A Feast Unknown

it-shit-not-peanut-butter-reality, Doc may be right about the causes and cure of criminals.”

Simmons looked as if he were grunting. He said, “Maybe. And maybe Doc was getting his kicks ... well, I shouldn’t say that, wouldn’t, if it wasn’t for his fu

They were silent for a while. Simmons puffed on his cigar. Rivers lit a long cigarette in a long cigarette holder. After a while, Simmons pulled some rectangles—photographs, I presumed—from the pocket of his bush jacket. He held them up so that the firelight illuminated them.

He said, “Looka the whang on that wild man! Did you ever see such a prick on a white man?”

Rivers took one of the photos and studied it. “My tool is longer,” he said. “Used to be, anyway. Eight inches. But it’s ski

“The son of a bitch is queer,” Simmons said. “I was looking through the glasses when he got up after breaking that lion’s neck. He had a hard-on you wouldn’t believe outside a zoo. And he was coming like a

Texas oil well.”

“Yes, I know,” Rivers said. “My choppers about dropped out. I saw Doc once, just once, and he’s the only man I ever saw, black or white, with a dong as big as that Englishman’s. In fact, I’ll swear his was even thicker and longer.”

“You saw Doc’s cock?” Simmons said. “When the hell was that?”

“... adventure of the Tsar of ...” Rivers said. “You remember, Doc and I’d been a long time hiding ... had to piss ... my eyes about flew the coop, believe me.”

Simmons looked around uneasily. “Maybe we shouldn’t be talking like this. Doc might ...”

“You think he hasn’t heard us a million times before? He knows how curious we’ve been. Personally, I think he’s been listening to us for years. But what we said never seemed to bother him. You know what a button-down lip he’s got. And he’s the most self-controlled man in the world; he couldn’t admit that anything we said would stick in his craw. And maybe it doesn’t. He knows he’s the superman’s superman!”

“After what I seen today, I ain’t so sure,” Simmons said. “I’ve never seen anything like it! But I can understand now why Doc is so hot to tangle with him. He wants to test his mettle on somebody who looks as if he could give him a hard time!”

The little man said, as if he hadn’t heard Simmons, “You know, I used to put it out of my mind, or tell myself that Doc was just keeping his private life entirely to himself. But he never lied to us, as far as I know. And he always said he led too dangerous a life and was too busy and always off on some quest or other. He couldn’t afford to get married; it made him too vulnerable. That’s understandable. But he went further. He said he didn’t want to get involved with any woman because it wouldn’t be fair to waste her time. That’s understandable. But then he claimed he had nothing at all to do with women. Nothing at all!

Now, didn’t you ever think that was peculiar? No ass at all! No pussy, no nothing, for God’s sakes!”

“Well,” Simmons said, “he coulda been jerking off. But it just doesn’t seem like Doc to be doing that. I always thought maybe he wasn’t so perfect, after all. You know, maybe he was paying for his mental and physical superiority to the rest of us—to every fucking man in the world—by not being able to get a hardon.

Could be. Jesus Christ! There has to be some sort of compensation in this world!”

“There does?” Rivers said. “Who told you that, you shoddy imitation of a philosophizing orangutan!”

“One a these days, I’ll orangutan it all the way up your decrepit asshole,” Simmons said.

“No, you won’t. I don’t allow anything but high-quality shit up there,” Rivers said.

They talked for a moment with their hands over their mouths as they held their smokes in their mouths. Then I saw Rivers’ lips.

“You know, Doc and ... as if they were brothers ... coloring ... black hair and gray eyes and a darker skin, but Doc has ...”

They talked on, rambling much. I got the impression that these two octogenarians had known each other intimately for a long long time. They had been through much with each other, and they were very fond of each other. The abuses and insults they loosed at each other were good-natured, indeed, their second natures. And as I listened—read, rather—I understood that they were here on The Last Great

Adventure. There had been three other men who had shared their exploits and dangers in the past. But these were dead now. The two old men expected to die soon, but they had insisted on coming to Africa with Caliban, and he had reluctantly agreed.

Now, they were sorry they had come. Or, at least, disturbed. Something had happened to the good doctor. He was here to hunt me down and to kill me. Not with guns. In bare-hand combat. This was not at all like Doc. He had always been averse to killing. He had only done so when he absolutely had to. And he had maintained that every man, no matter how evil, was worth saving.

Something had changed his mind. They knew what it was, but so far they had not named it. They referred to it circuitously.

Doc Caliban had told them that I was an abysmally evil man who should be obliterated. The two were not convinced. From what they had learned about me from other sources, they did not think I could be the monster that Doc described. Yet, all their adult lives, they had trusted Doc. They had regarded him as an oracle, as the fount of wisdom, as a doer of great good.

Doc had been born in 1903, I learned when the two were quarreling about the best sign in the zodiac.

He was now 65 years old, but he looked as if he were still 30.

They did not seem bitter that he had not shared his secret of prolonged youth with them. They spoke as if he had offered it to them, but they had turned it down.

I could not believe this. I assumed that I misunderstood them. There was the possibility that they had been over fifty when the offer was made. In that case, the elixir was only able to slow down aging somewhat. By the time they were ninety, they would have aged physically to about seventy. Perhaps, on considering the price they must pay for this slight prolongation of life, they had rejected it. What, after all, was an extra thirty years or so of life?

But when a man was offered a chance to live at least 30,000 years, then the price looked small.

I liked to think so.

But listening to them, I was forced to dwell a little on that which I had pushed away because it was too painful. Had I, by becoming a god, become less of a man?

9

Now I knew what Doc Caliban’s ultimate goal might be. He meant to kill me, for some reason, but the end of his journey could lie in the mountains to the west, where I also intended to journey.

I began to get more uneasy. Not that I expected him to try to kill me now. It was obvious that he was

“toying” with me. Also, it was obvious that the old men had instructions to talk as freely as they pleased.

Caliban wanted me to learn much about him. The more I knew, the more “equal” would be the hunted and the hunter.

I felt angrier. Up to now, every enemy had done his best to make the situation as unequal as possible.

But Caliban was treating me contemptuously.

Very well. Let him have his contempt. If he really intended to fight me to the death with only his bare hands, he was not going to frighten me.

I would leave now for the mountains, where I had an engagement for which I would be late if I did not start now. Doctor Caliban, if he was to make the same destination on time, would do better to start on the journey at once.

I inched backwards. Then I stopped. A bronze cloud had scudded into the light of the campfire.