Phobos: Mayan Fear by Steve Alten Read Free Book Online Page A

for two; if I were you, I would choose carefully between your wife and Italian mistress.”
    She wipes the blade clean on Donald Engle’s corpse, then whips it at Devlin, who snags it, his limb moving so fast it is undetected by Mulder’s eyes.
    “Find Immanuel Gabriel and bring him to me, and you can add your two children to the voyage. Those are my terms, Mr. Mulder. Accept it, or join Mr. Engle on his unscheduled three-week holiday.”

The Final Papers of Julius Gabriel, PhD

    Cambridge University archives

    AUGUST 23, 2001

    I f you believe in the existence of a supreme being, then I pose to you that the End of Days, though instigated by man, must surely be a supernal event to come, for how could any power in this physical universe be greater than God? This conclusion naturally raises the follow up question: why would God allow man to destroy what He created?
    In order to understand and therefore prevent a Doomsday Event, we need to ask an even more important question: why were we created in the first place?
    For the moment, let us eliminate God from the creation equation. From a purely scientific perspective, we now know that the Big Bang begat the physical universe, that the physical universe birthed galaxies and solar systems and planets—one of which was our own superhot volcanic world. The Earth cooled and developed an atmosphere through asteroid bombardment over millions of years, each space rock containing molecules of life-giving H 2 O. Gradually the planet cooled and the oceans and atmosphere formed, and then, some three-and-a-half billion years later, life took hold in the sea through a combination of chemical reactions and perhaps a random stroke of lightning. Another billion years of trial and error birthed more complex organisms, evolving into oxygen-producing coral, trilobites, and fish. Amphibians charted the land, becoming reptiles and dinosaurs … and a fragile new class of life form evolved: mammals.
    And then, sixty-five million years ago, another seemingly random sequence of cause and effect unfolded with the arrival of a seven-mile-in-diameter asteroid, which struck our planet in the Gulf of Mexico near the future Yucatan Peninsula. The cosmic collision enveloped the Earth’s atmosphere in dust, blotting out the sunlight and warmth. Photosynthesis ceased, the ensuing ice age wiping out the dinosaurs. When the sun returned, the planet had reshuffled its deck, allowing our surviving mouselike mammal ancestors to evolve into primates: a missing link away from primordial man, which eventually became Homo sapiens sapiens —modern man.
    While this reverse-engineered scientific method offers us a convenient hook upon which to hang our hat, it does little to help us understand who made the hat or why He needed a hat in the first place. And so man invented religion, and religion gave us a “Big Guy in the Sky,” along with war and hatred and all the other wonderful things our egos demanded as we set out to force others into believing which “Big Guy” was the right Big Guy to believe in. And yes, since religion required organizations and establishments from which to pray, money was required. Not just tithing to help the poor, but endowments and donations to seed seats of great power and political influence, along with inquisitions and crusades. Because there’s nothing more spiritually uplifting than torturing and robbing and massacring your fellow human beings in the name of God and patriotism—those annoying ten commandments be damned.
    But again, we have no concept of why our Big Guy created us, or why we’re here, or why our species is so prone to doing everything counter to what formalized religion tells us we’re supposed to do—namely, love one another.
    Raised a Christian, I questioned religious dogma, but was more than willing to sprinkle a “supreme being” over my theories of evolution, mostly because my donors felt more comfortable signing their checks to a “God-fearing