"I think I can explain that. Follow me."
Britton opened a door and ushered McFarlane forward. The carpeting and wood veneer gave way to stamped metal and linoleum. They descended yet another set of stairs to a door labeled CARGO CONTROL ROOM. The room beyond was dominated by a vast electronic schematic of the ship's maindeck, mounted on the far bulkhead. Countless small points of light blinked red and yellow across its surface.
"This is the ship's mimic diagram," Britton said, motioning McFarlane toward the schematic. "It's the way we keep track of how and where cargo is loaded. We control the ballast, pumps, and cargo valves directly from the mimic area." She pointed to a series of gauges and switches arrayed beneath the diagram. "These controls regulate the pump pressures."
She led the way across the room, where an officer watched an array of computer screens. "This computer calculates cargo distribution. And these computers are the ship's automatic gauging system. They monitor pressure, volume, and temperature throughout the ship's tanks."
She patted the beige case of the nearest monitor. "This is why Glinn chose a tanker. This meteorite of yours is heavy. Loading it will be exceedingly tricky. With our tanks and computers, we can shift seawater ballast around from tank to tank, maintaining even trim and list no matter what weird lopsided thing goes inside. We can keep everything level. I don't think anybody would be happy if we turned belly-up the moment you drop that thing in the tank."
Britton moved to the far side of the ballast control equipment. "Speaking of the computers, do you have any idea what this is?" She pointed to a tall, freestanding tower of black steel, featureless except for a keyhole and a small logo reading SECURE DATAMETRICS. It looked very different from the rest of the ship's electronics. "Glinn's people installed it back in Elizabeth. There's another, smaller one like it, up on the bridge. None of my officers can figure out what the thing does."
McFarlane ran a curious hand over its beveled front. "No idea. Could it have something to do with the dead man's switch?"
"That's what I assumed at first." She led him out of the room and along the metal-floored corridor to a waiting elevator. "But it seems to be tied in to more than one of the ship's key systems."
"Would you like me to ask Glinn?"
"No, don't bother. I'll ask him sometime myself. But here I am, going on and on about the Rolvaag," she said, punching an elevator button. "I'm curious how exactly one becomes a meteorite hunter."
McFarlane looked at her as the elevator began to sink. She was a very poised woman; her shoulders were straight, her chin held high. But it was not a military kind of stiffness; rather, he thought, it was a kind of quiet pride. She knew he was a meteorite hunter: he wondered if she knew about Masangkay and the Tornarssuk meteorite fiasco. You and I have a lot in common, he thought. He could only imagine how tough it must have been for her to put on a uniform again and walk a bridge, wondering what people were saying behind her back.
"I got caught in a meteorite shower in Mexico."
"Incredible. And you survived."
"Only once in recorded history has a meteorite ever struck anyone," McFarlane said. "A woman with a history of hypochondria, lying in bed. The rock had been slowed by going through the upper stories of her house, so it only made a massive bruise. Sure got her out of bed, though."
Britton laughed: a lovely sound.
"So I went back to school and became a planetary geologist. But I was never very good at playing the sober scientist."
"What does a planetary geologist study?"
"A long list of boring subjects, before you get to the really good stuff. Geology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, calculus."
"Sounds more interesting than studying for a master's license. And the good stuff?"
"My high point was getting to study a Martian meteorite in graduate school. I was looking at the effect of cosmic rays on its chemical composition—trying to find a way to date it, basically."
The elevator door opened and they stepped out. "A real Martian rock," Britton said, opening a door and stepping out into yet another endless corridor.
McFarlane shrugged. "I liked finding meteorites. It was a bit like treasure hunting. And I liked studying meteorites.
But I didn't like rubbing elbows at faculty sherry hour, or going to conferences and chatting with rock jocks about collisional ejection and cratering mechanics. I guess the feeling was mutual. Anyway, my academic career lasted all of five years. Got denied tenure. I've been on my own ever since."
He held his breath, thinking of his ex-partner, realizing this was a poor choice of words. But the captain did not pursue it, and the moment passed.
"All I know about meteorites is that they're rocks that fall out of the sky," Britton said. "Where do they come from? Other than Mars, of course."
"Martian meteorites are extremely rare. Most of them are chunks of rock from the inner asteroid belt. Small bits and pieces from planets that broke up soon after the formation of the solar system."
"The thing you're after isn't exactly small."
"Well, most of them are small. But it doesn't take a whole lot to make a big impact. The Tunguska meteorite, which hit Siberia in 1908, had an impact energy equal to a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb."
"Ten megatons?"
"And that's small potatoes. Some meteoroids hit the earth with a kinetic energy greater than one hundred million megatons. That's the kind of blast that tends to end an entire geologic age, kill off the dinosaurs, and generally ruin everybody's day."
"Jesus." Britton shook her head.
He laughed dryly. "Don't worry. They're pretty rare. One every hundred million years."
They had worked their way through another maze of corridors. McFarlane felt hopelessly lost.
"Are all meteorites the same?"
"No, no. But most of the ones that hit the earth are ordinary chondrites."
"Chondrites?"
"Basically, old gray stones. Pretty boring." McFarlane hesitated. "There are the nickel-iron types—probably like the one we're snagging. But the most interesting type is called CI chondrites." He stopped.
Britton glanced over at him.
"It's hard to explain. It might be boring for you." McFarlane remembered, more than once, putting a glaze over everyone's eyes at a dinner party in his younger, enthusiastic, innocent years.
"I'm the one that studied celestial navigation. Try me." "Well, CI chondrites are clumped directly out of the pure, unadulterated dust cloud the solar system formed from. Which makes them very interesting. They contain clues to how the solar system formed. They're also very old. Older than the Earth."
"And how old is that?"
"Four and a half billion years." He noticed a genuine interest shining in her eyes.
"Amazing."
"And it's been theorized that there's a type of meteorite even more incredible—"
McFarlane fell silent abruptly, checking himself. He did not want the old obsession to return; not now. He walked on in the sudden stillness, aware of Britton's curious gaze.
The corridor ended in a dogged hatch. Undogging the cleats, Britton pulled it open. A wall of sound flew out at them: the huge roar of endless horsepower. McFarlane followed the captain out onto a narrow catwalk. About fifty feet below, he could see two enormous turbines roaring in tandem. The huge space seemed completely deserted; apparently it, too, was run by computer. He gripped a metal pole for support, and it vibrated wildly in his hand.
Britton looked at him with a small smile as they continued along the catwalk. "The Rolvaag is driven by steam boilers, not diesel motors like other ships," she said, raising her voice over the roar. "We do have an emergency diesel for electricity, though. On a modern ship like this, you can't afford to lose power. Because if you do, you've got nothing: no computers, no navigation, no fire-fighting equipment. You're a drifting hulk. We call it DIW: dead in the water."
They passed through another heavy door at the forward end of the engine space. Britton dogged it shut, th
en led the way down a hallway that ended at a closed elevator door. McFarlane followed, grateful for the quiet.
The captain stopped at the elevator, looking back at him calculatingly. Suddenly, he realized she had more on her mind than a tour of the jolly old Rolvaag.
"Mr. Glinn gave a good talk," Britton said at last.
"I'm glad you think so."
"Crews can be a superstitious lot, you know. It's amazing how fast rumor and speculation can turn into fact belowdecks. I think that talk went a long way toward squelching any rumors." There was another brief pause. Then she spoke again.
"I have the feeling Mr. Glinn knows a lot more than he said. Actually, no—that isn't the right way to put it. I think maybe he knows less than he let on." She glanced sidelong at McFarlane. "Isn't that right?"
McFarlane hesitated. He didn't know what Lloyd or Glinn had told the captain—or, more to the point, what they had withheld. Nevertheless, he felt that the more she knew, the better off the ship would be. He felt a sense of kinship with her. They'd both made big mistakes. They'd both been dragged behind the motorcycle of life a little longer than the average Joe. In his gut, he trusted Sally Britton.
"You're right," he said. "The truth is, we know almost nothing about it. We don't know how something so large could have survived impact. We don't know why it hasn't rusted away. What little electromagnetic and gravitational data we have about the rock seem contradictory, even impossible."
"I see," said Britton. She looked into McFarlane's eyes. "Is it dangerous?"
"There is no reason to think so." He hesitated. "No reason to think not, either."
There was a pause.
"What I mean is, will it pose a hazard to my ship or my crew?"
McFarlane chewed his lip, wondering how to answer. "A hazard? It's heavy as hell. It'll be tricky to maneuver. But once it's safely secured in its cradle, I have to believe it'll be less dangerous than a hold full of inflammable oil." He looked at her. "And Glinn seems to be a man who never takes chances."
For a moment, Britton thought about this. Then she nodded. "That was my take on him, too: cautious to a fault." She pressed the button for the elevator. "That's the kind of person I like on board. Because the next time I end up on a reef, I'm going down with the ship."
15: Rolvaag
July 3, 2:15 P.M.
AS THE good ship Rolvaag crossed the equator, with the coast of Brazil and the mouth of the Amazon far to the west, a time-honored ritual began on the ship's bow, as it had on oceangoing vessels for hundreds of years.
Thirty feet below deck and almost nine hundred feet aft, Dr. Patrick Brambell was unpacking his last box of books. For almost every year of his working life he had crossed the line at least once, and he found the concomitant ceremonies—the "Neptune's tea" made from boiled socks, the gauntlet of fish-wielding deckhands, the vulgar laughter of the shellbacks—distasteful in the extreme.
He had been unpacking and arranging his extensive library ever since the Rolvaag left port. It was a task he enjoyed almost as much as reading the books themselves, and he never allowed himself to hurry. Now he ran a scalpel along the final seam of packing tape, pulled back the cardboard flaps, and looked inside. With loving fingers, he removed the topmost book, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and caressed its fine half-leather cover before placing it on the last free shelf in his cabin. Orlando Furioso came next, then Huysmans's À rebours, Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson's Rambler essays, Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua. None of the books was about medicine; in fact, of the thousand-odd eclectic books in Brambell's traveling library, only a dozen or so could be considered professional references—and those he segregated in his medical suite, to remove the vocational stain from his cherished library. For Dr. Brambell was first a reader, and second a doctor.
The box empty at last, Brambell sighed in mingled satisfaction and regret and stepped back to survey the ranks of books standing in neat rows on every surface and shelf. As he did so, there was the clatter of a distant door, followed by the measured cadence of footsteps. Brambell waited motionless, listening, hoping it was not for him but knowing it was. The footsteps stopped, and a brief double rap came from the direction of the waiting room.
Brambell sighed again; a very different sigh from the first. He glanced around the cabin quickly. Then, spying a surgical mask, he picked it up and slipped it over his mouth. He found it very useful in hurrying patients along. He gave the books a last loving glance, then slipped out of the cabin, closing the door behind him.
He walked down the long hallway, past the rooms of empty hospital beds, past the surgical bays and the pathology lab, to the waiting room. There was Eli Glinn, an expandable file beneath one arm.
Glinn's eyes fastened on the surgical mask. "I didn't realize you were with someone."
"I'm not," Brambell said through the mask. "You're the first to arrive."
Glinn glanced at the mask a moment more. Then he nodded. "Very well. May we speak?"
"Certainly." Brambell led the way to his consultation room. He found Glinn to be one of the most unusual creatures he had ever met: a man with culture who took no delight in it; a man with conversation who never employed it; a man with hooded gray eyes who made it his business to know everyone's weaknesses, save his own.
Brambell closed the door to his consultation room. "Please sit down, Mr. Glinn." He waved a hand at Glinn's folder. "I assume those are the medical histories? They are late. Fortunately, I've had no need to call on them yet."
Glinn slipped into the chair. "I've set aside some of the folders that might require your attention. Most are routine. There are a few exceptions."
"I see."
"We'll start with the crew. Victor Howell has testicular cryptorchidism."
"Odd that he hasn't had it corrected."
Glinn looked up. "He probably doesn't like the idea of a knife down there."
Brambell nodded.
Glinn leafed through several more folders. There were the usual complaints and conditions to be found in any random sampling of the population: a few diabetics, a chronic slipped disk, a case of Addison's disease.
"Fairly healthy crew, there," said Brambell, hoping faintly that the session was over. But no—Glinn was taking out another set of folders.
"And here are the psychological profiles," Glinn said. Brambell glanced over at the names. "What about the EES people?"
"We have a slightly different system," said Glinn. "EES files are available on a need-to-know basis only."
Brambell didn't respond to that one. No use arguing with a man like Glinn.
Glinn took two additional folders out of his briefcase and placed them on Brambell's desk, then casually leaned back in the chair. "There's really only one person here I'm concerned about."
"And who might that be?"
"McFarlane."
Brambell tugged the mask down around his chin. "The dashing meteorite hunter?" he asked in surprise. The man did carry around a faint air of trouble, it was true.
Glinn tapped the top folder. "I will be giving you regular reports on him."
Brambell raised his eyebrows.
"McFarlane is the one key figure here not of my choosing. He's had a dubious career, to say the least. That is why I would like you to evaluate this report, and the ones to follow."
Brambell looked at the file with distaste. "Who's your mole?" he asked. He expected Glinn to be offended, but he was not.
"I would rather keep that confidential."
Brambell nodded. He pulled the file toward him, leafing through it. " 'Diffident about expedition and its chances for success,' " he read aloud. " 'Motivations unclear. Distrustful of the scientific community. Extremely uncomfortable with managerial role. Tends to be a loner.' " He dropped the folder. "I don't see anything unusual."
Glinn nodded at the second, much larger folder. "Here's a background file on McFarlane. Among other things, it contains a report here about an unpleasant incident in Greenland some years ag
o."
Brambell sighed. He was a most incurious man, and this was, he suspected, a major reason why Glinn had hired him. "I'll look at it later."
"Let's look at it now."
"Perhaps you could summarize it for me."
"Very well."
Brambell sat back, folded his hands, and resigned himself to listening.
"Years ago, McFarlane had a partner named Masangkay. They first teamed up to smuggle the Atacama tektites out of Chile, which made them infamous in that country. After that, they successfully located several other small but important meteorites. The two worked well together. McFarlane had gotten in trouble at his last museum job and went freelance. He had an instinctive knack for finding meteorites, but rock hunting isn't a full-time job unless you can get backers. Masangkay, unlike McFarlane, was smooth at museum politics and lined up several excellent assignments. They grew very close. McFarlane married Masangkay's sister, Malou, making them brothers-in-law. However, over the years, their relationship began to fray. Perhaps McFarlane envied Masangkay's successful museum career. Or Masangkay envied the fact that McFarlane was by nature the better field scientist. But most of all it had to do with McFarlane's pet theory."
"And that was?"
"McFarlane believed that, someday, an interstellar meteorite would be found. One that had traveled across vast interstellar distances from another star system. Everyone told him this was mathematically impossible—all known meteorites came from inside the solar system. But McFarlane was obsessed with the idea. It gave him the faint odor of quackery, and that didn't sit well with a traditionalist like Masangkay.
"In any case, about three years ago there was a major meteorite fall near Tornarssuk, Greenland. It was tracked by satellites and seismic sensors, which allowed for good triangulation of its impact site. Its trajectory was even captured on an amateur videotape. The New York Museum of Natural History, working with the Danish government, hired Masangkay to find the meteorite. Masangkay brought in McFarlane.
"They found the Tornarssuk, but it took a lot more time and cost a lot more money than they anticipated. Large debts were incurred. The New York Museum balked. To make matters worse, there was friction between Masangkay and McFarlane. McFarlane extrapolated the orbit of the Tornarssuk from the satellite data, and became convinced that the meteorite was following a hyperbolic orbit, which meant it must have come in from far beyond the solar system. He thought it was the interstellar meteorite he had been looking for all his life. Masangkay was worried sick over the funding, and this was the last thing he wanted to hear. They waited, guarding the site, for days, but no money came. At last, Masangkay went off to resupply and meet with Danish officials. He left McFarlane with the stone—and, unfortunately, a communications dish.
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