The Rock From Mars (6 page)

Armstrong had decided that he and Aldrin would shovel as much lunar soil into the box as possible before they closed it. The result was a briefly frustrating cloak of blackish dirt over everything in there.

Two nights later, when the scientists got the first chunk of lunar sample cleaned off, they recognized it as basalt, a volcanic rock. That single moment proved the value of the collection and effectively resolved a long-standing dispute about how the moon had formed. The evidence doomed the “cold mooners,” led by a Nobel laureate, and handed victory to the “hot mooners” who insisted the moon had been geologically “alive.”

The art of handling the first alien samples involved what NASA calls a steep learning curve. For one thing, it soon became obvious that keeping the specimens in a vacuum had been a terrible idea. Somebody was always puncturing a glove and breaking the barrier between the vacuum and the outside world. Alarms would go off. Dirt would pour into the box. And, for a time, the lab staff took to diving under tables and hiding so they would not be found and themselves sent into quarantine. The lab soon switched to storing samples in cabinets filled with nitrogen, a much more manageable medium. This system would later be adopted for Antarctic meteorite samples as well.

The rock custodians also learned early on that they had problems with potential contaminants built into the sample enclosures or mistakenly stored there. A young geochemist named Everett Gibson, who arrived at the space center on July 24, the day the
Apollo 11
crew splashed down safely in the Pacific, was among those enlisted to help clean things up. Gibson would later become McKay’s partner in a public fight that would change people’s understanding of contamination in rock.

After three landing missions, the civilized world was persuaded that moon stuff was free of alien killer microbes and other hazards. Humankind was not at risk from the rocks, although the “purity” of the rocks was in some jeopardy from humankind.

McKay was in the first group of investigators selected to analyze the coveted samples. Right after the first landing, he extricated himself from the astronaut-training business. For McKay, those duties had been a departure—albeit necessary and entertaining—from his true purpose. All along, he had been working in his spare time to set up a lab and conduct his own research. By the time the first lunar samples headed back to Earth, he had managed to acquire microscopes and other equipment and essentially duplicated the lab he had worked in at Berkeley.

Because McKay knew that most of the others would be working on the
rocks,
he’d decided to focus on the finer material that made up the lunar regolith. He saw the promise of a pioneering field expedition. Moon dust was the last stage in the pulverizing of lunar rocks, a tossed salad of all kinds of moon stuff, remixed by impacts. The dust had memories he wanted to unlock, molecule by molecule, a record of events that would lead him far back into the history of the cosmos. If he followed it far enough, he might enjoy a thrill akin to Armstrong’s, of being the first to plant his flag on a patch of frontier knowledge.

McKay teamed up with two coworkers to write the proposal. It was accepted, but he was never sure whether the decision had been made on the basis of the proposal’s scientific merit or because the bosses wanted to mobilize the talents of the young newcomers. He always suspected that it was the latter. In any case, he knew he would have to compete by the same rules as everybody else from then on.

David McKay and the other rock detectives were in a race to publish the initial results from the historic first field investigations on the moon. This meant a mad scramble to do research, write, and revise papers. It meant working through holidays and vacations. It was all so momentous. Along with the chance of a career-making breakthrough came the danger of a world-class stumble. McKay, thirty-two years old when he’d watched Armstrong’s moon landing, was at the beginning of his career, while the competition included well-established heavy hitters.

Among the young up-and-comers who passed through the space center during this period was J. William Schopf, who had completed his graduate work at Harvard. He had participated in studies that had opened the way to a long-hidden fossil record of Earth’s early life-forms. Not long after the first moon landing, he joined five other scientists conducting the preliminary sorting and description of the
Apollo 11
and
Apollo 12
lunar samples. During that time, he might have first crossed paths with David McKay. While Schopf would focus his career on Earth, not space, his trajectory would collide with McKay’s twenty-seven years later in a very public and dramatic way.

In his lab in Building 31, McKay and his crew settled down to the tedious business of analyzing moon soils at the level of individual grains. The work could be compared to that of a crime-scene investigator: in both cases, people analyzed tiny quantities of evidence in minute detail in order to figure out how each clue had come to be there, and in the end, they would pull out the threads of hidden stories.

McKay suspected that bombardment by microscopic meteorites whipping in at over five thousand miles per hour (eight thousand kilometers per hour) had changed the lunar surface in predictable ways. He focused on certain types of particles. To name them, the team appropriated the term
agglutinates
from studies of volcanic eruptions on Earth, an interest that would take McKay repeatedly to Japan.

McKay and his staff set up a system that seemed mind-bogglingly monotonous. They would plot the data and determine the typical sizes of dust grains, and how they varied, so that one type of soil could be compared precisely with another. McKay mounted thin shavings of grains,
individually,
under the microscope and identified each particle. He kept track of them, maybe five hundred particles at a time.

In another setting, such narrow-beam focus and repetition might well be viewed as some kind of weird compulsion. To someone like McKay, his approach was a rational, logical way to mount an assault on the elusive unknown.

Although scientists like McKay were often cast as clinical, hard-eyed realists, they could also be the ultimate romantics. They tended to operate, out of necessity, with a heightened awareness of the incredible insignificance of the human life span set against the vastness of time and space. They knew not only that they would die in a blink but that the sun would die and the planets would become cinders. The cosmos would thin out and grow cold and dark (or be consumed in a crush of thermonuclear fire). They appreciated the extent to which we humans are prisoners of our senses and our language—and how much of reality still lay beyond those limits. And yet, they believed that through an accumulation of tiny steps they might somehow reach even that reality. This (along with the demands of time-limited experiments) was what kept them constantly at their benches.

Little wonder “civilians” sometimes found them off-putting, with their earnest smarts, obscure terminology, and workaholism. Geeks.

Like Sisyphus, condemned to push a stone endlessly up a mountain, many researchers devoted their lives to the exertion, not knowing if they would reach the summit. Like Sisyphus, they found fulfillment in the struggle itself—but they also wanted to get someplace. It was the sort of fanciful, audacious optimism, almost like religious faith, that in a few short centuries had carried the human species to amazing knowledge far beyond human senses—knowledge that stretched from the workings of subatomic particles to the edges of the known universe. And McKay felt this ancient momentum.

As McKay and his coworkers piled up more and more of his corpuscular information, they assembled a systematic portrait of how meteorites smashed up the soils and how natural processes gardened them over the eons. Though others worked the same vein, McKay’s model, published most extensively in 1972, became a kind of index for establishing broader insights into the workings of the moon. He had been in the right place at the right time, had been able to select the lunar samples he wanted, and had had good ideas that had panned out.

Inside his tribe, the slender geologist, as calm and deliberate as a stalagmite, came to be recognized as one of the leading specialists in the field, one of the elite company of rock detectives who had managed to decode the shining face of the poets’ moon.

All through this period, McKay’s love life flourished. He had kept in touch with Mary Fae Coulter. The two no longer lived in the same city, but McKay’s astronaut-training expeditions gave him enough mobility to pass through San Francisco to see her a couple of times.

Coulter eventually took a teaching job in Kobe, Japan, and invited everybody she knew to come visit her. David McKay—who, after all, had his own moon-related interest in the violent eruptions of Japan’s volcanoes—took her up on it. He stayed for two weeks. They saw more of each other in that exotic fortnight than in all the previous years of their acquaintance. She was impressed with how much they had in common: Both came from authoritarian Presbyterian families. Both were brainy and enjoyed the same quick, ironic humor. She felt that they both saw the stratigraphy of hidden meanings beneath the surface of a conversation.

They rode trains all over Japan and had a wonderful time. They’d be rumbling along, watching the scenery go by, and she’d say, “David, what if I showed you a rock blue and green with little gold specks, what would it be?” He would murmur sweet nothings, like: “Porphyritic pyroxene granodiorite.” Or perhaps: “Diatomiferous kimberlitic lherzolite.” She loved it.

On their Japanese train tours, McKay would get passersby to take photographs of the two of them at various shrines. But she noticed that, sometimes, he would arrange to get a shot of himself alone—for his other female friends back home, she assumed. She also noticed that he was buying gifts for about nine women in Houston. He had brought along his little address book, and she discovered that it contained the name of one of
her
friends, whom McKay had met at a dinner party at
her
house in San Francisco years earlier. She couldn’t believe it.

One day, McKay asked Coulter directly why she didn’t just move back to Houston. She gave him an equally direct look and said, “I don’t like standing in lines.” He said, “Oh, but you’d be
ichiban,
” using the Japanese word for “number one.” She said, “Well, if I’m
ichiban
out of nine or ten, I’d probably only get about two dates with you a week.” He noted that they’d been together twenty-four hours a day during his two-week visit, which put him about a year’s worth of dates ahead of the game. And so it went.

Then one day, before he left Japan, McKay asked Coulter to marry him. She hesitated. It wasn’t just his wandering heart that stopped her. She had yet to convince herself that this Japanese idyll wasn’t something akin to a shipboard romance—born more of the setting than of true, deep feeling. She put McKay off.

But she was pleased when his first letter arrived after his return to Houston and he hadn’t changed his mind about her.

In 1971, when Coulter moved back to the United States, she and David McKay were married. After a honeymoon in Mexico, the couple settled down in a town house near the space center. Actually, they were a threesome. Living with the newlyweds was a cat he had been keeping for one of his other woman friends—a coal-black animal that McKay liked to call Snowflake.

Apollo was one of those rare thunderclaps of history. There was never any doubt about its importance, no question that it would be the stuff of textbooks and museums and time capsules. But many people were mistaken about its robustness. At the time of that first landing, it was easy to think that this was just the beginning. Groups of geologists busied themselves drawing up grand wish lists and debating which landing spots would be the most rewarding for the next lunar digs. As they received the rain of lunar treasure, McKay and the others felt infused with a sense of wonder at the miracle times they lived in.

But the more politically alert among them knew that the brash American offensive in space was already running out of fuel. When Neil Armstrong set that first tractor-tread footprint into the lunar talc, he effectively stamped out Apollo’s reason for being. The space race was won. Mission accomplished. Americans, beset with body counts in Vietnam, assassinations in high places, a decaying civil rights movement, riots and demonstrations in the streets, a general disillusionment with government, politics, and the “establishment,” and assorted other social upheavals, possessed quite sensible and practical reasons for shifting focus.

There would be five more moon landings after the first one, sustained by the dwindling funding in the Apollo pipeline. In a late victory for the geologists, the last three Apollo missions would be devoted mainly to field investigations, each more complex than the one preceding it. On the last three, the astronauts would get equipment upgrades that included a battery-powered moon cart that resembled a dune buggy. Riding in this contraption, they could cover much more ground. They traveled hours from base camp, venturing into the moon’s central highlands. But it was not until
Apollo 17
that the moon would see its first (and, so far, only) professional scientist. Geologist Harrison Schmitt won his flight papers just in time.

On Tuesday, December 12, 1972, Schmitt found himself and crewmate Gene Cernan afoot in the Valley of Taurus-Littrow, on the southeastern shore of the Sea of Serenity, which forms the left eye of the “man in the moon.” It was, as anticipated, a geologist’s dream. Their haul would include one of the oldest fragments found during Apollo—possibly as much as 4.5 billion years old.

Toward the end of an exhausting day of digging and collecting, the pair discovered a bright orange, red, and yellow substance. It would turn out to be made up of tiny beads of glass—evidence of a fiery volcanic fountain that had jetted out of the young moon into the lunar sky some 3.5 billion years earlier. For the poetically minded, such a flare might be taken as a burst of celestial jubilation heralding a notable development over on the cooling planet that waxed and waned in the moon’s sky: life had sprung up there. It was primitive life, to be sure, but the cosmos, perhaps for the first time, had taken a step toward becoming conscious of itself.