The Ice Limit

by Douglas Preston; Lincoln Child

  “Tired.” She gave a wan smile. “And amazed.”

  “I’m eager to hear your report.”

  McFarlane squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. “Nothing’s written up yet. If you want a briefing, you’ll have to settle for a verbal one.”

  Glinn tented his gloved fingers together, nodding as McFarlane removed a dog-eared lab notebook from his jacket. Every breath was sending up a plume of frost. He opened it and flipped briefly through many pages of scribbled notes.

  “I want to say up front that this is just the beginning. Twelve hours gave us barely enough time to scratch the surface.”

  Glinn nodded again, silently.

  “I’ll describe the results of the tests, but I warn you: they don’t make a whole lot of sense. We started by trying to determine the metal’s basic properties—melting point, density, electrical resistance, atomic weight, valence—that sort of thing. First off, we heated a sample to find its melting point. We brought it up to over fifty thousand degrees K, vaporizing the gold substrate. It still remained solid.”

  Glinn’s eyes were half-lidded. He murmured, “So that’s how it survived the impact.”

  “Exactly,” said Amira.

  “Then we tried to use a mass spectrometer to find its atomic weight. Because of the high melting point, the experiment didn’t fly. Even with the microprobe, we couldn’t get it to remain a gas long enough to run the test.”

  McFarlane flipped some pages. “Likewise with specific gravity. The microprobe didn’t give us a large enough sample to determine that. It appears to be chemically inactive—we hit it with every solvent, acid, and reactive substance we could find in the lab at room temperature and pressure, as well as at high temperatures and pressures. Totally inert. It’s like a noble gas, except it’s solid. No valence electrons.”

  “Go on.”

  “Then we wired it up to test its electromagnetic properties. And that’s when we hit pay dirt. Basically, the meteorite seems to be a room-temperature superconductor: it conducts electricity without resistance. You put a current into it, and it will circulate forever unless something breaks it out.”

  If he was surprised at this, Glinn did not show it.

  “Then we hit it with a beam of neutrons. It’s a standard test on an unknown material: the neutrons cause the material to emit X rays, which tell you what’s inside it. But in this case, the neutrons just disappeared. Swallowed up. Gone. It did the same thing with a beam of protons.”

  Now Glinn raised his eyebrows.

  “That would be like shooting a forty-four magnum at a piece of paper, and having the bullet vanish into the paper,” said Amira.

  Glinn looked at her. “Any explanation?”

  She shook her head. “I tried to do a quantum mechanical analysis of what might be happening. No luck. It appears to be impossible.”

  McFarlane continued to flip through his notes. “The last test we did was X-ray diffraction.”

  “Explain,” Glinn murmured.

  “You shine X rays through the material, then you make a picture of the diffraction pattern that results. A computer reverse-engineers those patterns and tells you what kind of crystal lattice generated them. Well, we got a seriously weird diffraction pattern—virtually fractal. Rachel wrote a program that tried to calculate what kind of crystal structure would produce such a pattern.”

  “It’s still trying,” Amira said. “It’s probably gagged on it by now. It’s one hell of a computation, if it can be done at all.”

  “One other thing,” said McFarlane. “We used fission-track analysis to date the coesite from the staging area. We’ve now got a date on when the meteorite struck: thirty-two million years ago.”

  As he listened, Glinn’s gaze had slowly dropped to the frozen dirt floor. “Conclusions?” he said at last, very quietly.

  “They’re very preliminary,” McFarlane said.

  “Understood.”

  McFarlane took a deep breath. “Have you heard of the hypothetical ‘island of stability’ on the periodic table?”

  “No.”

  “For years, scientists have been searching for heavier and heavier elements higher on the periodic table. Most of the ones they’ve found are very short-lived: they last only a few billionths of a second before they decay into some other element. But there’s a theory that way, way up on the periodic table might be a group of elements that are stable—that don’t decay. An island of stability. Nobody knows what kind of properties these elements would have, but they would be extremely strange, and very, very heavy. You couldn’t synthesize them even with the largest of today’s particle accelerators.”

  “And you think this might be such an element?”

  “I’m fairly sure of it, actually.”

  “How would such an element be created?”

  “Only in the most violent event in the known universe: a hypernova.”

  “A hypernova?”

  “Yes. It’s much bigger than a supernova. It occurs when a giant star collapses into a black hole, or when two neutron stars collide to form a black hole. For about ten seconds, a hypernova produces as much energy as the rest of the known universe put together. Such a thing just might have enough energy to create these strange elements. It also might have had enough energy to accelerate this meteorite into space at a speed that would carry it across the vast distances between stars, to land on Earth.”

  “An interstellar meteorite,” Glinn said in a flat tone.

  McFarlane noticed, with surprise, a brief but significant exchange of glances between Glinn and Amira. He tensed immediately, but Glinn merely nodded.

  “You’ve given me more questions than answers.”

  “You gave us only twelve hours.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Let’s return to the most basic question,” Glinn said. “Is it dangerous?”

  “We don’t have to worry about it poisoning anybody,” said Amira. “It’s not radioactive or reactive. It’s totally inert. I believe it’s safe. I wouldn’t, however, mess around with it electrically. Being a room-temperature superconductor, it has powerful and strange electromagnetic properties.”

  Glinn turned. “Dr. McFarlane?”

  “It’s a mass of contradictions,” McFarlane said, keeping his voice neutral. “We haven’t discovered anything specifically dangerous. But then again, we haven’t shown it to be completely safe, either. We’ve got a second set of tests running now, and if that sheds any more light we’ll let you know. But it will take years to really answer these questions, not twelve hours.”

  “I see.” Glinn sighed, a small hissing sound that in anybody else would have been irritation. “As it happens, we have discovered something about the meteorite that may be of interest to you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’d originally estimated it to be about twelve hundred cubic meters in size, or about forty-two feet in diameter. Garza and his crew have been mapping the external contours of the meteorite as they prepare these tunnels. It turns out the meteorite is a lot smaller than we believed. It’s only about twenty feet in diameter.”

  McFarlane’s mind tried to fit this fact in. In an odd way, he felt disappointment. It wasn’t much bigger than the Ahnighito, at the museum in New York.

  “It’s difficult to measure its mass at this point,” Glinn said. “But all indications are that the meteorite still weighs at least ten thousand tons.”

  McFarlane suddenly forgot his disappointment. “That means it has a specific gravity of—”

  “Jesus, at least seventy-five,” said Amira.

  Glinn raised an eyebrow. “And what does that signify?”

  “The two heaviest known elements are osmium and iridium,” Amira said. “They each have a specific gravity of around twenty-two. With a specific gravity of seventy-five, this meteorite is more than three times denser than any known element on Earth.”

  “There’s your proof,” murmured McFarlane. He felt his heart pounding.
>
  “I’m sorry?” said Glinn.

  It was as if a weight was suddenly plucked from McFarlane’s shoulders. He looked Glinn in the face. “There can’t be any doubt now. It’s interstellar.”

  Glinn remained inscrutable.

  “There’s no way anything that dense originated in our solar system. It must have come from somewhere else. A place in the universe very different from our own. The region of a hypernova.”

  There was a very long moment of silence. McFarlane could hear workmen shouting in the distant tunnels, and the muffled sound of jackhammers and welding. Finally Glinn cleared his throat. “Dr. McFarlane,” he began quietly. “Sam. I apologize if I seem doubtful. Understand that we’re operating outside the parameters of any conceivable model. There’s no precedent to guide us. I realize you haven’t had adequate time for your tests. But our window of opportunity is about to close. I want your best guess—as a scientist, and as a human being—whether it’s safe to proceed, or whether we should close down the operation and go home.”

  McFarlane took a deep breath. He understood what Glinn was asking. But he also knew, quite clearly, what Glinn had left unsaid. As a scientist, and as a human being … Glinn was asking him to look at the question objectively—not as the man who betrayed his friend over this precise thing five years before. Several pictures flashed through his mind: Lloyd, pacing before his pyramid; the glittering black eyes of the destroyer comandante; the broken, weathered bones of his dead partner.

  McFarlane began slowly. “It’s been lying here for thirty-two million years without apparent problems. But the truth is, we don’t know. All I can say is, this is a scientific discovery of the highest importance. Are the risks worth it? Nothing truly great is ever accomplished without risk.”

  Glinn’s eyes seemed to go very far away. His expression was as unreadable as always, but McFarlane sensed he had articulated the man’s own thoughts.

  Glinn pulled out his pocket watch, opening it with a smart snap of his wrist. He had made a decision. “We’ll lift the rock in thirty minutes. Rachel, if you and Gene will test the servo connections, we’ll be ready.”

  McFarlane felt a sudden flood of emotion—excitement or anticipation, he couldn’t be precisely sure.

  “We have to be topside for those tests,” Garza said, glancing at his watch. “Nobody is allowed down here.”

  The feeling ebbed quickly. “I thought you said it was completely safe,” McFarlane said.

  “Double overage,” Glinn murmured. Then, leading the way, he walked out of the storage vault and led the way down the narrow tunnel.

  Rolvaag,

  9:30 A.M.

  DR. PATRICK Brambell lay snug in his bunk, reading Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. The tanker rode peacefully in the sound, and the mattress was delightfully soft. The temperature in the medical suite had been cranked up to eighty-six degrees: exactly the way he liked it. Everyone but a skeleton crew was ashore, preparing to lift the meteorite, and the ship was quiet. He was aware of no discomfort, no annoyance in the world—save perhaps that his arm, which had been propping up the book in front of his nose for the last half hour, had begun to fall asleep. And that was a problem easily remedied. With a sigh of contentment, he transferred the book to his other hand, turned the page, and immersed himself again in Spenser’s elegant verse.

  Then he stopped. There was, in fact, one other annoyance. His glance fell reluctantly through the open doorway, past the hall and into the medical laboratory beyond. On a gleaming metal gurney sat the blue evidence locker, clasps loosened but lid unopened. There was something forlorn, almost reproachful, about it. Glinn wanted the examination by the end of the day.

  Brambell stared at it for a moment. Then he laid the book aside, rose regretfully from his bunk, and straightened his surgical smock. Though he rarely practiced medicine, and even more rarely performed surgery, he delighted in wearing a surgical smock and never took one off while awake. As a uniform, he found it vastly more intimidating than a policeman’s and only a little less so than the grim reaper’s. Surgical smocks, especially when flecked with blood, tended to hurry office visits along and speed unnecessary conversations.

  He stepped out of his cabin and paused in the long hallway of the medical suite, surveying the parallel lines of open doorways. Nobody in the waiting room. Ten beds, all empty. It was most satisfactory.

  Entering the medical laboratory, he washed his hands in the oversized sink, then flicked the water from his fingers while turning in a small circle, in an irreverent imitation of a priest. Nudging the hot-air dryer with his elbow, he rubbed his knobbed old hands before the gush of air. As he did so, he gazed around at the neat rows of well-worn books: overflow from his cabin. Above them he had hung two pictures: a depiction of Jesus Christ, with the fire and thorns of the sacred heart; and a small, faded photograph of two identical babies in sailor suits. The picture of Christ reminded him of many things, some self-contradictory but always interesting. The picture of himself and his twin brother, Simon, who had been murdered by a mugger in New York City, reminded him of why he had never married or had children.

  He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, snapped on the ring light, and swiveled the magnifying glass into place over the gurney. Then he opened the evidence locker and stared disapprovingly at the jumble of bones. He could see right away that several were missing, and the rest had been tossed in higgledy-piggledy, with no regard for anatomy. He shook his wizened head at the general incompetence of the world.

  He began removing the bones, identifying them, and arranging them in their proper places on the gurney. Not much sign of animal damage, beyond the nibblings of rodents. Then his brow furrowed. The number of perimortem breaks was unusual, even remarkable. He paused, a nugget of bone suspended halfway between locker and gurney. Then, more slowly, he placed it on the metal surface. There was a stillness in the medical suite as Brambell stepped back, folded his green-suited arms, and stared at the remains.

  Ever since his Dublin childhood, his mother had entertained dreams of her twin lads growing up to be doctors. Ma Brambell had been an irresistible natural force, and so, like his brother Simon, Patrick had gone to medical school. While Simon had relished the job and gone on to great acclaim as a medical examiner in New York, Patrick found himself resenting the time away from literature. Over the years, he had gravitated to ships, most recently to large tankers, where the crews were small and the accommodations comfortable. And so far, the Rolvaag had lived up to his expectations. No parade of broken bones, raging fevers, or dripping cases of clap. Aside from a few bouts of seasickness, a sinus infection, and of course Glinn’s preoccupation with the meteorite hunter, he had been left to read his books. Until now.

  But as he stared at the collection of broken bones, Brambell felt an uncharacteristic curiosity stirring within him. The silence of the medical lab was broken by the whistled strains of “The Sprig of Shillelagh.”

  More quickly now, Brambell, whistling merrily, finished laying out the skeleton. He examined the effects: buttons, bits of clothing, an old boot. Of course there was only one boot; the daft beggars had missed the other. Along with the right clavicle, a piece of the ilium, the left radius, carpals and intercarpals … He made a mental list of the missing bones. At least the skull was there, if in several pieces.

  He bent closer. It, too, was webbed with perimortem fractures. The rim of the orbit was heavy; the mandible robust; definitely a male. From the state of the sutural closing he would be about thirty-five, maybe forty. A small man, no more than five foot seven, but powerfully built, with well-developed muscle attachments. Years of fieldwork, no doubt. This fit the profile of the planetary geologist Nestor Masangkay that Glinn had given him.

  Many of the teeth were snapped off at the root. It looked like the poor man had convulsed so hard in his death throes that he had broken all his teeth, and even split his jaw.

  Still whistling, Brambell turned his attention to the post-cranial skeleton. Virtually every bone that
could be broken was broken. He wondered what could have caused such massive trauma. It was apparently a blow to the front, striking simultaneously from toe to crown. He was reminded of a poor skydiver he had autopsied in medical school; the man had packed his chute wrong and fallen three thousand feet onto the middle of I-95.

  Brambell caught his breath, “The Sprig of Shillelagh” suddenly dying on his lips. He had been so caught up by the fracturing of the bones that he had not stopped to examine their other characteristics. But now, as he did so, he could see that the proximal phalanges showed flaking and crumbling characteristic of high heat—or severe burning. Almost all of the distal phalanges were missing, probably completely burned up. Toes and fingers. He bent closer. The broken teeth were scorched, the brittle enamel spalling off.

  His eyes made a circuit of the remains. The parietal showed heavy burn damage, the bone soft and crumbling. He bent down, sniffed. Ah, yes: he could even smell it. And what was this? Brambell picked up a belt buckle. The bloody thing was melted. And the single boot wasn’t just rotten—it too had burned. The bits of cloth were also scorched. That devil, Glinn, hadn’t mentioned a word of this, although he surely must have noticed.

  Then Brambell rocked back on his feet. It was with a twinge of regret that he realized there was no mystery here, after all. He now knew exactly how the prospector had died.

  In the dim light of the medical spaces, “The Sprig of Shillelagh” started up once again, the merry tune now sounding a little mournful, as Brambell carefully closed up the evidence locker and returned to his bunk.

  Isla Desolación,

  10:00 A.M.

  MCFARLANE STOOD at the frosted window of the communications center, melting a hole with his hand. Clouds hung heavy over the Jaws of Hanuxa, casting a pall of darkness over the Cape Horn islands. Behind him, Rochefort, more tense than usual, was typing at a Silicon Graphics workstation.