Boundary: Chapter Eleven

    Helen had intended to wait for Glendale outside another lecture late that afternoon, in order to thank him. But the call from Jackie Secord telling her about the accident at Ares not only distracted her for too long, but left her feeling much too depressed. Instead, she returned to her hotel room and spent most of the evening on or by the phone, waiting for further news.

    She was finally able to talk to Joe himself. That was a source of much relief, regarding him, of course. But the rest of the situation was very unsettling. In an odd sort of way that Helen still couldn't define—she'd only spent a few hours in the man's actual presence, after all—A.J. Baker had come to be an important person in her life. The idea of him dying was... horrible.

    Early in the morning, though, Joe called again.

    "He'll survive, Helen. The doctors say there isn't any doubt about that at all, any longer."

    "Oh, thank God."

    There was a little pause. "But he won't be one hundred percent again. Never. The damage to his lungs was just too extensive."

    "How bad is it?"

    She could almost hear the shrug on the other end. "Depends how you look at it. From the standpoint of most people, not bad at all. After a few months, you really won't be able tell the difference, under normal circumstances—at least, that's what the doctors say. He won't be running any marathons, of course."

    Helen chuckled. "Did he ever?"

    "As a matter of fact, he did. Twice, once in the big Boston one. He even had a pretty respectable finish. The truth is, Helen, A.J. is one of the few geeks I've ever known who could have been one hell of an athlete, if he'd wanted to. Which he didn't, but he's always been in top physical condition. Even studies martial arts, if you can believe it. That's partly why he was placed so highly in the running for the expedition. Now..."

    Suddenly, Helen understood. "Oh."

    "Yeah. 'Oh.' Traveling to Mars just doesn't fall under the label 'normal circumstances.' And you know how much it means to him."

    "Yes, I do." She took a long, slow breath. "Well, let's hope for the best. And let's also not forget—and make sure you remind him, Joe, when he needs it—that as long as you're alive you can still hope."

    She finally caught up with Glendale in one of the hallways later than morning.

    "Dr. Glendale—Nicholas—thank you."

    The famous smile was muted but sincere. He didn't try to pretend he didn't understand, either.

    "Helen, there's nothing I despise more than a hatchet job. And that was one of the most cleverly repellent things I've seen in years. It was, I assure you, a genuine pleasure."

    "So you believe..."

    "I believe that you have found the most interesting case of Problematica on record," Glendale said firmly. "Nothing more than that, Helen. I know you have some rather... extreme conclusions. But..."

    "But? Nicholas—"

    She more-or-less dragged him into a side room, away from the circulating masses. "Look at it. There isn't a phylum that even comes close. The means of locomotion is utterly alien to this world."

    Glendale winced. She could see he had been hoping to avoid this conversation entirely.

    "Helen... my dear..."

    He stopped, looked at her, sighed, and then shifted into his professional persona that she knew so well. "Dr. Sutter, I suppose it would be easiest to speak directly about this. Can we do that? I know everyone else, including yourself, is avoiding direct statements. Can we be straight with each other here?"

    Helen nodded.

    "Very well. Doctor Sutter, your theory, and presumably that of your co-workers, is this: that the anomalous fossil you have named Bemmius secordii is, in point of fact, the remains of an alien creature. A star-traveling visitor to our world, who had the misfortune to encounter some of our nastier native predators sixty-five million years ago, and paid the price. Although he managed to finish off the predators as well, through the use of a weapon which used the ceramic-type pellets you found on the site as projectiles. Am I basically correct?"

    Helen found herself hesitating momentarily. She didn't think any of them had ever—even to each other—put it so directly. It had been more an assumption than anything else. But what other explanation was there?

    "Yes, that is correct."

    "An attractive theory, certainly. We all want to have something sensational in our careers, and I remember you well as an undergraduate. You were something in the way of my star pupil. Science fiction was one of your favorite reading areas, too, as I recall. So, naturally, such an explanation would occur to you when confronted with something that bizarre."

    "It would occur to a lot of paleontologists. I would have bet it would occur to you, too."

    Glendale laughed. "Oh, it most certainly would occur to me. Did occur to me, I should say, the moment I finished reading your initial report. I'm an occasional reader of science fiction myself, as it happens. Unfortunately—or fortunately—I am also far too aware of the logical flaws involved to retain such a theory for very long."

    Helen felt her jaw setting as it always used to when she started arguing with Glendale. She reminded herself sharply of how often that had presaged her getting roundly trounced in an argument, rather as Pinchuk just had.

    "What other theory is there?"

    "There are many possibilities, Dr. Sutter. Instead of immediately offering one, I want you to consider what you are asking us to accept. You are, as a paleontologist, intimately aware of the probabilities involved in fossil formation. You may not, perhaps, have considered the probabilities of other events quite so closely, reasoning—with some justification—that there wouldn't be sufficient information to judge them by, anyway. Still, let me summarize."

    He held up one hand and began counting off the fingers with his other. "You want us to believe the following unlikely chain of coincidences:

    "First, an alien from another world arrives here. Perhaps you have never considered how very improbable that is, what with all the science fiction books and videos ignoring that very point. But from everything we currently know, such travel between the stars is hideously unlikely, even for us. And, so far, we have absolutely no evidence that there is any other life in the universe. We may assume it, but thus far there is not the smallest shred of acceptable evidence that it exists at all.

    "Second, this creature lands on our world and manages to get himself killed. Perhaps not so farfetched.

    "Third, that he was traveling completely alone. That seems a ludicrous assumption unless we allow for truly space-operatic level technology—and in that case, what was he doing protecting himself with what amounts to a fancy shotgun? Or, if he wasn't alone, that his fellow beings didn't bother to retrieve his body. Human cultures do not just leave bodies to be savaged by random creatures, and I find it hard to believe that alien ones would either. Or, of course, something else killed off his fellows coincidentally before they could interfere or retrieve the body.

    "Fourth, that he managed to injure most if not all of his attackers—but not swiftly enough to keep from being killed himself, though the injuries he dealt made them expire just a short distance from him. Close enough that they could all be found together in a single death scene, sixty-five million years later.

    "Fifth, that of all the untold trillions of death scenes across the entire world over the past hundreds of millions of years, it was this—already utterly improbable—death scene that just happened to be one of the very few preserved as a fossil."

    Having run out of fingers, he lowered his hands. "And, finally, to add insult to statistical injury, you want us to believe that all this just happened to occur at the very moment the asteroid or comet struck the Yucatan. So that all of these perfectly preserved corpses ended up literally sitting on the K-T boundary."

    He gave Helen a level stare. Not an unfriendly one, no. But it was just as disconcerting today as she remembered that stare being when she was a young graduate student.

    "Helen," he said softly, "I just demolished Pinchuk by showing the mathematical absurdities that his scheme would entail. I can assure you—this is my own field of expertise, as you know—that if I subjected your theory to the same sort of mathematical scrutiny, the results would be several orders of magnitude worse. I did a rough estimate, as it happens, the moment I finished your paper. I stopped once I realized that your theory is statistically more improbable—far more improbable, as a matter of fact—than the existence of dragons and unicorns."

    Helen couldn't argue with the statistical improbabilities involved. She was not an expert on the math involved, the way Glendale was, but she knew enough to know that he was right. She'd been bothered all along by the cumulative series of unlikely coincidences, and had no good explanation for them herself.

    Still...

    Helen was a field worker, not a theoretician like Glendale.

    "But facts trump probability, don't they, Nicholas?"

    "Certainly, Helen. Facts always trump theories. And if you had found that our mysterious friend had a fossilized repeating shotgun on his person, I would have conceded immediately—and then wracked my brains trying to figure out how to explain the improbabilities involved. In this case, however, I think what you are seeing is something still very improbable, but at least a couple of orders of magnitude more likely than fossilized aliens. That is, a creature of a previously unknown phylum which, through quite amazing probability events, has not had any of its precursor forms discovered previously.

    "Or," he added, "which I personally think is what we'll find, that such fossils have been found but weren't recognized for what they were. Helen, I suspect that if you could take a few years and search through the miscellaneous fossils in the New York Museum of Natural History and similar places, you'd find some misfiled shells that are, in fact, parts of precursors to your Bemmius. Such things happen often enough, as you well know. Look how long it took before we finally realized what the conodonts were. This is just an extreme version of it."

    He looked aside, for a moment, pensively. "It may even be less unusual than it seems, for that matter. The oddity isn't really the design of the phylum, after all, if you consider the incredible range of evolutionary possibilities we can see in the Burgess Shale. Is Bemmie really so outlandish, matched up against Wiwaxia and Opabinia and Anomalocaris—not to mention Hallucigenia? For that matter, it occurred to one of my current graduate students, when we discussed the subject, that your initial impression may actually not be far from the truth. Imagine an offshoot of the cephalopod family which took to land; had some of its tentacles migrate and become shorter for movement, and others evolve for manipulation or catching prey on land. It develops the plate-like supports for land propulsion and the skull is the internalization of the shell. Farfetched, perhaps, although..."

    He shrugged. "You know as well as I do that the real mystery is not the creature itself; it's explaining why we haven't seen any previous indications of such a phylum in the fossil record. But if the lifestyle of such animals kept them away from conditions which lend to fossilization, it's by no means impossible. And what's certain, mathematically speaking, is that the discovery of even a large, highly evolved representative of an unknown phylum is still a far, far more likely event than the fossilization of a singular alien from some distant planet."

    She suddenly felt exhausted, emotionally as well as physically. Her extended session of fury in Pinchuk's lecture, the abrupt relief, the lack of sleep from worrying about A.J.'s condition—and, now, the realization that even her defender didn't believe what she'd found, had drained her.

    "I don't know about that." She summoned enough energy for a last sally. "I do know this—and so do you. Using that same method of statistical analysis, you can demonstrate that the likelihood of a universe emerging which could eventually produce intelligent human life on Earth is every bit as far-fetched."

    Alas, Glendale just grinned. "Yes, you're right. I hate to think how many innocent trees have been slaughtered to provide the paper for the endless debate over the anthropocentric principle. But there's still a fundamental difference, Helen. Facts do trump theory, and here we have a fact. We know there is life here on Earth, and we know it's produced other phyla of life, including intelligent life. We have no such evidence for life on any other planet. Much less intelligent life. Much less life so technologically advanced that it can visit our own world."

    He spread his hands, a bit. "My own hypothesis is admittedly unlikely. But it is less unlikely than your own—and has the great logical advantage of being based on facts that we know to be true."

    He looked at her sympathetically. "You're wiped out, Helen, and no wonder. You've been worrying about just this sort of reaction for weeks, and it's not doing you any good. If you'll just accept that what you have is a wonderful terrestrial find, and write up some papers that way, you'll find it's a lot easier to sleep at night—and idiots like Pinchuk won't be able to bother you."

    He checked his watch. "I have a panel in five minutes. Helen, take care. You have a magnificent find; just stop thinking of an explanation that really doesn't hold water, even if it does look, well, a lot cooler than any other explanation out there."

    After Glendale left, Helen sank into one of the empty chairs nearby. "I wish I could do that, Nicholas. But—unlikely or not, impossible or not—I'm sure that Bemmius secordii died a long, long way from home."