The Fifth Risk(31)

Inside her space suit, with the pressure gone from the Challenger’s airlock, she felt no change at all, and that struck her here as strange, just as it had on Earth. “I always thought, Isn’t this room supposed to look different when it has no air in it? But there’s no difference!” She moved along a handrail to open the hatch. She poked her head out into space. Then she reached out and tethered herself to the hook on the outside of the capsule, before untethering herself from the hook inside the airlock. “Mountaineering 101.” With her body traveling at 17,500 miles per hour she set out, hand over hand, to demonstrate that it was indeed possible to refuel a satellite in orbit. With that, she became the first American woman to walk in space.

That first step would shadow her for the rest of her life. President Reagan would invite her to a dinner at the White House and sit her beside him. Corporations would offer her high-paying jobs. Civic organizations across the country would offer her awards and ask her to come and tell her story. Seemingly all of Long Island would soon be in touch, because at some point in space she had looked down—how could she not—and shouted, “Hey, there’s Long Island!” She had a choice of how to play her experience. “You can dine out on this stuff forever,” she said, “but that was feeling shallow to me. I wanted to make the experience matter.”

The same internal process that had led her to decline the role of “girl” made it possible for her to pass on the role of “lady astronaut.” She flew twice more into space, orbited Earth a few hundred more times, and then, in the early 1990s, went looking for something else to do. She now had a measure of celebrity and needed to make a decision about how best to use it. She wanted another mission that felt as important as the one she’d just completed. She wanted to do earth science, and she wanted the stakes of the science to be high: that wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was where she finally found her mission: the United States Department of Commerce.



Around the same time, DJ Patil also wandered into the Commerce Department, though in truth he didn’t know it. Physically, he was sitting at a desk on the campus of the University of Maryland, pursuing his PhD in mathematics. He’d found a security hole in the U.S. government’s computers, and he reached through it to grab what he needed. What he needed was a very specific pile of data. That it, like much of the rest of the government’s data, resided in the Department of Commerce he hadn’t bothered to figure out.

DJ had come to Maryland from California to study with James Yorke, a professor who had coined the term “chaos theory.” The idea was simple: some small, barely noticed event can cascade into huge consequences down the road. (The day your parents met, for instance: what if that hadn’t happened?) A lot of the drama in his life DJ traced back to a small, little-noticed event in his early childhood: a tendency to reverse the order of numbers. When you see “16” as “61,” you have problems in school. Struggling with his assigned tasks, he diverted himself with unassigned ones. Watching spy movies, he became intrigued withpicking locks.He’d pick his way into other kids’ lockers, move the stuff around inside, then lock them back up—just to freak them out. Then he learned how to pick people’s pockets for fun. He’d take the car keys off some unsuspecting grown-up, move his car, then return the keys to the guy’s jacket pocket. In the eighth grade he hacked the English teacher’s computer and changed the grades—and never got caught. In ninth grade, a prank gone wrong set an entire hillside in a well-to-do Silicon Valley neighborhood on fire. DJ ended up listening to a cop read him his rights. The landowner agreed not to prosecute if DJ agreed to spend the next few months at hard labor, restoring the hillside. While he was doing that he got himself suspended from his English class for exploding a stink bomb, and a few months after that from math class for . . . at that point it hardly mattered. By the time he graduated from high school—after a merciful school administrator changed an F on his transcript to a C—he wasn’t the only one who might look at “DJ” and see “JD.”

At De Anza Community College he stumbled into a calculus class and liked it. More than liked it. He realized he had a gift for it. The calculus class was another small life event that wound up having big effects. By the time he arrived in Maryland to pursue his PhD, he was still interested in math, but not so much as he was in what might be done with it, to study a lot of otherwise inexplicable things that happened in life and nature. “I was always in love with the patterns in nature,” he said, “and what I needed were the tools to understand them. And for me, math was the most sensible.”

All sorts of natural phenomena might be modeled and understood with chaos theory. The collapse of the sardine population off the California coast, for example. Or the bizarre long landslides that occurred in the Mojave Desert, where the rocks ended up inexplicably far from where they’d started, given the slope of their journey. “These long run-out landslides are crazy. The question is: how did the rocks end up so far away?” In theory, the new math might explain it. In practice, there wasn’t enough data on the movement of the rocks, or the sardine holocaust, for him or anyone else to study them effectively. The same went for traffic jams, the boom-bust cycles in the wolf and deer populations in the American West, and countless other big events triggered by surprisingly small ones.

Then he happened upon the weather. He’d always been interested in it, but never thought of it as something he might study until he discovered that the U.S. government was sitting on a huge trove of weather data. It resided inside something called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which was in turn inside the Department of Commerce—but he didn’t have any idea of that yet. He was just roaming around servers within the U.S. government, the sole supplier of the data he needed if he was going to get his PhD. “The only place I could get the data was the weather.”