The Ice Limit

by Douglas Preston; Lincoln Child

  McFarlane went back to work, and within fifteen minutes they were done. He fashioned a rough cross from two sticks and planted it carefully atop the low pile of rocks. Then he stepped back, dusting the snow from his gloves.

  “Canticum graduum de profundis clamavi ad te Domine,” he said under his breath. “Rest easy, partner.”

  Then he nodded to Lloyd and they turned east, heading for the white bulk of the snowfield as the sky grew still darker and another squall gathered at their backs.

  Isla Desolación,

  July 16, 8:42 A.M.

  MCFARLANE LOOKED out over the new gravel road, cut through the brilliant expanse of fresh snow like a black snake. He shook his head, smiling to himself in grudging admiration. In the three days since his first visit, the island had been transformed almost beyond recognition.

  There was a rough lurch, and half of McFarlane’s coffee splashed from his cup onto his snowpants. “Christ!” he yelped, holding the cup at arm’s length and swatting at his pants.

  From inside the cab, the driver, a burly fellow named Evans, smiled. “Sorry,” he said. These Cats don’t exactly ride like Eldorados.”

  Despite its massive yellow bulk, and tires almost twice as tall as a man, the Cat 785’s cab held only one person, and McFarlane had ended up sitting, cross-legged, on the narrow platform beside it. Directly beneath him, the huge diesel engine snarled. He didn’t mind. Today was the day. Today they were going to uncover the meteorite.

  He thought back over the last seventy-two hours. The very night they arrived, Glinn had initiated an astonishing process of unloading. It had all happened with ruthless speed and efficiency. By morning, the most incriminating equipment had been moved by heavy equipment to prefab hangars on the island. At the same time, EES workers under Garza and Rochefort had blasted and leveled the beach site, built jetties and breakwaters with riprap and steel, and graded a broad road from the landing site around the snowfield to the meteorite area—the road he was now on. The EES team had also offloaded some of the portable container labs and workspaces and moved them to the staging area, where they had been arranged among rows of Quonset huts.

  But as the Caterpillar 785 Hauler rounded the snowfield and approached the staging area, McFarlane saw that the most astonishing change of all had taken place on an escarpment about a mile away. There, an army of workers with heavy equipment had begun gouging out an open pit. A dozen huts had sprouted up along its verge. Periodically, McFarlane could hear an explosive shudder, and clouds of dust would rise into the sky over the pit. A tailings pile was growing to one side, and a leachpond had been built nearby.

  “What’s going on over there?” McFarlane shouted to Evans over the roar of the engine, pointing to the escarpment.

  “Mining.”

  “I can see that. But what are they mining?”

  Evans broke into a grin. “Nada.”

  McFarlane had to laugh. Glinn was amazing. Anyone looking at the site would think the activity on the escarpment was their real business; the staging area around the meteorite looked like a minor supply dump.

  He turned his gaze from the ersatz mine back to the road that lay ahead. The Hanuxa snowfield coruscated, seeming to grab the light and draw it into its depths, turning it to infinite hues of blue and turquoise. The Jaws of Hanuxa stood beyond, their grimness softened by a dusting of fresh snow.

  McFarlane hadn’t slept at all the night before, and yet he felt almost too wakeful. In less than an hour, they would know. They would see it. They would touch it.

  The truck lurched again, and McFarlane tightened his grip on the metal railing with one hand while quickly downing his coffee with the other. It might be sunny for a change, but it was also hellishly cold. He crushed the foam cup and slid it into a pocket of his parka. The big Cat was only slightly less shabby-looking than the Rolvaag itself, but McFarlane could see that this, too, was an illusion: the interior of the cab was brand-new.

  “Quite a machine,” he yelled over to Evans.

  “Oh, yeah,” the man replied, his breath smoking.

  The roadbed grew smoother and the Cat sped up. As they trundled along, they passed another hauler and a bulldozer headed back toward the shore, and the drivers waved cheerfully at Evans. McFarlane realized he knew nothing about the men and women wielding all the heavy equipment—who they were, what they thought about such a strange project. “You guys work for Glinn?” he asked Evans.

  Evans nodded. “To a man.” He seemed to wear a perpetual smile on his craggy face, overhung with two bristly eyebrows. “Not full-time, though. Some of the boys are roughnecks on oil rigs, some build bridges, you name it. We even have a crew from the Big Dig in Boston. But when you get the call from EES, you drop everything and come running.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Evans’s smile widened. “The pay is five times scale, that’s why.”

  “Guess I’m working the wrong end of the job, then.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’re doing all right for yourself, Dr. McFarlane.” Evans throttled down to let a grader pass them, its metal blades winking in the brilliant sunshine.

  “Is this the biggest job you’ve seen EES take on?”

  “Nope.” Evans goosed the engine and they lurched forward once again. “Small to middling, actually.”

  The snowfield fell behind them. Ahead, McFarlane could now see a broad depression, covering perhaps an acre, that had been scraped into the frozen earth. An array of four huge infrared dishes surrounded the staging area, pointing down. Nearby stood a row of graders, lined up as if at attention. Engineers and other workers were scattered around, huddled together over plans, taking measurements, speaking into radios. In the distance, a snowcat—a large, trailerlike vehicle with monstrous metal treads—was crawling toward the snowfield, wielding high-tech instruments held out on booms. Off to one side, small and forlorn, was the cairn he and Lloyd had built over Nestor Masangkay’s remains.

  Evans came to an idle at the edge of the staging area. McFarlane hopped off and made for the hut marked COMMISSARY. Inside, Lloyd and Glinn sat at a table near a makeshift kitchen, deep in discussion. Amira was standing by a griddle, loading a plate with food. Nearby, John Puppup was curled up, napping. The room smelled of coffee and bacon.

  “About time you got here,” Amira said as she returned to the table, her plate heaped with at least a dozen slices of bacon. “Wallowing in your bunk until all hours. You should be making an example for your assistant.” She poured a cup of maple syrup over the mound of bacon, stirred it around, picked up a dripping piece, and folded it into her mouth.

  Lloyd was warming his hands around a cup of coffee. “With your eating habits, Rachel,” he said good-humoredly, “you should be dead by now.”

  Amira laughed. “The brain uses more calories per minute thinking than the body does jogging. How do you think I stay so svelte and sexy?” She tapped her forehead.

  “How soon until we uncover the rock?” McFarlane asked.

  Glinn sat back, slid out his gold pocket watch, and flicked it open. “Half an hour. We’re just going to uncover enough of the surface to allow you to perform some tests. Dr. Amira will assist you with testing and analyzing the data.”

  McFarlane nodded. This had already been carefully discussed, but Glinn always went over everything twice. Double overage, he thought.

  “We’ll have to christen it,” Amira said, thrusting another piece of bacon into her mouth. “Anybody bring the champagne?”

  Lloyd frowned. “Unfortunately, it’s more like a Temperance meeting around here than a scientific expedition.”

  “Guess you’ll have to break one of your thermoses of hot chocolate over the rock,” McFarlane said.

  Glinn reached down, drew out a satchel, removed a bottle of Perrier-Jouët and placed it carefully on the table.

  “Fleur de Champagne,” Lloyd whispered almost reverentially. “My favorite. Eli, you old liar, you never told me you had bottles of champagne aboard.”

  Glinn
’s only reply was a slight smile.

  “If we’re going to christen this thing, has anybody thought up a name?” Amira asked.

  “Sam here wants to call it the Masangkay meteorite,” Lloyd said. He paused. “I’m inclined to go with the usual nomenclature and call it the Desolación.”

  There was an awkward silence.

  “We’ve got to have a name,” Amira said.

  “Nestor Masangkay made the ultimate sacrifice finding this meteorite,” said McFarlane in a low voice, looking hard at Lloyd. “We wouldn’t be here without him. On the other hand, you financed the expedition, so you’ve won the right to name the rock.” He continued gazing steadily at the billionaire.

  When Lloyd spoke, his voice was unusually quiet. “We don’t even know if Nestor Masangkay would have wanted the honor,” he said. “This isn’t the time to break with tradition, Sam. We’ll call it the Desolación meteorite, but we’ll name the hall it’s in after Nestor. We’ll erect a plaque, detailing his discovery. Is that acceptable?”

  McFarlane thought a moment. Then he gave the briefest of nods.

  Glinn passed the bottle to Lloyd, then rose. They all went out into the brilliant morning sun. As they walked, Glinn came up to McFarlane’s side. “Of course, you realize that at some point we’re going to have to exhume your friend,” he said, nodding in the direction of the stone cairn.

  “Why?” McFarlane asked, surprised.

  “We need to know the cause of death. Dr. Brambell must examine the remains.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s a loose end. I’m sorry.”

  McFarlane began to object, then stopped. As usual, there was no arguing with Glinn’s logic.

  Soon they were standing along the edge of the graded area. Nestor’s old hole was gone, filled in by the graders.

  “We’ve scraped the earth down to within about three feet of the top of the rock,” Glinn said, “taking samples of each layer. We’ll grade off most of the rest, and then switch to trowels and brushes for the last foot. We don’t want to so much as even bruise the meteorite.”

  “Good man,” Lloyd answered.

  Garza and Rochefort were standing together by the line of graders. Now Rochefort came over to join them, his face purple with windburn.

  “Ready?” Glinn asked.

  Rochefort nodded. The graders were manned and idling, their exhausts sending up plumes of smoke and steam.

  “No problems?” Lloyd asked.

  “None.”

  Glinn glanced over toward the graders and gave a thumbs-up to Garza. The engineer, wearing his usual athletic warm-ups, turned, held up his fist and cranked it in a circle, and the graders rumbled to life. They moved forward slowly, diesel smoke fouling the air, lowering their blades until they bit into the ground.

  Behind the lead grader, several white-jacketed workers walked, sample bags in their hands. They picked up pebbles and dirt exposed by the graders and dropped them in the bags for later examination.

  The line of graders made a pass over the area, removing six inches of dirt. Lloyd grimaced as he watched. “I hate to think of those big blades passing so close to my meteorite.”

  “Don’t worry,” Glinn said. “We’ve factored in elbow room. There’s no chance of them damaging it.”

  The graders made another pass. Then Amira came slowly through the center of the graded area, wheeling a proton magnetometer across the ground. At the far end, she stopped, punched some buttons on the machine’s front panel, and tore off the narrow piece of paper that emerged. She came up to them, trundling the magnetometer behind her.

  Glinn took the paper. “There it is,” he said, handing it to Lloyd.

  Lloyd grasped the paper and McFarlane leaned over to look. A faint, erratic line represented the ground. Beneath, much darker, was the top edge of a large, semicircular shape. The paper shook in Lloyd’s powerful hands. McFarlane thought, God, there really is something down there. He hadn’t quite believed it, not until now.

  “Fifteen inches to go,” said Amira.

  “Time to switch to archaeological mode,” Glinn said. “We’re sinking our hole in a slightly different place from where Masangkay dug, so we can sample undisturbed earth above.”

  The group followed him across the freshly exposed gravel. Amira took some more readings, tapped a few stakes into the ground, gridded it off, and snapped some chalk strings to make a square two meters on a side. The group of laborers came forward and began carefully troweling dirt from the square.

  “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.

  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.

&nbs
p; “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.