One Million Centuries

by Richard A. Lupoff

Genres: Science Fiction; Military Sci-Fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

Lost and unconscious in the Antarctic, chopper pilot Robert Parker awoke from a frozen sleep one million centuries later, in a tropical forest, where butterflies gave the kiss of death and men fought with broadsword and javelin.

Release date: August 27, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

PARKER CURSED and brushed a heavily gloved hand across his sweating brown brow. He peered through the thick plexiglass window of the chopper’s cabin, the corners of his mouth tugging downward in annoyance at the blinding white flakes outside.

“What do you think, Bob?” shouted his copilot. Parker could barely hear the questioner over the roar of the laboring engines as the navy helicopter struggled unsuccessfully to hold its altitude against the ravaging Antarctic gale. “Do you think there’s any chance we can find them in this stuff?”

“I’m afraid there’s not much hope for the advance camp,” Parker answered, “unless they can just seal up and let it snow itself out. Then maybe they can get a radio signal out so McMurdo can get a fix and send somebody to dig them out. But I’m more worried about us right now. This thing isn’t built to take the beating it’s getting in this storm. We’re going to need rescuing if it doesn’t let up. We’re not going to rescue anybody else.”

The snow seemed to grow heavier and new winds shook the aircraft more violently than ever.

“I’ll hold the tiller,” the Negro pilot said. “You try to raise McMurdo again, Harry. If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to take our bearings and land. Maybe we can sit this thing out and get off again, or at least wait for help. We’ll never find the camp or McMurdo in this storm.”

Harry Logan flipped the radio toggle on. “Advance camp rescue to base, advance camp rescue to base. This is Parker and Logan in HU-310. Can you read me, McMurdo?” He paused, but only a crackle came over the radio, nearly inaudible under the noise of the helicopter’s overworked powerplant and the shrill of the blizzard outside.

“Answer me, McMurdo. Rescue helicopter to base, do you read me?”

Still no reply. Either the helicopter’s radio was not getting through to the naval base at McMurdo Sound, from which Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Logan had lifted only two hours before, or the signal of the base transmitter was not getting back to the rescue craft. More likely the first—the twin-bladed aircraft carried a transmitter of far less power than that at the quonsets of McMurdo. If the chopper’s signal had got through, an answer surely would. The lack of a reply made it almost certain that the helicopter’s call was not being received.

Parker looked at Logan. “No luck.” It might have been a question, but both aviators knew it was a statement.

“Nothing.”

“Look,” said Parker, pointing at the altimeter.

Logan followed Parker’s extended finger. The needle was quivering at 3,000 feet, edging slowly downward. Slowly and irregularly, but downward still, at a rate that would bring the copter on to the Antarctic ice shelf in a matter of minutes.

“You’ve got your chute on,” Parker shouted, “want to try it?”

Logan grimaced. “What for? I’m sure as hell not going to walk back from this date, and besides, I thought that line was too old for a guy like you.”

Parker laughed briefly. “Okay, buddy, let’s stick it. Maybe we can ride this thing down. Maybe we’ll be the ones snowed in, not the tents. The storm has to end sooner or later, and this copter’s a pretty big object to spot if they try an air search. Hang on!”

Slowly the machine circled downward. Parker tried to tip the craft slightly to get a look at the terrain below, but everything was a mass of blowing, flowing white. He could make out none of the ice peaks that he knew were below, none of the flat areas between that he hoped to hit.

The altimeter needle continued to drift downward, to 2,500 feet, then to 2,000.

“Should I start the emergency sender?” Logan asked.

“No. McMurdo probably isn’t receiving now anyhow, and we’ll do better to save the cells for later on, after the snow stops. If it does.”

The needle was nearing 1,500. The rotors continued their struggle, no longer to hold the chopper’s altitude but now merely to slow the machine’s descent, to put it gently on the snow or ice below, avoiding a crackup that would wreck the aircraft and in all likelihood kill both its occupants.

There was an instant of warning, a jar transmitted through the frame of the copter as one rotor blade struck what must have been an ice-wall, white invisible against a white sky, whiteness blinding with swirling thick white flakes, white snow, white ice, white metal banded with brilliant red, twirling and then crumpling, the helicopter bounding crazily sideways in the freezing Antarctic air, kneeling in air, tilting over with grace so slow that Parker and Logan had time to reach for handholds they did not find before the machine struck full on its starboard side.

The plexiglass window Parker had peered through was shattered, the metal of the cabin a huge joke of an impromptu scrubbing board; the stubs of the metal rotors rolled slowly to a stop as steam rose where the engine exhaust stack buried itself in inches of white powder covering the untold feet of packed polar ice.

Parker had barely time to see Logan slide sideways in the copilot’s bucket, no farther than his seat belt would permit, his head and body going into a crazy dance as the wall of the cabin moved inward to meet him. An instant behind his copilot, Parker was jolted, shoved, spun dizzily, the sight of Logan, the cabin, the whiteness beyond blending into a blurred montage as the machine plowed into deeply accumulated snow and through it.

As the helicopter crashed into the solid ice beneath, Robert Parker too was flipped to the right, folded nearly double over the rubber-tipped control tiller that served as altitude control for the dying aircraft. His head struck Logan’s shoulder, the shock bringing an instant of strain and a momentary sight of multicolored points streaming through Parker’s vision before blackness became total and the Negro officer lost all sense of his surroundings.

The first sign of returning awareness for Parker was a pain in his right side, sharp and hot. Before he had time to think of the pain or its cause, the discomfort was forgotten in a worse ache throbbing in his neck and face. Parker tried to shove himself up from whatever still but plastic-feeling object served as his pillow, felt a total weakness, fell back and let the pain fill his consciousness. It did so adequately for a time, then he lost consciousness again.

The second time Parker awakened it was to the realization that a new sensation was crowding out the sharpness in his side and the dull anguish in his neck and head. It was bitterly cold.

Outside the shattered plexiglass of the copter’s cabin the white storm had given way to total darkness. Inside the cabin it was impossible to distinguish any object. The terrifying thought that he was blind came to Parker. He turned as much as he could, looking for any source of light, but could detect none. As he leaned forward his face must have passed below an opening in the broken plexiglass, for he felt snowflakes continuing to fall on his left cheek.

Cautiously he lifted his right hand, padded in its sheepskin glove, and gently touched the right side of his face. A new pain lanced inward and a bolt of red seemed to appear before his right eye. Something at least, he thought. From the feel of it he had hit with his right cheekbone. Hit what? He could not recall, but judging by the damage apparently done, it was blind luck that he hadn’t hit an inch higher and put his eye out.

Blind luck.

Was he blind? Or was it black outside? How could that be? Even through the Antarctic storm the sky had been a gray-white right up to the moment of the crash. How long had he been unconscious? Could night have fallen, and the storm still be continuing? Would he and Logan be covered over in their ruined machine, to die of cold before help could come?

Logan? Parker spoke his name. “Logan. Hey, Logan!” Parker’s voice sounded strange to him. It set up a ringing in his head that made it hurt to speak. And his normally rich voice rasped and faded.

“Logan.” There was no response.

Parker lowered his hands to the object that served as his impromptu pillow. Through the gloves he felt something round, with two small globes in cavities on one side. Below them a protuberance, then a flexible object attached by folds of skin. Logan’s face. Parker recoiled from the grisly discovery. As he did so he felt the head roll freely at the pressure of his hands. He knew that Logan’s neck was broken almost to the point of decapitation.

“Dead,” breathed Parker. Dead, and what shape am I in, he thought. Took a hell of a blow on my face, but it doesn’t seem to be a serious injury—if it’s really dark out. If it isn’t, I’m blind. Side seems painful but I can move. Probably a cracked rib. Inside—who knows?

Feeling gingerly to get his hands on the framework of Logan’s seat rather than the body, Parker shoved himself up. A tug at his waist reminded him of his belt. He managed to unfasten the buckle at the cost of several flaming jabs at his injured side, then reached above to the jagged edge of the broken window.

Certainly everything in the copter was hopeless. The emergency sender was on Logan’s side, crushed beyond identification. The main radio, even by feel, was equally hopeless. Parker could not see, the only sound was the wind, and his feeling was becoming fainter as cold struggled with pain in his side and neck, and won.

He pulled himself up through the broken window, barely able to lift his own weight, and made his way onto the upper surface of the shattered craft. Gingerly he lowered himself to the surface of the snow.

A crazy irrelevant thought struck him. If I die, Parker thought, if I die here that will make this frozen spot the first integrated cemetery on the Antarctic continent. I’ll be a hero at home. Adam, Jackie, and Bob Parker. Our Man in Washington, and the first Negro in the major leagues, and me. Parker, first man to integrate a cemetery in the deep, deep, deep south. You can’t get southerner than here.

Parker felt his way toward what must be the prow of the helicopter. Too cold, he thought. Even colder out here than inside, and wind, and it’s still snowing. Better go back in the copter.

No, no room to move in there. If I go back in I’ll be comfortable and go to sleep with Logan. He had a chance to walk home, now he’ll have to sleep with me. Sleep. Forever. We’ll be found together, perfectly preserved, together, dead, when the rescue team comes in a few days or in ten centuries. Nature’s own storehouse. Anything dead in that ice would last forever, or until somebody came to thaw it out. James Arness.

What was that weird movie he’d seen on Forty-second Street, how many years ago? Ten, twenty? The Glob, no The Blob. No. The Thing, that was it, with the crazy song, what do you think was the bop-bop-bop? Wasn’t the thing frozen in the Antarctic ice? No, that was the North Pole. No, his buddy, what was his name, the scrawny kid from 138th Street with the glasses, said the movie was wrong, it was the South Pole. What was the South Pole?

Parker started moving again, unable to feel his feet now. If he just kept one hand on the helicopter and kept walking, he could keep awake and alive until dawn. Then he would go back in the copter and look things over. Maybe he could find a way to signal. Anyway, a chopper was big, and they would have to look.

Keep walking. Anyway, what if he lost the copter? He would stand out. They’d see him on the snow. Of course he’d have to get undressed, but he’d be visible. Black man on white continent. Wear your bathing suit. Integrate this lily-white beach. Nice beach, but where was the water? Keep walking.

Better turn around and walk the other way for a while before you get too dizzy, Parker thought. Okay, clockwise, keep right hand on chopper, walk ahead, bear right in the dark. Was it getting light? Keep going. Keep going. Getting dizzy, cold, still snowing. Okay. You okay in there, Logan? No answer, must be asleep.

Turn, left hand out, right hand down, touch chopper. Walk ahead, bear left, counter-clockwise. Move. Numb legs. Logan! Do I ever get relieved of this friggin guard duty? Logan!

Turn, right hand, clockwise, turn, walk, left hand, counter, turn, right hand, no, left. No. Which was it? Parker put up one hand, felt nothing, tried the other. Nothing.

Okay, don’t panic. Both hands, shoulder height, straight out to the sides. Damn, his neck still hurt but his ribs were getting to feel better. Cold, less pain. Walk my post in a military manner. Nothing at either hand. He turned one-hundred-eighty degrees. Nothing. Turn back. Nothing. Turn the other way.

Nothing.

Parker started walking. Maybe be would find the copter. If not, he still had to keep moving, keep the blood circulating. In the morning he would see it. If morning came. If he was not blind. He walked, eyes open, eyes closed, no difference, feeling less pain now in his head, less pain anywhere, just cold, no pain, cold.

He walked until he stopped, weary. He stood for a moment, then sat to rest. As soon as he had a little strength back he would walk again. Probably best to go back the way he came, stay near the chopper. As soon as it got light he would surely see it, check the emergency supplies. Weren’t there flares? He could go back and light one. Find out for sure. Was he blind, or was it just night?

He rose, started back toward the machine. The direction where he thought the machine was. After a few paces he was not sure. It was off to the side, must be. But to the left? To the right? Parker stumbled, sat down to think. Lay down to think. Blinked to test his eyes again. Blinked. Left them shut.

Did not think.

A TOUCH so light it was hardly there was the first evidence of returning consciousness. A touch, a feeling of cold through every bone and fiber, a gurgling, trickling sound, a sense of motion passing over his body, the touch. It moved from Parker’s hip toward one knee, a tiny pressure, tiny, incredibly delicate, yet it held the full consciousness of the man as he lay on his left side.

Parker concentrated on the feeling, ignoring the sound, ignoring other tactile responses. The touch resolved itself into a pattern of separate contacts, coming and going on the surface of his naked leg. After a time the pressure, almost imperceptible to begin with, grew momentarily greater by the smallest degree, then was removed, leaving behind a ghost of a shadow of a sensation.

Parker sprang upward, fully aware in the instant of the occurrence, saw a butterfly—surely it was a butterfly—soaring gracefully upward from his leg which it had been inspecting. It was by far the largest flying insect Parker had ever seen, its wings spanning fully eight inches of velvety black trimmed with an intricate pattern of vivid yellow.

The insect hovered, seemingly without fear, a few feet over the man’s head, then flew off into the woods nearby, woods so lush as to suggest near-tropical growth. Parker shook himself, trying to grasp his surroundings. He was drenched with frigid water, standing on the bank of a fast-flowing stream from which he had leaped in that first moment of vivid awareness. Now he stood, slowly ceasing to tremble as the sun and warm air relieved the cold of his body. He had to orient himself to the situation.

But—what was the situation? And what were these surroundings? He must have dozed in his pilot’s seat as Logan handled the chopper controls. No, Parker remembered the storm, the crash. Logan was dead. He had felt Logan’s corpse, known he was dead. Parker remembered climbing from the wrecked helicopter, becoming lost in the blackness, and then … butterflies? Woods? What had happened?

Parker looked about him at a thick forest of tall trees, a wealth of saplings and smaller bushes between the trunks and a carpet of fallen vegetation covering the ground. He looked at his own body, feeling for the injured ribs he had suffered the day before. Except for a general feeling of soreness and a particular tenderness of his skin, Parker seemed uninjured.

Certainly he was not blind, and that was a gigantic relief. Unless the whole experience was an hallucination and he really lay still in the polar storm, his life being frozen from his body … If that was the case … If that was the case, he could just forget everything, lie back and enjoy the final dream-moments of his existence. But if it was not, he’d better try to take charge of himself and figure a way out of the puzzle.

And being uncertain, Parker chose to assume that this new world was real. Whatever, wherever, this world was, it was real.

And Parker’s injuries seemed to have healed. The blow to his head—he must have had at least a fractured cheekbone—no longer made tender his face, nor did his neck ache. His side seemed well. Healthy, naked, puzzled, Parker took one reassuring look at the blue sky, lowered his gaze to the level of the surrounding forest, and set out to find some sign of habitation. Lacking that he would settle happily for a sign of food.

He must have made three-quarters of a mile before he saw the cat, or what must have been a cat. It was walking apparently parallel to him, and at a break between two heavily boled trees the cat and Parker caught each other’s eye at the same moment. Parker saw a parti-colored beast the size of a large shepherd dog. Parti-colored! The cat was a geneticist’s nightmare: orange, black and white, it had the mad markings of a perfect calico, with solid patches, stripes, splotches interspersed among salt-and-pepper patches of orange on black. A white muzzle, the rest of its face black except for an exclamation point of brilliant yellow-orange reaching from the top of the skull to a point between and below the eyes. The cat must have weighed easily eighty pounds, and carried every ounce of it with muscular grace that spoke of speed and strength in equal portions. The animal’s head, somehow proportionately larger than the head of any cat Parker could recall, seemed also oddly shaped, as if the cat’s skull had been modified to accommodate more brain than was proper for a cat. The ears were pointed and alert, and from that strangely intelligent-appearing face two eyes of brilliant green-blue gazed enigmatically at the man.

Parker stopped in his tracks, glancing at the nearest tree and thinking about limbs for climbing, but the cat merely surveyed him, pausing momentarily in its progress, and then continued.

Shortly, so did Parker, altering course to the left to avoid the path of his newest acquaintance. In the next mile or so he noticed several more of the giant black and yellow butterflies, some settled on fruit trees that bore egg-sized fruit resembling slightly enlarged kumquats. He was tempted to try one of them, but before he could reach a tree his attention leaped to a new sound in the previously still woods. Voices.

For a moment Parker thought of hiding in the trees, attempting to spy out the nature of the owners of the voices, but his own curiosity and a sudden, desperate need for human companionship were more powerful than caution. He faced the direction from which the voices had come and shouted, “Hello!”

The voices ceased abruptly and Parker shouted again. There was a quick, indistinguishable conversation, then Parker heard the sounds of underbrush snapping, several pairs of booted feet advancing toward him.

Four figures stepped into view. Before Parker could register any reaction or say anything, one of the men spoke.

“January hayrick slant funnerway?” he asked.

Parker looked blank. Gibberish, a big portion of his mind told him. No, a smaller corner replied, not gibberish. That’s a foreign language. It sounded like gibberish and I made myself hear it as English words, but it doesn’t mean anything. “English,” said Parker. “Do any of you speak English?”

The four men looked at one another, exchanged a few sentences Parker could not understand, then addressed more slant funnerway at him. “Habla Español?” Parker tried. Blank looks from the four.

More January hayrick.

“Deutsch?”

Hayrick slant funnerzip trapshoot.

“Russian? Chinese?” asked Parker, thinking that it would be some language that he didn’t understand himself.

More slant January. That was hopeless. Parker and the four surveyed one another. To the four, Parker realized, he must be a naked brown figure. Himself seemingly much the better for wear since the accident with Logan, standing ready to talk, flee or fight as the occasion demanded, Parker saw four men of varied stature, ranging in age by some ten years over or under his own thirty.

At first he thought that they were all Negroes. Their color was much the same as his own, and varied little from one to another. The hair of all was black, the build varying. There was the small, sharp-featured man. He had spoken first. There was a huge, muscular fellow who must have stood close to seven feet and weighed 300 at least, who wore an incongruous handlebar mustache. There was another tall man, but built with a rangy, long-muscled shape, and there was the slim, well-proportioned fellow with the darting eyes and ever-mobile features.

But all four had the distinctive eye-folds and high cheekbones of the Chinese, and their hair was slack rather than curly. Chinese Negroes, thought Parker. Descendants of American GIs? And whom? Koreans? Vietnamese?

He let go of that puzzle in favor of the immediate one of getting some food and establishing communication with the four. They were all armed, apparently hunters. The two taller men each carried a longbow. Each of the four had a cutting weapon. The sharp-featured man held his in his hand. It had the look of hand workmanship on it. Twenty inches long, Parker guessed, shaped like a … like a combination of a scimitar and a meat cleaver. Broad, heavy blade. Curved, pointed, sharpened along the sweep edge and for about five inches on the back edge. An improved machete.

You could stab with it, flick backhanded if you missed and give an adversary a nice wound, or slash with the long side. A pretty sticker with a basket handle to protect the wielder.

Not as handy as a gravity knife, the American thought. But a good weapon. But not as handy. For a moment he felt dizzy, closed his eyes. He was back at home, thirteen again, and carrying his own first good knife. Seven inches of wicked, pointed blade, ready to drop out of a white pearl handle at the touch of the catch …

“Butchy” Parker was cold with fright. He could feel the perspiration running off his face, his hands were clammy, and in the right he clutched his new knife. Bought with money stolen from his mother’s purse, honed and polished as he’d long since learned from older boys.

Now he was in the street and Carlos, the local bully, appeared out of a bunch of kids loitering on a stoop. Carlos was fifteen and big. He’d been away to reform school, and since his return no kid crossed him.

“Whatcha got there, Butchy?” Carlos asked.

“Nothing,” the young Parker replied, trying to slide the white-pearl knife unobtrusively into his jeans.

“Not a pretty knife, is it?”

“Nothing, Carlos, just let me go to the store, I have to go the store and get something.”

“Let’s see the knife, Butchy. That looks like too big a knife for a little kid like you.” Carlos took a step toward Parker. Parker backed, and suddenly realized that the two boys were surrounded by a ring, an impenetrable ring of expressionless brown faces, black faces.

“Just let me go, Carlos, I don’t want no trouble!” But Carlos lunged forward. Butchy dodged to one side, slid the knife back out of his jeans. He looked at the older boy in terror, held the folded knife out in mute offering, wordlessly begging to buy free of the circle of faces, of the confrontation.

Carlos’s hand made an astonishingly rapid move to his own trousers, in a flash was back at waist-height, his own knife held forward. His hand made a rapid flicking motion and with a sharp click the knife’s gleaming blade flew into position, the twin of the steel sliver still concealed in Parker’s knife handle.

A strange grin appeared on Carlos’s face, a look of anticipation. He began the slow, classic circling of the knife fighter, his blade before him, his left hand held out for balance as he rolled his weight forward onto the soles of his feet. “Aren’t you going to open your knife, Butchy?”

“I don’t want to fight you, Carlos. You can have my knife.”

The bigger boy only laughed, and Parker clutched at his own weapon, depressing the catch that released the blade. It swung downward, out of the handle, and Parker clumsily imitated Carlos’s wrist motion to lock the blade in position. “I don’t want to fight you, Carlos,” the boy repeated. His voice broke and tears of fright began to force their way past his efforts to contain them.

Carlos feinted with his knife, Parker backed and tried to run but the boys surrounding the two refused to open, their serious faces telling him that there was no escape from the fight. Desperately Parker ran at his larger opponent, holding his knife directly before him, trying to spear the bigger boy. Carlos sidestepped nimbly, poked his knife gently into Parker’s shoulder as he blundered past. Blood began to run from the wound.

Parker turned, terror weakening his knees so that he could barely stand. He raced again at Carlos, took another small cut as the other boy dodged and poked, playing a game of blood and fright with the smaller boy. Parker sat down on the sidewalk and began to cry.

Carlos danced over, taunting him for cowardice. He kicked at the smaller boy who sat weeping and trembling as he bled from a half dozen petty wounds. He sat on the edge of the curb, his knees raised, head down, left arm across his face, right hand hanging in the gutter with his knife lying across the inside of the first joint of his fingers.

Carlos danced, kicked at Parker’s left thigh, taunted, danced, kicked, danced, the pain coming to Parker as an inevitable part of the icy rhythm, the sound of Carlos’s voice, taunting, dancing, the thud and pain of another kick, Carlos’s voice, his shoes on the dirty sidewalk, kick. Parker’s right hand came up from the gutter bringing his knife with it in a sudden arc over his own upraised knees, over Carlos’s moving leg, disappearing into the older boy’s colored shirt, passing from sight into the dark belly flesh of the bully, coming back dripping dark red held in a now dark red hand as Carlos’s blood spurted over Parker’s hand, his knees, the sidewalk, the gutter …

Parker shuddered, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, opened them again in the small clearing where he had faced the four Chinese-Negro hunters. He was still sitting with his knees upraised. He was covered with sweat. His forearms were bound behind his back and the biggest hunter was standing near, cleaver-scimitar in hand, watching him. The other three stood a few yards away.

“What happened?” Parker asked.

“Monday Alberta raceway slinkers,” the big hunter answered. “Afterthoughts proxyboo highway.” Oh God, thought Parker, more of that.

“January hayrick,” he said.

A surprised look from the big hunter was his reward, and the other three spun about where they stood, regarding him also with startled expressions.

“It’s all a gag. I don’t understand your January talk. I just imitated you,” said Parker.

The four clustered, jabbered for a few moments. Then their little sharp-featured leader said something that sounded imperative to the big man guarding Parker. The leader looked down at the bound aviator and gestured for him to rise, simultaneously issuing a command that Parker interpreted as obviously meaning “Get up!”

He did. The sharp-faced man allowed himself a look of slight gratification. So did Parker. At least it was communication of a sort, however simple it was.

He repeated the nonsense syllable that he knew meant get up, mimicking the hunter’s voice and accompanying the sound with a body pantomime of his own just completed movement.

The hunter nodded and said, “Gibblegabble, get up.”

Obvious again, the nonsense sound that came to Parker as gibblegabble was the local equivalent of that’s right. His January hayrick vocabulary now stood at four words. At this rate he wouldn’t be discussing technical aerodynamics with the local aviation crowd for a while, but he expected to be able to carry on simple conversations before very long.

How he had got to be tied up on the ground was another matter, as was the totally unexpected and totally realistic flashback to his fight with Carlos almost two decades before. Unless the sight of the four hunters with their cleaver-scimitars had triggered a fear-reaction. Then he might not only have hallucinated but re-enacted the street fight, wielding an imaginary gravity knife against one or more of the hunters and their nearly two-foot-long blades.

If so, he was lucky they had subdued him instead of simply dispatching him. Four armed hunters against one naked berserker was odds he did not care to face again, and if he had already faced them unknowingly he was grateful for his opponents’ care for his life.

Once more the lead hunter issued instructions in the local tongue, accompanying them with gestures chiefly for Parker’s sake. The small hunter led the way into the woods, using a trail so lightly marked that Parker could detect no sign of it, if it was marked at all.

Parker followed along stolidly, surrounded by the other hunters, pondering upon his situation.

First of all, the four must regard him as s