SHERIDAN DERWYDD
Humanity produces some very unlikely looking people. Einstein, with his drawstring trousers and higher physics on the back of envelopes. Newton with his great ideas and greater professional paranoia. Henry Ford, the strange, usually misquoted[1], watchmaker. H.G. Wells, the rather improbable draper’s assistant. Teddy Roosevelt, the world’s first tree hugger. These highly idiosyncratic people were never going to fit a “normal” life. Their lives were their talents.
Life is talent. The truth about anyone is their personal ability. Whether that ability is ever used or not seems to be largely dependent on the vagaries of the human environment. It is obvious that the most productive people who have ever lived haven’t been totally prevented from using their talent. All inventions are the result of talent. You couldn’t have had the wheel without it.
Innovations don’t result from people doing nothing. This idea had eventually managed to find a place in education by the year 2102, after a century of playing with spreadsheets pretending to be training the next generations. There was finally some active interest in developing and promoting human talents from primary school on. That was the year Sheridan Derwydd was born. Sheridan, much to his highly undisguised disgust in later life, has been credited with being a main mover in the incredibly complex Martian exploration program. He says he was just the guy driving the bus for those decades. He credits his wife with what went right. His wife says that he ought to have been a green grocer.
The first thing his parents, Sydney and Matilda, noticed about Sheridan was that he was the only textbook birth in the history of the local hospital. A 25 minute labor. He was born before the doctor scrubbed up. He was suspiciously convenient to have around, for a newborn anything. He hardly cried at all, he was more regular than a phone bill, and he fed without fuss. He also slept a lot. Feeding sometimes involved waking him up. The doctor said that since he ate like a racehorse when awake, it was probably best for him to decide when to eat. He was a frighteningly healthy baby. The standard baby issues came and went so fast that they were sometimes gone before they got to the doctor.
Sydney went from a confused to a fanatical father. Matilda ran the reliable gamut from anticipatory horror to love. They were a pleasant couple. Sydney was a bookish person with a gift for logic and extrapolation. Matilda was a particularly quick, sensitive person with a deep receptivity for emotions and a passion for music. Everyone who knew them when they were single was entirely unsurprised when they married. They filled each other out. Sydney converted Matilda into a true literateuse, and Matilda had Sydney bewitched with Beijing Opera and some of the more esoteric avant garde music of the time. Matilda’s sensitivity and speed of thought were a great help to Syd’s incessantly active mind.
Syd was an English teacher, which wasn’t illegal, and Matilda a graphic artist of considerable talent and renown, which was then recently decriminalized. She was famous and wasn’t even remotely interested in the fact. Syd wasn’t famous and nobody was quite sure why. He seemed as though he should be. Matilda had pushed him into writing his first book,[2] which he began in the hazy days of her pregnancy. Sheridan’s arrival had added a lot to both parents, and they began to work with a power they’d never had before. Three happier people would have been very hard to find.
Sheridan began talking at six months. Syd and Matilda dropped everything for a while and decided to learn from this experience. His first word was “Book”. Within two weeks he was making sentences of a sort. In two months he was able to hold reasonably complex conversations. Matilda said some years later that he never learned to speak baby talk. His sentence construction was something neither of them had ever heard before. “To book” was the first expression of intent to do something he ever made. With a sort of ruthless logic came the next step, “From book”, referring to a source of information, a copy of The Oxford Nursery Rhymes with the original woodcuts. Sheridan was attempting to explain why he’d been trying to get their Pomeranian to play the flute. For a nine month old child it was a fairly convincing explanation.
Meanings in books were his next project. It was obvious that the things in the books meant something. He therefore insisted to be told what, and how to read them. His parents were a little nonplussed to discover they never needed to repeat anything to him. He was able to read at fifteen months. Writing was a little more difficult, having to learn the eye/hand and motor skills, but he painstakingly copied the letters in the books to the point he was actually doing calligraphy when he stumbled across one of Matilda’s reference books to Old Gothic Lettering.
Nobody is more open to their talents than a child. Had he been looking for two more committed people in terms of promotion of children’s talents he couldn’t have done better than his own parents. They were also very aware of the dangers of deforming young talent by pushing it into places it doesn’t want to go, or giving it a set of unworkable, over-weighted, priorities. Sheridan was supposed to be having fun, as well as learning. Voluntary learning is unbeatable. Syd had learned long ago that pushing compulsory boredom into young kids is a very thankless task. He’d hated the rubbish he was forced to read as a child, and was determined that his pupils would never suffer as he had. He’d been chastised for giving his students books that were “too hard for them”, and then, inevitably, praised for his groundbreaking work. In Syd’s opinion the real payoff was that his was the only class where everyone in it was getting straight A’s. He was also amused when the other teachers started to notice that the kids were now able to understand what they were saying.
Matilda had been watching bemusedly this triumphant foray by Sheridan into Syd’s territory, and the Gothic lettering had come as a sort of personal vindication on her side. So when her two year old son hijacked her computer and asked how it made all the colors and shapes, she’d been only too happy to show him the codes that ran the programs. This was the first time Sheridan had seen numbers at work. He understood page numbers, (it was how he taught himself to count) and basic addition, because he kept running into them so frequently in his reading. This was numbers making things that weren’t numbers, though, so Matilda found herself explaining basic code writing. The calculator function, inevitably, got roped in to this epic, and all in all it was an interesting couple of months. By then Sheridan was able to play with the copy of the code that Matilda had given him for his very own computer, and he rewrote the whole thing. He experimented by adding functions, changing characters, inventing shapes, and crashing the computer with a regularity that was impressive. This was Sheridan’s first encounter with the idea of syntax, and the eternal refrain of “syntax error line…” made a lasting impact.
After six months of this he was writing working code. His parents were slightly stunned by his patience. He had thrown very slight tantrums as a baby, but his reaction to frustrations and problems was utterly merciless. He would sit down and work until he beat them, no exceptions. He even fixed an operating system error that the technician in the shop had said was unfixable, inherent in the system, on Matilda’s computer. All he did was move a couple of lines to remove the need to use the dud line, but it was quite enough, and the system had never worked as well. Syd and Matilda had watched an awed manufacturer come and go.
At this point the second child, Sally, was born, and although there were some signs of a normal baby, exposure to Sheridan soon had Sally toddling about being doted on by her elder brother and shown all the things he’d learned. Sally was herself a very fast learner, and her first word was “Sheridan”. The two kids soon had Syd and Matilda almost climbing the walls in pleasure at their daily achievements. A few years…centuries….passed in bliss.
Interestingly it was Sally, not Matilda, who introduced Sheridan to music as a thing to make. This was an area in which she was more talented than he, and his fascination with his little sister’s ability to make such beautiful sounds soon had him trying to play along. Even so, he’d be silent when she got inspired. He found her music far more interesting than the fact that he’d achieved the equivalent of tenth year education without having to go to school. He was by now nearly six.
Syd had been staggered when the principal at his school said that Sheridan should go straight to high school. There was literally nothing left to teach him in primary school. Sally later got the same result. The two were stimulating each other’s minds symbiotically, according to the local psychologist, who also said that he might have to find another career if they kept it up. She also said that no thesis could do justice to it, and that if Syd had the time, a journal might be worth the effort. That idea had Syd busy for decades. Matilda did the visual records.
The strange thing was that notwithstanding this unusual series of exclusions from a “normal” social upbringing, Sally and Sheridan’s social skills were immense. They met other kids their own age, and were friendly and tolerant. They met older kids and were extremely popular. This aberration was caused by the fact that both Sheridan and Sally were born comedians. They could and did catch most adults entirely unawares, which naturally endeared them to the other kids. Sally’s dismissal at age four of someone’s incessant and rather stupid, embarrassing, chatter as “conceptual dandruff” had devastated everyone at one of Syd’s school’s staff parties. Sheridan said that Sally had a natural advantage in looking so cute; nobody ever suspected what she was capable of, until it was too late.
When Sheridan wasn’t being funny he was being dazzling. He invented a new graphics mode, a “fitter” program which overcame the dire monotony of grids. It was an equation Monet and Euclid would have liked. It created a scale of points in almost infinite combination, a 2 to the fifth power scale upon which to place color and line. It ran as: Select area; enter point scale; run “fit”. This translated into a delineation in graded scales of color based on the existing colors. It also required a 256,000x magnification to see the individual points, well beyond the human eye. The patent was worth millions. Sheridan shared it with his family. He’d originally been trying to help Matilda make a portrait of Syd. Matilda, being Matilda, had been fuming about highly technical drawbacks in the graphics. Sally was the one who’d noticed that it was the nano-grids that were making it difficult. Her father wasn’t made of little squares. It may be noted in passing that Matilda was then the only graphic artist on Earth who was actually paid to do portraits using a computer. The software really was that lousy.
By the time Sheridan did actually get into a school it was for those his own age who were similarly talented. He was top of his class, despite genuine peer competition, for the first time in his life from someone other from than his sister. Sally was actually running a bit faster than Sheridan and joined the school a year later. She said old age was catching up with him. He said it was her choice of character reference.
A Nobel Prize (two behind Sally) and a large number of degrees later, at the sickeningly young age of 28, Sheridan was sitting in the local café reading a strange book called The History of Scientific Failures. He was trying to find a common thread in failed theorems. It was a worrying experience. Apparently everything was impossible until so irrevocably proven that it was impractical for even the dullest pedagogue to deny it. Interestingly most of the failed theories were negative positions; “Human flight is impossible”, “Man cannot withstand accelerations of more than 25 miles per hour”, “It would take 200 Earth years to travel 4.5 light years at the speed of light, therefore it’s impossible”, “The bumblebee can’t fly”, and other authoritative drivel.
There were gems regarding the possible size of insects, reducing them to roughly average present day sizes, while the museums had specimens of a dragonfly called Meganeuron, which was the size of a hawk, on plain view for centuries. It was noticeable that the opposing thought regarding evolution had never offered any supporting explanation on its own behalf regarding the observed data, it merely refused to consider them. This was followed by a history of the Denial Industry of the 20th century, in which all scientific achievements were alleged either never to have happened or to have been faked. Again, a purely negative position.
Interesting reading, but not likely to raise either the image of science or of public debate. History does tend to prove that humanity progresses despite itself as much as it does because of itself. He was distracted by a slightly frayed looking gentleman who obviously recognized him and was staring at him. Not a menacing or irrational stare, but a stare.
“Yes, can I help you?” asked Sheridan, largely avoiding the glacial tone which makes that question so offensive.
“Oh. Excuse me. I……. I was staring……simply forgot not to stare, I’m afraid……One of the reasons I was staring……that is, having realized who you were….. I’m not usually this inarticulate. (Pause to breathe normally) Actually Dr. Sheridan,…..I mean, Dr. Derwydd……despite my rudeness, you might be able to help me. That was what I was thinking about while I was forgetting to stop staring……God that sounded awful…. I can actually put two sentences together when I try……”
Sheridan knew a fellow academic when he heard one. Anyone this tangled in their own conversation was quite likely to be brilliant….eventually. The person seemed harmless to everything but the English language. So far it was doing far more introverted conceptual knitting than it needed, for such a young language.
“Have a seat, some tea, and grind it out,” said Sheridan, hoping that the process of changing seats wasn’t going to be as tough as the dialogue to date.
“I’m a sociologist.”
“Oh, I am sorry. How awful.”
That did it. Relief surged across the other’s face together with a large unaffected grin. The man’s name was David Krishna, he really was able to put two sentences together, and he really did have a problem. The problem was that he really was a sociologist. He apparently had begun his PhD thesis. He’d made an outline of his intended research, his theories, and had made one rather startling discovery that he badly wanted to include in his thesis.
The study was called Generational Socio Economic Stagnation Among The Poor – Mechanisms Of Social Decay. Using very large data bases and the huge quantities of ignored documentation which every citizen generates in their lifetimes, David had found a fundamental process. The generational aspect was the key to poverty. There was clear unmistakable evidence. Rather more complex than a hereditary disease, but as dangerous and often as fatal.
Sheridan had become very alert upon hearing the name of the thesis. He’d soon realized as he listened that this answer was not derived from mere statistical survey of historical incomes. It obviously required enormous amounts of information from a lot of very different and often slow or unresponsive sources, like repositories, family archives, coroners, police records, government housing reports, medical journals….. literature and news reports of the time……. Anything to do with human life, really. This heavily documented, much-too-multi-formatted monster would then have had to be made usable. David seemed somewhat surprised himself at the vast ocean of data he’d accumulated, after Sheridan gently interrupted him to ask how much actual raw data he’d collected.
“About 5 billion gigabytes. It was a bit of a struggle. I had to use network memory.”
“How on Earth did you make that workable?” Sheridan’s own mind was haring through possible methods as he asked.
“Friend of mine’s a linguist, when she’s not scaring other biologists. She came up with what she calls “human” usage, human experience as a terminological framework. She created a search engine which could read and recognize things like “So-and- so was living in a cardboard box in a garbage dump” in a book, or “Infant begging in the subcontinent was the subject of a conference” from some archaeology reference, and use them in context as data gathering. Anything, anywhere, which involved human environment and experience of poverty. It extracted the references from net archives, museums, family databases, the complete possible source scan, everything on Earth that was accessible. It ran the whole 5 billion gigs in a few days and retrieved about four hundred million, as well as making stats and cross references. Then she broke it all down into histories, people who said on record somewhere that they were born poor, demographics by the truckload. The software then correlated the entire gigantic mess into historical stats. The thing I don’t yet understand is that she told me that it was more important to find information that disproved my idea, and that the database was designed to structure its reports on both matches and non-matches to the idea of generational poverty. All I really had to do myself was establish time frames. Depressions, recessions, wars, and it all fitted.”
“Brilliant idea. She’s right, too; you can’t leave out contraindications.”
“She’s what I would call terrifying, intellectually. Apparently she’d had the idea for the software for a while, and I gave her something to try it on. To give you some idea of her ability, she put the search engine together in a week, and included a dictionary of old terminology, 19th and 20th century slang words, things like that.”
“How?”
“I have no idea. All I can say is that thing can eat up and summarize a whole national library in an hour. She also said I should expand my parameters to include Asian, Middle Eastern, South American and African data, which as I’m sure you know is pretty shaky stuff pre 2100. She said that cross cultural references were a surer study of human experience as human experience.”
“Would you introduce me?”
“Gladly, if we can get her out of her lab for that long. I’m sure she can explain it all to someone. Unfortunately I don’t seem to be that person. I wish I was, because as it is I’m fascinated by something I simply can’t claim to comprehend.”
“What’s her name? Should have asked.”
“Dana Macdougall.”
“I’m wondering why I don’t know the name. Anyway, your problem…..”
David’s early researches had immediately crashed straight into a single hideous and vicious fact. Most poverty is created by the idiom of human lives. The way a person is taught by experience to live is the way they tend to live. A dangerous version of adaption to an environment. A person born poor is more likely to stay in that mode of thought. A person born into a criminal family is more likely to become a criminal. Physical poverty can be corrected. Social poverty is a much tougher disease, and highly contagious.
Social poverty is a form of imprinting. Values and priorities are created by experience. A person raised in a slum cannot be expected to ignore its survival criteria. Join a gang and stay alive. Shoot someone because that’s the way things happen. Then have a family and try to raise it. Ability to rise above that environment, nil.
Sheridan waited as David said quietly,
“The real killer is that there are really no other options. Like any group of people, they create a sort of social stasis. Poverty is self perpetuating. Even the faces of some of those people look like they come from the 18th century. They’re like caricatures of old peasants. Slums make slums. Teach people to accept poverty and they will accept it. They do, because that’s what the last few dozen generations have taught them. Even architecture is the result of accepting lower and lower standards of living. Being cramped becomes normal. Ambitions are reduced in scale. I did a lot of interviews with people at shelters, welfare agencies and in jails and their idea of success is to win a lottery. There’s no indication that they believe they can get themselves out of the hole by their own efforts.
The trouble is they’re right. They can’t. Most of the world’s poor have always lived in a state of permanent handicap. Between the violence, the crime, the lack of proper nutrition, education and health care, there’s no chance of them ever living like other people. They never have. Other studies and some reports as far back as the early 1800s indicate that the way of life was established long before that, in European culture at least. According to Dana, the world’s poor have actually been living worse than the Old Stone Age cave people since about then.”
“So where does that leave your thesis?”
“With the simple realization that whatever my findings or recommendations are, my discipline won’t help. I’m in a science that has relegated itself to the status of a weather report. We’ve had massive social crises for the whole of recorded history, and we just don’t solve them. Whole civilizations have collapsed because of their social weaknesses. Most of those weaknesses were fixable. Peasant rebellions in ancient times might have been less frequent if the peasants hadn’t had so many good reasons to rebel, and destroy their societies. Crime might not have poisoned the 20th century if society had caught up with itself…….My view is that we can destroy poverty permanently by removing the environment, both physical and psychological, that creates it. “Study” isn’t enough. How do I make my findings a practical basis for action?”
Sheridan thanked whatever kindly deity had talked him into coming to the café. A real problem, in an unexpected form. A good question, too, coming from a surprisingly realistic if unlikely source. Sociology wasn’t well known for its radical concepts. Apparently there was now at least one sociologist who thought that being a mere spectator wasn’t enough. He was quite right, too, in that “study” was a rather lame excuse for the tides of unused social information that regularly washed up on the bureaucratic shores. A process without a product. However, he’d missed something.
“David. The main reason that the world’s problems have never been solved is that nobody has ever tried. I applaud your sincerity, and your guts in facing this rather ugly situation. That said, you’ve left out a very important thing: the future. To do anything about this, you need to fit it into a viable proposition in terms of future society. My main criticism of your science is that it simply does not address the future. It makes projections, then runs away. Since your study is generational, that would seem to me the next point; how do you translate the idea of preventing generational poverty? You will need to take into account how people will live in future, to maintain currency of your ideas, and make them fit into an ongoing program.”
It occurred to David at this point that he’d just been giving an hour-long almost-monologue to a prodigy, a teenage Nobel Prize winner, a globally famous scientist. His original terror of Sheridan had long gone, but he was now appalled at himself. Fortunately Sheridan’s point, which was given as a logical criticism, drove through this irrelevance. The future……. The answer. His mind kicked him into action.
“Can I yell, “Eureka?””
“Probably. You look as though you can.”
“You’ve answered the question. I’ll make a recommendation that for future housing, special attention be paid to dismantling the…….I’ll do better; I’ll run a test program, with real people…….show how to break up the patterns…..”
“The “all poor in one area” motif?”
“Yes. Break up the death-by-association. They’re born with liabilities in the form of people. They need to relate their own lives with people who have a future. And creating educational and career escape routes within curricula….and thematic escape routes….other ways of living. If you can get children into something like that before they get to high school, they’re young enough to pick up the thread from school and lose the one from home…..that’s been tried in the past but the environment has always been the liability. As long as they’re not bored to death….”
“You mean exposure to alternatives?”
“Alternatives and change. That’s what I meant about stasis, earlier. In poverty nothing changes. Maybe some different furniture, perhaps some new gadgets, but the poverty is of life, not property. The poor are always socially behind everyone else. They are quite literally the last to know about any opportunities. When they do find out about them the world has moved on. They straggle along behind, fully aware that yet another part of human experience has passed them by. The most negative possible mindset remains, with nothing to contradict it. There’s no reason for them to think otherwise. As far as I can tell it hasn’t changed at all since…..whenever. Human life at its lowest level is a thing of pessimism and trivia. Either will lower the person; both might do it permanently.”
“ Are all sociologists so idealistic, or is it just you?”
A long friendship started.
Sheridan had been asked to meet the senior biologists at the Joint Space Agency regarding a problem with the Mars ground surveys. His association with the Mars project was broad; anything nobody else could handle went to him. Given his wide multidisciplinary qualifications and his very deep research talents, he was the one to ask when they had no answers. He accepted that.
It had worked, too. He’d been able to talk to the environmental scientists and the flight engineers and resolve a major dispute, to the great relief of all. He’d improved the ion drive on the new spacecraft and fixed the unfortunate anomaly that had led to the drive crashing the sanitation facilities, simultaneously. He’d installed a thousand-redundancy system into a computer system that had started with four, and saved JSA millions in the process. The artificial gravity was now the size of a cheese, not a semi trailer. This to Sheridan was perfectly normal. To everyone else it was just impossible. Despite all of which, he was by now genuinely liked, and the agency people had learned to trust him and his methods. The Mars research station was everyone’s newborn baby, and he’d done more than anyone to keep it healthy.
This time it was no small problem. Contamination, on a colossal scale. Bacteria where they had no right to be. Viruses in billions. Nasty pathogens, too, pneumococci, staph, the whole directory of diseases. All terrestrial. Obviously sterility was gone. What was even less appealing was that the things were thriving in –200 degree temperatures. They seemed to love it there.
They’d grown, too. Bacteria aren’t usually much affected by gravity, being too small, but there had to be a relationship; these were twice the size of their earthly selves. The other unexplained oddity was how they were reproducing; nobody on Mars had even had a head cold. Fifty people in perfect health were currently wandering Mars. The Martian doctor, Sawyer, had tested till she was allergic to testing, and not a single symptom had shown.
The viruses were now present in huge numbers, and again there was no idea how they were replicating. That was merely impossible. Viruses must have genetic material to reproduce. There wasn’t any available on Mars, other than from the expedition, or the bacteria, and even then it was a bit of a stretch to assume that either would support such vast numbers. Every principle of epidemiology had failed to answer any of these situations. Sheridan was fascinated, and by now worried.
“You realize that the Mars expedition will have to be quarantined?” he asked, gently as he could.
“Why? They’re not sick.”
“Neither are the bacteria or viruses. They’ve obviously adapted to Mars somehow. If they return to Earth, they’ll think they’re in paradise. If they can reproduce like this in a hostile environment……”
“We can irradiate the ship, and the crew.”
“Mars has no shielding from solar radiation. That doesn’t seem to bother them at all.”
“We can disinfect…”
“No we can’t. We tried. Nothing happened. Even pure chlorine doesn’t work, in fact they seem to like it. Nor does borax. We actually had larger cultures afterwards.”
Sheridan woke up.
“They like chlorine? Can I have all your test results, please?”
“Of course. Doctor Sawyer says some of it’s a bit dust affected, though. We’ve managed to undo most of the damage.”
Martian dust was notorious for its ability to damage anything that wasn’t sealed. Despite the best efforts it crept into everything. Micro dust. So fine and smooth it made talcum powder look gritty. Billions of tons of it swept Mars every year. It was still a matter of considerable debate how anything as nominal as the Martian atmosphere kept such huge quantities of material in the air.
The dust made its presence known in blurry data, fizzy photos, fudged spectroscopic analyses, and many other endearing ways. With that in mind Sheridan settled down to survey the data. There was a large, very competent, highly systemized, supply of information. Sawyer really knew her job, and had even tried looking for evidence of metabolized toxins from the bacteria, little known byproducts from bacterial wastes, and other things which really belong in scientific papers.
By the end of his reading Sheridan was ready to admit she’d missed absolutely nothing. Every biological possibility had been thoroughly checked. Even the tests and the equipment were triple tested. It was such an exhaustive analysis that it didn’t need to be questioned any more. Those were the facts, and if medicine and biology didn’t like it, too bad.
One irritating piece of data was severely dust affected. Sawyer had made a note saying that it was the best they could get of this particular test. A positively furry schematic of a biological scan showed a lot of particles, almost entirely obscuring an E. Coli sample. As far as Sheridan could tell, the bacteria were unaffected by the large amount of dust. It seemed to be causing them no difficulty, which was strange, because bacteria can be smothered by some materials.
Particularly adhesive materials or those that get into cells…..Sheridan was on his way to the university before he finished that thought. It is a simple fact of micro particulates that they do get into things. Asbestosis is a case. Carbon particles after combustion can get into the body. Living things have inputs and outputs, and very small things can travel through organisms. Many get into tissues and stay there. Perhaps the dust was affecting the bacteria. That still didn’t explain their rapid growth and populations.
He charged into the biological sciences department. He rushed toward a desk and collided with someone. A female, who gave him a look which could have filleted a fish. Matters were not improved by the fact that he recognized her, because he’d crashed into her before in the cafeteria some months ago. It occurred to Sheridan that for an occasional physicist he hadn’t been paying much attention to the ideas about bodies in motion.
The next thing that occurred to him, like an asteroid strike, was that this was a particularly attractive woman. She was bright, alert……and was obviously already sick of the sight of him, with good reason. A deep groan was barely stifled. Hoping he looked as miserable as he felt, anything to show some hope of reform, Sheridan said,
“…..I’ve done it again, haven’t I? I really can’t apologize enough…… I wish I knew how to….”
She might have blinked. She would have made a beautiful if dangerous looking statue. Just to add a little terror she frowned. Sheridan was stunned. In his entire life nobody had ever put him in a position like this. The silence was now enough to remove bodily fluids. Sheridan could hear a tap dripping at the other end of the hall.
“Perhaps we should introduce each other, so you’ll know who you’re colliding with in future. I’m Dana Macdougall. You’re Derwydd. Dave Krishna said you were a real help. On that basis I might forgive you. Eventually. If you get some training wheels. Now, just for curiosity’s sake, what are you doing in my lab?”
Deciding that a filleted fish would have had a much easier time of it, Sheridan explained. On the other hand, a filleted fish wouldn’t have been introduced to itself, he thought. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. He didn’t have time to figure it out. The fish analogy held good, though. Dana put him through a grilling on the data he had, the data he didn’t have, and the likely reasons for him not having it. She looked over Sawyer’s work at staggering speed and agreed it was very comprehensive.
She also leapt onto the furry E. coli sample. Sheridan tried to watch as a blindingly fast series of further tests were done on the data. Some filtering produced a much higher resolution image than he’d managed. She looked at him as though he was out of his can without permission.
“Micro particulates in the cell nucleus. You of course noticed that?”
“Yes.” That was as close to a sentence as he’d got in the last twenty minutes.
Further mysterious rummagings in the depths of the lab produced an agar plate containing a slightly yellowed material.
“Martian dust,” she explained. “Subjected to enzyme actions.”
Under the microscope the dust was a series of strands. Like lumpy cotton, with spiky bits here and there. Sand doesn’t do that. Carbohydrates and amino acids do. Simple organic chains. Possible to anything able to form pre-proteins.
“What sort of enzymes?”
“Bacterial. Normal compounds. The ones usually present within bacteria. Even dead or dormant ones. If that material is put into any bacterium it will be processed chemically; the organism doesn’t have to be alive for that to happen.”
“Which means…..?”
“It means that our little friends from prehistory have become grazers. They’ve discovered that Mars is covered in this stuff, and will supply it in vast amounts. That’s why your expedition members aren’t getting sick. There’s a better food source. The added size is a result of plenty, and the added mass means the bacteria have more internal heat. Adaption to cold is a fairly easy thing for them. Any large population of microorganisms will have survivors in almost any environment. Now, have a look at this.”
She showed him an electron microscope scan of some Martian sand. Like tiny gems, perfect grains of polished sand, pristine. Quite a contrast to the grainy material in the agar plate. The obvious question didn’t get a chance to be asked. Dana explained,
“The material the bacteria are feeding on is ancient organic residue, bonded into the sand. Apparently the dust has been endlessly breaking down the organic materials to the point they’re almost back to the original precursors. The only workable solution is that there was life on Mars, at least at the microbial level, Pre-Cambrian, and a lot of it. It must have been close to terrestrial life, biologically, if never identical. Whatever cataclysm destroyed Mars didn’t destroy the physical chemistry of Martian life. It just had a bit of a setback. If so, bacteria are very practical at processing both organic and inorganic materials. We may see whole new phylums rising from this. We can’t stop it, either. The population is beyond control. It will be in the soil, and the air.”
“What about the viruses?”
“They’re riding piggyback on the bacteria. Plenty of new RNA and DNA to play with. It’s the sheer amount of material that’s causing the numbers; obviously the samples didn’t look outside the station environment. They’ll also evolve like mad.”
“Why did they like the chlorine?”
“It helped them get rid of the excess sand. They turned it into a chloride. They were looking a bit….obese, from the tests Sawyer did.”
Sheridan decided that if the worst thing that could happen to him was being told of the advent of a whole new alien ecology by a devastatingly beautiful and clearly brilliant woman, his career wasn’t a total waste. Dana agreed to help him write up the findings and was eventually persuaded to take the credit for her work. She even agreed to talk to him again sometime. Sheridan left feeling relieved, confused, bewitched, fascinated, astonished, and therefore rather happy. Now all he had to do was tell the JSA that the entire biochemistry of Mars was never going to be the same, and that there was no way of predicting what it would do. As the door closed he didn’t hear that most sinister of sounds, the sound of a giggling biologist.
A joint paper was duly written, Sheridan being dazzled by the depth of Dana’s work in the process. Dana didn’t tell him, but he was really the only person she’d ever met who could work at her speed. The paper was definitive. After it was declassified they won an award for it, which they both insisted on sharing with Doctor Sawyer. The head of JSA, Leo Nelson, had read the paper and asked Sheridan, grinning,
“If she’s that good, what do we need you for? Clapped out old has-been like you should be put out to pasture.”
“I look cute playing with balls of colored wool.”
“There’s that. Now, what about this quarantine? We can’t just say, “Hey guys, by the way, you’re going to be on Mars for the rest of your lives,” now can we?”
Sheridan and Dana had reluctantly had to agree about the quarantine, far too well aware of the ramifications. This left JSA with a real administrative problem. Stopping all Mars exploration was unthinkable. So was leaving their people there indefinitely. On the other hand there was no way of predicting what the new microfauna would do if allowed on Earth. The exploration group might be entirely uninfected, but there wasn’t enough information to know what would happen if the new organisms were denied their Martian food source.
Some of the new viral forms had actually been found inside processors. There wasn’t any system damage yet, but that didn’t mean much in the long view. Even the photon based systems were showing signs of their presence. One tiny mark on a graphic might be a virus. Alarmingly, a food processor had been getting a routine test and had weighed a kilo more than it should. (The mass test was standard on Mars to check for the accumulation of dust; measurements were accurate to the nanogram). The unit was returned to space for a cleaning and after being subjected to weightlessness, there, sure enough, was a gray mass of viral particles, separated by their shared specific gravity, floating merrily in the chamber. These were retrieved using a vacuum cleaner, and turned out to be yet another species.
Fortunately for all, Doctor Sawyer had prepared the exploration team for the quarantine idea. Nobody liked it, but all accepted her more than slightly forceful logic regarding possibly wiping out all life on Earth. She also had another idea. They could become colonists. They could get on with the terraforming study, and the resources analysis. There was nobody better suited to study the problems, after all, and if Earth could just manage to send some more hydroponics and protein synthesizers….
Sheridan’s contribution to all this was to put Sawyer in touch with Dana. This more than anything created a real friendship, beyond the implied one they’d both been trying to avoid admitting. It seemed that Dana, given a problem, was as much of a maniac as Sheridan about solving it. They spent hours, days, weeks and months arguing with each other about each element of the issue. They were rarely out of each other’s sight for more than a day.
The arguments were real enough. They were also grounds for genuine mutual respect. Sheridan had never before met anyone with the mental stamina to fight him on every single point, and win quite a few in the process. His sister Sally could do that, but she cheated, by being adorable. Even so his debates with Dana were stringent. She just didn’t make mistakes. Dana had been obliged to admit to herself that Sheridan was truly deep. Despite his reputation, there was solid thinking in every idea he had. He wasn’t some scientific one-hit wonder.
He was also the one who got her to isolate the primary enzymes the bacteria were using and put them to work on things other than silicates. The result was the positive identification of a solvent which later revolutionized the metals industry. The bacterial version was a good reusable product, and they were later harvested for it, one of Mars’ first cash exports. Strangely, the solvent could be used to create alloys. It was known to extract iron from Martian rocks. From there was a small step to ore processing. When mixed with two metals it bonded them, then, if heated, and could be chemically leached out of the alloy, which remained intact. (Apparently its bond with metals was purposefully temporary; the bacterial version was remetabolized, because it didn’t make a lot of biological sense to use cell chemistry and make a loss on the use of the enzyme. Very efficient things, bacteria). It took two days to get the concentrations right, but it was worth it. Dana was by now at the point of admitting that there might be some hope for Sheridan after all.
Things came to a head between them over the pneumococci. Being the most contagious pathogens, they were subjected to the most rigorous study, even down to minute examinations of cell walls for chemical agents. Dana thought that the bacteria were likely to amplify their successful strategy of enzyme production and become more dangerous. Sheridan felt that they were likely to evolve away from their past into quite different organisms. Since both events were equally likely, quite reasonable logical paths, and there was no information whatsoever to support either theory, this was the subject they chose to have an argument about, both fully conscious of the fact that neither could win.
“Why would they lose a whole genetic heritage? They can keep their options open easily with a few strands of DNA,” began Dana, with a slightly mock-rhetorical gleam in her eyes that Sheridan had learned was a real danger sign, meaning that she knew where she was going with the argument.
“Because that path is obsolete to them. Nature doesn’t carry a lot of baggage. Why waste a single amino acid on an in-house museum? They can use the space for better purposes.”
“Are you saying that they can simply edit out a whole DNA sequence on the basis of behavioral change?”
“Why not? We don’t have tails anymore.”
Too late, Sheridan realized that his premonition of danger had been well based in fact. Dana smiled. The rhetoric had simply led him away from the biology. He was trapped. Blasted beautiful pest of a woman…… he thought, not for the first time. He must have been more expressive somehow than he realized. Her expression was now the playful tigress motif which had been driving him consistently up the wall since he met her. Like anyone confronted with a 200 kg. carnivore, he modified his own behavior.
“……I mean, it’s unlikely that any biological trait would survive where it isn’t applicable…..”
Wrong again. She continued to smile. It occurred to Sheridan that his parents and particularly his sister would be laughing themselves sick if they saw the mess he was making of his own argument. The pathos……. Fortunately the human male has subtle strategies he can fall back on to survive in such trying conditions. Cunning ruses and clever evasions, calculated to shield one from harm and danger.
“Can I buy you dinner?”
“At Benny’s?”
“Of course.”
“Now?”
How they wound up later that night at his parents’ place he wasn’t sure. Good red wine tends to be vague about things like that. His sister was there, too. After all present had agreed what a total waste of a good plumber Sheridan was, they settled down to resume the argument. In that environment the debate took on a benevolence that was slightly terrifying.
Sally more or less agreed with Dana. Syd tended to accept Sheridan’s idea, but didn’t think it could be as simple as that. Matilda said flatly that since both ideas had no mid point, neither could be right. A two track mind was only marginally better than a one track, in her view. There was some sort of exchange of expressions between Matilda and Dana, which left both of them grinning happily. Sally had seen it, and followed suit. Syd and Sheridan exchanged looks of total and honest mystification.
Sally asked in her most endearing way, “What if Martian organisms do other things?”
This question was accompanied by a look of girlish wonder which had everyone including Dana in stitches. Father and son swapped beleaguered looks. Dana disappeared briefly to do a bit of panel beating, as she put it, on her hair. Matilda looked at her son.
“Sheridan, where have you been keeping this one?”
“Why haven’t you been foisting her on us?” asked Syd.
“Since when do you go out with human beings?” asked Sally.
It dawned on Sheridan that the main difficulty to date with bringing girlfriends to the family home was keeping his parents and sister awake while they were there. Dana had had them laughing since she walked in the door. Her introduction to his parents, “I believe this is yours,” with a nod indicating the somewhat festive remains of Sheridan after their dinner, had got a real belly laugh out of them. Sheridan managed a few explanations, none of which he believed, and neither did anyone else, and all knew it. Dana reemerged, looking like a beauty contest with only one contestant to Sheridan.
“We were just saying, Dana, that it’s nice to see Sheridan mixing with human beings. Such a relief,” said Sally.
“Oh I just decided he should get out of his Petrie dish. He was making it look untidy,” said Dana.
“Do you think that’s wise?” asked Syd, thoughtfully. “After all, he might be contagious.”
“Sheridan-itis…… possible,” admitted Dana. “Symptoms; a rash, red wine, good food, good company, good conversation…..and him.”
“A plague,” said Sally.
“Perhaps Dana could develop a vaccine,” said Matilda.
“I could ask for a grant. I’m sure JSA would be interested.”
“Think of the patents…….” added Sally.
“We really wanted a goldfish, you know,” contributed Syd.
So began amid howls of laughter from his family an intense personal relationship between Sheridan and Dana. One thing that pleased him and his parents immensely was that Sally had also acquired a friend at her own mental level. Dana and Sally became extremely close, and invaluable to each other in their work. Sheridan eventually pinned down the fact that the one thing they had in common was that they could both demolish any logic in seconds, reconstruct it, and then argue from any point in the process, and enjoy every second of it.
Dana was another prodigy. She’d got her doctorate at 14. She was six years younger than Sheridan, and if not as well known, certainly as well respected. Dave Krishna’s was only one of several awed testaments to Dana’s brilliance. More intriguing personally was that Sheridan found for the first time in his life someone whose mere existence was a revelation to him. He’d spent his life in the presence of mental inferiors, outside his family, and now here was this impossible woman, making him think like he’d never tried to think. There was no scientific discipline in which she didn’t have some level of knowledge. She inhaled information and exhaled facts, theses and jokes.
Sheridan eventually woke up to the fact that the only person she terrified was him. She was relatively humane to everyone else. She even got a laugh or two out of Leo Nelson and the formidable Doctor Sawyer, which was the first anyone had heard from Sawyer in a while. Dana had in fact been pulling his leg since their meeting in the lab. Sheridan spent some time trying to plot his revenge, then decided he was having too much fun to waste time on things like that.
The beauty of it was that they were far too young to even consider marriage. Matilda, confronted with the idea of Dana as a daughter in law, had said they’d have to wait because she, Matilda, was far too young to be anyone’s mother in law, and anyway she expected Sheridan and Dana to scandalize the scientific establishment with their unconventional relationship and immoral behavior for some years.
Dana had taken a great liking to Sheridan’s family and to his fundamental honesty, and unpretentiousness. His reputation obviously didn’t mean a thing to him. He cared about being correct, not being a famous irrelevance. That was a nice change of pace to a young biologist accustomed to being bored to the point of rabies by well known nobodies in her profession. There were people who thought they’d invented the amoeba, and were ready to tell every living thing on Earth about it without the slightest provocation. She had admittedly suspected Sheridan of being yet another, but five minutes with the man had convinced her otherwise.
The oddity to her was that for once she was having a decent relationship with a male. That was a new event. There had been a selection of cartoon boyfriends, the sort that are usually collected in high school, and inevitably wear out after a few dates. That series of monotonous ritual meetings had got very stale for Dana very quickly. Being an attractive woman is not a simple procedure, and she’d also encountered a few amorous academics who’d had to be put back in their kennels. She had a temper and a manner which was lethal to unwanted persons. A few horrified freshmen had been repelled and one professor had required trauma counseling after following the logic of her explanation of what he could do with the rest of his life. She’d just removed a research fellow from the lab with a similar display of her ability to exercise her prerogatives when Sheridan had crashed in. Nobody ever bothered Dana twice.
Sheridan became aware of the respect the men at the university had for Dana when he noticed that she was deferred to by people he would have thought were so full of themselves as to require physical restraints. Even the bizarre, narcissistic physics lecturer, Morton, was positively demure when she entered a room. The only incident which had involved Sheridan was during a party in which one of the lab assistants had become a little too friendly for Dana’s liking. His beautiful Dana had gone from playful tigress to killer. Sheridan had removed the offender before she did him any real damage. Everyone else in the room had seemed to shrink when she reacted. Her action, to grab the man, who was about average size, by the throat and physically drag him out of his seat with one hand, had terrified him. Outside, with Sheridan trying to decide what to do about him, he was hyperventilating and vomiting at the same time. Sheridan hadn’t seen a more frightened person in his life. Coming back to reality, the man had recognized Sheridan and cringed at him. That was a bit distressing, but he’d really asked for it.
“I think we’ll leave it at that,” said Sheridan.
“Yessir…..thank you, Doctor Derwydd…..cough, gargle…..thank you” said the man.
Sheridan had returned to be greeted with a raised eyebrow. He raised one of his own.
“That happen often?” he asked.
“Occasionally.”
She was still looking at him oddly.
“You were defending me,” she said.
Well, it didn’t sound like an accusation. It wasn’t.
“Apparently.”
“You know, Derwydd, you’re almost bearable sometimes.”
JSA were left to ponder the various insoluble Martian issues. Somebody had to make a decision about what to do, and there was no indication that any politician on Earth wanted to touch the subject. That was actually a blessing, but there was no doubt that something permanent now had to be put in place on Mars. Sheridan and Dana found themselves for once able to get on with their own work, after the frenzy. Dana happily dove into her new protein synthesizers, and Sheridan, innocently rereading a medical dictionary in the university library, was drawn into a debate which was as bizarre as it was enjoyable.
In the library there lurked paleontologists. Occasionally they would bump into each other, and as the flocks of terrified alumni fled across the verdant Cretaceous swamps of the registry, odd bellowings would be heard. Sheridan was currently in the unplumbed depths of a cross reference to Staphylococcus Aureus, “Golden Staph; the unknown martyr of infection”, which said that infection was really a terrible waste of Staph’s time and talents. The first thing he heard was enough to get him interested:
“Ectotherms! Dinosaurs! Rubbish! That sad old theory’s been around for hundreds of years, and it’s never once been proven, by any sort of forensics. What is this dismal little object doing in our library?” said a female, American, voice.
“Probably just to cover the rest of the argument, and give a rational perspective to the academic history of the debate, do you think?” said a male, slightly unraveled-sounding, British accent.
Sheridan, in a moment of literary but somewhat self interested zeal, had been appointed as a member of the Library Board. He found the mighty beasts pawing the ground around the snack machine. She was tall, elegant, and incensed. He was tall, inelegant, and obviously her normal protagonist. They looked quite understandable, as a couple. They recognized him, apparently. The female strode up and asked, almost civilly;
“Doctor Derwydd. You are on the Library Board, are you not? May I draw your attention to the fact that this pitiful relic is being lent out to people who are supposed to be seriously studying paleontology?”
“What’s wrong with it?” He knew, he’d read the book. It was the argument that interested him.
“It is wrong in almost every detail. It’s the science as it was about 1900 or so, with all the misconceptions represented as fact. It’s almost superstition, not science.”
For those interested, it is theoretically possible to find someone more dedicated to their profession than a paleontologist, it’s just that nobody ever has. There is no such thing as a reformed paleontologist. Who else would write their will stipulating the amount of limestone in the grave? Sheridan, who’d been interested in dinosaurs since he was first able to imitate a Tyrannosaurus for Sally, wondered in passing why he hadn’t done a degree in that. He did have an answer, though.
“That book is used as a reference for past theorems, largely because it contains so many. Students are expected to know the pitfalls of theory, and that thing really does prove what damage bad theory can do.”
The male paleontologist seemed skeptical, even if Sheridan was agreeing with him.
“Not wishing to sound unimpressed, Doctor Derwydd, but I’m unimpressed, even if I do understand the logic: isn’t the book more likely to be useful if you put a health warning or something on it, “Warning; contains antiquated idiocies from the last 200 years of pseudo-paleontology” or something like that?”
“No, because it clashes so fundamentally with the modern science. Anyone’s who’s actually studying will see the problems, and the insupportable arguments, clearly. Like T. Rex being a sedentary scavenger, or dinosaurs being cold blooded. Remember also that your science has been afflicted with a lot of pedagogues chasing notoriety rather than facts. That book could be called a tourist guide for things to avoid in paleontology.”
“Would you agree that anyone ignorant of paleontology wouldn’t be able to tell that this wasn’t a legitimate text book?” asked the female.
“If you’ll agree that it represents the level of ignorance prevalent when it was published in 2020, yes, I will.”
Several cups of tea and lunch later, they’d moved on to the current problems of paleontology. The ancient ecologies were much better understood now, thanks to advances in Magnetic Resonance Surveying, where fossil finds could now be scanned in depth, and the residues of fossilized plants and animals identified. A certain micro resonance would indicate there was a stand of horsetails, for example, or the presence of large herds of herbivores. The resulting data-tsunami had soon found and identified tens of thousands of new species, and a added a lot of contradictions of previous theories. The surveys were so finely calibrated they could locate specific chemical compounds under hundreds of metres of rock, and map them, and create chronological distributions of materials. A detailed geological and chemical survey of fifty square kilometres, to a depth of a kilometre, could be done in ten minutes. That good.
The result was a lot of very happy and incredibly busy paleontologists. New digs sprang up like franchises. To be a geologist was to risk your life among the swirling hordes of professional and amateur paleo-addicts. In hindsight, it had been a bit simplistic to assume that the entire ecology of a planet would fit into a neat, orderly progression over hundreds of millions of years. Ecologies aren’t static. Nor are populations. Diseases, droughts, and geological forces can overthrow whole hierarchies in the blink of a theorem. In Sheridan’s time, the recent reversion of North Africa to a jungle was a case in point, and all that had actually happened since it was a vast desert was that wind patterns had changed. The Sahara remained, but sub-Sahara had reverted very fast.
Dinosaurs had remained a human obsession, and the new discoveries had turned paleontology into a truly popular science. The added degree of complexity, thankfully, had attracted some of the really brilliant people to whom any problem is intolerable until solved. The arguments had grown up a lot, too. The absurdity of such huge animals being cold blooded, like reptiles, had taken a bit of killing. Eventually it was shown beyond doubt that such energy-inefficiency just couldn’t support giant animals. The idea that vast protein dependent things like the carnivores could be sedentary had died harder. The ability to obtain protein tends to define the size of the carnivore, and the century of argument had arrived at the conclusion that the big carnivores couldn’t just sit around waiting for food to die.
One of the beauties of paleontology is that so much thought has to go into every concept, and take in bits of nearly every other science in the process. Even the most basic images of the early studies of dinosaurs had taken quite a hammering. The vision of a T. Rex facing off head on against a Triceratops, for example, had been shown to be pure suicide on the part of the average T. Rex against an adult Triceratops. Even the center of gravity was against the T. Rex, let alone the physical impact of being hit by something weighing more than a few rhinos. This had led to a revised version of predator tactics in which the huge bite of the carnivores was shown to be a lethal weapon against any prey, and far more safely delivered away from the weaponry of the victims. All they had to do was wait for the bite to take effect. Ecologically, of course, nobody has it all their own way, and herds of Triceratops were obviously truly dangerous things for predators to approach.
By now it had been eventually agreed that the giant carnivores were sufficiently successful to be giant carnivores, but that therefore their impact on their prey couldn’t have seriously affected prey populations, even if there was a different predator/prey ratio, with more predators among the dinosaurs than in a mammal ecology. (Any ecology only has as many predators as it can support). It was also agreed, finally, after a century, that big carnivores could be opportunistic, and that they could push anything smaller than themselves off a kill. The big carnivores were eventually even conceptually permitted to be able to keep up with their preys’ speed at point of contact. Cynical reviewers in the profession likened this agreement to the grudging admission that you can make fire with matches, as well as rocks and sticks.
With such basic issues agreed, paleontology had become a debating society like few other disciplines. Dinosaur brains were the hot topic of the science now. Much wailing had been made about the tiny brains of the giant animals, and it was assumed that they couldn’t have been particularly intelligent. The female paleo-person, whose name turned out after an hour or so to be Professor Elizabeth Wales, didn’t agree.
“Brain size can be very misleading. It also doesn’t take into account the functional intelligence requirements of an animal. Ants have tiny brains, and a degree of complexity which is absolutely astonishing. A cat has a relatively small brain compared to many other mammals, yet nobody would call cats stupid. Their entire mode of life requires them to be able to think on a par with the kind of anticipatory ability we use in playing basketball. They have to be able to perform effectively. They’re also either ambush or pursuit predators, and that’s about as demanding a means of survival as has ever happened. Added to which, with dinosaurs we’re talking about reptile-morphology brains, which are based on an ancient structure which had time to perfect its functions. The dinosaurs were around quite long enough to develop theirs to an efficient level.”
Grinning, Sheridan asked, “I take it instinct isn’t your answer to everything?”
“Instinct isn’t case specific….you might know how to reproduce, but….oh… really, Brian.”
Her friend, Dr. Brian White, was laughing happily.
“Elizabeth doesn’t accept instinct as a basis for anything.”
Elizabeth managed to avoid falling out of the seat, almost, laughing like a Borhyena. Brian went on to explain that her various theses in behavioral science had left some lecturers seriously considering a life in a monastery somewhere. She’d argued that it was far too simplistic to believe that mere passive adaption was enough to deal with the sorts of critical situations that most animals face on a regular basis. Anything living had to be able to deal with current conditions at all times, to survive. She did a study of modern animals, exposing them to previously unknown conditions, and found that “instinct” went straight out into the trash. A seal, confronted with a fish in a tank, went to some trouble to do a threat-assessment, looking for the safest way to deal with this uncooperative fish. An ant, with five thousand identical chemical trails to follow, surged about until it found a reliable trail that led to food, before bothering its nest mates with the information. According to Elizabeth you could almost hear it complaining about bureaucracy.
As she saw it, what use is a brain, if you don’t use it? Her reasoning had followed this idea to the point that large successful animals must be functionally efficient, to exist at all. The big dinosaur carnivores were always faced with animals which also had working survival strategies, and some prey which were very dangerous indeed. Carnivores will be careful where the risk of injury is known, and the big sauropods and their later equivalents were no joke to their predators. Big bipedal predators could be crippled, and their weight would instantly become a deadly liability. They’d also be at risk from their own kind. A mild disagreement could cost a limb or an infected wound.
It followed from that thinking that whatever intelligence was at work had to be able to deal with a life full of real, immediate, dangers. Actual stupidity was likely to be fatal. Both predators and prey are always at risk from mistakes. They didn’t have to be geniuses to recognize dangers, but they did have to be able to recognize them. Ambush predation, too, requires the ability to be able to hunt passively with a reasonable chance of success. Just lumbering around taking pot luck isn’t a great strategy when you need huge amounts of protein. Hunting and stalking prey requires a lot of focus on current situations.
The extreme morphologies of the prey animals were another unsubtle hint that the predators were very efficient. Pack predators are never a joke to their prey, and the dinosaur predators came in a lot of other varieties and methods as well. So many herbivores with such drastic methods of self defence is a clear indication of adaption to a very tough predator environment. This is where behavior also matters. Threat assessment may be instinctive, but situations vary. Instinct is rarely the whole answer to dealing with a charging lion or a Tyrannosaur. Running away is an instinct, close attention to a possible ambush is situation specific. They aren’t the same thing. Alert animals survive better than others, and they need all the survival behaviors they can get.
Brian added that his own first instinct when arguing with Elizabeth on the finer points of her position was to run away, and Sheridan could see what the result of that instinct was. Sheridan said that flight was always an option, but didn’t really address the fact of predation. One predator against a hundred escaping prey usually meant either 99 prey or 100 survived. A one per cent casualty rate was pretty bearable for any species, so he should be proud of his role. Elizabeth commented that in an environment of competitive predation, like paleo, even success was a mixed blessing if you then had to devote most of the rewards from the kill to defending it. That was why she routinely killed others in her field and buried the carcasses for her descendants to dig up later. Sheridan said, “It was instinctive behavior. One of the terrible risks of the sciences is talking to people who understand you, and enjoying the experience. Awful, isn’t it?”
The book stayed on the shelves, and Elizabeth somehow found time to do a book of her own on the history of her science, which somehow wound up sitting next to it.