“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.