The political strategist was confused. "But..."
"That'll be all. The decision has been made," the First Lady scolded. "Let's not waste any more time on this."
The President assumed his command mode. "Right. The decision has been made. The examining board will judge. People, we all have a lot of work to do. I suggest we get moving."
CHAPTER 11
OPHIR PLANUM
JAN. 28, 2012 06:45 MLT
REBECCA TOSSED IN her bunk, immersed in her worst nightmare.
Young, frail, inexperienced, she stood in that old lecture hall at Cornell, nervously rattling out her Ph.D. presentation. It had been going well enough, until Professor Waldron raised his hand.
She could see him now, with that supercilious smirk on his face, asking her if she had read the JGR preprint by Osterman and Whitten. She hadn't. "If you had, then you would know that your assumed equality 3.1 is untrue. And without that equation, it appears evident that your entire thesis has no foundation."
She turned to the blackboard and watched as the terms in equation 3.1 seemed to lose their solidity and turn into meaningless spaghetti. Panicked, she looked to Carl Schaeffer for support, but he just sat there impassively with a look that said, "You're on your own, kid."
My thesis has no foundation. Five years of work down the drain...
It had been the worst moment of her life. She remembered the sadistic grin on Waldron's face as another old fart patted him on the back, the knowing smiles and snickers of the jealous post-docs in the rows behind them. Then a voice spoke inside her, I can't let them do this to me. I won't let them do this to me.
She started to walk back and forth in front of the blackboard, ignoring the vultures, forcing herself to focus. Equation 3.1 had made so much sense when she'd first written it into her thesis outline years ago. It had still seemed solid that morning when she'd reviewed her presentation for the final time. How could it suddenly be so weak?
Maybe it wasn't. She picked up the chalk and started to scribble. Now let's see—regroup terms, integrate both sides by parts, apply the chain rule... these terms cancel... regroup again, apply Leibniz's rule... Fourier transform. Maybe I'm getting somewhere—No, I'm stuck. Hold on, the right-hand side can be represented as a Maclaurin series... these terms can be integrated after a Riemann transformation in the complex plane. This other series reduces to a superposition of hyperbolic trigonometric functions, which can be shown through a set of standard identities to equal these other terms, and the rest of it is just a restatement of conservation of momentum and energy. Proof!
She drew a box around her final result and turned to face the crowd. She stared at Waldron like he was her dinner while she tossed the chalk carelessly over her shoulder. Then some of her fellow grad students in the back of the room started to clap their hands, and an instant later applause resounded throughout the hall. As Carl stepped up to shake her hand, she noticed out of the corner of her eye a red-faced Professor Waldron slipping out the door.
In her bunk on Mars, the sleeping scientist smiled. There was a knock on the door and she awoke.
"Rebecca?" Townsend's voice could be heard through the wall. "The DSN is waiting to receive your rebuttal to the examining board now."
She sat up in her cot, taking only a few seconds to smooth her hair. It was a foolish, nonsensical argument, panic-driven, with no basis in science...but Rebecca knew that the fate of the entire crew rested on how convincing she could be now.
I beat Waldron, I can beat Kowalski. "Okay, I'm ready." She stepped outside of her cabin, entered the galley, and seated herself in front of the video screen.
McGee gave her a grin and an encouraging thumbs up. "Go get 'em, tiger."
Rebecca gave him a wink. "I'll do my best. Let's have that disk of their summation one more time."
McGee slipped the disk into the player, and the examining board appeared on the screen: Drs. Wong and Kowalski, Administrator Ryan, and eight other doctors and scientists. Kowalski's image began to speak.
"In summation, Dr. Sherman, the board commends you on your flawless and thorough laboratory technique. The set of tests you performed was quite comprehensive, I would hasten to add almost astonishing, involving as it did cultures of various organ tissues of literally hundreds of species of animals and plants, under both normal and a host of abnormal physical and chemical conditions. All of your infection findings were negative, and no member of the board disputes them.
"Nevertheless, it is my feeling that you have not adequately addressed the issue of delayed incubation. As we know full well from terrestrial diseases such as AIDS, an incubation period of as long as a decade is sometimes required before symptoms of infection appear. Until and unless your cultures are allowed to incubate for at least such a period, and still test negative, you have not demonstrated complete epidemiological safety. While the probability of such a danger is admittedly remote, the consequences of making this mistake would be so grave that, under such circumstances, I cannot recommend that we permit the return of the crew."
"That fork-tongued faker!" Luke grumbled. "He knows you can never perform such a survey."
"Bastard." Gwen made as if to spit at the video screen.
Drawing a deep breath, Rebecca motioned for silence and signaled McGee to turn on the Beagle's transmission camera, which was mounted on top of the TV screen. Looking intently at the camera and speaking in a deliberate, authoritative manner, she began the most important presentation of her career. This one is for keeps, Becky.
"This is Rebecca Sherman, chief scientist and ship's doctor for the U.S.S. Beagle, presently located on the surface of Mars. Dr. Kowalski has alluded to a hypothetical, although in his words ‘remote,' possibility that Martian autotrophic organisms with completely incompatible cellular chemistry could present a delayed incubation threat to some species of terrestrial life. He has recommended that a multiple tissue culture study be conducted for an indefinite duration to prove that such a threat does not exist. Obviously, his suggestion is not useful or feasible, as it is clear that such an experimental program could never be carried out, nor, if it were attempted even to his specifications, could it ever provide convincing proof to any mind that thought it necessary in the first place. Indeed, an empirical proof of the nonpathogenic nature of the Martian microorganisms does not and can never exist."
"What's she saying?" Gwen whispered to the others in alarm.
Luke flushed with anger. "She's saying that she'll sign our death warrant."
"Hold on, people," Townsend urged. "I'm sure Dr. Sherman knows what she's doing." Gwen looked at Townsend. He sure didn't sound sure.
Unperturbed, Rebecca continued her lecture. "However, the issue in science is never one of absolute empirical proof. No one can ever know anything on the basis of empirical proof. On the basis of the type of empirical proof Dr. Kowalski requests here, no one can ‘know' that the sun will rise tomorrow. Actual predictive knowledge, as opposed to mere customary belief, requires a theoretical framework. We ‘know' that the sun will rise tomorrow because we know celestial mechanics. The Earth rotates, and it will continue to rotate, because the laws of physics mandate that angular momentum be conserved. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow not because we have records that it rose many times in the past, but because we know why it must."
McGee nodded approvingly. "I think I see where she's going."