I felt a jab of pain in my chest; I ignored it. “It’s still just indirect evidence for God’s existence,” I said.

“You know,” said Hollus, “you are in the vast minority, even among your own species. According to something I saw on CNN, there are only 220 million atheists on this planet out of a population of 6 billion people. That is just three percent of the total.”

“The truth in factual matters is not a democratic question,” I said. “Most people aren’t critical thinkers.”

Hollus sounded disappointed. “But you are a trained, critical thinker, and I have described to you why God must exist — or, at least, must have at one time existed — in mathematical terms that come as close to certainty as anything in science possibly could. And still you deny his existence.”

The pain was growing worse. It would subside, of course.

“Yes,” I said. “I deny God’s existence.”

6

“Hello, Thomas,” Dr. Noguchi had begun on that fateful day last October, when I’d come in to discuss the results of the tests he’d ordered. He always called me Thomas instead of Tom. We’d known each other long enough that casual names were surely appropriate, but he liked a little bit of formality, a touch of I’m-the-doctor-and-you’re-the-patient distance. “Please sit down.”

I did so.

He didn’t waste time on a preamble. “It’s lung cancer, Thomas.”

My pulse increased. My jaw dropped.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

A million thoughts ran through my head. He must be mistaken; it must be someone else’s file; what am I going to tell Susan? My mouth was suddenly dry. “Are you sure?”

“The cultures from your sputum were absolutely diagnostic,” he said. “There is no doubt that it is cancer.”

“Is it operable?” I said at last.

“We’ll have to determine that. If not, we’ll try to treat it with radiation or chemotherapy.”

My hand went immediately to my head, touching my hair. “Will — will that work?”

Noguchi smiled reassuringly. “It can be very effective.”

Which amounted to a “maybe” — and I didn’t want to hear “maybe.” I wanted certainty. “What — what about a transplant?”

Noguchi’s voice was soft. “Not that many sets of lungs become available each year. Too few donors.”

“I could go to the States,” I said tentatively. You read about that all the time in the Toronto Star , especially since Harris’s cutbacks to the health-care system had begun: Canadians going to the States for medical treatment.

“Makes no difference. There’s a shortage of lungs everywhere. And, anyway, it might not do any good; we’ll have to see if the cancer has spread.”

I wanted to ask, “Am I going to die?” But the question seemed too much, too direct.

“Keep a positive attitude,” continued Noguchi. “You work at the museum, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you’ve probably got an excellent benefits package. You’re covered for prescription drugs?”

I nodded.

“Good. There’s some medication that will be useful. It’s not cheap, but if you’re covered, you’ll be okay. But, as I say, we have to see if the cancer has spread. I’m going to refer you to an oncologist down at St. Mike’s. She’ll look after you.”

I nodded, feeling my world crumbling around me.

Hollus and I had returned to my office. “What you’re arguing for,” I said, “is a special place in the cosmos for humanity and other lifeforms.”

The spiderlike alien maneuvered his bulk to one side of the room. “We do occupy a special place,” he said.

“Well, I don’t know how the development of science went on Beta Hydri III, Hollus, but here on Earth it’s followed a pattern of repeatedly dethroning us from any special position. My own culture thought our world was at the center of the universe, but that turned out to be wrong. We also thought we had been created full-blown by God in his image, but that turned out to be wrong, too. Every time we believed there was something special about us — or our planet or our sun — science showed that we were misguided.”

“But lifeforms like us are indeed special,” said the Forhilnor. “For instance, we all mass the same order of magnitude. None of the intelligent species, including those that vacated their worlds, had average adult body masses below fifty kilograms or above 500 kilograms. We all are, more or less, two meters along our longest dimension — indeed, civilized life could not exist much below 1.5 meters in size.”

I tried again to lift my eyebrows. “Why on Earth would that be true?”

“It is true everywhere, not just on Earth, because the smallest sustainable fire is about fifty centimeters across, and to manipulate a fire you need to be somewhat bigger than it. Without fire, of course, there is no metallurgy, and therefore no sophisticated technology.” A pause, a bob. “Do you not see? We all evolved to be the right size to use fire — and that size is poised directly in the logarithmic middle of the universe. At its maximum extension, the universe will be some forty orders of magnitude larger than we are, and its smallest constituent is forty orders of magnitude smaller than we are.” Hollus regarded me and bobbed up and down. “We are indeed at the center of creation, if only you know how to look at it.”

When I started working at the ROM, the entire front part of its second floor was given over to paleontology. The north wing, directly above the gift shops and deli, had always housed the vertebrate-paleontology displays — “the Dinosaur Gallery” — and the south wing had originally housed the invertebrate-paleo gallery; indeed, the words “Museum of Paleontology” are still carved in stone along the top of the wall there.

But the invert gallery had been closed ages ago, and in 1999 the space was reopened to the public as “The Discovery Gallery,” precisely the kind of edutainment mind-candy Christine Dorati likes: interactive displays for kids, with almost no real learning going on. The subway-poster ads for the new gallery bore the slogan, “Imagine if the Museum were run by an eight-year-old.” As John Lennon once said, it’s easy if you try.

Our pride and joy in vert paleo is our duckbilled Parasaurolophus skeleton, with its glorious, meter-long head crest. Every specimen you’ve ever seen anywhere in the world is a cast of our mount. Indeed, even the Discovery Gallery contains a cast of our Parasaurolophus, lying on the floor, embedded in fake matrix. Kids whack at it all day long with wooden mallets and chisels, mostly resting their bums on the magnificent skull.

Just out front of the vert-paleo gallery there is an indoor balcony, looking down on the Rotunda, which has a subtle star-burst design laid into its marble floor. There’s another balcony on the opposite side, out front of the Discovery Gallery. Between the two, above the glass-doored main entrance, are three vertical stained-glass windows.

While the museum was closed to the public, I took Hollus through the vert-paleo gallery. We’ve got the best collection of hadrosaurs in the world. We’ve also got a dramatic Albertosaurus, a formidable Chasmosaurus, two dynamic mounts of Allosaurus, an excellent Stegosaurus, plus a Pleistocene-mammals display, a wall covered with casts of primate and hominid remains, a La Brea tar-pits exhibit, a standard evolution-of-the-horse sequence, and a wonderful late-Cretaceous underwater diorama, with plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and ammonites.

I also took Hollus over to the hated Discovery Gallery, where a cast of a T. rex looms over the hapless, floor-mounted Parasaurolophus. Hollus seemed enchanted by all the fossils.

In addition, I showed him a lot of paintings of dinosaurs as they might have looked while alive, and I had Abdus go get a copy of Jurassic Park on video so Hollus could watch that.