Course: Science Fiction & Religion
Lecture #5: Reading #4
The Theology of Water
By Hilbert Schenck
Hilbert Schenck won instant acclaim a couple of years ago with his first short stories, collected in Wave Rider in 1980. His first novel, At the Eye of the Ocean, was published in 1981 and reinforced his reputation as a fine and thoughtful writer whose work is solidly grounded in both hard science and a deep sensitivity for the fragile humanity of his characters.
In "The Theology of Water," Schenck presents an isolated group of scientists with a scientific question that may or may not have a scientific answer.
The Theology of Water
NASA had finally come to the Titan Mission as a desperate, final throw of the dice. The robot Mars landers, with their little automatic diggers and warmed and watered flower pots, had grown nothing. The probes to Venus, Jupiter and the asteroid belt all sent back discouraging messages: sterility and either violent surface conditions or utter barrenness. But then the big Saturn orbiter, an expensive wonder in itself, had turned its instruments on the moon, Titan, and a tiny hope was born. Titan had a thick atmosphere, mostly methane and other hydrocarbons but some oxygen, the surface pressure at alinost seven-tenths Earth normal. Pasadena altered the orbiter's flight to let it free-fall around Saturn near Titan and several surprises appeared. There was ice, seas of it, in fact. Although the surface was at a horrendous mean temperature of minus one-hundred-and-twenty Celsius, the bolometer at the prime focus of the onboard reflecting telescope told of substantial warm spots-volcanic, radioactive, or both-where the temperature estimated beneath the ice sheet was actually above zero C. Most exciting, there were electrical storms that scorched the atmosphere of Titan and actually set high-altitude "sky fires," where the local oxygen concentration was high enough for ignition with methane, and these further warmed the satellite. The exobiologists of NASA, who for years had been trying to make life in their labs from methane and electrical discharges, were filled with hope, and though the public had mostly lost interest in the life-in-space hunt, NASA slowly began to assemble the Saturn-mission manned vehicle in orbit, panel by panel, appropriation by appropriation.
After almost fifty years, NASA had finally concluded that the number of consecutive push-ups and miles-run-per-day were irrelevant criteria for selecting deep space crews. The four persons on the Titan lander were thus the oldest and most expert astronauts ever to travel beyond the Moon. Mission Commander David Brunel, pilot and astronomer, had years of deep space activity, as did Dr. Gregory Bateson, a professor of chemistry at a distinguished New England university. Dr. Thomas Feeney, S.J., often referred to in the press as "God's Astronaut," had walked on the moon and had flown ten months in synchronous Earth orbit making geophysical measurements. And the tiny, fifty-year-old Japanese-American exobiologist, Dr. Anna Takoa, dean of her odd profession, was the ultimate hope for the lords of NASA in their search for other life. Veteran of half-a-dozen flights, this small woman, less than five feet tall and weighing ninety pounds, was the only scientist who had actually created a "pseudo-life" in the test tube, though she had never been able to get her chemicals to assemble duplicates of themselves. As a handsome bonus, Dr. Takoa required only sixty-three percent of the life support used by the other crew.
The gigantic Earth-Saturn transit vehicle took almost a year to make the trip, but once near Titan, the actual descent of the lander from its storage bay turned out to be simple. The cold, soupy atmosphere of Titan readily and safely absorbed the lander's potential energy and Brunel was able to drift his vessel across Titan's surface and pick his spot. They set down on a flat, volcanic plane, adjacent to a great lake or sea of ice that stretched to the horizon. And though they had all seen wonders not even imagined by most persons, they now stared, transfixed, out the lander's ports and up through the deep, blue-black sky of Titan to huge Saturn and its brilliant ring structure.
Father Feency, his large, red face momentarily illuminated by the thin sunlight reflected from Saturn, stared in wonder. "Well, Anna," he said finally. "It's awfully cold, but the view alone ought to be enough to stir up some life out here."
The little woman peered up at the stocky priest and smiled gently. "What a nice idea, Tom," she said, "that life might emerge in response to beauty. If only it were true."
Suddenly a lightning-set sky fire went off in Titan's upper atmosphere where gravitational separation increased the molecular oxygen concentration, and the flat, rocky ground around them was fitfully bathed in an even redder light. They heard the thunder and then felt the ignition boom as the lander shuddered.
"I'm glad those things don't happen on the surface," said Commander Brunel half to himself. "Where do you think the O2 comes. from, Tom?"
"Out of the rocks, Dave," said Feeney at once. "I can't see how the ice could ever disassociate at these temperatures. There must be a continual fall and accretion of water and hydrocarbon compounds. from those ignitions."
The Titan lander, its stubby wings jutting out on each side, sat on four eight-foot legs. The little craft had only two crew compartments, the upper one for sleeping, eating, and piloting, the lower one for lab work. The crew had known from the orbiter data that the ground-level atmospheric disturbances on Titan would be small. The high gas viscosity at these cold temperatures, coupled with the small contribution of heat from the distant sun, damped any weather activity. Their protective suits thus needed to resist only the bitter cold, but were flexible and non-armored, operating as they did at Titan's surface pressure.
First priority was the search for life. Dr. Takoa and Brunel went off in the electric, three-wheeled land-runner to search along the shores and out onto the ice slice near them, while Tom Feeney and Bateson poked around the rocks and dirt of a nearby "warm spot" they had located while flying across Titan's surface. The NASA exobiologists, led by Anna Takoa, had developed an arsenal of marvelous, life-seeking instruments; devices that could detect the smallest bit of heat from the metabolic activity of microscopic, one-celled animals, protoplasm detectors that reported the weak radio waves emitted by all living cells undergoing certain kinds of biological activity, hydrocarbon probes that acoustically detected "large" or "complex" molecules such as might be associated with living matter.
Houston had designed the mission for a sixteen-day stay on Titan, to correspond with one complete orbit of the satellite around Saturn. Everyone had agreed before the start that if these four specialists could not find some kind of life on Titan in that time, it did not exist. And so, when they were not eating or resting, they went out on Titan's dark surface, peering, measuring, digging, and hoping for some tiny sign of warmth or irritability.
After several days of continuous search, their disappointments began to grow. Titan seemed as sterile as Earth's moon. There was ice with water under it. There was some oxygen and there were various hydrocarbons in the weathered "dirt." But it was a chill, flat, dark world, and finally Father Feeney and Professor Bateson decided to spend a day in the lander organizing and assimilating their data and specimens. While Tom Feency tried various plotting methods to separate and locate Titan's two magnetic poles, Bateson worked in the chemical hood with some of the dirt and water from the surface.
"Hey, Father. Can you spare a minute?"
Tom Feeney, glum and disheartened, sighed and walked himself across the lab floor to the hood on his wheeled, aluminum stool. "Amoeba?" he suggested in a rumbling, hopeful voice.
Bateson shook his long, craggy head, but he was grinning. "No, but something weird anyway, Tom. I hacked out about a gallon of ice from the edge of the lake." He had both hands in the enclosed hood and he pointed with a slick, latex finger at the properties analysis box. "There's a sample melted from that ice in the magic box, Tom, and I'm getting a freezing point of minus 67.1 degrees Celsius."
Feeney frowned. "Quite a depression! Salty?" he suggested.
Bateson shook his head. "What I thought. So I distilled half a liter." He pointed to a compact apparatus stuffed in one corner of the long hood, "Not much residue, mostly dust. I'll look at it later. That material in the magic box now is distilled Titan water."
"It's not water, Greg, if it freezes at minus 67 C," said Father Feeney, frowning harder. "What is that stuff? It's absolutely clear?" Bateson's griu turned sly. "If the audience will now direct its attention to this corner of the stage." His plastic-covered finger indicated a small electrolysis apparatus. "Nolice that we have gas traps over the two electrodes, busily collecting gas from the electrolytic decomposition of this. . . ah... stuff. Note especially that one gas appears in just twice the volume of the other. Clue one. Now I take this glowing stick, ignited in the bunsen flame, and plunge it into the gas appearing in the lesser amount." He lifted the glass cover off one of the collection burettes and plunged the glowing stick into the colorless gas. It glowed whitely, then flamed up. "Clue two," said Bateson, peering sideways at Father Feeney's round mouth and eyes. He then took the flaming stick, lifted the cover off the other burette, and held the fire at the mouth. A blue flame and a loud pop immediately followed. "Clue three," said Professor Bateson, taking his hands out of the gloves.
But Tom Feeney's initial surprise had been immediately replaced by something else, a wariness coupled with an excitement. "Greg, what else is odd about that... water?" he asked in a tight voice.
"Let's see what we get for specific heat." Bateson put his hands back in the hood and fiddled with the controls of the properties box. In a moment the monitor screen beside the hood flashed some numbers. "About 20 percent higher," muttered Feeney thoughtfully. "Greg, can we get its density curve? Let's see if the extremum at 4 degrees C is still around anywhere."
The box heated and tested the sample as requested and soon a full data curve of liquid density against temperature appeared on the monitor. Tom Feeney blinked at the output. "Look at that, Greg! The extremum is much deeper and at least 20 degrees above the freezing point."
"Let me check that nutty thing with some real water," grunted the chemist, but when he did, the curve exactly matched the Earth water reference line.
"Why is the Titan curve stopped at 28 C?" asked Feeney.
Bateson peered at the monitor. "Because that's the boiling point, Tom. I didn't ask it for steam properties."
"Of course!" breathed Tom Feeney, and it suddenly seemed to Professor Bateson that Feeney was peering right out through the side of the lander.
At that moment they heard the whiss of the gas into the air lock. In a minute the hatch in the center of the circular lab compartment opened and a small, silver figure climbed up. Anna Takoa was both tired and discouraged. The finding of life, any life, on Titan would be the ultimate triumph in the career of any exobiologist. The hateful sterility of the place, cruel and harsh as it was, upset her. Titan wasn't much but it was now the only hope left in the system. And she, the greatest of her exobiologist tribe, would eventually have to pronounce it a lost hope to the world press. Her science simply did not exist, at least in this system.
Dr. Takoa was followed immediately by Mission Commander Brunel in a much larger suit. And even this extrovert seemed quiet and lost, an investor who had gambled years of effort in an enterprise now seen to be without gain or profit.
Still, they could both sense that something had changed in the lab. Tom Feeney had showed that same, humped resignation when they had left on the electric vehicle for another life search, but now he was standing straighter and his large face was flushed and tense. Even Gregory Bateson's New England reserve seemed frayed and his hands were twisting together.
The priest stared at the arrivals as they hung up their suits and connected them for recharge. "Greg," he said, turning, "give them the same magic act you gave me. But start with the electrolysis."
Nodding, Bateson pushed his hands back into the gloves and explained where he had found the water, how he had distilled it, and what he was doing now. After the flame-up and the little blue pop of an explosion, Bateson turned to Commander Brunel. "What would you say that stuff was, Dave?"
Brunel smiled at him. "Iley, you'll have to ask harder ones than that to flunk me out. It's water, Professor, just like in Chem 101." "Exactly," said Bateson drily. "Anna, what are your thoughts?" The little Japanese woman crinkled her eyes at him. "It is obviously not water. Otherwise you wouldn't be going through all of this," she said with a small laugh.
"Now that's not fair!" said Bateson. "Anyway, I now place a sample of the water in the magic box and give you . . . freezing point, density of the liquid, and boiling point at one At."
They stared long and silently at the curve until Anna Takoa turned to look at Father Feeney. "Father Tom," she said lightly, "do you understand this?".
Feeney sat facing them. "I nay. Some of it, anyhow. But I think we should look at whatever other properties the analysis box can give first. I have to tell you a story that I think may relate to this, but you'll believe it more after you see for yourself how this material acts."
Brunel peered shrewdly at the older man. "Is it water, Father?" Feeney nodded. "Yes, I believe it is Titan water."
21
"What other. changes. . . in its properties do you expect?" asked Brunel, his cool eyes peering at Feeney.
The priest smiled. "Yes, you should test me that way, Dave. All right. I think the solid phase will not only float, but have an unusually low density."
Greg Bateson put his hands back in the hood and soon the monitor showed numbers and uncertainties. Brunel read off the ice density himself. "Point-six-two. I'll say it's lighter!" He whistled, then said more loudly to the chemist, "Greg, I know that super little properties box cost NASA a couple of million, but would you actually float a little Titan ice on a little Titan water for us to see?"
Bateson immediately filled a beaker with water and opened the door to a small refrigerator at the back of the hood. He removed a sliver of ice with tongs, chopped it roughly cubical with deft knife strokes and popped it into the beaker.
There was no doubt about it; the Titan ice floated far higher than normal ice. And as it floated, it rapidly melted, runnels of water appearing throughout the underwater part. This caused the cube to topple over, but as it turned upside down, it kept on rotating, over and over, faster and faster, growing steadily smaller and less cubelike. They stared, astonished.
Finally Gregory Bateson rubbed his fingers into the corners of his eyes and said to the exobiologist, "Care for a couple of those ice. cubes in your before-bed nip of bourbon, Anna?"
But Tom Feeney was intently watching the ice turn and melt. "Greg, is there any substance that when it melts has an ordered, molecular momentum exchange, say from recoil effects, as the molecule leaves the solid phase?"
Bateson shook his head. "No way, Tom. No solid is ordered like that. And the distances are too small...
But the priest was muttering, lost in thought. "We never even thought of that. A high-level ordering during solidification. But what use is it?"
"All right," said Brunel to Tom Feeney with a rueful grin. "I give up on this property. Tell us another, Tom."
Feeney pursed his lips and thought for a moment about Titan. "The vapor pressure curve should be steeper at the high end. Normalize the two curves, Greg, zero to 100, then superimpose them." Indeed, the Titan water curve was much steeper near its boiling point than the curve for Earth water. Encouraged and excited, Father Feeney rattled off a few more predictions. "Thermal conductivity of the liquid is probably about the same, as is viscosity. Specific heat of the ice, the solid phase, will be higher. Latent heat of fusion also larger but boiling latent heat lower, way lower maybe. The ice probably has different absorptive characteristics to electromagnetic energy with infrared penetrating deeper."
Almost an hour later, after all these statements were shown to be correct, the three of them stared silent and baffled at the priest, whose face now twitched with excitement. "I think we'd better hear that story, Tom, before I go completely nuts!" said Brunel.
"All right," said Tom Feeney, settling his large bulk squarely on the small stool. "Understand, it was a painful time for me and I never thought.... Well, as you know, I went to Notre Dame grad school after I joined the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits have always been big on physical science, sort of 'keeping an eye on the enemy,' I suppose, and I was a star in the geophysics department. So I became a professor there after my doctorate, and wrote my books and did all that business. I didn't like academic life much. NASA has some stupid people and docs some stupid things, but at least nobody is claiming they're some kind of unique humanistic seers while behaving like hypocritical phonics.
"I was on the doctoral committee of a student named Elias Fullerton. He was a priest, a Jesuit too, so he immediately asked me to be his major professor since his other committee members were two laymen and a stuffy old Dominican who was department chairman. Fullerton was tall and scrawny, had a huge Adam's apple, was nervous, jerky, what Freud would have seen as a classic neurasthenic.
"His dissertation topic was as odd as he was. He wanted to study, really optimize, the characteristics of water in relation to the climate of the Earth. Oh, many people had noticed how the stranger properties of water-for example its high heat capacity, density extremum, and floating of the solid phase on the liquid-related to climate and ocean behavior. But fifteen years ago it had just become possible to run computer simulations that could actually predict climatic changes with hypothetical changes in the properties of air or water. Before then we didn't have the knowledge or the equations. Too much was empirical. Also, the machines couldn't access the memory fast enough to do a complete Earth.
"The dissertation title was some typically academic jargon, 'Climatic parameter variations of real and simulated Earth-type planets as a function of the liquid and solid phase properties of water.' Something like that. Around the department, we called it "The theology of water.'
"Well, the thing interested me. It was certainly a project with some scope to it, so Fullerton wrote the proposal and we all signed it and we were off. He did the study both ways. That is, he both varied the water properties for our given Earth, then tried the true water properties on planets at different locations, with different masses and so on. That's how I guessed out the trends for Titan's water. I tried to remember what was the best kind of water for small planets far from the sun."
"And the Earth's water and the Earth itself optimized together?" asked Anna Takoa.
The priest nodded. "It was striking. For example, if you simply assumed a continuously increasing liquid density with cooling, without our water's highly unique extremum at 4 degrees C, all kinds of drastic things happen. The cold water now lies stagnant in the deep oceans and the mean Earth temperature is over zo Celsius degrees lower. Storms, wind and heavy cloud result. It's even worse if you make the ice sink instead of float. The oceans permanently freeze to within a couple of hundred feet of the surface. The rapid air temperature changes lead to massive storm systems. Fullerton's simulation. predicted winds averaging over 300 miles an hour. If you monkey with the vapor pressure or the huge latent heat of vaporization, you get either too much cloud or none at all; either way, it's disaster. Try reducing the high specific heat of water, and remember there are few other substances that are that high, and you lose the stabilizing effect of the ocean surface and get more storms, colder average days. Virtually everything he tried either had very little effect, as with viscosity and conductivity, or else drastic effects in either direction."
"Then they were true optimums, Tom?" asked Dr. Takoa. "Both ways," answered Feeney. "Whether you tilt the Earth up straight or lean it over to roll around like Uranus, you need another kind of water. Up straight, our water gives too much thermal stability and you get complete cloud cover and ice caps down to latitude 40 north and south. With the polar axis down flat, you get wild storms because of the source-sink effect of the hot and cold poles. To moderate this, you need a lower freezing point, lower specific heat so the storms are more localized, and other changes. In fact, it was the angle of tilt of the Earth's axis that optimized most sharply with the properties of water."
Commander Brunel sighed. "And what was the optimizing parameter, Tom?"
Father Feeney shrugged. "It was some complicated thing that Fullerton had worked out. Ile went to the biologists and your gang" -Feeney pushed a finger at Professor Bateson--"to decide on a mean Earth temperature at which metabolic, hydrocarbon activity would best be served, then figured in a statistical number that expressed the severity of wind and climatic variations, kind of a standard deviation for lousy weather."
"It was geared to us, Tom, to human life?" asked Brunel, frowning. Feeney nodded. "Yeah... us, Dave not snakes or ants.
Things that run at 98.6 Fahrenheit."
But Commander Brunel was already wondering what he could possibly tell Houston in the next transmission.
Father Feeney continued. "What happened next, I have no excuses for. I don't know how much you remember about the university situation fifteen years ago, but it was a discouraging, demoralizing time. I know I wasn't thinking clearly. I hated the school, but I didn't know what else to do, or to put it in the language inside my head, what God wanted me to do.
"Fullerton had already done three dissertations' worth of work and neither he nor I was satisfied with what he had. Oh, it would have been another story three or four hundred years ago. They would have made him a Prince of the Church. How Rome would have delighted in all his simulation output as a counter to nasty old Copernicus. 'Look,' they would have said, 'so what if we aren't the center of the system? We're even more unique and unusual, and thus more God-centered.' Elias and I didn't see it like that. Planetary systems form in statistically allowed ways, as you well know, Dave. How freaky were we? That was the question Elias wanted to look at next. He wanted to go on and make a statistical study to determine the probability of planets that fell within the several limits apparently expressed by the properties of water. That is, planets of our mass, solar constant, tilt, primary star type. Yes, he had even looked at the sun's spectral class. You see, natural ocean water has a kind of spectral window to the most intense solar spectral region.... Oh, rotation speed was another critical parameter, and related to specific heat and latent heat of evaporation."
Commander Brunel smiled thinly. "It came out a damn small chance, didn't it, Tom?"
Father Feeney nodded. "The chance of a water-optimized Earth occurring in our own galaxy varied between one in ten-to-the-seventh to one in ten-to-the-ninth, depending on how far you were willing to let Elias's optimum life parameter' slip. In the visible universe, it was higher, a chance of one in ten to one in a thousand that a single Earth night appear."
He looked around at the others, his face heavy with remembered distress. "To understand what happened next, I have to tell you a little about what was going on then in the university. Oh, Notre Dame was nothing special; half the big schools and most of the private ones were on strike that year in one way or another. It isn't very priestlike to say it, but I'd really had a gut-full of that faculty. It was obvious that the country faced serious difficulties, changes in jobs, retrenchment, but all they wanted was more money and fewer hours to do the saine, tired old stuff. The most despicable thing about them. was the fact that they all knew their own students could never aspire to the kind of leisure and affluence they had lived through themselves, yet they were prepared to withhold grades, teaching and degrees to continue their own pleasant and unhurried lives.
"At first the students fell in with the faculty militants... It wasn't that they were stupid, just young and bewildered by the canniest con men of all time, full bulls on the liberal arts faculty. But a graduation missed because no grades come in tends to concentrate one's mind, like a hanging, as Samuel Johnson once said.
"By the time Elias finished his last calculation, the students were in court after restraint and had begun to picket the faculty pickets. It was ugly enough, all right, in and out of school. Shouting, curses, old men who had once lectured on Chaucer and Aquinas and John Locke spitting venom and hate at young persons who responded with rocks, shouts, and open cans of paint. That morning was especially bad, a car afire at one campus entrance, local and state police between the various groups, tear gas, and filthy, abusive language everywhere."
Feeney looked around. "If that was what universities had become, it seemed to me that we were lost and society ended. Where was the source of renewal or sanity? Of course they didn't bother me much. Some of the students cheered as I went through the lines in my clerical collar while the faculty pickets turned their backs. Still, I got phone calls all the time... threats and hatred... shouts about dirty scab Catholic finks. . . all that kind of phony talk the faculty had learned from reading about the earlier days of labor war, when real men fought for real rights. I'm telling you this so that you'll understand what comes next.
"Elias came to my office at about nine that day. His face was white and he seemed very disturbed. I was disturbed too, and when he showed me his results, I went into a kind of funk. What he was saying was that we, we on Earth, were all there was anywhere... an improbable oddity. A dreadful, small, selfish, hurting people, beset by greed and violence, and still... the absolute lords of the known universe! It was really shocking, unbelievable. I spent the whole day going over his stuff, assumption by assumption. We found one mistake and it only made the probabilities a little higher, a little worse. "By five that afternoon there was loud chanting from the campus entrances and sirens were all about us. Elias Fullerton stared at me and his bony face was a mask of white distress. 'Are we really God's creatures?' he asked finally.
"I nodded, feeling sick. 'We are imperfect, Elias,' I said.
"He pointed out toward the sounds of riot. Those men and women. represent the culmination of three thousand years of humanistic scholarship and philosophy. And all they can think about is greed and grossness. . . greed above all!'
"Elias,' I tried to say, 'there are good men yet. They are silent now, but they are all around us.' But I didn't really believe it and he could see that. The mistake we were both making was in assuming that if people with PhD's could turn into bums, the rest of the world was already gone." Father Feeney chuckled. "As though Saint Francis or the folks who faced the lions had PhD's. Not likely!
"There really were good, steady citizens, millions of them, and in the end they muddled the country through to where we are now. That fuss at the universities was just a kind of specialized decadence, local, and the old bulls were really more to be pitied than hated.
"But back then everything seemed ended and awful. I have no excuse for what happened next. I should have seen that Elias was in deep trouble, but I was like those people out on the picket line, thinking of my own philosophical problems, my own alienation. I never really knew him. We should have had a drink together or gone to a movie sometime. He walked out into that wild night, whitefaced, his hands shaking in rage and dismay, and all around us were sirens, violence, the flicker of fires across the campus.
"I decided to sleep in the department office that night. We had some cots set up in the basement corridor. Why didn't I keep Elias with me? I still think about that now and then. I certainly wasn't much of a priest. There were plenty of devils whispering in your ear at the university then!
"The next morning I was in my office early, thinking about what Elias had found and trying to make some other interpretation of it. There was still noise of riot, but old Father Ryan, the Dominican head of the department, walked in, sat down, and stared at me. 'Father Fullerton killed himself last night, Tom,' he said evenly. 'He went off a bridge into the river. He tied two flatirons to his ankles.' "He had chosen death by water, the same way Quentin Compson killed himself in Faulkner's story. Elias liked Faulkner; it was about all he read outside of geophysics. I couldn't answer Father Ryan and the old man went on. 'Ile cleaned out his office, Tom, all his dissertation stuff. Apparently burned it all... plenty of fires last night for that, I guess.'
"I began to shake; my hands, my head. I suppose you three have never had that happen to you? If NASA had ever heard of it, I wouldn't be here now. My head seemed huge, expanded. My jaw muscles were absolutely locked, rigid, and I couldn't control the shaking. I began to cry and tried to speak. Finally I said, 'Father . . . Father... I can't go through those lines. . . I'll kill the bastards ... Kill . . . I hate them. . . Father. . . .
"That old man was stooped and wrinkled, but he was tough. He got up and came behind my desk and took my arm and actually stood me up, like unfolding a jackknife.
"I'll get you off the campus, Tom,' he said to me in a low voice. We walked to the campus police offices. I don't know what Ryan said to the head of Campus Security but within minutes we were in a police car, driven by a youngster, who wore a gun, the red lights spinning on top, the siren screaming. We went through the faculty pickets at sixty miles an hour, like a cannonball, and I only caught a glimpse of shaken fists. A rock bounced off the trunk.
"We drove six hours that day, Father Ryan, the young cop, and I. In another state they left me at a Dominican retreat. They didn't give me food or sleep when I got out, still shaking, trying to weep from eyes long run dry. They took me into the chapel and I fell onto my knees with thein and we were there a very long time.
"They got me through the worst of it, somehow, and a week later a young Jesuit in a rented car arrived and in two days I was at an exclusive retreat high in the mountains of New Mexico. They valued me, the Society, and they weren't going to flush their efforts and investments down the drain without a fight. I never went back to the university. They bought me a place on an eclipse expedition and I did some good things there. Then came NASA and all the rest of this. I've never told you folks the story for obvious reasons, though I guess by now I probably won't start shaking again."
Dr. Takoa put her small hand on Father Feeney's arm. "Dear Tom," she said, "how too bad that you and Father Fullerton could not see then this other interpretation of his finding." She shook her head. "Yet, how could you? How could anyone?"
Commander Brunel frowned at the small exobiologist. "What 'other interpretation,' Anna?" he asked darkly.
She winked at him. "Why, the obvious one, Dave. Water evidently has variable properties. The reason Father Fullerton found an exact optimization is not that the Earth is 'lucky' or 'statistically unusual.' The Earth's waler was specifically designed for it. Titan's water, if Tom's predictions mean anything, was designed for it as well."
Brunel stared at the floor of the lander and grunted. He looked with a pleading expression at Professor Bateson. "Greg, for heaven's sake. How can water be different here from on Earth? I mean..." Bateson shrugged. "The thing is, Dave, why not? This Titan water is actually closer to the way you would expect our water to behave if it followed similar compounds like hydrogen sulfide. It still has too wide a liquid range, but at least it boils lower on the temperature scale. Theoretically, water should boil at about minus 100 Celsius." Brunel started shaking his head but the chemist went on. "You see, all the theories of boiling, freezing, vapor pressure, whatever, depend on measurements. I mean, we know that water boils when the energy of molecular agitation exceeds the attractive forces between the liquid water molecules. So we calculate those bonding forces from kinetic theory. But if Earth water had been like this stuff, we certainly wouldn't have found it any more novel than what we have now. We'd just compute constants for the binding forces and go along with them. The point I'm making, Dave, is that there's nobody who can prove from, say, the laws of thermodynamics, that water must behave the way it does for us. Its behavior is a given, an experimental starting point."
The chemist rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Let me ask you something, Dave. Did they ever test the properties of Mars water, or bring any back?"
Commander Brunel tried to remember all the experiments. He shook his head. "The robot diggers really never found any in the temperate zone. They tried to incubate any encysted life in the soil with water they brought along."
Anna Takoa chuckled to herself. "The poor Martian bacteria, Dave! Oh, dear! I suppose surface tension, capillarity, and osmotic pressures must be very different between these different waters. If there was any life in the Martian dirt samples, we probably cither exploded it-" she suddenly puffed out her cheeks-"or shrank it away to nothing...." And now she sucked in until her lips poked out like a guppy's. "No, Greg. I don't want any of that ice in my bourbon!"
"Wasn't there a Martian polar cap probe, Dave?" asked the chemist.
"Yes, but it was mainly for seismic and weather measurements.
Think about it, Greg. Why use up room and power on an expensive space craft to run high school experiments on water?"
"Which they wouldn't have 'believed from that distance anyway," continued Bateson in a thoughtful voice.
"Look. Do any of you have an explanation for this?" said Brunel in exasperation. "Are you willing to just accept that the damn stuff changes at will from planet to planet?"
Professor Bateson shrugged again, but he spoke quietly and seriously. "Dave, what else have we got but Tom's story? If this isn't a theological matter, then what else is it?"
Feeney's large, ruddy face was beaming at them now. "Think of it!" he said excitedly. "We're just talking about water. But what about carbon? Or silicon? Their properties aren't even completely known yet. Imagine what other world-to-world adjustments may also exist!"
Brunel shook his head fiercely. "Now wait a minute, all of you! Let's back off from the metaphysics and get back to physics. Greg, what if we disassociate the Titan water and burn its O2 and hydrogen with our hydrogen and O2? Do we get some kind of intermediate or average property?"
They all thought about that. Finally, Father Feeney frowned and rubbed his hands together. "Dave, I don't know. Do we want to try that right now. . . ?" His voice trailed off as Brunel peered at him in puzzlement.
Anna Takoa patted Tom Feeney's hand and cocked her head. "Tom, I think Dave has proposed a crucial experiment. We must go forward with this."
Feeney suddenly grinned at them and leaned back on his stool. "Of course we must. We've gotten this far following what we think is the path to truth. Now, if ever, we should go ahead," and his smile became radiant. "But, Greg, I do suggest that we test the decomposed and recombined Titan water first, to make sure we're not doing something by breaking down the molecule."
Professor Bateson clapped his hands in mock applause. "You know, I really do like being on a geriatric crew. Young kids never think of things like that. They just want to go ahead as fast and spectacularly as possible."
They formed a tense line in front of the hood, each on a stool, while Professor Bateson added catch tubes to his electrolysis apparatus, then led the gas flows to a combustion chamber and condensing apparatus that allowed the recombined water to drip into an analysis-box specimen-holder. Bateson turned up the juice on the electrolysis, and lit off the combining gas so that a blue flame flickered steadily and water droplets condensed and ran down the cooled glass of the condenser. Minutes passed and finally the sample holder was full. Bateson took a deep breath and shifted the water specimen to the analysis box. "Okay, here's good old density-versus-temperature again." The monitor screen flashed up a curve.
Commander Brunel exhaled and blinked. "Now... it's just water, our water." Indeed, the density curve lay exactly over the Earth-water reference, starting at zero C instead of minus 67 as before.
But Tom Feeney's eyes were wide and bright. "Greg Greg..." and his voice was so tense that they all turned and stared at him. "Test some of the water from the beaker that didn't go over." Bateson stared. "We've done the distilled Titan water three times already, Tom."
"Again, Greg. Please!"
Bateson turned without a word, put his hands in the gloves, and drew a sample from the original flask of distilled Titan water. He placed it in the analysis box and they silently watched as the data flashed up on the screen. Now it too was identical with the previous sample and the Earth reference curve.
Commander Brunel's cheeks turned dead white. "Now... hang on here! We weren't hallucinating. Those other experiments are all on video tape. That camera goes on every time Greg shoves his hands into the gloves!"
Ton Feeney stared at them in wonder. "Don't you see it yet? Any of you? He... He designs each world... to be as gentle as He can make it! It didn't work on Titan, maybe not on Mars cither. Nothing came to live. But now we're here And we're searching! We're the life on Titan! Ile's given Titan, its water, everything, to us! Think of it, Dave! He's like Johnnie Appleseed, preparing orchards all across the universe. And then changing them when a different seed comes by. How beautiful Oh, Anna, think of the variety, the endless kinds of life! Ah... the love. . ." And Tom Feeney dropped to his knees on the floor of the lauder and lifted his hands in prayer. He remembered a summer moment when he was fourteen as though it were an hour ago. He had gone with some Protestant friends to a Presbyterian song service on a Sunday night in the summer resort town where his family spent two weeks each year. They had a new minister, a bearded young man, who had organized a musical program with a choir and some soloists. The part of it that Tom Feeney remembered was a thin, plain girl who stood and sang in a sweet, round, innocent voice a song called "The Saints of God." Tom Feeney did not remember most of the verses; they were about different saints. . . . "One was a doctor, and one was a thief, and one was devoured by a fierce, wild beast. . . ." But he had never forgotten the refrain. . . . "And there's no real reason, no none in the least, why I shouldn't be one too," sung in that pure, lovely voice. Kneeling on the floor of the Titan lander, Father Thomas Feeney, S.J., suddenly, finally, understood how you became a saint. You knew! It was that simple. You knew! And the intensity of his prayers bloomed like sudden flowers.
But the rest of them were not yet ready. Anna Takoa peered intently at the two other men. "Send out the land runner! See if the ice sheet has changed tool Quickly!"
They darted over to the control station for the robot vehicle and soon they were watching a TV view of the runner scooting out on the ice sheet. They braked it over a smooth spot they had surveyed before and the digger descended and pulled a plug of ice up into the runner's innards. Brunel's hands moved over the console and they watched a density curve move upward on the screen. Earth water again!
The little woman's eyes were wide. "Have it put down the acoustic probe, Dave! That changed water must be freezing on the bottom right now!"
The acoustic profiler immediately extended and tracked the thickening ice sheet. There was no doubt about it. The water was rapidly freezing solid in the hot-spot bottom pools. The ice cover was thickening while they watched, at a rate of half a meter per minute. The bolometer monitors they had planted in deep bore holes in the ice were registering sudden, intense thermal output from the latent heat released by the solidifying ice.
Commander Brunel shut his eyes and let his head fall back to the steel wall behind him. "Greg... Anna ... Tom. Good God! While we were testing a half liter of its water, something has changed the whole planet!"
But Anna Takoa had finally seen and heard enough to understand it. She fell to her knees in front of Tom Feeney and pressed her thin hands up between his. Her eyes filled with tears of joy. She said to him in her soft voice, "The Lord Buddha can appear as a running, tinkling brook as well as a man, Tom."
Feeling her hands between his, Father Feeney bent toward her small face. "Monet, the painter, knew that God lived in the pond and the lilies. Oh, think of a billion different ponds and lily pads, dear, dear Anna!"
"And frogs on them, Tom. Fat, green, croaking. All different. All beautiful!"
Their souls swooned together then and their prayers pierced the metal of the lander and flew outward into the great spangle of stars that lay in every direction.
And at just about that same time, hundreds or maybe thousands of other, more or less similar, groups were making these same discoveries and responding in nearly identical ways. So that for those who could see and delight in it, the entire universe was constantly pierced by bright new arrows of surprise and love and joy.