Uneasy Relations

NINE

Julie stretched, sighed, and let her head fall back on the pillow. “Let’s be decadent this morning-”

“We’ve already been decadent this morning,” Gideon pointed out, nuzzling the ear lobe nearest him.

She laughed. “Then let’s continue in that vein, and order up a room service breakfast. We can have it out on the balcony in those lovely terry cloth robes.”

Their room’s generous balcony was two floors above the Wisteria Terrace, so the view was, if anything, even more grand than from the terrace. Through the French doors, which they’d left open during the night, they could see the winding paths and lush plantings of the public gardens just below, the bay a little farther out, and off to the left the Strait of Gibraltar and the dusky mountains of Africa, shimmering in their haze as the early morning sun found them.

“I’m for that,” Gideon said. “How about if I order up a good, greasy, thoroughly decadent full English breakfast – the Full Monty?”

“I’m for that,” Julie said. “I’m starving.”

Over their mammoth breakfasts – fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled tomato, mushrooms, baked beans, white toast in a rack, marmalade, butter, and a cozy-covered pot of tea – they worked out their plans for the day.

“Well, you’ve got your lecture to give at noon,” Julie said. “Where is that going to be again?”

“St. Michael’s Cave. It’s a set of natural caverns up on the Rock, and they use one of them as a lecture hall. That’ll be over by one, and then we have a late lunch date with Fausto at one thirty.”

Several years before, Gideon had lectured in an international forensics symposium for criminal justice personnel, held in St. Malo, France, and Fausto Sotomayor, then a young detective constable in the Royal Gibraltar Police, had been an attendee. Since then, he had been in intermittent touch with Gideon with one technical question or another, and they had become e-mail buddies of a sort, dropping each other a few lines now and then. They’d seen him briefly the day before, when Fausto, now much glorified – a detective chief inspector, no less – had insisted on driving them into town from the airport, and had invited them to lunch today at a downtown pub.

“What about before your talk?” Julie asked, spreading marmalade on a wedge of toast. “Are you free?”

“Mostly, but I did want to sit in on one of the paleoanthropological society papers at nine thirty. They’re holding the conference down at the Eliott Hotel.”

“What’s the topic? Maybe I’ll join you.”

“The title is…” He consulted the conference program he’d brought out with them. “The title is – um, no, I have a hunch you won’t be interested – ‘A Bio-Mechanical Assessment of Cranial Base Architecture in the Hominoidea.’ ”

She made a face. “Your hunch is correct. Tell you what: let’s stretch our legs and stroll down the hill into town. We’ll have an hour or so, maybe get a cup of coffee somewhere?”

He smiled. Tea was nice, very British and all that, but for both of them, a couple of cups of coffee in the morning were a necessity for comprehensive physiological functioning.

“Sounds good, Julie.”

“And then I think I’ll pick up a guidebook and just explore the sights until we meet your friend for lunch.”

“You don’t want to sit in on my presentation?”

“Would you mind very much if I didn’t? I have seen this one before. ”

“No, I don’t mind.”

To be honest, he preferred it that way. How could you be expected to enter fully into your exalted role as one of the world’s foremost forensic scientists when the woman who told you when to take out the garbage was sitting in the first row watching you? “I’ll see you at lunch then. The Angry Friar. Fausto says you can’t miss it. On Main Street, in the middle of town. Right across from the Governor’s Residence.”

While they spoke, he had been leafing cursorily through the conference program, and now something, a boxed item on the last page of the schedule, caught his eye. “ ’Close-of-conference reception,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘proudly sponsored by Javelin Press to celebrate the publication of Uneasy Relations: Humans and Neanderthals at the Dawn of History: Implications for Today’s World, by Rowley G. Boyd. 5:00-7:00 P.M., Eliottt Hotel Poolside Terrace (on top floor). Open bar and heavy hors d’oeuvres. Government and cultural dignitaries have been invited to attend.’ ” He looked at her. “What do you know, Lester really is doing his book launch here. I half thought he was kidding.”

“ Uneasy Relations: Humans and Neanderthals at the Dawn of History: Implications for Today’s World,” Julie repeated. “Now there’s a mouthful.”

“It sure is. I bet Rowley had a heck of a time talking him out of Making It with a Neanderthal, or Caveman Sex.”

“But are these academics really going to show up for it, do you think?” Julie asked. “I mean, no offense to Rowley, but would these people be that interested in what he has to say?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Gideon said, laughing. “Free booze, free food – of course they’ll attend.”

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 expose,’ 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.