Congo - Crichton Michael - Страница 7

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Yet 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.

He turned to face his console, mounted beside his desk. “Travis,” he said, and the screen glowed.

“Psychograph file,” he said.

The screen showed call prompts.

“Ross, Karen,” Travis said.

The screen flashed THINKING A MOMENT. That was the programmed response which meant that information was being extracted. He waited.

Then the psychograph summary printed out across the screen. Every E RI S employee underwent three days of intensive psychological testing to determine not only skills but potential biases. The assessment of Ross would, he felt, be reassuring to the Board.

HIGHLY INTELLIGENT / LOGICAL / FLEXIBLE / RESOURCEFUL / DATA INTUITIVE / THOUGHT PROCESSES SUITED TO RAPIDLY CHANGING REAL-TIME

CONTEXTS / DRIVEN TO SUCCEED AT DEFINED GOALS / CAPABLE SUSTAINED MENTAL EFFORT /

It looked like the perfect description of the next Congo team leader. He scanned down the screen, looking for the negatives. These were less reassuring.

YOUTHFUL-RUTHLESS / TENUOUS HUMAN RAPPORT /

DOMINEERING / INTELLECTUALLY ARROGANT / INSENSITIVE / DRIVEN TO SUCCEED AT ANY COST /

And there was a final “flopover” notation. The very concept of personality flopover had been evolved through ERTS testing. 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.

FLOPOVER MATRIX: DOMINANT (POSSIBLY UNDESIRABLE) OBJECTIVITY MAY BE LOST ONCE DESIRED GOAL IS PERCEIVED CLOSE AT HAND / DESIRE FOR SUCCESS MAY PROVOKE DANGEROUSLY ILLOGICAL RESPONSES / PARENTAL FIGURES WILL BE ESPECIALLY DENIGRATED / SUBJECT MUST BE MONITORED IN LATE

STAGE GOAL-ORIENTED PROCEDURES /

Travis looked at the screen, and decided that such a circumstance was highly unlikely in the coming Congo expedition. He turned the computer off.

Karen Ross was exhilarated by her new authority. Shortly before midnight, she called up the grant lists on her office terminal. ERTS had animal experts in various areas whom they supported with nominal grants from a non-profit foundation called the Earth Resources Wildlife Fund. The grant lists were arranged taxonomically. Under “Primates” she found fourteen names, including several in Borneo, Malaysia, and Africa as well as the United States. In the United States there was only one gorilla researcher available, a primatologist named Dr. Peter Elliot, at the University of California at Berkeley.

The file onscreen indicated that Elliot was twenty-nine years old, unmarried, an associate professor without tenure in the Department of Zoology. Principal Research Interest was listed as “Primate Communications (Gorilla).” Funding was made to something called Project Amy.

She checked her watch. It was just midnight in Houston, 10 P.M. in California. She dialed the home number on the screen.

“Hello,” a wary male voice said.

“Dr. Peter Elliot?”

“Yes…“ The voice was still cautious, hesitant. “Are you a reporter?”

“No,” she said. “This is Dr. Karen Ross in Houston; I’m associated with the Earth Resources Wildlife Fund, which supports your research.”

“Oh, yes…“ The voice remained cautious. “You’re sure you’re not a reporter? It’s only fair to tell you I’m recording this telephone call as a potential legal document.”

Karen Ross hesitated. The last thing she needed was some paranoid academic recording ERTS developments. She said nothing.

“You’re American?” he said.

“Of course.”

Karen Ross stared at the computer screens, which flashed

VOICE IDENTIFICATION CONFIRMED: ELLIOT, PETER, 29 YEARS.

“State your business,” Elliot said.

“Well, we’re about to send an expedition into the Virunga region of the Congo, and-”

“Really? When are you going?” The voice suddenly sounded excited, boyish.

“Well, as a matter of fact we’re leaving in two days, and-”

“I want to go,” Elliot said.

Ross was so surprised she hardly knew what to say. “Well, Dr. Elliot, that’s not why I’m calling you, as a matter of fact-”

“I’m planning to go there anyway,” Elliot said. “With Amy.”

“Who’s Amy?”

“Amy is a gorilla,” Peter Elliot said.

IT IS UNFAIR TO SUGGEST, AS SOME PRIMATOLOGISTS later did, that Peter Elliot had to “get out of town” in June, 1979. His motives, and the planning behind the decision to go to the Congo, are a matter of record. Professor Elliot and his staff had decided on an African trip at least two days before Ross called him.

But it is certainly true that Peter Elliot was under attack:

from outside groups, the press, academic colleagues, and even members of his own department at Berkeley. Toward the end, Elliot was accused of being a “Nazi criminal” engaged in the “torture of dumb animals.” It is no exaggeration to say that Elliot had found himself, in the spring of 1979, fighting for his professional life.

Yet his research had begun quietly, almost accidentally. Peter Elliot was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley when he first read about a year-old gorilla with amoebic dysentery who had been brought from the Minneapolis zoo to the San Francisco School of Veterinary Medicine for treatment. That was in 1973, in the exciting early days of primate language research.

The idea that primates might be taught language was very old. In 1661, Samuel Pepys saw a chimpanzee in London and wrote in his diary that it was “so much like a man in most things that… I do believe that it already understands much English, and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs.” Another seventeenth-century writer went further, saying, “Apes and Baboons… can speak but will not for fear they should be imployed, and set to work.”

Yet for the next three hundred years attempts to teach apes to talk were notably unsuccessful. They culminated in an ambitious effort by a Florida couple, Keith and Kathy Hayes, who for six years in the early 1950s raised a chimpanzee named Vicki as if she were a human infant. During that time, Vicki learned four words-”mama,” “papa,” “cup,” and “up.” But her pronunciation was labored and her progress slow. Her difficulties seemed to support the growing conviction among scientists that man was the only animal capable of language. Typical was the pronouncement of George Gaylord Simpson: “Language is… the most diagnostic single trait of man: all normal men have language; no other now living organisms do.”

This seemed so self-evident that for the next fifteen years nobody bothered to try teaching language to an ape. Then in 1966, a Reno, Nevada, couple named Beatrice and Allen Gardner reviewed movies of Vicki speaking. It seemed to them that Vicki was not so much incapable of language as incapable of speech. They noticed that while her lip movements were awkward, her hand gestures were fluid and expressive. The obvious conclusion was to try sign language.

In June, 1966, the Gardners began teaching American Sign Language (Ameslan), the standardized language of the deaf, to an infant chimpanzee named Washoe. Washoe’s progress with ASL was rapid; by 1971, she had a vocabulary of 160 signs, which she used in conversation. She also made up new word combinations for things she had never seen before: when shown watermelon for the first time, she signed it “water fruit.”

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