Richard Zare doesn’t want to talk about life on Mars. It’s not that the prospect of life on other planets isn’t fascinating. It’s just that everything else is, too. The Stanford chemistry professor sits behind the enormous conference table that extends from his desk, an acre of oak sown here and there with lecture notes, correspondence, manuscripts, congressional testimony, and results of experiments in progress. A lot of it is Mars-related--which is great, what’s not to like?--but Zare was busy and happy enough before there were people asking for his autograph, farmers calling him to ask if the red rocks they’d plowed up were Martian, and everyone in the media asking for just a minute with the man who told Jim Lehrer we may all be Martians: Ted Koppel, Time, the documentary director who demanded he be filmed while bathed in an eerie red glow (Zare refused), and now you, waiting by the door while he checks his E-mail.
When he’s finished he hops out from behind the desk and greets you like an old friend. Zare has a class to teach in a few minutes, so he is dressed up in a jacket and tie, which you can’t help noticing because it displays the periodic table of the elements running vertically down toward a silver belt buckle, a big square western number. An artless smile lights up his broad face, as if he is half-expecting something enjoyable to happen, if not this moment, then maybe the next. You remember this luminous beam of a face from the now-famous press conference at NASA headquarters when the discovery was announced, one face among several at the podium because coaxing evidence for ancient life out of a Martian meteorite is the work of many very bright minds. But only one face up there was still smiling through the jet lag and the glare of the television lights, the big elfish one with the thick square-rimmed glasses and salt-and-pepper goatee. Mars, of course, is what you have come here to ask about, but before you can get your notebook clear of your pocket, Zare is asking you a question, catching you off guard.
What do you think of this? he asks, pointing to a large and very agitated object on the coffee table. Something retro-existential, a human figure composed of ball bearings, hex nuts, and threaded pipe, a face like a metal pizza. It is holding two candlesticks aloft in case anybody wants to have a quiet romantic dinner. The first response that comes to mind is Yard sale? and while you are rummaging for a more tactful reply, Zare himself admits that the sculpture is here in his office because his wife refused to have it in the house.
I think it’s ugly and powerful. She just thinks it’s ugly. He laughs. Then he tells you how he came across the figure recently in Berlin, in an abandoned department store that was burned out in World War II and now held in hostile occupation against the police by a coalition of drug dealers, prostitutes, and artists. It is a good story, and the voice telling it is high and impetuous, leaping from one syllable to the next like somebody with his pant cuffs rolled up jumping rock to rock through a stream. By the end you are appreciating the sculpture, but Zare has barely enough time to make it to class. He heads for the lecture hall at a trot, not like a professor who is late, but like a boy hurrying toward the swimming hole on a clear summer morning.
There’s nothing better than teaching freshman chemistry, he says on the way. It’s the researcher’s secret weapon. These kids really make you think.
