Free The Rock From Mars by Kathy Sawyer

your edge, you’ll lose your expertise, you’ll lose your knowledge.” McKay’s overriding message was “Stop diddling with all this hand-wringing stuff and get back to good, hard, honest work doing science.”
    Mary Fae, with a Ph.D. in English, worked as a technical writer and editor at the space center, and was known to be an aggressive (some said “difficult”) advocate of her point of view. Since 1980, McKay’s brother Gordon, also blessed with the geology gene, had worked in the same building. Gordon was nine years younger than David, and some of their coworkers perceived at least the ordinary level of sibling rivalry there.
    David and Mary Fae had moved the family and their cats into a three-story modern glass-and-cedar sanctuary hidden away in a cul-de-sac. They’d bought three acres of woodland, dense with oak and southern pine trees, which backed up to Clear Creek, a tributary of Galveston Bay. They deliberately left the lot wild. It had been affordable on their government salaries because it was part of a hundred-year floodplain. Their architect, a friend, told them it was the most modest home he had ever worked on. He designed it to withstand the one flood they thought they might get during an anticipated thirty-year tenure in the house. They relegated the ground floor to serve as a kind of basement, with a shop and laundry room.
    In July 1979, two months after they moved in, they played host to a five-hundred-year storm. A record rain sent eight feet of water surging through the property. That same summer, they had a second flood that crested at four feet. Having learned their lesson, they removed the carpeting from the wood stairs and converted them to tile-covered steel. They made a few other adjustments and settled in, with the expectation that every so often tons of water would course through their quotidian underpinnings.
    Once, they found a family of armadillos living under the front porch. They caught glimpses of opossums and other creatures in their woods. And one time, a large pileated woodpecker attacked the cedar house, pecking through a wall and wreaking considerable damage.
    Their second floor, at a safe altitude, held the living and dining rooms, with a soaring cathedral ceiling over a low fireplace, and a gourmet kitchen where they liked to entertain. They covered the floors with muted Oriental rugs. Walls of glass on two levels made the thickets of trees part of the decor. A corner of one other house, barely visible at some distance through the foliage, was the only sign of neighbors. A Houston magazine did an article on the place.
    The house abounded with evidence of the McKays’ ongoing romance with Japan. On the walls of the staircases hung brilliant Japanese wedding kimonos; a shelf next to the kitchen held trompe l’oeil plates of pasta and other artificial foods manufactured in Japan. On the flood-prone ground level, they had installed a Japanese-style hot tub. And central to the main level was a tatami room (named after the straw matting that covered the floor), a clever conception the McKays had learned to appreciate. On a raised platform that could be closed off by sliding wooden doors (
fusuma
), the room held several low tables and stacks of floor cushions and backrests. According to the need, it could be a family TV room where the kids could sprawl or it could provide relaxed dining for six to eight guests. Many an evening, the house in the woods bustled with the McKays’ guests, chatting and sipping margaritas or beer.
    Johnson Space Center, like any closed society, had its share of jungle rivalries and cliques. Civil servants, for instance, were in a loftier caste than contract employees, and the former did not invite the latter to their Christmas parties, and vice versa. Newcomers considered the Apollo-era crowd quite the old-boy clique.
    At the same time, the atmosphere was one of intellectual curiosity and collegiality. On Fridays, a group of planetary scientists from