Foster had our pilot waggle his wings to show that we wouldn’t put up any battle. Vickie went one step further. She was waving a white rag in front of the Plexiglas to indicate that we surrendered. But I was still concerned with Von Koerner and Mendoza.
From where I was standing in the cabin, I could see a parachute hooked into place over the back of the pilot’s seat. I picked it up and began putting it on. “I’m going after them,” I told Vickie and Foster.
“I’ll go with you,” Foster said, reaching for the parachute strapped to the co-pilot’s seat.
“Me too,” Vickie said.
“You can’t,” Foster pointed out. “There are only two chutes. The crew took the others with them when we put them off.”
“Then I’ll go instead of you," Victoria said. “You’re wounded and you should have that shoulder looked after.”
“Nuts! Let’s you and I go and let Steve stay here,” Foster suggested.
“The hell you say!” I objected.
“Actually, neither of you should go,” Vickie pointed out. “You’ve both got instructions that this is a woman’s job. There are reasons.”
“You two fight it out,” I told them. And before they could start any more arguments, I shoved open the hatch-door and jumped.
I counted out a long free-fall. I didn’t want any of those jets trying to pick me off, and I knew if I waited until the last minute to pull the ripcord I’d be too low for them to shoot by the time they saw me. When I finally did pull the cord, it jerked me right side up and I was looking up at the plane I’d left. I was just in time to see another figure plummet from the hatch. Vickie and Foster must have settled their argument. I wondered who had won.
I didn’t wonder for long. I didn’t have time. With that jungle rushing up at me, I had my own problems. It looked like really wicked terrain, and I could see I’d have my hands full jockeying a landing without getting badly torn up. I picked out a postage stamp between two bristling trees and tried to manipulate the chute straps so I’d land on it.
I almost made it perfectly, but not quite. My chute snagged in the branches of one of the trees and I was caught up short about twenty feet above the ground. I dangled there, wondering what the hell to do next. I didn’t even have a knife to cut myself loose. And even if I had, it sure looked a long way down to the ground.
I looked up automatically, looking to Heaven for some kind of moral support, I suppose. I saw a chute fluttering down into the jungle a few miles to the south of me. Either Foster or Victoria. Whichever one it was, I hoped they had better luck landing than I had.
It was a hell of a time to just hang around, but what else could I do? My armpits were killing me where the straps cut into them, and I would pull myself up by my hands for as long as I could to relieve the pain. But then my wrists would start aching and I’d let go and hang by my armpits again. I don’t know how long I hung there; long enough for the day to start to gray into night, long enough to begin to hallucinate.
I saw myself hanging there until the flesh fell away from my bones. I saw my skeleton hanging there, the skull grinning at the impassive jungle. I saw the chute straps melted by eons of sunlight until the skeleton crumpled to the ground and the bones splintered into fragments. And then I saw the fragments disintegrate into dust. Just dust. No marker for Steve Victor, the man from O.R.G.Y., the man who’d hung around too long.
It was twilight when the sound of movement in the underbrush beneath me brought me back to reality. I squinted downward, and first one and then a group of four or five figures appeared beneath me. Dizzy as I was from the sun and the pain, I could appreciate that they were figures worth studying.
They were all female. The shortest of them was around five-foot-eight, the tallest well over six feet. Some of them carried bows and had quivers of arrows over their shoulders. The others carried spears. All wore the same garment, a sort of skirt which started well down on their hips and ended just below the knee. These skirts were of a coarse fiber which had been dyed either green or brown, and they were slit up one side to the hip, where a knot held them in place. The women wore nothing above the waist. Even in my predicament I could appreciate the impressive array of bare bosoms they presented to view.
One of them saw me and pointed. They conferred among themselves in a language I couldn’t understand. Then three of them started climbing up the tree in which my chute was snared.
They climbed like agile monkeys. Soon two of them were pulling me in toward a crotch in the tree while the third continued upward to where the chute was snared. Here she started sawing away at the straps. The other two held me so that I wouldn’t fall, or be snared in the lines of the freed chute. When I was untangled from it, they started back down the tree and I followed.
On the ground, I tried to thank them. But they simply smiled and shook their heads to show they hadn’t the slightest idea what I was saying. In friendly fashion, they indicated that I should come with them, and I readily followed along.
They led me through the jungle until we reached a small village of mud huts. Here the first thing that struck me was the preponderance of women lounging around. There seemed to be five or six women for every man I saw. And it was the men who were scurrying around preparing some sort of community meal while the women relaxed and chatted in small groups.
This tribal society I’d stumbled on was obviously a matriarchy. The women who had rescued me had carried the caracasses of small, freshly killed game. They were huntresses. And the other women I saw now in the village carried themselves with the same lithe grace and easy authority. Occasionally one of them would give an order to one of the men and he would scurry off to do her bidding. A matriarchy—that’s what this tribe of Amazon beauties was, and no doubt about it.
But I was hard put to place them in relationship to the area in which I found myself. As near as I could tell, I was in the lowlands of Brazil, in the jungle country somewhere between the inland city of Manaus and the banks of the Amazon River. My memory told me that the only Indian tribes in this area should be aborigines. But this group was obviously far advanced beyond the aborigine stage.
What I knew about such things was that anthropology which I had studied in connection with my work, which is sexology. The two are interrelated and have many points of contact, and over the years I had read a great deal in the field of anthropology. However, my researches in this area of South America had occurred more than five years back, and so now I searched my mind to see if I could recall mention of a matriarchal tribe as far advanced as this one.
The more I thought about it, the surer I became that I had never read of such a tribe. However, I did recall an Inca legend which seemed to have some pertinence. It had to do with the Tiahuanaco civilization which preceded the Incas and vanished around 500 A.D.
According to Inca folklore, the Tiahuanacos had flourished on the shores of Peru and Ecuador until some plague borne by the ocean winds had driven them inland. Vague descriptions of this plague sound like it might have been Yellow Jack. The legend goes on to imply that the Tiahuanacos continued to migrate in an easterly direction while their numbers were steadily decreased by sickness. Eventually, the legend concludes, they died off in the jungle wilderness which is today the Brazilian interior. The last to go, according to this tale, were the women, who were far less susceptible to the fevers encountered in the jungle than the men were. In the Inca civilization as late as the Spanish conquest, to call a male a “Tiahuanaco” was a supreme insult since it implied that he was effeminate.
I remembered reading of tribes of Amazons encountered by explorers in Brazil, but such tribes were Negro and had been found far south of here. These people I found myself with now had the handsome features of Indians, and their skins were bronze colored, more golden than red. Indeed, most of the women qualified as stunning beauties, although the men seemed quite puny and even downtrodden.