Aaron Elkins: Unnatural Selection

Very probably, yes. Well, without the gold chain, but he’d certainly been well on the way. Julie’s hand was still warm in the crook of his elbow. Gently, he covered it with his own.

“I’m so sorry, Rudy, I didn’t know. She was a terrific person.”

“Yes,” Rudy said, managing a small, pinched grimace of a smile. He shrugged and took a double-slug from his drink. “Well, you’ve certainly come a long way since Madison, Gideon. I’ve followed your career.”

Gideon jumped at the chance to change the subject. “And I yours, Rudy,” he said, not entirely honestly. “You’ve made quite a name for yourself too.”

The truth was he’d pretty much forgotten about Rudy Walker until Julie told him that he was one of the consortium participants. Then he’d looked him up and found an impressive string of articles and monographs that he’d contributed to ecology journals, popular magazines, and conference proceedings. Rudy had indeed made a name for himself, first as an articulate defender of America’s remaining pristine wilderness, and then, in a famous, or infamous, Atlantic magazine piece, he’d reversed course and come out in favor of opening up the wilds to roads, cars, and even-talk about anathema to environmentalists-snowmobiles.

“If snowmobiles are the only way to see our great national parks in winter (and mostly, they are),” he’d written, “then I say let’s have the snowmobiles. Sure they’re noisy, sure they pollute, but so do cars in the summer. So do people, wherever they go. If the more extreme environmentalists had their way, human beings would be prohibited from our national parks altogether, so that no one annoyed the deer, or the bears, or the moose, or the titmice. But what’s the point of preserving a wilderness no one can see? Whose enjoyment are we preserving it for? The titmice’s? I don’t think so. In my book, people come before titmice.”

It had turned him into a pariah overnight.

“Quite a name is right,” he said now. “I’m the man they love to hate. The whole damn ecology crowd sees me as a traitor to the cause. Yea, I am an abomination to mine own kind. Ever since Black February.”

“Black February?”

“The date of the piece in the Atlantic. February 2003. Before then, they loved me, couldn’t get enough of me. But now…” He trailed off, darkly shaking his head.

“I know the way it can be,” Gideon said. “We gentle academics can get pretty brutal when you step on our pet theories.”

“They actually hiss me at the meetings, did you know that? Can you imagine? At what are supposed to be scholarly conferences? Sometimes they walk out on my presentations.” Rudy had a rigid, skeletal grin on his face. “They wait until I get to the lectern, then get up and leave, all together, just in case I might miss the point.”

Gideon lifted his shoulders in sympathy. Over time, that kind of treatment alone would have been enough to sour Rudy, never mind losing Fran. “That sounds rough, Rudy. I don’t know if I agree altogether with your position, but I give you credit for sticking to it.”

“They’re in love with the notion of biodiversity,” Rudy said bitterly, mostly to himself. “It’s thought diversity they can’t stand.”

“Well…” Gideon said, searching for something to drop into the awkward pause, “… how’s your little girl doing?” He struggled to come up with her name. “Little Mary, although I suppose she’s not so little any more. She was only five or six the last time I saw her. I bet-”

But Rudy, festering over his treatment in academia, was jiggling the ice in his otherwise empty glass and looking longingly toward the bar.

“Well, look,” Gideon said, “why don’t we have a pint in town one of these days and catch up, just the two of us?”

“Sure, that’d be good,” Rudy said absently. “Well, then…” He smiled that lame, pathetic smile again and stalked off to the bar.

“Sad,” Gideon said. “Was he like that at the last meeting?”

“Oh, he lightened up about once every three days, but most of the time, yes. Not easy to get to know. I learned more about him these last five minutes than I did in a whole week last time. I never knew he had any children. I never even knew he’d been married.”

“Oh, yes, he and Fran were… well, the way you and I are. I envied them.” He shook his head and sighed. “Come on, I could use a drink myself.”

At the bar, drinks were being poured by two young women in decorous Ye Olde Tea Shoppe uniforms-shiny, black, mid-calf-length dresses with scalloped white collars, white buttons down the front, short sleeves with pointy, turned-up white cuffs, and little white headpieces to match. Julie took a glass of red wine from the row that had already been poured. Gideon asked for a Glenlivet single-malt Scotch served neat. At twenty dollars a day, he felt entitled to splurge. As they clinked glasses, Liz came up.

“I have to borrow your wife for a minute,” she said, drawing Julie off. “I need some advice. Girl stuff.”

Gideon raised his glass in acquiescence and took a sip, relishing the velvety, peaty flow that warmed him from gullet to stomach. “You like poker?” a voice said into his ear, Vasily Kozlov having sidled up to his elbow.

“Poker? Sure, sometimes.”

“Is old tradition here. Ten o’clock, in dining hall, every night. Last hand midnight, penny-ante, ten pence limit, three raises, just for fun, you know? Mens only. Shall you come?”

“I don’t know about every night, Vasily, but you bet, I’ll come by tonight. Thanks for asking me.”

“Bring plenty money,” Kozlov said with a twinkling leer as he threaded off through the crowd.

“I got invited to the poker game,” Gideon told Julie when she got back from whatever advice-giving Liz had needed.

“Ah, I thought he’d ask you. Are you going?”

“Tonight, anyway. I haven’t played poker in a long time; should be fun.”

“Are you good at it?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. I’m figuring on getting that twenty bucks back.”

“Good luck. They tell me Vasily turns into a shark when he gets behind a handful of cards.”

“So do I. Wait and see. I’ll buy you lunch tomorrow with my winnings.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” Julie said neutrally. “Oh, and here’s the last of our Fellows. Donald Pinckney, this is my husband, Gideon.”

“Happy to meet you, Donald.” Gideon stuck out his hand and smiled, but his heart sank: another guy wearing a button.

But this bright yellow one made him laugh. If we’re not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?

Donald Pinckney, he remembered, was the pro-hunting voice at the consortium, but he looked about as much like Gideon’s idea of a hunter as Joey Dillard looked like an investigative reporter. A tall, balding, bookish man in a crisp blue linen sport coat and bow tie, with mild, seemingly myopic eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, he seemed like the last person in the world who would willingly be found crouching in a cold, wet duck blind at dawn, with a shotgun to his shoulder.

“And I you, Gideon,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your books, but-”

“What? You haven’t read A Structuro-Functional Approach to Pleistocene Hominid Phylogeny? I can hardly believe what I’m hearing.”

“I need hardly say, however, that it is quite naturally on my must-read list at present,” Pinckney said without missing a beat. “But what I was going to say was that I saw you on The Learning Channel not long ago and was extremely impressed by what you’re able to deduce from a few skeletal fragments.”

“Only if they’re the right fragments,” Gideon said modestly. “Fortunately, the TV people had the right fragments. I’ve read a few of your pieces, Donald, and I have to say you make a heck of a good case for hunting as a positive conservation measure; I’m almost convinced myself.”