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This primeval forest has stood, unchanged and unchallenged, for more than sixty million years.
The great expanse of the forest remains inviolate, and to this day thousands of square miles are still unexplored.
One co-worker described her as “logical to a fault.” Her chilly demeanor had earned her the title “Ross Glacier,” after the Antarctic formation.
So she did “fill-in-the-blanks”—instructing the computer to introject imagery, according to what was around the blank spaces. In this operation the computer made a logical guess about what was missing.
The first was called APNF, for Animation Predicted Next Frame. It was possible to treat videotape as if it were movie film, a succession of stills. She showed the computer several “stills” in succession, and then asked it to create the Predicted Next Frame. This PNF was then checked against the actual next frame.
Travis had a hunch about the Ross Glacier. His management philosophy, tempered in his rain-dancing days, was always to give the project to whoever had the most to gain from success—or the most to lose from failure.
It suggested that any dominant personality trait could be suddenly reversed under stress conditions: parental personalities could flop over and turn childishly petulant, hysterical personalities could become icy calm—or logical personalities could become illogical.
Travis looked at the screen, and decided that such a circumstance was highly unlikely in the coming Congo expedition.
Such observations led another researcher, John Bates, to say in 1977 that “we are producing an educated animal élite which demonstrates the same snobbish aloofness that a Ph.D. shows toward a truck driver.… It is highly unlikely that the generation of language-using primates will be skillful ambassadors in the field. They are simply too disdainful.”
Ross saw that the girl had violet eyes; she was exquisitely beautiful, and could not have been more than sixteen. In careful English the girl said, “This is your telephone to Houston. The bidding will now begin.”
People were denied movement in the 1970s; but they will be denied information in the 1980s, and it remains to be seen which shortage will prove more frustrating.”
The computer went back to the previous statement: PROPOSED ROUTING UNACCEPTABLE / ALTITUDE FACTORS / HAZARDS TO PERSONNEL EXCESSIVE / PROBABILITY SUCCESS UNDER LIMITS / Munro didn’t think that was true. He thought they could pull it off, especially if the weather was good. The altitude wouldn’t be a problem, and the ground although rough would be reasonably yielding. In fact, the more Munro thought about it, the more certain he was that it would work.
“I just wish I knew what he was telling them,” she said. But as it turned out, Ross needn’t have worried, for Munro paid the Chinese in something more valuable to them than electronics information.
looked over at Karen Ross, whom he found beautiful and graceful in an utterly unexpected way.
Whenever any animal’s behavior puts it out of touch with the realities of its existence, it becomes extinct.
“Maybe there is a higher truth than merely staying alive,” Ross said. “There isn’t,” Munro said.
Elliot would have agreed with Stanley’s description from a century before: “Overhead the wide-spreading branches absolutely shut out the daylight.… We marched in a feeble twilight.… The dew dropped and pattered on us incessantly.… Our clothes were heavily saturated with it.… Perspiration exuded from every pore, for the atmosphere was stifling.… What a forbidding aspect had the Dark Unknown which confronted us!”
Elliot was unimpressed. These ideas of nature mirroring the affairs of man were very old—at least as old as Aesop, and about as scientific. “The natural world is indifferent to man,” he said.
Yet at the time, Elliot felt disappointment with Amy’s neutrality. Of all the possible reactions he had imagined when he first set out for the Congo, boredom was the least expected, and he utterly failed to grasp its significance—that the city of Zinj was so fraught with danger that Amy felt obliged in her own mind to push it aside, and to ignore it.
“We’ve been doing it for centuries,” Ross said. “What’s a domesticated animal—or a pocket calculator—except an attempt to give up control? We don’t want to plow fields or do square roots so we turn the job over to some other intelligence, which we’ve trained or bred or created.” “But you can’t let your creations take over.” “We’ve been doing it for centuries,” Ross repeated. “Look: even if we refused to develop faster computers, the Russians would. They’d be in Zaire right now looking for diamonds, if the Chinese weren’t keeping them out. You can’t stop technological advances. As soon as we
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For Elliot, Ross, and Munro, the five minutes following the onset of the eruption were a bizarre nightmare. Elliot recalled that “everything was moving. We were all literally knocked off our feet; we had to crawl on our hands and knees, like babies. Even after we got away from mine-shaft tunnels, the city swayed like a wobbling toy.
