“So, how’d it go, Pieter?” Keene inquired. “You’re not wasting much time. Your section of the labs isn’t finished yet, and you’re starting a menagerie and horticultural collection already.”
“Hey, Lan. Pretty good. Well, you know how it is. There’s so much going on out there that we’d need a hundred lifetimes anyway. Are we online here with the power yet?”
“The crew are just hooking up to the distribution system now. We’ll be ready to go as soon as they’ve finished the shielding wall.” Some of the file folders on top of the wad that Naarmegen was carrying slipped loose. Keene caught them deftly before the wind could carry them away. “It’s okay, I’ll bring them in,” he said.
They walked together to the open double doors leading into the lab block. Inside, the technicians were setting the cages and sample boxes down on benches among others waiting to be cataloged and stored. Naarmegen took the papers into a partitioned area littered with boxes, pieces of furniture, desktop equipment, and miscellaneous paraphernalia that was in the process of becoming an office. Keene looked around while he waited. The boxes contained small animals like mice and shrews, lizards, a brown snake, worms and snails, various insects. He moved closer to contemplate some plant specimens standing in soil-filled plastic pots. They were drab green to dark gray, tough and leathery-looking in texture. One had cactus-like spines along the edges of broad, spade-shaped leaves. Another, purple and gray, growing from a partly-visible tuber, was putting out curly tendrils that were already feeling along the rim of the container.
“Strange-looking things,” he commented as Naarmegen rejoined him.
“That’s the interesting thing. I’m not enough of an expert to know if those forms are something new or just an unusual variety that happen to be suited to the new conditions. But what intrigues me is the coloring. It’s widespread across all kinds of different species. They’re getting as much energy as they can by absorbing all across the spectrum. If they did it a hundred percent efficiently, they’d be black.”
“Would they have the right chemistry to process it?” Keene asked dubiously. “I thought most plants were specialized to absorb in the red.” Which, of course, was why most plants used to look green.
“That’s one of the things we hope to find out,” Naarmegen said.
Keene stared at the growths reflectively. “Those changes didn’t all just happen together by random guesses in the time since Athena.”
“Exactly,” Naarmegen agreed. “The programs to switch to the new environment were already in there.”
It was an allusion to the Kronian version of evolution, which held that as with their findings in geology and planetary formation, changes didn’t happen gradually over immense spans of time as had been previously thought, but in huge leaps, where whole new sets of designs and body plans seemed to appear abruptly to repopulate the Earth after major cataclysms. So maybe “revolution” would have been a better word.
It had long been known that species genera, and whole families appeared suddenly in the fossil record, fully differentiated and specialized, with no traces of the transitional and intermediary forms that gradualist theory said should be present in abundance; but in keeping with what had become so much the practice on Earth, only that which accorded with the theory had been deemed acceptable as fact, and so the difficulty was ignored. Hence, the billions of years required to make the traditional account of things sound plausible were not needed. That fitted well with the general picture the Kronians were putting together of things happening much more quickly and far more recently than had previously been believed. And this was just as well, since according to Vicki, the view among the Kronian scientists whom she worked with was that the traditional account wasn’t plausible in any case, even given billions of years. The improbabilities involved were simply so huge as to be indistinguishable from miracles.
“So, do you think we’ll be seeing new animals and things coming out of all this?” Keene asked curiously.
Naarmegen screwed up his face and peered into the distance, as if trying to read the answer off the wall at the far end of the room. “It’s early days to say yet. But a lot of the niches are vacant now. It will be interesting to see what emerges to fill them. If I had to guess, I’d say we’ll probably know within a few generations. Blind trial and error didn’t remodel the whole biosphere in a few centuries after the Disruption and the Detachment. But if I had to guess, I’d say that Athena wasn’t extreme enough to bring about anything that radical. I think what we’ll get will be pretty much variations on what we know”