Darwin's Watch

by Terry Pratchett

  `And then whoosh, this chap was hit by a rock? I call that suspicious.'

  `Hex does too, sir.'

  `I'll be jolly glad when we've got this Darwin to the damn islands, then,' said the Archchancellor. `We'll need a holiday after this. Oh well, I'll address the wizards now. I hope we'll have enough for-'

  `Er, we haven't just got to get him to the islands. We've got to get him all the way home, sir,' said Ponder. `He'll be away from home for nearly five years.'

  `Five years?' said the Dean. `I thought visiting the wretched islands was what it was all about!'

  `Yes and then again, in a very real sense, no, Dean,' said Ponder. `It would be more correct to say they later became what it was all about. He was actually there for a little more than a month. It was a very long voyage, sir. They went all around the world. I'm sorry, I hadn't made that clear. Hex, show the entire timelines, please.'

  The display began to recede, drawing from nowhere more and more tangles and loops, as if half a dozen cosmic kittens had been given stars to play with instead of balls of wool. There was a gasp from the throng of wizards.

  The tangles were still streaming away overhead when the Dean said: `There's millions of the wretched things!'

  `No, Dean,' said Ponder. `It looks like that, but there are only 21,309 important nodalities at this point. Hex can deal with almost all of them. They involve quite minute changes at the quantum level.'

  The wizards continued to stare upwards as the whorls and loops flashed by and dwindled.

  `Someone really doesn't want that book,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, his face illuminated by the multi coloured glow.

  `In theory there isn't a someone in charge,' said Ponder.

  `But the odds against Darwin writing Origin are getting bigger by the minute!'

  `The odds against anything actually happening are huge, when you come to think about it,' said Ridcully. `Take poker, for example. The odds against four aces are huge, but the odds of having any four cards at all are really big.'

  `Well put, Archchancellor!' said Ponder. `But this is a crooked game.'

  Ridcully strode out into the centre of the Great Hall, his face illuminated by the glowing map.

  `Gentlemen!' he bellowed. `Some of you already know what this is about, eh? We're going to force a history on Roundworld! It's one that should be there already! Something is trying to kill it, gentlemen. So if someone wants to stop it happening, we want to make it happen all the more! You will be sent into Roundworld with a series of tasks to do! Most of them have been made very simple so that wizards can understand them! Shortly our missions for tomorrow, should you chose to accept them, will be given to you by Mr Stibbons. If you do not choose to accept them, you are free to choose dismissal! We're starting at dawn! Dinner, Second Dinner, Midnight Snack, Somnambulistic Nibbles and Early Breakfast will be served in the Old Refectory! There will be no Second Breakfast!'

  Over a chorus of protest he went on: `We are taking this seriously, gentlemen!'

  TWELVE

  THE WRONG BOOK

  OUR FICTIONAL DARWIN HAS A lot more in common with the `real' one - the Darwin of the particular timeline that you inhabit, the one who wrote The Origin and not The Ology - than might at first be apparent. Or

  plausible. The irresistible force of narrativium induces us to imagine Charles Darwin as an old man with a beard, a stick, and a faint but definite hint of gorilla. And so he was, in his old age. But as a young man he was vigorous, athletic, and engaged in the kind of exuberant and not always politically correct activities that we expect of young men.

  We've already learned of the real Darwin's amazing fortune in getting on board the Beagle and remaining there, culminating in his boundless delight at the geology of the coral island of St Jago. But there are other crucial nodalities, points of intervention, and thaumic occlusions in that version of Roundworld's historical record, and the wizards are exercising extreme care and attention in the hope of steering history through, past, and around these causal singularities.

  For example, the Beagle really did come under fire from a cannon. When the ship tried to enter the harbour at Buenos Aires in 1832, one of the local guard ships fired at it. Darwin was convinced that he heard a cannonball whistle over his head, but it turned out that the shot was a blank, intended as a warning. FitzRoy, muttering

  angrily about insults to the British flag, sailed on, but was stopped by a quarantine boat: the harbour authorities were worried about cholera. Incensed, FitzRoy loaded all of the cannons on one side of his ship. As he sailed back out of the harbour he aimed them all at the guard ship, informing its crew that if they ever fired at the Beagle again, he would send their `rotten hulk' to the seabed.

  Darwin really did learn to throw a bolas, too, on the pampas of Patagonia. He enjoyed hunting rheas, and watching the gauchos bring them down by entangling a bolas in their legs. But when he tried to do the same, all he managed was to trip up his own horse. The Origin might have vanished from history's timeline then and there, but Darwin survived, with only his pride hurt. The gauchos found the whole thing hugely amusing.

  Charles even took part in suppressing an insurrection. When the Beagle reached Montevideo, shortly after the cannonball incident, FitzRoy complained to the local representative of Her Majesty's Royal Navy, who promptly set sail for Buenos Aires in his frigate HMS Druid to secure an apology. No sooner had the warship disappeared from view than there was a rebellion, with black soldiers taking over the town's central fort. The chief of police asked FitzRoy for help, and he dispatched a squad of fifty sailors, armed to the teeth ... with Darwin happily bringing up the rear. The mutineers immediately surrendered, and Darwin expressed disappointment that not a shot had been fired.

  No expense, then, has been spared to bring you historical truth, inasmuch as so weighty a characteristic as truth can be attributed to something as ethereal as history. Except for the giant squid, of course. That happened in a different timeline, when the malign forces were getting extremely desperate and strayed into Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea through some obscure warp in L-space.

  The most important similarity between the two Darwins is less exciting, but essential to our tale. The real Charles Darwin, like his fictional counterpart, began by writing the wrong book. In fact, he wrote eight wrong books. They were very nice books, very worthy ... of great scientific value ... and they did his reputation no harm at all... . but they weren't about natural selection, his term for what later scientists would call `evolution'. Still, that book was brewing merrily away in the back of his mind, and until he was ready to bring it off the back burner, he had plenty of other things to write about.

  It had been FitzRoy who had put the idea of authorship into his head. The Beagle's captain had signed himself up to write the story of his round-the-world voyage, based on the ship's log. He had also agreed to edit an accompanying book about a previous survey by the same vessel - the one where Stokes had shot himself. As the Beagle headed north-west from Cape town, stopped briefly at Bahia in Brazil, and turned north-east across the Atlantic towards its final destination in Falmouth, FitzRoy suggested to Darwin that the latter's diary might form the basis of a third volume on the natural history of the voyage, completing the trilogy.

  Darwin was nervous but excited at the prospect of becoming an author. He had another book in mind, too, on geology. He'd been thinking about it ever since his revelation on the island of St Jago.

  As soon as the ship had returned to England, FitzRoy got married and went on honeymoon, but he also made an impressive start to his book. Darwin began to worry that his own slow writing would delay the whole project, but FitzRoy's early enthusiasm soon ground to a halt. Between January and September 1837 Charles worked flat out, overtook the captain, and towards the year's end he sent his finished manuscript to the printer's. It took FitzRoy more than a year to catch up, so Darwin's contribution was held back, finally seeing the light of day in 1839 as volume 3 of the Narrative of the Surveying
Voyages of HMS. Adventure and Beagle, Between the Years 1826 and 1836, with the subtitle Volume 3: Journal and Remarks, 1832-1836. After a few months the publishers reissued it on its own as journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle. It may have been the wrong book,

  but writing it had one very useful effect on Darwin's thinking. It forced him to try to make sense of all the things he had seen. Was there some overarching principle that could explain it all?

  Next came his geology book, which eventually turned into three: one on coral reefs, one on volcanic islands, and one on the geology of South America. These established his scientific credentials and led to him winning a major Royal Society prize. Darwin was now recognised as one of the leading scientists in the land.

  He was also making ever more extensive notes on the transmutation of species, but he still was in no hurry to publish. Quite the contrary. Elsewhere, political forces were at work aiming to destroy the influence of the Church, and one of their key points was that living creatures could easily have arisen without the intervention of a creator. Darwin, being (at that point in his life) a good Christian, was totally averse to anything that might seem to ally him with such people. He could not publicly espouse transmutation without risking serious damage to the Anglican Church, and nothing in the world would induce him to contemplate that. But his deep insight about natural selection wouldn't go away, so he continued developing it as a kind of hobby.

  He did mention the insight to various scientific friends and acquaintances, among them Lyell, and also Joseph Dalton Hooker, who didn't dismiss the idea out of hand. But he did tell Darwin, `I shall be delighted to hear how you think this change may have taken place, as no presently conceived opinions satisfy me on this subject.' And he later said, rather acerbically, that `No one has hardly a right to examine the question of species who has not minutely examined many.' Darwin took this advice to heart and cast around for new species to become an expert on. In 1846 he sent the final proofs of his geology books back to the printer and celebrated by collecting the last bottle of preserved specimens from the Beagle voyage. At the top of the bottle he noticed a crustacean from the Chonos Archipelago - a barnacle.

  That would do. It was as good as anything else.

  Hooker helped Darwin set up his microscope and make some preliminary anatomical observations. Darwin asked Hooker to name the new beast, and together they decided on Arthrobalanus. [1] `Mr Arthrobalanus', as they privately called it, turned out to be somewhat unusual. `I believe Arthrobalanus has no ovisac at all!' Charles wrote. `The appearance of one is entirely owing to the splitting & tucking up of the posterior penis.' To resolve the mystery he took other barnacles from the bottle and looked at them, too. Now he was doing comparative anatomy of barnacles, and enjoying the hands-on experience immensely. This was better than writing.

  By Christmas he had decided to study every barnacle known to humanity - the entire order of Cirripedia. Which turned out to be rather a lot, so he settled for the British ones. Even these were rather a lot, and in the end the task took eight years.

  He might have finished earlier, but in 1848 he got interested in barnacle sex, and that was very peculiar indeed. Most barnacles were hermaphrodites, able to assume either sex. But some species had good old-fashioned males and females. Except that the males spent much of their lives embedded in the females.

  Not only that: some supposedly hermaphrodite species also had tiny males that somehow assisted in the reproductive process.

  Now Darwin became very excited, because he had convinced himself that what he was observing was a relic of evolution, as a hermaphrodite ancestor gradually developed separate sexes. A `missing link' for barnacle sex. He could reconstruct the barnacles' family tree,

  and what he thought he saw reinforced his views on natural selection. So even when he tried to do respectable science, and become a taxonomist, transmutation insisted in getting in on the act. In fact, if anything convinced Darwin he was right about transmutation, it was barnacles.

  [1] . Literally, 'jointed acorn'

  He became ill, but continued working on barnacles. In 1851 he published two books about them - one on fossil barnacles for the Palaeontographical Society, the other on the living ones for the Royal Society. By 1854 he had produced a sequel to each of them.

  These were Darwin's eight wrong books:

  1839 Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle

  1842 The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs

  1844 Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle

  1846 Geological Observations of South America

  1851 A Monograph on the Fossil Lepadidae, or, Pedunculated Cirripedes of Great Britain

  1851 A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia volume 1

  1854 A Monograph on the Fossil Balanidae and Verrucidae of Great Britain

  1854 A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia volume 2

  Not a hint of transmutation of species, the struggle for life, or natural selection.

  Yet, in a strange way, all of his books - even the geological ones - were crucial steps towards the work that was now putting itself together inside his head. Darwin's ninth book would be pure dynamite. He wanted desperately to write it, but he had already decided that it would be far too dangerous to be published.

  It is a common dilemma in science: whether to publish and be damned, or not to publish and be pre-erupted. You can have the credit for a truly revolutionary idea, or a quiet life, but not both.

  Darwin was wary of publicity, and he was scared that putting his views into print might damage the Church. But there is nothing that more effectively galvanises a scientist than the fear that somebody else will pip them to the winning post. In this case, that somebody was Alfred Russel Wallace.

  Wallace was another Victorian explorer, equally keen on natural history. Mostly because he could sell it. Unlike Darwin, he was not `gentry', and had no independent income. He was the son of an impecunious lawyer [1] and had been taken on at age fourteen as a builder's apprentice. He spent his evenings drinking free coffee in the Hall of Science off Tottenham Court Road in London. This was a socialist organisation, dedicated to the overthrow of private property and the downfall of the Church. Wallace's experiences as a youth reinforced a left-wing view of politics. He financed his own travels, and made a living by selling the specimens he collected - butterflies, beetles (a thousand labelled specimens per box, the dealers demanded), [2] even bird skins. He went on a collecting expedition to the Amazon in 1848, and again to the Malay Archipelago in 1854. There, in Borneo, he sought orang-utans. The idea that humans were somehow related to the great apes was simmering away in the collective subconscious, and Wallace wanted to investigate a potential human ancestor. [3]

  One miserable Borneo day, when a tropical monsoon raged outside and Wallace was stuck indoors, he put together a little scientific paper outlining some modest ideas that had just popped into his head. It eventually appeared in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, a rather ordinary publication, and it was about the 'introduction' of species. Lyell, aware of Darwin's secret interest in such matters, pointed the paper out to him, and Charles began to read it. Then another of Charles's regular correspondents, Edward Blyth,

  [1] Yes, we know it sounds unlikely, but apparently there are such things.

  [2] It was a good job that God had such a fondness for beetles.

  [3] Its potential for Librarianship was not widely recognised at that time.

  wrote from Calcutta with the same recommendation. `What do you think of Wallace's paper in the Ann M.N.H.? Good! Upon the whole!' Darwin had met Wallace shortly before one of the latter's expeditions - he couldn't remember which - and he could see that the Ann M.N.H. paper had useful things to say about relationships between similar species. Especially the role of geography. But apart from that, he felt that the
paper contained nothing new, and made an entry to that effect in one of his notebooks. Anyway, it seemed to Darwin that Wallace was talking about creation, not evolution. Nevertheless, he wrote to Wallace, encouraging him to continue developing his theory.

  This was a Really Bad Idea.

  Encouraged by Lyell and others, who were now warning him that if he delayed too long, others might snatch the prize, Darwin was putting together ever more elaborate essays on natural selection, but he continued to dither about publication. All that changed in an instant in June 1858, when the postman dropped a bombshell through Charles's letterbox. It was a package from Wallace, containing a twenty-page letter, sent from the Moluccas. Wallace had taken Darwin's advice to heart. And he had come up with a very similar theory. Very similar indeed.

  Calamity. Darwin declared that his life's work was `smashed'. `Your words have come true with a vengeance,' he wrote to Lyell. The more he read Wallace's notes, the closer the ideas seemed to his own. `If Wallace had my MS manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract!' Darwin moaned in a letter to Lyell.

  Staid Victorians would soon consider both Wallace and Darwin to be out of their minds, and Wallace certainly came close, for he was suffering from malaria when he composed his letter to Darwin. As a good socialist, Wallace had been taught not to trust the reasoning of Malthus, who had argued that the world's ability to feed itself grew linearly, while the population grew exponentially - implying that eventually the population would win and there would be too little food to go round. Socialists believed that human ingenuity could postpone such an event indefinitely. But by the 1850s even socialists were beginning to view Malthus in a more favourable light; after all, the threat of overpopulation was a very good reason to promote contraception, which made excellent sense to every good socialist. Half-delirious with fever, Wallace thought about the rich variety of species he had encountered, wondered how that fitted in with Malthus, put two and two together, and realised that you could have selective breeding without the need for a breeder.