Robert Sawyer - Calculating God

And now the floodgates were open. Now everyone, everywhere, was talking about creation, and the big bang, and the previous cycles of existence, and the fudging of fundamental constants, and intelligent design.

And the charges were running high against evolutionists and biochemists and cosmologists and paleontologists, claiming that we’d known — or at least had an inkling — that perhaps all this might be true, and that we’d deliberately suppressed it, rejecting papers submitted to journals on these topics, and ridiculing those who had published such ideas in the popular press, lumping anyone who supported the anthropic cosmological principle in with the obviously deluded fundamentalist young-Earth creationists.

Of course, phone calls poured in requesting interviews with me — approximately one every three minutes, according to the logs from the ROM’s switchboard. I’d told Dana, the departmental assistant, that unless the Dalai Lama or the pope called, not to bother me. I’d been joking, but representatives of both were on the phone to the ROM within twenty-four hours of Salbanda’s revelations in Brussels.

As much as I wanted to dive publicly into the fray, I couldn’t. I didn’t have the time to spare.

I stood bending over my desk, trying to sort through the papers on it. There was a request from the AMNH for a copy of that paper I’d done on Nanshiungosaurus; a proposed budget for the paleobiology department that had to be approved by me before the end of the week; a letter from a high-school student who wanted to become a paleontologist and was looking for career advice; employee-evaluation forms for Dana; an invitation to give a lecture in Berlin; galley proofs of that introduction I wrote for Danilova and Tamasaki’s handbook; two article manuscripts for the JVP that I’d agreed to referee; two quotes on the resin we needed; a requisition form that I had to fill out to get the damned lighting for the Camptosaurus in the Dinosaur Gallery fixed; a copy of my own book that had been sent to me for an autograph; seven — no, eight — unanswered letters on other topics; my own expense-claim form for the previous quarter that had to be filled out; the departmental long-distance bill, with calls that no one had yet owned up to highlighted in yellow.

It was too much. I sat down, turned to my computer, tapped the E-mail icon. Seventy-three new messages waiting; Christ, I didn’t have time to even begin to wade through that many.

Just then, Dana stuck her head through the door. “Tom, I really need those vacation schedules approved.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll get to it.”

“As soon as you can, please,” she said.

“I said I’ll get to it!”

She looked startled. I don’t think I’d ever snapped at her before. But she disappeared out into the corridor before I could apologize.

Maybe I should have just dispensed with or delegated all my administrative duties, but, well, if I stepped down as department head, surely my successor would claim the right to be Hollus’s guide. Besides, I couldn’t leave everything a mess; I had to wrap things up, complete as much as I could, before . . .

Before . . .

I sighed and turned away from the computer, looking again at the piles of stuff on my desk.

There wasn’t enough time, dammitall. There just wasn’t enough time.

Many employees have no idea how much their bosses make, but I knew to the penny what Christine Dorati was pulling down. The law in Ontario required public disclosures of all civil-service salaries of over a hundred thousand Canadian dollars per year; the ROM had just four staff members who fell into that category. Christine made $179,952 last year, plus $18,168 in taxable benefits — and she had an office that reflected that stature. Despite my complaints about the way Christine ran the museum, I understood that it was necessary for her to have such an office. She had to entertain potential donors there, as well as government bigwigs who could boost or slash our budget on a whim.

I’d been sitting in my office, waiting for my pain pills to settle, when I’d gotten the call saying Christine wanted to see me. Walking was a good way to get the pills to stay down, so I didn’t mind. I headed off to her office.

“Hi, Christine,” I said, after Indira let me pass into the inner sanctum. “You wanted to see me?”

Christine was looking at something on the web; she raised a hand to tell me to be patient a moment longer. Beautiful textiles hung from her office walls. There was a suit of armor behind Christine’s desk; ever since our Armour Court — which I’d always thought had been a rather popular exhibit — had been scrubbed to make room for one of Christine’s trademark feed-them-pablum displays, we’d had more suits of armor than we knew what to do with. Christine also had a stuffed passenger pigeon (the ROM’s Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Biology — the slapped-together catchall formed by merging the old ichthyology, herpetology, mammalogy, and ornithology departments — had about twenty of them). She also had a cluster of quartz crystals as big as a large microwave oven, salvaged from the old Geology Gallery; a beautiful jade Buddha, about the size of a basketball; an Egyptian canopic jar; and, of course, a dinosaur skull — a fiberglass cast from a Lambeosaurus. The blade-shaped crest on the duckbill’s head at one end of the room nicely balanced the double-headed ax held by the suit of armor at the other.

Christine clicked her mouse, minimizing her browser window, and at last gave me her full attention. She gestured with an open palm toward one of the three leather-upholstered swivel chairs that faced her desk. I took the middle one, feeling a certain trepidation as I did so; Christine had a policy of never offering a seat if the meeting was to be wrapped up quickly.

“Hello, Tom,” she said. She made a solicitous face. “How are you feeling?”

I shrugged a little; there wasn’t much to say. “As well as can be expected, I suppose.”

“Are you in much pain?”

“It comes and goes,” I said. “I’ve got some pills that help.”

“Good,” she said. She was quiet for a time; that was abnormal for Christine, who usually seemed to be in a great hurry. Finally, she spoke again. “How’s Suzanne doing? She holding up all right?”

I didn’t correct her on my wife’s name. “She’s managing. There’s a support group that meets at the Richmond Hill Public Library; she goes to meetings there once a week.”

“I’m sure they’re a comfort to her.”

I said nothing.

“And Richie? How’s he?”

Two in a row was too much. “It’s Ricky,” I said.

“Ah, sorry. How’s he doing?”

I shrugged again. “He’s frightened. But he’s a brave kid.”

Christine gestured toward me, as if that only made sense given who Ricky’s father was. I tipped my head in thanks at the unspoken compliment. She was silent a moment longer, then: “I’ve been talking to Petroff, over in H.R. He says you’re fully covered. You could go on long-term-disability leave and receive eighty-five percent of your salary.”

I blinked and thought carefully about my next words. “I’m not sure it’s your place to be discussing my insurance situation with anyone.”

Christine raised both hands, palms out. “Oh, I didn’t discuss you in particular; I just asked about the general case of an employee with a ter — with a serious illness.” She’d started to say “terminal,” of course, but hadn’t been able to bring herself to use the word. Then she smiled. “And you’re covered. You don’t have to work anymore.”

“I know that. But I want to work.”