Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer Read Free Book Online

archeological dig near Abu Simbel.
    A sixth was in northern Pakistan, examining flowers and trees.
    Another was seen variously walking around the sites of the old death camps in Germany, scuttling through Tiananmen Square, and visiting the ruins in Kosovo.
    And, thankfully, one more had made himself available in Brussels to speak with media from all over the world. He seemed to be fluent in English, French, Japanese, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), Hindi, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, and more (and managed to mimic British, Scottish, Brooklyn, Texan, Jamaican, and other accents, depending on whom he was speaking to).
    Even so, no end of people wanted to speak with me. Susan and I had an unlisted phone number. We’d gotten it a few years ago after some fanatics started harassing us following a public debate I’d had with Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research. Still, we had to unplug our phone; it had started ringing as soon as the item appeared on the news. But to my surprise and delight I managed to get a good night’s sleep.
    The next day, there was a huge crowd outside the museum when I emerged from the subway around 9:15 A.M.; the museum wouldn’t be open to the public for another forty-five minutes, but these people didn’t want to see the exhibits. They were carrying signs that read “Welcome to Earth!” and “Take Us With You!” and “Alien Power!”
    One of the throng spotted me, shouted and pointed, and people started moving my way. Fortunately, it was only a short distance from the staircase leading up from the subway to the ROM’s staff entrance, and I made it inside before I could be accosted.
    I hurried up to my office and placed the golf-ball-sized holoform projector on the center of my desk. About five minutes later, it bleeped twice, and Hollus—or the holographic projection of him, at any rate—appeared in front of me. He had a different cloth wrapped around his torso today: this one was a salmon color with black hexagons on it, and it was fastened not with a jeweled disk but a silver pin.
    “I’m glad to see you again,” I said. I’d been afraid, despite what he’d said yesterday, that he’d never come back.
    “If” “it” “is” “per” “mis” “able,” said Hollus, “I” “will” “appear” “daily” “about” “this” “time.”
    “That would be absolutely terrific,” I said.
    “Establishing that the dates for the five mass extinctions coincided on all three inhabited worlds is only the beginning of my work, of course,” said Hollus.
    I thought about that, then nodded. Even if one accepted Hollus’s God hypothesis, all that having simultaneous disasters on multiple worlds proved was that his God had thrown a series of hissy fits.
    The Forhilnor continued. “I want to study the minute details of the evolutionary developments related to the mass extinctions. It appears superficially that each extinction was designed to nudge the remaining lifeforms in specific directions, but I wish to confirm that.”
    “Well, then, we should start by examining fossils from just before and just after each of the extinction events,” I said.
    “Precisely,” said Hollus, his eyestalks weaving eagerly.
    “Come with me,” I said.
    “You have to take the projector with you, if I am to follow,” said Hollus.
    I nodded, still getting used to this idea of telepresence, and picked up the small object.
    “It will work fine if you place it in a pocket,” he said.
    I did so, and then led him down to the paleobiology department’s giant collections room, in the basement of the Curatorial Centre; we didn’t have to go out into any of the public areas of the museum to get there.
    The collections room was full of metal cabinets and open shelving holding prepared fossils as well as countless plaster field jackets, some still unopened half a century after they’d been brought to the museum. I started by pulling out a drawer containing skulls of