“What can we do with an elephant that paints?” Mitch leaned back in the passenger seat as Max accelerated up the on-ramp, heading east toward Griffith Park and the Los Angeles Zoo.
“Beats me. There have been stories on this elephant before, in the daily media. It’s pretty bland stuff.” Max looked at his para. “That’s why Kryzewski assigned me to it. I’m supposed to be good at finding new angles to old news. So don’t just sit there. Think of something inventive.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Mitch replied irritably. “Two heads are only better than one if the first leaves the second alone once in a while.”
“Let’s concentrate on different approaches. I’ll work the elephant angle, and you try to come up with something based on the paintings she does. Something like ‘Noted Freudian Seeks Vindication Through Elephant Art,’ or ‘Ponderous Pachydermal Paintings Pure Pontification, Praises Poet.’”
“Fair enough,” agreed Mitch.
“Of course it is.” Once up to speed on the freeway, his double focused on his driving. “We’re a fair kind of guy.”
Max had no trouble gaining admission to the zoo with his press pass, but the attendant wanted Mitch to pay, insisting that the pass was only good for one. They solved the problem by having Max enter alone. After checking around for Security personnel, he then moved quickly to a chain-link fence and handed his pass over to Mitch. Presenting the pass at the other main gate, he was readily admitted, unseen by the first attendant.
Judy’s keeper was delighted that they had come to do a story on her charge. With every news release, the price of the elephant’s colorful abstracts rose. That meant additional in-come for the zoo, and not incidentally, more notoriety for the four-legged artist’s handlers. Her delight was mitigated when Max informed her that they represented the Investigator.
“The Times has already done a couple of stories on us,” she informed them. When neither of them responded to this she added reluctantly, “I suppose any publicity is good for the zoo. You’re not going to do anything unpleasant like say she paints pornography or something, are you?”
Mitch responded with a reassuring smile. “As I understand it, her ‘paintings’ are all abstruse swatches of color. Pretty hard to read something controversial into that.”
“People love to read about the anthropomorphic aspects of animals.” Max chuckled encouragingly. “The pig that lives in the house, the dog that likes to ride motorcycles, the bird that rings the doorbell—that sort of thing. That’s where Judy fits in. She’s entertaining, not controversial.”
“Well, your paper is certainly ‘entertaining.’” The young female keeper directed them to a small electric cart. “Not that I ever read it,” she added hastily. “I just see it at the checkout stand in the supermarket.”
“Of course you do.” Mitch struggled to keep any hint of condescension out of his voice. He winked at Max. Nobody ever actually bought the Investigator and its cousins. All those millions of copies that sold weekly were always purchased by Someone Else.
It was a short ride in the service cart to the spacious elephant enclosure, where Judy proved to be more congenial and cooperative than the majority of Max’s human story subjects. At her keeper’s command to “Paint, Judy!” the pachyderm delicately selected a brush from a bucket and turned her attention to a nearby rack that held cans of paint. Choosing her own colors and working with unmistakable deliberation, she proceeded to execute broad streaks and splotches on an easeled canvas. From across the way, ordinary, less privileged zoo-goers looked on raptly.
“Her paintings sell for thousands of dollars.” The keeper repeatedly patted the elephant on her side and trunk.
“Who gets the money?” Mitch had his own recorder out and Max was watching him admiringly. We’re all professional, I am, he thought.
“It all goes to the zoo. Mostly for educational programs and elephant upkeep.” The keeper’s affection for her multiton charge was evident.
Max glanced knowingly at his other self. “Come on, now. Are you telling us that Judy doesn’t have her own bank account? After all, it’s her money.”
“Yeah.” Mitch was warming to the possibilities. “She probably has thousands stashed away in a numbered Swiss account.”
“No, no, in the Seychelles,” Max corrected him. “That’s the closest tax haven to East Africa.”
Mitch nodded. “Wouldn’t surprise me if she has somebody working the peanut futures at the Chicago Commodities Exchange for her.”
Heretofore open and friendly, the keeper was now eyeing them anxiously. “This is going to be a serious story, isn’t it? I mean, I know the kind of paper you guys are working for, but you’re not going to make fun of Judy, are you? She’s a genius, not a freak.”
“I wouldn’t dare make fun of her, or her manifest artistic abilities,” Max insisted somberly. “After all, if I wrote a less than respectful story and somebody read it to her, she’d never forget it.” Next to him, Mitch chuckled appreciatively. “Seriously, I’ve seen plenty of so-called innovative gallery art that isn’t half as interesting.”
“And she works for peanuts,” Mitch reminded him, proving himself incapable of resisting the obvious. “I’d buy one of her pieces myself. If I had the money. If I had a blank wall.”
“You sure can’t afford it,” Max told him. “And I ought to know.”
They were interrupted by a commotion on the far side of the enclosure, beyond the protective moat and wall. Mitch strained to see.
“Wonder what’s going on over there?” Behind him, the keeper left Judy to her painting and joined them for a better look, standing on tiptoes and shading her eyes with one hand as she tried to see.
“Something’s not right. There’s some kind of trouble. I…” She broke off as the intercom clipped to her belt buzzed. Max and Mitch waited silently while she listened.
“Yes … yes sir, right away, sir.” Snapping the unit shut, she looked up at her two guests. “There’s a zoo emergency. All visitors must be evacuated now. I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut this short.” Without waiting for a reply she turned and ran off back the way they’d come. Baffled, and unwilling to be left alone with even an artistic elephant, they followed her at a more measured pace.
“What’s wrong, what’s the matter?” Max called after her, but she was already too far in the lead to hear. Not wanting to be left behind, they lengthened their strides to catch up.
In the service alley behind the elephant enclosure they found her waiting impatiently behind the wheel of the electric cart. Wordlessly, she watched them climb aboard, barely waiting for Mitch’s feet to clear the pavement before she engaged the engine. With a jerk, the compact vehicle started off down the narrow paved track they had taken previously.
“If I’m not diverted, I should be able to drive you all the way to the entrance. The office there has been secured. But stay alert.” She did not look at them as she spoke. Instead, her eyes kept darting from side to side, intently examining the lush, dense landscaping that gave the zoo grounds the look and feel of a real forest even in the midst of a vast city.
“‘Secured’? ‘Stay alert’?” Uneasy, Max stared out the right side of the cart. “Alert for what?”
“The chimps.” Her expression was grim as the cart, driven much faster than it usually was on such rounds, bounced over the undulating asphalt. “The chimps have gotten loose.”
“How do we tell them apart from the general public?” Mitch asked, unable to resist. He beat Max to the punchline by half a second.
Their guide was not amused. “You think this is funny? Chimpanzees are powerful, dangerous animals, with incredibly strong arms and long canines. The ones we have here aren’t trained, like movie chimps. They’re still more than half wild. If one gnaws half your face off, you won’t think it so funny.” With Mitch looking suitably abashed, she returned to her driving, negotiating the narrow twists and curves in the path with practiced ease.
They were starting to en
counter panicked visitors. Not many, because early on a weekday morning the zoo was typically uncrowded, but enough to indicate that an alarm had been raised.
“Where are these renegade chimps now?” Max found himself watching the trees. Arriving to do a filler about a painting elephant, they found themselves quite by accident on the cusp of a breaking story of considerably more interest. He could see the headlines now, right up on the front of the next issue of the Investigator.
“KILLER CHIMPS TERRORIZE L.A. ZOO! RUN AMOK ON FREEWAY! DODGER STADIUM THREATENED BY CHEETAH AND BREAK-OUT RELATIVES!”
Bannered over a photo of someone like their middling attractive young hostess, with her clothing ripped in suitably strategic places, the story would without a doubt sell double or triple the usual number of copies. And he would have the chance to do a legitimate news story, for a change. Now, if only he and Mitch could get a glimpse of a couple of the proverbial raging chimpanzees, they would have all the verification they needed.
They did not have to wait long, and when the encounter finally took place, it involved rather more than one or two of the resourceful primates.
Rocking around a sharp bend, they came face-to-face with not one, not two, not a dozen, but perhaps fifty fully-grown adult chimps. Presently, this mob of 99.9-percent-same-DNA close cousins was tearing apart a mobile snack stand from whose vicinity the prescient operator had long since fled. Icecream bars were ripped open and slurped, popcorn was flung madly about, and vicious battles over colorful bags of peanuts raged in at least two separate locations.
The cart slowed as its driver changed direction to avoid the fracas. “I don’t understand. This isn’t possible.”
“Don’t take it so hard,” Mitch told her. “Every once in a while a cage is breached somewhere in the world and its inhabitants get loose. It’s just your turn today.”
“It’s not that.” Wearing a dazed expression, she studied the anthropoid free-for-all as they drove carefully past. With plenty of food at hand, the rampaging chimps ignored them. “There are too many of them.” She shifted her attention to Max. “There are only twelve individuals in the whole zoo chimp family. That includes males, females, and infants.” She gestured with one hand. “Not only are there too many of them, but they’re all adult females. I’ve spent a lot of time working with our primates and I know all our chimps by name. These I can’t even tell apart.”
Tell them apart. Max looked at Mitch. Neither man spoke; neither had to. Each knew what the other was thinking.
Fifty chimps where there ought to have been no more than twelve, and all looking alike. The rush of a hundred identical canaries had been unsettling, but in its perverse and unnatural fashion, almost beautiful. Certainly their presence was harmless. Fifty or more para chimps on the loose were something else entirely. As their hostess had explained, the husky primates constituted a very real danger, not only to one another as the peanut war demonstrated, but to fleeing visitors and overwhelmed zoo staff alike. He stared back over his shoulder as the howls and screeches receded behind them, glad that the menacing escapees had found something to hold their attention.
Mitch leaned forward and whispered. He needn’t have bothered. Their guide was too preoccupied to pay any attention to their conversation anyway.
“Don’t take this to heart, Max. You have no control over this field, or effect, or whatever it is. Things could be worse. You might have sucked in fifty para bull elephants, or fifty rhinos.”
“I know, I know. But it’s getting harder to try and ignore. If we hit the beach later and decide to go for a swim will the field around me pull in fifty para whales? Or a hundred?”
“You’re asking me?” Mitch sat back, occasionally looking back the way they had come to make certain the boisterous chimps were not in pursuit. “If we did and that happened, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were all white, with wrinkled brows lined with broken lines and bent harpoons.”
“This isn’t a literary conceit, Mitch,” Max replied darkly. “This is happening.”
“Pardon me if from time to time I try to pretend that it’s not.” He shifted in his seat and scratched reflexively at his chin, precisely as Max would have done.
We may do things alike but at least we don’t do everything simultaneously, he mused. That would have been too much to take. He fought down the urge to scratch.
They passed another group of some twenty chimps being driven back in the general direction of the overwhelmed primate enclosure by a phalanx of keepers and other zoo personnel who had been recruited for the purpose. Intelligent and agile, the chimps were proving difficult to round up. Several scampered gleefully up nearby eucalyptus trees. From their inviolable perches they rained insults, urine, and branches down on their outnumbered assailants. In the distance, the high-pitched complaint of approaching sirens could be heard.
“Reinforcements,” Mitch observed.
“I don’t suppose the director had any choice,” their hostess commented. “The chimps can’t be allowed to get out of the zoo. They could run around in the rest of Griffith Park for weeks, months even, attacking hikers and picnickers.” She was chewing her lower lip. “Our people have tranquilizer guns. I don’t know where all these chimps came from, but I’d hate to see any of them end up dead.”
“Police and sheriff departments have tranquilizer rifles, too,” Mitch pointed out. “For darting wandering coyotes, and bears, and mountain lions, and citizens tripping on PCP.” Some of the sirens were very loud now. “Hopefully they’re coming with that in mind.”
Not only that, Max knew, but on a number of parallel worlds in a plethora of parallel zoos, a host of distraught parallel keepers must be lamenting the sudden disappearance of their own chimpanzees, no doubt worrying anxiously over their present location and condition.
“Where do you think they all came from?” Mitch was watching their guide carefully. Max threw him a sharp look, but the question was a perfectly natural one for a reporter to ask.
They slowed as the service cart approached the main gate area. There was no panic, but frantic visitors were struggling to file through the exits while anxious cops came pouring through the entrance gates. Hauling nets and specialized rifles, they were accompanied by local veterinarians and other volunteers. Television news crews from most of the metropolitan stations were not far behind. Somehow the story no longer seemed quite so important to Max.
“I don’t know and can’t imagine. Maybe they escaped from some movie star’s illegal private primatarium, or an unlicensed medical research lab.” The guide climbed out of the cart. “I’m going to have to leave you here. They’ll be needing me for the roundup.”
“Git along little monkeys,” Mitch quipped. “They had to come from somewhere.”
She looked back over her shoulder as she ran toward the main administration office. “Maybe it’s part of a more elaborate agenda. You might try contacting the representatives of the more radical local animal-rights groups. This could be their way of making a statement.” She disappeared into the office before Max could ask her any more questions.
Mitch was eyeing him expectantly. “What now—brother?”
Max studied the confusion. Most of the zoo visitors had been hustled outside. A small army of cops and medical personnel continued to stream onto the grounds. Their thoughts focused on rampaging chimps, nobody paid the two “twins” the least attention.
“I guess we might as well get out of here. It’ll make a great story.” He started toward a deserted exit gate.
“Sure will.” Mitch sounded equally unenthusiastic. “You write it, I guess, and I’ll do the polish.”
“Oh sure, put all the work off on me!”
“Why not? You’re the one who’s going to get the credit. Remember, in my world I’m absent without leave.”
“Okay. You can have the story.” Max pushed through the revolving gate.
“Fat lot of good it’ll do me. No chimps are going berserk in my L.A.”
“That’
s right,” Max realized. “I didn’t think of that.”
Wending their way through the advance guard of emergency vehicles that had assembled outside the main entrance, they circled to the left to avoid the surging crush of nervous, uneasy visitors who had been hustled out of the zoo. Piling into their cars, families and couples honked and beeped at one another in their haste to get clear of the parking lot. To Max’s relief, his new car was right where he had left it, untouched and safe from the near-panic. The Aurora responded instantly when he thumbed the unlock button on the remote door key entry system.
In fact, all eight of them did.
They were lined up as neatly as in a showroom lot, side by side and facing the same direction. All eight gleamed with the same champagne-gold paint, and displayed the same sharp ding on the passenger’s-side doorframe, an identical pattern of collected dirt, and the same beige upholstery. Three had license plates that differed by one digit. One had a map bag on the backseat. While curious to see what kind of maps it contained, Max was more anxious to flee the increasingly frenetic atmosphere of the zoo parking lot.
Mitch had gone on ahead and was trying doors. Released by Max’s remote, every one of them was open. “I guess we can take any one of them.” He smiled wanly. “They’re all ours.”
“Somewhere, six of us are missing their cars.” Max fingered the door handle of the nearest Aurora. “I’d sure like to leave in my own.”
“Why yours?” Mitch rejoined him. “Why not mine?” Leaning over and peering through a window, he tried to find some small detail that would separate his particular vehicle from the rest. Max joined him in the search.