He waited for the obligatory laugh. “On the other hand, the investigation may show a completely alien biochemistry, indicating a separate origin. That's a very different scenario.” Now Mike paused, realizing he was at the edge of his soundbite envelope, also of deep waters. He decided to cut it short: “Either way that turns out, we'll know that life is very adaptable, and that it can either cross space between planets, or begin twice in the same solar system, so either way we'll be safer in assuming that life is fairly widespread in the universe.”
Bill smiled. Mike was good; the answer provided a quick summary of the situation, bullet points, potential headlines: “Life on Mars Proves Life Is Common in the Universe.” Which wasn't exactly true, but there was no winning the soundbite game.
Bill left the room and crossed the little plaza, then entered the big building forming the north flank of the compound. Upstairs the little offices and cubicles all had their doors open and portable TVs on, all tuned to the press conference just a hundred yards away; there was a holiday atmosphere, including streamers and balloons, but Bill couldn't feel it somehow. There on the screens under the CNN logo his friends were being played up as heroes, Young Devoted Rocket Scientists replacing astronauts, as the exploration of Mars proceeded robotically—silly, but very much preferable to the situation when things went wrong, when they were portrayed as Harried Geek Rocket Scientists not quite up to the task, the extremely important (though underfunded) task of teleoperating the exploration of the cosmos from their desks. They had played both roles several times at JPL, and had come to understand that for the media and perhaps the public there was no middle ground, no recognition that they were just people doing their jobs, difficult but interesting jobs in difficult but not intolerable circumstances. No, for the world they were a biannual nine-hours' wonder, either nerdy heroes or nerdy goats, and the next day forgotten.
That was just the way it was, and not what was bothering Bill. He felt at loose ends. Mission accomplished, his TO DO list almost empty; it left him feeling somewhat empty; but that was not it either. He still had phone and e-mail media questions waiting, and he worked through those on automatic pilot, his answers honed by the previous week's work. The lander had drilled down and secured a soil sample from under the sands at the mouth of Shalbatana Vallis, where thermal sensors had detected heat from a volcanic vent, which meant the permafrost ice in that region had liquid percolations in it. The sample had been placed in a metal sphere which had been hermetically sealed and boosted to Martian orbit. After a rendezvous with an orbiter it had been flown back to Earth and been released in such a manner that it had dropped into Earth's atmosphere without orbiting at all, and slammed into Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds a mere ten yards from its target. An artificial meteorite, yes. No, the ball could not have broken on impact, it had been engineered for that impact, indeed could have withstood striking a sidewalk or a wall of steel, and had been recovered intact in the little crater it had made—recovered by robot and flown robotically to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it had been placed inside hermetically sealed chambers in sealed labs in sealed buildings before being opened, everything having been designed for just this purpose. No, they did not need to sterilize Dugway, or all of Utah, they did not need to nuke Houston (not to kill Martian bacteria anyway), and all was well; the alien life was safely locked away and could not get out. People were safe.
Bill answered many such questions, feeling that there were far too many people who badly needed a better education in risk assessment. They got in their cars and drove on freeways, smoking cigarettes and holding high-energy radio transmitters against their heads, in order to get to newsrooms where they were greatly concerned to find out if they were in danger from microbacteria locked away behind triple hermetic seals in Houston. By the time Bill broke for lunch he was feeling more depressed than irritated. People were ignorant, short-sighted, poorly educated, fearful, superstitious; deeply meshed in magical thinking of all kinds. And yet that too was not really what was bothering him.
Mike was in the cafeteria, hungrily downing his lunchtime array of flavonoids and antioxidants, and Bill joined him, feeling cheered. Mike was giving a low-voiced recap of the morning's press conference (many journalists were in the JPL cafeteria on guest passes), “What is the meaning of life?” Mike whispered urgently, “it means metabolism, it means hunger at lunchtime, please God let us eat, that's what it means.” Then the TVs overhead began to show the press conference from Houston, and like everyone else they watched and listened to the tiny figures on the screen. The exobiologists at Johnson Space Center were making their initial report: the Martian bacteria were around one hundred nanometers long, bigger than the fossil nanobacteria tentatively identified in ALH 84001, but smaller than most Terran bacteria; they were single-celled, they contained proteins, ribosomes, DNA strands composed of base pairs of adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.