The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man_ A Norman De Ratour Mystery - Alfred Alcorn [59]
I have to cover my eyes. I knock back the Scotch. The drumming reaches a fever pitch. There are whoops. Incredibly, Corny speaks again. “I’m still okay. Ferdie get the, get the …” Like his arm, the stump of his leg is tied off again and anointed with the dark paste. “Bricklesby will have to be revised. They don’t start with the genitals and the … How … how could they, and keep the sacrifice alive? My God. This is a amazing.”
Mercifully, right then, Corny passes out. He sags in the crude stanchion, horrific and yes, strangely glorious, stirring within me some atavistic recognition of what we are. A few minutes later he manages to open his eyes and say, quite clearly, “Norman, no copyright.” And while the shaman is dancing around the chain saw and trying to start it, the tape goes blank.
I ran it for a while longer, but there was no more on it. I couldn’t have gone on watching it anyway. I was in shock. I felt half crazed. Is this the heart of darkness? Who is worse, those savages or Corny himself, making himself complicit in their debauchery? What are we?
I have no real idea what to do with this truly incredible piece of documentation. I suppose I should make a copy and then clear its legal status through our attorney. I mean, while the MOM did not contribute very much to underwriting the trip, is it possible that Jocelyn and their children will be able to sue the museum for wrongful death or some such thing. Strange how, in our lawyer-infested society, the first thing you need think about in a situation like this is liability.
On the other hand it is a kind of evidence of a heroic if unwise exploration of the heart of our species. Perhaps I will consult the Reverend Alfie Lopes. The matter involved here is moral as well as legal. I would not want this footage to fall into the wrong hands. There are parties that would exploit it for its sensationalism. There are enemies of the museum who would use it as a pretext to attack us. At the same time, it is a remarkable piece of anthropological fieldwork. And our allegiance must be to the high purposes to which the founders dedicated it: to explore the phenomenon of man in its many manifestations.
In a kind of daze I rewound the tape and made my way over to Margaret Mead Auditorium. I thought of stopping the introductory proceedings at some point to announce what I had just witnessed. But of course, that would have been utterly inappropriate.
On the other hand, I could not help having the tape color my appreciation of Father O’Gould’s address. In his lecture, “Why Is There No Tuna-Safe Dolphin,” the good priest gave us a taste of his upcoming book, Paragon of Animals, taking a bead on a question he has been grappling with all his professional life.
Everyone knows, of course, that S.J., as we all call him, holds the recently created Teilhard de Chardin Chair in Evolution and Cosmology. In his lecture S.J. went right into the teeth of prevailing notions, contending that there is indeed a scala naturae, and that mankind is at the very top of it. He said that to claim that there are no normative standards that can be used to rank species is arrant nonsense. The very professors making these claims, and he named a few who are vociferous on the subject, “are themselves part of a well-defined hierarchy, one that carefully grades people, especially fellow academics seeking to join their departments. They rank very precisely who is or is not good enough to be a colleague. Yet they maintain that Homo sapiens as a whole is no better or worse than any other living species. No better than, say, a turnip. Sure now, would Professor Dawkins of Oxford, for instance, consider a turnip worthy of a professorship? On the contrary, most of these thinkers