The Rock From Mars (4 page)

Score was in charge of assigning the rocks their laboratory numbers, and she singled this one out despite, or perhaps because of, the trick it had played on her. She knew this was the one she wanted to look at first. So she designated it ALH84001: ALH for Allan Hills, after the major landmark near the site where she’d bagged it; 84 for the year (traditionally marked in December); and 001 because she had selected it to be the first of the season’s harvest to be recorded and analyzed.

Robbie Score had become the unwitting instrument of a beginning. Many years in the future “her” rock would send scientists down the slippery slopes and into the unexplored crevasses of one of the most profound questions ever asked by civilization. The rock would emerge as the catalyst in one of the most bitter scientific debates of the century. It would lead down new avenues of understanding—and some blind alleys—in humankind’s long struggle to understand what defines a living thing at the most fundamental levels, how life came to exist on Earth, and whether the terrestrial version is unique in all of time and space. The rock’s mere possibilities would incite yearnings of the spirit, clashes of ego, and intrigues among the powerful. The White House would summon prominent thinkers to discuss the potential implications for religion, culture, and the federal budget. The rock would help explode a scandal that ensnared a presidential adviser and his mistress.

The rock had escaped Earth’s polar ice only to be entrained in another kind of complicated glacial advance, this time moved along not by gravity but by the force of human curiosity.

But for nine more years, the rock and its secrets would rest in quiet obscurity on a shelf, a victim of mistaken identity.

CHAPTER TWO

MOON DUST

N
EIL
A
RMSTRONG STOOD
alone in the middle of a broad, cratered plain cloaked in dust as fine as talcum powder. The lighting was eerie, dreamlike. Blazing brilliance at ground level contrasted with hard ebony blackness overhead. It reminded him of standing in a floodlit sandlot baseball field under an Ohio night. He pulled a collapsible tool from a pocket on his thigh and, turning his back to the explosive glare of the white sun, bent awkwardly in his bulky suit to scoop up some soil and rock. When he studied the pieces close up, he saw the true shades of this shining place: charcoal brown or nearly black, like powdered graphite.

Armstrong, thirty-eight, a son of the American heartland, had just picked up the first geological samples ever taken by a human on another world. David McKay, five years younger, watched from a seat some 240,000 miles across the void that Texas summer evening in July 1969. He was the lone geologist inside the hushed inner sanctum of Mission Control, Houston, during the landing of the first men on the moon.

McKay watched with wide, owlish brown eyes, sensing in his own nerve endings the motions of those human hands at work on that alien plain, willing them to move faster, pick up more stuff. It was the ultimate field expedition, and Armstrong was, in a sense, McKay’s surrogate. The geek geologist (taciturn and ironic) had helped teach the celebrated astronaut (taciturn and earnest) about the just-invented art of lunar prospecting. Now, during the surface exploration, McKay could only watch and see how those few hurried lessons had taken. The events unfolding out there were what flight director Gene Kranz (referring, of course, to much more than mere geology) had called “the final exam.”

Sitting in the back row of the main floor in Mission Control, a place redolent of cigarette smoke, stale pizza, and burnt coffee, McKay could see the astronauts moving like ghostly apparitions on the big screen at the front of the room. He could hear the terse exchanges between Houston and the moon. He was at the center of Big History, and his spine tingled as much as anyone’s.

But his focus was different from that of most of those around him and, for that matter, most of the global population that had tuned in to watch the grainy, jerky black-and-white images flowing from the moon. His focus was, you might say, microscopic. For him, the main show was not in the technological virtuosity of the moon landing, not in its Cold War symbolism, not in the triumph of the first human footfall on another world, and not even in the steely courage and skill exhibited by Armstrong and his crewmate Buzz Aldrin.

The stomach-clenching descent from orbit had been punctuated with alarm bells as the spacecraft headed for a landing about two miles beyond the planned aim point and an overtaxed computer threatened to abort the landing. Armstrong, with Aldrin reading out crucial data, had maneuvered the landing craft manually to avoid a treacherous crater-pocked and boulder-strewn obstacle course and make it to a smoother patch. They’d contacted the surface with about twenty seconds of fuel remaining. In the harrowing final seconds before touchdown, Armstrong had found his visibility obscured, his sense of the craft’s motion confused, by the lunar dust kicked up by his blasting jets—pulsing, fan-shaped sheets of dust expanding like veils flung by a dancer and captured for posterity on a movie camera attached to the landing craft.

From the moment Armstrong exited the lander and activated a small TV camera on the side of the craft, sending the images flowing to Earth, McKay and a few others like him scattered around the world watched the dust—to see how it took the imprint of Armstrong’s tread and clung to the light blue sole of his boot, how it flew off strangely in all directions like a swarm of disturbed flies (with little gravity to sort them, no atmosphere to interfere) when the astronaut tried to shovel it up with an aluminum scoop. McKay could barely stand the wait for the samples to arrive back at Earth. If he couldn’t go to the moon himself, let the moon come to him. Then he would no longer be a mere spectator.

On this July evening, the meteorite trapped in the ancient blue ice of Earth’s south polar region lay undisturbed some eight thousand statute miles to the south of McKay. Robbie Score, still a kid, was on a camping vacation with her family in California. They had all driven to the nearest town to see a movie (
Yellow Submarine,
with the Beatles). Robbie and her dad kept slipping out of the theater to watch the moon landing on the television set in a store window display next door.

More than fifteen years still had to pass before Score would pluck “her” rock from its resting place on the ice and start the slow unfolding of events that would lead McKay on to a frontier of a different sort, where he would be tested in ways he had never anticipated. But it was the unprecedented national push toward this summer moment in 1969, toward the imprint of that first human footfall in the alien dust, that would set the stage for McKay’s unlikely turning later on.

It was Apollo that sanctified this swampy, buggy acreage of salt-grass pastureland south of Houston as the once and future temple of the stones. Apollo would draw together many of the primary players in this story. It would set the trajectory of their lives, shape their dreams, and determine that Robbie Score’s rock, as it emerged from its frozen history years from now, would fetch up in their midst with all its enigma, here in this meltingly torrid precinct of south Texas, of all places.

It has been said that the advance of science is driven not so much by the quest for truth as by a scramble for jobs. Apollo in the early 1960s opened a gusher of tax dollars to fuel a crash program modeled after the secret Manhattan Project, which had developed the atomic bomb. (This one, however, would be wildly public.) The result was the largest single civilian project in history.

It proved to be a soul-stirring drama—a “triumph of the squares,” a NASA official would call it—that fleetingly enthralled much of civilization and eventually seduced even the cynics and ironists. Author Norman Mailer (who had scorned the U.S. space program as protofascist) would be moved to acknowledge the moon landing as a victory for the WASP culture and a rebuke to the counterculture. “You’ve been drunk all summer,” he wrote, “. . . and
they
have taken the moon.”

David Stewart McKay was one of the squares.

The ancestral McKays had moved from Scotland to Ireland and then, in 1830, immigrated to the United States, to settle in Pennsylvania. One McKay helped build the Erie Canal; another fought in the Civil War, as a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard, and his rifle—made by Eli Whitney Co.—would become one of David McKay’s family treasures. Still later, a McKay started a carriage factory with the motto “If it’s McKay, it’s okay.” On his mother’s side, David knew, a grandfather had worked for a steel mill and gotten elected county commissioner; he had good “people skills.” Her uncle Derwood was a photographer who experimented in his own darkroom—the only known McKay ancestor who came close to a scientific pursuit of any kind.

David McKay was born in 1936 above the strata where the first oil well in America began pumping in the 1800s, near Titusville, Pennsylvania. His father worked for an oil company—but not as a geologist. He was an accountant.

Still, two of the three sons developed an abiding interest in how the oil had gotten there and other matters geological. Even as a boy, David was fascinated by the notion that you could go into the great out-of-doors, look around, and see coded messages about how the natural world worked. For McKay, there really was a sermon, or at least a little good gossip, in every stone.

When he was ten, the family followed the oil jobs to Tulsa. After high school, David McKay went to Rice University in Houston to get a bachelor’s degree in geology. A “TRB” (Typical Rice Boy), he wore his pants high and carried a slide rule. It was geek heaven.

McKay moved on to the University of California at Berkeley for a master’s but soon got fed up with school and bolted. He hired out to oil companies, doing survey work and living in a drafty trailer in the desert. He worked on offshore rigs in the Pacific near California and in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. But the industry jobs, with their slow pace and funky, low-tech tone, soon frustrated him even more than school had. After about a year, he escaped back to Rice to acquire a Ph.D. in geochemistry, which he completed in 1964.

That year, McKay returned to Berkeley to do postdoctoral lab work. A bit roguish, he was lanky, with dark tousled hair, dark eyes behind black-rimmed glasses that he had worn since eighth grade. He wore a Rice class ring. It was during this period that he met a young woman who would prove both elusive and inescapable in his life. Her name was Mary Fae Coulter, and she was a sassy Phi Beta Kappa from Rice, a schoolteacher who was at Berkeley to get a master’s degree in English.

They would go out to a movie now and then, but Coulter was on guard. She noted that David McKay always seemed to be on the lookout for other women. Although she thought he was cute and enjoyed his company, she was not about to get herself dangerously tangled up with this roving Romeo.

In any case, McKay soon got a call from a Rice colleague who was staffing up a geology group at the new space complex in Houston. The fellow offered McKay a job.

In the early sixties, NASA was hiring in a near frenzy, signing up almost anyone who walked in the door with a bachelor’s degree—and a few Ph.D. scientists for ballast. The designation of a large cow pasture twenty-five miles south of Houston as a major hub of space operations had triggered waves of dismay and rumors of scandal at first. The choice had been determined primarily through the influence of Texas politicians, most prominently Vice President Lyndon Johnson, an ardent ally of the space program, and Albert Thomas, chairman of NASA’s funding committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. An oil company (with Rice University as intermediary) had magically donated the required expanse of land, one thousand acres of unproductive oil field where cattle grazed, not far from the refineries around Galveston Bay. (The geology here had been laid down in stream deposits from the erosion of the Rocky Mountains. These sediments of sands and clays had been set down on top of decaying organic matter transformed over the centuries into oil and natural gas.)

The NASA officials who had to move there initially balked at the region’s glowering climate, which was enough to make a body yearn for the rigors of outer space. “For eight months Houston was an unbelievably torrid effluvial sump,” Tom Wolfe wrote. The humid air was heavy with the odors of the Houston Ship Channel, as well as of petroleum, and chemical and paper plants, and periodically hung thick with mosquitoes. And the nearest town to the space complex, Clear Lake City, was named loosely after an inlet that Wolfe said was “about as clear as the eyeballs of a poisoned bass.”

But the resistance soon evaporated, once the serendipitous wisdom of the choice became clear. The move represented an escape from the “old fogies” back at NASA headquarters in Washington, people realized. It was a chance to recruit young people with creative ideas and build something truly new. Besides, the hot, humid climate had some advantages, such as minimizing the threat of blizzards and extended airport shutdowns. The clay beneath the surface of the land in these parts precluded the buildup of friction that ended in earthquakes. Instead, the region experienced only the more benign “fault creep.” That, plus the city’s location about halfway between the West and East Coasts, turned out to be a blessing for a workforce that (thanks to the geopolitics of space) had to travel by plane constantly in both directions—to the launch complex in Florida and to the aerospace contractors concentrated in California.

The new recruits were swept up in the chaotic excitement of an undertaking whose momentum, for the moment, seemed irreversible. The timing couldn’t have been better for an impatient young geochemist.

In the summer of 1965, word went around the space center that one of the female managers, a chemist, was expecting her boyfriend to come and join NASA. That fellow turned out to be McKay.

He arrived in June 1965 at the still unfinished Manned Spacecraft Center (later rechristened Johnson Space Center), where offices at first were scattered in strip shopping centers and at the spartan, faded facilities of nearby Ellington Air Force Base. By 1967, he’d moved into the science building, the freshly built Building 31, two stories of labs and offices whose facade was a variety of limestone known as Austin chalk, from a Texas quarry. The numbers signified the order in which the buildings had been completed. In the next decade, an extension of Building 31 would become the permanent home of the Antarctic meteorite collection.

McKay became a junior member of a small, feisty offshoot of the tribe of people who made their living interpreting the language of rock. He and others in this select band had seen a rare opportunity in lunar geology, even though the field barely existed at the time. (It was being invented almost single-handedly by a contemporary of McKay’s, the irrepressible geologist Eugene Shoemaker, of the U.S. Geological Survey, and a few others.) A number of scientific superstars, some of them Nobel material, felt the lure. The promised harvest of lunar samples looked to this group like the scientific equivalent of an oil gusher. It would provide a bonanza of revelations about the history of Earth’s corner of the cosmos, and how we humans came to be here. And it was the chance of a lifetime to cherry-pick big-league, career-making discoveries.

McKay’s first assignment as one of the new kids was dumbfoundingly exotic. He was to help teach astronauts (amazing!) how to collect rocks on the moon (more amazing!). He was one of two scientists assigned specifically to train the
Apollo 11
crew—Armstrong, Aldrin, and Mike Collins, who would remain alone in lunar orbit while the other two landed on the surface.

The job had many attractions, not least the aura of glamour and social appeal that attended anyone who worked with the astronauts. McKay was hardly immune from that. A young woman who knew McKay off and on in those years thought that his hobnobbing with the astronauts had given him a new social confidence. At Rice, he had dated nurses and townies, but not the women at the top of the campus social pecking order. Now he found that he had a certain cachet. He was a professional with prospects. He kept the requisite little black book and dated several women concurrently.