The 2084 Precept (57 page)

This called for an interruption. "Did you
say 90 tons every day?" I queried.

"Yes, Peter. You are bombarded every day by
millions of meteors, meteoroids, and meteorites—the latter being
your term for objects which actually impact your atmosphere or
surface. But as their size is usually anything from that of a grain
of sand to the size of a fist, and as they are travelling quite
fast (40,000 kilometers per hour would be a common speed), nearly
everything vaporizes as it enters your atmosphere. My colleagues
simply chose an asteroid which was large enough to make its impact
on Jupiter an interesting one for you."

"And what if they had sent it to Earth
instead of to Jupiter?" I asked. "Would it have destroyed our
planet?"

"Oh no, your planet is too big for an
asteroid impact to be able to destroy it. But a large enough
asteroid would certainly destroy all life on your planet, if that's
what you mean, except—perhaps—for some bacteria. In fact, this has
already happened twice in your planet's history, mass extinctions
both times. And it will probably happen again, but perhaps not for
a very long time. You will, however, continue to have more
near-misses like the one that passed very close to you a few years
ago."

"Well…you've explained to me how you got
that asteroid to leave its orbit, not that I really understand your
explanation, but I'll take your word for it. However, how did you
manage to get it to travel as far as Jupiter in such a short time?
It was a very sudden event, virtually without notice in fact."

"Now that was done by utilizing our
space-time technology, a science which you might describe, in its
simplest form, as a far-reaching extrapolation of your Einstein
theories, and for which you would need several years of study to be
able to understand, Peter. Assuming, that is, that you were an
accomplished physicist in the first place."

"O.K., Jeremy, understood. Accepted. And
anyway, many thanks for making the effort to explain. I appreciate
it. I guess I just have to accept the fact that the event happened,
and that it happened exactly as you said it would happen, and
exactly when you said it would happen. That is the fact of the
matter. So thanks again for the info, and may I wish you a
successful meeting tomorrow."

"Oh, successful or otherwise, Peter, it will
be intriguing. A close-up view of how your species reacts to
something beyond its comprehension. I know you don't believe me,
Peter, and they probably won't either. But they, like you, cannot
reject facts and it will be interesting to see what they decide.
I'll update you on the particulars in due course."

And we said our goodbyes. He was right, I
didn't believe him. He hadn't convinced me. He hadn't convinced me
at all. His explanations had been far too amateurish, based on an
absolute minimum of knowledge, they were far too nebulous, they
didn't hold water. In fact, thinking over his rhetoric even more
closely, he had not provided me with any intelligible explanation
at all.

So there remained the one and only possible
conclusion. He must have known about it in advance but didn't want
to admit it. He preferred to maintain his carefully and
painstakingly fabricated delusion of the alien traveler. But—honest
as I am—the one and only possible conclusion was also a difficult
one for me to swallow. I was confused and I had, for the first time
since I had been involved with him, some doubts concerning his
status as a human being. But please don't ask me what the form or
consistency of those doubts were, because I don't know.

And so I took Mr. Brown for a walk, I played
some chess on my laptop and studied some end-game situations, and I
took Mr. Brown for another walk and I ate at the Italian.

I also stayed up reading a large portion of
my new book,
'L'Élégance du hérisson' by Muriel Barbery—
an
extraordinarily beautiful book because of its writing, and also
because of that rare manifestation in literature, its uniqueness.
Not a great book but an eminent one. I must buy a couple of copies
of the English translation to use as gifts for a blinking red light
or two (would they have kept the title, 'The Elegance of the
Hedgehog'?), and to see if they have been able to achieve the
herculean task of retaining most or all of its literary
accomplishment. And then I went to bed.

I can trace my ancestry back to a
protoplasmic primordial globule. Oh yes.

To a prokaryote to be precise. Prokaryotes
such as bacteria and archaea first appeared on this particular
planet about 4 billion years ago. Like all living cells, they use
the same basic set of nucleotides and amino acids, and they share a
limited set of morphologies. I use the present tense here, because
some of these organisms are still around.

Around 2 billion years ago, enkaryotic cells
arrived on the scene (don't ask me how, maybe God or Allah sent
them do you think?) and eventually caused the next major change in
cell structure by engulfing bacteria, by means of endosymbiosis,
and triggering a co-evolution which finally resulted in organisms
such as mitochondria, hydrogenosomes and, in plants and algae,
chloroplasts.

But these were still unicellular organisms.
The first multicellular organisms began to appear in the planet's
oceans around 600 million years ago, in the form of sponges, slime
moulds and a variety of similar organisms. And not too long after
that, something we call the Cambrian Explosion produced a massive
increase in biological diversity, probably caused by the
significant increase at that time in photosynthetic activity, the
consequence of which was an accumulation of oxygen in our planet's
atmosphere.

And so it was that around 500 million years
ago plants and fungi began to colonize the land, and they were
followed about 350 million years ago by arthropods and other
animals of elementary structure. Amniotes and birds began to
develop around 150 million years ago in what we refer to as the
Jurassic period, and mammals evolved about 20 million years after
that. Homininae first began to appear around 10 million years ago.
And the human being—the initial anatomical version, as I had
explained to Jeremy—evolved around 200,000 years ago. Very similar,
at the time, to certain other animals; in fact to this day human
beings and chimpanzees share 96% of their genomes.

What evolved, including ourselves, and how
it evolved—in fact, how it is still evolving—is, without
contradicting proven biological and chemical theses, a matter of
pure chance. It is a matter of pure chance based on several
haphazard and unforeseeable occurrences, similar to the ones
affecting our planet's weather. For example, the majority of plants
and animals reproduce sexually, the defining characteristic of
which is recombination, so called because each of the offspring
receives 50% of the genetic inheritance from each of the parents.
Nobody knows how or why sexual reproduction came into existence,
although we do know when—it was in the early history of the
enkaryotes—nor do we understand how it has managed to evolve and
survive. For it is not only a highly inefficient method of
reproduction—an asexual group of organisms can outbreed and
displace a similar sexual group in as little as 50 generations—but
it is well documented as being a haphazard and sometimes dangerous
method as well. The genetic reshuffling produced by the random
nature of recombination can, and often does, break up favorable
combinations of genes. And it can cause unforeseen mutations.

Another example of the random nature of
evolution is the way predators and their prey have developed. Both
have always needed to continuously develop and enhance their attack
and defence mechanisms in order to survive: the predator in order
not to die of hunger, and the prey in order not to be slaughtered
into extinction. The continuous evolution of the increasing
strength of toxins and antitoxins in certain animals, including
limbless reptiles, is a perfect example of this. And sometimes the
predator has become extinct, and sometimes the prey has become
extinct, depending on the comparative efficiency and/or the speed
of their individual evolutionary processes. Depending, in other
words, on chance.

And extinction events play a major role
overall. It is interesting to note that extinctions of species
occur regularly, the best-known one being the Cretaceous-Paleogene
event, in which all non-avian dinosaurs were eliminated. In fact,
nearly all plant and animal species that have ever lived on the
Earth are now extinct. And we have a mass extinction event going on
right now, the Holocene event we call it. It has only been with us
for a few thousand years, for the simple reason that it is
associated with the human species, with humanity's expansion around
the globe. It is a very deadly extinction event and it is working
at a very high speed. And the human animal is the cause.

And so we are just a dot in the history of
evolution, part of a long, long series of speciation and extinction
events. The fossils tell no lies. And extinction, like it or not,
is in any case the ultimate fate of
all
species.

So…that is my ancestry. And, since all
organisms on our planet derive from a common ancestral gene pool,
it is yours as well. We are the products of evolutionary chance, a
system created by a deity or deities, or otherwise, take your pick.
Or don't take your pick if you don't want to. I don't. The big
mysteries remain unsolved including the unanswered question of
where did those prokaryotes come from in the first place and how
did they manage to come into existence—on Earth or somewhere
else—if they didn't exist before?

But perhaps all of this is a load of crap.
Maybe the Jews have got it right—we did not evolve at all. We,
along with the universe, were suddenly created 3,761 years before
the birth of Christ. Who knows? Not I. I am neither a Hebrew, nor
has anybody else provided me with any worthwhile information on the
matter.

The cause of these idle evolutionary
ruminations on a nice, sunny Wednesday morning was—of course—Jeremy
Parker.

That asteroid business had me thinking
outside of the box, a fine expression for which we owe a debt to
the Americans, and which I apply as necessary in my consultancy
work when faced with major and seemingly insoluble problems.
Hypotheses in other words, and mainly of the 'what if…?' kind, and
as crazy as you care to make them. What if Jeremy Parker
were
an alien? And what if Jeremy Parker and his brothers
were
capable of eliminating us, should they choose to do so?
It would, after all, be just another extinction event, it wouldn't
have the slightest effect on our solar system, or on our galaxy or
on the universe. It would be like destroying an ants' nest, it
wouldn't have any effect on anything—or to be more precise, it
wouldn't have any
noticeable
effect on anything,
notwithstanding that legendary time-travel story to the contrary.
You know the one I mean. The one in which the butterfly got trodden
on.

So…what if? The only thing to try and do
would be to persuade them to please not do it. Which was exactly
what was already under way, albeit with a well-nigh insurmountable
condition attached—getting our birdbrains to agree on something in
the first place, and in the second place getting them to do
something about it. So there was no point in even thinking about
it. Superfluous worry. And in any case, the idea was ridiculous
anyway. He
couldn't
be an alien. He was, and without doubt
the police had already substantiated it as an irrefutable fact,
Jeremy Parker, ex-inmate of an institution for the mentally
disturbed. An insane person with unusual hypnotic powers and very
advanced astronomical knowledge.

And that, of course, was equally
far-fetched. So drop the subject. Carry on earning the money and
time, as time is wont to do, will eventually deliver an answer to
the conundrum.

This thinking had carried me through much of
the morning outing with Mr. Brown. It had been interrupted by a
salad lunch in Monika's apartment, but it took hold of me again in
the afternoon and it still didn’t bring me an inch closer to any
form of rational conclusion. I mean, asteroids for goodness'
sake.

* * * * *

It was eight p.m. and I was just about to
leave to go to Marie-Anne's for something to eat, when Jeremy's
'phone rang. Seven p.m. his time of course.

"The meeting finished a short while ago."
said Jeremy. "It was an interesting experience."

"What happened?" I asked. I could think of
all kinds of ludicrous outcomes, but at least he didn't seem to
have been held for further questioning. 'Held' of course is the
wrong word, in that that would only be possible if he felt like
being held.

"Well, they certainly have some security
there," he said. "and it included a body-search. I was told that
the prime minister would not be meeting me on his own, that he
would have some high-level aides present. And so I told them I was
leaving."

"And what then?"

"Well, they had obviously anticipated this
possibility and after some mutterings here and some mumblings there
and some whispered mobile communication, I was shown into a room
which had clearly been especially prepared for the purpose. There
was a bullet-proof partition of some transparent material or other,
a microphone, several cameras recording the scene, and so on. And
there were several armed security people outside the door of
course. And then the prime minister entered through a door on the
other side of the room."

"So you did get to meet with him on your
own?" I asked. Well, well.

"Yes," he said. "The prime minister told me
that the Jupiter event, together with the occurrence in Piccadilly
ten days ago, had been more than convincing and was sufficient for
him to accede to a meeting—highly unusual though this one was. I
told him that the cameras were not a problem for me but that, in
his own interest, it would not be a good idea for any live audio
surveillance to be in operation, at least not for the first ten
minutes. After that, he could switch it on if he wished, or even
have more people join him. No problem, his decision."