ominously silent formation until they reached a door bearing a plaque with the name Doctor Hans Karowitz etched into the surface. The door was half-open, the room apparently empty.
“He was Lucy’s mentor, according to her e-mails,” Rachel said, peering into the room.
Ethan knocked gently on the door, but there was no response. He walked inside, Rachel and their agents following behind.
The office was like a miniature lecture hall, complete with a lectern. Chairs were stacked neatly to one side beneath broad windows overlooking a sculptured garden. The room was silent, dust motes winking in the musty air as they floated between two rows of large display cases that dominated the rear of the office.
Ethan walked past the cases, each as tall as he was. Within each was the skeleton of a human or, more precisely, an ancient species of hominin. Ethan looked in fascination at each of them as he passed by, each specimen progressively taller and more recognizably human than its predecessor.
As he rounded the far end of the first row of cabinets, he found himself looking at the back of an old man who was staring into one of the second-row displays against the wall. From Ethan’s perspective, the old man’s reflection was ghoulishly superimposed over the ancient remains of a Neanderthal within the case.
“Dr. Karowitz?”
The old man seemed startled at the sound of Ethan’s voice. Ethan extended a hand and introduced Rachel. At his realization of who Rachel was, Karowitz’s eyes saddened.
“I am so sorry to hear of what has happened,” he said.
“Do you know where my daughter is?” Rachel asked.
“No, but there is no shortage of likely candidates for her kidnapping, creationist groups being the most likely to—”
Before he could finish, Agent Cooper barged in. “That is an unsubstantiated comment with no basis in reality. Keep your opinions to yourself.”
“Shut up and let him speak,” Ethan snapped.
Cooper’s jaw twisted around a shit-eating grin as he rested one hand on a Sig 9 mm pistol at his waist.
“Accept my judgment or you’ll be on the next plane back home, Warner, understood?”
Rachel looked at Karowitz. “Please, just tell us what you can.”
Hans Karowitz sighed, glancing warily at the MACE agents as he spoke.
“Creationists believe that the universe was created in seven days,” he said softly. “Yet the Torah, the Old Testament as recorded by the Hebrews, makes no such claim. It refers only to seven ‘periods of time,’ or yom, which meant aeon in ancient Hebrew. The error appeared as a result of translation between Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Therefore, the supposed creationist age of the Earth as less than ten thousand years is baseless.”
“What difference does it make?” Ethan asked.
Karowitz smiled faintly.
“Almost every major faith on our planet has a creation myth, in which their devotees believe without question regardless of evidence to the contrary. But it may be that such myths found their origin not in fantasy but in a sort of distorted historical record.”
Ethan glanced at Rachel before replying.
“I thought that science would oppose such a concept. You think that religious myths have a genuine historical origin too?”
“Possibly,” Karowitz qualified. “How much do you know about human evolution?”
Ethan, caught off balance, shrugged. “We evolved from apes, right?”
Karowitz spread his arms to encompass the room around them. “Look around, you’re surrounded by examples of evolution. These are the fragments of a human story that began eight million years ago in Africa’s Great Rift Valley and continues to this day.”
“To this day?” Ethan asked. “I thought that we were the last of our kind, the best of our species?”
“Evolution does not have a goal, it’s driven by unguided natural selection,” Karowitz said. “It is constantly in motion and simply represents change over time. It is driven in biological species by random genetic mutations and environmental influences that govern how species adapt to their environments, and thus how efficiently they can reproduce and pass their characteristics on to their offspring.”
“I never understood how one species can suddenly change into another,” Rachel said.
The Belgian shook his head and whistled through his teeth.
“They don’t. Creationist groups have long spread such rumors in an attempt to deceive uncritical minds into believing that humans are special, the product of a god. For decades they have deliberately spread disinformation, misquoted scientists and invented conspiracies, or claimed that evolution is only a theory, despite knowing that the word in science doesn’t mean the same as in daily life. You don’t hear them criticize Einstein’s theory of general relativity, another well-proven foundation of science that