Fellowship of Fear

“Of course not,” said Gideon.

“Could you explain to me as you go along? That is, if I could understand it?” He was a little shy; Gideon was touched.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s not complicated, really. What I’m going to do is estimate the height.”

“You can tell how tall the guy was from these?”

“I can make a rough guess.”

“So can I, but that doesn’t make it right.” John said it aggressively, provocatively, but Gideon was beginning to understand his style. In a second he would burst into laughter.

He did, and Gideon laughed too. “Well, that’s the difference between a professor and a cop,” Gideon said. Look, it is pretty iffy, but it’s a place to start. This is the tibia, the proximal part of it, anyway. That’s your leg bone, from the knee down. It’s the only one of all these pieces we can use to estimate height. You can only do it from the long bones. The idea’s simple enough; people with long tibias usually have long femurs— thigh bones— and if they have long thigh bones they probably have long vertebral columns, and so on. The same relationships hold true for short people. So if you can get a measurement on one of the long bones, you can project the others, and total height too.

“But not all tall people have long legs.” John was sounding genuinely interested, like one of Gideon’s own anthropology students.

“Right, only most do. If I had a hundred tibias here, I’d feel confident in estimating the average total height. The few tall ones with short legs would balance out the few short ones with long legs. But with only one, how do I know I don’t have one of the oddballs? I don’t, but the odds are on my side.”

“Fair enough.”

“Okay. We can shortcut the calculations a little. If I remember correctly, we can get the approximate total height from the tibia by multiplying tibial length by ten, dividing in half, and subtracting about five percent. The taller a person is, the less reliable that becomes, but I think this guy’s short. Anyway, let’s measure it.”

John sat, childlike in his concentration on the fragment in Gideon’s hand. When Gideon didn’t do anything for a long time, he finally asked, “What’s the matter?”

“You’ve got the ruler.”

John chuckled delightedly and handed it over. Gideon realized he was beginning to like John Lau very much.

The tibial fragment was 113 millimeters long. “All right,” Gideon said, “time for a major leap of faith. I’ll guess that we’ve got about a third of the total bone here—you can tell from the popliteal line, this ridge on the back. That would make the total length… 339 millimeters, say 340.”

He jotted a few numbers on a piece of paper. “Total height, 1615 millimeters,” he said. More jotting. “About five-four.”

“All you have to do is know the formula? That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s what Watson was always saying to Holmes… after the fact.”

“Except that Sherlock Holmes was always right.” The enthralled student was giving way to the skeptical cop. “No offense, Doc, but you sure made a lot of unverifiable assumptions there. Maybe they’re okay when you’re measuring ten-thousand-year-old Neanderthals. Who could prove you were right or wrong? But this stuff would never hold up in court.”

John was quite right, Gideon knew. He’d often had similar thoughts about prehistoric finds. But he also knew somehow that his estimate was accurate. “I may be an inch or two off, but no more. You can count on it.” Pettishly he added, “And the Neanderthalers are a lot closer to a hundred thousand years old than to ten.”

“Okay, Doc, you’re the expert. Only I’m still not convinced. But what are you suggesting? That it’s the little one, Marco?”

“Marco?” Gideon had forgotten that John wasn’t aware of the rest of his findings. “No, it’s not Marco. Marco was about twenty. This one was nearly forty. And Japanese. And built like a wrestler, say 145 pounds.”

All this was put rather more confidently than the data warranted, but a strong front seemed appropriate. Then the coup de grace:

“And, if it’s of any interest, he was left-handed and he smoked a pipe.”

The effect was more than Gideon had hoped for. John’s mouth dropped open and he actually stammered. “You’re telling me you know all that from… some… some skull bones and a… a piece of leg bone? You don’t have any hand bones—any, any arm bones! How can you know he’s left-handed?” John was chopping at the air with both hands, his quirky temper on the rise.

“Gently, John. I’m not pulling your leg.”

Slowly, simply, Gideon began explaining his conclusions. John was testy, however, and querulous, arguing every point. Gideon didn’t have the energy for it. After a few minutes his enthusiasm had drained away. “The hell with it, John; I don’t give a damn if you buy it or not. Solve it all yourself. Look, could we go back? I’m really bushed.” He could feel the torn muscles in his cheek sagging, blurring his speech. His ankle had begun to throb again, and it felt grossly swollen.

“Fine,” John said, sounding as if he didn’t give a damn either. “If it’s all right with you, we’ll stop at the Security Office on the way in to see if anything new has come in.”

Gideon didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question.

In the car, he sulked most of the way. John was silent and fidgety. As they neared the base, John suddenly said, “Look, Doc, I know you know a lot of things about bones. If this was some old fossil skeleton, I wouldn’t argue with you. What do I know? But I can’t just blindly accept what you’re telling me. What am I supposed to put in my report? ”Professor looked at burned piece of jawbone and identified victim as five-foot-four-inch male Japanese with a birthmark on his left ear and a pimple on his ass‘?“

Gideon’s eyes were closed. He opened them. “Five-four was wrong,” he said slowly. “That formula was for