In simpler terms, you banged one rock against another until something gave.
It helped, of course, if the banger was harder than the bangee, and if the bangee was made of flint, or obsidian, or something else that would fracture along regular, predictable planes, but these were luxuries he didn’t have. What he had were two pieces of limestone. Setting the smaller one on the trunk between his thighs, with its cleanest edge up and at a slight angle (if you struck the edge straight on, you’d just crumble it away), he delivered his first careful blow with the other one, his aim being not merely to break the rock in two, but with a series of well-placed blows to produce a finer implement, sharp-edged and shaped to the hand.
The first blow produced nothing; only a sharp little clack. He tried again. This time the hammer stone glanced off the core and drove painfully into his thigh. He winced. That was going to be another bruise. The hell with producing a finer implement, he decided. Any old chopper would do, as long as he could operate it with one hand. He tried another blow, harder. Nothing. Even harder. A tiny chip came off the wrong rock. Frustrated, grunting with the effort, he clenched his teeth and raised the hammer stone over his head “What in the world are you doing down there?” Pru McGinnis’s wondering voice floated down to him from the top.
“Pru!” he cried, looking up. “Am I glad to see you!”
She looked down at him, thoughtfully chewing on her lower lip. “Umm… I don’t suppose you could use a little help?”
SIX
“So I look down and what do I see?”
Pru was zestfully regaling an enthralled, aghast Julie. “It was awe-inspiring, positively cosmic, as if I was watching the very dawn of mankind re-created before me. There he was, this primitive, hulking creature crouched in his tree, grunting, at the very moment of the invention of tool-making. You could see the intense concentration on his face as he crudely hammered his rocks together, in preparation for coming down from his arboreal abode and standing erect upon the earth on his own two legs.”
A subdued Gideon offered a modest correction. “Coming up from my arboreal abode, actually.”
Which was the first time Julie relaxed enough to laugh. “But you are okay?” she asked for the third or fourth time.
“I’m fine, honey. A few dings, a few scuffs, but all in all, in pretty good shape for a guy who fell off the Rock of Gibraltar.”
And now the laughter turned to relieved giggles. “ ‘I appreciate your wifely concern,’ ” she mimicked, dropping her voice an octave and adding a supercilious, mock-English accent, “ ‘but don’t worry, I have no intention whatever of falling off the Rock of Gibraltar.’ ”
“I did not say ’whatever,’” Gideon muttered, but then ruefully laughed along with her. “Next time I’ll pay more attention.”
They were in the tiny bar-restaurant, midway through the simple, satisfying luncheon of roast chicken, chips, and salad, along with bottles of cold white Montilla wine from across the border. Julie, Gideon, and Pru were at the larger of the two tables, speaking quietly, preferring to keep their conversation private.
Between the two of them, Gideon and Pru had described how she had found him. She had been walking on the trail without anything in particular in mind when she heard a clack-clack-clack sound, “as if someone was banging two stones together.” Curious, she had climbed up to the sentry post, looked down, and found Gideon doing exactly that. She had hurried back to the cable car terminal and located an employee who was able to get hold of a stout, twenty-five-foot electrical extension cord. The two of them had then run back and used the cord to “walk” Gideon up the cliff face.
“It was really exciting,” Pru declared. “It was fun!”
“It was exciting, all right,” Gideon admitted. “I don’t know about fun. Maybe five years from now it might seem as if it was fun.”
“And you still really think you might have been pushed?” Julie asked.
He shrugged. As time had passed, a conviction that he had indeed been pushed had first grown, then shrunk. On the one hand, it seemed impossible that he could have fallen off the Rock on his own, but wasn’t that just what he’d done on those log bridges? No one had pushed him then; he’d managed to fall off without any help. Maybe the same thing had happened here. There was that nasty wind, after all. “I don’t know. I think I felt something… a push.” He touched his right hip, just above the hip pocket. “Here.” Another shrug. “I think.”
“You don’t sound very positive.”
“I’m not. But I just can’t believe I did it all by myself. I mean, did you ever hear of anybody accidentally falling off the Rock of Gibraltar? ”
“Most people who fell off the Rock wouldn’t be able to talk about it afterward,” Pru pointed out. “You had a little luck on your side.” She and Julie were both clearly disinclined to believe anyone had pushed him.
Julie gently touched the back of his hand. “No offense, sweetheart, but you’re… how do I put this? You’re really not very good with heights.”
“Tell me about it,” he said with a sigh. “All the same-”
“Gideon, listen. Let’s assume for a minute that somebody really did push you. If that were true, it would pretty much have to be someone right here in this room, wouldn’t it? Who else would have any idea where you were? Who else that you know would be in Gibraltar? Why would anyone else want to… well, kill you?”
“Why would anyone in this room want to kill me?”
“That’s what I was wondering.”
He nodded. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “I guess.”
A few moments of meditative silence followed, until Pru, having wrested the last shred of white meat from her half chicken, jerked her head and gestured decisively with her fork. “Okay, I’ve thought it through, and I simply can’t see anyone having pushed you. It doesn’t hold water.” She shoved her plate away and moved her wineglass nearer.
“Look,” she whispered, leaning closer in. “Do you really believe someone here – one of these people – harmless, fusty, certified academics right down to their sensible shoes – not only wanted to murder you… well, on second thought, that part I can believe-”
“Thank you so much.”
“-but went so far as to actually try to do it? No, that’s straining credulity. Think about it. Aside from the guts it would take, he would have had to follow you down the trail, carefully keeping out of sight, then follow you up the steps, then-”
“That’s not necessarily true. He could have heard me say I was going to go up there, and then gotten there before me and waited.”
“Even so, he would have had to hide behind a rock or something until you went into the hut, then skulk up and crouch behind it, waiting for you to come out, then shove you over at exactly the right moment, when you were right on the edge – all without being seen, I might add – and then run back here before anyone noticed. And act as if nothing happened.” She sat back. “That, if you’ll permit me to say so, is a pretty bizarre hypothesis.”
Yes, it was, but that hadn’t stopped him from entertaining it. When he’d walked in with Pru only a few minutes late for lunch, after getting his bloodied knuckles washed and sprayed with an antibiotic, he couldn’t help scanning the room, searching for a guilty face, or more likely, one that looked astonished at seeing him alive. He didn’t find any. They all looked exactly like their everyday selves, with no special interest in him. And none of them did have any special interest in him, that was a major sticking point. Except for Pru, he knew none of them very well, and most hardly at all. His only connection to most of them was his lab work on the First Family and the subsequent paper that came out of it, and there had been nothing in those to provoke their antagonism. On the contrary, his phrase describing Gibraltar Boy – “a seeming phenotypical mosaic of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens traits” – had helped catapult almost everyone associated with the dig to vastly increased prominence. (When they quoted it, which they often did, the “seeming” usually fell by the wayside.)
All the same, he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. If he squeezed his eyes shut he could feel… he could almost feel… he could imagine he could feel… that quick, firm shove at his hip…
“Well?” Pru pressed when nothing was forthcoming from him.
