The Rock From Mars (19 page)

The political adviser was riding high these days over the historic victory he anticipated soon, when Clinton would become the first Democrat in fifty years to win a second term. Morris saw rich political possibilities for Clinton in the news of possible extraterrestrial life. He immediately started pushing for the president to go beyond even NASA’s most ambitious blueprint and announce a manned mission to Mars on an accelerated timetable. It wasn’t exactly the glory days of Apollo, but here was a space-related achievement that could stir the souls of the masses.

Morris’s plan was wildly unrealistic. The idea of a hasty “Mars initiative” brought shudders to the White House science staff, which considered it ill-informed and naive. The tug-of-war fell to Goldin for resolution.

Not long after his visit to the White House, Goldin took a call that linked him into a meeting in progress there, with members of the White House science office and others. Morris got on the line and asked Goldin about the prospects for a major Mars initiative. The NASA administrator hesitated. The question put him in an awkward spot. For all his hopes and dreams about somehow getting NASA on track for Mars, he had to be honest. He told them that a grand foray to the red planet was simply not feasible under current circumstances—not technically or financially or in any other way. That ended that.

But Morris had shared the secret of the rock with one outsider. While working at the White House, the adviser—a married man—had been renting a $420-a-day suite in the Jefferson Hotel a few blocks north. There, he had been paying $200 an hour for the services of a long-legged call girl named Sherry Rowlands.

On August 2, Rowlands made a diary entry about a hush-hush item Morris had passed on to her after drinks and dinner. He’d whispered in her ear that scientists had discovered life on another planet. Something like a “vegetable in a rock” was how she recalled his description. “He said they found proof of life on Pluto!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“KLAATU BARADA NIKTO”

O
VER MILLIONS OF
years, warm, shallow seas deposited limestone, shale, marl, siltstone, and an overlay of more limestone along the shifting shores where dinosaurs had once roamed in great herds and left their footprints in the sands. Now the inverted reflections of the ancient stone cliffs festoon the clear streams of the hill country around Garner State Park, about ninety miles west of San Antonio in Uvalde County.

The McKays had come up here on a long-planned escape from the steamy cauldron that was Houston in August. They joined other summer visitors who camped out or rented cabins and hiked in the shade of majestic bald cypresses under the limestone bluffs cut by the Frio River. The waters of the Frio were clear and cool—even in the hottest summers. And the visitors could hope for a glimpse of skittery white-tailed deer, Rio Grande turkeys, and waddling armadillos.

David McKay was confident that the big announcement was still more than a week away—timed for August 15, to coincide with publication of the paper in
Science.
Accordingly, three days ago (on Saturday, August 3), he had gone AWOL in direct violation of an edict from NASA headquarters. This pilgrimage was a decades-long McKay family tradition. Besides, after the tensions and labors of the last few months, capped by the Goldin grilling in Washington days earlier, David McKay welcomed a chance to catch his breath, enjoy the spring-fed waters, and collect his thoughts.

Ordinarily, McKay found it a pleasant bonus that modern communications had a hard time penetrating here in the backcountry. This time was different. As a precaution, he brought along his government-issue SkyPager. He expected to be back in plenty of time for the scheduled press conference, and in case anything went wrong—such as the word leaking out—he had the pager. But the device had registered no messages since he’d left Houston, and he found the isolation increasingly uncomfortable.

On this day—Tuesday, August 6—McKay’s innate prudence finally prompted him to trek to a general store where there was a pay phone, to check in with his office. Standing at the phone, McKay was informed that, in effect, the schist had hit the fan and that his coworkers had been trying frantically to reach him. He and Gibson would laugh about the irony of it later. The pager, it turned out, was an embodiment not of the high-tech, cutting-edge, cosmic-virtuoso NASA but of the low-bid, behind-the-curve, bureaucratic NASA. The device did not work outside the Houston metropolitan area.

Dismayed, McKay absorbed the instruction from on high: he must fly to Washington immediately. NASA was throwing together a press conference. The nightmare scenario was a reality. The story was breaking loose on both sides of the Atlantic, and he had stuck himself out in the boonies with a pager that operated more like a magic decoder from a box of Cracker Jacks than a device favored by the designated agents of the high-tech, high-frontier future.

McKay was obliged to leave the quiet eye of the storm and enter the maelstrom. He and his collaborators were headed for total immersion in an experiment quite unfamiliar to them. They would become Exhibit A in a modern case study of the real-life consequences, as opposed to the well-worn Hollywood scenarios, when somebody ventures into an area that smacks of extraterrestrials. This would be the first case to demonstrate what can happen when such an event whets the appetites of the uncontrollable, everywhere-all-the-time, instant-news monster that had lately begun to take over the planet.

The McKay Martians were both hypothetical and microscopic, to be sure. They lacked the clarity of invading seven-foot Cyclops-eyed creatures with oily, fungoid skin, or of an oversized robot stationed at the ramp of a flying saucer on a greensward in the nation’s capital, responding only to cryptic intergalactic idiom like “Klaatu barada nikto.” Still, McKay and his partners would feel the very real and wrenching forces that can roil the intersection of media, science, and politics.

The story had been pushing at several portals, trying to escape.

Sherry Rowlands, Dick Morris’s “paid lady,” as she called herself, had been dickering with Richard Gooding, a reporter for the tabloid
Star,
over the sale of her diary. He wanted proof of her assertions that Clinton adviser Morris was transgressing beyond mere adultery—no big deal—and betraying the president of the United States by sharing state secrets with a call girl. Now
that
would be a story. In response, Rowlands offered the anecdote about the rock. She told Gooding about the evening when, following drinks and dinner, Morris had said to her, “Can I trust you? I have a military secret only seven people in the world know. We found life on one of the planets.”

For all Gooding knew, it was a complete fabrication. (Actually, Morris or Rowlands or both of them had bobbled the facts: she wasn’t sure which planet was involved; the information was not actually classified; many more than seven people knew about it; and the evidence of life on another planet was not conclusive.) But what she told Gooding was rooted in fact and would be something of a global scoop for the
Star—
if only the reporter could be sure.

Gooding pressed her about which planet.

“Well, what are we exploring now?” she asked Gooding.

“I don’t know—Jupiter?” he suggested.

Gooding would remain a skeptic until August 6, when the story of the rock reverberated around the world and he realized Rowlands had been telling the truth.

At the same time, the tale of the “secret” made its way to the British media.

Everett Gibson, back in Houston, felt these first cracks opening up over the same weekend (August 3–4) that McKay left to play hooky. Gibson got a call from his friend Colin Pillinger in Britain. “I have an abstract with your initials on it,” Pillinger told him. Gibson had left a copy of the galley proofs—bearing his initials—with Goldin in Washington, who had passed it to the White House. Apparently, somebody had faxed a copy to British media outlets, and they’d turned to experts like Pillinger for comment.

Gibson would later surmise that this, too, was the work of Rowlands, trying to sell the information after getting it from Morris. During the transcontinental phone call, Gibson asked Pillinger to maintain silence a little longer. “Just bear with me for a little while.” Gibson thought he could stall the rush of events. He was wrong.

For one thing, the politically excited Morris had been promoting the story quietly (and with the understanding that the information was embargoed) to members of the White House press corps, who were pressing to break the news.

But the first person to put the story on the public record was Leonard David, a weathered freelance reporter writing for the industry weekly
Space News
and also editing the magazine
Final Frontier.
In appearance, he was a blend of balding, long-haired hippie and cowboy casual. As a kid, he had been known to break up his eyeglasses and hook the lenses to toilet-paper tubes to make telescopes. An unabashed space enthusiast since well before Sputnik, he had spent almost four decades reporting on space-exploration issues for a variety of bosses and was still scrambling to string together enough checks to pay the rent. He had, on occasion, gone over to the other side to work for the government, including stints as a consultant to NASA and research director for a commission on space exploration set up jointly by Congress and the White House. He was a familiar presence in aerospace circles, closely attuned to the players, the gossip, and incipient news.

For months now, as he made his rounds at the scientific gatherings in Houston and other places, David had been picking up “hall talk”—the same hints and rumors that had been circulating with increasing energy in the corridors of Building 31. David had first begun to focus on the rock as a potentially big story in March 1995, in Houston, when the McKay group had discussed their preliminary description of Zarelab’s detection of the organics—the PAHs—at a gathering of planetary scientists.

A few months after that, John Kerridge, a cosmochemist and meteorite specialist at NASA headquarters working on studies about how to find life on Mars, had slipped David a tip to watch the rock for a big development. “I’m telling you about this now, because when you hear about it, don’t be too carried away,” Kerridge had told his friend. “You know, it’ll seem extremely spectacular when it appears, but you need to approach it from a very skeptical frame of mind, because there are a lot of pitfalls here, and it’s not clear that all the pitfalls will have been gotten out of the way.”

Kerridge and others at NASA headquarters had heard rumors that the McKay team was anxious to publish. Kerridge, for one, went from feeling intrigued with the evidence of the organics—the PAHs detected by Zarelab—to a horrible sense that “Oh, my God, this could be a disaster,” because the Houston group might actually claim to have found life. Kerridge, who was at NASA on detached duty from the University of California, would argue later—after he became one of the most outspoken critics of the McKay group’s claims—that he had not prejudged the question but was “just very concerned about the potential for, if you like, negative publicity if somebody comes up with something and it turns out to be incorrect.”

In July 1996, Leonard David had attended a conference of space enthusiasts in Boulder, Colorado, on strategies and rationales for sending humans to explore and colonize Mars. Again he’d encountered a lot of buzz about this same rock. A couple of people had speculated casually about the f-word: fossil. From this point on, David had worked on the theory that the source of the buzz was some kind of fossil on Mars. He’d started “pinging” his sources at the Houston space center in earnest. It was when they started to clam up on the topic that he knew he had something big. During the months that he worked on the story, there was no single tipster but rather four or five different people who provided various small pieces of the puzzle that he could then use to leverage even more information out of sources. His dogged pursuit would later be widely referred to, somewhat misleadingly, as a “leak”—as if someone had kindly dumped a juicy scoop on his front stoop.

The final pieces fell into place at the end of July. A source left David a voice-mail message informing him of rumors that NASA was planning an important press conference in mid-August on an unspecified topic.

As July turned to August and David’s next end-of-the-week deadline neared, he called Don Savage, a public affairs officer at NASA headquarters. He asked whether something was brewing that had to do with the Martian meteorite and a fossil.

Uh-oh, Savage thought.

Savage tried to walk the tightrope—to be as evasive as possible while responding honestly. He hoped (like Gibson) that he might be able to stall the rush of events. David didn’t seem to have much in the way of hard facts. Savage told David that information about the story was restricted (“embargoed”) and he couldn’t talk about it. But that, of course, amounted to a confirmation of sorts. Now David knew there
was
a story coming to a head.

David then decided to take “a little bit of a gamble,” as he would put it later. Nobody had ever laid it all out for him. But he wrote down all that he thought he had learned. He ran his draft past a “deep throat”—an informed source who assured him his story was accurate. He called his editor at
Space News
from his home base on Capitol Hill in Washington and told him he had an important item he’d like to get in right away. He kept saying, “I think this is really gonna be big.” But the weekly deadline was looming, and work on the issue was almost closed out. When he quit work that Friday, David wasn’t sure whether his exclusive would get in.

Over the weekend, he attended a party where he spotted Andrew Lawler, a reporter for
Science
magazine. David walked into the kitchen and, taking a wild shot, said to Lawler, “Hey, how about that Mars meteorite story.” Lawler fired back, “You’re not supposed to know about that!” That confirmed in David’s mind that
Science
was the journal with the hot rock, and that his story was right on.

The following Monday, August 5, as David McKay was relaxing in the hill country, the short piece by Leonard David appeared in
Space News.
It was all but buried. It ran on page 2, the second in a column of eight little items. Only five paragraphs long, it began: “The prospect that life once existed on Mars is being raised following analysis of a meteorite recovered on Earth.” At another point, David wrote that the Martian meteorite ALH84001 contained “indications of past biological activity on Mars.”

The
Space News
item, in both its brevity and its placement, was so unassuming that it did not make a big, sudden splash. But it entered the circulatory system of the media beast. Like a virus, the word spread. The beast began to quiver and hum. People started calling Savage and his coworkers in NASA public affairs to inquire about the rock. By seven
A
.
M
. the next day—Tuesday—NASA had issued the emergency call for McKay, Gibson, and the other authors, wherever they were, to scramble to Washington for a press conference.

The NASA headquarters group had known that as soon as Goldin and Huntress paid their late-July visit to the White House (“one of the leakiest places on the planet,” as they reminded one another), the risks would shoot up, given the magnitude of the story. They were aware that a leak could spring from anywhere—from their own ranks, from Building 31 in Houston, from the scientists scattered across the land who had reviewed the paper for the journal, from anyone in the expanding circle of those who knew.

The NASA group had made extensive preparations for such an escape, assembling charts, graphics, videos, written guidance for President Clinton in case he decided to comment, and everything else they might need for going public. But there were some things that could not be precooked and ready to serve. For example, the NASA team had laid out a by-the-book schedule of private briefings for relevant agency chiefs, key members of Congress, and other interested VIPs—to be implemented a few days ahead of the announcement.