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life was pretty unlikely -- maybe even unique to Earth," Malenfant was saying. "An astronomer called Fred Hoyle once said that the idea that you could shuffle organic molecules in some primeval soup and, purely by chance, come up with a DNA molecule is about like a whirlwind passing through an aircraft factory and assembling scattered parts into a 747." Laughter. "But now we think those notions are wrong. Now we think that the complexity that defines and underlies life is somehow hardwired into the laws of physics. Life is emergent.
    "Imagine boiling a pan of water. As the liquid starts to convect, you'll see a regular pattern of cells form, kind of like a honeycomb -- just before the proper boiling cuts in and the motion becomes chaotic. Now, all there is in the pan is water molecules, billions of them. Nobody is telling those molecules how to organize themselves into those striking patterns. And yet they do it.
    "That's an example of how order and complexity can emerge from an initial uniform and featureless state. And maybe life is just the end product of a long series of self-organizing steps like that..."
    Malenfant was giving his lecture in Bootstrap's roomy, air-conditioned public affairs auditorium: the one place Frank had been prepared to spend some serious money, aside from on the engineering itself. Xenia and Dorothy arrived a little late. To Xenia's surprise, the auditorium was pretty nearly full, and she had to squeeze them into two seats at the back.
    The stage was bare save for a lectern and a plastic mock-up, three meters tall, of the Big Dumb Booster -- that, and Malenfant.
    To Xenia, Reid Malenfant -- a lithe but Sun-wrinkled sixty-something, his polished-bald head shining under the overhead lights -- was an unprepossessing sight. Even as he spoke he seemed oddly out of place, blinking at his audience as if he wasn't sure what he was doing here.
    But the audience, mostly young engineers, seemed spellbound. She spotted Frank himself in the front row: a dark, hulking figure before the grounded astronaut, gazing raptly with the rest. That old space dust still carried some magic, she supposed; there was something primal here, about wanting to be close to the wizard, the sage who had been involved in that first wondrous discovery -- as if, just by being close, it was possible to soak up a little of that marvelous light.
    Malenfant went on. "We'd come to believe, even before the Gaijin showed up, that life must be common. We believe nature is uniform, so the laws and processes that work here work everywhere else. And now we hold to the Copernican principle: We believe that we aren't in any unique place in space or time. So if life is here, on Earth, it must be everywhere -- in one form or another.
    "So the fact that living things have come sailing into the asteroid belt from the stars -- if they are living, that is -- isn't much of a surprise. But what is a surprise is that they should be just arriving, here, now. If they exist, why weren't they here before?
    "It is good scientific practice, when you're facing the unknown, to assume a condition of equilibrium: a stable state, not a state of change. Because change is unusual, special.
    "Now, maybe you see the problem. What we seem to face with the Gaijin is the arrival -- the very first arrival we can detect -- of alien colonists in the Solar System. And so we find ourselves not in a time of equilibrium, but at a time of transition -- in fact of possibly the most fundamental change of all. It's so unlikely it isn't true.
    "To put it another way, this is the question that was avoided by all those terrible alien-invasion sci-fi movies I grew up with as a kid." Laughter, a little baffled, from the younger guys. What's a "movie"? "Why should these bug-eyed guys arrive now, when we have tanks and nukes to fight them with?"
    Malenfant gazed around at his audience, his eyes deep-sunken, tired-looking, wary. "I'm telling you this because you people are the ones who have