Legion by William Peter Blatty

and taken the camera aboard for study. He might think that his government had lied to him, had sent other Americans before him. He might even conclude that he was hallucinating, or dreaming the entire event. But the one thing he wouldn’t do, Kinderman knew, was to think that since Mars had been bombarded by meteorites and churned by volcanic eruptions, it was reasonable that over many billions of years almost any imaginable arrangement of its materials could have happened, and the camera was one of those chance combinations. They would tell him he was totally meshugge from exposure to some kind of cosmic ray, and then put him away in a special home with a bagful of matzohs and a Space Cadet badge. Shutter, lens, shutter speed regulator, diaphragm, automatic focus, automatic exposure. Could such a device come about by chance?
    In the human eye, there were tens of millions of electrical connections that could handle two million simultaneous messages, yet see the light of just one photon.
    A human eye is found on Mars.
    The human brain, three pounds of tissue, held more than a hundred billion brain cells and five hundred trillion synaptic connections. It dreamed and wrote music and Einstein’s equations, it created the language and the geometry and the engines that probed the stars, and it cradled a mother asleep through a storm while it woke her at the faintest cry from her child. A computer that could handle all of its functions would cover the surface of the earth.
    A human brain is found on Mars.
    The brain could detect one unit of mercaptan amid fifty billion units of air, and if the human ear were any more sensitive, it would hear air molecules colliding. Blood cells lined up one at a time when faced with the constriction of a tiny vein, and the cells of the heart beat at different rhythms until they came in contact with another cell. When they touched, they began to beat as one.
    A human body is found on Mars.
    The hundreds of millions of years of evolution from paramecium to man didn’t solve the mystery, thought Kinderman. The mystery was evolution itself. The fundamental tendency of matter was toward a total disorganization, toward a final state of utter randomness from which the universe would never recover. Each moment its connections were coming unthreaded, and it flung itself headlong into the void in a reckless scattering of itself, impatient for the death of its cooling suns. And yet here was evolution, Kinderman marveled, a hurricane piling up straws into haystacks, bundles of ever–increasing complexity that denied the very nature of their stuff. Evolution was a theorem written on a leaf that was floating against the direction of the river. A Designer was at work. So what else? It’s as plain as can be. When a man hears hoof beats in Central Park, he shouldn’t be looking around for zebras.
    “We’ve cleared the church, Lieutenant.”
    Kinderman’s gaze flicked up at Atkins, then he stared at the confessional box with the body of the priest still inside it. “Have we now, Atkins? Have we really?”
    Ryan was dusting the exterior panels and Kinderman watched him for a time, his eyelids gradually beginning to droop. “Get the inside parts,” he said. “Don’t forget.”
    “I won’t forget,” muttered Ryan.
    “Wonderful.”
    Kinderman heaved himself up with a sigh and then followed Atkins to another confessional at the back and to the right of the doors. Sitting in the back two pews of the church were the people whom Atkins had detained. Kinderman paused to look them over. Richard Coleman, a lawyer in his forties, worked in the Attorney General’s office. Susan Volpe, an attractive twenty–year–old, was a student at Georgetown College. George Paterno was the football coach at Bullis Prep in Maryland. He was short and strongly built and Kinderman gauged him to be in his thirties. Beside him sat a well–dressed man in his fifties. He was Richard McCooey, a Georgetown graduate, and owner of the