Later I heard that there is indeed an engineered lichen called “gray paint patch lichen.” I'm sure the designer thinks it's very funny.
That day in the rain it didn't matter. Soon enough I stumbled on Dorr's next masterpiece in stone, this one still on the maps, and so well used it was gleaming under its coat of water, which there, where the trail traversed the slope, was not deep.
But then it turned downhill again, back down toward town, and once again became a bounding waterfall. And I came to a section where the crater wall steepened and curved to a convex bowl, overhanging a deep downward cut in the wall, next to a knob. There the trail dropped in big deep stairs, down a ravine between knob and wall. But now this ravine was a big violent waterfall, or rather several waterfalls, curtaining off the wall and then funneling down into a steep rapids, roaring between rocks that were ordinarily waist-or chest-high when you passed between them. To proceed I would have to descend this torrent.
I placed each boot carefully, holding on to rocks or branches on both sides of me. The water went knee deep, then thigh deep. I could feel it pushing at the backs of my legs.
Then a hard rain squall hit, and the crater wall became one great big waterfall. Then the rain turned to hail. Sheets of hail careened down on the rushing white water at me. I grabbed a rock beside the trail with both hands and ducked my head, watching the froth of floating hail rise up on my body, until I was chest deep in it as it poured by. For a second I feared the water would rise even farther and tear me away, or drown me right in place. Then the level of the flood dropped a bit, and I succeeded in fording the rapids and clambering down the opposite side of the ravine step by step, the water roaring everywhere around me. I got a good grip on a wet birch and laughed out loud. It was one of the most civilized moments of my life.
Discovering Life
The final approach to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a narrow road running up the flank of the ugly brown mountains overlooking Los Angeles, is an adequate road in ordinary circumstances, but when something newsworthy occurs it is inadequate to handle the influx of media visitors. On this morning the line of cars and trailers extended down from the security gate almost to the freeway off-ramp, and Bill Dawkins watched the temperature gauge of his old Ford Escort rise as he inched forward, all the vehicles adding to the smog already making the air a tangible gray mist. Eventually he passed the security guards and drove up to the employee parking lot, then walked down past the guest parking lot, overflowing with TV trailers topped by satellite dishes. Surely every language and nation in the world was represented, all bringing their own equipment, of course.
Inside the entry building Bill turned right and looked in the press-conference room, also jammed to overflowing. A row of Bill's colleagues sat up on the stage behind a long table crowded with mikes, facing the cameras and lights and reporters. Bill's friend Mike Collinsworth was answering a question about contamination, trying to look like he was enjoying himself. But very few scientists like other scientists listening in on them when they are explaining things to nonscientists, because then there is someone there to witness just how gross their gross simplifications are; so an affair like this was in its very nature embarrassing. And to complicate the situation this press corps was a very mixed crowd, ranging from experts who in some senses (social context, historical background) knew more than the scientists themselves, all the way to TV faces who could barely read their prompters. That plus the emotional load of the subject matter, amounting almost to hysteria, gave the event an excruciating quality that Bill found perversely fascinating to watch.
A telegenic young woman got the nod from John and took the radio mike being passed around. “What does this discovery mean to you?” she said. “What do you think the meaning of this discovery will be?”
The seven men on stage looked at one another, and the crowd laughed. John said, “Mike?” and Mike made a face that got another laugh. But John knew his crew; Mike was a smart ass in real life, indeed Bill could imagine some of his characteristic answers scorching the air: It means I have to answer stupid questions in front of billions of people, it means I can stop working eighty-hour weeks and see what a real life is like again; but Mike was also good at the PR stuff, and with a straight face he answered the second of the questions, which Bill would have thought was the harder of the two.
“Well, the meaning of it depends, to some extent, on what the exobiologists find out when they investigate the organisms more fully. If the organisms follow the same biochemical principles as life on Earth, then it's possible they are a kind of cousin to Terran life, bounced on meteorites from Mars to here, or here to Mars. If that's the case, then it's possible that DNA analysis will even be able to determine about when the two families parted company, and which planet has the older population. We may find out that we're all Martians originally.”
He waited for the obligatory laugh. “On the other hand, the investigation may show a completely alien biochemistry, indicating a separate origin. That's a very different scenario.” Now Mike paused, realizing he was at the edge of his soundbite envelope, also of deep waters. He decided to cut it short: “Either way that turns out, we'll know that life is very adaptable, and that it can either cross space between planets, or begin twice in the same solar system, so either way we'll be safer in assuming that life is fairly widespread in the universe.”
Bill smiled. Mike was good; the answer provided a quick summary of the situation, bullet points, potential headlines: “Life on Mars Proves Life Is Common in the Universe.” Which wasn't exactly true, but there was no winning the soundbite game.
Bill left the room and crossed the little plaza, then entered the big building forming the north flank of the compound. Upstairs the little offices and cubicles all had their doors open and portable TVs on, all tuned to the press conference just a hundred yards away; there was a holiday atmosphere, including streamers and balloons, but Bill couldn't feel it somehow. There on the screens under the CNN logo his friends were being played up as heroes, Young Devoted Rocket Scientists replacing astronauts, as the exploration of Mars proceeded robotically—silly, but very much preferable to the situation when things went wrong, when they were portrayed as Harried Geek Rocket Scientists not quite up to the task, the extremely important (though underfunded) task of teleoperating the exploration of the cosmos from their desks. They had played both roles several times at JPL, and had come to understand that for the media and perhaps the public there was no middle ground, no recognition that they were just people doing their jobs, difficult but interesting jobs in difficult but not intolerable circumstances. No, for the world they were a biannual nine-hours' wonder, either nerdy heroes or nerdy goats, and the next day forgotten.
That was just the way it was, and not what was bothering Bill. He felt at loose ends. Mission accomplished, his TO DO list almost empty; it left him feeling somewhat empty; but that was not it either. He still had phone and e-mail media questions waiting, and he worked through those on automatic pilot, his answers honed by the previous week's work. The lander had drilled down and secured a soil sample from under the sands at the mouth of Shalbatana Vallis, where thermal sensors had detected heat from a volcanic vent, which meant the permafrost ice in that region had liquid percolations in it. The sample had been placed in a metal sphere which had been hermetically sealed and boosted to Martian orbit. After a rendezvous with an orbiter it had been flown back to Earth and been released in such a manner that it had dropped into Earth's atmosphere without orbiting at all, and slammed into Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds a mere ten yards from its target. An artificial meteorite, yes. No, the ball could not have broken on impact, it had been engineered for that impact, indeed could have withstood striking a sidewalk or a wall of steel, and had been recovered intact in the little crater it had made—recovered by robot and flown robotically to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it had been placed inside hermetically sealed chambers in sealed labs in sealed buildings before being opened, everything havi
ng been designed for just this purpose. No, they did not need to sterilize Dugway, or all of Utah, they did not need to nuke Houston (not to kill Martian bacteria anyway), and all was well; the alien life was safely locked away and could not get out. People were safe.
Bill answered many such questions, feeling that there were far too many people who badly needed a better education in risk assessment. They got in their cars and drove on freeways, smoking cigarettes and holding high-energy radio transmitters against their heads, in order to get to newsrooms where they were greatly concerned to find out if they were in danger from microbacteria locked away behind triple hermetic seals in Houston. By the time Bill broke for lunch he was feeling more depressed than irritated. People were ignorant, short-sighted, poorly educated, fearful, superstitious; deeply meshed in magical thinking of all kinds. And yet that too was not really what was bothering him.
Mike was in the cafeteria, hungrily downing his lunchtime array of flavonoids and antioxidants, and Bill joined him, feeling cheered. Mike was giving a low-voiced recap of the morning's press conference (many journalists were in the JPL cafeteria on guest passes), “What is the meaning of life?” Mike whispered urgently, “it means metabolism, it means hunger at lunchtime, please God let us eat, that's what it means.” Then the TVs overhead began to show the press conference from Houston, and like everyone else they watched and listened to the tiny figures on the screen. The exobiologists at Johnson Space Center were making their initial report: the Martian bacteria were around one hundred nanometers long, bigger than the fossil nanobacteria tentatively identified in ALH 84001, but smaller than most Terran bacteria; they were single-celled, they contained proteins, ribosomes, DNA strands composed of base pairs of adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.
“Cousins,” Mike declared.
The DNA resembled certain Terran organisms like the Columbia Basement Archaea Methanospirillum jacobii, thus possibly they were the descendant of a common ancestor.
“Cousins!”
Very possibly mitochondrial DNA analysis would reveal when the split had happened. “Separated at birth,” one of the Johnson scientists offered, to laughter. They were just like the JPL scientists in their on-screen performances. Spontaneous generation versus panspermia, frequent transpermia between Earth and Mars; all these concepts poured out in a half-digested rush, and people would still be calling for the nuclear destruction of Houston and Utah in order to save the world from alien infection, from andromeda strains, from fictional infections—infictions, as Mike said with a grin.
The Johnson scientists nattered on solemnly, happy still to be in the limelight; it had been an oddity of NASA policy to place the Mars effort so entirely at JPL, in effect concentrating one of the major endeavors of human history into one small university lab, with many competing labs out there like baby birds in the federal nest, ready to peck JPL's eyes out if given the chance. Now the exobiology teams at Johnson and AMES were finally involved, and it was no longer just JPL's show, although they were still headquarters and had engineered the sample-return operation just as they had all the previous Martian landers. The diffusion of the project was a relief of course, but could also be seen as a disappointment—the end of an era. But not watching the TV, Bill could tell that wasn't what was bothering him either.
Mike returned with Bill and Nassim to their offices, and they continued to watch the Johnson press conference on a desk TV. Apparently the sample contained more than one species, perhaps as many as five, maybe more. They just didn't know yet. They thought they could keep them all alive in Mars jars, but weren't sure. They were sure that they had the organisms contained, and that there was no danger.
Someone asked about ramifications for the human exploration of Mars, and the answers were scattered. “Very severely problematized,” someone said; it would be a matter for discussion at the very highest levels, NASA of course but also NSF, the National Academy of Sciences, the International Astronomical Union, various UN bodies—in short, the scientific government of the world.
Mike laughed. “The human mission people must be freaking out.”
Nassim nodded. “The Ad Martem Club has already declared that these things are only bacteria, like bathroom scum, we kill billions of them every day, they're no impediment to us conquering Mars.”
“They can't be serious.”
“They are serious, but crazy. We won't be setting foot there for a very long time. If ever.”
Suddenly Bill understood. “That would be sad,” he said. “I'm a humans-to-Mars guy myself.”
Mike grinned and shook his head. “You better not be in too much of a hurry.”
Bill went back into his office. He cleaned up a little, then called Eleanor's office, wanting to talk to her, wanting to say, We did it, the mission is a success and the dream has therefore been shattered, but she wasn't in. He left a message that he would be home around the usual time, then concentrated on his TO DO list, no longer adding things to the bottom faster than he took them off at the top, trying to occupy his mind but failing. The realization was sinking in that he had always thought that their work was about going to Mars, about making a better world there; this was how he had justified everything about his life, the killing hours of the job, the looks on his family's faces, Eleanor's fully sympathetic but disappointed, frustrated that it had turned out this way, the two of them caught despite their best efforts in a kind of 1950s marriage, the husband gone all day every day—except of course that Eleanor worked long hours too, so that their kids had always been daycare and after-school care kids, all day every weekday. Once Bill had dropped Joe, their younger one, off at daycare on a Monday morning, and looking back in through the window he had seen an expression on the boy's face of abandonment and stoic solitude, of facing another ten hours at the same old place, to be gotten through somehow like everyone else, a look which on the face of a three-year-old had pierced Bill to the heart. And all that, all that he had done, all the time he had put in, all those days and years, had been so that one day humans would inhabit Mars and make a decent civilization at last; his whole life burned in a cubicle because the start of this great project was so tenuous, because so few people believed or understood, so that it was down to them, one little lab trying its best to execute the “faster better cheaper” plan which contained within it (as they often pointed out) a contradiction of the second law of thermodynamics among other problems, a plan that they knew could only really achieve two out of the three qualities in any real-world combination, but making the attempt anyway, finding that the only true “cheaper” involved was the cost of their own labor and the quality of their own lives, rocket scientists running like squirrels in cages to make the inhabitation of Mars a reality—a project which only the future Martians of some distant century would truly appreciate and honor. Except now there weren't going to be any future Martians.
Then it was after six, and he was out in the late summer haze with Mike and Nassim, carpooling home. They got on the 210 freeway and rolled along quite nicely until the carpool lane stalled with all the rest, because of the intersection of 210 and 110; and then they were into stop-and-go like everyone else, the long lines of cars brake-lighting forward in that accordion pattern of acceleration and deceleration so familiar to them all. The average speed on the L. A. freeway system was now eleven miles per hour, low enough to make them and many other Angelenos try the surface streets instead, but Nassim's computer modeling and their empirical trials had made it clear that for any drive over five miles long the clogged freeways were still faster than the clogged streets.
“Well, another red letter day,” Mike announced, and pulled a bottle of Scotch from his daypack. He snapped open the cap and took a swig, then passed the bottle to Bill and Nassim. This was something he did on ceremonial occasions, after all the great JPL successes or disasters, and though both Bill and Nassim found it alarming, they did not refuse quick pulls. Mike took another one before twisting the cap very tightly on the bottle and stuffing it bac
k inside his daypack, actions which appeared to give him the feeling he had retuned the bottle to a legally sealed state. Bill and Nassim had mocked him for this belief before, and now Nassim said, “Why don't you just carry a little soldering iron with you so you can reseal it properly.”
“Ha ha.”
“Or adopt the NASA solution,” Bill said, “take your swigs and then throw the bottle overboard.”
“Ha ha, now don't be biting the hand that feeds you.”
“That's the hand people always bite.”
Mike stared at him. “You're not happy about this big discovery, are you, Bill.”
“No!” Bill said, sitting there with his foot on the brake. “No! I always thought we were the, the bringing of the inhabitation of Mars. I thought that people would go on to live there, and terraform the planet, you know, red green and blue—establish a whole world there, a second strand of history, and we would always be back at the start of it all. And now these damn bacteria are there already, and we may never land there at all. We'll stay here and leave Mars to the Martians, the bacterial Martians.”
“The little red natives.”
“And so we're at the start of nothing! We're the start of a dead end.”
“Balderdash,” Mike said. And Bill's spirits rose a bit; he felt a glow like the Scotch running through him; he may have slaved away in a cubicle burning ten years of his life on the start of a dead-end project, a project that would never be enacted, but at least he had been able to work on it with people like these, people like brothers to him now after all the years, brilliant weird guys who would use the word “balderdash” in conversation in all seriousness; Mike who read Victorian boys' literature for his entertainment, who was as funny as they got; who had not even in the slightest way appeared on TV while playing the Earnest Rocket Scientist, playing a stupid role created by the media's questions and expectations, all them playing their stupid roles in precisely the stupid soap opera that Bill had dreamed they were going to escape someday, What does life mean to you, Dr. Labcoat, what does this discovery mean, Well, it means we have burned up our lives on a dead-end project. “What do you mean balderdash!” Bill exclaimed. “They'll make Mars a nature preserve, a bacterial nature preserve, for God's sake! No one will risk even landing there, much less terraforming the place!”