Inherit the Stars Read online

  "Allow me to recapitulate," Danchekker continued. "Homo sapiens—modern man—belongs to the phylum Vertebrata. So, also, do all the mammals, fish, birds, amphibians, and reptiles that have ever walked, crawled, flown, slithered, or swum in every corner of the Earth. All vertebrates share a common pattern of basic architecture, which has remained unchanged over millions of years despite the superficial, specialized adaptations that on first consideration might seem to divide the countless species we see around us.

  "The basic vertebrate pattern is as follows: an internal skeleton of bone or cartilage and a vertebral column. The vertebrate has two pairs of appendages, which may be highly developed or degenerate, likewise a tail. It has a ventrally located heart, divided into two or more chambers, and a closed circulatory system of blood made up of red cells containing hemoglobin. It has a dorsal nerve cord which bulges at one end into a five-part brain contained in a head. It also has a body cavity that contains most of its vital organs and its digestive system. All vertebrates conform to these rules and are thereby related."

  The professor paused and looked around as if the conclusion were too obvious to require summarizing. "In other words, Charlie's whole structure shows him to be directly related to a million and one terrestrial animal species, extinct, alive, or yet to come. Furthermore, all terrestrial vertebrates, including ourselves and Charlie, can be traced back through an unbroken succession of intermediate fossils as having inherited their common pattern from the earliest recorded ancestors of the vertebrate line"—Danchekker's voice rose to a crescendo—"from the first boned fish that appeared in the oceans of the Devonian period of the Paleozoic era, over four hundred million years ago!" He paused for this last to take hold and then continued. "Charlie is as human as you or I in every respect. Can there be any doubt, then, that he shares our vertebrate heritage and therefore our ancestry? And if he shares our ancestry, then there is no doubt that he also shares our place of origin. Charlie is a native of planet Earth."

  Danchekker sat down and poured himself a glass of water.

  A hubbub of mixed murmurings and mutterings ensued, punctuated by the rustling of papers and the clink of water glasses. Here and there, chairs creaked as cramped limbs eased themselves into more comfortable positions. A metallurgist at one end of the table was gesturing to the man seated next to her. The man shrugged, showed his empty palms, and nodded his head in Danchekker's direction. She turned and called to the professor.

  "Professor Danchekker . . . Professor . . ." Her voice made itself heard. The background noise died away. Danchekker looked up. "We've been having a little argument here—maybe you'd like to comment. Why couldn't Charlie have come from a parallel line of evolution somewhere else?"

  "I was wondering that, too," came another voice.

  Danchekker frowned for a moment before replying.

  "No. The point you are overlooking here, I think, is that the evolutionary process is fundamentally made up of random events. Every living organism that exists today is the product of a chain of successive mutations that has continued over millions of years. The most important fact to grasp is that each discrete mutation is in itself a purely random event, brought about by aberrations in genetic coding and the mixing of the sex cells from different parents. The environment into which the mutant is born dictates whether it will survive to reproduce its kind or whether it will die out. Thus, some new characteristics are selected for further improvement, while others are promptly eradicated and still others are diluted away by interbreeding.

  "There are still people who find this principle difficult to accept—primarily, I suspect, because they are incapable of visualizing the implications of numbers and time scales beyond the ranges that occur in everyday life. Remember we are talking about billions of billions of combinations coming together over millions of years.

  "A game of chess begins with only twenty playable moves to choose from. At every move the choice available to the player is restricted, and yet, the number of legitimate positions that the board could assume after only ten moves is astronomical. Imagine, then, the number of permutations that could arise when the game continues for a billion moves and at each move the player has a billion choices open to him. This is the game of evolution. To suppose that two such independent sequences could result in end products that are identical would surely be demanding too much of our credulity. The laws of chance and statistics are quite firm when applied to sufficiently large numbers of samples. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, are nothing more than expressions of the probable behavior of gas molecules, yet the numbers involved are so large that we feel quite safe in accepting the postulates as rigid rules; no significant departure from them has ever been observed. The probability of the parallel line of evolution that you suggest is less than the probability of heat flowing from the kettle to the fire, or of all the air molecules in this room crowding into one corner at the same time, causing us all to explode spontaneously. Mathematically speaking, yes—the possibility of parallelism is finite, but so indescribably remote that we need consider it no further."

  A young electronics engineer took the argument up at this point.

  "Couldn't God get a look in?" he asked. "Or at least, some kind of guiding force or principle that we don't yet comprehend? Couldn't the same design be produced via different lines in different places?"

  Danchekker shook his head and smiled almost benevolently.

  "We are scientists, not mystics," he replied. "One of the fundamental principles of scientific method is that new and speculative hypotheses do not warrant consideration as long as the facts that are observed are adequately accounted for by the theories that already exist. Nothing resembling a universal guiding force has ever been revealed by generations of investigation, and since the facts observed are adequately explained by the accepted principles I have outlined, there is no necessity to invoke or invent additional causes. Notions of guiding forces and grand designs exist only in the mind of the misguided observer, not in the facts he observes."

  "But suppose it turns out that Charlie came from somewhere else," the metallurgist insisted. "What then?"

  "Ah! Now, that would be an entirely different matter. If it should be proved by some other means that Charlie did indeed evolve somewhere else, then we would be forced to accept that parallel evolution had occurred as an observed and unquestionable fact. Since this could not be explained within the framework of contemporary theory, our theories would be shown to be woefully inadequate. That would be the time to speculate on additional influences. Then, perhaps, your universal guiding force might find a rightful place. To entertain such concepts at this stage, however, would be to put the cart fairly and squarely before the horse. In so doing, we would be guilty of a breach of one of the most fundamental of scientific principles."

  Somebody else tried to push the professor from a different angle.

  "How about convergent lines rather than parallel lines? Maybe the selection principles work in such a way that different lines of development converge toward the same optimum end product. In other words, although they start out in different directions, they will both eventually hit on the same, best final design. Like . . ." He sought for an analogy. "Like sharks are fish and dolphins are mammals. They both came from different origins but ended up hitting on the same general shape."

  Danchekker again shook his head firmly. "Forget the idea of perfection and best end products," he said. "You are unwittingly falling into this trap of assuming a grand design again. The human form is not nearly as perfect as you perhaps imagine. Nature does not produce best solutions—it will try any solution. The only test applied is that it be good enough to survive and reproduce itself. Far more species have proved unsuccessful and become extinct than have survived—far, far more. It is easy to contemplate a kind of preordained striving toward something perfect when this fundamental fact is overlooked—when looking back down the tree, as it were, with the benefit of hindsight from our particular successful branch
and forgetting the countless other branches that got nowhere.

  "No, forget this idea of perfection. The developments we see in the natural world are simply cases of something good enough to do the job. Usually, many conceivable alternatives would be as good, and some better.

  "Take as an example the cusp pattern on the first lower molar tooth of man. It is made up of a group of five main cusps with a complex of intervening grooves and ridges that help to grind up food. There is no reason to suppose that this particular pattern is any more efficient than any one of many more that might be considered. This particular pattern, however, first occurred as a mutation somewhere along the ancestral line leading toward man and has been passed on ever since. The same pattern is also found on the teeth of the great apes, indicating that we both inherited it from some early common ancestor where it happened through pure chance.

  "Charlie has human cusp patterns on all his teeth.

  "Many of our adaptations are far from perfect. The arrangement of internal organs leaves much to be desired, owing to our inheriting a system originally developed to suit a horizontal and not an upright posture. In our respiratory system, for example, we find that the wastes and dirt that accumulate in the throat and nasal regions drain inside and not outside, as happened originally, a prime cause of many bronchial and chest complaints not suffered by four-footed animals. That's hardly perfection, is it?"

  Danchekker took a sip of water and made an appealing gesture to the room in general.

  "So, we see that any idea of convergence toward the ideal is not supported by the facts. Charlie exhibits all our faults and imperfections as well as our improvements. No, I'm sorry—I appreciate that these questions are voiced in the best tradition of leaving no possibility unprobed and I commend you for them, but really, we must dismiss them."

  Silence enveloped the room at his concluding words. On all sides, everybody seemed to be staring thoughtfully through the table, through the walls, or through the ceiling.

  Caldwell placed his hands on the table and looked around until satisfied that nobody had anything to add.

  "Looks like evolution stays put for a while longer," he grunted. "Thank you Professor."

  Danchekker nodded without looking up.

  "However," Caldwell continued, "the object of these meetings is to give everyone a chance to talk freely as well as listen. So far, some people haven't had much to say—especially one or two of the newcomers." Hunt realized with a start that Caldwell was looking straight at him. "Our English visitor, for example, whom most of you already know. Dr. Hunt, do you have any views that we ought to hear about . . . ?"

  Next to Caldwell, Lyn Garland was making no attempt to conceal a wide smile. Hunt took a long draw at his cigarette and used the delay to collect his thoughts. In the time it took for him to coolly emit one long, diffuse cloud of smoke and flick his hand at the ashtray, all the pieces clicked together in his brain with the smooth precision of the binary regiments parading through the registers of the computers downstairs. Lyn's persistent cross-examinations, her visits to the Ocean, his presence here—Caldwell had found a catalyst.

  Hunt surveyed the array of attentive faces. "Most of what's been said reasserts the accepted principles of comparative anatomy and evolutionary theory. Just to clear the record for anyone with misleading ideas, I've no intention of questioning them. However, the conclusion could be summed up by saying that since Charlie comes from the same ancestors as we do, he must have evolved on Earth the same as we did."

  "That is so," threw in Danchekker.

  "Fine," Hunt replied. "Now, all this is really your problem, not mine, but since you've asked me what I think, I'll state the conclusion another way. Since Charlie evolved on Earth, the civilization he was from evolved on Earth. The indications are that his culture was about as advanced as ours, maybe in one or two areas slightly more advanced. So, we ought to find no end of traces of his people. We don't. Why not?"

  All heads turned toward Danchekker.

  The professor sighed. "The only conclusion left open to us is that whatever traces were left have been erased by the natural processes of weathering and erosion," he said wearily. "There are several possibilities: A catastrophe of some sort could have wiped them out to the extent that there were no traces; or possibly their civilization existed in regions which today are submerged beneath the oceans. Further searching will no doubt produce solutions to this question."

  "If any catastrophe as violent as that occurred so recently, we would already know about it," Hunt pointed out. "Most of what was land then is still land today, so I can't see them sinking into the ocean somewhere, either; besides, you've only to look at our civilization to see it's not confined to localized areas—it's spread all over the globe. And how is it that in spite of all the junk that keeps turning up with no trouble at all from primitive races from around the same time—bones, spears, clubs, and so on—nobody has ever found a single example of anything related to this supposed technologically advanced culture? Not a screw, or a piece of wire, or a plastic washer. To me, that doesn't make sense."

  More murmuring broke out to mark the end of Hunt's critique.

  "Professor?" Caldwell invited comment with a neutral voice.

  Danchekker compressed his mouth into a grimace. "Oh, I agree, I agree. It is surprising—very surprising. But what alternative are you proposing?" His voice took on a note of sarcasm. "Do you suggest that man and all the animals came to Earth in some enormous celestial Noah's Ark?" He laughed. "If so, the fossil record of a hundred million years disproves you."

  "Impasse." The comment came from Professor Schorn, an authority on comparative anatomy, who had arrived from Stuttgart a few days before.

  "Looks like it," Caldwell agreed.

  Danchekker, however, was not through. "Would Dr. Hunt care to answer my question?" he challenged. "Precisely what other place of origin is he suggesting?"

  "I'm not suggesting anywhere in particular," Hunt replied evenly. "What I am suggesting is that perhaps a more open-minded approach might be appropriate at this stage. After all, we've only just found Charlie. This business will go on for years yet; there's bound to be a lot more information surfacing that we don't have right now. I think it's too early to be jumping ahead and predicting what the answers might be. Better just to keep on plodding along and using every scrap of data we've got to put together a picture of the place Charlie came from. It might turn out to be Earth. Then again, it might not."

  Caldwell led him on further. "How would you suggest we go about that?"

  Hunt wondered if this was a direct cue. He decided to risk it. "You could try taking a closer look at this." He drew a sheet of paper out from the folder in front of him and slid it across to the center of the table. The paper showed a complicated tabular arrangement of Lunarian numerals.

  "What's that?" asked a voice.

  "It's from one of the pocket books," Hunt replied. "I think the book is something not unlike a diary. I also believe that that"—he pointed at the sheet—"could well be a calendar." He caught a sly wink from Lyn Garland and returned it.

  "Calendar?"

  "How d'you figure that one?"

  "It's all gobbledygook."

  Danchekker stared hard at the paper for a few seconds. "Can you prove it's a calendar?" he demanded.

  "No, I can't. But I have analyzed the number pattern and can state that it's made up of ascending groups that repeat in sets and subsets. Also, the alphabetic groups that seem to label the major sets correspond to the headings of groups of pages farther on—remarkably like the layout of a diary."

  "Hmmph! More likely some form of tabular page index."

  "Could be," Hunt granted. "But why not wait and see? Once the language has unraveled a bit more, it should be possible to cross-check a lot of what's here with items from other sources. This is the kind of thing that maybe we ought to be a little more open-minded about. You say Charlie comes from Earth; I say he might. You say this is not a calendar; I say it
might be. In my estimation, an attitude like yours is too inflexible to permit an unbiased appraisal of the problem. You've already made up your mind what you want the answers to be."

  "Hear, hear!" a voice at the end of the table called.

  Danchekker colored visibly, but Caldwell spoke before he could reply.

  "You've analyzed the numbers—right?"

  "Right."

  "Okay, supposing for now it's a calendar—what more can you tell us?"

  Hunt leaned forward across the table and pointed at the sheet with his pen.