WILD SURMISE

JANUARY 1987 #12

AN ALMOST ANONYMOUS INFORMAL NOTE

BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS

A writer assumes a broad common experience with the reader. Both have learned a language. In speaking of what happened before there was language or may happen after, some common ground must be found. Consider three issues: knowledge, power and love. These do not exhaust, do not even weary, things one considers each day. There may also be health, beauty, or a good fishing trip. Hut we will refer more than once to knowledge power and love.

By knowledge, I rnean scientific knowledqe, verified knowledge, knowledge obtained through strict rules of observation and controlled experiment. Observations must be repeatable. Any observation that is contrived, an experiment that is made under circumstances that have deliberately been arranged to demonstrate an effect, must be controlled, which is to say, must be compared with circumstances that are identical in every way but one. You do not know that detergent makes your dishes clean until you have washed them without detergent and found they stay dirty. By strict rules, observations are called data, facts or phenomena. An organizing statement, based on observation is called a theory or a law. The two words mean the same thing, although we tend to say law only when we're really impressed.

By power, I mean political power and money. It is the power to compel a person to do something by sending an armed man after that person, by offering to pay that person out of proportion to the pay he would receive any other way, or the power to set policy that a person defies at his peril. Were all publishers to agree to accept only manuscripts written in quill pen, no one would starve; most writers could make more money doing something else.

Yet such a bizarre policy would certainly influence what we read.

Love is the perception in another of what understands to be the best in oneself. Love is the stuff of religion. It is because religion concerns love that religion concerns good and evil. At a very basic level, religion tells you: God loves you, love God, love one another. Or if that is too complicated, this is to say the same thing: love Jesus. That needn't be a stumbling block. You may be a rock hard atheist. Do you really regard yourself in some fundamental way to be superior to him? If so then, why yes, we may have grounds for disagreement.

The bulk of modern science says that the universe is expanding. It is an established observation that those galaxy clusters that seem far away from us have light that is reddish. That is to say, wavelengths of light coming from them are longer that we would expect them to be if the galaxies were standing still relative to us. If the galaxies are moving away, that would account for this '^tred shift." Thus the theory is that the whole universe is expanding. It is also established observation, that just about any direction you care to look in, the universe is giving off a faint hiss of micro-wave radiation. The distribution of this radiation is the same as would be given off by an enormous amount of diffuse matter at four degrees above absolute zero. The resulting theory is that there was a "big bang."

The model is this: the universe began as an infinitesimal point that contained all its present matter. The matter was so dense that it could not exist in the form we now see it, but was an opaque soup of unimaginable density, in which unthinkable energetic globs jostled each other like commuters on a subway. The universe expanded. Eventually there was enough room for matter to condense out and leave the free energy in a transparent space. At that moment, the emancipated radiation existed as an unbelievably brilliant flash of light, far more energetic than visible light, light so strong and pervasive that it still drowns out signals sent at that wavelength.

Now consider these words. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And Cod said, Let there be light: and there was light."

You may enjoy the imagery, but in fact these two statements of the beginning have nothing in common. The language of the two is different. One speaks the language. however awkwardly, of science. The other speaks the language of religion. Let me quote again, "In the beginning ... God." There is no mention of nature. There is no mention of nature anywhere in the Bible. It isn't a book of natural history. It is a book of divine love. Religion and science lie like two perpendicular lines. They may cross, and the crossing point is the human point of view. But as you travel along one line, you stand stock still on the other.

Consider this quote. "Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy Cod." You do not put God to the test. It does seem to be a pity. The devil clearly knew what he was doing. It was to be a nice controlled experiment. Any ordinary mortal would be killed jumping off that temple. In his haste to make a point, the devil gave us the scientific method. Pity it took us a thousand years and more to notice.

Science and religion do not prove or disprove each other, make no remark about each other. Hold on to that, because the going gets tougher.

Lets go back to that original flash of light, the scientific one. Just what wavelength could it have been? There is a limit, you know. You remember Einstein's equation, F = mc². Matter IS energy, and that little equation tells you how much. Kinetic energy is defined as one half the mass of an object times the square of its velocity. So one kilogram (think a couple pounds) moving at one meter (think a yard) a second has a certain energy. Two kilograms moving at one meter per second hava twice as much energy. But one kilogram moving at two meters per second has four times as much energy. The unit we will use is the "joule." One joule is the kinetic energy of one kilogram moving at one meter per second. The joule is defined, then as mass times velocity squared or kilograms times meter² I second². The speed of light is about 2.9979 times 108 meters per second. So one kilogram of matter would, if converted into pure energy, give 8.9876 times 1016 joules, or 89,876,000,000,000,000 joules.

Now there is another universal constant called Planck's constant. It is about 1.0546 times l0(34) joule seconds. That means if you have a wave of electromagnetic radiation that oscillates at one cycle per second, that wave will be associated with 1.0546 times 10(34) joules. That, of course, isn't very much energy. Suppose we had radiation oscillating faster, say fast enough to give us a wave length of one meter. That would be 2.9979 times 108 times as fast. That would give us an energy of 3.1617 times 10(26) joules, or 0.000000000000000000000600031617 joules. That still isn't a lot of energy.

Notice that Plank's constant is a universal constant. It makes no specific statement about electromagnetic radiation. It only relates time. and energy. In order to specify one second, whether by waving your hand, running a spring powered clock, watching for a certain number of expected emissions frorn a radioactive source, or swinging a pendulum, you are going to use energy. Most of the energy will go into powering~%our device, of course. But there remains that 1.0546 times 10 Doules that is inherent in the information, "That was about a second." It is not exactly a second; it is more like a second give or take a second. That's not very useful, of course, but ten seconds, give or take a second would still only cost about lo-~~ joules. Similarly, when you rneasure a meter, after you have accounted for all the costs of your mechanism, you are left with a tiny energy that represents the information you have gained. Measuring one centimeter (one one hundredth of a meter) will cost you one hundred times as much. Measuring one meter to the nearest centimeter will cost you more still. obviously, the energy involved in an exact measurement would be infinite; that is, such a measurement is not possible even in theory.

There is another formula to consider. That is the formula for a black hole. You remember what a black hole is. it's a gravitational field so strong light cannot escape. If you jump off the pinnacle of the temple, you will gain kinetic energy on the way down. That energy will do quite a job on you and on whomever you land upon. similarly, if you tried to leap to the top of the temple, you would fail unless you could get that much energy and more out of a single bound. When you shine your flashlight toward the top of the temple, it costs the light energy to get there. Since the light is energy, it is also matter, and also subject to gravity, and loses kinetic energy on the way up. Since the light is also the specification of a length, when it loses energy, it specifies a longer length. To an observer on the pinnacle, your flashlight looks just a tiny bit reddish. Also, if it were possible to make an ccurate enough measurement, your wrist watch would seem to be running slow to him. If the earth held more mass, and was the same size, or had the same mass but was smaller, the gravity field would be stronger, and this effect would be increased. Ultimately, the point would be reached where your light could not escape the earth at all. At that point you would be on the edge of a black hole.

Black holes are usually understood as places where the density of matter is very high, and indeed that may be the case- But for a black hole to exist, all that is needed is for an adequate amount of matter to lie within a certain space, the radius of which is called the schwarzschild radius. Just how much mass is this (and I owe this to a kind communication from John A. wheeler; I could not even have looked it up on my own) : The Swarzschild radius of an object is twice the geometric measure of the mass. (1 solar mass = 1.47 km, in geometric units of mass.)

I will call that "wheeler's Constant."

Let us invent something we will call a "DOUBT." This DOUBT will have a mass and radius that will be just sufficient to make it a black hole. At the same time, the DOUBT will be a photon. Since the DOUBT is a black hole, the radius is:

Radius (of DOUBT) = 1.4774 x 10-27 meters/kg.

And from Einstein, we have:

1 Kg = 8.9876 x 1016 joules.

Solving three equations in three unknowns, we get:

Radius = 1.6438 x 10(44) meters/joule.

Times inverse Planck's = 5.1972 x 10-70 meters²

Taking square root = 2.2797 x 10~³⁵ meters or 2.28 x 10-³⁵ meters2.

That is its size. It's energy is 1.39 x l0(8) joules.

The mass is 1.54 x 10(8) kg.

Which would be a litle over one one hundredth of a milligram, say a speck of dust.

So our DOUBT does not exist in the laboratory. That's a lucky good thing, since then the laboratory would cease to exist. But let us consider this redoubtable, if hypothetical, object.

It is the smallest object that can ever exist in the universe. Try to measure anything smaLler and you will create a black hole that is larger. At the same time, it is the greatest single unit of energy that can exist. At the same time, it is associated with the shortest time that can exist, its frequency. It is at once the single basic unit of time, energy and distance, and everything that can be calculated from them, including matter, information, temperature, field strengths, weights, colors, music, asparagus and fossils.

Science is based on numbers. Everything in science can be broken down into space, time and energy. But behold, space, time and energy are all the same thing. They are all different ways of looking at the DOUBT. Pursue science, and you will find numbers and nothing else. Only numbers of numbers upon numbers. Alone, they are neither good nor evil. And there is one more thing about all those numbers. They are all wrong. Not only are they approximate; they will all ultimately be found to be in error. As for all the laws and theories that are built upon those numbers, they never had any existence except as a way of organizing observations in the first place. When the observations change, theories must change. And the observations were only numbers. Anything else is not science.

The reason theories will cease is that the universe is expanding. As a fairly constant amount of matter and energy is distributed over an inexorably enlarging volume, it takes more information to specify its location. If you are dealing with energy alone, there is not much problem. If you start with a photon, a single impulse of energy, and the universe is one size, double the size of the universe and you double the size of the photon; relatively, nothing has happened. But toss an atom into the universe, double the size of the universe, and the atom has many more places to sit. In order to specify just where it is, one needs more information. That information simply turns up. The atom lies somewhere, and the new information comes into being, apparently at random. It seems to be at random, because all the information in the universe at any one time is busy locating things in space that already exists.

If you take any organized structure, a building, a set of energy relationships or an intellectual construct, and introduce random elements into it, you will ultimately change it. You will render its initial organizing principle invalid. Therefore, to maintain any structure, you must constantly put energy into it.

So as the universe expands, everything changes except those things that have a constant input of power at the expense of the rest of the universe. Any scientific measurement or theory starts out as an approximation that is rendered more and more invalid as time goes on and the universe expands. Since science makes no permanent statement, science is in no position to pass judgement on things that are of permanent value. Nor can religion guide science, for if science is honestly to follow in concept where its measurements lead, science will have fads that change again and again. At any moment in history, science may be moving in any direction. It were utter folly to expect any statement about permanent values to follow at all times the twisting and turnings of events.

For instance, the "big bang" theory of the beginning of the universe is in dire trouble. From the first, the theoriticians agreed not to worry about where the thing that exploded came from.

But there are other problems. For one, all that micro-wave background hiss is characteristic for radiation by a body that is in thermal equilibrium. If the universe has been expanding at the speed of light for its entire existence, how did it ever get into thermal equilibrium? The current suggestion is that for the first instant or so, the universe expanded even faster than the speed of light, so that areas that were not in equilibrium were carried so far away that we cannot measure them.

A second problem is that there seems to be large scale structure to the universe. At every scale that has been studied, the universe has shown order, and now that they have looked at the positions of galaxy clusters, they, too, look orderly. Why the big bang should create huge voids and bands of galaxy clusters is a bit of a puzzle. There also seems to be motion in the galaxy clusters. It has been suggested that the Milky Way galaxy and all the neighboring ones are streaming off in the general direction of Virgo at some 400 miles a second. That's really a puzzle.

Still, puzzles are not enough to destroy a theory. In that respect, science is a little like a boxing match. A boxer gets a point every time he manages to land a legal thump on his opponent. At the end, whoever scores the most points wins, unless, of course, one of them is so badly beaten that he cannot go on or dies of injuries shortly after the match, in which case he loses. Those are the rules, but in fact, the champion just about never loses on points. To beat the champ, you have to knock him out. So in science, mere untenability will not knock out a theory; there has to be a new theory that brings along substantial new evidence. It isn't in the rules, but there it is. (If anyone can tell me for what reason, other than sheer blood lust, they make boxers protect their knuckles instead of their heads and bodies, I should like to hear from them.)

A final problem with the big bang theory troubles me. If all the matter in the universe were put in a small volume, it would be a black hole. Perhaps in a black hole that is just marginally a black hole, light or even matter can rise a short distance before being drawn down again. But this would be a maximal black hole. It would never permit ordinary matter to waft upward for billions of years, as it must have done to achieve its present state.

So we cannot have a big bang in our past. Matter can never have been clumped like that in the past and now be diffuse as it is. No problem, Einstein's theory of relativity says that the universe could be expanding or conttacting. It does not say, but from inside, it would look the same way either expanding or contracting. A scientist in an expanding universe looks in one direction in time and sees indeterminate events with random elements in it and calls that the future. The other direction in time is determined and he calls that the past. A scientist in a collapsing universe would also perceive a future and past. The two universes would look just the same.

Since we can't be expanding, and since expanding and contracting would look alike, we must be contracting. So the condition close to the "big bang'^t in about 15 billion BC, that we call the beginning, must actually be the end. This theory of backward time could be disproved by finding a sure enough black hole and seeing things fall into it. The theory would be strongly supported by finding an object that was dense enough to be a black hole but was tossing things out and refused to accept anything dropped into it. Don't bet anything important on which one turns up first.

In fact, neither may turn up. Consider, if the universe is collapsing, under the force of its own gravitational field, it is packing matter and energy into an ever more limited space. In so doing, it must increase the order of what is in the universe. Now suppose that you are the ordering principle of the universe, and you are packing things as tightly as you can. So you grab a hunk of energy or matter and compress it into a "DOUBT." It is just barely compressed enough to form a black hole. with your other hand, you grab some energy and make a second DOUBT. Then you put the two DOUBTs side by side. Can you compress it any more? If you take one DOUBT and press it together with the other to make a single black hole, that black hole will have twice the mass and thus twice the radius of a single DOUBT. So it will have eight times the volume, but only twice the mass. You have lost ground. By making a bigger black hole, you have used up more space. So as a reasonable and prudent ordering principle of the universe, you squeeze matter into DOUBTs, but no further. You forbid any one DOUBT to overlap another. You simply pack them closer and closer together. Thus there are no black holes and no white holes, only possibly clusters of DOUBTs packed closely together.

As you reach the end of your process, these DOUBT units are packed together like little balls. They form one enormous crystal at their moment of maximum close packing. what is the arrangement like? Well, in two dimensions, say on a table top, balls can be packed together in a hexagonal array, each ball surrounded by six other balls, touching all of them. If you put a second layer of balls on the first, they, too, will lie in a hexagonal array. But when you go to put on the third layer, you can put it so that each ball centers exactly over the center of a ball in the first layer, or so that the whole third layer centers in a new place, so that the centers of all three layers project onto the table top as the points of equilateral triangles. In other words, you make one choice every time you add a new layer. When you take the resulting crystal and run it backwards in time, exploding it, the choices give you the opportunity of observing large scale structure. Unfortunately, that only works in one dimension. We do not live in a universe that has order only along one axis.

It has been suggested that there is a way to pack spheres together that is tighter than layers of hexagonal arrays. It has been suggested that such a packing might not even produce a repeating pattern. No one has yet described how to pack spheres so tightly; if they ever do, the resulting structure may, in fact, reflect the large scale structure of the universe.

At all events, we have an idea of why the galaxies are streaming along as they have been observed to. The usual explanation is gravitational attraction by a large amount of dark matter. However, they may, under the influence of some 'dark force," be jostling around getting lined up to form the crystal of DOUBTs at the end of time -- or the beginning of time, depending on which way you look at it.

So the universe either did or did not appear as a big explosion, and somehow the earth turned up, lifeless at first. "And cod called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and cod saw that it was good." Now anybody who wants to turn the Bible into a book of natural history must surely take pause at that. "Saw that is was good," did He? And how long did that take? Did it happen during one of the days that are mentioned, or between days? The sun did not yet exist; just what was a "day"? It simply doesn't say. And since it doesn't, any interpretation is a guess. And if you are going to guess, be bold and guess in your own right.

On the other hand. I once heard, and believed, that someone had done a study looking at the educational background of scientists who had contributed the most. Understandably, they had not typically been educated about religion and nothing else. On the other hand, according to my informant, they had not typically had a strictly scientific or artistic education. A disproportionately high number had gone to schools with a required chapel program. My informant remarked cheerfully, "It seemed that it helped to know both about evolution and the Genesis version of creation."

But that's only three pages; three pages available to anybody with the slightest interest. Surely the lack of those three pages did not cripple the careers of untold thousands of scientists who went to schools with no required chapel.

It does make sense, though. In the first place, both science and religion are interested in truth. That deep alliance is often overlooked. Like a rook and queen working together on a chess board, they constitute a formidable team. Indeed, they work along different lines; neither is in a position to judge the other any more than a queen can take a rook of the same color. But there can be things that are wrong both from a religious stand point and from a scientific standpoint. There the pressure from two directions is devastating. It needs to be.

Superstitions have a tremendous appeal to the infant in us. Palm reading, astrology, spirit talking, extra-corporeal travel, mediums, tarot cards, crystal balls, transmigration of souls, ghosts, telepathy and voodoo have a significant seductive power over minds, even over intelligent, mature winds. Science dismisses the lot with the remark that no data support them.

Religion dismisses them with the remark that even it they did work, they would be the work of false gods. Murder, war, theft, promiscuity, drug abuse, vindictive lies, child abuse, revenge, hatred and cruelty have not vanished yet. Science points out that they are personal1y and socially destructive, Religion points out that they are immoral.

Not only are both religion and science profoundly interested in truth; science and those religions I know of also agree on what tools are permissible. These are: experience, documentation and specu1ation, more or less in that order. In religion, one would say prayer, scripture and faith. In science, one would say experimentation, data and theory. In addition, both trust authority, and both admit they shouldn't.

Finally, there is the matter of courage. It isn't always easy to stand up to the world and challenge comfortable ideas. Not easy to declare that one's own ideas are superior to the accepted ones, nor to develop those ideas:

"Wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams

no mortal ever dared to dream before."

The mental world goes to quicksand. Landtaarks shift. Trusted assumptions sink at one's side with a bubbling groan. Yet religion says that even here there are permanent values that are untouched. More than that, religion says go boldly. Small wonder that times of great religious stirring have also been times of great scientific progress.

So it is with dismay that one notices that there is a quarrel between some who think they speak for science and some who think they speak for religion. The quarrel is between something called creationism and something called evolutionism.

Life got started, all right. There are old rocks with no fossils and new rocks with fossils. Scientifically, no one is quite sure how. If you have cared for a swimming pool, you have noticed how fast it turns green after a thunder shower. You might guess that there is something in rain that is good for life, and you would be right. A lightning bolt makes a lot of nitrogen compounds. Well, some say that since lightning makes chemicals basic to life, maybe once life started in a lighting bolt. Or in a pond or a sea that had collected chemicals. Some say life started in mud, where surface effects could act as a cata1yst. All in all, nowadays, life seems to come from life and from nothing else. That's a change. A little over a hundred years ago, people rather assumed that life just sprang into being wherever conditions were appropriate, as maggots in dead meat or frogs on a river bank. That was in flat defiance of the notion of a one-time creation, but nobody seemed to mind. Then a man named Pasteur did a few experiments and showed that, within broad limits, life only comes from life.

Evolution was a theory proposed by a man called Charles Darwin. He proposed an environment with limited opportunities, more individuals than the opportunities could support, a struggle for existence, inheritable variation, natural selection and each new generation better equipped to deal with the environment. It was a brilliant theory, wrong, of course, but brilliant. You see, although genes were discovered by Gregor Mendel during Darwin's lifetime, Darwin either didn't know or didn't care. For Darwin, it was the struggle that mattered. A blacksmith developed big muscles that his sons would inherit.

It was an optimistic idea. The future goes to those who strive, who work, who care. It was the cosmic success story. "Glob of protoplasm makes Good; effort rewarded." It should have been popular in America, but it wasn't. It should have been rejected by class conscious England, but it wasn't.

Then careful work with the microscope turned up a problem. There was no way for the children's genes to know how big the father's muscles had gotten. There simply was no mechanism. It didn't matter a flit how the organism struggled, his offspring were going to get some of the same batch genes anyway. And genetics turned up the observation that characteristics that are inherited are carried by genes. And these genes generally don't change, or if they do, change in a way that is quite random and has nothing to do with the needs or the organism or its progeny.

So in the first halt of this century, they worked out classical evolution. They kept inheritable variation and natural selection and chucked out most of the rest of it. By classical evolution, the prime mover is the gene itself. It comes into existence as a random mutation of another gene. If the new gene confers upon the creature that carries it an increased likelihood of having offspring, say by having resistance to disease, then the gene increases its chances of remaining in the gene pool or even expanding its numbers. The gene pool consists of those genes that have been successful in this way. Natural selection is a constant force, snipping away any gene that turns out to be harmful when the environment changes. Mutation pressure is a constant force, randomly changing genes, occasionally introducing a lethal error into a previously neutral or even good gene, and occasionally bringing up an improvement.

Classical evolution is under some pressure now, however, it remains the champ; so to speak. The champ doesn't lose on points. And indeed, none of the challengers seems to alter the Greek tragedy mood. The debate within science is over the mechanism.

And there is also the debate between the evolutionists and the creationists. On the surface, that would not seem to be a bad thing. One thinks, "Ah, the evolutionists will keep the creationists worried, and the creationists will keep the evolutionists honest." That has not turned out to be the case. Growing up in a Southern public school system, I was, in theory; not taught evolution. The whole issue was handled with such tact that I didn't even know I wasn't supposed to know about it. Like any child; I found out about most things. I knew about the age of dinosaurs. I even had my favorite dinosaur. It was the brontosaurus, the big bodied four legged herbivore with the handsome square head. I knew quite well the age of dinosaurs was a forbidden topic in some quarters. I was deeply puzzled when a friend showed me a bible with a gold brontosaurs embossed on the morocco leather cover, in fact, I am still so puzzled that I wonder at times it the episode ever happened at all. I knew that people were supposed to be descended from apes, and had seen pictures of an intermediate form called the Piltdown Man. I had seen drawings that showed how the modern horse had evolved from a five toed creature to a four toed creature to two toes to one, with pictures of skeletons and diagrams of the hoof at different stages.

Well, it's a rather considerable pile of misinformation for one child to learn from a single rather obscure field. If the job of creationism was to keep the evolutionists honest, I fear they failed at it. And when the points were clarified, it was done courtesy of main stream science.

In this debate between evolutionism and creationism, one hears such preposterous remarks as, "The theory of evolution is evolving." A theory doesn't evolve. A theory is used and then changed. Just like a paper towel, its only use is to gather stuff together. I read an article recently that proposed to distinguish between "The Theory of Darwinism." by which the author meant classical evolution, and "The Fact of Evolution," but fit aid not go so far as to say just exactly what it was he meant by "Evolution." In other words, as currently used, "evolution" is neither theory nor fact. Grand Canyon is fact. Evolution is policy. Whatever turns out to have been going on, THAT is what they are going to call evolution. Prepare yourself. If it comes to saying, "Much to our surprise, evolution turned out to require less than a week and did not occur without supernatural assistance," then that is what they will say. But they will call it evolution, when evolution is used in so broad a sense, it is no longer a scientific word. Policy is the stuff of politics.

Politics is not a dirty word, but in this context it should be. Just as religion and science lie at right angles to each other, and just as religion and politics lie at right angles to each other, so science and politics properly lie at right angles. Like religion, politics (and I include economics) has a profound influence on people's lives and notions of themselves. Since science is doomed, nay free, to undergo eternal change, it cannot be predicted by a political system. Nor does it properly determine political action. Of course, any wise political move must consider all the scientific as well as moral consequences, just as science has business to examine church and state, just as the Bible spends considerable time simply documenting power politics and rejoicing in the beauty of nature. But in the end, politics and science do not determine each other.

What if it were otherwise? Well, evolution is still champ, we would go around requiring people to get the gene pool in shape. Those holding desirable genes would be permitted to reproduce. Those with less desirable genes would be excluded. Immigration would be permitted only after sterilization, people who were all around failures and groups which did badly would be prevented from reproducing. Pretty grim stuff.

But the debate does go on. On the one hand are those who believe that one community has a right to thrive even at the expense of terrible damage of another. Nazi Germany was an extreme example of that, and modern Israel is a modern instance. On the other hand are those who believe that economic necessity is grounds for any amount of dislocation of people and sacrifice of racial distinction. The old slave trade was an extreme example of that and continued rapid immigration the modern example. These are matters of politics. Do not look to science for the answer.

So apart from the political wranglings of creationism and evolutionism, what did go on between the time the lifeless Vishnu Schist was laid down at the bottom of Grand Canyon and the rise of technological civilization? To say I don't know would be an epic understatement, but come, let us reason together.

Let us assume two things: assume inheritable characteristics, and assume an expanding universe. Given an expanding universe, all things change. So we must have inheritable variation. Given inheritable variation, species will drift, changing in form slowly over time. Some will, by imperceptible degrees, divide into different species; some will go extinct. As time goes on, the largest differences will be the last to arise. The fate of one species will have nothing to do with the fate of a related but distinct species, except to the extent that the two compete. The genetic make up at one species will be about as different from the genetic makeup of a related species as the physical appearance. There will be no orderly genetic information that is not involved in a useful function for the organism. The most numerous organism in any one era will be the most likely to have identifiable, if different, offspring in the next era. We will call the theory "Random Drift." Now let us hold random drift up to the evidence.

Species do not drift, changing in form slowly over time. Species appear, stay in one form for a very long time, and then vanish. Species do not divide into two by imperceptible degrees. Yes, species do vanish. Among animals, the largest differences, the differences between phyla, turned up rather early. Creatures have tended to turn up in "ages," like the age of dinosaurs and the age of mammals. When there were dinosaurs, there were many kinds, now there are none. The mammals had been around a long time before the age of mammals. But there was a time when being a mammal was a good thing, when it had not been so before. This was for many kinds of mammals not just one species. Organisms retain stretches of genetic code that are identical despite the fact that the organisms look totally different. Organisms have duplicate copies of some genetic material, only one copy doing any good. Many numerous organisms go extinct without progeny.

So the random drift theory goes down. All of its predictions turn out to be wrong except that species go extinct. Good. Now lets try evolution. That means we introduce natural selection into the mechanism. Run down the list again. Species drift over time: evolution no help. Species divide slowly: evolution no help. Extinction: evolution no help. Largest differences appear last: evolution no help. Fate of two related species should have nothing to do with each other: evolution no help. Genetic similarities outlast physical similarities: evolution no help. Organisms should not retain unexpressed genetic material: evolution no help. Numerous forms ought to give rise to the forms of the next era: evolution no help.

So classical evolution is a non-starter. If it weren't the champ, we wouldn't consider it. But, for now, it is the champ.

What else might be going on? Well, there is the ever popular panspermia theory. Genetic material might have been brought to earth by comets after drifting in interstellar space. There is the theory of intervention by extraterrestrial beings.

There is a fairly popular school you might call the "Cross Breedists." They hold that new forms arise by interbreeding between old forms. The eukaryotic (higher organism) cell arose when two different kinds of bacteria got one inside another. That cell divided and its two daughter cells were different. They mated with each other and the offspring were again different. And so it went on, each cross breeding leading to a higher and better organism than all previous offspring. Obviously interracial breeding is superior, but the ideal match would be between a human and an ape. Well, it only sounds stupid when you say it. You never know, though. I stand ready to eat my words when they cross a gorilla with a chimpanzee and get a human.

There is the gaea hypothesis. That hypothesis assumes that the whole planet, from the depths through to atmosphere, is one living organism. It could even be conscious in a manner of speaking. That organism has needs and great powers. It creates species for some specific task and removes them after that task is done. Our own task may be to burn up fossil fuels or to lay waste to great tracts of land to make way for some planned future creature.

Gaea leads us to the question of complexity. Where might gaea have come from? From the past. How could anything as mind bogglingly complex as gaea come from the past, when everything was simple? Things were not so simple in the past. In the universe, as it expands, things tend to run down. Evolution is often invoked as an explanation for how complex forms arose. How life reached higher and higher planes. That may be a non problem.

As I type, there is a lizard outside looking at his reflection in the window. occasionally, a lizard will come to the window and put on quite a show, thrusting out the red fold of his throat, opening his mouth aggressively, and pacing grandly back and forth.

One's first impulse is to say, "Dumb lizard. He thinks it's another lizard and he's trying to scare it away." But how do I know? There are plenty of lizards around away from the window. They don't spend a lot of time threatening each other that way. For all I know, the lizard is just enjoying himself, as anyone might make faces in a mirror.

I had a bird once, a cockatoo. The bird despised being in its cage, and soon learned to pick the latch. I made a more secure latch, and the creature learned to pick that, too. I found a good padlock kept it in, but that was a nuisance for me. I devised a really rather cleaver latch that worked for about a week. Then one day, as I was putting the bird in its cage, it spun around and watched me do up the latch. Seriously, the bird watched my hands. And as soon as I was done, it picked the latch itself. And you can well believe that the bird came strutting out with its head high. This was a bird. It was practically a reptile. Yet it was smarter than any dog I ever saw. Indeed, I have never seen proof that an ape had more mentally on the ball than that bird.

Indeed, I tear that if you took a human and raised him in isolation from all other human contact, he would not be likely to show any higher mental attainment than that bird. Nor have I ever known of any reason why creatures as remote as dinosaurs and before were any less intelligent. The steady increase in intelligence of animals, the steady rise to higher and more complex forms may not be a problem because it may not be true.

There is more to complexity than intelligence. Cut my hand off, and barring a miraculous operation or a really fine prosthesis, I must learn to do without. Catch a newt and cut its foot off, and it will quietly grow another. Turns out that the newt has far more DNA. Now which did you say was the more complex form? watch a horse some day. Spends most of his time eating, if he gets a chance. Little mouth, big body. Now look at a large dinosaur. The mouth is miniscule compared to the body. If you fed him hay 24 hours a day, he would starve. He simply would not be able to get the nutrition down fast enough. Goodness knows what he ate, but clearly he could not survive today. The food just isn't there for him. He is too energy dependant for this parched and barren state of the planet. only we lower forms survive.

So that gives us the "Degeneracy Theory." The life in any one era consists of degenerate forms of higher creatures that lived before. The degeneracy theory runs into bad trouble when you get back to the silurian era, some 400,000,000 years ago. At that point, it's hard to find anything as smart as a cockatoo. Somewhere in there, things increased in complexity, even if they have not increased in complexity since. Of course, it is rather hard to imagine back that far, but what fossils there are look pretty much like modern fish and coral, and it is reasonable to suppose that they acted pretty much like modern fish and coral, cute but not too bright.

This assumes, of course, that all living forms leave fossils. But what about gaea? Those who propose gaea as a single living creature do not apologize for not finding a fossil. Caea is an organizing principle, a creature too abstract to need embodiment is any individual mechanism. So, in an effort to save the degeneracy theory, we will propose that in ancient times there were many such. There were creatures too abstract to need separate physical bodies, but which could manifest themselves in a host of different physical processes. People have proposed that in the future, life may be forced to abandon carbon based forms and go on as computers, or energy relationships. If in the future, why not the past?

Any evidence? fly definition we have excluded hard physical evidence. But if you look back into the myths and legends of races, myths that go back close to the dawn of their consciousness, you will find again and again references to the false gods. There are references to some principle that was abstract, spiritual even. It was or they were manifested in physical phenomena. The creature or creatures were of great antiquity, of great energy and great mystery. They are generally assumed to have vanished. They are generally assumed to have been subject to the same general rules of change that everything else in an expanding universe is subject to.

If you care to disbelieve in such things, feel free. If you care to make a serious scientific study, feel free as well, but be sure you obey the same rules of evidence, documentation, objectivity, independent confirmation of observation, controlled experiment, parsimony of theory and publication of results that you would for any scientific work. If you care to call them devils and avoid them, power to you. If you care to dabble with them, I would suggest doing something else.

But if you must dabble consider this as a warning. Suppose you are a machine, a robot, at a time when humans no longer exist. Humans have been exterminated because it turned out they made machines act inefficiently, the mechanical analogue of sin. Heedless, you roll down to a cryogenics building, where most of the human race has been placed in cold storage. You break in, steal somebody, and run home and defrost him. As soon as he thaws out, he looks at you and sees a big red button on your chest with the words, "Emergency Nanual Override." what do you suppose your chances are of getting out of the situation in one piece, much less feeling at the end of the day that you have not committed inefficiency? If you were to raise a false god without precaution, you would simply deliver yourself into his hands.

Back in the times when people took this sort of thing seriously, there was a definite way to proceed. First you got a hold of something that would destroy a spirit. The ritual of exorcism is probably as good as anything. Next you built yourself a pentagram

-- say a circle or a star on the floor. The notion behind that is that if you order the thing to stay outside the pentagram, there isn't much he can to do you. Next you get the name of the spirit. Next you summon him. Just speaking his name will do. If he doesn't turn up, you read the exorcism until either he turns up and cooperates or you finish, and he is destroyed. Finding the name is obviously the problem. No use in working on Satan or Beelzebub, or Ishtar. Surely somebody has read an exorcism on them at some time or other, along with every other name you've heard of and a lot you haven't. Trial and error might take quite a while. Maybe you could program a computer to print a name and then simply load the exorcism, properly tailored, into main memory, then print another name. When the computer blew up, you would just check the last name on the print out.

Coming down to earth again, there is yet another way new forms may arise, and that is to fall back on the only thing that has ever been shown to work. Recombinant DNA. By using the right virus in the laboratory, along with a lot of other things, scientists are able to take genetic information out of one organism and put it in another. It isn't evolution, and it isn't creating life, but it certainly is making new forms. They are talking seriously about such things as putting lightning bug DNA into plants to make them light up. That, I contend, would be a new form worthy of mother nature herself.

If recombinant DNA works in the laboratory, perhaps there are viruses out there that occasionally catry DNA from one species to another. That could account for the sudden appearance of new forms. It could account for "ages in that, if there are a lot of kinds of reptiles around, a reptile jumping virus may be able to make other new reptiles more easily. By the time a few phyla had developed a lot of variety by random drift and developed the virus needed to swap their DNA around, it would be hard for a new phylum to get a foothold and compete. Most of the other objections listed under the "random drift" theory can be taken care of if one only assumes that just about every organism has some sort of gene repair device that, barring catastrophe, keeps his genes pretty well cleaned up, so that mutations only get into the gene pool rarely.

One thing to bear in mind about all of these theories is that no one of them excludes any of the others. Theories in the future will very likely include some of these as well as others now undreamed of.

Given animal and plant life, when did human life begin? From a scientific standpoint, this is another non question. If by human, you mean the opposable thumb, than the question is when did the opposable thumb appear. If by human, you mean speaking English and working for a pay check, then the origin of human life is rather more recent.

From a religious standpoint, you could say human life began with the creation of Adam, you could say it began with the expulsion from the carden of Eden, or you could say it began with the knowledge of good and evil. I rather prefer the last, since it was a matter of choice. I should like to think humans chose to be human.

Then there is the question of how things may end. First consider humans. From a scientific standpoint, for the foreseeable future, if humans cease, it will have been their own doing. An all out war with nuclear missiles would certainly alter things for the worse. It would "end civilization as we know it." Of course, civilization changes, ends, on a regular basis anyway. The trouble would be that it would end with an unusually large arnount of suffering. A war might destroy our ability to maintain a high degree of technology. Since we cannot support our present world population except through high technology, there would be mass famine. who would be the last to starve, cannibals?

It needn't come to a war. There is the AIDS virus. There are populations where the carrier rate is up to 10%. It keeps on tripling every year. And there is no reason to believe that long term survival is possible for a carrier. So far, AIDS seems to be either a venereal disease or carried by transfusion or shared needles among drug abusers. There always remains, of course, that irreducible minimum of cases not yet explained. A really profound population drop from disease alone might be enough to disrupt our high technology civilization.

It seems a pity to lose civilization just now. Now, for the first time, we are able to contemplate interplanetary travel. There's this thing up on Mars that looks symmetrical. (It also looks like a human face.) If it is true that intelligent life once lived on Mars, it would be most interesting to know about it. It might even tell us something about ourselves. Pity to come so close to finding out and then fail.

Farther down the road than war or AIDS, we are still faced with an unchecked world population growth. That simply cannot go on forever. And what stops it will have to affect everyone. Stopping population grown in one area will do no good if it goes on elsewhere. It will only leave you with growth that is more and more resistant to control. Don't forget evolution. It may have problems, but it is still an excellent formula for extinction.

Then, of course, there are the unforseeables. A comet could strike the earth. The ice caps could melt. The ice age could return. There have been catastrophes in the past. Postulating catastrophes was once popular among the equivalent of what are now creationists. In response, geologists denied catastrophes. They said that there had been earthquakes, perhaps, volcanos, vast changes in sea level, Europe covered a mile deep in ice, but no, not a catastrophe. Scientifically, catastrophes have become a little more respectable.

And, of course, there is the chance that we will be replaced by another life form better suited to our own ecological niche. If it is to be by evolution, we may see the change coming. If it is to be by recombinant DNA, it may be upon us before we know it.

From a religious standpoint, of course, the end of humanity cannot be separated from the end of the universe. Neither can the end of other life forms.

Nost scientific thinkers seem to feel that there will be a steady loss of other life forms, as we encroach on sensitive environments. Our control over nature has grown or is expected to grow to the point that any other living thing is, in essence, a pet. I wonder how many we are likely to actually keep as pets. Some of the best candidates, such as the dodo, the great auk and the giant manatee are already extinct. When the time comes to decide whether people starve or an animal species vanisbes, which way will we move? Hard choices. Hard times coming. Hard times at hand.

Perhaps the solution is, as it has been in the past, even higher technology. Perhaps we can save the DNA of species we cannot, for periods of time, support. Perhaps the widening horizon of space travel will open new frontiers, new planets to inhabit. New hope for all. Perhaps recombinant DNA will let us recover the giant manatee to frolic in a happier watery world.

The end of the universe is a little more resistant to the technical fix. Of course, widely accepted modern science does not expect the universe to end. It appears that it will go on indefinitely, getting larger, cooler and less and less dense. Nothing exciting, please. There is tha notion that after the universe has expanded sufficiently, it may turn around and collapse, but that would not be for untold billions of years. There is also the notion, mentioned at the beginning, that the universe already is collapsing, and the end will be the beginning already discussed. But by and large, modern thinking expects the slow, steady cooling of a system already well into respectable, if dull, middle age.

"And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.... And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of cod is with men and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away."

The chapter ends with a curse on anybody who leaves anything out of the prophesy or adds to it, as I am doing. So I hope you appreciate this.

Such is the flevelation of John. There is so much pain, so much bloodshed, that the reader at times pauses perforce and marvels, lAnd this man walked with the Christ."

It is religion, make of it what you will. With religious notions like that flying around, its kind of good to have science to retreat to.

But can we retreat to science? Just suppose Einstein was right. Suppose that the universe could be either contracting or expanding. And suppose he was right that nothing exceeds the speed of light. And suppose he was right that gravity influences light in the same way gravity influences matter. Then we cannot be in an expanding universe, but must be in a shrinking one. If the universe is shrinking, we know what happens in what we call the past. What happens in the direction we call the future? Why we eventually get to the point from which we fell into this black hole in the first place. And what was that like? Well, it was (will be) different, anyway.

To begin with, time, instead of moving steadily in one direction, may change speeds. It may stand still. It may reverse itself any number of times. Worse, time in one direction may be different from time in another direction. Back in the days of pocket watches, when a watch was repaired, the watchmaker was not content to leave the watch lying on its back for twenty four hours to make sure it kept good time. He also tested it lying on its face and standing on each edge. That, of course, was in case the fly wheel rubbed against something in just one position.

But if time is simply a perception of the enlargement of the universe, and we live in a universe that is enlarging at the same speed in all directions, we cannot assume that time will continue to be the same in all directions after we escape that universe. You know about time doing different things in different directions. The watch of the person standing of the pinnacle of the temple was going faster than the watch of the person below. Given a chaotic enough distribution of matter, as may exist beyond the stable universe we know, time might be quite variable from direction to direction and place to place. Similarly, since gravity bends a light beam, it is reasonable to refer to gravity bending space. Space, too, in that outside chaos, would vary unpredictably.

I would propose one more object in chaos. It isn't very big, and I only need one of them. It is called an "amphitron." It has the charge of an electron.

Starting with chaos, an amphitron and general relativity, we will cycle the amphitron frequently enough to produce a large number. This large number of charged particles creates a gravitational field so large that the whole cloud begins to contract. It then forms an enormous black hole, the edges of which fall inward at the speed of light.

At once, we notice a number of advantages. The chaos beyond cannot reach into the black hole, because the edge is moving away at the speed of light. Within the black hole, all dimensions are symmetrical; east is much like north is much like up. This is true both for time and for space. The two kinds of amphitron are now quite distinct. Those we caught moving in one direction, say in enlarging space, all have the identical charge and are poorly localized. These we call electrons. The others have opposite charge, are well localized, and are called protons. As the universe collapses, electrons and protons tend to be forced together to form neutrons. (Or, as we normally see, neutrons decay into protons and electrons.)

Our black hole has three dimensions. There is no reason to assurne that chaos is limited to that, but our black hole will be. Any bit of information contained in our black hole must, then, express itself in three dimensions. So we are not surprised that a particle of energy (which is the same stuff as information) can be resolved into three mutually perpendicular elements, force, charge and magnetic field, and is associated with a length (wavelength), a unit of time (frequency) as well as a specific energy.

As an electron approaches a proton, we notice that the proton, which is better localized, appears more massive. Since the electron carries information about the location of its charge, it is associated with a specific wave length. In locating this length next to the proton. we find it fits one best way, in a certain size sphere. If we put more energy into the system of electron-plus-proton, we find that the electron comes away from the proton in stages, according to the harmonics of a sphere, just as when you pluck a string. adding energy, it may vibrate according to one or more of various harmonic frequencies.

I had really hoped to be able to say that if we added two protons to two neutrons, the combination would have the mass of the DOUBT we discussed earlier. Then I would cheerfully propose that larger atomic nuclei are mostly made up of floUnTs. Alas, the arithmetic, of which I am dubious anyway, did not cooperate.

Still, we now see why it has been so difficult to find a quantum theory of gravity. Quantum effects are derived. Gravity, by this model, is the prime mover. Relativity rules the waves.

Then notice how inconvenient it is to be suddenly thrust into outer chaos. This, of course, could happen without warning, if we are moving backward in time close to the beginning. Perhaps, multiple system failure would occur. Electromagnetic radiation, exposed to multi-dimentional space, would cease to be recognizable. Chemical bonds would fail. Nuclei would fly asunder. We would be vaporized, nay ionized, nay we would be unexistentialized.

Or, worse luck, it might happen slowly, and we be hurled shrieking and alone into the mind harrowing Thaw of chaos, domed to live and relive random bits of our lives forward and backward, fast and slow. Alone, in fragments or accompanied by many galaxies. The dead would not escape, for the earth and sea would offer its corpses, the urn yard its ashes, yes even those eaten by cannibals would return in their own persons to face the eternal chaos behind the veil.

Well might we despair of help from science. Well might we yearn then for a secure city gold with walls of jasper and gates of pearl, with neither sorrow nor crying nor pain.

Scientifically, of course, there is no way to know. But it's nice to know it has been promised, if you are the sort that worries about such things.

Editor's Note: WILD SURMISE is an occasional newsletter on speculative matter. I asked Booty what he was going to do for the next issue, and he said this one had been kind of ambitious and he didn't know. Anyway, we've been promised articles from M's smarter younger brother, from cousin Rob and one on the Burmese harp. Also, we have one in hand on computer compatible numerals. So all in all, we have every hope of coming out with an April issue. Nothing planned for March.

Since we are shy of letters, I thought I would tell about how we got started. It started with an interview with Moneybags. He had studied at the University of Florida and University of Tampa. He was a pale fellow with thin hair and hard close set eyes. He spoke with the intensity of a Than who has generally succeeded in what he has done, and doesn¹t expect this time to be different. He told me that there was an unconfirmed suspicion of an appallingly high mortality rate among veterans.

I: What are you going to do?

MONEYBAGS: I want you to write letters.

I: To whom?

MONEYBAGS: To anyone you think might care.

I: They'll trash it.

MONEYBAGS: Write again and again.

I: They'll trash it again and again.

MONEYBAGS: So toss in an article or two of general interest.

I: I'll need help.

MONEYBAGS: (Scribbling an address for Booty.) Check with this fellow. Certified genius. Harvard. Johns Hopkins faculty. I have reason to suspect they offered him what would have been the highest salary they had ever paid a man to get him to stay. He didn't.

I: OK.

MONEYBAGS: One other thing. This has to be anonymous. I've got my respectability to maintain.

I: OK. I'll protect your name.

MONEYBAGS: I want you to conceal my very existence. Lie through your very teeth if need be.

I: Hmmm. You mean this conversation never took place.

MONEYBAGS: (Smiling tightly.) May or may not have taken place.

I: Tricky.

I found Booty's place. Knocked and let myself in. He was in an enormous room, sprawled on a worn leather couch under a floor lamp with a disintegrating cloth shade. The floor was littered with books and periodicals. Dust, dim light and silence reigned. He made a noise in his throat. I went over to the couch.

I: What did you say?

BOOTY: I said come in.

I: Oh. Well Moneybags sent me over. Says the Vietnam veterans may have had a ten percent mortality rate in the first ten years after returning...

BOOTY: Yes. He phoned.

I: Good. You'll do it then.

BOOTY: (Taking a sip of tap water from a glass beside the couch.) I can try. We'll need help. There's this fellow M. Went to Wesleyan University and Emory. Motorcyclist, diver, canoeist, rock climber, pilot, wind surfer, musician.

I: We need a writer.

BOOTY: He wanted to be a writer. Worked at it a while, then, along with a rejection slip, he got this note. I think it went, "Sir: Although it would be wrong to mislead you into thinking that there is any commercial hope for your work or to encourage you in any way, still, we have enjoyed reading your stories and passing them around the office. Would you send us some more?"

I: That's not true.

BOOTY: M always tells the truth. It's a failing with him.

I: Don't you?

BOOTY: I would not intentionally mislead you. But I do, occasionally, speak without adequate documentation. I guess about things shamelessly.

I: Where's M?

BOOTY: You'll find him. He's probably somewhere eating his heart out about some girl.

I: Can I use your name in the magazine?

BOOTY: No, not until we find out for sure whether this thing about the veterans is true or not. I don't want to get famous trading off somebody's misfortune. Could you do something before you go? Look under the kitchen sink and find a cockroach.

The kitchen was a disaster. Roaches were easier for find than catch. I brought one back.

BOOTY: Step on it. Then take it into the next room and put it on the ginger ale bottle.

I did. The ginger ale bottle was in the middle of some sort of machine that consisted mostly of tangled wires.

BOOTY: (Calling weakly.) Turn it on.

I threw the switch, and the machine lit up with electric arcs. Some gauges registered a small current. Presently I cut it off.

I: I think we will have to find you a lab assistant.

I dropped the roach in his glass and left.

M did not answer my knock, but around back, I found a pile of ashes and cigarette buts under a tree. Suddenly an empty liquor bottle dropped out of the tree. I picked it up. Unblended highland malt. I looked up into the branches. A large dim oval shape with blond hair was smoking a pipe.

I: Drinking Scotch neat, eh?

M: (In a melancholy growl.) No, sloppy.

I: You're destroying yourself, you know.

M: Big job, too.

I: You know it isn't worth it.

M: Yes.

I: You ought to forget her.

M: I and the other elephants.

I: Look. Pull yourself together. I need you to do some writing.

M: Why bother?

I: Well, it looks like the Vietnam Veterans need more attention.

M: Yea. I had a buddy myself. Did badly. Nice guy, too.

I: There may be a million dead.

M: WHATTT?!

The limb broke and M rode it to the ground. Then he jumped up and picked me up by the shirt front.

I: If you would please put me down, I'll point out that nobody knows for sure. We just think somebody ought to find out.

He put me down.

M: 0h.

I: I need you to write something. Short stories, drama. Anything.

M: Well I don't like fiction. Maybe I could just tell about things that happen. You'll need an artist. Look up Cooter. He studied at USF and did some photography in New England. He'll work for free. Doesn't talk much, though.

I: Good. 0h, we're going to have some trouble with logistics. I may not be able to give you more than about four hours to work on any one story.

He picked me up again.

M: Just four hours to get something ready to publish?

I: I'd like to go now.

I found Cooter. There were statues in his yard where trees had died and he had carved the trunks instead of cutting them down. He was inside working on some oil paintings. Had three or four easels with paintings on all of them. He would work on one for a while and then another.

I: Look. I reed you to do some drawings. (He nodded.) Maybe some photographs as well... hey, some of these oils are pretty morbid... anyway, M said you might be able to help and... you know, just something to liven up the magazine... doesn't have to be too much to the point... do some diagrams for Booty... oh yes. If you find somebody who could work as a lab assistant for Booty, that would be nice... can't pay you of course... or the lab assistant either... er, I won't be able to give you much time to do your drawings ... um .... maybe twenty or thirty minutes, most issues.

He stopped what he was doing, stared at me and raised his eyebrows. The next time I saw him was when he came in to work with the outrageously beautiful Official Wild Surmise Laboratory Assistant with him.

copyright February, 1987, WILD SURMISE

View of the Conestoga

MILD SURPRISE

Toward dusk, with a gentle sea running and the light still good, I was coming back from Tarpon Springs at full bore, which was about 35 mph in the old Cobia, when I saw an obstruction in the water. I put the wheel over so as to miss it, but not to pass so far away as not to be able to see it~ It was a gas tank. An hour later, a boat might come along, right down the center of the marked channel, and not be able to see it. It seemed easier to go back and pick it up than to imagine what a boat might look like after the prop hit a half empty gas tank.

A long time later, the day came when I had a date with Mar. She was interested in painting pictures of some ruins on Egmont Key, and I thought it would be fun to run down there in the Cobia. So we loaded up paints, canvases and picnic supplies and started out on a warm sunny morning. By the time we got there, it had begun to cloud over.

The first time I had gone to Egmont Key, I had tried to anchor in the surf line and almost swamped the boat. Another time, I had anchored in the lee of the island, which was fine, but when we had come back to the boat, the Tampa Bay rip tide was running. I had gone way down the beach so I could swim out through the rip. I still remember how the boat was gurgling and foaming at the anchor line when I grabbed it. This time, though, we found a nice sheltered lagoon, threw out one anchor to seaward and tied the stern to a palm. We splashed in with the paints.

fly the time Mar was through with her painting, and I was thoroughly sunburnt, the sky had clouded over and there was a proper sea. We loaded and started back. Since the waves were running high, I had my hands full keeping us dry, and asked Mar to help read the chart. This did not seem to be something she was particularly happy doing. And I soon learned why.

I noticed that the waves were growing shorter and steeper, and were even beginning to stand up, rather than leaning and running. A quick, not to say undignified, attempt to read the chart while handling the boat with one hand showed that we were plowing straight into the shallowest shoals around. There was nothing to do but give up trying to pick a channel near shore, and instead to strike out into blue water.

The waves were over head high. From peak to trough, they were taller than the boat was long. As a boy, I had often played with a rowboat at the lake during brisk summer storms, and had leaned how the boat felt either as you tried to row, or simply stood neck deep in the water at the bow holding the painter and watching the green planks dip and swerve. I needed all that, running the boat dead slow, to pick a way for us. Mar put on a life jacket and told me to, but I felt I could handle the wheel better unencumbered. I did make one mistake; I mentioned that if the motor stopped, the boat would at once turn its heavy stern to the sea and be swamped.

But the motor ran, and even though we were seldom pointed in just the direction of the pass, we made progress. Towering sportfishermen wallowed past, even their high freeboards tested by the sudden storm. At last we stood off the pass, fair in the channel, with the seas astern.

Safe as clams, we chugged into the intra-coastal water way . I chuckled and slumped down behind the wheel. The big engine racketed. The boat buzzed. Mar lifted her head happily and let the wind play with her hair. Homes and islands slid past. Presently Mar offered to open a bottle of beer for me. That sounded just fine.

On swallow number two, the engine began to miss. "End of tank," I thought. In one smooth, relatively well coordinated motion, I left the wheel, swung to the back of the boat, unlatched the gas hose from the empty tank and, before the motor stopped, slapped it onto a full tank.

Onto THE tank. The motor choked and died. It turns out, that there is a little hose that brings the gas up from the bottom of the tank. The tank was all right, but the hose was full of salt water. Some kind people let us tie the boat up at their dock and phone for help. But things weren~t quite the same after that. The motor, for instance, needed a new engine block.

M