Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

The list of nonamenities was shorter but more striking. Between Iquitos and Leticia, there was no TV reception, no e-mail, no Internet, no cell phone transmission. Here in the nearly unpopulated jungle there were no communication satellites zipping overhead for such things. Unless any of the passengers happened to be carrying a shortwave radio, the sole communication with the outside world would be the captain’s shortwave in the wheelhouse.

Were there any questions?

“Yeah, I’d like to organize my notes on my laptop in the evenings,” said a man with a Neanderthal jaw and a tree trunk of a neck, but a friendly, open face, “but there aren’t any outlets in my room. How do I recharge?”

“Unfortunately,” Vargas said sadly, “the cabins don’t have electrical outlets yet. This will be repaired in the future. But there is an outlet in the dining room that is available to you at any time. Other questions?”

“I notice the rooms don’t have locks either,” Scofield said. “Also to be repaired in the future, I assume?”

“Yes, of course, everything in due time. I can’t do everything at once, ha-ha. There used to be great, big locks, enormous locks, from the prison days, but I had them taken off. They made such a bad impression. But I still have them, so if you don’t trust each other,” he said archly, “I can have them put on again.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Scofield said drily.

Were there other questions?

Yes, Duayne V. Osterhout had one too. He had noticed that the water coming out of both taps was the same lukewarm temperature. And a definite greenish cast could be seen in the water in the toilet. Was that river water in their bathrooms?

“Ye-es,” said Vargas, as if to say, “What else would it be?”

“Do you mean untreated water? Straight out of the Amazon? And when we flush the toilets it goes-”

“Straight back. Out of the Amazon, back into the Amazon.” Vargas chuckled. “That’s recycling, my friend.”

A mild tremor passed through the ship, and then a more pronounced juddering, along with a scraping noise. “Don’t worry, this is not a problem,” Vargas said, glancing nervously over his shoulder toward the bow of the boat, “but it is best perhaps that I attend to it.”

“I knew it,” John muttered. “Didn’t I say the damn thing wouldn’t float?”

With Vargas gone, having promised to return shortly, Arden Scofield took over. He stood, placed a foot on the seat of his chair, leaned one elbow on his knee, and inhaled a long breath. In his hand was his unlit pipe. Behind him the jungle slid smoothly by on the far bank.

“To those who know nothing of botany,” he began dreamily, “a great rain forest can only be a jumble of colors, forms, and sounds, unintelligible and mysterious.” He had a nice voice, chuckly and avuncular, well suited to his lively eyes. “Beautiful, yes; treacherous, certainly; awe-inspiring, perhaps; but in the end without meaning or coherence. Only for the botanist does the jumble resolve itself into a precise and harmonious whole of many parts, a mosaic, if you will, of discrete components, each playing its prescribed part in the natural order. And only for the ethno botanist do these components present themselves as a cornucopia of almost untapped gifts that can heal and nourish and protect, gifts the uses of which it is our great good fortune to study and make known to the world at large.”

He paused to gaze out over their heads and to contemplatively put the pipe in his mouth and chew at it, as if thinking hard about what to say next, but Gideon, who had plenty of experience delivering “spontaneous” lectures of his own, knew a fellow fake when he saw one. He had to hand it to him, though; it was well prepared and mellifluously delivered – well, maybe a little bombastic (Gideon could have done without the “if you will” and the “cornucopia”), but effective all the same.

Scofield judged that his pause had been long enough. The pipe was taken from his mouth. “The isolated, little-known rain forest into which we now sail is not only the greatest, the least discovered, and the most prolific forest on earth, it is one of the very most ancient. When we enter it, we go back in time to a primeval jungle hardly changed, hardly disturbed, in a hundred million years. The temperate European and North American forests that are more familiar to us are only as old as the end of the last ice age, eleven thousand years ago – one ten-thousandth ” – the words were drawn-out and caressed by his tongue – “of the age of the Amazon Basin. In this rich, nurturing…”

Gideon had been marginally aware that something was bothering him about the people at Scofield’s table. Something wasn’t right, something about their postures, or the way they toyed with their drinks, or what they chose to rest their eyes on. Something.

He suddenly realized what it was. Why, they don’t like him. Not one of the people at his table likes him, or at any rate they sure don’t like listening to him. There was a long, gangly, beak-nosed guy in his late twenties – a graduate student, probably, or maybe post-grad – who was following every word with avid fascination plastered all over his face, but any experienced professor (including Scofield, you would think) could recognize the grim, deeply resented necessity to suck up that was in those glazed, rigid eyes. Scofield’s probably his major prof, Gideon thought. Poor guy. Gideon himself had no doubt worn that sorry look on his own face many a time during his graduate years at Wisconsin under Dr. Campbell.

The other two people at the table weren’t being quite as obvious. There was a tall, bemused-looking woman of forty with a decades-out-of-date Laura Petrie hairstyle – a flip, was it called? – whose expression was opaque enough, but Gideon could see an impatient, sneaker-clad foot jiggling away under the table at supersonic speed. Next to her was the big guy who had asked about outlets. Thick-chested but showing the usual middle-age signs of losing the battle against weight and gravity, he looked plain bored out of his mind, as if he’d heard Scofield speak two or three hundred times too often, and it took every ounce of his willpower simply to sit still and listen. His eyes had been tightly closed for a while, as if he had a headache.

This is going to be one interesting trip, Gideon thought.

“This confluence of land and water is also the most biologically diverse reservoir of life on earth,” Scofield was saying. Lost in his own presentation, he appeared to be oblivious to the cloud of aversion that enveloped him. Either that, or he just didn’t give a damn. “There are at least a hundred thousand plant species here, only a fraction of them known in the scientific literature,” he said, “and only a fraction of those whose potential attributes are understood. There are two million species of insects – five thousand species of butterflies alone and-”

There was a gentle throat-clearing sound to Gideon’s right. Duayne Osterhout’s left forefinger rose tentatively.

Scofield pretended not to notice. “ – and almost two thousand species of birds. The river itself is home to two thousand species of fish – compare that to the hundred and fifty that are found in all the rivers of Europe combined.”

Osterhout’s finger remained in place, gently waggling. Scofield’s lips compressed. He nodded – at the finger, not the man. “Did you want to say something?”

“Only a minor correction, professor,” Osterhout said. “I believe that four thousand butterfly species would probably be a safer estimate if it’s generally accepted classified species that we’re referring to.” He was being very deferential, very unassuming. Uneasy under Scofield’s cool glare, he cleared his throat a couple of times more. “Of course, there’s little doubt that five thousand species, perhaps even more, do exist here but are not as yet all identified. Perhaps that’s what you meant?”