Humans

Chapter Twenty-three

“Fascinating,” said Jurard Selgan. “Fascinating.”

“What?” Ponter’s voice was tinged with irritation.

“Your behavior, while at the memorial wall commemorating those Gliksins who had died in southeast Galasoy.”

“What about it?” said Ponter. His voice was sharp, like that of someone trying to talk while a scab was being picked off.

“Well, this was not the first time your beliefs—our beliefs, as Barasts—had been in conflict with those of the Gliksins, was it?”

“No, of course not.”

“Indeed,” said Selgan, “such conflicts must have come up on your first visit there, no?”

“I guess.”

“Can you give me an example?” asked Selgan.

Ponter folded his arms in front of his chest. “All right,” he said, in a smug, I’ll-show-you tone. “I mentioned this to you right at the beginning: the Gliksins have this silly notion that the universe has only existed for a finite time. They’ve completely misconstrued the redshift evidence, thinking it indicates an expanding universe; they don’t understand that mass varies over time. Further, they think the cosmic microwave background radiation is the lingering echo of what they call ‘the big bang’—a vast explosion they believe started the universe.”

“They seem to like things blowing up,” said Selgan.

“They certainly do. But, of course, the uniformity of the background radiation is really caused by repeated absorption and emission of electrons trapped in plasma-pinching magnetic-vortex filaments.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Selgan, conceding that this wasn’t his territory of expertise.

“I am right,” replied Ponter. “But I didn’t fight with them over that issue. During my first visit, Mare said to me, ‘I don’t think you’re going to convince many people that the big bang didn’t happen.’ And I told her that was fine; I said: ‘Feeling a need to convince others that you’re right is something that comes from religion; I’m simply content to know that I am right, even if others don’t know it.’”

“Ah,” said Selgan. “And do you really feel that way?”

“Yes. To the Gliksins, knowledge is a battle! A territorial war! Why, to have their equivalent of the title ‘Scholar’ conferred upon you, you have to defend a thesis. That’s the word they use: defend! But science isn’t about defending one’s position against all comers; it’s about flexibility and open-mindedness and valuing the truth, no matter who finds it.”

“I concur,” said Selgan. He paused for a moment, then: “But you didn’t spend much time looking for any evidence as to whether the Gliksins might have been right in their belief in an afterlife.”

“That’s not true. I gave Mary every opportunity to demonstrate the validity of that claim.”

“Before this encounter at the memorial wall, you mean?”

“Yes. But she had nothing!”

“And so, as in the case of their finite cosmology, you let the matter go, content to know that you were right?”

“Yes. Well, I mean…”

Selgan raised his eyebrow. “Yes?”

“I mean, all right, sure, I argued with her about this belief in an afterlife. But that was different.”

“Different from the cosmological question? Why?”

“Because so much more was at stake.”

“Doesn’t the cosmological question deal with the ultimate fate of the entire universe?”

“I mean, it wasn’t just an abstract issue. It was—it is—the heart of everything.”

“Why?”

“Because…because—gristle, I don’t know why. It just seems terribly important. It’s what lets them fight all those wars, after all.”

“I understand. But I also understand that it is fundamental to their beliefs; it was something that surely you must have realized they weren’t going to give up easily.”

“I suppose.”

“And yet, you continued to press the point.”

“Well, yes.”

“Why?”

Ponter shrugged.

“Would you like to hear my guess?” asked Selgan.

Ponter shrugged again.

“You were pushing this issue because you wanted to see if there was some proof of this afterlife. Perhaps Mare, and the other Gliksins, had been holding out on you. Perhaps there was evidence that she would reveal if you kept pushing.”

“There cannot be evidence for that which does not exist,” said Ponter.

“Granted,” said Selgan. “But either you were trying to convince them that you were right—or you were trying to force them to convince you that they were right.”

Ponter shook his head. “It was pointless,” he said. “It is a ridiculous belief, this notion of souls.”

“Souls?” said Selgan.

“The immaterial part of one’s essence that they believe is immortal.”

“Ah. And you say this is a ridiculous belief?”

“Of course.”

“But surely they are entitled to hold it, no?”

“I guess.”

“Just as they are entitled to their bizarre cosmological model, no?”

“I suppose.”

“And yet, you couldn’t let this question of an afterlife go, could you? Even once you’d left the memorial wall, you still tried to push this point, didn’t you?”

Ponter looked away.

With the crisis over the closing of the portal at least temporarily averted—there was no way the Neanderthals would shut it down now with a dozen of their most valuable citizens on this side—Jock Krieger decided to return to the research he’d been doing earlier.

He left Seabreeze, driving his black BMW to the River Campus of the University of Rochester; the river in question was the Genesee. When he’d been setting up Synergy, a couple of phone calls from the right people was all it had taken to get his entire staff full priority access to the UR Library holdings. Jock parked his car in the Wilmot Lot, and headed into the brown brick Carlson Science & Engineering Library—named for Chester F. Carlson, the inventor of xerography. Journals, Jock knew, were on the first floor. He showed his university VIP ID to the librarian, a pudgy black woman with her hair in a red kerchief. He told her what he needed, and she waddled off into the back. Jock, never one to waste time, pulled out his PDA and scanned articles from that day’s New York Times and Washington Post.

After about five minutes, the librarian returned, presenting Jock with the three back issues he’d requested—one of Earth and Planetary Science Letters, and two of Nature—which his Web-searching had shown contained follow-ups to the rapid-magnetic-reversal research by Coe, et al.

Jock found an unoccupied study carrel and sat down. The first thing he did was remove his HP CapShare from his briefcase—a battery-powered hand-held document scanner. He ran the device over the pages of the articles he was interested in, capturing them at 200 dpi, adequate for OCRing later. Jock smiled at the portrait of Chester Carlson mounted near where he was sitting—he’d have loved this little unit.

Jock then started reading the actual articles. What was most interesting about the original piece, the one in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, was that the authors freely acknowledged that the results they’d found were at odds with conventional wisdom, which held that magnetic collapses would take thousands of years to occur. That belief though, was apparently based not so much on established facts but rather just a general feeling that the Earth’s magnetic field was a ponderous thing that couldn’t rapidly stand on its head.

But Coe and Prévot had found evidence of extremely rapid collapses. Their studies were based on lava flows at Steens Mountain in southern Oregon, where a volcano had erupted fifty-six separate times during a magnetic-field reversal, providing time-lapse snapshots of the action. Although they couldn’t determine the intervals between the eruptions, they did know how long the lava in each one must have taken to cool to the Curie Point, where the magnetization of the newly formed rocks would be locked in, matching the current orientation and strength of Earth’s magnetic field. The study suggested the field had collapsed in as little as a few weeks, rather than over a period of millennia.

Jock read the follow-up article by Coe and company in Nature, as well as a critique of it by a man named Ronald T. Merrill, which seemed to amount to nothing more than what Merrill himself referred to as “the principle of least astonishment:” a dogmatic statement that it was simpler to believe that Coe and Prévot were flat-out wrong, rather than to have to accept such a remarkable finding, despite being unable to show any flaw in their work.

Jock Krieger leaned back in the study carrel’s chair. It seemed what Ponter had told that Canadian-government geologist, Arnold Moore, was likely correct.

And that, Jock realized, meant there might be no time to waste.