She drove through swank suburbs, following the softscreen map in the car, and was surprised when she rounded a turn, and came upon JPL.
At first glance JPL could have been any reasonably modern corporate or college site, maybe a hospital: it was spread over two hundred acres, nestling in the eroded, green-clad shoulders of the San Gabriel Mountains, the blocky office buildings interspersed with Southern California palms. She caught glimpses of some kind of campus inside the security fences, fountains and trees.
But the roads here were called Mariner Road, and Surveyor Road, and Ranger Road. For the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had built and run spacecraft which had reached every planet in the Solar System, save only Pluto. And, right now, the scientists here were gathering information from the moons of Saturn.
She parked her car. Isaac Rosenberg was there to meet her at the visitors’ reception. ‘Jackie. Thanks for coming in.’
‘Isaac, it’s good to meet you again.’
He pushed his John Lennon spectacles a little further back up his nose. ‘Rosenberg. Everybody calls me Rosenberg.’
‘Rosenberg, then.’
He was somewhere in his mid-twenties, she figured, maybe a couple of years older than she was. He didn’t look as if he lived too well; his face was pale and badly shaved, and his prematurely thinning black hair, none too clean, was tied back in a pony tail.
But none of that mattered, compared to the look in his brown eyes.
He said, ‘Thanks for coming out. Listen, you want me to get you a coffee? A doughnut, maybe?’
‘No, thanks, Rosenberg. I want you to tell me about your results. At the party the other night, you were so –’
‘Out of it.’
‘Were you serious? Are the press reports true? How come the official spokesmen won’t answer questions on it?’
‘Come see the results for yourself.’
He led her through the reception area and across the campus, to a long, low building he called the SFOF, for Space Flight Operations Facility. He took her up to the second floor, to a big windowless loft of a room, painted grey, with grey carpeting. It was divided up into rows of cubicles, within which worked – Rosenberg said – the engineers and scientists who controlled Cassini’s systems. So this is a spacecraft control center, she thought. It was about as lively as a bank’s back office.
They crossed the engineering room, and then passed through a hall to a science area, and entered a new warren of cubicles, the science back room. Rosenberg took her to his own cubicle, which was cluttered up with papers and rolled-up softscreens and an old-fashioned hard-key calculator. There were reproductions of the covers of antique science fiction magazines taped to the cubicle walls, she saw: By Spaceship to Saturn, and Raiders of Saturn’s Rings, and Missing Men of Saturn.
He showed her a Packard Bell softscreen, stuck to one wall, which was cycling through displays of what turned out to be a thermal profile through Titan’s atmosphere, as sampled by the descending Huygens lander. Grabbing a mouse, he cleared down the screen and pulled up data from a fresh database.
She’d met him a few days before at a party at her old fraternity at Caltech, where he was getting steadily drunk on ice beer and talking too much, loud and fast and humourlessly, about his work here at JPL on the Cassini/Huygens mission. He’d attracted a rotating audience of student types, some intrigued, some argumentative; as the group cycled, Rosenberg would happily launch into his obsessive monologue again, as far as Jackie could tell pretty much from the beginning.
He was talking about biochemistry – the chemistry of life – on Saturn’s moon, Titan.
Jackie was intrigued. Here was a classic loser magnet, but with a story of such compelling intensity that it was attracting a crowd, if a transient one. And she got even more interested, when the sensational claims about life on Titan had started appearing in the press and the net.
She was in the middle of a new effort to revive her once-promising career in journalism, which had been pretty much dormant since her second kid was born. If she was going to progress, she knew, she was going to have to develop a nose for a story, her own story, something dramatic and compelling – but out of the way, far from the attention span of the big boys.
And maybe – she’d thought, listening to this skinny monomaniac mouthing off to a bunch of strangers about weird chemistry results from Titan, and with his eyes shining – maybe, she’d found it.
Before the end of that party she’d buttonholed Rosenberg and arranged to meet him here, at JPL. She’d figured it was a better than evens chance that he would have forgotten all about her, in which case she would have driven all this way out here to the arroyo for nothing. But when she’d arrived at the security gate, she found he’d left a media pass for her to collect.
Soon the softscreen was covered by chemical notation and complex molecular structure charts.
He said, ‘How much biochemistry do you know?’
Actually, she’d picked up a little in her graduate days. But she said, ‘Nothing.’
‘All right. I’m working in the group responsible for the GCMS results.’
‘GCMS?’
‘Gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer. In-situ measurements of the chemical composition of gases and aerosols in Titan’s atmosphere, and at the end of Huygens’s descent, a direct sample of the surface. The lead scientist is a guy at Goddard. On the lander, a slug sample was drawn in through filters and into an oven furnace, which –’
‘Enough. Tell me what you do.’
‘I’m working on high atomic number results. Complex molecules. Look – what do you know about conditions on the surface of Titan?’
‘Only what I’ve seen in the pop press the last few weeks.’
‘All right. Titan is an ice moon, with a thick layer of atmosphere. The only moon with a significant layer of air, anywhere. In a lot of ways, Titan right now is like primeval Earth – say, four and a half billion years ago. Its chemistry is mostly based around carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. And chemistry like that produces a lot of the key molecules of prebiotic chemistry.’
‘Prebiotic?’
‘The components of life. But there’s a crucial difference. Titan has no liquid water. It’s too cold for that. The importance of water on primitive Earth is that it was a solvent. It allowed the polymerization of volatile reactive organics and the hydrolysis of prebiotic oligomers into biomolecules … I’m sorry. Look, you need water as a solution medium, so that the components, the building blocks, can assemble themselves into proteins and nucleic acids, the main macromolecules of our form of life.’
Our form of life. That phrase made her shiver. ‘But maybe there are other solvents.’
‘Correct. Maybe there are other solvents. In particular, ammonia. And we knew before Huygens that there is ammonia on Titan. Now. Look here. Look what the Huygens GCMS found.’ He pointed to a diagram of a molecule shaped like a figure eight on its side, with some of its edges highlighted in blue for double covalent bonds.
‘What is it?’
