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?”
“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?”