down.”
“I know about the disappointment,” he said icily. “I read Bradbury, and Clarke, and Heinlein. I can imagine how it was.”
“NASA learned its corporate lesson, slowly and painfully.” She thumped the desk with her closed fist to emphasize her words. “Look how carefully they handled the story of the organic materials they found in the Martian meteorite…”
“Careful, yeah. But so what? They still haven’t flown a Mars sample-return mission to confirm—”
“It’s not the point, Rosenberg,” she snapped. “You don’t promise what you don’t deliver. You don’t yap to the media about finding life on Titan.”
“All I talked about was the preliminary results, and what they might mean. You can hear the same stuff in the canteen here any day of the week.”
She tapped the clipping on her screen. “This isn’t the JPL canteen, Rosenberg.”
“Anyway, what does NASA have to do with it? JPL’s an arm of Caltech; it’s organizationally independent—”
“Don’t be smart, Rosenberg. Who the hell do you think you are? Maybe it’s escaped your notice, but you’re just one of a team here.”
The team lecture, he thought with dread. “I know.” Rosenberg pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “I know about the line, and the matrix management structure, and my office, division, section, group and subgroup, I know about the organization charts and documentation trees.” It was true. He did know all about that; he’d had to learn. An education in JPL’s peculiar politics was like a return to grade school biology, learning about kingdoms and phyla and classes.
“Then,” she snapped, “you know that you occupy one space in that organization, one little bitty square, and that’s where you should damn well stay. Leave the press to the PR people; they know how to handle it right… Look, Rosenberg, you have to come to some kind of accommodation with me. I’m telling you there’s no other way to run a major project like a deep space mission except with a tight, lean organization like ours. And it works. As long as we all work within it.”
“Come on, Marcia. We shouldn’t be talking about organizational forms, for God’s sake. At the very least we’ve got evidence of a new kind of biochemistry, something completely new, out on the surface of that moon. We should be talking about the data, the results. About going back, a sample-return mission—”
“Going back?” She laughed. “Don’t you follow the news, Rosenberg? The Space Shuttle just crashed. Nobody knows what the hell the future is for NASA. If it has one at all.”
“But we have to go back to Titan.”
“Why?”
He couldn’t see why she would even pose the question. “Because there’s so much more to learn.”
“Let me give you some advice, Rosenberg,” she said. “We aren’t going back to Titan. Not in my lifetime, or yours. No matter what Huygens has found. Just as we aren’t going back to Venus, or Mercury, or Neptune. We’ll be lucky to shoot off a few more probes to Mars. Get used to the fact. And the way to do that is to get a life. I understand you, Rosenberg. Better than you think I do. Probably better than you understand yourself. Titan is always going to be out there. What’s the rush? What you’re talking about is yourself. What you mean is that you want to discover it all, before you die. That’s what motivates you. You can’t bear the thought of the universe going on without you, its events unfolding without your invaluable brain still being around to process them. Right?”
This sudden descent into personal analysis startled him; he had no idea what to say.
She sat back. “Look. I know you’re a good worker; I know we need people like you, who can think out of the box. But I don’t need you shooting your mouth off to the press. It’s not three months since Columbia came down. We’re trying to preserve Cassini, the last of the great JPL probes; you must know we
“I know about the disappointment,” he said icily. “I read Bradbury, and Clarke, and Heinlein. I can imagine how it was.”
“NASA learned its corporate lesson, slowly and painfully.” She thumped the desk with her closed fist to emphasize her words. “Look how carefully they handled the story of the organic materials they found in the Martian meteorite…”
“Careful, yeah. But so what? They still haven’t flown a Mars sample-return mission to confirm—”
“It’s not the point, Rosenberg,” she snapped. “You don’t promise what you don’t deliver. You don’t yap to the media about finding life on Titan.”
“All I talked about was the preliminary results, and what they might mean. You can hear the same stuff in the canteen here any day of the week.”
She tapped the clipping on her screen. “This isn’t the JPL canteen, Rosenberg.”
“Anyway, what does NASA have to do with it? JPL’s an arm of Caltech; it’s organizationally independent—”
“Don’t be smart, Rosenberg. Who the hell do you think you are? Maybe it’s escaped your notice, but you’re just one of a team here.”
The team lecture, he thought with dread. “I know.” Rosenberg pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “I know about the line, and the matrix management structure, and my office, division, section, group and subgroup, I know about the organization charts and documentation trees.” It was true. He did know all about that; he’d had to learn. An education in JPL’s peculiar politics was like a return to grade school biology, learning about kingdoms and phyla and classes.
“Then,” she snapped, “you know that you occupy one space in that organization, one little bitty square, and that’s where you should damn well stay. Leave the press to the PR people; they know how to handle it right… Look, Rosenberg, you have to come to some kind of accommodation with me. I’m telling you there’s no other way to run a major project like a deep space mission except with a tight, lean organization like ours. And it works. As long as we all work within it.”
“Come on, Marcia. We shouldn’t be talking about organizational forms, for God’s sake. At the very least we’ve got evidence of a new kind of biochemistry, something completely new, out on the surface of that moon. We should be talking about the data, the results. About going back, a sample-return mission—”
“Going back?” She laughed. “Don’t you follow the news, Rosenberg? The Space Shuttle just crashed. Nobody knows what the hell the future is for NASA. If it has one at all.”
“But we have to go back to Titan.”
“Why?”
He couldn’t see why she would even pose the question. “Because there’s so much more to learn.”
“Let me give you some advice, Rosenberg,” she said. “We aren’t going back to Titan. Not in my lifetime, or yours. No matter what Huygens has found. Just as we aren’t going back to Venus, or Mercury, or Neptune. We’ll be lucky to shoot off a few more probes to Mars. Get used to the fact. And the way to do that is to get a life. I understand you, Rosenberg. Better than you think I do. Probably better than you understand yourself. Titan is always going to be out there. What’s the rush? What you’re talking about is yourself. What you mean is that you want to discover it all, before you die. That’s what motivates you. You can’t bear the thought of the universe going on without you, its events unfolding without your invaluable brain still being around to process them. Right?”
This sudden descent into personal analysis startled him; he had no idea what to say.
She sat back. “Look. I know you’re a good worker; I know we need people like you, who can think out of the box. But I don’t need you shooting your mouth off to the press. It’s not three months since Columbia came down. We’re trying to preserve Cassini, the last of the great JPL probes; you must know we
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