“So where did it come from?” Ethan asked.
“Stars,” Hassim replied. “They all form from interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas that collapse under their own gravity, creating pressure and heat within. When the core of the cloud gets hot enough, it shines with nuclear fusion, just as our sun does now. What’s happening inside is that the hydrogen fuel is being converted into heat and light as atoms of hydrogen fuse together under the immense gravitational pressure: fusion. The thing is, when this occurs, only a small percentage of the mass of each atom is released. The rest remains within, and so the two nuclei fuse and create a new element, helium.”
“Which was already present in the universe,” Rachel said.
“Yes,” Hassim agreed. “From this process, a helium core grows inside the star, and when it’s big enough, it too begins burning with nuclear fusion, creating carbon. In stars, the deeper you go, the heavier the elements you find being created, all the way up to iron, if the star is large enough. When these stars exhaust all of their fuel, they blast their material out into space in supernova explosions to become part of the interstellar medium from which new stars are made. As the heavier elements build up in space after each generation, so the next generation of stars have an abundance of heavy elements that form planets and comets and asteroids in orbit around them: the things that we’re made from.”
Rachel blinked in surprise. “That’s where the Earth came from?”
“Yes,” Hassim said. “The process is called nucleosynthesis. This is where you get the sodium in common salt, the neon in fluorescent lights, and the magnesium in fireworks, not to mention the zinc in your hair, the calcium in your bones, and the carbon in your brain. The iron in the hemoglobin in your blood shares the same origin as the iron in the rocks of our planet. In your body there’s enough iron to make a three-inch nail, enough carbon to make nine hundred pencils, enough phosphorous to make two thousand match heads, and enough water to fill a ten-gallon tank. We are all chemical beings.”
“And all of this is ‘old news’?” Ethan asked.
“The physics behind all of this was worked out in the 1950s and early 1960s, using Einstein’s general relativity,” Hassim said. “Scientists like Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, and William Fowler did all the calculations long ago, and they’ve all been proven right with further actual observation of the stars using spectroscopy. William Fowler won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for the work done. But it’s generally unknown within the public domain, and powerful faith movements prefer it to remain so. Their beliefs are all based upon a human-centric view of the universe, but nucelosynthesis proves that all life is merely a product of natural processes and not unusual or even unique to our world, their disinformation just a smoke screen to deceive the public.”
“But why does that make Lucy’s discovery so important to you?” Rachel asked.
“For two reasons,” Hassim explained. “Firstly, if genetic material from the remains that Lucy found can be extracted and analyzed, it may show what evolutionary path life has followed through natural selection on other worlds. And secondly, it proves what we already suspect: that life is as common as the stars that fuel its existence.”
“Several hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone,” Rachel murmured, “and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.”
Ethan began to realize the scope of what Hassim was saying, and suddenly the existence of extraterrestrials didn’t seem quite so ridiculous after all.
Rafael slipped through the door of the building and closed it behind him. An archaic iron lock protruded from the door. On an impulse he turned the key, locking the door from the inside, and slipped it into his pocket before taking in his surroundings.
Musty odors of dust and desiccated soil stained the air; chunks of dislodged masonry and shattered bricks littered the floor. Letting his eyes adjust before daring to move, he saw the faint outlines of a crumbling stairwell leading up and away to his left, and a narrow corridor ahead of him that led into the gloomy depths of the building.
He was about to venture forward into the corridor when he noticed a single door to his left, just before the stairwell. It stood ajar, and he crept toward it, reaching for his knife before swinging the door open.
A large gib frame stood in the center of the room. Atop the frame was a barrel-sized coil of thick rope, from the end of which dangled a heavy iron hook. To Rafael’s right, an unused diesel generator crouched above patches of fuel staining the dusty floorboards.
Rafael edged forward, and in the dim light he saw a large rectangular hole hewn from the living earth, an impenetrable blackness that plunged to unknown depths beneath the city. On the far side of the hole, a rope ladder was tied to two stakes driven deep into the earth, the ladder vanishing down into the darkness.
Rafael squatted at the edge of the tunnel entrance and listened intently.
No sound emanated from within, although he could feel the hot air from the underground tunnels wafting toward him as though the ancient soil was breathing. He knew that there would be other entrances and exits from this tunnel, providing some meager ventilation to those hiding or incarcerated within.
He closed his eyes, orienting himself within the building to the street outside, picturing the layout of the nearby streets. He recalled the single glowing streetlight perhaps a hundred yards to his left. Power was intermittent in Gaza and electricity cables were often run directly down the tunnels by insurgents, using either the grid or generators to supply light to the depths. This tunnel would most likely pass close by the streetlight, an easy point at which to tap into the electricity supply. From there, he suspected that a row of buildings on the opposite side of the street provided a likely termination point, an escape route for Hamas fighters fleeing an Israeli assault.
Rafael pocketed his blade and moved around to the ladder, carefully testing its strength before lowering himself into the darkness.
The remains Lucy found were similar to humans,” Rachel said. “You think that life on other planets is like life on Earth?”
Hassim Khan shook his head.
“That’s unlikely. Life on other planets will endure differing environments. If a planet orbiting another star was more massive than Earth, then its gravity would be correspondingly higher, resulting in species of a more muscular build to counter their increased weight on such a planet. That could match the physicality of the species Lucy found.”
“But it looked almost human to me,” Ethan said, “just a lot bigger. Surely that can’t be possible on an entirely different planet?”
“Evolution often follows certain paths,” Hassim explained. “There are facets of biological species that often appear as a result of natural selection, especially in predatory species. Limbs, eyes, ears, grasping hands and so on appear frequently in the fossil record. There is no reason to think that this would not occur on other planets too.”
Ethan sat in thought for a moment.
“Do you think that genetic material could be extracted from Lucy’s find?”
“Almost certainly.” Hassim nodded. “Researchers have successfully extracted intact blood cells from a Tyrannosaurus rex bone some sixty-five million years old. The remains that Lucy found were only seven thousand years old. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were able to recover organic material from it, maybe even intact DNA.”
“Which would confirm the idea of life forming on a universal theme,” Ethan guessed.
Hassim smiled.
“The origin of life among the stars as a universal and not a local event,” Hassim agreed. “It’s known as panspermia.”
“You mean that we didn’t evolve on Earth?” Rachel stammered.
“Oh, we evolved here all right,” Hassim corrected. “But the very things we are made of did not, and that may include life in all of its self-replicating glory. It has been known for some time that when giant stars die in supernova explosions, the material they release in the cooling conditions contain car
bon grains, and that particles of other chemical elements attach themselves to the tiny grains and react enthusiastically with each other. These carbon grains were given a name: stardust.”
“Grains?” Ethan asked. “Like sand?”
“Much smaller,” Hassim said. “Spectroscopic studies of these star-remnant molecular clouds have found there the presence of methanimine, formaldehyde, formic acid, amine groups, and long-chain hydrocarbons caught within their veils. These are the building blocks of life: methanimine is an ingredient in amino acids; formic acid is the chemical that insects use as venom and is also the stinging ingredient in nettles. Both are polyatomic organic molecules that combine to form the amino acid glycine, which has since been seen in molecular clouds in deep space and found in comets by NASA in 2009, and amino acids are one step away from life itself.”
“And that’s without planets forming?” Rachel asked.
“Yes,” Hassim said. “Ultraviolet radiation bathes the clouds, heat from other nearby stars warms them, and all manner of chemical reactions occur. Frozen water, methanol, and ammonia rapidly form around the grains as the heat from the supernova fades. Trapped within these tiny cores the elements react and produce various polyatomic molecules. Experiments carried out in 2001 at NASA’s Ames Research Center confirmed these processes, when silicate grains covered in this kind of material were chilled to the temperature of deep space and suspended in ultraviolet light. When the organic compounds produced were immersed in water, membranous cell structures appeared spontaneously, as they may well have done on the young Earth: life, without supernatural intervention. All life on Earth is based on cells such as these, biological material encased in a membrane.”
“It all fits together,” Ethan said, genuinely amazed.
“That’s what science does. In 2002,” Hassim went on without missing a beat, “further experiments conducted with water, methanol, ammonia, and hydrogen cyanide found in molecular clouds discovered that three amino acids called glycine, serine, and alanine arose spontaneously within the containers. In another similar experiment, no less than sixteen amino acids and other organic compounds were produced under the conditions that exist between the stars using nothing more than the ingredients of molecular clouds. The proteins of all living things on Earth are composed of combinations of twenty amino acids.”
Ethan grasped where Hassim was going just before Rachel did.
“All life might be very similar in a fundamental way,” he said.
“Yes,” Hassim agreed, and tapped his own chest. “The chemical reactions that support metabolism in all of our bodies involve just eleven small carbon molecules such as acetic and citric acids. These eleven molecules would have been sufficient to produce chemical reactions that led to the development of biomolecules such as amino acids, lipids, sugars, and eventually early genetic molecules like RNA on Earth. Metabolism came first, the fuel for life, before cells or replication or anything else. Life then followed as a natural result of chemical metabolism. If it happened here on Earth, then it could happen anywhere on suitable planets harboring liquid water, and life might follow a similar path of evolutionary development that leads eventually to intelligence.”
Rachel caught on quickly.
“And if an intelligent species evolved on a planet reasonably close by, and was only ten thousand years more advanced than us …”
“Even a thousand years more advanced might do it,” Hassim said. “In two hundred years mankind has gone from wooden sailing ships and witchcraft to landing on the moon and nuclear power. Think what we could be like in another thousand years.”
“It would look like magic,” Ethan said, remembering Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law. “Or God. But could they be that much more advanced than us?”
“The universe has been producing stars for over thirteen billion years,” Hassim explained, “and the elements required for life have been in place within galaxies for at least eight billion years. By our planet’s timeline of evolution, it’s quite possible that advanced, intelligent life has existed in our universe for the past four billion years or so. The technology of such civilizations could be advanced on a scale completely unimaginable to us.”
“If so,” Ethan challenged, “then why would they bother with us at all?”
“We can only speculate,” Hassim admitted, “but such civilizations may well have been forced to travel through space as their parent stars aged and became unstable: the window in which our own Earth can support complex life is surprisingly short in cosmological terms, ending as the sun grows hotter and Earth is no longer able to harbor liquid water. However, although life may be common in the universe, intelligent life will be much rarer, and if you were an advanced race traveling the stars and found early humans struggling to survive after a climatic disaster, wouldn’t you be tempted to stop and help them or at least investigate?”
Rachel stood up, pacing again as she struggled with the consequences of her newfound knowledge.
“But if this actually happened, surely our ancestors with their newly acquired skills might have recorded it better, in more detail?”
“Perhaps they did,” Hassim said. “But we haven’t learned to recognize the signs for what they are yet.”
“How do you mean?” Ethan asked.
“Imagine,” Hassim suggested, “that you’re living in ancient Egypt, before the pyramids or technology, and down from the skies come beings that reveal great knowledge to you and then vanish again. As you struggle to capitalize upon this new knowledge, would you not be tempted to beg them for help, to make contact again?”
“I guess so,” Ethan agreed.
“And how would you do that?” Hassim asked.
“I’d make a sign,” Ethan said cautiously, “in the ground or something.” Then he got it. “A big sign, big enough to see from the air.”
“Exactly,” Hassimm nodded. “You’d create megastructures, hoping that your mysterious flying benefactors would see them and return.”
Rachel seemed bemused.
“You’re talking about the pyramids, aren’t you?”
“Not just the pyramids,” Hassim replied. “Almost every major ancient megastructure, and I can prove it too. Have either of you heard of something called a cargo cult?”
Rachel was about to answer, but Mahmoud got up from the crate upon which he had been sitting and looked at her.
“Whatever your daughter was dabbling in, it is better left alone. There are some things we weren’t meant to see,” he warned before looking at Yossaf. “Time to check the tunnels.”
Ethan watched as the two Palestinians went in opposite directions.
“Why would MACE abduct Lucy when they could just have taken the remains and left her there?” he asked Hassim.
“The reason for that, my friend,” Hassim said, “is almost too horrific to speak of.”
Rafael crouched at the bottom of the ladder, enveloped in near pitch-blackness but for the glow of a low-watt lightbulb flaring some ten meters down the narrow, craggy walls of the tunnel.
He crept away from the ladder, careful to avoid the electrical cables secured with lengths of string that ran along the upper-left corner of the tunnel. The smuggling tunnels were periodically bombed by Israel, and as a result the Palestinians bothered little with such trivial concerns as electrical insulation.
The heat clung like a blanket to Rafael’s skin as he edged forward, holding his knife in a loose grip. He had no idea how many men might be hiding down in the tunnels, nor how they were armed. If he encountered anyone, they would have to be dispatched quickly and silently.
The harsh light of the bulb ahead obscured the tunnel beyond, preventing Rafael from seeing more distant threats. A small fly buzzed lazily around the light, entrapped beneath the earth. Rafael kept his gaze downward, sensing for movement ahead on the upper periphery of his vision as he ducked beneath the bulb. He crouched to avoid casting long shadows down the tunnel, and then peered ahead into the gloom.
P
erhaps five meters or so ahead the tunnel turned right, to where a faint patch of light glowed from some unseen source. Rafael observed a particularly large cable entombed in the wall of the tunnel and guessed he was beneath the streetlight he had seen, the tunnel’s electrical supply spliced into the mains. That would mean that the tunnel indeed terminated beneath the houses at the opposite end of the street. He recalled that several were abandoned buildings, the skeletal remains of Palestinian homes and businesses pounded into oblivion by Israel.
He crept toward the curve in the tunnel and was halfway there when a flicker of a shadow drifted across the patch of light. Rafael froze and crouched down again.
The shadow began moving toward him.
Then he heard the footfalls. Urgent synapses fired across his brain, thoughts too rapid to process yet crystalline in their clarity. The shadow moved toward me. Footsteps, heavy, male. Moving slowly.
A chunky figure with broad shoulders and a thick neck appeared in the tunnel, the unmistakable shape of an AK-47 rifle cradled loosely in his grip. Rafael crouched down, concealed in the darkness between the two light sources. Don’t move. Movement is much more dangerous than staying still.
The figure lumbered closer, the footfalls growing louder and heavier, thumping rhythmically with the rolling beats of Rafael’s heart. Move without fear, without tension, without compromise. Breathe. The body now blocked the light from beyond completely, looming to fill Rafael’s field of view.
He relaxed his body and mind, exhaling a ghost’s breath as he did so.
Rafael lunged upward and forward even as the man’s eyes registered the form crouched in the tunnel before him. Rafael’s blade flickered in the weak light and plunged into the man’s throat with a quiet, crisp rasp.
The man’s cry gargled somewhere below his thorax, lost forever as the blade crossed his windpipe and severed his spinal column just above the third vertebra. Rafael caught the man as he fell, his body crumpling onto the ground in the center of the tunnel. He quickly slammed his hand over the man’s bearded mouth, slipping the blade out of his throat as he yanked the head to one side and jabbed the steel upward into his skull. A faint crackling of splintered bone just behind and below the ear, and the body jerked with a series of diminishing spasms before falling still. The undignified odor of spilled feces tainted the hot, stale air as Rafael slipped the blade out of the lifeless skull.
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