Unnatural Selection (2 page)

“Hm, what?”

“Hm, nothing, just ‘hm.’”

“No, when you say ‘hm,’ it must mean something. What is it?”

“Julie, I’m a professor. I’m supposed to go around saying ‘hm.’ It’s expected of me.”

She looked at him, her dark, pretty, close-cropped head tilted to one side. “Hmmm,” she said doubtfully.

Gideon laughed. “Anything else in the article?”

She went back to reading aloud. “‘Mr. Villarreal, a resident of Willow, Alaska, was often cited as a modern American success story, the son of Cuban migrant citrus workers in Florida. He worked alongside them from the time he was five years old. Contacted today, his agent, Marcus Stein, said: “At seventeen this guy was still picking oranges down in Dade County, barely speaking English. At forty he was one of America’s most respected and best-known environmentalists. He was one hell of a guy.” Mr. Villarreal was, however, also a controversial figure whose vigorous, blunt defense of the wilderness and of wilderness animals had embroiled him in controversy many times over the years. He leaves no immediate relatives.’”

She folded the paper. “That’s it.”

The check had come while she had been talking, and Gideon laid the amount on the table. “So,” he said. “Can I interest you in a sunset walk along the Promenade?”

“Does it come with a Cornish clotted-cream ice cream cone?”

“But of course.”

“I know it’s awful of me to say it,” she said soberly as they arose, “but this year’s meeting will be a lot more… well, civil, relaxed… without Edgar’s being there, if you know what I mean.”

“Mm,” Gideon said.

“‘Mm’? Is that different than ‘hm’?”

“A minor dialectical variant.”

The meeting of which they spoke, and the reason for their being in this remote corner of England, was the Consortium of the Scillies, the wonderfully inaptly named brainchild of American multimillionaire and noted eccentric Vasily Kozlov. Kozlov, who had come to the United States from the Soviet Union as a non-English-speaking twenty-eight-year-old, had struggled his way through evening high school and community college in only five years, and then gotten a job as a low-level laboratory technician in the research division of a soap and detergent company in New Jersey, where he’d worked for nearly five years. In his spare time, the brilliant, inquisitive Kozlov had come up with a revolutionary way of determining the surface tension of liquids by measuring the reflected variance of light intensity at different points on the surface. When he had offered to sell his method to the company, the chemists who were his superiors had laughed off the skinny guy with the wild hair, the two-year degree, the mad-Russian accent, and the grandiose ideas. Kozlov had quit his job, moved back in with his parents in Brooklyn at the age of thirty-eight, and spent the next several years refining his technique and trying to sell it to other companies and to the United States government. But he had been baffled and frustrated by bureaucratic red tape and scientific indifference.

An uncle who owned a Russian bakery chain had come to his rescue, offering to back him in return for a share of the profits, if any. Kozlov had jumped at the chance, and within a year he had turned out his first prototype. Two years after that the company he’d originally worked for came back, hat in hand, to apply for a license for its use. And in another ten years every major detergent maker and toothpaste producer in Europe and the United States was using the Kozlov method in their research and production departments. Not long after, this gifted foreigner of little formal education, working in his own laboratory, developed a new, non-petroleum-based surfactant that had the detergent-makers lining up on his doorstep all over again.

By the age of fifty-five, Kozlov was an extremely rich man. He was also a confirmed iconoclast, with a ferocious disdain for the scientific and bureaucratic establishments. A three-time divorce, but still a romantic through and through, he sold out to his uncle, bought a dry-moated, sixteenth-century castle high on a hill on St. Mary’s Island, and retired to live out his days in brooding, baronial splendor. This lasted the restless and intellectually curious Kozlov all of two months, by which time he had developed an interest in natural history, devoting himself with typical Kozlovian intensity to the particular study of the abundant mosses and liverworts to be found in the unusually temperate climate of the Scillies.

In a year he’d learned all there was to know, or all he wanted to know, about the habits of Telaranea murphyae and Lophocolea bispinosa and their kind. Restless and bored, feeling himself getting old before his time, he cast about for a way to marry his newly awakened interest in the natural environment and his old anger at and contempt for bureaucracy and academia. What he came up with was the funding of an ongoing forum for the practical, realistic consideration of conservation and biodiversity issues-something that would be completely outside the obstructiveness and foot-dragging of government and academic scientists. Thus was born the Consortium of the Scillies. (When his attorney had delicately suggested that the name was perhaps not all it might be, Kozlov had scratched his head and replied in his mangled English: “Is better-Scilly Consortium?” The attorney had let it go.)

The consortium was to consist of five to seven Fellows, personally chosen by Kozlov from applications submitted to him, with a decided preference toward people that he recognized as blood-brothers: mavericks, firebrands, and, most important, “self-made” men and women. They would also be expected to be capable of “civilized discourse with those who might disagree with them.” (He had made it clear that he meant this at the very first convocation in 1995, when two Fellows got into a shouting match over the role that cow flatulence played or didn’t play in global warming. The disgusted Kozlov had thrown them both out.)

Participants would meet twice, two years apart. The first weeklong meeting would be to review current issues and refine subjects for subsequent monographs by individual members. Two years later, they would formally present their papers, with discussion following. The papers, along with the discussions, would then be published as the Transactions of the Consortium of the Scillies. A new group of Fellows would be chosen for the following two-year cycle, and so on.

The sessions would be at Kozlov’s castle on St. Mary’s, where participants would also live and dine. All expenses would be covered, and there would be a $50,000 stipend out of Kozlov’s own pocket, to be presented when their papers were delivered and accepted at the second meeting. With stipulations like these, there was no shortage of applicants. Right from the start, the biannual Transactions, with their offbeat, unorthodox views and conclusions, had created a stir in the media that gladdened Kozlov’s heart, despite their being received with amused derision in mainstream conservation circles.

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.”

“Gideon, has anyone ever told you you’re an intellectual snob?”

He laughed. “Not since last Friday. Look, let me put it this way. As smart as some of these people might be-and I grant you, Kozlov himself is a bona fide genius-they don’t have the advantage of a thorough, rigorous, scientific education. Okay, they know a lot, but, like anybody who’s ‘self-made, ’ they’re also bound to have gaps-misapprehensions, misconceptions-that they don’t even know they have because they’ve never been tested, they’ve never been required to learn material they don’t feel like learning, and they’ve never had to put together a dissertation to the satisfaction of a highly critical committee.”

“So?”

“So you know me; if I’m sitting there and I hear some typical misunderstandings, say about the mechanics of evolution or natural selection, getting thrown around as if they were good science, I’m not sure I could control myself.”