When Shakespeare wrote, “There are
more things in heaven and Earth . . . ,”
he may have been more literally right
than he realized. . . .
Of all those contentions with which the world is surfeit, the one that may never be settled is whether the Chordettes or the Four Aces recorded the definitive version of “Mr. Sandman.” Each rendition has its partisans in the Irish Pub, and these partisans will sometimes change sides just to keep the debate lively, the Irish being more committed to the argument than to the outcome. The debate is of long-standing; and in the jukebox of the Irish Pub, amidst the Clancies and the Dubliners and the Dayhills, there rests a single recording of each version. Sooner or later, those two old 45’s will have to wear out, and that will be the end of it all.
At least such is the hope of the rest of us—agnostic as we are in the matter.
It was a Saturday evening in late October when Bill Poke reared up and said to Kelly Brady, “I’ll show you what I mean.”
Everyone else hunkered down, for this could mean only that another round in the Sandman Wars was about to begin. Bill was from Philadelphia and therefore a devotee of the Four Aces while Kelly, being of the female persuasion, favored the Chordettes.
The O Neill, seated to my right, said something in the Gaelic, the which does not bear translation in a family magazine such as this. He slipped off his stool and said, “I have to get to rehearsal,” before vanishing. A wily devil, he had taken a role the month before in a community theater performance of The Sound of Music in order to have this very excuse ready for this day. Even O Daugherty Himself was heard to heave a long sigh as he polished and rehung glasses in the overhead rack behind the oval bar. A short, wide-set man, he slicked his hair down, parted in the middle. “I’m thinking,” he said to me, “that this will outlast the Troubles.”
Doc Mooney entered just as the first bars of the Chordettes chimed out. “Jaysus, Mary, an’ Joseph,” he cried. “Not again!” Although an atheist himself, he was not above calling on help in extremity. Nonetheless, he entered and took the stool beside me that the O Neill had so lately vacated. “A gin and tonic, Mr. O Daugherty, if you please. It’s been a busy day at the morgue, with little in the way of live-ly con-ver-sa-tion.” These last two words, he lilted, he being a man who liked to savor his speech.
“And while you’re at it,” said I, “my Guinness could use some reinforcement.”
“Oh, and could it now?” Himself answered, setting a fresh mug emphatically before me. “And will you be paying the O Neill’s tab as well?”
A wily devil, the O’Neill, as I have often said.
“Slainte!” Doc lifted his gin to me and I tapped it with my Guinness. “That damned song,” he complained with a toss of his head toward the jukebox, “is an earworm. I’ll be a week exorcising it.”
“Why, then you are in luck,” I told him, “for here comes the very man for an exorcism.”
The door to the street had opened to the dry-leafed autumn weather to admit Father James McGinnity, S.J. He was accompanied by a slim, young woman wearing an Irish barleycorn wool tweed cap and a suede jacket. But before Doc could so much as hail the priest, the young woman cocked a head to the jukebox, turned the brightest red I have ever seen on the female flesh, and spun on the good father. “Is this some kind of joke!” she demanded. And then, suiting actions to words, she strode to the power cord and pulled the Chordettes from our ears. The music died in that peculiar winding-down fashion of old vinyl recordings.
Bill and Kelly had been swing dancing to the music. (You don’t think that musicological metaphysics was their only purpose in the playing of it, do you? This was the music of their youth, and in it they could be always young.) As the Chordettes groaned to a halt, Kelly blanched and turned on the newcomer. “You!” she cried. “If you’ve damaged my record . . . !”
Doc muttered under his breath. “One down. One to go.”
Bill Poke moved to Kelly’s defense. “Young lady, I think you owe my friend an apology.” Now Bill, in his youth had agitated the gravel with the best of ’em—he had been cool when “cool” was new—and something of the young greaser remained in the old man.
The woman in the Ivy cap turned to Fr. McGinnity. “It wasn’t a prank?” At the silent shake of his head, she broke into tears, and Father put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the bar. “A pint of bitters for my niece, here; and white wine for myself.” And then he spoke to her gently so that we could not hear.
Apologies thereafter flowed all around. Jeanne Price, that being her name, begged from Kelly a forgiveness gradually and only grudgingly allowed. In penance, Jeanne offered to buy a round for the house. That drew Danny Mulloney from the back room, where he had been practicing for an upcoming pool contest with Jimmy Shaugnessy. He was fated to lose—Jimmy had never lost a game to our certain knowledge—but Danny was working on the point spread.
Shortly, the craic was flowing. Bill and Kelly explained about their long-standing debate, and I think Jeanne saw that it was not about the music at all. Father introduced her to Doc and myself. Danny excused himself and returned to his balls. It being early afternoon, no one else was about. This is the best time to buy a round for the house, should the mood ever strike you.
“She doesn’t look a bit like you, Jim,” Doc said. “Sure you’re related?”
“Ah, she has my sister’s face,” the priest explained. “And her brains. ‘Little Jee’ is a doctor of biology, and she has clicked her heels and flown in from her emerald city—I speak of Seattle—to participate in a conference at the University. A featured speaker,” he added with no little familial pride.
“Not that it impressed anyone there,” Jeanne murmured, but I think she meant the comment only for herself.
“And what conference was that?” Kelly asked.
“Approaches to Abiogenesis and the Monogenic Problem,” she answered—though to no great enlightenment on anyone’s part. Seeing our perplexity, she added, “Abiogenesis is the origin of life from non-living matter.”
A crafty gleam came into Doc’s eye, and I shot one anxious glance toward the pool room before whispering, “No! Don’t say it!”
But it was no use. “You mean it has to do with e-vo-lution?” the Doc announced; and no sooner had the words slipped the leash of his tongue than Danny Mulloney burst forth from the back room, cue in hand, seeking infidels to smite.
You see, Danny had forsaken Holy Mother Church a few years back for one of those sects that worship a text rather than a God, and “evil-ution” was the pea under his personal mattress. Doc and he had danced this particular jig more than once in the past. Like the old warhorse, “he sayeth among the trumpets Aha! and smelleth the battle afar off.”
But Jeanne said, “Oh, not really. Abiogenesis isn’t evolution.”
I don’t know who was more deflated at this, Danny or Doc. The looks on their faces so perfectly mirrored each other that I nearly burst out laughing.
“It isn’t?” said Kelly. “But didn’t you say it was about the origin of life?”
“Yes, but evolution is about the origin of species, not the origin of life. Biological evolution is driven by Malthusian pressure on resources. Individuals less able to secure those resources produce fewer offspring, so those better fit eventually prevail. Well, for that you need organisms—and competition for resources. That doesn’t apply to non-living matter, most of which just sits around without either reproducing or competing. So something other than natural selection must have kicked off the whole thing.”
Danny had been steadily brightening throughout this explanation, never a good sign. Now, he cried, “You mean . . . like God?” He said this as though the possibility had only just now occurred to him.
Jeanne glanced at her uncle before answering. “Ah, probably not the way you think.”
Doc said, “Hey, Jim! Are you going to let her get away with that?”
McGinnity shrugged. “Not my field. My specialty is paleography—ancient manuscripts.”
Doc lifted his gin and tonic. “Say something ancient for us.”
Hoisting his wine in reply, the priest said, “en arxh hn o logoß, kai o logoß hn proß ton ueon, kai ueoß hn o logoß.”
Himself had been sipping from a water bottle he kept behind the bar. Now he choked on a swallow. It was a good laugh all around; but I wondered if Doc knew what the good father had quoted at him.
Bill Poke brushed off the whole matter. “Whatever happened that long ago is nowheresville. I sold Buicks for forty years and not once did ‘evolution’ or—what’d you call it? A-buy-o’genesis? Or for that matter, ‘Genesis’—ever add a dime to my commission.”
“Well, now,” said Doc, “I’ve been cutting up the dearly departed for twenty years and not once did Buicks help me diagnose the cause of death.”
“Except for auto accidents,” I suggested in a helpful tone. Doc gave me a disgusted look.
“Evolution makes a lot of difference, Bill,” Jeanne said. “It’s been very helpful in planning research programs, developing new medicines, diagnosing new strains of disease. And just generally making sense out of a mess of data. What it comes down to is this: Either new species branch off older species, or they just ‘poof’ into existence. And they don’t ‘poof.’”
“Jim,” Doc said, trying again, “aren’t you going to jump into this?”
McGinnity finished his wine and set the glass down, circled it with his finger to indicate a second. “And why should I? I don’t have a dog in the hunt.”
“I thought this creation thing was part of your religion.”
“Oh, creation, sure. But not creationism.”
Danny snorted in derision. “Typical Jesuitical evasion . . .”
“I don’t get it,” said Kelly. “What’s the difference?”
“Creation,” said McGinnity, “is bringing being from nonbeing. That’s not the same as changing one form of matter into another—like changing sodium and chlorine into salt or one species of ape into another. I should hope that no one would invoke God in the course of an ordinary scientific explanation.”
Danny crossed his arms. “Some things are so unlikely, they couldn’t happen by chance. Microbiological machinery. The cosmologic numbers. You need a Designer to make them happen. They’ve proved that.”
“Ah, Danny,” said the priest, “there’s no need for theokinetics.”
Now it was Doc’s turn to choke on his drink. “Theokinetics . . . ?”
McGinnity accepted his second white wine. “The idea that God’s creative power can only be expressed by events beyond the natural capacities of matter. Danny, it’s not the exceptions to the natural law that demonstrate the orderliness of creation. It’s the existence of the natural laws themselves. My Church holds that God created matter with the natural capacity to act directly, in a manner accessible to reason.”
“Then,” said Doc, “you don’t need the God Hypothesis.”
“No more than you need the ‘Frank Whittle Hypothesis’ to understand how a jet engine works. You’ll never find him, no matter how many measurements and tests you perform on the engine’s parts and components. That’s because the ‘Whittle Hypothesis’ simply isn’t an engineering problem.”
Jeanne spoke up. “Beside, the odds may not be as long as you think, Danny. There are only about a thousand or so possible protein folds. That’s a limit set by physics and chemistry, not by natural selection.”
“Not by natural selection?” Another mask of faux surprise. “You mean Darwin was wrong?”
“No, I mean a theory can explain many things without being tortured into explaining everything. Darwin’s natural selection explains certain kinds of evolution. Kimura’s neutral selection explains other kinds. Neither one explains abiogenesis.”
“Wait a minute,” said Kelly. “What was that about natural and neutral selection?”
“Natural selection is mostly a culling of unfit variations, with encouragement to the occasional advantageous one. Neutral selection is . . . Well, living creatures have a drive to go on living. Whatever variation the roll of the genetic dice comes up with, if it’s not outright deadly, the creature will probably find some way to use it for something. That is, it’s not so much that the trait is advantageous, but that the organism uses it to its advantage. Much faster evolution that way.”
“What about Fox’s protocells?” said Doc. “Didn’t his experiments show that heating amino acids produces vesicles that grow and bud, just like living cells?”
“The paraffin in a lava lamp can ‘grow and bud,’ too,” said Jeanne. “That doesn’t make it alive. His protocells have no true metabolic processes. They don’t act; they’re acted upon. Like the bubbles growing and budding in a glass of beer.” She held her glass up to show us. “There’s no internal information, so there’s nothing there to evolve.”
“Worse luck, that.” I suggested, studying my Guinness.
Doc remained skeptical. “The theory of evolution is as well established as the theory of gravity.”
Jeanne set her glass down. “Exactly—and the theory of gravity has been drastically revised since the Victorian Age. What I’m saying is that when you’re not dealing with organisms struggling to survive and reproduce, it may be that ordinary physics and chemistry matter more than Darwinian selection. And . . .” She pursed her lips and turned to her uncle. “And I don’t really want to talk about this, Uncle Jim. I’ve spent all day talking about it and defending a son of a bitch, and I’d really much rather talk about the World Series or, or anything else.”
Father McGinnity smiled. “Think the Cubs can take it this time?”
Bill Poke, delighted for a topic he could contribute to, said, “Naw. You hate to see old traditions die.”
Doc was downcast by this turn of events, and I could see Danny was too. He hesitated a moment, as if to return to the back room, then shrugged, leaned his cue against the wall, and took a stool. “Black and tan,” he told Himself.
For myself I wondered why Jeanne Price had spent all day defending a son of a bitch, but the answer was not then forthcoming.
Not until later, after Joe and Kelly had gone and the evening traffic had softened to the point where Doc contemplated the completion of his journey home. Danny had gone out and returned with a tray of sandwiches from the deli on the corner, for while he was impervious to reason on certain matters, he did own a generous spirit. Father McGinnity had nursed his second white wine as if it were a patient in critical care, and had watched with increasingly evident dismay as his niece put herself outside of one pint after another.
Not that you could see it on her, beyond the ruddy flush that is the curse of the Gael. Her voice took on no slur, and she kept up her end of the banter as it drifted from one topic to another. Perhaps a slight surliness had crept into her tone. Though she was still its master, “the creature” was lurking, ready to pounce.
When she raised her hand to signal another pint, her uncle seized her wrist and whispered urgently. What he said, we could not hear, but its import was clear to all. Doc looked away, and even Danny Mulloney fell silent. The glass that Himself was polishing squeaked under his ministrations.
Jeanne pulled herself from her uncle’s grasp. “I know what’s best for me! O Daugherty, please?” She hefted her glass for the refill.
But Himself only shook his head. “It’s sometimes better to pour the bitters out than to pour them in. They’re a poor medicine for any pain.”
For a moment, I was unsure whether Jeanne would throw the glass or not, for there was a wild look in her eye on the other end of which I’d loathe to be. But then she set it down like a hammer and a shudder passed through her and she began to cry.
It was a quiet weeping, not the caoine of mourning, though there was something of the keening in it. It was the lament for things lost past all recovery, which the Irish know down in their bones.
Finally, Jeanne sucked in a long, gasping breath and wiped her eyes with a bar napkin. “I’m so sorry,” she told us. “You’d not want my troubles. Did you ever . . .” and she looked to Himself as she asked, “Did you ever miss a toothache when it was gone?”
“I can’t say I have,” he answered.
“I went down with him, but I don’t have to go down with him. It’s my career, right? I had to stand up there and listen to them laugh at me. They all thought it was a joke—un hommage dans l’humeur—and I had to pretend it was. I had to laugh with them. That hurt. He was a son of a bitch, and I had to mock his life’s work. Can there be a greater cruelty than that?”
“There was bound to be a man in the back of such tears,” said Himself.
But Jeanne shook her head. “It wasn’t like that. No broken hearts. I didn’t like him.”
“It isn’t always the love of a man that drives a woman to tears.”
“This world is a vale of tears,” Danny suggested. “But He is with us to guide and comfort.”
Jeanne’s smile was as brief as a flash of sun on a cloudy day. “That’s what Uncle Jim tells me.” She let her breath out slowly, ran a finger down the sweaty side of her empty glass, and looked on something that only she could see. Then she sat upright on her stool. “Alright. I’ll have to explain some things; but this is how I went down with Luke Bonhomme. Luke Bonhomme! Oh, was there ever a man with so inapt a name!”
I should begin by telling you that I love the outdoors. When I went into biology I pictured myself in the wild. A naturalist, observing and recording, describing new species. I didn’t count on days spent tied to desks, buried in journals, importuned by grade-crazed students. Ah, but there’s nothing for it when you’re an associate professor but to bend yourself to the wheel. At times, gazing at blank and bored young faces, I would wonder: Are there green fields somewhere? Lonely, rocky crags? Dank tidal estuaries? Dark and haunted caves? So whenever—as Melville wrote—it’s ‘a damp, drizzly November in my soul,’ I know it’s time to get out in the field as soon as I can. It is a way I have of driving off the strangulation of the ivy-covered walls.
Now grant money has never come easy to me—I don’t have the knack for writing the proposals—but it bounds toward Luke Bonhomme like eager puppy dogs. So when the word went around the department that he was organizing field work for the summer quarter, I went to see if I could hang some research of my own on his proposal.
I’m not sure if he even knew who I was at that point. Certainly he gave that impression. Now, I might have been new, but the department is small, and it may have been a calculated affront intended to show me my appointed place in his universe. But then, he lived in a Lukocentric universe, so he may not have been intentionally rude. He may only have been thoughtlessly so. I think that may be worse.
How was he rude? It was in everything he did. The way he pursed his lips when he talked to you. They way he always made you wait when you called on him with a question. It was in the way he walked, for the love o’ Mary. But . . . Oh, he was brilliant!
When I suggested that I include my researches on micro-adaptations of alpine flora—we were going to Mount Rainier for the field work—he smirked and told me that was in the wrong direction.
I almost told him to, ah . . . But he was already in love with himself, and I really did need the field work. Publish or perish, right? But Luke told me that since it was his grant, I’d write about what he told me to write about. Something no doubt to ornament his own research.
“Don’t worry,” he told me in that nasal drone of his. “The Nobel Prize will make up for it. If you follow me to Rainier, you can follow me to Stockholm.”
Well. No one ever said he lacked confidence.
Alright, Uncle Jim. ybriß. But, by God, I think he could have gotten there! What’s the point of falling unless you’ve first scaled a height?
It was my outdoor experience, of course. Otherwise, I don’t know if he would have taken me on. But he asked me about caving and rock climbing, and what I said must have made an impression because by the time I got back to my office there was an e-mail waiting for me. “You’re in,” it read. “Arrange spelunking gear for five people. Camping supplies for two months.” Evidently, I could be useful. That was the only criterion. At the very least, I could tell him that cavers never say “spelunking.”
I met three of the others later that same day.
Knobby Bryant was Luke’s grad student: young, wiry, and with a prominent Adam’s apple. Bonhomme needed a serf to do his scut work. Knobby had climbing experience, but he was along mainly to keep Luke’s notes and samples.
Cap McConnell was, in theory, Bonhomme’s peer, but while in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is. I found out later that McConnell was up for tenure but shy on his publications. Luke had promised him a breakthrough in geochemistry, and so a certain spirit of desperation had lured him into our company.
Wendy Chen was an engineering student. She would not be climbing with us, but would stay above and monitor the fiber-optic link that we would maintain.
* * *
We took a rental van out State Road 165 to the park entrance and from there to the Carbon River trailhead. I drove and Knobby sat shotgun. He fairly bounced in his seat the whole while, so excited was he to be part of the project. In the back seat, Cap stared morosely at the passing scenery while Luke read maps and jotted from time to time in a pocket journal.
A ranger met us at the trailhead, and there were papers and other formalities. Stay on trails. Do not pick flowers. Carry the “10 Essentials” and Leave No Trace of your visit. I could hear the ranger capitalize Leave No Trace. This was all done with such grave solemnity that I nearly raised my right hand and swore on a map of the park.
I could tell the ranger was not happy. The amount of our equipment hinted that a trace of something might be left somewhere. “What are extremophiles?” she asked, referring to our permit.
“Biological lifeforms,” Luke answered, “that have adapted to extreme conditions—around ocean thermal vents or, as we hope to learn, in deep lightless caverns.” He managed to say this in a tone that implied some deficiency on the ranger’s part for not having known.
Certainly the ranger heard it that way. She folded the documents and stuck them in a pocket of her jacket. “Your permit expires in six weeks,” she reminded us.
The second van had arrived behind us with Wendy and four more grad students co-opted for the day to carry our equipment to our base camp. Since no wheeled vehicles were permitted inside the park, it all had to be carried in by Shank’s Mare. The grad students were husky outdoors types and were getting fifty bucks for the work.
We divided the equipment among us and each took a share, except Luke, who had the maps and walked on ahead of us. I think he liked being “bwana” with a line of bearers behind him. Cap and I carried the power source, each of us taking a handle. We would use it to power our communicator and recharge our batteries and lights while belowground. We planned to spend several weeks below ground, and it wouldn’t do to lose our lights or our contact with base camp. It’s dark down there. Cavers have been known to hallucinate when deprived too long of light. I don’t know what the ranger would have done if she had known our “battery” was a nuclear device, like those they use to power deep space probes. People sometimes don’t think clearly about things like that.
It was a three hour hike. Just past Alice Falls, there was a side valley running off to the right, and on a boulder at the fork in the trail sat a large man with black ponytailed hair and wearing a sleeveless bush jacket. He had arms like legs, and they were decorated with intricate tattooing.
“Our guide,” said Luke.
Billy Quiemuth was a Nisqually Indian from down near Fort Lewis. When he saw us coming, he studied us for a moment, then rose and said, “This way,” and turned up the side valley. Luke had started to say, “Let’s keep moving,” but he was saying it already to Billy’s back. I think he was a little miffed that the guide hadn’t waited for instructions.
Billy’s stride could eat miles, but after a few minutes he looked back and saw that, burdened by our equipment, we had fallen behind, and with a shrug, he adjusted his pace to ours. His whole body said, “I ain’t in no hurry.”
“The cave is an old Indian site,” Luke told Cap and me as we struggled behind him. He held up an old browned notebook tied up with a string.
“Sacred?” asked Cap.
“Aren’t they always?”
“Naw,” said Billy without turning. “That’s all done with. I’m a Presbyterian. We used to go to this cave an’ smoke weed when I was a kid.”
It was late afternoon when we reached the mouth of the cave. Luke had our “bearers” set the equipment just inside, micromanaging until they had things arranged to suit him. It would be a three-hour hike back for them, and they were not wishful of finishing that hike in the dark. Even with the flashlights that were one of the “Ten Essentials,” that would be a chancy thing.
Luke paid the four with checks. It was a Friday afternoon and he paid them with checks. That was so . . . so Luke.
The first thing we did was arrange our sleeping bags and set up the stove. We would begin our descent in the morning after a meal and a good night’s rest. I wondered why Luke had really brought us here. Extremophiles, my left buttock. [Sorry, uncle.]
That evening, after we had eaten, Luke gathered us around the lamp. It was bright—LED, and powered like I said off atomic batteries—but caves have that peculiar property by which their shadows are not dissipated by light, but rather retreat deeper into cracks and crevices. It seemed as if we only illuminated the darkness.
Knobby vibrated so much that I thought his clothing would catch fire. Beside him Cap sat like one of the rocks he studied, so that between them the two averaged a normal amount of movement. As to the other two members of our group, Billy sat apart with his eyes closed, apparently asleep, while Wendy busied herself running tests on the communication gear. The research as such did not involve them.
Luke unfastened the flap of his bush jacket and extracted that yellow-brown notebook I had seen him reading earlier. He removed the rubber bands that held it together. “This,” he explained, “is the journal of Ezra John. He was a naturalist of the old frontier days. He traveled up the Red River, along the Missouri, across the Great Basin and the Rockies, eventually here to the Pacific Northwest. He made literally thousands of observations and sketches of the flora and fauna he saw along the way. He also made geological observations, McConnell, which should interest you, especially of the ‘sand blows’ in and around Cahokia and the Mississippi Valley.”
“‘Sand blows,’” said Knobby. It could be taken for an acknowledgment or a question.
Luke nodded to Cap. “Why don’t you explain, McConnell?”
Cap grimaced, perhaps wondering if Luke were not trying to catch him out with a pop quiz. “It’s a ‘sand volcano’,” he said. “During earthquakes, water-saturated sediments below ground can liquefy and shoot up through the soil, making a cone of sand, complete with a crater in the top. They can range from a few millimeters to a few meters in diameter. You say this John fellow visited Cahokia. Quite a few sand blows erupted around there during the New Madrid earthquake in, oh, 1810, I think.”
“In 1811 and ’12,” Luke said.
Cap looked at him for a moment and then said, “Yeah. Okay.”
“Sand,” said Luke in a meditative voice, “is silicon dioxide.”
“Mostly,” said Cap. “There are limestone sands and gypsum sands and—”
Luke waved his hand. “Not usually inland or outside the tropics. The blows around the New Madrid and other earthquake sites were silicon dioxide.” He smiled benignly.
While we waited for enlightenment on this trivial point, Billy spoke up, showing that he had been listening all along. “Ezra John, he was a Choctaw Indian come up from down the Territories, back after the Removal. He lived with the Nisqually for several years. Made quite an impression, because we’d never seen a civilized Indian before. Then he faded from oral history into oral tradition and became a culture hero. There are stories about him. Jeeze, I haven’t thought about those stories in years. The tales say the Earth Mother gave him birth. He come up, taught the Nisqually crafts like farming and blacksmithing, then the Earth swallowed him again.”
“Blacksmithing, I can understand,” I said, “but farming?”
“Ah, that’s just how folklore works. Once events are far enough in the past, they all happen at the same time. ‘Origin time’ instead of ‘historical time.’ Real people become culture heroes and whatever needs explaining is assigned to one of ’em. De Brazza was a real man when he reached the Congo in 1880, but by 1960 he had become a culture hero to the Tio folk who lived there. Same thing happened to Ezra John. They don’t tell his story no more; they tell stories about him.” When he saw us looking at him, he shrugged. “Anthropology major. Seattle U.” He grinned. “Self-defense. I plan to study the folks who come to study us.”
Luke had listened with the benign patience that said others were doing his work for him. When Billy lapsed into silence, Luke turned his flashlight to the cave wall just above the entrance. There, chiseled into the rock was a symbol: EJ
“E J,” he explained, as if we couldn’t see it for ourselves. “His monogram.” Luke wagged the tattered journal he kept in his pocket. “He filled twenty-seven notebooks on his various journeys. This is the last. The twenty-seventh. It describes his journey deep into the earth—and what he found at the bottom.”
I had been silent during this entire discussion, busying myself with our equipment. But I had finally grown tired of Luke’s little games and, just to end the matter, I set the climbing ropes aside. “And what was that?”
Luke smiled at me like I was a dim pupil who had finally asked a bright question. “The answer to the monogenesis problem.”
Doc interrupted. “Monogenesis. You mentioned that before. What is it, exactly?”
Father McGinnity grinned. “In theology, ‘monogenes’ means ‘the only-begotten.’”
Jeanne had been staring vacantly at something invisible and shook herself aware. “Nothing quite so dramatic as that, uncle. No. You see if abiogenesis is inherent in the laws of physics and chemistry and not in the whims of chance, then . . .”
“Then why did it happen only once?” That was Danny, and it surprised us all that he would see it first. “Sure,” he continued in a rush. “If it was so natural, so inevitable, why didn’t life happen twice right here on Earth? Why isn’t it happening every day? But you say life was only created once—just like Genesis says.”
“What Genesis says,” Father McGinnity told him, “is ‘producat terra animam viventem in genere suo . . .’ That’s the Vulgate. ‘Let the earth bring forth all kinds of living things.’ You’ll note nature does the bringing forth, and I don’t see that God told her to stop.”
Danny lowered his glass of Harp to the countertop of the bar. “Are you trying to tell me that evolution is in the Bible?”
Jeanne winced. “‘Let the earth bring forth?’ No wonder Davischen was so hostile this afternoon!” But she did not then elaborate on the comment.
“Besides,” Doc said, “any lifeforms that got started later would have been gobbled up by the ones already here.”
“The stillbirth theory,” Jeanne said. “That’s one answer.”
“But there are others,” I suggested. “Or you wouldn’t’ve called it the ‘monogenesis problem.’”
“Oh, certainly. Through any finite collection of facts you can draw an infinite number of theories. Danny was right to ask why abiogenesis happened only once—if it did. But Doc might be wrong. It’s not always the established lifeforms that win out. In fact, evolution pretty much says the opposite, doesn’t it? The Ediacaran biota are truly weird. They don’t fit into the known phyla. The Cambrian biota do—mostly. Did the Ediacarans evolve into the Cambrians? Or were they two separate events, with the Cambrians replacing their predecessors? The fossil record is too sparse to say. And here’s a third possibility: All the major modern phyla appear abruptly in the Cambrian Explosion. Would it be so strange if some phyla originated in separate abiogenetic events in different places around the world, established themselves in distinct niches, and then spread out and mingled, giving the impression of an ‘explosion’? Sponges and jellyfish really are peculiar compared to the bilaterian rest of us.”
Doc waved a hand. “Aah. But those’ve all got related DNA. Remember when they found those creatures living around the deep ocean thermal vents, and they thought at first that they might represent an in-de-pen-dent Tree of Life? But their DNA turned out to be the same as all the rest of us, which proves they share the same origin.”
But Jeanne had warmed to her topic. “Doc, if physics and chemistry do set boundary conditions on the DNA, similarity needn’t indicate common descent. It may only indicate a limited solution set. The determinism of physics and chemistry takes a big bite out of the randomness of evolution. Sorry, Danny, but it needn’t be as improbable as Hoyle insisted. But it also mucks up the molecular clock, and that may mean that there are multiple geneses that we simply can’t distinguish because their DNA looks like they might be related. But I could not imagine that Luke Bonhomme would have so proudly announced that we would find ‘the answer to the monogenesis problem’ if that answer were that it only happened once. He had to have meant a second genesis, a second tree of life.”
But Luke was a tease [Jeanne said, taking up the tale once more]. He told us only enough to lead us on. I should have reasoned ahead of him, but all I could foresee was that he had found a clue in John’s journal hinting at some deep-in-the-earth extremophile. I didn’t see how its DNA would be different enough to settle the matter. The monogenesis advocates would say the DNA showed evidence of common descent. The polygenesis advocates would say the DNA seemed related because there were only so many possible ways that DNA could look.
But of course if I could see that, so could Luke, and he would never have assembled our little expedition if the only thing lurking at the end of it would be a resounding “maybe.”
The first descent was the roughest: a nearly sheer chimney, the dead remnant of a volcanic vent. Billy tossed a rock down the center and grinned ferociously while we counted off the seconds before its rattle announced the depth of the tube. He winked at me. “Remember what they say. Gravity is not our friend.” But an LED lantern, lowered into the shaft, revealed pitons driven into the rock at intervals. John had gone this way, and what he could do with old-style hemp ropes we could do with modern nylon.
In the two weeks running up to the expedition, I had tested each of our team-members’ climbing ability and was satisfied that even Knobby could handle the descent. Billy, I was not sure about, as I had not met him until that day, and I assumed at first that he had only been hired to guide us to the cave. But stepping to the lip of the chimney, he looked into the darkness and grinned at me. “Not as deep as it looks.”
“No?”
“Deeper.” He chuckled. “But there’s a ledge about three hundred feet down where we can rest.”
I paused while lowering the rope with our supplies. “You’ve been down there already?”
He nodded. “A little ways.”
“What do you think we’ll find down there?”
“Depends on what you look for, doesn’t it.”
We expected the temperature below ground to run around fifty degrees, the mean for this region. We had dressed in thin layers for comfort, and now we pulled on our coveralls—fewer loose edges to catch on things—and donned and checked out climbing harnesses. We said good-bye to Wendy, promised to call in once a day, and went down the chimney.
I won’t go into that climb in any great detail. It was painstaking, but not especially daunting, and a climber who doesn’t take pains can wind up dead. I went first and Billy went last, since we were the more experienced climbers. I did a straight shot, abseiling with my chest rack. On the way down, I passed several old pitons hammered into the rock, and along one stretch, a length of old hemp still hung. Ezra John had evidently left ropes in place, but they had decayed over the years. I warned the others not to grab hold of them and continued down. When I reached the ledge, I belayed for Knobby and Luke. Billy came last and drove in rebelays at intervals to facilitate our return climb.
Like John, we left the ropes in place. I wondered if climbers a century hence would know who we had been when they found their frizzled remains.
It took most of the day to complete the descent, and although Luke was anxious to press on and Knobby was like a bunny with a drum, I insisted we make camp. Luke chafed, but he was smart enough to realize that you don’t bring an expert along in order to ignore her advice. I could see that Billy was ready to back me up, but he kept silent. The last thing a climb leader needs is a second leader.
Before turning in, I checked the rest of our equipment, and Knobby attached the fiber-optic cable to a repeater. We had several spools of it and planned to run them out as far as we could. Knobby plugged in the transmitter and called Wendy. It was just a test. We could have hollered up the chimney to her.
I circled the room into which we had come, saw three clefts that seemed to lead out of it, and over one of them was an EJ. I turned a lamp into its dark interior, but it didn’t get much lighter.
“It widens out farther down,” Billy told me over my shoulder.
“A good thing, too, given the baggage we’re carrying. Any more pitches like the chimney?”
“One more I know about, but not as long or steep.”
I grunted, then turned to face him. “Any idea what Luke has in store for us?”
He only shrugged. “The elder gods, maybe?”
“The elder gods.”
“These mountains, they were people once. There’s a Nisqually legend about the Beautiful Firekeeper. She kept the peace between two quarrelsome brothers; so when the Great God turned them into mountains, she was turned into a third mountain set between ’em.”
“Were they, now? Which mountains?”
“The brothers became Mount Adams and Mount Hood. The firekeeper became Mount St. Helens. Appropriate, don’t you think, for a firekeeper? But in the story it was the two brothers who were always blowing their tops. I think Nisqually legends remember a time when the volcanoes were more active.”
“What about Mount Rainier?” I asked him. “Do you have a story for this mountain?”
“The Miser of the Mountain . . .”
“Supper’s ready,” said Cap, who had volunteered to cook this time. Chicken soup. Red beans and rice. It smelled wonderful.
Luke emerged from the folding tent he had brought along for his lordly privacy and looked around. “Here,” he told Cap. “Look these over and tell me what they say to you.” He plopped a stack of papers beside the geologist, who glanced at them before attending to the soup. Luke tossed his head toward the crack in the rocks. “Quiemuth. Is that the way John took? Never mind. I see his mark. Bryant, come with me.” And then he returned to his sanctum. A few moments later, Knobby ducked inside with him.
Cap did not look up from his cooking. “Maybe he’ll trip and fall down a volcanic tube.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” I told Cap.
“The man ain’t a fool, neither,” said Billy.
Cap grumbled some more, served out the food, and hollered to Knobby to come and get it. “The great man can figure the rest out for himself,” he said.
After supper, as I was cleaning the plates, Luke held another of his “underground seminars.” His answer to the problem of abiogenesis was a resurrection of the Smith-Cairns hypothesis, which disappointed me, because I had been expecting something more twisted, more novel.
Clays result naturally from silicates in solution, and their fault structure, domain structure and cross-sectional shape are all copied as they accrete. When mechanical stresses cause them to snap this information is exposed at the ends of both the resulting crystals.
“In other words,” said Luke, “it’s heritable information.”
“Not really,” I told him. “The crystals don’t build themselves from it the way biological organisms self-assemble from their DNA.”
“It’s information,” Luke insisted. “And the two fragments get it from the original. Fits my definition. Now, suppose one form of clay is stickier and so more likely to silt up a stream bed. That leads to further sedimentation, and to flat areas exposed to the air. The flat areas dry out, the wind blows the dust around, and some of the crystals fall into another stream and start the cycle over. So the sticky clays become more successful. Natural selection.”
“Sticky clays,” said Cap in a voice less than convinced.
“It needn’t be stickiness, McConnell,” Luke said. “Brittleness, weight, speed of growth, anything that expedites replication will make that form of crystal more common.”
“It’s not natural selection, Luke,” I told him. “Not the Darwinian kind. Not every natural sorting mechanism can be called—”
“Oh, quite right, Price. Quite right. But it is a prototype for the real thing, isn’t it? Just like the replication of fracture domains and such is a prototype for ‘heritable information.’ It needn’t be the real thing to be like the real thing. I’m glad you see that.”
Luke had a way of turning criticism of his ideas into support for his ideas. You could point out a flaw in his reasoning and the next thing you knew it was part of his reasoning. Laying into him was like punching pillows. Suddenly, nothing happened! The head pat was worst of all.
Knobby said, “But what has that to do with abiogenesis?”
“It’s quite simple, Bryant . . . Complex proto-organic molecules can be catalyzed by the surface properties of silicates. You should know this, McConnell. The surface grooves can entrap these carbon polymers, protecting them from UV or wave action that might otherwise disrupt them; and they will be ‘carried along for the ride’ as the crystals grow and fracture. At some point, exaptation occurs and the organic molecules begin to grow and replicate on their own.”
“You mean,” said Cap, “that at some point a miracle occurs. It’s an attractive story, Bonhomme, but all the hand-waving plausibility in the world won’t get you over the empirical hump.”
Knobby rose to his thesis advisor’s defense: “But it makes sense.”
“Yeah? So did antiperistalsis, geocentrism, and the world-flood.”
Luke was accustomed to Knobby’s agreeable nature. Cap rubbed him the wrong way. “The flood is a creationist fable,” he said.
“So is life being formed from the clay of the earth,” Cap answered. “But Xenophanes never read the Bible. He was a Greek pagan who drew his conclusions from the facts. He’d seen marine fossils in the mountains of Greece, and the only natural process he knew of that could deposit ocean life on land was a flood. It was seafloor uplift that would have sounded supernatural to him. He couldn’t see it happening.”
“You’re right,” Luke countered blandly, “we mustn’t assume that Smith-Cairns is false just because we can’t see the process going on today.”
That flustered Cap, because he hadn’t been drawing that conclusion. Me, I leave philosophy to those trained to do it—and scientists are notoriously rotten philosophers. But I must have made a face of some sort because Luke turned to me. “And what are your thoughts, Price?”
“You have an answer,” I told him, “or you think you do, or you wouldn’t be dragging us down the rabbit hole with you. So why not just tell us?”
“I told each of you: Follow me here and you can follow me to Stockholm.”
“Me too?” said Billy with an impossibly innocent look.
Luke treated the question as a joke, and talk drifted, as it always does among scientists, to the possibility of testing the theory. What would constitute supporting evidence? What would provide falsification? That was not as easy a question as it sounds. The Greeks thought heliocentrism falsified because it contradicted known facts: There was no observable parallax in the fixed stars. Duhem thought Maxwell had been falsified by permanent magnets—and the electron was like an epicycle, a particle-of-convenience tacked on to save the equations. I wondered what Luke thought he had in his back pocket.
And I wondered too what “obvious truths” we held that would give future scientists the chuckles.
I suddenly realized that Cap was the key member of our team. Knobby was along to be Luke’s slave, and Billy and I were along to ensure climb safety. But why exactly had Luke Bonhomme dragged Cap into this?
I could only conclude that Luke believed that Ezra John had found a fossilized clay matrix—and we were there to witness its discovery.
Of course, what does a fossilized rock look like?
The next day saw a series of climbs down a few short pitches, into which a flight of steps had been carved. Billy—and Ezra John—had told us about them, but it was still a startling thing to find this far underground.
“Nisqually carve ’em,” said Billy, “or whoever come before us.”
“Why would they have come down here?” I asked him.
Billy shrugged. “Religion, maybe. The stairs were cut by Those Who Came Early. Remember I told you how oral tradition has only two eras: historical times and origin times? About the Early Ones, we don’t even have origin stories.”
The steps led to a gallery of colored crystals that caught all of us short, even Luke, who had known it was ahead. The crystals grew in beds on the wall of the cavern and flickered in ochre and green and red. Knobby so far forgot himself that he whispered, “It’s beautiful.”
Billy nodded. “I’d’ve carved those steps myself, just to come here.”
“John described this gallery in his journal,” said Luke, “but . . . I can see that words failed him.”
“Fracto-luminescence,” Cap told us. “The crystals convert vibrations into light. Hey! Remember crystal radio sets?” The crystals blinked as he spoke. I was reminded of Christmas tree lights, not crystal radio sets. I wondered if these “light echoes” of our words would convince Luke that the crystals had a “language.”
“John had two Nisqually guides with him,” Luke told us, “and he mentioned how the crystals flickered and flashed to their shouts of amazement.”
“Hear that hum?” asked Billy.
The rest of us hadn’t noticed any sound until then, and Billy’s question led naturally to a comic interval in which we were all crying out “quiet!” and “hush!” until by incremental steps we achieved silence. Luke turned off his lamp as well, and the rest of us followed suit until utter and absolute darkness enveloped us.
There is no more still a place on earth than a deep cavern. The only sound was our own breath; there was not the slightest hint of a breeze.
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep.
Sand strewn . . . The crystals continued to flicker, but more dimly. I thought I could detect, just beyond the range of my own hearing, a hum like the sigh of a dying organ.
“Subsonics?” Cap guessed. “The Juan de Fuca plate is subducting under the North American plate somewhere down below us. Very low frequency vibrations from the subduction may be inducing light flashes in the crystals.”
“I said hush, McConnell.” Luke had a laser pointer. I don’t know why. Maybe he expected to give a lecture. When he aimed it at a nearby crystal, it began to purr—I don’t know how better to describe it—it began to purr like a cat in sunlight.
“It works both ways,” he said. “Light induces sound.”
The sound of the first crystal induced light in its neighbors, and soon the chain reaction had the crystal bed blinking again. Luke flipped his pointer off, blanketing us once more in absolute darkness as the colors slowly damped out.
This time, before anyone could speak, a ripple of color passed like a glissando through the crystals, running from our left to a bend just out of sight on our right. At the same time, the floor of the passage trembled. It was like the rumble you sometimes feel on a Manhattan street as a subway train passes beneath you.
“Microquake,” Knobby whispered, and he looked back at the way we had come. I think it had not occurred to him until then what an earthquake might mean underground. Luke, however, looked off into the shadows on our right.
When we made camp that night, Luke called Wendy on our land line. Reception was good, considering that we had spliced the repeaters into the line ourselves. Luke reported that all was well and Cap added something about the singing crystals. I think at that point he had a paper in mind to get his tenure. For my own part, I mentioned some fairly ordinary cave-dwellers I had found and written descriptions of, including a species of sightless bat. New species, to be sure, but not new kinds of species.
Well, thousands of papers have been written on “discoveries” far less momentous. Quantity, not content, mattered. Darwin or Newton, taking thoughtful years between books, would never have survived in today’s academe. Or they would have been forced by the selective pressures of survival to dribble out their insights in half-formed tidbits.
The next day’s descent led to an ancient lava tube that sloped sharply downward. It was hard not to pick up speed as we made our way along it. Knobby forgot himself and stumbled into an awkward canter before he outran his legs and went body surfing on the harsh flooring of the tube. He was badly scraped and bruised, but it could have been much worse. Shortly after, Cap lost his grip on the spool of fiber-optic cable we were unreeling behind us and it clattered ahead into the darkness. Billy grunted and said, “We shoulda thought of that sooner.” He drove a spike into the wall of the tube and hung a motion-activated LED floodlight on it. Cap said, with a sly voice, “We’re not supposed to leave anything behind when we leave.” But Billy only shrugged. “Ranger no like ’um, she come down an’ take ’um.”
A moment later, the fiber-optic cable, which had been lying slack on the floor, abruptly straightened and went taut with an audible twang. Cap laughed nervously. “Looks like we caught something.” Luke turned and looked at him, but said nothing.
Billy and I rigged a rope and pulley to the tube wall, and we used that to control our descent down the steep pitch.
What had made the fiber-optic cable go taut was that the reel, bouncing and rolling down the tube, had reached a wide crevasse in the rock and had tumbled into it. It hung now like a plumb bob on the end of the cable, pulling it. I was surprised it had not broken loose.
The chasm ran through a chamber whose ceiling was lost in the darkness above and whose floor was lost in the darkness below.
Cap whistled and panned his LED along the fissure. “Deep fault line,” he said. “Part of the Western Rainier Seismic Zone. Secondary cracking in the North American Plate, I think.” He turned to Billy. “You see, the Juan de Fuca Plate out in the Pacific, it’s subducting . . . It’s shoving its way under . . .” He emphasized this with hand motions. “. . . under the North American Plate, ploughing northeastward at three to four centimeters per year and pitching downward at thirty to sixty degrees. That’s why the Sea-Tac region has so many earthquakes—and why the Cascades are a range of not-so dead volcanoes. The Cascades are the result of crumpling . . . Say, that tube we came down was pitched about forty degrees. I bet it tracks the subducting plate beneath us. In fact, I wonder if this crevasse is deep enough that we could actually see the Juan de Fuca itself at the bottom—”
A man suddenly finding himself in his comfort zone can become remarkably loquacious. For me, volcanoes and subduction earthquakes were hardly more comforting than that Rainier’s status as “extinct volcano” was only provisional. St. Helen’s had been extinct, too, until it wasn’t.
But Cap’s sudden silence drew our attention, and we aimed our own lamps to join where his own now rested.
Sixty feet below the lip of the sheer drop and a few dozen yards to our left was a ledge. And on that ledge lay a body.
Clad in heavy flannels and resting on a canvas rucksack, the mummified eyeless thing stared back at us. The unnatural angle of repose bespoke a broken back. The ragged and torn hands and missing fingernails told of a frantic grabbing for handholds that had not been there.
Billy peered over the edge. He saluted the body. “Hello, Ezra.”
The rest of us looked at him. “How do you know it’s him,” Knobby asked after a moment.
Billy shrugged. “How many people ever came down here?”
Luke wagged the daybook like a chastising finger. “If that’s him, how’d his journal make it back to wind up in our library’s collection? There’s a point a little farther to our right where the crevasse closes up to no more than a crack in the ground. That’s the way John describes.”
But Billy only shrugged again. “Okay. Maybe it ain’t him.”
I moved a little to the left, until I was standing directly over the ledge, and played my light across the rocks opposite. There was a tunnel there that looked like the continuation of our lava tube, broken off and offset slightly by the shifting fault at some unimaginable past time. I sensed that someone had come to stand beside me and turned to see Billy.
“A good run,” he said with a toss of his head to the opposite tube, “and a man in top condition could leap across the fissure, easy.”
“But why risk it, if he could just step across farther down?”
“Why, that’s a good question,” said Billy. “And maybe if we learn the answer to it we can avoid joining ol’ Ezra down there on the ledge.”
I tried to see into the darkness of the tube’s continuation, but my lamp only illuminated the shadows. “What’s down that way?”
“Dunno. Never came this far. But the story of the Miser on the Mountain tells us that you can’t climb Mt. Rainier without leaving something behind for each thing you take.” He looked at the mummy on the ledge. “Don’t know if it makes a difference if you climb down instead of up, but whoever that is down there—Ezra or some nameless stranger—he sure left a lot behind. I hope whatever he took was worth it. Come on, we gotta haul the rest of the cable out of the pit.”
When we continued our downward trek the next day, the sharp edge of Cap’s enthusiasm had been dulled, but he did not revert to that sullen temper in which he had begun the trip. “I’ll get at least two good papers out of this,” he had confided to me once we were in camp and had checked in with Wendy. “That rift gave me some ideas about the Nisqually Quake of 2001.”
Luke didn’t even look up from his own note taking. “Have you finished studying the seismic charts I gave you?”
He didn’t seem to expect an answer, which was a good thing because Cap didn’t give him one. If you ever want to take the bloom off a rose or wipe the smile from a baby’s face, Luke is your man.
I really do think there is a value to going down now and then on your knees. If I hadn’t done so, I would never have seen them.
I was on my knees because Ezra John had taken us through an especially tight passage, and while Knobby could duck-walk with only a scrape to his temple from an unfriendly stalactite, the rest of us had to crawl. That’s how I noticed the grotto off to the left.
Perhaps it was the sound of a slight rustle, perhaps it was a hint of motion in the darkness. Perhaps it was the smell. “Hey!” I cried, being last in line in that particular passage. “Which of you guys cut one?” I heard a giggle from up ahead—Knobby, I think—as I played my lamp into the grotto.
The Medusa Grotto, I called it afterward. All along the floor against lefthand wall was a writhing bed of white tubes from which red gill-like structures emerged and retracted. They looked like small crimson snakes trying to strike the rock itself. Careful, I remember thinking, you’ll blunt your fangs. I ran my light around the rest of the grotto, but the strange creatures were nowhere else. “Hey!” I cried more loudly. “Get a load of this!”
From farther ahead I could hear Cap’s voice. “What is it?”
“Lipstick applicators dancing the samba.” That earned me silence, followed by the sounds of others crawling back up the passageway. Well, they did look like lipstick applicators, and their wavy motions would do for dancing. Suddenly, it all clicked into place, and I knew what I was looking at, and I knew it would make my reputation.
“Well, well, well,” I whispered. “What are you guys doing here?”
Copyright © 2009 Michael F. Flynn
