Uneasy Relations

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?”

“There was a rubber mat behind the lectern,” Gideon said. “It’s not there now.”

“ ’Course it’s there.”

Gideon made a motion with his hand, palm up. See for yourself.

Derek did and came back shaking his head. “That’s them janitors for you. Couldn’t do a job proper like to save their lives.”

The janitorial staff, it appeared, was the bane of Derek’s existence. A gaggle of creaky old duffers who should have been superannuated years ago. Careless, slipshod, lazy, apparently they’d thought that Gideon had already given his talk, so they’d begun clearing the stage, presumably to set up for the four o’clock concert. This was grumblingly explained as Derek located the mat – a rubber pad glued to a slightly raised wooden platform – in a corner of the workroom, hauled it out onto the stage, and flopped it on the stone floor behind the lectern. Then he busied himself with checking the mike, setting the angle of the goosenecked reading lamp attached to the lectern, and tinkering with the connections.

“Can’t be too careful when you’re working ’round electricity… now what’s this?” he said disgustedly “Will you just look at this ’ere?”

He tugged at a black electrical cord, revealing a frayed spot where the wiring joined the base of the lamp, and clucked his disapproval. “Accident waiting to ’appen. Should’ve been repaired long ago.” With a complaining sigh he unplugged the lamp and unscrewed it. “Now I’ll ’ave to go and find you another one.”

“That’s all right,” Gideon said, concerned that the audience might think they were having an argument. “I don’t need one, the ambient light’s fine. I don’t have notes to look at anyway.”

“Suit yourself. Good luck, then, mate, they’re all yours.”

Gideon faced his audience. An expectant hush replaced the buzz of conversation. He took a deep breath.

“Good afternoon and thank you all for coming. I guess I’d better tell you right now that my subject isn’t quite what this morning’s paper implied, but I, uh, hope you won’t, um…”

But his anxieties were needless. The talk went beautifully. No one got up and walked out upon learning that that Piltdown Man was not to be left in the dust after all. They listened with active interest, laughed in the right places, and asked intelligent questions afterward. He was pleased.

But he was also troubled. While his archaeologist friends filed upstairs to the St. Michael’s Cave Cafe for a snack, he sought out the technician in the workroom again. “Derek,” he said, “let me ask you a question. That lamp – if I’d touched it, what would have happened? ”

“Touched it? Nothing. You’d’ve ’ad to switch it on.”

“Okay, let’s say I switched it on.”

“Well, still nothing, probably. You’d’ve been standing on the mat, wouldn’tcher?”

“But let’s say I wasn’t standing on the mat – remember, the mat wasn’t there at first.”

At this Derek showed some interest. He set down the soldering iron he’d been using. “I see whatcher getting at. Well, that’d depend on the condition of the wiring in the cord, wouldn’t it? Let’s have us a look, why don’t we?”

The lamp was on a second, smaller worktable crowded with what looked like material for the junkman – broken hand tools, rusty lengths of rebar, chunks of wallboard, a battered old electric sander. Derek brought the lamp back to examine it under the better light of the larger work table.

“Blimey,” he said quietly, probing in the cord’s innards.

“What?”

“Well, just look. There’s only the ’undred-twenty-volt wire still in one piece. The other one, and the ground wire – they’re frayed clear through.”

This told Gideon nothing. “Which means what? I would have gotten a shock?”

“Well, you’d’ve become the switch, d’you see, and the current would’ve ’ad to pass right on through you to close the circuit. Now as long as you was standing on the mat, it would just’ve gone through your ’and, not-”

“But if I wasn’t standing on the mat?” Gideon persisted. “If there was no mat? Could I have been killed?”

Derek astonished Gideon by guffawing. “ Killed! Blimey, mate, you would have been fried. To a crisp,” he added, in case Gideon had missed his drift.