Then I saw on a tree trunk ahead of me one of the rectangular gray paint spots I had seen on a previous rainy dawn patrol. Hey! I said, thinking I had confirmation. But then I noticed that there were more gray spots on the tree trunks around the first one, and in fact there were gray spots on every tree trunk I could see at that moment, in every direction. I realized that the rainy trail I had found on the other side of the crater must have been only a figment of my imagination, seeing something in the landscape that hadn’t been there.
Only it had been there, I swear. There is something out there. This is why I don’t think we can so easily dismiss some sort of teleology in history. The landscape itself seems to call forth the trail. It imposes on us the best way forward. And it could be that the human landscape, or even the continuum in which time unfolds, has invisible ramps and battlements that shape our course. Of course we still have choices, but there is a certain terrain to be crossed. So I suspect that seeing trails that are not there is actually an everyday activity of the human mind. When the going is hard people come together. And the trails appear out of nowhere.
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.
Chapter 7
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.”
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.