Word: dusts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...though all the dust devils that ever ghosted across the desert before the days of irrigation had returned to haunt California's Imperial Valley. Over fields of flax reddened by a dawning sun, thousands upon thousands of mourning doves wheeled and circled, their whistling wings deepening the sense of speed. Below, Cattleman Virgil Torrance tightened his grip on a 12-gauge single-barreled shotgun. The doves' cries were tender and doleful: "Whee-eet, whee-eet, whee-eet." Torrance smiled: "When I hear that, it's all I can do to pull the trigger." And he proceeded...
...What if we should discover that the last are first and the first last, that the voice of the Good Shepherd should find a clearer echo over there than among us?" The renewal of Roman Catholicism, Earth concludes, summons Protestantism to seek its own renewal, "to sweep away the dust before the door of our own church with a careful but nevertheless mighty broom...
When the first Mariner capsule soft-lands on Mars, the multivator will be tossed out at the end of an electronic umbilical cord. After settling its tripod feet firmly on the Martian surface, a miniature vacuum cleaner will suck dust into a thin-lipped opening in the multivator's base. As the dust filters through the multivator's 15 tiny chambers, it will stick to their adhesive-coated walls. Then the chambers will be automatically sealed and filled with water from a small external tank...
...phosphatase is present in the Martian dust, it will eat away the inhibiting phosphate, and the fluid in the multivator's chambers will begin to glow. That glimmer will then be picked up by a photomultiplier tube, converted into a radio signal in the Mariner capsule, and relayed back to earth...
Phosphatase itself is not alive, but Lederberg reasons that if the enzyme shows up in the dust of Mars, its presence must mean that microscopic living organisms exist-or have recently existed-on the distant planet just as they do on earth. The actual identification of these creatures will have to wait for larger, more elaborate spacecraft. But in the meantime, to ensure that Mars is not contaminated by earthly microbes carried there aboard the multivator, Lederberg is working on a technique for sterilizing his life detector...