FIFTH DAY
                                  by Jack McDevitt

                                        ****

“In another age, I was a customs officer on the northern border. During winter
nights, when the temperature sank to forty below, and the blizzards came and the
traffic stopped, it was Asimov’s that kept me alert. I retain my passion for the
magazine to this day, and sympathize with those unfortunate souls who have never
known what it means to catch the late freight to Polaris.”—Jack McDevitt

      Jack McDevitt recently won the Southeastern Science Fiction
Achievement (SESFA) Awards for best novel, Seeker, and lifetime
achievement by a Southern writer. He is believed to be the only Philadelphia
taxi driver ever to have claimed either award.
                                        ****
      Francis A. Gelper had been a biologist. He wasn’t especially well known
outside Lockport. Won one or two minor awards, but nothing that raised any
eyebrows. But everyone who knew him said he was brilliant. And they said it in a
way that told me they meant it. They liked him, too. They all did. His colleagues
shook their heads in disbelief that he was gone; several of his students openly cried
when I tried to interview them. In his spare time, he was a Little League coach, and
he even helped out down at the senior center. Wednesday evenings, he played
competitive bridge.
      He’d been on his way back to his apartment after a social gathering at the
university—they’d been celebrating a prize given to one of the
astrophysicists—when he apparently fell asleep at the wheel and drove his hybrid
over an embankment. He was thirty-eight years old.
       I’d never actually met him. I’d seen him from a distance on several occasions,
and spotted him at the supermarket now and then. I’d always planned to do a feature
story on him. Biologist With a Heart. Instead I got to do a postmortem appreciation.
      He was from Twin Rivers, Alabama. I thought the body would be shipped
back for the funeral, but they conducted the service locally, at the McComber
Funeral Home on Park Street. The place was packed with friends and students. The
crowd spilled out into the street.
      The service was one of those attempts to celebrate his life rather than
recognize his death. They never work, if you ask me. But there were a lot of people
who wanted to say something about him. And the speakers all had trouble with their
voices.
      When it was over, I stood outside with Harvey Pointer, the biology
department chairman, watching the crowd dissipate. Harvey and I had gone to
school together, been in Scouts together. He was a little guy with an outsize
mustache and the same mischievous smile that always made him the prime suspect
when something happened. “Did he have a girlfriend?” I asked. “Any marital
prospects?”
      He shook his head. “I don’t think he was the marrying type.”
      I let the comment go.
       “You know, Ron,” he said, “Frank got caught up in the genesis problem and
he devoted his life to it. He could have gotten a grant in any one of several research
areas, but he wanted to settle that one issue. It was the driving force in his career.”
      It was one of those hard, bright, sunny days when you have to stand facing
away from the sun. “What’s the genesis problem?” I asked.
      Harvey grinned. “How life got started. Where the first cell came from.”
      “I thought that got settled years ago,” I said. “In a laboratory somewhere.
Didn’t they mix some chemicals and add heat and water? Or was it electricity?”
      “No.” Harvey stopped to talk to a couple of people from the department.
Yeah, they were going to miss him. Damn shame. Then they were gone. “There’ve
always been claims,” he said, continuing where he’d left off, “but nothing’s ever
stood up.” He jammed his hands down into his topcoat pockets. “Pity. Solve that
one and you get to take a Nobel home.”
      Genesis. It would make a nice bit to add to the story I’d already half-written.
                                         ****
      As far as we could tell, none of Gelper’s family had shown up. His mother
and father were still living, and he had a brother and sister. When I broached the
subject to Harvey he said he didn’t know any details. Gelper hadn’t talked much
about his family. “I don’t think he liked them much,” he added.
      I’d seen odder things over the years, like Arnold Brown’s religious
conversion at his mother’s funeral, and Morey Thomas’s insistence when they
buried his father that it was no use because the old man wouldn’t stay dead. But
usually death has a way of bringing families together. Especially when the loss is
unexpected.
      I wrote the story and went back to covering the routine social calendar for
Lockport, doing weddings and visiting authors at the library and writing features on
anybody who did anything out of the ordinary. If you discovered you could play a
banjo standing on your head, you could make the front page of the Register.
        So I’d forgotten about Gelper and his missing family when, about a month
after the funeral, Harvey called me. “Got something you might be interested in,” he
said.
      “What is it, Harvey?”
      “Can you come over?”
                                         ****
       You’d expect a department chairman to be set up in a reasonably elaborate
office. In fact, he was worse off than I was. They had him jammed into a space
about the size of a large closet. He sat behind a desk piled high with folders,
magazines, disks, and legal pads. Behind him, a bulletin board had all but
disappeared behind a legion of Post-its, schedules, and articles cut from magazines.
      He got up when I appeared at the door, waved me in, shook my hand, and
indicated a chair. “Good to see you, Ron,” he said, leaning back against his desk
and folding his arms.
     We did a couple of minutes of small talk before he came to the point. “You
remember I told you what Frank was working on when he died?”
      “Sure,” I said. “How life got started.”
      “You knew he left his papers to the university?”
      “No, I didn’t. In fact, I hadn’t thought of it at all.”
      “I’ve been looking through them.”
      “And—?”
       He walked around behind the desk, took his seat, shifted back and forth a few
times, and put his hands together. Announcement coming. “I could have called
CNN. And the A.P., Ron. Instead I called you.”
      “I appreciate that, Harvey.”
      He had sharp brown eyes that could look through you. At the moment they
had gone dull, as if he’d gone away somewhere. “Frank found the solution.”
      “To what?”
     “Genesis.” I stared at him. The eyes came back from wherever they’d been.
“He worked out the process by which the first living cells appeared.”
      The words just hung there. “Are you serious, Harvey?”
        He nodded. “You think I’d make jokes about something like that? It’s true. At
least, as far as we can tell. We haven’t run all the tests yet, but the numbers seem to
be right.”
     “Well, you’re an honest man, Harvey. You could have taken that for yourself.
Claimed credit for a major discovery. Who would have known?”
      “What makes you think I won’t?”
      “How much cash is involved?”
      He rubbed his index finger across his mustache. “Truth is, I thought about it,
Ron. But I couldn’t have gotten away with it.”
      “Why not?”
       “I could never have done the equations. And everybody in the department
knows it.” He chuckled. “No, this needed somebody brighter than I am.” He glanced
out through the single window at Culbertson Hall, directly across from us. It was the
home of the student center.
      Bells went off in the building. I listened to doors opening, the sudden rush of
voices in the corridors. “What a pity,” I said.
      “How do you mean?”
       “He makes a major discovery. And is killed before he can announce it. Is it
really worth a Nobel?”
       “Yes,” he said. “If everything bears out, as I suspect it will. But I think there’s
a misunderstanding. This wasn’t a current set of results, Ron. It looks as if he’s had
it locked up for more than seven years.”
                                        ****
       I asked whether he could explain it to me. In layman’s language, so I could
pass it on to my readers. The short answer was no. But that didn’t stop him from
trying. I got out my recorder and he started talking about primal conditions and
triggers and carbon and God knows what else. “Could we duplicate it in a
laboratory?” I asked.
      “Already have.”
      “Really? You’ve made life?”
      “Well, we’ve done it virtually.”
     “Okay.” What else would my readers want to know? “Why didn’t he
announce the discovery?”
      Harvey had no idea. “It makes no sense,” he said. “This was the grail.”
      “What’s he been doing since?”
      “Refining his results, looks like.”
      “Stalling?”
      “Maybe.” He took a deep breath. “Are you interested in knowing what the
odds were against life developing?”
        “I’ve no idea. I’ve always assumed it was more or less inevitable.”
        “Not hardly. In fact, if Frank has it right, the possibility was one in trillions.”
        “That’s a big number.”
       “Actually, it goes up another level. Quadrillions.” He pushed back and the
chair squeaked. “That first living thing requires a precise sequence of a long series of
extraordinarily unlikely events. Then it has to survive to reproduce. We were the
longest of long shots, Ron.”
      We stood looking at each other. “I guess it explains why those SETI guys
never hear anything.”
                                      ****
      Nobody who knew Gelper could offer any explanation why he might have
withheld his breakthrough. When Harvey reported that the testing results continued
to confirm everything, I wondered whether he might have been unaware of the
implications. “No,” said Harvey. “Not a chance.”
       So that was how I wrote a story that collected world-wide attention. It’s true
that hardly anybody in Lockport got excited, but I found myself filing for the A.P.
and getting interviewed, along with Harvey, on the Science Channel.
      Harvey was getting credit for the work, since he had made it public, and
gradually Gelper disappeared into the background. I tracked down a few women
who’d dated Gelper on and off, but none of them had suspected he’d been
harboring a secret.
      Eventually, I called his parents, got the father, and offered my sympathies. He
thanked me, but his voice was distant. “You’re one of his friends?” he asked.
        “I’m a reporter for The Lockport Register,” I said.
        “Oh.”
        “Your son did some very important work, Mr. Gelper. You must be proud of
him.”
        “I’ve read the stories.”
       “He did the breakthrough research years ago. But he never released the
results.”
        “So I understand.”
        “Did he tell you what he was doing?”
        “No.”
     “If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Gelper, that seems strange. I’d expect
you would be the first person he’d confide in.”
         “Mr.—?”
         “Haight.”
         “Mr. Haight, my son and I have not been close. For a long time.”
      “Oh. I’m sorry to hear it.” There was silence at the other end. “Can you
imagine any reason why he’d have withheld this kind of information?”
         “I’m not surprised he did,” he said. Then: “Thanks for calling.”
         “Why?” I asked. “Why are you not surprised?”
         “Please let it go.”
         And I was listening to a dial tone.
                                           ****
      He wouldn’t agree to an interview. Wouldn’t return my calls. So I persuaded
Harvey to draw up a departmental certificate of recognition to Francis Gelper. We
framed it, and I bought a ticket to Huntsville, on my own dime, rented a car, and
drove to Twin Rivers.
      Gelper Senior was a retired real estate dealer. He’d been an automobile
salesman at one time, had run unsuccessfully for the Twin Rivers school board, and
had home-schooled his kids. He was semi-retired at the time of his son’s death.
Showed up once a week at Gelper and Martin, which specialized in developing new
properties.
      His wife had, for a few years, been a math instructor at the local high school.
They lived just outside town in a two-story brick home with columns and maybe a
quarter-acre. A gardener was digging at some azalea bushes when I pulled into the
driveway.
       Mrs. Gelper answered the door. I’d seen no recent photos of her, but she was
easy to recognize. She was well into her sixties, with blonde hair pulled back, blue
eyes, and the sort of disconnected gaze that let me know I was of minor
significance. “Yes?” she said, glancing down at the envelope in which I carried
Frank’s award.
     I introduced myself and explained that I’d come from Lockport University. In
Maryland. She made no move to invite me inside.
         “They’ve issued your son a certificate of appreciation,” I continued.
         “Oh,” she said. “That’s very kind of them.” We stood there looking at each
other.
      A voice in back somewhere broke in: “Who’s at the door, Margaret?”
      She stepped aside and I saw Gelper Senior, Charlie Gelper, who had
apparently been asleep on the sofa. “Please come in,” she said. Then, to her
husband: “He’s brought something. For Frank.”
     I couldn’t say the guy was hostile. But he clearly wanted me out of there.
Apparently misunderstanding, he said that Frank was dead.
      “It’s an award,” I said. “In recognition of his service.”
       He got up from the couch and watched while I removed the certificate from a
padded manila envelope and held it out for whichever of them might choose to take
it. Margaret did. She looked at it and smiled. “Thank you,” she said.
       Gelper nodded. “Tell them we appreciate it.” I could see the son in the father.
Same features, same wide shoulders, same eyes. He waited his turn, took the
certificate from her, frowned at it, and said thanks again. The presentation was over.
       “I don’t know whether you’re aware,” I said, “but he’s made a significant
contribution to his field.”
      “So we’ve heard,” said Margaret.
      “They’re mystified at the school.” I tried to be casual. And of course when
you try hard to be casual you know what happens.
     She exchanged smiles with her husband. “Can I get you something? Coffee,
maybe?”
      “Yes, please.” I was grateful she’d loosened up a bit.
       Gelper laid the certificate on a side table. We were standing in the living room.
They didn’t lack for money. Leather furniture. Large double windows looking out on
the grounds. Etched glassware. Finely carved bookshelves.
      A copy of The Hunting Digest lay on a chair, and half a dozen books were
arranged on one of the shelves. The others were devoted to artificial flowers,
reproductions of classic art works, and framed photos.
      “You from Lockport?” Gelper asked.
      “Yes, sir. Lived there all my life.”
      I steered the conversation onto hunting, admitted I knew nothing about it,
pretended it was something I’d always wanted to do. The coffee came. Margaret
asked how well I’d known their son.
       “Only in passing,” I said. “But everybody he worked with, and his students,
all thought very highly of him.”
       Eventually I was able to get back to Frank’s failure to report what he’d found.
“It baffles everybody. Harvey, his department head, says if he’d revealed what he
knew, he’d have won the Nobel.”
      Margaret nodded. “I can tell you why he said nothing.” Her voice shook.
      “Why?” I asked.
      “The newspapers say the process is so convoluted, that it requires such a
conjunction of unlikely events, that the odds against it are almost infinite.”
      “And—?” I said.
      “Scientists,”—she said it as if she were referring to a disreputable
pack—”were expecting that it would be routine. You get water, and sunlight, and a
few basic elements, and next thing you know you have squirrels.”
      “It didn’t work out that way,” I said, trying to encourage her.
      She nodded. “No. Despite all the talk, it took the hand of God. That’s what
Frank proved, what he wanted to deny. It’s the fifth day.” Tears were beginning to
run down her cheeks.
       Gelper came up behind her, held her shoulders, and looked down at me. He
was an imposing figure. “He couldn’t have stood that kind of result,” he said in a
soft voice. “He abandoned his faith a long time ago. I don’t know whether you
understand what that means. But it’s why he kept it quiet. He lived in denial. Denied
everything we know to be true.” He looked shaken. “He was denying the Lord right
to the end. Think about it. At this moment, our son is in hell.”
                                        ****
       Well, I didn’t know how to respond to that so I said thanks for your time and
left. As soon as I was clear of the neighborhood, I called Harvey. “I don’t think his
folks approved of him.”
      “You figure out why?”
      “It’s a religious thing, apparently. They said something about a fifth day.”
     “It figures. They would have been referring to Genesis, I guess. The fifth
day was when God created the first living things.”
     “It was a sad scene back there, Harvey. I thought religion was supposed to be
a comfort.”
      “Not always. I guess his being gay didn’t help, either.”
      “You didn’t say he was gay.”
      “I couldn’t see any reason to spread it around, Ron. I slipped just now, and
I’d appreciate it if you didn’t print it.”
       “I won’t. But I’ve interviewed some women who said they had dated him.”
       “I guess you could say he played both sides of the aisle.”
      I thought about Gelper standing there trembling and it occurred to me that he
was the one in hell.
                                        ****
      I rode down to the local library, commandeered a computer, and did a search
on Francis Gelper. I’d done that before, of course, when I’d been putting the
original story together. Thousands of entries had popped up. Gelper on telomeres
for Nature. Gelper discusses evolutionary extracts for The Darwin Newsletter.
Gelper on cell cycle checkpoints for Scientific American.
       But this time I narrowed the search. I added “gay.”
      The usual range of off-the-subject results showed up. Joe Gelper plays
Gaylord Batterly in Over the Top, with George Francis conducting. Time travel
novel Back to the Gay Nineties by Marie Gelper, one of the year’s best, according
to Mark Francis. Then I saw the one that froze me. It was from something called
The Revelation Bulletin:
       Exorcism Rites Performed on Three Boys
      Twin Rivers, Ala. April 11. Three teenaged boys received exorcism rites this
past Sunday at the Divine Beneficence Church. The ceremony was conducted by
the Rev. Harry Parver, while hundreds of worshippers watched in awe.
      The article went on to name the teens. One of them was Francis Gelper. I
checked the date. He would have been fifteen.
       I looked up the Divine Beneficence Church, and drove over. It was a
picturesque place, not as big as it sounded in the story. It was freshly painted, with a
white picket fence sealing off the grounds, and a large signboard exhorting everyone
to attend the Mighty Soldiers of the Lord Revival that weekend. The Rev. Parver
was listed as rector.
       Ten minutes later I was back at the Gelper place.
                                        ****
       They were surprised to see me. “Tell me about the exorcism,” I said.
      Margaret went pale; Gelper took to glaring at me. “I don’t see how it’s any of
your business,” he said.
     “What did he have to do? Stand at the front of the church while all his friends
watched? And somebody prayed over him?”
         Margaret looked through me. “We had no choice. We were fighting for his
soul.”
         “Did he have to confess his sins to the entire congregation?”
         Gelper started for me. “Get out,” he said.
         “That explains why he kept it quiet, doesn’t it?”
      “I already told you why. He was denying his God. No wonder he died
young.”
      He was moving toward me with his fists balled. I’m not normally all that brave
when it comes to physical confrontations. But on that afternoon I was in a rage and I
stood my ground. “You got it wrong, Gelper,” I said. “He knew the conclusion
you’d jump to. That his results supported your notions of creation. And he didn’t
want that. He wasn’t denying God. He was denying your vision of things. He was
denying you. He sacrificed everything rather than allow you to misread his work.”
                                       ****
       Harvey informs me the odds against life in any one place are so remote that
they exceed the estimated number of worlds in biozones in the entire universe by a
factor of three. If we assume that the sort of life we know, the carbon-based type
that needs liquid water, is the only kind possible, then the chances were two to one
against the appearance anywhere of a single living creature. We got lucky. That’s
what Harvey says.
        But the estimate of the number of eligible planets is wildly speculative.
Nobody has a clue how big the universe actually is. So all the talk about probabilities
is, in the end, just talk.
       Still, when I look at the night sky now, it’s different from what it used to be. It
feels cold. And impersonal. Just a machine.
       I wonder if Frank Gelper had felt the same way. And if, in the end, that was
the real reason he kept everything to himself.
         Copyright © 2007 Jack McDevitt