Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

“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. ”