Uneasy Relations

Aaron Elkins
ONE

PROMINENT SCIENTIST TO REVEAL “STUNNING” SCIENTIFIC FRAUD IN GIBRALTAR

By Mike Fender

Affiliated Press

The annual conference of the International Paleoanthropological Society isn’t usually associated with pulse-pounding levels of excitement, other than in some of the more remote halls of academe, but next month’s meeting in Gibraltar promises something different.

Gideon Oliver, a well-regarded professor of physical anthropology at the University of Washington’s Port Angeles campus, and the author of Bones to Pick, an examination of hoaxes, dead ends, and frauds in archaeology and anthropology, is set to reveal his most stunning expose yet. The occasion will be a public lecture during the twenty-third annual conference of the august group, which is meeting in Gibraltar this year to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the discovery there of the celebrated prehistoric double burial known as the First Family, consisting of a mother and young son (Gibraltar Woman and Gibraltar Boy) in a close embrace.

Oliver’s publisher, Lester Rizzo (Javelin Press), describes Oliver’s bombshell as “the most sensational expose of a scientific scam in history. ” Oliver himself, known in forensic circles as the Skeleton Detective, is slightly more circumspect. “Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s the most sensational one in history,” he said during a recent telephone interview, “but it’s right up there.”

“More sensational than Piltdown Man?” he was asked by this reporter.

“Oh, no comparison. It’ll leave Piltdown in the dust,” he promptly replied. “Piltdown was nothing compared to this.”

When asked for a hint, the scientist declined. “Nosirreebob, I’m not letting the cat out of the bag ahead of time on this one. It’s too big. There’s too much at stake. My publisher doesn’t know what it is, my colleagues don’t know what it is, even my wife doesn’t know what it is.”

Rizzo admits that, indeed, he hasn’t been let in on the details. “But I know Dr. Oliver and I can promise you this,” he says with relish. “It’s going to stand the scientific world on its ear.”

“Oh, jeez,” Gideon said, slapping his copy of the Peninsula Daily News down suddenly enough to make a fellow diner, dozing over his English muffin and coffee two tables away, sit up with a jerk. “Look at this, will you, Julie?” He tapped the headline with his finger. “Sheesh.”

His wife, dressed in the trim, tan park ranger uniform in which she would be reporting to work in twenty minutes, paused in buttering a cinnamon-raisin bagel to read the article. Then she read it again.

“Nice going, prof,” she said, only barely managing to keep a straight face. “Did you really say that? ‘It’ll leave Piltdown in the dust’? Talk about over the top.”

The Piltdown hoax was the most celebrated deception in the history of anthropology, the sham discovery of the “missing link,” decisively proven only after forty years of widespread acceptance to be a combination of fossil human skull bones and the jaw of an orangutan. Even now, anthropologists found it painful to joke about, Gideon among them.

“No, of course I didn’t say that,” he said petulantly, “and this isn’t funny. Well, okay, maybe I did say it, but I was kidding. I mean, this reporter calls – Lester told me to expect it; he set it up – and the first thing out of his mouth, the reporter’s mouth, is: “Dr. Oliver, would you agree that this is really going to be the most sensational scientific expose in history?” I thought he was kidding. So I said… whatever the heck it says I said. It was a joke. Am I the kind of person who would go around saying things like ‘nosirreebob’ under conditions of anything but extreme stress or ill-considered jocularity?”

“Uh-huh,” Julie said. “And how was he supposed to know it was a joke? From the twinkle in your eye? It was a phone conversation.”

“From my tone. From my manner. It should have been obvious. It was obvious. Besides, that was just the start. We talked for another ten minutes. I told him in all seriousness that Lester had a tendency to exaggerate, and that it was true that while I was down there at the conference I might or might not do a little research on the Atlantis myth for the next edition of Bones to Pick, but that I had no earth-shattering expose in mind, and the lecture I’d be giving was actually about something else altogether.”

Julie scanned the article again. “He seems to have left that part out.”

“He left it out, all right. I was sandbagged. This is Lester’s doing, Julie. As far as he’s concerned, any publicity is good publicity. He thinks it’ll sell a few more copies of the new edition, even though it won’t be out for eight months. I haven’t even finished the damn thing.”

Julie put down her muffin and the knife. “Gideon, sweetheart, don’t take this as a criticism, but maybe you ought to think twice about joking with reporters? Remember that story that showed up everywhere that had you predicting that in ten thousand years human beings would be four feet tall? Or was it three feet?”

“It was four feet,” he grumbled, “and ten million years, but you know that wasn’t what I really said. I said we could be four feet tall – or seven feet tall, or extinct, for that matter. I was just making the point that you can’t take a teleological approach to evolution, that just because we’ve been getting taller, that doesn’t mean we’re going to continue to get taller. Selective forces in the environment change, and we, or any other organisms, respond to those forces, not to some long-range design or some supposed future condition. If we – oh, heck, you know all that. Anyway, the woman I talked to had no sense of humor at all.” He shook his head in frustration. “Everything I say, these people take literally.”

“Which is my point.”

Gideon shrugged and nodded. “You’re right,” he said, returning with only slightly diminished appetite to his cream cheese-chives-and-egg bagel, a specialty of the Port Angeles Olympic Bagel Company, where they breakfasted once or twice a week. “But this guy was an Associated Press reporter!” he suddenly blurted. “You’d think I could trust him!”

“Look again,” Julie said, turning the paper around so he could read the byline.

“ ‘Mike Fender,’ ” Gideon read aloud. “ ‘Affiliated Press.’ ” He looked up. “What the heck is Affiliated Press?”

“I’m not sure,” Julie said, “but on a guess, I’d say it’s the agency that supplies the checkout magazines with all those snazzy news items: ‘Monkey Woman Gives Birth to Twin Lobsters’, ‘Talking Gorilla With I.Q. of 250 Seeks “Significant Relationship” with “Large” Woman’. …”

“ ‘Noted Anthropologist Stands Scientific World on Its Head,’ ” Gideon said, smiling at last. “Oh, boy, I’m going to take a lot of flak about this. I guess I’d just better resign myself.”

“I’m afraid so. So this talk you’ll be giving in Gibraltar – it’s open to the public? Not part of the society meetings?”

“Right. I’m not giving a paper at the meetings. But apparently there’s a very active cultural association down there, and they hold these monthly noontime Heritage Lectures on everything under the sun. So they’ve asked me if I’d be willing to do the June one; something that would be interesting to the general public.”

“Why you, do you think?”

“Probably because I’m the only one they’ve ever heard of. The Skeleton Detective, you know? But it’s fine, I’m glad to do it. It sounds like fun, actually. They hold them in someplace called St. Michael’s Cave, which I gather has a natural underground amphitheater they use for this kind of thing, and for concerts and such.”

His cell phone, lying on the table, tinkled out the melancholy opening bars of the overture to La Traviata just as he chomped down on bagel and egg, and Julie answered it for him.

“Why, hello, Lester!” she said brightly. “We were just talking about you. Yes, we did see the article. Yes, it certainly is that.”

“I’m not here!” Gideon cried around a mouthful of food. “You don’t know where I am. You haven’t seen me since last Friday. You don’t know when I’ll be back, if ever.”

“Why, yes, of course he’s here,” Julie said pleasantly. “Gideon, guess what?” she burbled, batting her eyes. “It’s Lester Rizzo. Your publisher.” She held out the phone.

Scowling, Gideon took it. Lester was already babbling away. “You read it, Gid? Is that good copy, or what? You did great, buddy. Fender tells me it’s been picked up by over a hundred papers.”

“Oh, wonderful, Lester. But the fact is – as you damn well know – I don’t have any sensational exposes to pull out of my hat. I don’t have any exposes to pull out of my hat. And my public lecture in Gibraltar is about the evolutionary concomitants of erect posture, not-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, but who cares about that stuff? With all due respect, nobody. Look, by the time Bones comes out, this’ll all be ancient history. You think Fender or anybody else is gonna go to Gibraltar to check up on you? Don’t worry, they won’t. Trust me. But your name’s gonna be a little more familiar to people, you see? They won’t know why they know it, they’ll just know they know it when they see it at the bookstore. And they’ll be more likely to reach for it. ‘Oh, yeah, here’s one by that guy, Gideon Oliver. I think I’ve heard of him.’ And if they reach for it, maybe with a little luck they’ll buy it.”

“Maybe, but-”

“ Definitely. Market research proves it, pal.” His voice deepened with veneration at the magical words. “That’s what it’s all about: Market research.”

“Fine, but what about the people who buy it expecting something fabulous? What about them? And what about me, how does that make me look?”

“Ah, yeah, that’s the beauty part, see? Eight months is perfect. Any more than that and they forget they ever heard of you. Any less than that, and they still remember what you said. Market research, buddy.”

With a sigh, Gideon dropped whatever it was he was going to retort. He and Lester went back a few years now, and Gideon knew there wasn’t much point in arguing. Lester Rizzo, the associate publisher of Javelin Press and the improbable executive editor of their Frontiers of Science imprint, had approached Gideon after an open lecture he’d given on scientific fraud at the university and asked if he’d be interested in expanding it into a book-length manuscript for the Frontiers series.

Gideon had accepted, partly because the manuscript wouldn’t be due for almost a year and anything that far away was always doable, and partly because he was flattered at the thought of joining the august roster of contributors to the series. The $15,000 advance, a delightfully unusual prospect to anyone accustomed to dealing with the academic presses, hadn’t hurt either. Besides, as opposed to the necessarily arcane monographs he turned out for the scientific journals (his contribution to the current American Journal of Physical Anthropology was “Sexual Dimorphism in Tibial Diaphysis Robusticity among Eastern European Upper Paleolithic Populations”), the idea of writing something for popular consumption seemed like fun.

And it had been. To Gideon’s surprise – but not, apparently, to Lester’s – the book had done well, and Gideon was now finishing up an expanded section on mythology and science (thus, his interest in Atlantis) for a new edition. But from the very beginning, there had been differences, and a long string of compromises, between his editor and himself. The title had been one such. When Gideon had proposed Error, Gullibility, and Self-Deception in the Social Sciences, Lester had looked at him as if he were crazy. “You’re writing for the masses here,” he’d pointed out. “What do you say we dumb down the title a little?” But Lester’s idea (Bungles, Blunders, and Bloopers) had left Gideon equally dismayed. They had settled, each with his own reservations, on Bones to Pick: Wrong Turns, Dead Ends, and Popular Misconceptions in the Study of Humankind.

More often than not, however, he had been outfoxed by Lester one way or another, and obviously it had just happened again. Well, Lester was probably right; it might sell a few more copies. But it wasn’t going to be easy to live with.

“Okay, Lester,” he said, “what’s done is done.”

“Hey, don’t say it like that, buddy; it hurts my feelings,” he said cheerfully. So, you going to be down here in L.A. any time soon?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Okay, then, see you in Gibraltar.”

“Right, see you – what? You’re coming to Gibraltar?”

“You better believe it. We’re going to do a book launch at that conference you’re going to that’ll knock ’em dead. Drinks on the house, speeches-”

“Lester,” Gideon said, appalled, “give me a break. Why do we want to do a book launch there? These are my colleagues, they’ll-”

“Hey, get off your high horse. This’s got nothing to do with you. You’re not my only author, you know. You know a guy named Rowley Boyd?”

“Uh-huh, I’ve met him a few times.” Rowley, Gideon remembered, was the pleasant, unpretentious, somewhat bookish director of the archaeological museum in Gibraltar.

“Well, he’s been piddling around with a book about Gibraltar Boy for almost three years, and we finally squeezed it out of him – pub date early October. You have any objections to my giving a book party for him?”

“None whatever. If it’s okay with him, it’s okay with me.”

“It’s more than okay with him. He’s overjoyed. He’s thrilled. Some people appreciate the efforts made on their behalf.”

“Well, I’m glad for him, Lester, and for you. I hope the book’s a big success.”

He said good-bye and hung up with another sigh. “According to Lester, a hundred newspapers have picked the article up. It’s going to be all over the place. LeMoyne and the others are going to have a ball with this, Julie. So are my students. Life is going to be hell for me for a while.” All the same, he couldn’t help chuckling. “Still, I guess it’s pretty funny, in a way.”

“It is, really. ’It’ll leave Piltdown in the dust,’” she said, shaking her head. “Quite a statement.”

He grimaced. “I really wish you wouldn’t keep repeating that.”

She glanced at her watch. “Gotta go. Well, you know what I think? I think you should think about what Abe might have said at a time like this.”

“That’s a good idea.” Abe was Abraham Goldstein, the impoverished, persecuted, Jewish immigrant from Russia who had made an improbable place for himself in America as an eminent professor of anthropology. At an advanced age, as Gideon’s major professor at the University of Wisconsin, he had been Gideon’s mentor in life as in anthropology, and his presence was still very much missed.

Gideon smiled. “So what would Abe have said?”

“ ‘Oy,’ ” said Julie, draining her coffee as she stood up.

He responded with a full-throated laugh and lifted his cup. “I’ll drink to that.”