In its heyday, no other single industry required people of the caliber of the field exploration geophysicist. He had to be particularly competent and able to handle all sorts of situations immediately, often with no hope of higher counsel or supervisory assistance. Decisions involving thousands of dollars resided in the hands of the several key men on each crew and the margin of profit was not large enough to permit a man the luxury of mistakes.

Perhaps no other group of engineering personnel have ever, until much later, in the era of the Manhattan Project, been under much continued pressure to betray the trust of their employers. A seismic map represented closely guarded information whose loss seas irreparable in every sense of the word, and these maps were immediately negotiable. Yet, to the author's knowledge, no Party Chief, or his computing staff or observer ever diverted any Information to his own use. Leaks occurred, but only because it was impossible to operate a crew in total secrecy. Competing oil companies employed regular scouts to cover all the crews of their competitors, and these men were under instructions to get any and all information they could, by any means short of torture. Lease hounds stood ready to act on any information obtained by securing strategic leases.

So the Doodlebugger was an honorable man.

The doodlebugger was not, however, an average type... he formed a most remarkable class. Some drank to excess and some were addicted to girls, neither of which were particularly anomalous in the pre-Second World War days... and may not be now, for all I know. One, whom I regarded with complete respect did both, but also read nothing but the works of Milne; perhaps he read other authors, but if he did, he hid this peculiarity. I suppose Edward and John were logical enough, because this guy was a Ph.D. from Caltech and these two were cosmologist and seismologist respectively. He introduced me, however, to the delightful characters of the other Milne; I had somehow missed Winnie the Pooh, in my early youth.

There must have been any number of nice, quiet, normal, commonplace people in the racket, but I truthfully don't remember any worth recalling to print. Since I performed my own part in this vast, tentless circus mostly in foreign climes, I may be short of data, or using the wrong controls as the statisticians are wont to say. Maybe only the peculiar ones went foreign. If this is true, then most of the really brilliant ones had a tour of outland duty, because none of the strange people you will meet here were technical or philosophical dullards by any strain of the facts. In any event, everybody I knew seemed to be a character, some mild, others batty as a fruitcake.

My first paying job on a seismograph crew involved me with a group of web-footed individualists who were working the Louisiana marshes. This crew had an office in the old, then-abandoned parish jailhouse. That this did not strike them as odd should have been a tip-off, what with the other aberrations which were shortly evident, but I was already in too deeply to take up another line of endeavor, and soon became as oblivious to the nature of the place as anyone else.

One of the drillers, who was accustomed to catching a quick nap on a pile of sacked drilling additive while awaiting a comrade whose duties kept him later in the field sets this scene. The mud was stored conveniently in one of the cells, and it was only a matter of time until some wag found a set of old cell keys someplace and locked this chap quietly in. When it came time to let him out again and the Joke was over (these people never prolonged a joke) it seemed that the keys wouldn't open the lock. As it waxed later and later, some were for just forgetting the whole thing and going to supper. The Party Chief, as a matter of fact, made a few ribald comments and did just that, after admonishing the captive that he would be docked the following day's pay did he not get his drill to the field on time'. Upon hearing of the contretemps, various characters drifted back to the office after having been to their rooms, bathed, and dressed according to their custom for dinner. Most of these had already had a pre-prandial Bourbon or two; these suggested some direct action, and two schools developed. One faction was for removing the door, the other, the window. A cooler head went for the sheriff, who arrived to find about half the assemblage running cables from a winch truck to the window bars. The rest he found inside, cheering one of their number who had lugged a set of tanks inside, settled his goggles, and was adjusting the oxygen valve on his cutting torch preparatory to burning the lock off the door.

The story should logically stop here, with the sound of truncheons on hard heads and the Black Marias drawing up to the door. Instead, the sheriff was revealed as an old Seismos Gesel-lschaft permit man who saw nothing really strange about the matter. He hastened to produce a set of keys that worked and averted damage to parish property in a severe, if benign manner. When the furore had died down and the captive had disappeared in search of a bath and dinner, proclaiming his intention to find other work, the sheriff-cum-ex-doodlebugger led all hands to a nearby saloon to speak of old times.

Undoubtedly, credibility is improved, insofar as the sense of the bizarre is concerned if the scene is set in the Tropics. There is something about the climate; surely.

I once joined a crew in the Guajira Peninsula of Colombia during the early part of the wet season. There was a shortage of living quarters, and I was housed with the Observer I was replacing. This seemed a reasonable sort of man; he was a mechanical engineer with a second degree in animal husbandry or something equally appropriate, very competent and somewhat quiet. The first night we repaired to our tent after having participated in a session of rum-drinking and lying about a distant, almost forgotten myth called "women."

Sometime later I was catapulted out of a deep sleep into reality. It was only a couple of years after the European misunderstandings World War II and I hadn't yet re-acquired the ability to sleep in a boiler factory which was then so important to the compleat geophysicist.

It was awfully dark, which is the only way it can be in the jungle, and I could just make out a mass in the doorway, which must have been my tentmate.

"Shah I" quothe, sotto-voce, "Listen! ~

I slid out of the cot and crawled over; I was new enough in Colombia not to know the difference between a Guajira Indian and a Motilone, and I assumed that both were equally fond of shooting black-palm arrows into foreign oil seekers. I listened carefully for a minute or so and began to unwind; there was nothing but the night noise of the jungle ... frogs, the lament of a disturbed monkey, maybe the cough of a prowling "tiger".

"I don't hear anything, " I complained. I could see my roommate somewhat better now; he was staring straight out into the jungle. "Listen!" he repeated hoarsely. "Can't you hear them? The ones 'way out there are crying I Help!' and the ones close in are saying I 'No!' Listen to them!"

For many weeks I was to devoutly wish that I had just gone back to bed. Even after this guy had turned his work over to me and gone back to the States for his obviously-overdue annual leave, I sat every night for hours listening to "them". Sure enough, way out there in the jungle, the little green tree frogs were saying " Help!, Help In in high tenors; and closer in where the trees had been cleared around the camp, the water frogs in their puddles were replying, "No !, No!" in deep basses. The longer one listened, the more plaintive the cries for succor, the more arrogantly negative the refusal. Even after I had broken the habit, by the simple expedient of reading Stephen Potter until I fell asleep, the temptation to listen was strong. I have never met the chap who introduced me to night-noise-in-the-jungle listening, and now that the years have mellowed me, I no longer yearn to do him in. I hope that he can now rest even in a Pullman berth without listening to the rail joints speak to him of dire and awful things.

There are those who will take issue with me, I know; these hold that there is nothing really different or peculiar about doodlebuggers. This fable goes on to say that the fellowship was a composite victim of circumstances imposed by the bizarre complications of the job. No such oversimplification can be wrung from me. The denizens of this sub-world simply performed more magnificently in the stage setting provided by the situations inherent to their profession. Ordinary people placed on this stage would shake their heads sadly and walk off into more predictable occupations.

I don't have very many proofs of this contention, but I will give you one very telling point in case. The respected head of one of the world's largest and most competent geophysical companies is the star of this performance.

I had the pleasure of working for this gentleman for a number of years and I am here to tell you that he could not, by any stretch of the imagination be called a screwball. I am not able to vouch for the absolute truth of the story because I wasn't a witness, but I heard it in infinite variations over the period of almost three decades, with never a refutation. It goes something like this.

Back in the heydays, when there were so many seismograph crews in the Gulf States that two crews would sometimes be shooting on opposite sides of the same country road within minutes of simultaneity, the hero of this piece receives a disquieting report from an executive of another company. It seems that the second party has been in a certain town and has in turn been informed that one of the protagonist's seismic crews is behaving in an undignified manner, with much drinking and disorderly conduct.

At this point, the ordinary man would have hied himself to his office, summoned a secretary, and dashed off a command for the errant chief of party to betake himself to the home office to explain things. Things aren't so simple in doodlebugging.

Our hero is going to be in the town in question in the course of a routine inspection trip a day or so later and plans to see to it personally. He arrives in this town late one night and puts up at a hotel. In this same hotel his crew have their offices, and the key personnel reportedly live there. It's late, though, and he is dead tired, so he goes to bed. Sometime later he is blasted out of a deep sleep by the sounds of loud and thorough revelry. There is a cacophony of splintering glassware, the rumble of heavy, unsteady feet, the high happy laughter of women, and snatches of ribald song.

Now, what does our plaything of the rates do? Does he gnash his teeth and try to go back to sleep, hoping that the police will shortly arrive and restore the peace? No. Despite his present status, he is a doodlebugger, and he recognizes the sound of unruly doodlebuggers. He gets up, pulls on a pair of trousers, goes upstairs and beats on the offending door. After a moment the door is opened, releasing a torrent of happy, riotous noise, and framing a character in khakis with a bottle in one hand and a blonde in the other. This worthy peers blearily out into the corridor and is immediately identified by our irate president as a doodlebugger. A doodlebugger in considerable disorder, but unmistakably a doodlebugger ... probably a chief computer, or perhaps the observer.

Crew Number Sixteen, I presume, " he says, looking past the disorderly one at the chaos within.

"Who wants to know?" says the unsteady one.

"I will tell you who wants to know. When your Party Chief sobers up, tell him the president of the company he purportedly worked for was here, that he is fired, and that I am sending replacements down for all of you." Raving thus delivered the clincher, he turns on his heel and goes back to his room. By the time he has regained his bed, the loud noises have all died away, and there is nothing but heavy silence, pregnant with unhappiness, and punctuated by people leaving the scene of the shattered revels.

He awakes betimes and goes down to the dining room for breakfast. He there encounters the manager of the hotel. He introduces himself to this worthy and begins to apologize, in the name of his company, for the behavior of his employees.

The hotel manager looks at him in some confusion. "But Mr. Blank," he interrupts, "your crew moved out day before yesterday. There must be some mistake. Your people were the most considerate guests we have ever had.

Now, watch carefully. The ordinary man would have clapped a hand to his brow and muttered, "My God I What have I done? " or some other cliche. Not our man. "You say," he says mildly, "And who, may I ask were those ruffians upstairs?"

The manager makes a moue. "Oh, them! They are Glutz Company's Party Sixteen. Disgraceful. I called the police last night, but when they got here everything was quiet. I hope they didn't disturb you.

"Not at all, " says the doodlebugger, buffing his immaculate nails on a well-pressed lapel. "Not at all. As a matter of fact, I spoke to them about the noise, and I think you will find them much quieter from now on."

You see? Nice, simple situation. Normally, with ordinary actors in the cast, the thing would have drawn on to some morbid conclusion. People would be going to jail for disorderly conduct, there would be all sorts of recriminations and assorted unpleasantness and a messy residue of ill feelings. Set the scene with doodlebuggers, and what do you have? Absolute and complete confusion, with the characters all wandering about talking to themselves and wondering what happened. I tell you true; you can't beat it for sheer drama. Why no playwright has hit upon the happy solution of using this readymade reservoir. I cannot image. The potential is staggering.

The author arrived in Venezuela in 1949. This was my first trip to Latin America, and my Spanish was limited to a few essentials like requests for beer and a few selected salutations and farewells.

I was assigned to a crew in the eastern part of the country, and expected I know not what... possibly to be escorted thence by the Manager himself. It became painfully apparent to me, however, that the custom of the company in those days was to pitch the new arrival into the situation in the most direct way possible. His reactions were then studied and r presume that his success ... or failure could predict his future with the concern. At any rate, I was given a brand-new shooting truck to deliver to some other crew, and a map. My instructions were to get to a town called Las Mercedes if the bridges were still intact, and to wait an unspecified time for some equally unspecified person to contact me.

I had some minor trouble getting to Las Mercedes. It took me the better part of three days; I later made the same trip in less than a day, but at the time, I thought of it as quite an accomplishment.

I found the best hotel and got a room, put up my hammock and went out to have a look at the town.

The truck had a big shiny company decal on the door, and I reasoned that if I parked it in front of the biggest drinking establishment in town, sooner or later, doodlebuggers being what they are, someone would find me. I found the place I wanted near the center of town on the main, unpaved, street. As long as I was there, it seemed uncivil not to patronize the place, so I took a little table outside in front where I could watch the truck. After a moment a chap came out and said "Senor?" and I said, N9enor. Cerveza, por favor, thereby using up all my Spanish except one or two farewells, which didn't seem particularly appropriate. The chap, laughing gently, as everybody did when I spoke Spanish in those days, went inside. He returned soon with a cold bottle of Cerveza Caracas, which is a really fine Venezuelan beer made by Venezuelans with names like Frederico Schlausser and Roberto Krause. I said, "gracias." and he went away, laughing fit to kill.

I was on my second or third beer and nothing much had happened except that a different person brought it each time and they all laughed gently. finally a chap in a uniform came by. He made me a sort of salute and bespoke me in English, asking if I was a Northamerican and if he could help me. I forthwith asked him to Join me in a beer. He sat down and the proprietor appeared and I ordered two beers. This time nobody actually laughed, but Just smiled gently. We had a draught of beer and my companion remarked that he saw that I was with the seismograph company. I replied that it was so, and that I was waiting for some other Northamericans to meet me here. He remarked that there was no scarcity of the article in these parts and we addressed ourselves to the beer. Then: "Mire," said the officer.!

I followed his glance. Down the street toward the center of town, and apparently headed towards us was a small cloud of dust. We watched this phenomenon, the policeman and I, sipping our beer, and the dust cloud began to resolve itself into a cloud of dust with people inside. As it came closer, it became evident that there were two people, running. It was a peculiar, unenthusiastic sort of running, but the runners were covering some ground. They passed directly in front of us, dust cloud and all, ignoring us completely in their dedication to their enterprise. In front, but not by much, was one of the biggest guys I have ever seen; he was not Just tall, he was thick, and had you wanted to be ungracious, you might have called him somewhat obese. The most singular thing about him, however, was that he was absolutely naked except for a ragged athletic supporter and a cowboy hat. Perspiration poured off him in rivers. The guy behind him was fully dressed, and almost as large, although not so well fed.

He wouldn't have been particularly notable, if it weren't for the fact that he carried a forty-eight inch pipe wrench.

As this little group drew abreast of us, the pursuer had closed to within almost arm's reach. Thereupon, he drew back the pipe wrench for a two-handed swing. It was a clumsy weapon, and the act slowed him a little. Simultaneously, without looking back, the character in front put on a piteous burst of speed, if "burst" can be applied to a ten-percent increase over what had slowed by now to a sort of shambling trot. The blow struck by the type with the wrench was a terrific thing, and aimed with sufficient force to shatter a granite boulder. Because of several factors, however, the interval had opened just far enough so that it missed, and the unbalanced wielder fell flat on his face. Still without looking to one side or the other, he got painfully to his feet and took up the chase.

I glanced at my companion. When in a foreign country, I told myself, it is prudent not to criticize the local customs until one is acquainted with the mores. The policeman was watching the procession go offstage to his left, sipping his beer and smiling. He turned and saw me regarding him.

"They must have come all the way from Maria's place on the other side of town," he mused. "They must be very tired."

I replied that I shouldn't be surprised. It was a hot day for that sort of thing.

"They were not the North Americans you seek?" he asked.

I watched the little entourage disappear painfully around a bend in the road. I told him I didn't think so, and suggested another beer. We finished it without haste, speaking of this and that, and finally the policeman got up and said that he must go. I got up too, and thanked him for his company, and he tossed me another grave soft salute and went his way.

Several beers later a Jeep with the Company's seal emblazoned on it drew up and a guy Jumped out and came up the steps. He had on a pair of lederhosen, a sweatshirt that said: "Mardi Gras, 1946" on it, a pair of cowboy boots and a pith helmet. He sat down where the policeman had been, put his hat on the table, grinned at me, said U "You're Schoellhorn. I know your brother." yelled. "Oye, Roberto Dos cervesas Caracas, por favor !" and lit up a brown paper cigarette.

I had been found.

There was a kind of blithe assurance about these people. It probably wasn't generated entirely by confidence; it would be unkind that this air of quiet competence was simply the result of ignorance.

Or would it?

Consider a little group of three young people in a small town on the Louisiana coast in 1953 or thereabouts. The oldest by a year is the chief of party on a radiolocation crew and is responsible for the navigation of about twenty marine seismograph crews. He is a graduate electrical engineer with a Master's degree; the next oldest is his wife who is considerably pregnant and also a university graduate. Unfortunately, as it develops, her degree is not in medicine. The third is a doodlebugger, also a college man. All of these people are modern sophisticates, citizens of the world, blase, always in command of their fate. Right?

Wrong. We are about to embark on one of those little excursions into chaos again.

The young husband has been concerned about the arrival of his first child. Being an engineer, and knowing it is about forty miles to a decent hospital, he has been planning everything very carefully He has made practice runs from their house to the hospital at various times of the day and night, and has worked out the quickest routes under any possible condition. It is Just as well. His wife is about to put the whole thing to the acid test.

The third man is the deputy party chief. He is sitting at his in the party office, happily plotting hyperbolic families of curves on an acetate overlay. The door to the inner office opens and his boss comes out, lugging a brief case.

"Al, I've gotta go up to Tulsa to see the Old Man. I'll be back tomorrow. Make sure that the Northwest Ex crew gets checked out okay first thing in the morning. Yeah ... another thing, Al. If you'll do me a favor ... I don't think anything will happen, but you know that Ellen is due any day. " He passed over an envelope. "Just in case ... these are the maps showing the easiest way to the hospital, and there's the name and phone number of her doctor. The baby's not really due for a week or so yet, but ... Just in case, huh?"

Our Hero says, "Sure. Don't worry about a thing. See you tomorrow. Give the Old Man my love.

About one o'clock the next morning, Al is rudely awakened by his landlady beating on his door. "Mr. Jones," she says, glacially, "there's a woman on the phone that says she's Ellen and that she's going to have a baby. Now Mr. Jones ... N."

"Ungggg ... Oh, eec, she's my boss' wife, Mrs. Glutz. I've got to get her to the hospital. Where's my pants? Where's that damned envelope?"

Now… It's childishly simple to get lost in Southern Louisiana. It's even easier at night. These facts, combined with a handful of sketches drawn on the backs old tailor's bills by an electrical engineer who was never exposed to a course in surveying, make a combination that is foolproof.

About four in the morning, a sedan marked with the logo of a well-known geophysical company roars into a hamlet illuminated only by the blinking yellow caution light suspended over the only street intersection in town. It stops in the middle of the junction of these two unpaved roads and disqorqes a disheveled character who looks about wildly, and then rushes about pounding doors and shouting. This performance is greeted by absolute dead silence. A signpost catches his fevered eye. It says "SABINE FERRY 2 MI," Underneath, a weather-beaten, yellowed sheet of shirt cardboard has been tacked, and he trots up to look at it in the intermittent yellowish illumination It says "FERRY NOT (something) …go back to …(Gloopsville ?)… "

Our sophisticated young citizen of the world fumbles for the hundredth time for the package of cigarettes he left on top of Mrs. Glutz bureau. "Jesus Christ, " he mumbles "Sabine River, what is it doing over here? A clear soprano: voice breaks into his meditation. "Al? Al! AL !! Come quick think I'm going to have the baby."

About four o'clock in the afternoon of the same day, the chief of party pays off his taxicab and goes whistling carefree like across the street to the office in this little town in Louisiana. Upon opening the door, he is confronted by an unshaven, dissolute type sitting at a drafting table drinking from a tumbler of whiskey and smoking a cheap cigar. As he stands there wondering perhaps, what happened to the proper young gentleman he left only yesterday, this disreputable tramp leaps up, falls flat on his face, recovers sluggishly, and ultimately presses upon him a tumbler of whiskey and a cheap cigar.

"Congratulate me, " says the wreck. "It's a boy. Seven pounds and four ounces. Mother and son doing very nicely. You can collect them at… " He fumbles around in his pockets and produces a Card. ". .. At some little town out by the Sabine River, wherever that is. This doctor is the best I could do. He's a veterinarian. Have you ever cut an umbilical cord with a nail clipper under a street light? I can't recommend it as a permanent hobby. I called your wife's doctor and he went out to the Sabine River place and said everything's okay. I got the impression that he thought all doodlebuggers ought to patronize vets and leave his ilk to take care of the gentry. The vet said I should give up geophysics and take up medicine. I gather he liked the knot I tied in the umbilical cord, " He stumbles over and rips a sheet of paper out of the typewriter. "This is my request for a transfer to Libya. After last night I don't think I could be comfortable socially with your good wife. I have already written my fiancée and called off our relationship, whatever that was. I may embrace Zero Population Growth. I left my nail clippers on your desk. I don't think I could ever use them again for clipping nails. Perhaps you can have them gilded along with Junior's baby shoes.

Hmmm.

It wasn't just outsiders to the family who got enmeshed in these problems. The major participants in doodlebugger-type marital arrangements didn't seem to do much better. The women doodlebuggers married seem to have been cast from the same mold, albeit from a distaff impression. Few ever legally severed the junction which had been blessed by God or some convenient Justice-of-the-Peace. I don't suppose that they make womenfolk like that anymore. Perhaps, the way things are universally going to pot, it may be just as well.

I was associated with a seismograph crew party chief once long ago while awaiting a foreign assignment. We were in a little town in North Texas. He and his wife had their apartment over the office. This arrangement, considering the poor quality of the acoustic insulation, was oftentimes fascinating for the unintentional eavesdropper working late on the day's records.

On this particular evening, I was laboring over my reports in the office. An altercation developed upstairs, over what I do not recall. We were all criminally underpaid, so it may have been about living conditions; I guess wives always thought that their spouses would ultimately be promoted to high places. Some were, I suppose. Anyway, the discussion heated. The girl came from an important family somewhere in rural Oklahoma, and she tearfully announced that she was going back to the bosom of her family. There were other noises, culminating in door slamming, taxicab arrival and departure, and, finally, her husband, my boss, coming down with a bottle of Old Loudmouth bottled-in-bond.

"Schoellhorn, " he said, " Whatshername has left me."

"I heard, " I said.

"I'm scared, " he said, she was awfully mad.

We drank for a while. I wasn't married. I was carefree. also wanted to go back to my crummy boardinghouse and hit the sack, to be able to arise cheerful and bushy-tailed to drive my jug-hustlers to new heights of production on the morrow.

"She packed all of her good clothes in the suitcase, " said the malfeasant. "She was awful mad."

"Awfully," I corrected absently.

The telephone rang, and he answered it listlessly. There was a long, indistinguishable passage to which I sedulously refrained from listening. He spoke in occasional monosyllables, ending with, "I'll be right down, darling."

He hung up and shook his head. "That was Whatshername."

"I kinda figured, " I said.

"Schoellhorn," he said,

He grinned. "She called from the Greyhound station. Jesus, I guess I'm Just plain lucky. She said that when she checked her suitcase in, she heard a noise inside. It was a 'meow'. She had packed the housecat in with her clothes. She was crying. she wants me to come down and bring her back home.