Uneasy Relations

by Aaron Elkins

  Delivered with the meal was a folded copy of the Gibraltar Chronicle (“The Independent Daily—First Published 1801”), and now, while Gideon contentedly sipped his third cup of tea and continued with the program, Julie unfolded it to browse.

  “Oh, boy,” she said the moment she looked at it.

  He glanced at her. “What?”

  Mutely, she handed the paper to him.

  And there it was again, big and bold, and apparently tracking him around the world like a vindictive ex-spouse.

  PROMINENT SCIENTIST TO REVEAL “STUNNING” SCIENTIFIC FRAUD AT PUBLIC LECTURE TODAY.

  “Aw, no,” he groaned, scanning the piece. It was an abbreviated version of the overheated Affiliated Press release, with the addition of the title of his presentation: “ ‘Mistakes’ in Human Evolution.”

  “Well, look on the bright side,” Julie chirped

  “There’s a bright side?” he said dismally.

  “Sure, there is.” She stood up, leaned over to kiss him on the cheek, and headed inside. “I bet you’ll have a heck of a crowd.”

  AT ten thirty, Gideon returned to the hotel for a final prep session before for his presentation, then went downstairs to wait for Rowley, who had offered to have his administrative assistant, Henrietta, stop by the hotel at eleven to give a ride up to the cave to anyone who needed one. (Rowley himself had gone up earlier to make sure everything was in order for the lecture.) He found Buck and Adrian already beside the curving driveway, waiting for the lift. The others were there too, grouping up to walk into town so they could drop in on the society meetings for a few minutes before going up to the cave.

  “Say, Gideon,” Pru said wryly, “just in case we get tied up and don’t make it to your, um, ‘stunning exposé,’ will you have abstracts of the paper you can let us have?”

  Gideon sighed. “I gather you saw the article in the Chronicle.”

  “Hard to miss. Right there on page one.”

  “Well, the answer to your question is no. I do not have abstracts. I am not giving a ‘paper.’ This is going to be strictly off-the-cuff, seat-of -the-pants stuff. Miss it today, and there will never be another opportunity. ”

  “Oh, well, then, we’ll be sure to be there,” she called merrily as she, Audrey, and Corbin started down the driveway. “Wouldn’t want to miss that!”

  At eleven on the dot a gray, mud-spattered Ford minivan pulled up beside them. “I’m Henrietta,” the large, jovial driver jauntily proclaimed. “Climb aboard, gents!”

  Buck instinctively took the front seat beside her; not only was he the biggest of the three, and needful of the most leg room, but riding shotgun seemed to suit him. Gideon and Adrian sat behind.

  “Henrietta,” Gideon said as she pulled out onto Europa Road, “do you happen to know how Ivan Gunderson’s doing?”

  “Ah. Ivan.” Henrietta’s round, jolly face sagged. “I haven’t seen him today, but according to Rowley, he was quite destroyed by what happened last night. As soon as I drop you gentlemen off, I’m on my way to see him with a load of broken pots—that’s the clinking you’ve been hearing from the back. We’re hoping it helps him find his footing, but sometimes it takes days.”

  “Yes, that’s typical of dementia senilis,” Adrian averred. “But it was dreadful to see him in that condition.”

  “Well, you know—” Buck began, but Adrian hadn’t yet relinquished the floor.

  “Did I understand Rowley to say yesterday,” he continued, “that Ivan is expected to give some sort of welcoming presentation at the Europa Point ceremony tomorrow?”

  “Yes, he—”

  “Will he be able to manage it?”

  Henrietta shrugged. “God only knows. Rowley’s going to make sure he writes it down, but . . .” Another shrug.

  They climbed the flank of the Rock in silence for a few minutes, until Adrian slyly lifted his eyebrows and disingenuously said, “Bigger than Piltdown, eh?”

  Gideon sighed again. He’d been expecting more of this, although perhaps not from Adrian.

  “Yeah, hey, I saw the paper too,” Buck said, turning. “What is that about? Aud says it’s, like, some kind of stupid joke.” His beefy face flushed. “Not that she meant—”

  “I understand,” Gideon said. “And it is a stupid joke. Not that you could tell from the way the article was written.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry,” Henrietta said, unabashedly joining in. “I read it too. I think most people could tell you weren’t being serious. ”

  “The thing is,” Gideon said, “some of these reporters take what you say and—”

  “Indeed they do,” said Adrian with a full-throated laugh, and Gideon got his first rich morning whiff of Tullamore Dew. “They take what you say in all innocence and twist it unconscionably. Of course it’s irritating at the moment, but really, it becomes quite amusing with the passage of time. Let me tell you what happened to me once. It had to do with the relative chronology of the Mousterian succession at Peche de Bourre. Now, what I actually said was that the superpositioning of the Ferrassie variant was an unfortunate—”

  And off he went on a convoluted story about Neanderthal lithic technology, stopping when the car stopped at the pay booth that marked the entrance to the Upper Rock Nature Preserve, which encompassed most of the popular visitor sites on the Rock, including St. Michael’s Cave. But as soon as Henrietta was recognized and waved through, he took up where he’d left off.

  Even Gideon, let alone Buck and Henrietta, had trouble following him. When the story had finally reached its conclusion (they knew because he had stopped talking for a full five seconds and was looking at them with a wry, expectant expression), Henrietta, after providing the appreciative chuckle that was expected, addressed Gideon.

  “Tell us, then, will you? What will your lecture be about? Really.”

  “Well, why not wait to hear the full, unexpurgated version? I wouldn’t want to spoil the anticipation for you.”

  “Oh, come on, give us a hint,” Adrian coaxed. “Whet our appetites. ”

  “Yes, do,” agreed Henrietta. “What are these ‘mistakes’?”

  “We won’t tell anybody,” Buck said.

  Gideon, a professor through and through, wasn’t the sort of man who could easily turn down multiple requests for a lecture— even a prelecture lecture—from a captive and apparently sincere audience.

  “All right, it’s about what you might call the slipups, the bloopers, that have occurred over the years—over the eons—of human evolution. ”

  Buck’s open, honest face showed shock. “Can evolution make mistakes?”

  “Well, not mistakes. Call them arrangements that haven’t worked out quite as well as they might have, things that, oh . . .”

  “What Gideon is referring to are what are known as vestigial organs,” explained Adrian, ever ready to provide expertise and edification to the insufficiently educated. “You see, Buck, our bodies carry around these tag ends of structures that were at one time functional, but now serve no use, and in fact may do us damage. Our appendix would perhaps be the best example. All it can do for us now is to become infected. Our coccyx, which is no more than the rudimentary root of the tail we once had, would be another such example. Most of the time, these tag ends make their appearance early in our intrauterine development and then disappear—fortunately. How would you like it if you still had, pulsing at the sides of your throat, the gill slits that are found in the human embryonic pharynx? ”

  Gideon took advantage of Adrian’s predictable pause for astonishment and appreciative laughter to barge in. “Uh, actually, Adrian, the subject isn’t going to be vestigial structures. Interesting as they are,” he added as Adrian’s face clouded. The great man very much disliked being told he didn’t know what he was talking about, however gently.

  “No? What then?” he asked coldly.

  “Mostly, the problems that resulted when we evolved from quadrupeds to bipeds,” Gideon said, and then, at Buck’s puzzled frown, added
, “from four-legged animals to two-legged. You see, the difficulty is that we didn’t get totally redesigned. Nature— evolution—doesn’t go in for total redesign. Generally, it acts in a kind of piecemeal manner, fixing this or that up, but not taking into consideration how it affects other things. And getting up on our hind legs has affected a lot of other things, which is why we wind up with problems.”

  “I don’t get it,” Buck said. “What problems?”

  “Do you mean like fallen arches?” Henrietta asked. “Varicose veins in the legs? Oh, Lord, I can tell you all about those.”

  “Yes, exactly. When we were on four legs, the blood from the leg veins had to overcome about two feet of gravity to get back to the heart. Now that we’re standing erect, your heart is a good four feet above the ground. Sometimes it’s too much for the venous pumping system. The blood can’t make it back up, it collects in the leg, and the veins bulge—varicose veins.”

  “Oh, I get it. That’s pretty cool,” Buck said. “And fallen arches, what about them?”

  “Ah, you see, our feet are unique in the animal world. In most four-legged animals, what they have are paws or hooves—nice, compact, simple structures wonderfully suited to running or walking. But primates were tree-dwellers to start, and almost all of them still are. So instead of four feet, they have what you might call four hands—a lot more useful for getting around up there. But ever since we humans started walking upright, our rear hands, so to speak, have been turning into paws to make walking more efficient. The problem is, they’re not really either; useless for holding things, but not built too well, not compact enough, for efficient walking. Not yet, anyway. The result is fallen arches. And bunions. And most of the rest of our foot miseries. ”

  “So you mean I got flat feet because I used to be a monkey?” Buck exclaimed with his deep, pleasant laugh.

  “Closer to an ape, actually,” Gideon corrected, unable to help himself.

  “Ape, monkey, whatever,” Buck said happily.

  Adrian seemed on the brink of putting in his own explanatory two cents’ worth, but then remembered he was still miffed and sat silently back without saying anything, pretending to be engrossed by the passing scenery. And looking more like a big, sulky baby than ever.

  “But what may be the biggest problem,” Gideon went on, warming to his subject (once he’d gotten well launched, he was almost as hard to stop as Adrian), “is that the human pelvis has changed. See, when we walked on four legs the ribs were underneath our guts and took care of holding them in place, but once we stood up, that didn’t work anymore, and the pelvis constricted to meet the challenge. It went from being a pair of wide, flat, open blades to becoming a sort of bowl with only a tiny opening in the base, that could support the internal organs.”

  “So why is that a problem?” Buck asked.

  “Because while that’s been going on at the bottom of the spinal cord, the thing on top of it—the brain case—has been expanding. In other words, the birth canal has been getting smaller, while the biggest thing that has to go through it, the infant’s head, has been getting bigger. Giving birth hasn’t been getting any easier.”

  “Tell me about it,” muttered Henrietta.

  “And yet at the same time that the skull has been expanding,” Adrian said, finally unable to resist chipping in—he wasn’t one to stay irked very long—“the facial skeleton has diminished in size. We no longer have a snout, which means there is less room for our teeth. But our teeth have not gotten any smaller, and as you can surmise, that has meant trouble. The last teeth to come in, the third molars or wisdom teeth, often don’t have a decent space left, so they come in impacted, or crooked, or not at all. Good for the dentists, bad for the rest of us. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in another half-million years, we only have twenty-four teeth or so. Instead of thirty-two. Wouldn’t you agree, Gideon?”

  With difficulty, Gideon restrained himself from pointing out that evolutionary change didn’t work that way. It didn’t work toward something. It worked from something, but even people like Adrian Vanderwater seemed to have a hard time getting that straight. It was the conditions of the moment that determined which genes would be favored and thus increase their proportion in the next generation. If the conditions changed, the “direction” of evolution would change. It had happened again and again, and was in fact the reason that most advanced life-forms were such seemingly patchwork products. It was a crucial understanding of the process that he freely badgered his introductory students into comprehending, but in this case he held his tongue. He was happy to have a cheerful, outgoing Adrian back with them and didn’t want to spoil things. He groped for a reply that was truthful and yet wouldn’t tick the archaeologist off again.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said.

  TEN

  AT the visitors’ entry to the cave, Henrietta’s presence once again got them waved through without need of fees or passes. Rowley, accompanied by Audrey and Corbin, was there to greet them in the entrance grotto. “You know, Gideon, you’re not on for half an hour,” he said around the bit of his unlit pipe. “There’s time for a look ’round if you’d like. I was about to give these two the tuppence tour. Can I interest you two in joining us? There’s a lot of history here.”

  Only Buck took him up on it. Adrian rather frostily said he preferred to explore it on his own, inasmuch as he was already quite familiar with the history of St. Michael’s Cave, and Gideon said he wanted to have a look at Cathedral Cavern, the natural amphitheater in which he’d be speaking. He found it at the end of a narrow passageway, approaching it from the rear: a breathtaking, echoing, bowl-shaped hollow with a hundred-foot-high concave ceiling from which hung tremendous stalactites made all the more spectacular and mysterious by concealed amber, green, and orange lighting. Over the millennia, many of the stalactites had reached the bottom and congealed, making great, crenellated, floor-to-ceiling columns, also impressively lit.

  The audience section consisted of twenty rising rows of red plastic chairs, each row sited on a white-painted concrete tier. Altogether, there was seating for a good four hundred people. The stage was simply a natural rock platform, slightly raised from the rest of the rock floor. The temperature was a comfortable seventy or so, but it smelled cold—cold, and flinty, and a little musty, but not unpleasant. About the way a great stone cavern ought to smell.

  The walls, the floor, the stage—everything but the chairs—were slick with moisture, and shallow puddles had formed in the hollows in the stone floor. At either end of the stage was a huge speaker, and in the center a lectern had been set up with a rubber floor mat behind it. Gideon went down the tiers and up to the lectern to get a sense of the place from there, something he liked to do before he spoke. He placed his hands on either side of the lectern and looked out at the empty tiers. “Ladies and gentlemen—”

  “Can I ’elp you, mate?” inquired a voice straight out of East London.

  He turned to see a man in bib overalls, wearing a leather tool belt from the pockets of which protruded the multicolored, insulated handles of a dozen pliers, wire-strippers, and screwdrivers. Hanging on the outside were a couple of meters or testers of some kind. Even Gideon, whose knowledge of such things was laughable at best, recognized him as an electrician.

  “No, just checking things out. I’m the speaker today.”

  “Oh, glad to meetcher. M’name’s Derek. Going to be showing any slides, are we?”

  “Nope.”

  "PowerPoint?”

  “Nope.”

  “Just gonner talk, then?”

  “That’s right. I’m pretty low-tech.”

  “Right, then. You’ll be sure and finish up before two? I ’ave to set up for a concert at four.”

  “No problem there. I’ll be out before one thirty.”

  “Right, then.”

  With twenty minutes to go until noon, Gideon went exploring on his own, wandering among the visitors through the multilevel caverns and looking at the exhibits
—a replica of a Neanderthal skull embedded in stone, a Neanderthal family bloodily butchering the day’s kill around a fire, a six-foot-thick slice of stalactite taken from a toppled giant. At five to twelve he headed back to the amphitheater, running into Rowley, Audrey, Buck, and Corbin also on their way in, returning from Rowley’s “tuppence tour.” They entered from the front of the hall this time, coming in alongside the stage.

  The moment they entered, Gideon stopped dead in his tracks. Julie was right. The place was now completely filled, every seat taken, with a row of standees at the back, and more coming. Up front, several of them—journalists?—had reporter’s notebooks open on their laps. Half of Gibraltar seemed to be there, buzzing with excitement. And all of them, he thought wretchedly, eager to be in on it when the Skeleton Detective set the scientific world on its ear.

  “Oh, Lord,” he muttered. “How am I—”

  “Say, Gideon,” Rowley said, frowning at the area where the lectern had been set up, “shouldn’t they have a mat or something for you to stand on? The floor’s wet, you might get a shock.”

  “You’re right,” Buck said. “All that electrical stuff, the mike and everything—you could get a hell of a shock.”

  “There was a mat,” Gideon said, puzzled by the undeniably bare, glistening rock floor. “Somebody took it away.”

  “Some mad scientist, no doubt,” said Pru, who had just come along, “who’s determined to prevent you from revealing his dastardly scheme to the world.” This with a sinister wiggle of her eyebrows.

  “It’s hardly a joke,” Rowley said in mild reproof. “You’re quite right, Gideon. I saw the mat myself, but it’s obviously not there now. You’d better find something non-conductive to stand on.”

  Gideon, who knew next to nothing about electricity, knew enough to agree with that. A few moments’ poking around behind the rocky stage turned up Derek at a work table in a crowded little workroom— a work cranny, more properly—soldering something or other to something or other else.

  “Derek?”

  “ ‘Arf a mo’,” Derek said as a pungent wisp of smoke rose from his work. Satisfied, he put down the iron and looked at Gideon. “Yair?”