“—the Moche tombs, Cuzco, Huaca Rajada—”
“Hey, hold your horses, will you? Forget archaeology. That’s not exactly what we’ll be doing.”
“—the ruins at—it’s not?”
“Not exactly, no.” He cleared his throat.
***
“ITbetter be someplace warm,” John said as Gideon returned to the table. “That’s my one and only condition.” John, who’d grown up in Hawaii, loved hot weather. He considered it a cruel trick of fate that he’d been assigned to cold, gloomy Seattle. He claimed to have a standing request into the bureau for a transfer to Mexicali if they ever opened a regional office there.
“Well, then,” Gideon said, “you’ll be happy. How does eight days on the Amazon sound?”
John’s eyes popped wide open. “Seriously?”
“
“Yup, an Amazon cruise.”
“That sounds fabulous,” Marti said. “Hey, maybe
“Yes, but this is Phil we’re talking about,” Julie said. “On the Cheap. Somehow, I don’t think pampering will be on the agenda.”
“Don’t they have anacondas on the Amazon?” John asked. “Headhunters? Poisonous frogs? Giant spiders?”
“I’m pretty sure headhunting died out thirty years ago or so,” Gideon said. “About the others, I don’t know.”
“And what about mosquitoes?”
“I believe there are a few down there.”
“And malaria? How many damn shots would we have to get?”
“There aren’t any shots for malaria, there are pills you take. Other than that, there may be a couple of other shots, just to be on the safe side.”
“Great, I love shots,” John said under his breath, but Gideon could see he was just going through the motions. He was intrigued
with the idea, and who wouldn’t be? “So where would we pick up the ship?”
“In Peru. A town called Iquitos,” Gideon said, “way upstream, near the headwaters of the Amazon.” He returned to his salad of smoked salmon, Dungeness crab, and avocado, picking it over to see if he’d missed any slivers of crab. “It’s not Phil’s usual thing, though. That is, it’s not an official On the Cheap tour, it’s a kind of...I guess you’d say, an evaluation visit, and he wouldn’t mind having us along to help him evaluate.”
There was a cargo boat operator in Iquitos, he explained, who had been trying for some time to convert his rebuilt ship, the
“In other words, other than telling Phil how we like it, we wouldn’t have any responsibilities at all. Nothing to do. Just relax and enjoy it.”
“A research cruise,” Julie said. “What kind of research?”
“Well, apparently they’re all ethnobotanists—”
“Ethnowhatanists?” Marti said.
“Ethnobotanists. Sort of a combination of cultural anthropologists and botanists. They study the way various peoples live with and use their local plants. You know, how they use them for medicine, for food, for clothing, and so on. Phil says they’re going to be doing some scientific collecting—there’s a tremendous number of unknown, uncataloged flora in the Amazon basin—and talking to shamans along the way to see what they can learn from them.”
“Learn from shamans?” Marti snorted. “And these guys are supposed to be scientists?”
“Well, I know what you mean,” said Gideon. “A lot of the shamanistic stuff is mumbo jumbo, but they do know an awful lot about the properties of their plants, especially the curative aspects, and some of it’s very much worth knowing. It’s been put to a lot of use in medicine, and there’s still a lot to be learned.”
They paused while the waiter cleared their plates and poured coffee for all.
Phil had offered a few other details, which Gideon now shared. Scofield held a dual professorship, spending most of the year at the University of Iowa, but also teaching at the
