He managed, 'Only Morris?'
'Six men, some women and children, rifles, stock. It isn't that. Morris isn't a man. He's a Messiah.'
Mondaugen's annoyance had given way all at once to fear; fear began to bud from his intestinal walls.
'They threatened to rip down your antennas, didn't they.'
But he'd done nothing ....
Van Wijk snorted. 'You contributed. You told me you'd listen for disturbances and record certain data. You didn't say you'd blast them out all over my bush country and become a disturbance yourself. The Bondelswaartz believe in ghosts, the sferics frighten them. Frightened, they're dangerous.'
Mondaugen admitted he'd been using an audio amplifier and loudspeaker. 'I fall asleep,' he explained. 'Different sorts come in at different times of day. I'm a one-man research team, I have to sleep sometime. The little loudspeaker is set up at the head of my cot, I've conditioned myself to awake instantaneously, so no more than the first few of any group are lost . . .'
'When you return to your station,' van Wijk cut in, 'those antennas will be down, and your equipment smashed. A moment' - as the young man turned, redfaced and snuffling - 'before you dash off screaming revenge, one word. Just one. An unpleasant word: rebellion.'
'Every time a Bondel talks back to you people, it's rebellion.' Mondaugen looked as if he might cry.
'Abraham Morris has joined forces by now with Jacobus Christian and Tim Beukes. They're trekking north. You saw for yourself that they'd heard about it already in your own neighborhood. It wouldn't surprise me if every Bondelswaartz in the district were under arms within the week. Not to mention a number of homicidally-disposed Veldschoendragers and Witboois from up north. Witboois are always looking for a fight.' Inside the hut a telephone began to ring. Van Wijk saw the look on Mondaugen's face. 'Yes,' he said. 'Wait here, it may be interesting news.' He vanished inside. From a nearby hut came the sound of a Bondelswaartz pennywhistle, insubstantial as wind, monotonous as sunlight in a dry season. Mondaugen listened as if it had something to say to him. It didn't.
Van Wijk appeared in the doorway. 'Now listen to me, younker, if I were you I would go to Warmbad and stay there until this blows over.'
'What's happened.'
'That was the location superintendent at Guruchas. Apparently they caught up with Morris, and a Sergeant van Niekerk tried an hour ago to get him to come in to Warmbad peacefully. Morris refused, van Niekerk placed his hand an Morris's shoulder in token of arrest. According to the Bondel version - which you may be sure has already spread to the Portuguese frontier - the Sergeant then proclaimed 'Die lood van die Goevernement sal nou op julle smelt.' The lead of the Government shall now melt upon you. Poetic, Wouldn't you say?
'The Bondels with Morris took it as a declaration of war. So the balloon's gone up, Mondaugen. Go to Warmbad, better yet, keep going and get safely across the Orange. That's my best advice.'
'No, no,' Mondaugen said, 'I am something of a coward, you know that. But tell me your second-best advice, because you see, there are my antennas.'
'You worry about your antennas as if they sprouted from your forehead. Go ahead. Return - if you have the courage, which I certainly don't - return up-country and tell them at Foppl's what you've heard here. Hole up in that fortress of his. If you want my own opinion, it will be a blood bath. You weren't here in 1904. But ask Foppl. He remembers. Tell him the days of von Trotha are back again.'
'You could have prevented this,' Mondaugen cried. 'Isn't that what you're all here for, to keep them happy? To remove any need for rebellion?'
Van Wijk exploded in a bitter fit of laughing. 'You seem,' he finally drawled, 'to be under certain delusions about the civil service. History, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history. He doesn't fight it, he tries to coexist with it.'
'Die lood van die Goevernement indeed. We are, perhaps, the lead weights of a fantastic clock, necessary to keep it in motion, to keep an ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos. Very well! Let a few of them melt. Let the clock tell false time for a while. But the weights will be reforged, and rehung, and if there doesn't happen to be one there in the shape or name of Willem van Wijk to make it run right again, so much the worse for me.'
To this curious soliloquy Kurt Mondaugen flipped a desperate farewell salute, climbed into his Cape cart, and headed back up-country. The trip was uneventful. Once in a great while an oxcart would materialize out of the scrubland; or a jet-black kite would come to hang in the sky, studying something small and quick among the cactus and thorn trees. The sun was hot. Mondaugen leaked at every orifice; fell asleep, was jolted awake; once dreamed gunshots and human screams. He arrived at the recovery station in the afternoon, found the Bondel village nearby quiet and his equipment undisturbed. Working as quickly as he could, he dismantled the antennas and packed them and the receiving equipment in the Cape cart. Half a dozen Bondelswaartz stood around watching. By the time he was ready to leave the sun was nearly down. From time to time, at the edges of his field of vision, Mondaugen would see small scurrying bands of Bondels, seeming almost to merge with the twilight, moving in and out of the small settlement in every direction. Somewhere to the west a dogfight had started. As he tightened the last half-hitch, a pennywhistle began to play nearby, and it took him only a moment to realize that the player was imitating sferics. Bondels who were watching started to giggle. The laughter swelled, until it sounded like a jungleful of small exotic animals, fleeing some basic danger. But Mondaugen knew well enough who was fleeing what. The sun set, he climbed on the cart. No one said anything in farewell: all he heard at his back were the whistle and the laughter.
