Aaron Elkins - Uneasy Relations

“So you mean I got flat feet because I used to be a monkey?” Buck exclaimed with his deep, pleasant laugh.

“Closer to an ape, actually,” Gideon corrected, unable to help himself.

“Ape, monkey, whatever,” Buck said happily.

Adrian seemed on the brink of putting in his own explanatory two cents’ worth, but then remembered he was still miffed and sat silently back without saying anything, pretending to be engrossed by the passing scenery. And looking more like a big, sulky baby than ever.

“But what may be the biggest problem,” Gideon went on, warming to his subject (once he’d gotten well launched, he was almost as hard to stop as Adrian), “is that the human pelvis has changed. See, when we walked on four legs the ribs were underneath our guts and took care of holding them in place, but once we stood up, that didn’t work anymore, and the pelvis constricted to meet the challenge. It went from being a pair of wide, flat, open blades to becoming a sort of bowl with only a tiny opening in the base, that could support the internal organs.”

“So why is that a problem?” Buck asked.

“Because while that’s been going on at the bottom of the spinal cord, the thing on top of it – the brain case – has been expanding. In other words, the birth canal has been getting smaller, while the biggest thing that has to go through it, the infant’s head, has been getting bigger. Giving birth hasn’t been getting any easier.”

“Tell me about it,” muttered Henrietta.

“And yet at the same time that the skull has been expanding,” Adrian said, finally unable to resist chipping in – he wasn’t one to stay irked very long – “the facial skeleton has diminished in size. We no longer have a snout, which means there is less room for our teeth. But our teeth have not gotten any smaller, and as you can surmise, that has meant trouble. The last teeth to come in, the third molars or wisdom teeth, often don’t have a decent space left, so they come in impacted, or crooked, or not at all. Good for the dentists, bad for the rest of us. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in another half-million years, we only have twenty-four teeth or so. Instead of thirty-two. Wouldn’t you agree, Gideon?”

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.

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.”