Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  Gideon had begun to wonder if Glinn really had changed. He had never seen the man quite so driven, in his own quietly intense way. The meeting with Lloyd in the gigantic, one-man mental hospital had evidently shaken him badly.

  The man serving them all coffee silently retreated, shutting the door behind him. The room was dim, the lights low. Glinn, seated at the head of the table, his hands clasped in front of him, allowed the silence to gather before speaking. He turned his two gray eyes on Gideon.

  “Well, what did you think of our visit to Palmer Lloyd?”

  “He freaked me out,” said Gideon.

  “Do you know now why I wanted you to meet him?”

  “As you said. To seek his approval, get his blessing. After all, that thing down there cost him a lot of money—not to mention his sanity.”

  “That’s part of it. I also wanted to—as you put it—freak you out. To impress on you the gravity of our undertaking. You need to walk into this with your eyes open: because without you, we cannot succeed.”

  “You really caused the deaths of a hundred and eight people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wasn’t there an investigation? No charges were filed?”

  “There were certain, ah, unusual circumstances touching on the relationship between Chile and the United States that encouraged both state departments to make sure the investigation was not overly thorough.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Glinn turned to Garza. “Manuel, will you please give Gideon the necessary background?”

  Garza nodded, taking a large folder from his briefcase and laying it on the table. “You already know some of this. I’m going to start from the beginning anyway. If you have any questions, feel free to interrupt. Six years ago, EES was approached by Palmer Lloyd for a peculiar assignment.”

  “The same Palmer Lloyd I just saw in Dearborne Park.”

  “Yes. The billionaire was planning to build a natural history museum in the Hudson River Valley. He was collecting the rarest, finest, and biggest of everything—money was no object. He had already snagged the biggest diamond, the largest T. rex, a real Egyptian pyramid. Then he got a report that the largest meteorite in the world had been found. It lay on Isla Desolación, an uninhabited island in the Cape Horn Islands at the very tip of South America. The islands belong to Chile. Lloyd knew that Chile would never allow the meteorite to leave. He therefore hired EES, and a meteorite hunter named Sam McFarlane, to steal it.”

  “Excuse me,” said Glinn, “steal isn’t quite the right word. We did nothing illegal. We leased mineral rights to Isla Desolación, which allowed us to remove iron in any form.”

  “Steal may not be the most apt description,” said Garza, “but it was a deception.”

  At this rebuke, Glinn fell silent. Garza continued. “The meteorite was extremely heavy—twenty-five thousand tons. It was a deep-red color, very dense, and it had other, ah, peculiar properties. So under the cover of this iron-ore-mining operation, we outfitted a ship, the Rolvaag; sailed to the island; excavated the rock; and loaded it on board. Suffice to say, this was a challenging engineering project. But we succeeded—quite brilliantly, in fact. And then we were caught. A rogue Chilean destroyer captain figured out what we were up to. He commanded the Almirante Ramirez, the ship Lloyd mentioned. Instead of informing his superiors, he decided to play the hero and chased us southward to the Ice Limit.”

  “Ice Limit. You’ve used that term before. What is it, exactly?”

  “It’s the frontier where the southern oceans meet the Antarctic pack ice. We played hide-and-seek among the bergs. The Rolvaag was shot up in the confrontation, but ultimately we managed to sink the destroyer.”

  “You sank a destroyer? How?”

  “It’s a complicated story, best left to your briefing book. In any case, the Rolvaag, carrying the twenty-five-thousand-ton meteorite in its hold, had been badly damaged by the destroyer. The weather worsened. A point came where we had a choice: either jettison the rock—or sink.”

  “How do you jettison a twenty-five-thousand-ton rock?”

  “We’d installed a dead man’s switch for that purpose, just in case. Throw the switch, and the meteorite would be dropped through a door in the hull.”

  “Wouldn’t that founder the ship?”

  “No. A large amount of water would come in before the door could slide shut, but the ship was fitted with pumps and self-sealing bulkheads that would have handled it. The crew and captain wanted to dump the rock…” Garza seemed to hesitate, glancing at Glinn.

  “Tell the full story, Manuel. Spare nothing.”

  “In the end, everyone wanted to dump the rock. Even Lloyd came around. But Eli alone had the code to the dead man’s switch. He insisted the ship could ride it out. They begged, pleaded, threatened—and he refused. But Eli was wrong. The Rolvaag sank.”

  Garza glanced at Glinn again.

  “Let me tell the rest,” said Glinn quietly. “Yes, I refused to pull the switch. I was wrong. The captain ordered an evacuation. Some got off, but many did not. The captain…” He hesitated, temporarily losing his voice. “The captain, a woman of great courage, went down with the ship. Many others died in the lifeboats or froze to death on a nearby ice island before help arrived.”

  “And Lloyd? What happened to him?”

  “He was evacuated in the first lifeboat—against his will, I might add.”

  “How did you survive?”

  “I was in the hold, trying to secure the meteorite. But it finally broke out of its cradle and split the ship in half. There was an explosion. It seemed as if the meteorite, when it came into contact with salt water, reacted in an unusual way, generating a shock wave. I was thrown clear of the ship. I remember coming to on a raft of floating debris. I was badly injured. They found me a day later, close to death.”

  Glinn lapsed into silence, toying with his cup of coffee.

  “So now the thing’s just lying on the seabed. Why all the worry, the talk of danger? And…of aliens?”

  Glinn pushed the coffee cup away. “It was McFarlane, the meteorite hunter, who figured out what it really was.”

  This was followed by a long silence.

  “There’s a respected theory in astronomy called Panspermia,” Glinn finally continued. “It holds that life may have spread through the galaxy in bacteria or spores carried on meteorites or in clouds of dust. But that theory assumed microscopic life. Everyone missed the obvious idea that life might be spread by seeds. A gigantic seed would better survive the cold and intense radiation of outer space by its sheer size and resistance. It’s the same reason why coconuts are so large: to survive long ocean voyages. The galaxy has many water-covered planets and moons in which such a seed might fall and then sprout.”

  “You’re saying this meteorite was actually just such a seed? And when the Rolvaag sank, it went to the bottom and was…planted?”

  “Yes. Two miles beneath the surface. And then it sprouted.”

  Gideon shook his head. “Incredible. If true.”

  “Oh, it’s true. It sank roots and grew upward like a giant tree—rapidly. Seismic stations around the world noted a number of shallow quakes on the seafloor at the site. Several small tsunamis raked the coasts of South Georgia and the Falkland Islands. But it was all happening two miles deep, and the seismic signature of the quakes looked like the product of undersea volcanic eruptions. So did the mini tsunamis. Since it was in an area far outside of any shipping lanes and posed no risk to anyone, the ‘undersea volcano’ was generally disregarded. Even volcanologists ignored it, as it was simply too deep and too dangerous to study. And then it went quiescent. All of which explains why nobody figured out what was really going on—except me, of course. And Sam McFarlane. And Palmer Lloyd.” He shifted in his chair. “But over the past five years, we’ve developed a plan to deal with this problem. Manuel will summarize it for you.”

  Garza looked at Gideon. “We’re going to kill it.”

 
; “But you said it had gone quiescent. Why go to the trouble and the expense—not to mention the danger?”

  “Because it’s alien. It’s huge. It’s dangerous. Just because it’s quiescent doesn’t mean it will remain so—in fact, our models predict exactly the opposite. Think about it for a moment. What will happen if it blooms, or produces more seeds? What if these plants spread to cover the bottom of the oceans? What if they can also grow on land? No matter which way you look at it, this thing’s a threat. It could destroy the earth.”

  “So how are you going to kill it?”

  “We have in our possession a plutonium core of about thirty kilograms, a neutron trigger device, fast and slow shaped HE, high-speed transistors—everything needed to assemble a nuke.”

  “Where in hell did you get that stuff?”

  “Everything’s for sale in certain former satellite states these days.”

  Gideon shook his head. “Jesus.”

  “We also have a nuclear weapons expert on staff.”

  “Who?”

  “You, of course.”

  Gideon stared.

  “That’s right,” said Glinn quietly. “Now you know the real reason I hired you in the first place. Because we always knew this day was coming.”

  4

  THE ROOM FELL silent. Gideon slowly rose from his chair, making a successful effort to hide his anger. “So you hired me to oversee the building of a nuke,” he said calmly.

  “Yes.”

  “In other words, four months ago, back when Garza first walked up to my fishing spot on Chihuahueños Creek and offered me a hundred thousand dollars for a week’s work, stealing the plans for some new kind of weapon off a defecting Chinese scientist—it was really this moment, this job, that you had in mind.”

  Glinn nodded.

  “And you want to use the nuke to kill a gigantic alien plant that is supposedly growing on the bottom of the ocean.”

  “In a nutshell.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Gideon,” said Glinn, “we’ve been through this tiresome dance several times before: your heated refusals, your storming out, and then your eventual return once you’ve thought it through. Can we please skip all that?”

  Gideon swallowed, stung by the comment. “Let me try to explain to you why this is a crazy idea.”

  “Please.”

  “First, you can’t do this on your own. You need to take this problem to the UN and get the whole world behind the effort to kill this thing.”

  Glinn shook his head sadly. “Sometimes you amaze me, Gideon. You seem so smart—and then you say something so remarkably stupid. Did you just suggest that we ask the United Nations to solve this problem?”

  Gideon paused. He had to admit, on reflection, that it didn’t sound like a very intelligent idea. “Okay, maybe not the UN, but at least take it to the US government. Let them deal with it.”

  “You mean, let our most excellent Congress deal with this situation in the same way it has handled our other pressing national problems, such as global warming, terrorism, education, and our crumbling infrastructure?”

  Gideon fished around for a snappy rejoinder to this but could not find one.

  “This is no time for waffling,” said Glinn. “We’re the only ones who can do this. It’s got to be done now, while the life-form is quiescent. I hope you’ll help us.”

  “If not?”

  “Then sooner or later, the world as we know it will end. Because without you, we will fail. And you’ll reproach yourself for the rest of your life.”

  “The rest of my short life, you mean. Thanks to what’s growing in my own brain, I’ve got maybe eight, nine months left to live. You and I both know that.”

  “We don’t know that anymore.”

  Gideon looked at Glinn. His face looked years younger; as he spoke he gestured with both hands, and his dead eye had healed up and was now clear and deep. His wheelchair was nowhere to be seen. On their last mission together, he had partaken of the restorative, health-giving lotus—just as Gideon himself had. It had worked for Glinn; but not, apparently, for Gideon.

  “You really believe you’ll fail without me?” Gideon asked.

  “I never say anything I don’t believe.”

  “I’ll need to be convinced this thing is as dangerous as you say before I help you with anything nuclear.”

  “You’ll be convinced.”

  Gideon hesitated. “And you have to make me a co-director of the project.”

  “That’s quite absurd,” said Glinn.

  “Why? You said we work well as a team. But we’ve never worked as a team. It’s always been you telling me what to do, me doing it my own way, you protesting, and then, in the end, I turn out to be right and you’re wrong.”

  “That is an oversimplification,” Glinn said.

  “I don’t want you second-guessing and overruling me. Especially if we’re dealing with something as dangerous as nuclear weapons—and this seed of yours.”

  “I don’t like governing by committee,” Glinn said. “At the least, I’ll have to run this through our QBA programs to see if it’s feasible.”

  “You yourself said there’s no time,” said Gideon. “Make your decision now or I walk. For once, do something without your damn QBA programs.”

  For a moment Glinn’s face flashed with anger, but then it smoothed out, the neutral mask reasserting itself, until he once again looked like the Glinn of resolute mystery.

  “Gideon,” he said, “think for a minute about the qualities that a leader—even a co-leader—is required to have. He’s a team player. He’s good at inspiring others. He’s able to hide his true feelings, put up a false front when necessary. He projects confidence at all times—even if he doesn’t feel confident. He can’t be a freelancer. And he’s certainly not a loner. Now, tell me: do any of these qualities describe you?”

  There was a pause.

  “No,” Gideon finally admitted.

  “Very well.” Glinn rose. “Our first stop is the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And then it’s off to the South Atlantic—and beyond the Ice Limit.”

  5

  AS THE HELICOPTER banked, the afternoon sun shimmered off the waters of Great Harbor, Massachusetts, and the R/V Batavia came into view. Gideon was surprised at how big it looked from above; just how much, with its massive prow and tall central superstructure, it dwarfed all the other research vessels and boats in the mooring field.

  “A Walter N. Harper–class oceanographic research vessel,” Glinn said from the adjoining seat, noticing Gideon’s interest. “Three hundred twenty feet in length, beam of fifty-eight feet, twenty-one-foot draft. It has two thirty-five-hundred-horsepower Z-drives, a fourteen-hundred-horsepower azimuthing jet, full dynamic positioning, two-hundred-fifty-thousand-gallon fuel capacity, eighteen-thousand-nautical-mile range at a cruising speed of twelve knots—”

  “You lost me with the part about the ‘azimuthing jet.’”

  “All it means is that the jet drive can be rotated in any horizontal direction, so the ship doesn’t need a rudder. It allows for very exact dynamic positioning, even in rough seas with winds and currents.”

  “Dynamic positioning?”

  “Keeping the ship in one place. Gideon, surely you know all about boats after your recent adventure down in the Caribbean.”

  “I know I don’t like them, I don’t like being on the sea, and I’m quite content to remain ignorant of all things nautical.”

  The helicopter finished its turn and began to descend toward the midships helipad. A deckhand with wands motioned them into place, and a moment later the door was opened and they hopped out. It was a brilliant fall afternoon, the sky a cold blue dome, the sun slanting across the deck.

  Gideon followed Manuel Garza and Glinn across the helipad, the EES director crouching a little stiffly against the backwash of the rotors. They went through a door into a waiting and staging room, sparely furnished. Three people immediately stood up, two in uniform and
one civilian. Outside, the chopper lifted off.

  “Gideon,” said Glinn, “I’d like you to meet Captain Tulley, master of the R/V Batavia, and Chief Officer Lennart.”

  The captain, a man of no more than five feet, stepped forward and shook Gideon’s hand with gravity, his tight and humorless face breaking into a poor semblance of a smile. One brisk up-and-down motion, and then he stepped back.

  Chief Officer Lennart was worlds apart from Tulley: a blond, Nordic woman in her early fifties who towered over the diminutive captain, full of warmth and fluid motion, with a hand as warm and as enveloping as an oven mitt.

  “And this is Alexandra Lispenard, who is in charge of our fleet of four DSVs. She’ll be your driving instructor.”

  Lispenard tossed her long, teak-colored hair and took his hand with a smile, giving it a slow shake. “Nice to meet you, Gideon,” she said, her contralto voice in contrast to the formal silence of the others.

  “DSVs?” Gideon asked her, trying not to stare as he did so. She was about thirty-five and stunningly attractive, with a heart-shaped face and exotic, agate-colored eyes.

  “Deep Submergence Vehicles. A motorized bathyscaphe, really. A marvel of engineering.”

  Gideon felt the pressure of Glinn’s hand on his shoulder. “Ah, here’s the doctor. Gideon, I’d like you to meet Dr. Brambell, the expedition’s physician.”

  A wiry old man with a glossy pate, wearing a white lab coat, had appeared in the doorway. “Pleased, very pleased!” he said in a wry Irish accent. He did not offer to shake hands.

  “Dr. Brambell,” said Glinn, “was on the Rolvaag when it went down. I’m sure when he has a chance, he’ll tell you all about it.”

  This unexpected statement was greeted by a short silence. The two ship’s officers looked surprised—and displeased. Gideon wondered if Brambell might be considered a kind of unlucky Jonah.

  “That isn’t a fact I care to have bandied about,” said Brambell shortly.

  “My apologies. In any case, Gideon, you’ve now met several of the most important people on board. Alex will take you down to the hangar deck. I’m afraid I have another engagement.”