The Rock From Mars by Kathy Sawyer Page B

too much about the meteorite. It was standard practice for the person classifying a new sample to do the minimum necessary. This prevented him or anyone else in the curator’s lab from skimming off the cream of information on incoming specimens, thereby robbing all the hungry investigators out there of the prizes that had lured them to study such rocks in the first place—the unprecedented insights that led to published papers and enhanced reputations.
    Years later, despite his conviction that he had done his job properly, MacPherson could not help feeling a touch of chagrin when this unremarked event, this routine encounter with one little wafer among the many, became a footnote in a very public and ferocious feud.
    The meteorite curators in Houston had based their selection of Duck Mittlefehldt’s sample on this initial misidentification. At first, Mittlefehldt accepted the assessment written on the label. To be sure, he noted that the “asteroid” sample included some weird signs and portents, considering its humble parentage. (There were a lot of carbonates, for instance, which were previously unknown in this ordinary family of meteorite.) But Mittlefehldt, like the few others who had studied pieces of it at this point, at first assumed that these were the result of weathering during the rock’s long sojourn in Antarctic ice. Otherwise, his initial bulk analysis of the chip’s chemical composition showed no significant conflict with a relatively ordinary origin on Vesta.
    Finding himself with traces of the Allan Hills rock left over after these studies, Mittlefehldt glued the remnant grains—only a few times larger than the period at the end of this sentence (about a square millimeter)—to a glass slide and polished them flat. In the spring of 1990, he put the grains under an electron microprobe, which fired a narrow stream of electrons at them. (Their atoms would give off X-rays with an energy signature unique to whatever element was in the target item, and with an intensity that indicated the amount of that element.)
    “This can’t be right,” he thought. The results indicated properties and interactions that seemed impossible on the parent asteroid.
    Growing up in Jamestown, New York, Mittlefehldt had discovered as early as third grade that he had a natural affinity for science, even though there was no familial goad in that direction. His mother worked for an insurance company, and his dad was employed by the local bank. But he somehow always knew more about scientific subjects—anything at all to do with science—than the other kids.
    But now his confidence in his own instincts wavered. He was still assuming that the curator back in Washington had been correct, and therefore his analysis must be in error even though he had carried it out with his usual rigor.
    Mittlefehldt kept an open mind. He knew this was often the way you learned new things: you focused in on these little oddities, things that didn’t add up—the geological odd ducks—and you chased them down. They were usually trying to tell you something important. But it took a focused effort to climb out of the old sucking sump of conventional thinking.
    Mittlefehldt dropped the matter and moved on to other things. That was the way he liked to work: keep several projects going at once, put the riddles aside, and let them simmer and churn in his subconscious for a while. They would get sorted out in their own good time.
    In a way, that was how he had gotten his nickname—by putting something off. As an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Fredonia, he’d waited until the last possible moment to do a laboratory assignment due the next morning. A substitute professor had assigned a huge batch of rock samples he’d (wrongly) assumed the students could analyze easily in four hours. Mittlefehldt and several others started after supper that night. Four hours passed, and they were still there. Things started to get crazy toward the