Free The Rock From Mars by Kathy Sawyer Page B

of doing research so far out of mainstream geology. In the perpetual battles for funding, more alluring celestial bodies and rival NASA groups had wrested away much of the money and attention.
    In short, McKay felt he had been on the same dusty path too long. As he would remark one day, “I’ve studied agglutinates until I’m sick of them.”
    McKay was expanding into new territory: He had taken up meteorites and, well, yes, more dust. But it was a different kind of dust
—cosmic
dust, the dust that rains through space. He had been casting about for something unprecedented, something fresh to restoke his cooling fires.
    Very soon, a couple of the guys down the hall would come to him with just the thing.

CHAPTER THREE
    ODD DUCKS
    “S HERGOTTY , N AKHLA , AND Chassigny. Shergotty, Nakhla, and Chassigny.” The names rang in the brain like some incantation from the netherworld. For David “Duck” Mittlefehldt, the words provided the essential key that would loft Robbie Score’s rock out of obscurity and expose its special gifts.
    The year was 1993, and another muggy Houston summer was yielding to fall. Building 31 was so quiet you could almost hear the roaches ticking along behind the walls. Just about everybody wore crepe-soled shoes or sneakers, so there was no echo of footfall; only the white noise of humming machinery. People here often worked behind doors with combination locks and multiple warning signs: DANGER : HIGH VOLTAGE and DANGER : POISON GAS . Exposed wire bundles were routed high around the walls, and in some places dust bunnies collected in the corners behind space-age machinery on well-worn linoleum floors.
    In one of these quiet labs, Mittlefehldt, a wiry guy with a beard, a receding hairline, and a resemblance to the actor Michael Keaton, sat and stared at his problem. Mittlefehldt was in the middle of one of those pivotal moments when a human mind, revved on a combination of its own accumulated knowledge, frustration, learned skills, instinct, competitive drive, anxiety, and imagination, finally uncoiled for a leap of insight that would send ripples through the world.
    Or maybe, as he would say with a shrug, if he hadn’t thought of it, somebody else would have, and besides, it had taken him long enough.
    Either way, Mittlefehldt’s train of logic would lead to the unmasking of the mother of all planetary rocks. The leap would change the lives of David McKay and several other people working, unawares, in this building and in other places thousands of miles away. It would trigger no end of public fuss. And, as so often happens in these matters, this wasn’t at all what Mittlefehldt had set out to do—which could help explain why it had taken him so long.
    He had acquired the nickname Duck in college, and it had stuck. Scattered around his small office in Building 31, Mittlefehldt kept a collection of duck magnets, plastic ducks, duck pictures, and duck postcards, including a depiction of fat, feathery duck bottoms sticking out of water. There was a stained-glass wall hanging with a couple of ducks taking wing. Friends noted with amusement that he would refer in a published geology paper to “duck-shaped” features.
    Flanked by his feathered support group, Mittlefehldt pondered the infernal microscope images of tiny grains from a meteorite. They had vexed him off and on for some years now, and here he was again. They were odd; they didn’t fit in. They had threatened to mess up his major project. He was a stuck duck.
    A geochemist, Mittlefehldt had gravitated to meteorite studies on a whim back in 1973, as a graduate student at UCLA. It was at about that time that he became friends with a younger geology student named Robbie Score. Now both of them were in Houston and she was on the staff of the Antarctic meteorite lab that supplied his rock samples. They both worked here in the cloistered preserves of Building 31, staring at minuscule, pedestrian crumbs of what seemed the humblest matter. But