Having begun in 1995, the consortium was now in its fourth incarnation, and had changed little, except that Kozlov, responding reluctantly to mainstream criticism, now included one or two token “establishment” participants in the mix. The current consortium had two such members. One was Liz Petra, an archaeologist with the State of New York, who had years ago taken a couple of courses with Gideon and whose specialty was “garbology,” the study of populations through analysis of their waste products and refuse. The other, amazingly enough, was Julie. She had sent in her application mostly as a lark—it was understood that her $50,000 stipend would go to the National Park Service in any case—but the paper she proposed to research and write, an assessment of changing wildfire management policies, had caught Kozlov’s interest. And so here she was, with Gideon along for the ride.
The first of the two meetings, two years earlier, had come during finals week at the University of Washington, making it impossible for him to come with her. This time the quarter was over, and so here he was too, proud of his wife and quite content to be playing the unaccustomed role of accompanying spouse.
THE Penzance Promenade is actually the top of the nineteenth-century, block-cut-stone seawall, with a wide shingle beach on one side and the old town sloping up away from it on the other. They had walked its length, from Battery Rocks, past the Victorian-era Jubilee Swimming Pool and the public gardens, and down the long row of seaside hotels, guest houses, and restaurants, to the curve in Mount’s Bay, where town, seawall, and promenade all peter out. It’s a nice walk at sunset, when the massive granite blocks underfoot look golden and the air itself has a burnished, Victorian feel to it, and it tends to make walkers reflective.
“It’s not that Edgar didn’t have something valuable to add,” Julie mused as they sat on the last of the benches, finishing their ice cream cones, “but, well, he was one of those people who just sucked the oxygen out of the room. I remember, at dinner sometimes, when he’d leave early, it was as if this glowering black cloud had lifted.”
“I know. I’ve seen him on TV panels once or twice,” Gideon said. “Kind of a bully, I thought.”
“I’d say most people who had anything to do with him would agree with that.”
“Also very taken with himself—the handsome, brooding defender of the wilds.”
“That, too. Definitely.”
“Come on, let’s head back,” Gideon said.
Strolling eastward on the promenade brings with it the famous view of St. Michael’s Mount, the great, castle- topped medieval stone pile sitting in isolated glory far out in Mount’s Bay, and for a few minutes they walked toward it in silence, watching it turn from amber, to pale straw, to flaming orange as dusk settled in.
“Gideon,” Julie said after a while, “are you going to sit in on any of the sessions? Vasily would love for you to participate. He told me so in the last e-mail. He really respects you.”
“If I sit in, would he stop charging me twenty bucks a day?”
They both laughed, but it was a fact. Kozlov, generous as he might be in some respects, was a penny-pincher in others. Fellows were welcome to bring partners to the meetings, but additional food and lodging charges of twenty dollars a day (“to pay for extra work-staff peoples”) would be applied.
“He just might,” Julie said.
“Even so, I think I’ll pass. I have some work with me, and I also want to get over to the outer islands to see the Bronze and Iron Age sites, and then—”
“No, really, why won’t you?”
Gideon hesitated and shrugged. “I just don’t think I’d be comfortable getting involved. It doesn’t sound like my kind of thing.” He was treading carefully. Julie was naturally delighted to be a Fellow, and Gideon was delighted for her; the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to rain on her parade.
“I don’t understand why not. ”Issues in Biodiversity and Conservation Biology.“ I’d think it would be just your cup of tea.”
“Well, the thing is… you know, I looked at the participants’ bios, and frankly, I wasn’t exactly bowled over by them.”
“These are pretty capable people, Gideon. Vasily’s a little eccentric, yes, but he’s a certified genius, and he didn’t pick a bunch of wackos.”
“I know that. But except for Liz, there’s not a single Ph.D. in the crowd, and her degree’s in archaeology, with a specialty in garbage.”
“What about Rudy Walker, your old buddy from the University of Wisconsin? You said he was smart.”
Rudy Walker was the one other member of the consortium that Gideon knew personally, although it had been many years since they’d been in touch. The two of them had been research assistants at Wisconsin when they were working on their doctorates. Rudy was seven or eight years the elder—he had gotten a medical discharge from the Army after shattering both wrists during the invasion of Grenada, and he’d had a wife and a five-year-old daughter. He had taken the younger, greener Gideon under his wing. They had worked together, with Rudy as the senior assistant, on an important but grisly project for their major professor: injecting dyes into the soft, developing bones of aborted fetuses of varying known ages to determine the exact progression of skeletal formation. Despite the morbid hours in the lab (windowless and underground, to avoid offending the sensitive or the delicate-stomached), Gideon remembered his years at Wisconsin as a happy time of much laughter and much learning. This was thanks largely to Rudy. There had been so many late-night pizzas at the Student Union, so many pitchers of beer, so many abstruse, hilarious, academic arguments with Rudy and his equally vibrant young wife Fran, another anthropology grad student. A great time, looked back upon with pleasure.
And yes, Rudy was smart, all right.
“He got his Master’s—with honors—but never did get his doctorate,” Gideon maintained. “I went on to Arizona for mine, and Rudy went to Penn State, but he quit before he finished—never took his comps, never did a dissertation—to take a job with some private college up in Toronto, and there he stayed. Apparently never finished up. No Ph.D. on his bio.”
“Oho, now we’re getting down to brass tacks. Only Ph.D.”s meet your high standards of discourse, is that it?“
“If the subject is as complex as biodiversity and the people talking about it expect to be taken seriously— yes.”
