Kathy Sawyer - The Rock from Mars: A Detective Story on Two Planets

CONTENTS

FOR JOHN,
MY ROCK

The author gratefully acknowledges
the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a mans heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

ALBERT CAMUS, The Myth of Sisyphus

Physicists have paid little attention to rock, mainly because we are discouraged by its apparent complexity.... We also may question whether it is even possible to find interesting physics in such a dirty and uncontrolled system.

PO-ZEN WONG, The Statistical Physics of Sedimentary Rock, Physics Today 41, no. 12 (1988): p. 24.

The role of the infinitely small in nature is infinitely large.

LOUIS PASTEUR

PROLOGUE

SOME 16 MILLION years ago, a comet or asteroid slammed into Mars with the energy of a million hydrogen bombs. The impact gouged out a crater and blasted a massive cloud of soil and rock into the planets thin atmosphere. Most of it fell back, but some fragments were ejected at velocities as high as 11,000 miles per hourenough to fling them out of their native gravity and off on their own orbits around the sun.

After millions of years, at least one fell into Earths gravitational embrace. It plunged through the atmosphere trailing fire, melted a little from the heat of friction, and resolidified with a new looka glassy black fusion crust. The rock plowed into the south polar ice cap.

Elsewhere on the rocks adopted world, mastodons, long-horned bison, and saber-toothed cats roamed. Birds of prey with twenty-five-foot wingspans drifted overhead. Beluga whales plied the seas. Horses and camels loped across plains. Vast continental glaciers covered much of what is now northern North America and Eurasia, pushing their towers of ice up to 13,000 feet high. And an inquisitive, uppity species of upright walkers crossed the Bering land bridge from Eurasia into North America.

As the rock lay icebound for thirteen millennia, the humans evolved precociously, rose beyond the day-to-day struggle for existence, and pondered concepts of justice, beauty, and their place in the cosmic scheme. They developed powerful machines that extended their reach across time and space, to the edges of all known creation. They wondered if they were alone in this daunting expanse, and at times seemed to edge tantalizingly close to the answer. All this time, a natural conveyor belt in the Antarctic was nudging the rock toward its destiny.

One polar summer day, a young woman plucked it off the ice. The rock had emerged at last into the province of human curiosity.

Twelve years later, on a muggy August afternoon in Washington, D.C., CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and other media outlets carried images of the rock, nested in velvet, live around the globe. Reporters and VIPs jammed an auditorium to glimpse this object and to hear the report of nine exhausted, exhilarated people who had looked into its heart and found tantalizing clues to the history of worlds.

Across town, in the Rose Garden of the White House, President Bill Clinton stepped to the microphones and said this about the alien rock: Today, rock eight four oh oh one speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks of the possibility of life. If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far-reaching and awe inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental.

We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say as we continue the search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself but essential to our peoples future.

What follows is an account of how a fist-sized lump fallen in wilderness came to such a pass and of the people who made it possible and of what happened next. In the end, the mysterious stranger changed their lives and much else besides.

CHAPTER ONE

SCORE

ROBBIE SCORE HAD no idea what she had found, and yet it was exactly what she was looking for. She noticed the object first as a dark green blemish on the clean expanse of ancient blue that shimmered around her.

In this stretch of Antarctica, December 27, 1984, was a balmy summer day, the temperature around zero Fahrenheit, the winds abating. The sunlight shone thermonuclear white. It could play tricks on your eyes. Score was on her first trip to the ice, cruising downslope on a snowmobile in loose formation with five others who had come here for the hunt. Inside a sarcophagus of expedition-weight clothes, she felt the painful bite of the breeze intensified by her own motion over the ground. She wore dark Polaroid glasses and three layers of glovesglove liners, insulated gloves, and bear paw mittens that fit over the top of the cuff of her red polar anorak with the fur-lined hood. That and her black wind pants were standard government issue. She wore her own hat, a jaunty red, white, and black knit, which (when not covered by the hood) distinguished her from the others.

They were working in a region of soul-searing desolation known as the Far Western Icefield, whose nearest landmark was a forked ridge of rock called Allan Hills. They were a good 150 miles from the nearest outpost of anything resembling civilization. Ordinarily, the hunters would spread out in a line, about a hundred feet separating each from the next, and sweep in tandem one way and then the other across a designated grid as large as three or even five miles in one direction. Back and forth, back and forth. The downwind legs werent bad; but heading into the wind could be brutal, the chill searing right into your face.

In places, the ice turned washboard rough, jarring the riders with ranks of long, concrete-hard dunes called sastrugi. Built of windblown ice crystals, they could stretch to hundreds of yards in length and grow to the height of a person.

To an observer looking down from a godlike vantage, the behavior might have seemed puzzlingthese bright-colored motes of life sweeping out their puny patterns in terrible isolation against a continent. But they had come here with a purpose. Their begoggled eyes were scouring the bright ground for bits of dark rubble. They were hunting the fallen husks of shooting stars. Meteorites.

The exercise itself was a little like plowing a Kansas wheat field. But you had to concentrate. Done right, the job meant hour after hour of relentless, brain-numbing eyeball concentration. If you blinked, you might miss a trophy.

During these sweeps, you were alone in your own world, in your own head. You moved through a deep, oppressive silence except for the wind and the vibrating hum and scrape of the Ski-Doo as it schussed over the hard ice. No birds sang. No trees rustled. Score would think about what was going on in her life and sing the latest rock-and-roll songs to herself, using just a smidgen of her consciousness to keep a proper distance from the hunters on either side. Maintaining focus was easier when there were lots of meteorites turning up. But some days, it seemed that the people on the other side of the grid had all the luck. It was like being in the wrong line at the bank. On days of really slim pickings, she mused about what she and her roommate would fix for dinner, wondered about events back in the real world, and sang something like maybe that Hall and Oates hit about broken ice melting in the sun.