The Ice Limit

by Douglas Preston

  "How come the ground's not frozen?" asked McFarlane.

  Glinn nodded upward at the four towers. "We've bathed the area in far infrared."

  "You've thought of everything," said Lloyd, shaking his head.

  "You're paying us to do just that."

  The men proceeded to trowel out a neat cube, descending bit by bit, occasionally taking samples of minerals, gravel, and sand as they went. One of them stopped and held up a jagged object, sand adhering to its surface.

  "That's interesting," said Glinn, stepping forward quickly. "What is it?"

  "You got me," said Amira. "Strange. Looks almost like glass."

  "Fulgurite," said McFarlane.

  "What?"

  "Fulgurite. It's what happens when a powerful bolt of lightning hits wet sand. It fuses a channel through the sand, turning it to glass."

  "That's why I hired him," said Lloyd, looking around with a grin.

  "Here's another," said a workman. They carefully dug around it, leaving it sticking up in the sand like a tree branch.

  "Meteorites are ferromagnetic," McFarlane said, dropping down and carefully plucking it from the sand with his gloved hands. "This one must have attracted more than its share of lightning."

  The men continued to work, uncovering several more fulgurites, which were wrapped in tissue and packed in wooden crates. Amira swept her instrument over the ground surface. "Six more inches," she said.

  "Switch to brushes," said Glinn.

  Two men now crouched around the hole, the rest of the workers taking up positions behind them. At this depth, McFarlane could see that the dirt was wet, almost saturated with water, and the workers were not so much sweeping away sand as they were brushing mud. A hush fell on the group as the hole deepened, centimeter by centimeter.

  "Take another reading," murmured Glinn.

  "One more inch," Amira said.

  McFarlane leaned forward. The two laborers were using stiff plastic brushes to carefully whisk the mud into pans, which they passed to the men behind them.

  And then a brush swept across a hard surface. The two workmen stepped out of the hole and gingerly troweled away the heavy mud, leaving a shallow layer covering the hard surface below.

  "Rinse it off," said Glinn. McFarlane thought he heard a note of anticipation in the voice.

  "Hurry, man!" Lloyd cried.

  One of the workmen came running up, unrolling a thin hose. Glinn himself took the nozzle, aimed it toward the mud-covered meteorite, and squeezed. For several seconds, there was no sound except the gentle hiss of water as the last of the mud was rinsed from the surface.

  Then Glinn jerked the nozzle shut. The water drained away from the naked surface of the meteorite. A sudden paralysis, an electric moment of suspension, gripped the company.

  And then there was the sound of the champagne bottle, heedlessly dropped, landing on the damp earth with a heavy thud.

  24: Isla Desolación

  9:55 A.M.

  PALMER LLOYD stood at the edge of the precise cut in the earth, his eyes locked on the naked surface of the meteorite. For a moment, his mind went blank at the astonishing sight. And then, gradually, he became aware of himself again: felt the blood pounding in his temples, the air filling his chest, the cold air freezing his nose and cheeks. And yet the overpowering surprise remained. He was looking at it, he was seeing it, but he couldn't believe it.

  "Margaux," he murmured, his voice small in the snowy vastness.

  The silence around him was complete. Everyone had been shocked mute.

  Lloyd had made pilgrimages to most of the great iron meteorites in the world—the Hoba, the Ahnighito, the Willamette, the Woman. Despite their widely varying shapes, they all had the same pitted, brownish-black surface. All iron meteorites looked alike.

  But this meteorite was scarlet. But no, he thought, as his brain began to pick up speed again: the word "scarlet" did not do it justice. It was the deep, pure velvety color of polished carnelian, yet even richer. It was, in fact, precisely the color of a fine Bordeaux wine, like the parsimonious drams of Chateau Margaux with which he had been forced to content himself on the Rolvaag.

  Now one voice cut through the shocked silence. It had a note of authority that Lloyd recognized as Glinn's. "I would like everyone to please step back from the hole."

  Distantly, Lloyd was aware that nobody was moving.

  "Step back," Glinn repeated, more sharply.

  This time, the tight circle of onlookers reluctantly shuffled back a few steps. As the shadows fell away, sunlight lanced through the crowd, illuminating the pit. Once more, Lloyd felt the breath snatched from him. In the sunlight, the meteorite revealed a silky, metallic surface that resembled nothing so much as gold. Like gold, this scarlet metal seemed to collect and trap the ambient light, darkening the outside world while giving itself an ineffable, interior illumination. It was not only beautiful, but unutterably strange.

  And it was his.

  He felt flooded by a sudden, powerful joy: for this amazing thing that lay at his feet and for the astonishing trajectory of his life that had given him the opportunity to find it. Bringing the largest meteorite in human history back to his museum had always seemed goal enough. But now the stakes were higher. It was no accident that he—perhaps the only person on earth with the vision and the resources—would be here, at this time and in this place, staring at this ravishing object.

  "Mr. Lloyd," he heard Glinn say. "I said step back."

  Instead, Lloyd leaned forward.

  Glinn raised his voice. "Palmer, do not do it!"

  But Lloyd had already dropped into the hole, his feet landing squarely on the surface of the meteorite. He immediately fell to his knees, allowing the tips of his gloved fingers to caress the smoothly rippled metallic surface. On impulse, he leaned down and placed his cheek against it. Above, there was a brief silence.

  "How does it feel?" he heard McFarlane ask.

  "Cold," Lloyd replied, sitting up. He could hear the quaver in his voice as he spoke, feel the tears freezing on his numb cheek. "It feels very cold."

  25: Isla Desolación

  1:55 P.M.

  MCFARLANE STARED at the laptop on his knees. The cursor blinked back, reproachfully, from a nearly blank screen. He sighed and shifted in the metal folding chair, trying to get comfortable. The lone window of the commissary hut glittered with frost, and the sound of wind came through the walls. Outside, the clear weather had given way to snow. But within the hut, a coal stove threw out a wonderfully intense heat.

  McFarlane moused a command, then closed the laptop with a curse. On a nearby table, a printer began to hum. He shifted again, restlessly. Once again, he replayed the events of the morning. The moment of awestruck silence, Lloyd jumping so impulsively into the hole, and Glinn calling out to him—by his Christian name, for the first time McFarlane remembered. The triumphant christening, the torrent of questions that followed. And—overlaying everything—an overpowering sense of incomprehension. He felt that the breath had been knocked out of him, that he was struggling for air.

  He, too, had felt a sudden urge to jump in; to touch the thing, to reassure himself that it was real. But he was also slightly afraid of it. It had such a rich color, so out of place in the monochromatic landscape. It reminded him of an operating table, a vast expanse of snowy white sheets with a bloody incision at their center. It repelled and fascinated simultaneously. And it excited in him a hope that he thought had been dead.

  The door to the hut opened, admitting a howl of snow. McFarlane glanced up as Amira stepped in.

  "Finish the report?" she asked, removing her parka and shaking off the snow.

  In response, McFarlane nodded toward the printer. Amira walked to it and grabbed the emerging sheet. Then she barked a laugh. " 'The meteorite is red,' " she read aloud. She tossed the sheet into McFarlane's lap. "Now that's what I like in a man, succinctness."

  "Why fill up paper with a lot of useless speculations? Until we get a piece of
it for study, how can I possibly say what the hell it is?"

  She pulled up a chair and sat down beside him. It seemed to McFarlane that, beneath a forced casualness, she was eyeing him very carefully. "You've been studying meteorites for years. I doubt your speculations would be useless."

  "What do you think?"

  "I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

  McFarlane glanced down at the pattern of ripples on the plywood table, tracing his finger along them. It had the fractal perfection of a coastline, or a snowflake, or a Mandelbrot set. It reminded him how complicated everything was: the universe, an atom, a piece of wood. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Amira draw a metal cigar tube from her parka and upend it, letting a half-burnt stogie drop into her hand.

  "Please don't," he said. "I'd rather not be driven out into the cold."

  Amira replaced the cigar. "I know something is running through that head of yours."

  McFarlane shrugged.

  "Okay," she said. "You want to know what I think? You're in denial."

  He turned to look at her again.

  "That's right. You had a pet theory once—something you believed in, despite the razzing of your peers. Isn't that right? And when you thought you'd finally found evidence for that theory, it got you into trouble. In all the excitement you lost your usual good judgment and shafted a friend. And in the end, your evidence turned out to be worthless."

  McFarlane looked at her. "I didn't know you had a degree in psychiatry, along with everything else."

  She leaned closer, pressing. "Sure, I heard the story. The point is, now you've got what you've been looking for all these years. You've got more than evidence. You've got proof. But you don't want to admit it. You're afraid to go down that road again."

  McFarlane held her gaze for a minute. He felt his anger drain away. He slumped in his chair, his mind in turmoil. Could she be right? he wondered.

  She laughed. "Take the color, for example. You know why no metals are deep red?"

  "No."

  "Objects are a certain color because of the way they interact with photons of light." Amira shoved a hand in her pocket and took out a crumpled paper bag. "Jolly Rancher?"

  "What the hell's a Jolly Rancher?"

  She tossed him a candy and shook another one into her hand. She held the green lozenge up between thumb and forefinger. "Every object, except for a perfect blackbody, absorbs some wavelengths of light and scatters others. Take this green candy. It's green because its scatters the green wavelengths of light back at our eye, while absorbing the rest. I've run a few pretty little calculations, and I can't find a single theoretical combination of alloyed metals that will scatter red light. It seems to be impossible for any known alloy to be deep red. Yellow, white, orange, purple, gray—but not red." She popped the green candy in her mouth, bit down with a loud crunch, and began to chew.

  McFarlane placed his candy on the table. "So what are you saying?"

  "You know what I'm saying. I'm saying it's made of some weird element we've never seen before. So stop being coy. I know that's what you've been thinking: This is it: this is an interstellar meteorite."

  McFarlane raised his hand. "All right, it's true, I have been thinking about it."

  "And?"

  "All the meteorites ever found have been made from known elements—nickel, iron, carbon, silicon. They all formed here, in our own solar system, out of the primordial cloud of dust that once surrounded our sun." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "Obviously, you know I used to speculate about the possibility of meteorites coming from outside the solar system. A chunk of something that just happened to wander past and get caught in the sun's gravitational field. An interstellar meteorite."

  Amira smiled knowingly. "But the mathematicians said it was impossible: a quintillion to one."

  McFarlane nodded.

  "I ran some calculations back on the ship. The mathematicians were wrong: they were working from faulty assumptions. It's only about a billion to one."

  McFarlane laughed. "Yeah. Billion, quintillion, what's the difference?"

  "It's a billion to one for any given year."

  McFarlane stopped laughing.

  "That's right," said Amira. "Over billions of years, there's a better than even chance that one did land on Earth. It's not only possible, it's probable. I resurrected your little theory for you. You owe me, big time."

  A silence fell in the commissary hut, broken only by the rattle of wind. Then McFarlane began to speak. "You mean you really believe this meteorite is made of some alloy or metal that doesn't exist anywhere in the solar system?"

  "Yup. And you believe it, too. That's why you haven't written your report."

  McFarlane went on slowly, almost to himself. "If this metal did exist somewhere, we'd have found at least some trace of it. After all, the sun and the planets formed from the same dust cloud. So it must have come from beyond." He looked at her. "It's inescapable."

  She grinned. "My thoughts exactly."

  He fell silent and the two sat, absorbed for the moment. "We need to get our hands on a piece of it," Amira said at last. "I've got the perfect tool for the job, too, a highspeed diamond corer. I'd say five kilos would be a nice chunk to start with, wouldn't you?"

  McFarlane nodded. "But let's just keep our speculations to ourselves for now. Lloyd and the rest are due here any minute."

  As if on cue, there was a stomping outside the hut, and the door opened to reveal Lloyd, even more bearlike than usual in a heavy parka, framed against the dim blue light. Glinn followed, then Rochefort and Garza. Lloyd's assistant, Penfold, came last, shivering, his thick lips blue and pursed.

  "Cold as a witch's tit out there," Lloyd cried, stamping his feet and holding his hands near the stove. He was bubbling over with good humor. The men from EES, on the other hand, simply sat down at the table, looking subdued.

  Penfold took up a position in the far corner of the room, radio in hand. "Mr. Lloyd sir, we have to get to the landing site," he said. "Unless the helicopter leaves within the hour, you'll never get back to New York in time for the shareholders' meeting."

  "Yes, yes. In a minute. I want to hear what Sam here has to say."

  Penfold sighed and murmured into the radio.

  Glinn glanced at McFarlane with his gray, serious eyes. "Is the report ready?"

  "Sure." McFarlane nodded at the piece of paper.

  Glinn glanced at it. "I'm not much in the mood for drollery, Dr. McFarlane."

  It was the first time McFarlane had seen Glinn show irritation, or any strong emotion, for that matter. It occurred to him that Glinn, too, must have been shocked by what they found in the hole. This is a man who hates surprises, he thought. "Mr. Glinn, I can't base a report on speculation," he said. "I need to study it."

  "I'll tell you what we need," Lloyd said loudly. "We need to get it the hell out of the ground and into international waters, before the Chileans get wind of this. You can study it later." It seemed to McFarlane that this was the latest salvo in a continuing argument between Glinn and Lloyd.

  "Dr. McFarlane, perhaps I can simplify matters," Glinn said. "There's one thing I'm particularly interested in knowing. Is it dangerous?"

  "We know it's not radioactive. It might be poisonous, I suppose. Most metals are, to one degree or another."

  "How poisonous?"

  McFarlane shrugged. "Palmer touched it, and he's still alive."

  "He'll be the last one to do that," Glinn replied. "I've given orders that nobody is to come into direct contact with the meteorite, under any circumstances." He paused. "Anything else? Could it be harboring viruses?"

  "It's been sitting there for millions of years, so any alien microbes would have dispersed long ago. It might be worth taking soil samples and collecting moss, lichen, and other plants from the area, to see if anything's unusual."

  "What would one look for?"

  "Mutations, perhaps, or signs of low-level exposure to toxins or teratogens."

&nbs
p; Glinn nodded. "I'll speak to Dr. Brambell about it. Dr. Amira, any thoughts on its metallurgical properties? It is a metal, isn't it?"

  There was another crunch of candy. "Yes, very likely, since it's ferromagnetic. Like gold, it doesn't oxidize. However, I can't figure out how a metal can be red. Dr. McFarlane and I were just discussing the need to take a sample."

  "Sample?" Lloyd asked. The room fell silent at the change in his voice.

  "Of course," said McFarlane after a moment. "It's standard procedure."

  "You're going to cut a piece off my meteorite?"

  McFarlane looked at Lloyd, and then at Glinn. "Is there a problem with that?"

  "You're damn right there's a problem," Lloyd said. "This is a museum specimen. We're putting it on display. I don't want it chopped up or drilled."

  "There isn't a major meteorite found that hasn't been sectioned. We're only talking about coring out a five-kilogram piece. That'll be enough for all the tests anyone could conceivably think of. A piece that large could be worked on for years."

  Lloyd shook his head. "No way."

  "We must do it," McFarlane said with vehemence. "There's no way to study this meteorite without vaporizing, melting, polishing, etching. Given the size of this thing, the sample would be a drop in the bucket."

  "It ain't the Mona Lisa," Amira murmured.

  "That's an ignorant comment," Lloyd said, rounding on her. Then he sank back with a sigh. "Cutting it up seems like such a—well, a sacrilege. Couldn't we just leave it a mystery?"

  "Absolutely not," said Glinn. "We need to know more about it before I'll authorize moving it. Dr. McFarlane is right."

  Lloyd stared at him, his face reddening. "Before you'll authorize moving it? Listen to me, Eli. I've gone along with all your little rules. I've played your game. But let's get one thing straight: I'm paying the bills. This is my meteorite. You signed a contract to get it for me. You like to brag that you've never failed. If this ship returns to New York without that meteorite, you will have failed. Am I right?"