The Rock From Mars (22 page)

It was no secret that she was an advocate for the agency. That was not only her job, as she saw it, but something she felt on a personal level. She believed in the agency’s role. “When I look at those Hubble pictures, I hear music,” she would tell people. She felt the same way about the images from the rock. Now she had a modest supporting role in an investigation into one of the great, eternal questions. She didn’t intend to blow it.

What concerned her at this moment were the personal dynamics in the room. Schopf was intimidating the others, and that was affecting the way McKay and his team were talking about their results.

So now, as Schopf concluded his arguments, Boeder prodded McKay and the others about whether there might not be a better way to talk about what they had found. As she would recall it, she said something like “That’s a pretty good argument. He’s making a really good point there. What’s your response?” (She would take issue with Schopf’s recollection, insisting that she would never have used the word “demolished.”)

As Weiler would recall the exchange, he, Boeder, and some others advised the McKay group this way: “Do you believe in your result? Yes? Well, then say it! You know, don’t be wimps up there. The reporters are going to pick up on your body language. If you come across tentative, it means you are tentative about your results. If that’s the way you feel, fine. Be tentative. But if you feel these results are solid, show it.”

After the prep session, as several of them rode the elevator to the first floor, Goldin gave McKay a final locker-room spur: “Don’t wimp out.”

Weiler wandered outside for a cigarette. There was Schopf—also a smoker. He was trying to relax before the press conference. They struck up a conversation. Weiler soon realized that Schopf had been under the impression that Weiler was just some dumb bureaucrat, trying to boss around the great scientist from California. Once he informed Schopf he was actually a fellow scientist who had done a lot of TV, Schopf seemed to lighten up. The two men called a truce. They stood in the steamy August heat and enjoyed their smokes. The fun was about to start.

CHAPTER NINE

IN THE BEAM

C
HRIS
R
OMANEK WAS
on a road trip. The previous year, when Everett Gibson had been unable to offer him a NASA job, he had moved to the University of Georgia’s Savannah River ecology lab in South Carolina. But he’d spent most of the summer of 1996 back in Houston on a fellowship and had helped his comrades in Building 31 with final preparations for the big “coming out.” On August 1, with a full two weeks until the scheduled press conference, he and his wife decided to pack up their dog, cats, and all the stuff they had brought with them for the summer and take a leisurely drive back to South Carolina.

When they reached Mobile, Alabama, they joined family members vacationing at a condo on the east side of Mobile Bay, with a postcard view of the rolling surf. Romanek went out to eat with his sister and his mother. They got home about eleven
P
.
M
. that Tuesday, August 6, 1996, and turned on the television set. The first thing Romanek saw was a picture of the carbonate globules
—his
carbonate globules, and then he heard somebody talking about a press conference. The next day!

He called his erstwhile collaborators in Houston, one after another. No answer. No answer. He finally reached Kathie Thomas’s husband, who said, “Oh, yeah, they’re all up at NASA [headquarters] right now.”

Romanek felt sick. It seemed clear that he had been left out of the loop. He threw up his hands in frustration. No way he could make it. He was at the beach in shorts and sandals.

His family jerked him out of his funk. “Are you going to be a weenie here, or what? We can get you to Washington, D.C., in time if you really want to be in on this.”

“Can you really do that?” he said.

“Of course!” His brother-in-law started calling and making plane reservations. His sister rushed home to collect all of her husband’s suits. Her husband went six feet three, about 230 pounds. Romanek, a lean six-one, 180 pounds, found himself throwing on jackets, pants, shoes, and shirts, trying to find something that he could at least walk in without tripping.

But he couldn’t shake the hollow feeling. “I’m being excluded,” he thought. “I’m no longer a part of this.”

He caught a flight out of Pensacola and made it to Washington by about ten-thirty
A
.
M
. the day of the one
P
.
M
. press conference. He got off the plane and headed straight for the nearest newspaper stand. There it was—front page of
The
New York Times,
The Washington Post,
and
USA Today.
There was his name. He couldn’t believe it. He jumped into a taxi and said, “Take me to NASA headquarters.”

Already in an anxious state, Romanek soon noticed they were driving away from the downtown area. “I think NASA headquarters is downtown,” he protested. The cabbie said, “No, I know exactly where headquarters is. We have to go out this way.”

They were headed toward Baltimore! Romanek saw an exit sign that said
NASA GODDARD
. (Goddard Space Flight Center is a major NASA facility in the Maryland suburbs northeast of Washington.) Romanek noted that there were few cars going in their direction, but that traffic was bumper to bumper going the other way
—into
the city. “What are you doing?!” Romanek yelled. “I’ve just broken my neck to get here just in time. If this is wrong—it’s all for nothing. We’ll never make it!”

Finally, Romanek persuaded the headstrong driver to pull over and ordered, “Wait for me.” He ran into a building, found a phone, called information, and asked for the address of NASA headquarters. The operator gave it to him.

He got back in the cab and gave the cabbie the location. “Take me there as fast as you can,” he instructed. “I’ve got a press conference in one hour!” Romanek was frantic, nauseated, feeling a cold sweat on his face. The cabbie, chastened, got back on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, veered out of the slow lane, and went rumbling along the shoulder in order to shove past the slow-moving morning rush. He ran red lights.

They pulled up to the stone-and-glass facade of NASA headquarters with about twenty minutes to spare.

“How much do I owe you?” Romanek asked the cabbie.

“Nothing,” the glum, shaken driver told him. “Please, just get out of my cab.”

Romanek walked into the big, first-floor auditorium in his giant suit. “Where’s the research team that’s going to have the press conference today?” he asked somebody.

“Well, what do you want to know for?”

“I’m part of the research team. . . . No, really. I am.”

Somebody finally helped Romanek catch up with his comrades. To his great relief, they greeted him warmly. “Chris! Glad you made it!” They gathered in Wes Huntress’s office upstairs, and somebody came in with about ten big pizzas. They took five minutes to eat and then headed down to the auditorium.

A pumped Dan Goldin, on his way to the podium, told a companion, “I’ve been waiting for this my entire life.”

They walked into pandemonium. For Romanek, such scenes had existed only on TV. Now he was in the middle of one: some fifty cameramen snapping and clacking away, lights flashing, people pushing and shoving and tugging him this way and that, reporters throwing questions, microphones stuck in his face.

There was no room on the stage for Romanek, and besides, he had not been prepped. He found himself sitting in the audience with Simon Clemett behind a phalanx of VIPs. The momentousness of the event would crystallize for Romanek shortly, when he heard Everett Gibson, up on the stage, say that this moment was more exciting for him than working on the Apollo missions.

“It was beyond my wildest dreams,” Romanek would say later. He was somewhere high above, looking down at himself. He finally knew what it meant to have an out-of-body experience.

The countdown was at zero. The speakers sat on the stage in NASA’s big main auditorium. McKay, Gibson, and Zare were exhausted. Zare had not slept in the last thirty hours. Kathie Thomas-Keprta (she had taken her husband’s name when she’d signed the paper, as thanks for his patience with the recent craziness) looked calm enough, her mane of softly curled blond hair tamed by a dark headband. But she felt nauseous. She didn’t know it yet, but she was pregnant.

Sweaty-palmed and dry-mouthed in varying degrees, the scientists in the bright lights sensed the restless focus of the peripatetic media horde settling abruptly on them like one of Zare’s laser beams. This was their moment.

McKay, wearing his Apollo tie, and Gibson were struck by the contrast between the smaller, more relaxed, and virtually all-male press pack of the 1960s and the major-league circus in front of them now. Out beyond the stage, milling and swarming like cattle on the verge of stampede, was one of the biggest crowds drawn to a NASA press conference since the glory days of Apollo.

NASA had borrowed a chunk of the Allan Hills meteorite from the Smithsonian—the “ambassador” sample, which would be seen by the vice president and first lady, shown at a Senate hearing, and exhibited in the museum. It weighed 1.3 ounces (37 grams). Now it rested like a stolid punctuation mark in a glass case on a velvet swatch on the blue-draped table, right in front of McKay. It glowed in the blaze of light. Photographers hunched and squatted around it, searching for the best angle on the ignoble-looking lump.

The press conference and related proceedings, which would last two and a half hours, were being carried live on CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS.

But first, the electronic eyes swiveled abruptly toward the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. At 1:13
P
.
M
., President Clinton stepped to the microphones to address the story of the rock from the Rose Garden (using some of the wording suggested by Huntress and NASA): “Today, rock eight four oh oh one speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks of the possibility of life. If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered.”

When the cameras refocused on the stage at NASA headquarters and the waiting press conference, Boeder introduced Goldin. As he took the podium and peered into the limelight haze, the NASA administrator was so excited that he sometimes tripped over his tongue as he went through the requisite niceties, introducing VIPs and thanking various institutions and people, including his father, who was on his deathbed.

Goldin had already emphasized in a written statement that nobody here would be talking about “little green men” and that the evidence was “exciting, even compelling, but not conclusive,” involving at most “extremely small, single-cell creatures that somewhat resemble bacteria on Earth.” Now he took care to repeat the caveats, adding that the scientists were “not here to say they found ultimate proof or evidence.” The discovery was “certain to create lively scientific debate and controversy. . . . We [NASA] will be driven by scientific process and not a rush to go to Mars.”

At the same time, he said, the team’s work had “brought us to a day that may well go down in history.” The scientists had come here to “to tell a fascinating detective story.” He added, “We’re now at the doorstep of the heavens. What a time to be alive.”

The scientists on the stage faced an uncomfortable challenge. The average citizen could readily grasp the concept of life on Mars, but this story was highly nuanced. To many in the wider audience, the very
fact
of the press conference, added to the headlines and TV images of the last day or so, implied some sort of finality, of certitude. The bulk of the audience, including some journalists, would have little, if any, familiarity with the arcane meat of the evidence under discussion.

Wes Huntress, Goldin’s chief space scientist, set the scene, reminding everybody about the paper soon to be published in
Science,
and handed the microphone to McKay, seated behind the meteorite chunk in its velvet nest. McKay’s eyes behind his glasses were huge brown-satin buttons in his pale face. He cleared his throat, managed a fleeting smile, and began his story of “why we think we have found evidence for past life on Mars.” He repeated Goldin’s cautions, saying, “This is a controversial story, and there will be a lot of disagreement.”

McKay briefly outlined the four lines of evidence: (1) the meteorite came from Mars and contained carbonates; (2) the carbonates’ mineralogy and chemistry were compatible with biological origins; (3) the rock contained organic compounds (Zare’s PAHs) sometimes associated with life; and (4) images of the rock showed fossil-like forms.

McKay noted that the team’s interpretation of those forms as fossils was “perhaps the most controversial part of our presentation.” He also said there were “alternative explanations for each of the lines of evidence that we see. . . . But,” he concluded, “when you look at them all together collectively, particularly in view that they all occur within a very small volume [in the rock sample]—every sand-size chip has most of these kinds of evidence in it—we conclude that taken together this is evidence for early life on Mars.”

He passed the mike to Gibson for an overview of the story, accompanied by the NASA animated video that would be replayed on TV around the world. It showed an artist’s conception of the team’s proposed scenario. It began with the rock’s birth on Mars some 4.5 billion years ago, and followed with violent bombardment by cosmic debris that fractured the planet’s surface. The “camera” zoomed in for a close-up of blue water flowing into the fractures in the rock, carrying specklings of minerals, and finally showed shiny bluish wormlike organisms (depicted at 100,000 times magnification) getting trapped in the gradual buildup of the carbonate deposits. The on-screen story, with Gibson narrating, jumped forward across billions of years to the frigid, dried-up Mars of about 16 million years ago, where the audience saw another large object slam into the surface, kick up a cloud of debris, and send the rock spinning off into space. The animation showed the rock plummeting onto the Antarctic ice sheet 13,000 years ago. As Gibson described its discovery by a National Science Foundation field team, there was film of a technician processing the meteorite in a Johnson Space Center laboratory.

Gibson’s West Texas drawl accelerated with energy as he and the images took the audience further into the crevasses of the rock, and he briefly described the mineral composition. He ended up with an arresting color photograph of the carbonate pancakes, girdled by their Oreo rims, taken by Monica Grady of the Natural History Museum in London. “These are five times the diameter of a human hair,” Gibson said of the carbonate globules, adding that they were unusual in a meteorite.

He passed the mike to Kathie Thomas-Keprta. She showed, in a cartoon cross section of a carbonate globule, how the black portions of the concentric Oreo rims were actually made up of fine mineral grains—magnetite (iron with oxygen) and pyrrhotite (iron with sulfur). In another region inside the orangey carbonate, she showed a patch of dark magnetite mixed with supposed greigite (also iron with sulfur). She noted that, on Earth, it is quite common for greigite to be produced by bacteria, and that, on Earth, this particular type of pyrrhotite can be produced either inorganically or by certain types of microorganisms. “In sum,” she concluded, “although we feel there could be very complicated inorganic explanations for the presence of these mineral grains, the simplest explanation is that these are products of microorganisms on Mars.”

Zare spoke next, explaining how his lab had found the minuscule amounts of organic chemicals—the greasy PAHs—deep inside the rock. Crisply, with the barely contained delight familiar to his students, he explained what exactly his Stanford team had found. Though they could have come from either biological or nonbiological sources, he noted, these PAHs were different from those found in other meteorites, and their distribution in the rock was much simpler. “It very much resembles what you’d expect when you have simple organic-matter decay,” he said.