Aaron Elkins - Unnatural Selection

“Madeleine, I’ll buy you lunch.”

When the waitress passed behind him with a tray of wine, Cheryl reached over his shoulder for a glass. As she did, a small, firm breast pressed unmistakably against his upper arm and then stayed there while she spoke to someone at the next table, her arm very nearly around Gideon’s shoulder. A few strands of her long, dark hair, held back with a barrette, grazed his neck.

This was something that didn’t happen to him very often these days. He had long ago learned that he was attractive to women-six-one, broad-shouldered, with an only slightly middle-aged version of the fighter’s body that had seen him through the brief professional boxer’s career with which he’d paid his way through graduate school. And the broken nose that had come with it was an intriguing counterpoint to his sometimes pedantic manner, or so he’d been told.

All this he knew. But he also knew that no woman had to check his ring finger to tell whether or not he was married. It was written all over him. He was one of those men who emanated husbandly contentment, and women on the prowl were quick to sense his unavailability. He was taken, happily married, and couldn’t have hidden it if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t.

Still, his forehead was warm as he tried as nonchalantly as possible to separate himself from the undeniably stimulating pressure of that warm, pokey little mound of flesh. Now wait a minute, he lectured himself. What are you getting embarrassed about? You haven’t done anything to feel ashamed of.

When Cheryl smiled knowingly, and a little patronizingly, at him as he shifted gingerly away, he turned grumpy. Now he felt stodgy, and old-fashioned… and just plain old.

“Everybody?” Standing in front of the bar, Kozlov was calling for attention. Gideon took advantage of the opportunity to turn his chair still farther around. In doing so, he caught Julie’s eye from across the room. She blew him a discreet kiss that instantly whisked away his sulk. He returned it somewhat less discreetly, and Julie gestured something to him. He knit his eyebrows to show he didn’t understand.

She repeated the message, emphasizing the movements a little. With a couple of tips of her head she indicated that she was referring to Kozlov and to the welcoming speech that was apparently on the way, then mouthed: “Be… good… You… promised.”

Gideon bowed his head and placed his hand over his heart to show his good intentions.

He had no trouble sticking to them during Kozlov’s presentation, a witty, charmingly accented, and unobjectionable condemnation of the existence of close-mindedness in scientific inquiry, followed by an introduction of the five Fellows, who then described the subjects of their papers. The Fellows had known this was coming, so it went smoothly, if dully, each one standing in his or her place and reading a brief, dry abstract in AcademicSpeak.

Julie was first, soberly explaining the importance of “fire management polices that replicate as closely as possible the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of natural fire regimes, taking into account the importance and reality of anthropogenic fires in woodland subsystems and thereby achieving the maintenance of biodiversity in a form adhering as closely as possible to its natural facets and fluxes.”

Damn, he thought with pride, she’s almost as good at that stuff as I am. When she took her seat again and glanced furtively in his direction he gave her a vigorous thumbs-up.

The others followed with equally turgid descriptions of their work, and although he took mental issue with a few things that were said, it wasn’t too hard to keep his peace through most of them, including even Victor Waldo’s rattling on inscrutably and at length about holistic and naturalistic paradigms that would reconstruct the nature-human dynamic of the postindustrial world.

But Donald Pinckney, speaking last, broke through his self-restraint when he dipped a toe into the treacherous waters of Darwinian theory.

“… and therefore demonstrate that hunting, properly regulated, positively impacts wildlife populations by preventing game from exceeding the carrying capacity of their habitat areas, thus serving as a valuable adjunct to the mechanisms of natural selection and the survival of the fittest.”

“Nggkk,” Gideon said.

To his dismay, this strangled, inadvertent squawk, wholly unintentional, dropped smack into a dead spot in the presentation and was heard clear around the room. Donald, with the faintest of frowns, glanced questioningly at him and prepared to continue reading, but Kozlov interceded.

“Mr. Skeleton Detective wants say something?”

No, Gideon didn’t want to say anything, but by now his professorly instincts were beyond his control. “Well, it’s only that Donald may have made a small… a very small but nonetheless important, um, misinterpretation of the way that natural selection works.”

Donald’s pale eyes glittered behind his glasses. “Oh?”

“The thing is,” Gideon said, as delicately as he could, “in nature, natural selection works by selectively eliminating the more vulnerable-those animals that are least ‘fit’ to survive in their current environment. By removing them from the gene pool, the stronger-or I guess I should say the better-adapted-animals are more likely to reproduce, to contribute their genes, and to thus keep the species genetically strong; that is, genetically well-adapted to their environment…”

Unnoticed by Gideon, a pursed-mouthed Donald slid silently back into his seat.

“Hunting by natural predators has the same result,” Gideon went on, well-launched now. “They’re most likely to catch and kill the weak, the old, the slow, the sick, and so on. But modern human hunters, with their intelligence and technology, are a kind of super-predator that’s never been seen on earth before. They kill the strongest and ablest animals, which of course means that the less ‘fit’ animals have a relatively greater opportunity to reproduce and pass on their genes.”

“Ha-ha, that’s exactly right,” a delighted Joey Dillard cried. From the looks of him, he had had more to drink than was good for him. “What it is, is, it’s evolution in reverse.”

“Well, no, I wouldn’t exactly say that. The idea that evolution can reverse itself, while it has a certain poetic appeal…”

“I tried, I really did,” Gideon told Julie afterward, when they had come back outside to take a few turns around the ramparts, watching dusk turn to night as the sun dropped toward the sea beyond the Western Rocks, a jumble of offshore boulders that had been the end of many a seagoing vessel during winter storms, but in summer served mainly as a picturesque backdrop for the sunset-watchers who picnicked on Garrison Hill as the evening came on. Julie and Gideon could see several groups of them on the bluffs below the castle walls.

“Actually, I thought what you said was quite interesting,” Julie told him loyally. “I think everybody did. Honestly.”

“Not Pinckney.”

“No, not Donald,” Julie agreed. “But then he does tend to be a little touchy, a wee bit sensitive.”

With a predatory wife like Cheryl, Gideon thought, who wouldn’t be?

“So, what did you think of his wife?” Julie asked.

“Um… his wife?”

“Cheryl? The person sitting next to you? Certain parts of whom were more or less on top of you there for a while?”

“Oh, that Cheryl,” Gideon said, laughing. “I didn’t think you noticed.”

“I bet you noticed.”

“I did, but I hope you also observed that she didn’t get to first base with me. Why would she? I can do a whole lot better than Cheryl Pinckney.” He swung an arm around her shoulder, pulled her to him, and kissed her warmly. “Have I mentioned to you today that I’m in love with you?”