Demon Box

I asked if a Dr. Klaus Woofner had checked in yet. She glanced at her book and told me not yet. I left my name and a message for him to call our room as soon as he arrived. “Or leave word if we’re out,” Mortimer added, herding us upstairs to stow our bags. “Time’s a-wasting, boys. I intend to see it all.”

On the monorail to the park Dr. Mortimer divided the package of free ticket books that had been provided us by the movie producers, more thrilled by the minute. He really did intend to see everything, we found out. He ran Joe and me ragged for hours. I finally balked at Small World.

“I want to phone the hotel, see if anybody’s heard anything about Woofner.”

“And I want,” Joe added, “to buy one of those beadwork botas.” We had seen a bunch of foreign sailors drinking out of wineskins on the Mississippi Riverboat Ride, and Joe had been covetous ever since.

“I suspect they’re not available here, Joe,” the doctor suspected. “I hate to get separated—”

“Joe can ask around while I phone. We’ll check for you every half hour—at, say the Sky Ride ticket booth?”

“I guess that will be all right,” the doctor singsonged, right in time with “It’s a small world af-ter all,” and hurried away toward the music.

Joe asked around and I phoned. Nobody had heard anything about Woofner or wineskins, either one. On the Sky Ride we were able to enjoy Joe’s samples in the privacy of our plastic funicular. We alighted to find that there are ticket booths at each end of the ride. When the doctor wasn’t at one end there was nothing to do but climb back aboard and highride back to the other. We spent a good part of our afternoon this way, without another glimpse of Dr. Mortimer. Once, though, Joe thought he might have seen Dr. Woofner.

“The guy with the nurse?” Joe pointed a tiny Tanqueray bottle at the funicular that had just passed us. “Could that be our hero? He appears old and bald enough.”

I craned around to look. An old man and a blond nurse were seated on each side of a folded wheelchair. He wore dark glasses and a too-big Panama hat. For a second something about him did remind me of Woofner, some severe slant to the shoulders, some uncompromising hunch that made me wonder if I wanted to meet up with the ornery old gadfly as much as I thought I did, then a breeze flipped the hat off. The man was old and bald all right, nary a hair from his crown to his chinless neck, but he wasn’t much bigger than a child. I laughed.

“Not unless he’s turned into a Mongoloid midget,” I said. “These dwarf drinks must be affecting your vision, Joe.”

When we docked I phoned the hotel nevertheless. No doctor by that name had checked in. There was a message from one named Mortimer, though. He had returned, reserves exhausted—would see us before the evening’s program.

The Sky Rides had depleted Joe’s reserves, too, so we spent the rest of the afternoon more or less on the ground. It was exactly like Disneyland in Anaheim except for one striking addition: the Happy Hippos. This was a temporary exhibit set up in Adventureland, near the Congo boat dock. A low fence had been erected outside a tent, and a pair of full-grown hippos lounged in a makeshift puddle in the enclosure.

These brutes were nearly twice as big as those mechanical robotamuses on Disney’s Wild Jungle River Ride, awesome tons of meat and muscle, fresh from the real wild. Yet they dozed complacent as cows in their knee-deep puddle, beneath an absolute downpour of insults. Kids bounced ice cubes and balled-up Coke cups off their bristled noses. Teenagers hollered ridicule: “Hey Abdul how’s yer tool?” A Campfire Girl probed at the wilted ears with her rubber spear from Frontierland until an attendant made her stop. Every passerby had to stop and express contempt for this pair of groggy giants, it seemed. The chinless dwarf from the Sky Ride even got in his licks; he took a big sip of Pepto-Bismol, then motioned his nurse to wheel him up close so he could spew a pink spray at them.

Inside the tent was the exhibit’s film, produced by UNESCO, Made Possible by a Grant from Szaabo Laboratories, rear-projected on three special screens donated by Du Pont. As the right and left screens flashed slides of drought-stricken Africa, the center screen would show parched hippos being winched from the curdled red-orange mire of their ancestral wallows. These wallows were drying up, the narration informed us, as a result of a lengthy dry spell plus the damming of rivers to provide electricity for the emerging Third World.

After an animal was successfully winched up from his bog he would be knocked out with a hippo hypo, forklifted onto a reinforced boxcar, and released, hundreds of miles away, into a chain-link compound full of other displaced hippos awaiting relocation. The compound looked as desolate as the regions they’d just been evacuated from, swirling with flies and thick orange dust.