“So no one escapes the soup??”

“It depends what you mean by escaping the soup?”

The chairs of some of my classmates shifted in boredom.

“Sooner or later, everyone eats. Sooner or later, everyone is eaten. If you’re not eaten when you’re alive, you’re eaten when you’re dead. So no one escapes being eaten. It’s just a question of time.”

“The first law of thermodynamics: energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed.”

Notes were unanimously taken, for the verbatim law interested my classmates more than did its dire consequences.

Professor Ranji was inspired; he defined other laws of thermodynamics and assigned the chapters of a heavy reading assignment before darting out of the classroom.

“Professor Ranji!” I cried, forcing my way through the slow moving students after him. I reached him as he was opening his office door. I’d never seen so many paperback books in my life. There were glasses of leftover juice on piles of books, tall piles, short piles, you could hit each one with a spoon and make a tune. The walls were covered with shelves, the only place free of books, and consecrated to carvings of a smaller elephant within a larger. There was a plastic flute and a rubber cobra on the floor, maybe a child’s because there were also a line of fallen Dominos nearby.

“Professor Ranji?” I mouthed gently.

The first thing I noticed when he turned around was a pattern of black points on the tip of his nose which upon scrutiny proved to be razor stubble.

“Professor Ranji. I’m sorry to bother you, but there are two questions still troubling me. I would not like to die without knowing their answers …”

“Well, I hope I can be of help and well before then.” He crossed his arms and smiled.

I heard myself which is always annoying, “Biologically speaking, it took two parents to make you, and your two parents had parents, which makes four, and these four had parents, which makes eight it took to make you. If we kept going, we get to 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, just to make you.”

My ability for basic arithmetic was slowing, so I did not go on further though logically, I should have, for these far-off relatives did not come into being by spontaneous generation.

“Okay …” he stroked his beard, pulled down his thick, curly moustache and turned over his lower lip.

I detected the impatience in his eyes and accelerated, “Well the same holds true with all of us. Which means, mathematically speaking, the former population must have been much greater than the present population.”

“Are you promoting colonization from another planet?”

“No, sir, I’m not. According to the Bible, we come from two people only, Adam and Eve, so the sum of people it took to make each of us must grow smaller as we count back … the former population must be less than the present overpopulation, according to God …” My voice weakened on the last words.