Rudy Walker was the one other member of the consortium that Gideon knew personally, although it had been many years since they’d been in touch. The two of them had been research assistants at Wisconsin when they were working on their doctorates. Rudy was seven or eight years the elder-he had gotten a medical discharge from the Army after shattering both wrists during the invasion of Grenada, and he’d had a wife and a five-year-old daughter. He had taken the younger, greener Gideon under his wing. They had worked together, with Rudy as the senior assistant, on an important but grisly project for their major professor: injecting dyes into the soft, developing bones of aborted fetuses of varying known ages to determine the exact progression of skeletal formation. Despite the morbid hours in the lab (windowless and underground, to avoid offending the sensitive or the delicate-stomached), Gideon remembered his years at Wisconsin as a happy time of much laughter and much learning. This was thanks largely to Rudy. There had been so many late-night pizzas at the Student Union, so many pitchers of beer, so many abstruse, hilarious, academic arguments with Rudy and his equally vibrant young wife Fran, another anthropology grad student. A great time, looked back upon with pleasure.
And yes, Rudy was smart, all right.
“He got his Master’s-with honors-but never did get his doctorate,” Gideon maintained. “I went on to Arizona for mine, and Rudy went to Penn State, but he quit before he finished-never took his comps, never did a dissertation-to take a job with some private college up in Toronto, and there he stayed. Apparently never finished up. No Ph. D. on his bio.”
“Oho, now we’re getting down to brass tacks. Only Ph. D.’s meet your high standards of discourse, is that it?”
“If the subject is as complex as biodiversity and the people talking about it expect to be taken seriously-yes.”
“Gideon, has anyone ever told you you’re an intellectual snob?”
He laughed. “Not since last Friday. Look, let me put it this way. As smart as some of these people might be-and I grant you, Kozlov himself is a bona fide genius-they don’t have the advantage of a thorough, rigorous, scientific education. Okay, they know a lot, but, like anybody who’s ‘self-made, ’ they’re also bound to have gaps-misapprehensions, misconceptions-that they don’t even know they have because they’ve never been tested, they’ve never been required to learn material they don’t feel like learning, and they’ve never had to put together a dissertation to the satisfaction of a highly critical committee.”
“So?”
“So you know me; if I’m sitting there and I hear some typical misunderstandings, say about the mechanics of evolution or natural selection, getting thrown around as if they were good science, I’m not sure I could control myself.”
“You might go into lecture mode, you mean.”
“Exactly, the dreaded lecture mode. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’d bore the hell out of everybody. And this isn’t my show, Julie. Nobody’s there to hear me.”
There was more to it than that, but he wasn’t about to give voice to it. Simply put, this was one of Julie’s rare chances to shine outside the world of the National Park Service. She had put a lot of time and a lot of work into her paper, and he wasn’t about to take even a remote chance of upstaging her.
She gave it some thought. “You know, I’m beginning to see the wisdom of your position,” she said.
“Good, I’m glad that’s settled.”
For a few minutes they walked along amicably enough, hand in hand, and then Julie suddenly stopped and turned to face him.
“Wait a minute, all I have is an M.A. Therefore I can’t be taken seriously?”
“Well, in your case-”
She held up a warning finger. “Consider your reply carefully.”
“In your case,” he continued smoothly, “you’re not pretending to be an authority on biodiversity. You’re here as a wildfire management expert-which you certainly are.”
“Uh-huh, and what about my paper? Is it full of ‘misapprehensions’ and ‘misconceptions’?”
“I think,” he said, unblinking, “that your paper is absolutely brilliant.”
Their eyes remained locked for a second more. “Good answer,” she said as they began walking again.
“Whew,” he said softly.
“From this vantage point,” intoned the sonorous voice from the loudspeakers, “we look back at the whole of Land’s End, the rugged promontory that marks the southeasternmost point of the mainland of England. And we are lulled by our first sense of the gentle Atlantic swell, which has traveled three thousand miles, only to impotently expend its energy against these stark and ancient cliffs.”
“Gentle swells!” somebody called out. “Try lookin’ out the bloody window, mate!”
The ripple of laughter that greeted this was a trifle apprehensive, but after a few anxious minutes during which people’s eyes roamed in search of a quick exit to the open air of the deck, should one become necessary, the surge grew calm and the ferry settled into a slow heave that most of the passengers found more relaxing than discomforting. The minority who felt otherwise gratefully followed the posted directions to the windowless lowest deck, where ranks of permanently set-up cots were waiting.
The soothing narrative continued: “And now, in the far distance we can see the Isles of Scilly themselves, the fabled Fortunate Islands, thought by many to be the mountain peaks of the sunken, lost land of Lyonesse. There are five inhabited islands, forty uninhabited ones, and a hundred-and-fifty-”
“Am I wrong,” Gideon asked Julie, “or is that Liz Petra in the snack bar line?” He pointed at a small, plump figure in a shawl, a flowing peasant skirt, and sandals.
Julie turned to look. “It sure is. Liz! Over here!”
The pixie-faced blonde’s eyes lit up. “Julene! Hello! Be there in a sec.” She went back to paying for the bag of Cad-bury’s Chocolate Fingers she was buying.
Gideon looked at Julie, eyebrows raised. “ ‘Julene’?”
Julie mumbled something.
“What?”
“Oh, heck, it just seemed more professional,” she muttered.
“Ah. Well, I suppose it is, at that.” He was happier than ever with his decision not to horn in on the meetings.
“Well, hi there, Julene!” Liz chirped as Julie jumped up to embrace her. “My favorite fellow Fellow! And I see you’ve brought the famous, or should I say infamous, Skeleton Detective along with you.” She stuck out her hand. “Long time no see, prof.”
It had been more than five years since she’d sat in on his nonhuman primate social behavior seminar as a graduate student in archaeology, but she seemed to have changed not a bit: still the same soft, dimply, unfailingly jolly dumpling of a person she was back then, grandmotherly (despite her pretty face) and chuckling, nurturing even at the age of thirty-five, and still apparently favoring the same vintage-clothing-store wardrobe, which had been passe even then. Only now she was a figure of note in the unlikely but burgeoning discipline of refuse archaeology.
“It’s great to see you again, Liz,” he said, grasping her hand and moving over to make room for her in their booth. “What’s new in the world of garbage?”
“Things have been pretty trashy, actually,” she said, plopping down. “So how’s the bone business?”
“Oh, kind of dry, to tell the truth.”
Julie rolled her eyes at this show of what passed for academic humor. “Liz, they found Edgar’s remains, did you hear? He was eaten by a bear!”
Liz’s clear blue eyes sparkled even more. “Yes, Joey just told me. Is that creepy, or what?”
“Joey Dillard? Is he on this ferry too?”
“Well, he was a minute ago. Back there near the Coke machine.”
Julie looked over Liz’s shoulder and waved. “Joey! Come join us!”
Joey Dillard, if Gideon remembered correctly, had been an investigative reporter for a paper somewhere in the Midwest-Gary, or Des Moines. He had been assigned to do a series on a new meat-packing operation and had come away so revolted that he became a vegetarian on the spot. He then joined PETA-People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals-and several lesser-known groups, had since become an officer in some of them, and was now a fairly well-known writer for various animal-rights, vegetarian, and ecology magazines and Web publications.