But it wasn’t. It was a contest to make the best dinosaur marionette.

I knew which dinosaur it had to be: Parasaurolophus, the ROM’s signature mount.

I tried building one out of Plasticine and Styrofoam and wooden dowels.

It was a disaster. The head, with its long crest, kept falling off. I never got it finished. Some fat kid won the contest; I was at the ceremony where he received his prizes, one of which was a sauropod model. He said, “Neat! Brontosaurus!” I was disgusted: even in 1960, no one who knew anything about dinosaurs called Apatosaurus that.

I did learn one valuable lesson, though.

I learned that you can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested.

Donald Chen and Hollus might have been fascinated by supernovae, but I was more interested in what Hollus and I had been talking about before. Once Don left, I said, “So, Hollus, you guys seem to know an awful lot about DNA.”

“I suppose that is true,” the alien said.

“What—” My voice had broken a bit; I swallowed and tried again. “What do you know about problems with DNA, about errors in its replication?”

“That is not my field, of course,” said Hollus, “but our ship’s doctor, Lablok, is reasonably expert in that area.”

“And does this Lablok . . . ” I swallowed “. . . does this Lablok know anything about, say, cancer?”

“The treatment of cancer is a specialized discipline on our world,” said Hollus. “Lablok knows something about it, of course, but—”

“Can you cure cancer?”

“We treat it with radiation and chemicals,” said Hollus. “Sometimes these are effective, but often they are not.” He sounded rather sad.

“Ah,” I said. “The same is true here on Earth.” I was quiet for a time; of course, I’d been hoping for a different answer. Oh, well. “Speaking of DNA,” I said, at last, “I — I wonder if I might have a sample of yours. If that’s not too personal, that is. I’d like to have some studies done on it.”

Hollus stretched out an arm. “Help yourself.”

I almost fell for it. “You aren’t really here. You’re just a projection.”

Hollus lowered his arm, and his eyestalks did their S-ripple. “Forgive my sense of humor. But, certainly, if you would like some DNA, you are welcome to it. I will have the shuttle come down with some samples.”

“Thanks.”

“I can tell you what you will find, though. You will find that my existence is just as unlikely as yours. The degree of complexity in an advanced lifeform simply could not have arisen by chance.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to argue with the alien, but, dammitall, he was a scientist. He should know better. I swiveled in my chair, turning to face the computer mounted on what had, when I’d started working here, been the return for a typewriter. I’ve got one of those nifty Microsoft split keyboards; the museum had to provide them to anyone who asked after the staff association started making complaints about liability for carpal-tunnel syndrome.

My computer was a Windows NT system, but I opened a DOS session on it, and typed a command at the prompt. An application began, and it drew a chessboard on the screen.

“That’s a standard human game board,” I said. “We play two games of strategy on it: chess and checkers.”

Hollus touched his eyes together. “I have heard of the former; I understand you used to consider its mastery one of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements — until a computer was able to beat the most-skilled human. You humans do have a tendency to make the definition of intelligence quite elusive.”

“I guess,” I said. “But, anyway, it’s actually something more like checkers I want to talk about.” I touched a key. “Here’s a random deployment of playing pieces.” About a third of the sixty-four squares sprouted circular occupants. “Now, look: each occupied square has eight neighboring squares, including the diagonal corners, right?”

Hollus clinked his eyes together again.

“Now, consider three simple rules: a given square will remain unchanged — either occupied or vacant — if precisely two of the neighboring squares are occupied. And if an occupied square has three occupied neighbors, it remains occupied. In all other cases, the square becomes empty if it isn’t already, and if it is empty, it remains empty. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Now, let’s expand the board. Instead of an 8-by-8 matrix, let’s use 400 by 300; on this monitor, that lets every square be represented by a two-by-two pixel cell. We’ll show occupied squares by white cells and unoccupied ones by black cells.”

I tapped a key, and the checkerboard apparently receded into the distance while at the same time extending to the four corners of the screen. The grid of the board disappeared at this resolution, but the random pattern of lighted and unlighted cells was obvious.

“Now,” I said, “let’s apply our three rules.” I tapped the space bar, and the pattern of dots shifted. “Again,” I said, tapping the space bar, and again the pattern shifted. “And once more.” Another tap; another reconfiguring of the dots on the screen.

Hollus looked at the monitor and then at me. “So?”

“So this,” I said. I tapped another key, and the process began repeating itself automatically: apply the three rules to every piece on the board, redisplay the new configuration, apply the rules again, redisplay the revised configuration, and so on.

It only took a few seconds for the first glider to appear. “See that group of five cells?” I said. “We call that a ‘glider,’ and — ah, there’s another one.” I touched the screen, pointing it out. “And another. Watch them move.”

And, indeed, they did seem to move, staying a cohesive group as they shifted from position to position across the monitor.

“If you run this simulation long enough,” I said, “you’ll see all sorts of lifelike patterns; in fact, this game is called Life. It was invented in 1970 by a mathematician named John Conway; I used to use it when I taught evolution at U of T. Conway was astonished by what those three simple rules generated. After enough iterations, something called a ‘glider gun’ will appear — a structure that shoots out new gliders at regular intervals. And, indeed, glider guns can be created by collisions of thirteen or more gliders, so, in a way, the gliders reproduce themselves. You also get ‘eaters,’ which can break up passing objects; in the process, the eater gets damaged, but after a few more turns, it repairs itself. The game produces movement, reproduction, eating, growth, the healing of injuries, and more, all from applying those three simple rules to an initially random selection of pieces.”

“I do not see the point you are trying to make,” said Hollus.

“The point is that life — the apparent complexity of it all — can be generated by very simple rules.”

“And these rules you keep iterating represent precisely what?”

“Well, the laws of physics, say . . .”

“No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules? For the universe you are showing me, you mentioned a name—”

“John Conway.”

“Yes. Well, John Conway is the god of that universe, and all his simulation proves is that any universe requires a god. Conway was the programmer. God was also a programmer; the laws of physics and physical constants he devised are our universe’s source code. The presumed difference between your Mr. Conway and our God is that, as you said, Conway did not know what his source code would produce until he compiled and executed it, and he was therefore astounded by the results. Our creator, one presumes, did have a specific result in mind and wrote code to produce that result. Granted, things have apparently not gone precisely as planned — the mass extinctions seem to suggest that. But, nonetheless, it seems clear that God deliberately designed the universe.”