The Martians(41)

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.”