And, of course, we kept arguing that the universe had to be teeming with life—that there was nothing remarkable about Earth, that it was, in fact, mediocre, that planets like it were, well, as common as the dirt after which we’d named our own world.
But then, in 1988, the first extrasolar planet was discovered, orbiting the star HD 114762. Of course, back then we didn’t think it was a planet; we thought maybe it was a brown-dwarf star. After all, it was nine times as heavy as Jupiter, and it orbited HD 114762 closer than Mercury orbits our sun. But in 1995, another extrasolar planet was discovered, this one at least half as big as Jupiter, and also orbiting its parent, the star 51 Pegasi, closer than Mercury came to Sol. And then more and more were found, all from solar systems unlike our own.
In our solar system, the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—orbit far away from the central star, and the inner planets are small, rocky worlds. Rather than being a normal planetary system, ours was beginning to look like a freak. And yet the layout of bodies in our system seemed to be crucial to developing and sustaining life. Without the gravitational effects of our giant moon—almost a sister planet, formed early on when an asteroid slammed into our still-molten world—Earth would wobble in an unstable fashion, and our atmosphere would be crushingly dense, like that of Venus. And without Jupiter, patrolling the border between the inner and outer solar system, sweeping up wayward comets and asteroids with its immense gravity, our world would have been hit far more frequently by such objects. A bolide impact apparently almost wiped out all life on Earth sixty-five million years ago; we could not have withstood more frequent bombardment.
Of course, Hollus’s solar system apparently resembled ours, as did the Wreed system. But, nonetheless, systems like Sol’s were extraordinary; the exception, not the rule. And cells aren’t simple; they are enormously complex. And the fossil record, fascinating but frustrating thing that it is, shows evolution proceeding by leaps rather than by the accumulation of gradual changes.
I’ve spent my whole adult life being an uncompromising neo-Darwinian evolutionist. I certainly don’t want to issue a deathbed retraction.
And yet—
And yet perhaps, as Hollus believes, there is more to the puzzle of life.
I know evolution happens; I know it for a fact. I’ve seen the fossils, seen the DNA studies that say that we and chimps have 98.6 percent of our genetic material in common, and therefore must have had a recent common ancestor.
Proceeding by leaps…
By…perhaps, maybe…by quantum leaps.
Newton’s seventeenth-century laws of physics are mostly correct; you can use them to reliably predict all sorts of things. We didn’t discard them; rather, in the twentieth century, we subsumed them into a new, more comprehensive physics, a physics of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Evolution is a nineteenth-century notion, outlined in Darwin’s 1859 book, a book called, in full, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. But the more we learn, the more natural selection seems inadequate on its own as a mechanism for the creation of new species; even our best attempts at artificial, intelligently guided selection apparently aren’t up to the task—all dogs are still Canis familiaris.
And now it’s the start of the twenty-first century. Surely it’s not unreasonable to think that Darwin’s ideas, like Newton’s before them, will be subsumed into a greater whole, a more comprehensive understanding?
Damn it!
God damn it.
I hate it when the pain comes like that—like a knife, slicing into me.
I reached over onto my cluttered night table. Where are my pills? Where are they?
* * *
27
R
honda Weir, short, stocky, silver-haired, was a detective for the Toronto Police. Her phone rang at 1:11 P.M. on Sunday afternoon. She picked up the handset and said, “Detective Weir.”
“Hello,” said a raspy man’s voice at the other end of the phone, sounding somewhat exasperated. “I hope I’ve got the right person this time; I’ve been transferred several times.”
“What can I do for you?” asked Rhonda.
“My name is Constantin Kalipedes,” said the voice. “I’m the weekend manager at the Lakeshore Inn in Etobicoke. One of my housekeepers just found a gun in one of the rooms.”
“What kind of gun?”
“A pistol. And she also found an empty gun case, the kind you’d use to carry one of those—what do you call it?—one of those assault weapons.”
“Has the guest checked out?”
“Guests, plural. And no. They’ve got a reservation through Wednesday morning.”
“What are their names?”
“One is J. D. Ewell; the other, C. Falsey. They have Arkansas license plates.”
“You took down the plate number?”
“No, but they wrote it themselves on the registration card.” He read the string of characters to Rhonda.
“Did the maid finish cleaning the room?”
“No. I had her stop as soon as she found the gun.”
“Good man,” said Rhonda. “What’s your address?”
He told her.
“I’ll be there in”—she looked at her watch, then calculated; traffic should be light on a Sunday afternoon—“twenty minutes. If this Ewell or Falsey return, stall them if you can, but don’t put yourself at risk, understood?”
“Yes.”
“I’m on my way.”
The Lakeshore Inn was, not surprisingly, on Lakeshore Boulevard. Rhonda Weir and her partner, Hank Li, parked their unmarked car in front of the entrance. Hank checked the license plates on the cars to the left, and Rhonda looked at those on the ones to the right. Six were American—two from Michigan, two from New York, and one each from Minnesota and Illinois—but none were from Arkansas. A little rain was falling; there would doubtless be more later. The air was pungent with ozone.
Constantin Kalipedes turned out to be an old, paunchy Greek, with a stubble of gray beard. He led Rhonda and Hank along a row of units, past door after door, until they came to an open one. There they found the East Indian woman who was his housekeeper, and he brought her with them to room 118. Kalipedes got out his pass key, but Rhonda had him hand it over; she opened the door herself, turning the knob with the key so as not to disturb any fingerprints that might be on it. It was a fairly shabby room, with two framed prints hanging crookedly, and powder-blue wallpaper peeling at the seams. There were two double beds, one of which had beside it the sort of oxygen bottle that a person who suffered from sleep apnea needed. Both beds were disheveled; the maid obviously hadn’t gotten to them by the time she’d made her discovery.
“Where’s the gun?” asked Rhonda.
The young woman stepped into the room and pointed. The gun was lying on the floor, beside a suitcase. “I had to move the suitcase,” she said with a lilting accent, “to get at the outlet, so I could plug in the vacuum cleaner. It must not have been closed all the way, and the gun tumbled out. Behind it was that wooden case.” She pointed.
“A Glock 9mm,” said Hank, glancing at the handgun. Rhonda looked at the case. It had a specially cut black foam-rubber inlay, just the right size to hold an Intertec Tec-9 carbine, a nasty beast—essentially a submachine gun—about the length of a man’s forearm. Possession of the handgun was illegal in Canada, but more disturbing was that Falsey and Ewell had left it behind, opting for the Tec-9 instead, a weapon banned now even in the U.S. because of its thirty-two-round clip. Rhonda put her hands on her hips and slowly surveyed the room. There were two ashtrays; it was a smoking room. It had data jacks for hooking up a modem, but there was no sign of a portable computer. She stepped into the bathroom. Two straight razors and a can of foam. Two toothbrushes, one of them badly chewed.
Back in the main room, she noticed a black-covered Bible sitting on one of the night tables.
“Probable cause?” said Rh
onda to her partner.
“I’d say,” said Hank.
Kalipedes was looking at them. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” said Rhonda, “there’s enough superficial evidence to indicate that a crime has been or is about to be committed to allow us to thoroughly search this room without first obtaining a warrant. You’re welcome to remain and watch in fact, we encourage you to do so.” The department had been sued more than once by people who had claimed that valuables had disappeared during a search.
Kalipedes nodded, but he turned to the chambermaid. “Back to work,” he said. She scurried out the door.
Rhonda pulled out a handkerchief and used it held between two fingers to open the drawer in one of the night tables. It had another Bible in it, this one bound in red—typical Gideon issue. She crossed over to the other night table. She pulled a pen out of her pocket and used it to flip open the cover of the black bible. It wasn’t a Gideon one, and on the inside front cover it said “C. Falsey” in red ink. She glanced at the submachine-gun case. “Our Bible boy needs to reread the part about swords into plowshares, I think.”
Hank grunted in response as he used his own pen to fan out the papers on the dresser. “Look at this,” he said, after a moment.
Rhonda came over. Hank had revealed an unfolded city map of Toronto. Taking care to handle only the edges, Hank turned it over and pointed to the segment that would have been the cover had the map been folded up. It had a Barnes and Noble price sticker on it—an American bookstore chain, with no outlets in Canada. Falsey and Ewell had presumably brought the map with them from Arkansas. Hank gingerly flipped it over again. It was a full-color map with all sorts of symbols and markings. It took a moment before Rhonda noticed the simple circle drawn in ballpoint pen at Kipling and Horner, less than two kilometers from the spot they were currently at.
“Mr. Kalipedes,” called Rhonda. She motioned for him to come over, and he did so. “This is your neighborhood, sir. Can you tell me what’s at the intersection of Kipling and Horner?”
He scratched his chin with its grizzled stubble. “A Mac’s Milk, a Mr. Submarine, a dry cleaner’s. Oh yeah—and that clinic that was blown up a while ago.”
Rhonda and Hank exchanged glances. “Are you sure?” asked Rhonda.
“Of course,” said Kalipedes.
“Jesus Christ,” said Hank, realizing the magnitude of it all. “Jesus Christ.”
They hurriedly scanned the map, looking for any other markings. There were three more. One was a circle drawn in pencil around a building shown by a red rectangle on Bloor Street. Rhonda didn’t have to ask anyone what that was. It was typeset in italics right on the map: Royal Ont. Museum.
Also circled were the SkyDome—the stadium where the Blue Jays play—and the CBC Broadcasting Centre, a few blocks north of the SkyDome.
“Tourist attractions,” said Rhonda.
“Except they took a semiautomatic weapon,” said Hank.
“The Jays playing today?”
“Yup. Milwaukee is in town.”
“Anything happening at the CBC?”
“On a Sunday? I know they do a live show from the lobby there in the mornings; I’m not sure about the afternoons.” Hank looked at the map. “Besides, maybe they went somewhere other than these places. They didn’t take the map with them, after all.”
“Still…”
Hank didn’t need the consequences spelled out. “Yeah.”
“We’ll take the ROM—they’ve got that alien visiting there,” said Rhonda.
“It’s not really there,” said Hank. “It’s just a transmission from the mothership.”
Rhonda snorted, conveying that she knew that. She pulled a cellular phone out of her jacket pocket. “I’ll get teams sent to the CBC and SkyDome, and I’ll call for a couple of uniforms to wait here in case Falsey and Ewell return.”
Susan gave me a lift to Downsview subway station about three-thirty in the afternoon; it was cloudy, the sky bruised, a storm threatening. Ricky was spending the rest of the day with the Nguyens—my young son was developing quite a taste for Vietnamese food.
The subways were slow and infrequent on Sundays; I’d save time on my trip downtown by starting at Downsview at the north end of the Spadina line rather than at North York Centre. I gave my wife a kiss goodbye—and she held the kiss for a long time. I smiled at her. And she smiled back.
I then took the paper bag with the sandwiches she’d packed for me and headed into the station, riding the long escalator down into the subterranean world.
Rhonda Weir and Hank Li had got descriptions of Falsey and Ewell from Kalipedes. Kalipedes didn’t know which was which, but one was mid-twenties, blond, scrawny, maybe five-eight, with an overbite and a crew cut; the other was mid-thirties, three or four inches taller, narrow face, and had brown hair. Both had accents from the southern States. And, of course, one of them might well be carrying a Tec-9 submachine gun, perhaps hidden under a coat. Although the museum was crowded on Sundays—it was a favorite place for divorced fathers to take their kids—there was still a good chance that Rhonda or Hank would be able to spot them.
They parked their car in the small lot at the Bora Laskin Law Library, on the south side of the planetarium building, then walked over to the ROM, entering through the main doors and making their way over to Raghubir Singh.
Rhonda flashed her badge and described whom she and Hank were looking for.
“They were here before,” said Raghubir. “A few days ago. Two Americans with southern accents. I remember them because one of them called the Burgess Shale ‘the Bogus Shale.’ I told my wife about that when I got home—she got quite a kick out of it.”
Rhonda sighed. “Well, it’s unlikely that they’re back, then. Still, it’s the only lead we’ve got. We’ll look around, if that’s okay.”
“Of course,” said Raghubir. He radioed the other security guards, getting them to join in the search.
Rhonda pulled out her cellular again. “Weir,” she said. “The suspects were here at the ROM last week; still we’re going to have a look around on the off chance that they’ve come back, but I’d concentrate our forces at SkyDome and the CBC.”
I arrived at the museum about 4:30 P.M., entered through the staff entrance, and made my way up to the Burgess Shale exhibition, just to have a final look around, to make sure everything was okay before the arrival of Hollus and company.
Rhonda Weir, Hank Li, and Raghubir Singh met up in the Rotunda at 4:45. “No luck,” said Rhonda. “You?”
Hank shook his head. “I’d forgotten how big this place was. Even if they had come back here, they could be anywhere.”
“None of my people found them, either,” said Raghubir. “A lot of patrons carry their coats in the museum. We used to have a free coat check, but that was before the cutbacks.” He shrugged. “People don’t like having to pay.”
Rhonda looked at her watch. “It’s almost closing time.”
“The school-group entrance is locked on weekends,” said Raghubir. He pointed at the bank of glass doors beneath the stained-glass windows. “They’ll have to go out through the main doors.”
Rhonda frowned. “They probably aren’t even here. But let’s wait outside and see if we can spot them leaving.”
Hank nodded and the two detectives headed through the glass-doored vestibule. It looked like it was about to rain. Rhonda used her cellular again. “Any update?” she asked.
A sergeant’s voice crackled over the phone. “They’re definitely not at the CBC Broadcasting Centre.”
“My money’s on SkyDome,” said Rhonda, into the phone.
“Ours, too.”
“We’ll head down there.” She put the phone away.
Hank looked up at the dark sky. “I hope we get there in time to see them close the stadium roof,” he said.
J. D. Ewell and Cooter Falsey were leaning against a tomato-soup-colored wall in the Lower Rotunda; Falsey was wearing a Toronto Blue Jays cap that he’d bo
ught yesterday when they took in a game at SkyDome. A prerecorded male voice with a Jamaican accent came over the public-address system: “Ladies and gentlemen, the museum is now closed. Would all patrons please immediately go to the front exit. Many thanks for visiting us, and do come again. Ladies and gentlemen, the museum is now closed. Would—”
Falsey flashed Ewell a grin.
Theatre ROM had four double doors that gave access to it, and these were often left unlocked. Curious patrons sometimes stuck their heads in the doors, but if no programming was going on, all they saw was a large darkened room.
Ewell and Falsey waited until the Lower Rotunda was empty, then walked down the nine steps into the theater. They stood still for a moment, letting their eyes adjust. Although the theater had no windows, there was still some light: the red glow of EXIT signs, light seeping in under the doors, a large illuminated analog clock on the wall above the doors, red LEDs from smoke detectors, and lights from a control panel or some such coming from the five little windows of the projection booth above the entrance.
Earlier in the day, Falsey and Ewell had sat through a seemingly endless film about a little wooden carving of a canoe with a male Native Canadian figure in it traveling down various waterways. But they didn’t pay much attention to the movie. Instead, they’d examined the physical structure of the theater: the presence of a stage in front of the movie screen, the number of rows of chairs, the position of the aisles, and the location of the staircases leading up to the stage.
Now they quickly made their way in the dark down the gently sloping left-hand aisle, found one of the staircases leading to the stage, climbed the steps, slipped behind the large movie screen, which hung from the roof, and entered the backstage area.
There was more light back there. A small washroom was at one side, and someone had left the light on in it and the door ajar. There were several mismatched chairs behind the screen, and the usual hodgepodge of lighting equipment, microphone stands, anaconda-like ropes hanging from the ceiling, and lots of dust.
Calculating God Page 23