The Ice Limit

by Douglas Preston; Lincoln Child

  The last half hour had seen a frenzy of activity. The corrugated-metal shack that shielded the meteorite from view had been moved to one side, and the area above the rock had been freshly bladed down to dirt, a dark brown scar on the white fairyland of snow. A small army of workers swarmed about, each at some obscure task. The radio traffic had been a perfect Babel of technical incomprehension.

  Outside, a deep-throated whistle blew. McFarlane felt his pulse quicken.

  The door to the hut banged open and Amira entered, a wide smile on her face. Coming in behind, Glinn closed the door carefully, then went to stand behind Rochefort. “Lift sequence ready?” he asked.

  “Check.”

  Glinn lifted a radio and spoke into it. “Mr. Garza? Five minutes to lift. Please monitor this frequency.” He dropped the radio and glanced at Amira, who had taken a seat at a nearby console and was fitting an earphone. “Servos?”

  “On line,” she replied.

  “So what will we see?” McFarlane asked. Already, he could anticipate Lloyd’s barrage of questions during the next videoconference.

  “Nothing,” said Glinn. “We’re only raising it six centimeters. There might be a little crackling of the earth above.” He nodded to Rochefort. “Bring the jacks up to sixty tons each.”

  Rochefort’s hands moved across the keyboard. “Jacks are uniformly engaging. No slippage.”

  There was a faint, subaudible vibration in the ground. Glinn and Rochefort bent close to the screen, examining the data that scrolled past. They seemed perfectly calm and unconcerned. Typing, waiting, typing some more. It seemed so routine. Not exactly the kind of meteorite hunting McFarlane was used to: digging in some sheikh’s backyard by moonlight, heart in mouth, muffling every bite of the shovel.

  “Bring the jacks up to seventy,” said Glinn.

  “Done.”

  There was a long, boring wait.

  “Damn,” Rochefort muttered. “I’m getting no movement. Nothing.”

  “Bring them up to eighty.”

  Rochefort tapped on some keys. There was a pause, then he shook his head.

  “Rachel?” Glinn asked.

  “Nothing wrong with the servos.”

  There was another silence, longer this time.

  “We should have seen movement at sixty-seven tons per jack.” Glinn waited a moment, then spoke again. “Raise it to one hundred.”

  Rochefort tapped the keyboard. McFarlane glanced at the two faces illuminated in the gleam of Rochefort’s monitor. Suddenly, the tension in the hut had risen dramatically.

  “Nothing?” asked Glinn, something like concern in his voice.

  “It’s still sitting there.” Rochefort’s face was even more pinched than usual.

  Glinn straightened up. He slowly walked to the window, his fingers squeaking on the glass as he cleared a hole through the frost.

  Minutes crawled by while Rochefort remained glued to the computer and Amira monitored the servos. Then Glinn turned.

  “All right. Let’s lower the jacks, examine the settings, and try again.”

  Suddenly a strange keening seemed to fill the room, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was almost ghostly. McFarlane felt his skin crawl.

  Rochefort was suddenly intent on the monitor. “Slumping in sector six,” he said, his fingers flying over the keyboard.

  The sound subsided.

  “What the hell was that?” McFarlane asked.

  Glinn shook his head. “It looks like we might have lifted the meteorite just a millimeter in sector six, but then it subsided and pushed the jacks back.”

  “Getting another shift,” Rochefort said suddenly, a note of alarm in his voice.

  Glinn strode over and peered at the screen. “It’s asymmetrical. Lower the jacks to ninety, quickly.”

  A patter of keystrokes, and Glinn stepped back, frowning. “What’s with sector six?”

  “The jacks seemed to have locked at a hundred tons,” Rochefort said. “They won’t go down.”

  “Your analysis?”

  “The rock may be settling toward that sector. If so, a lot of weight has just shifted onto them.”

  “Zero out all the jacks.”

  To McFarlane, the scene seemed almost surreal. There was no sound, no dramatic subterranean rumbling; just a group of tense people gathered around flickering monitors.

  Rochefort stopped typing. “All of sector six has locked up. The jacks must have frozen under the weight.”

  “Can we zero the rest?”

  “If I do that, the meteorite might destabilize.”

  “Destabilize,” McFarlane repeated. “You mean, as in tilt?”

  Glinn’s eyes glided toward him, then returned to the computer screen. “Suggestions, Mr. Rochefort?” he asked coolly.

  The engineer leaned back, licked the tip of his left index finger, and placed it against his right thumb. “Here’s what I think. We leave the jacks as is. Keep them in position. Then we release the fluid from the emergency hydraulic valves on the sector six jacks. Unfreeze them.”

  “How?” Glinn asked.

  After a moment, Rochefort replied, “Manually.”

  Glinn held up his radio. “Garza?”

  “Roger.”

  “You follow this?”

  “Roger that.”

  “Your opinion?”

  “I agree with Gene. We must’ve seriously underestimated the weight of this baby.”

  Glinn swiveled his gray eyes back to Rochefort. “And who do you suggest should drain the jacks?”

  “I wouldn’t ask anyone to do it but myself. Then we’ll let the meteorite settle back down to a stable resting place, set additional jacks, and try again.”

  “You’re going to need a second person,” came Garza’s voice over the radio. “That would be me.”

  “I’m not going to send both my chief engineer and my construction manager underneath that rock,” said Glinn. “Mr. Rochefort, analyze the risk.”

  Rochefort did some calculations on a pocket calculator. “The jacks are rated to stand maximum pressure for sixteen hours.”

  “What about higher-than-maximum? Assume one hundred percent above maximum.”

  “The time-failure rate gets shorter.” Rochefort made another series of calculations. “However, the chance of failure in the next thirty minutes is less than one percent.”

  “That’s acceptable,” said Glinn. “Mr. Rochefort, take a crew member of your choice along.” He glanced at his pocket watch. “You have thirty minutes from this moment, not one second more. Good luck.”

  Rochefort stood up and looked at them, his face pale. “Remember, sir, we don’t believe in luck,” he said. “But thank you all the same.”

  Isla Desolación,

  10:24 A.M.

  ROCHEFORT OPENED the door to the decrepit hut and moved the nail kegs aside, exposing the access tube and its halo of bright fluorescent light. He gripped the rungs of the ladder and began to descend, palmtop computer and radio jiggling on his belt. Evans followed behind, humming an off-key variant of “Muskrat Ramble.”

  The main emotion Rochefort felt was embarrassment. Brief as it was, the walk from the communications hut had taken an eternity. Although the staging area was deserted, he had nevertheless sensed dozens of eyes trained directly—and no doubt reproachfully—on his back.

  He had set fifty percent more jacks than deemed necessary. It was within EES operating guidelines, and it had seemed like a safe margin. But he had miscalculated. He should have invoked double overage, set two hundred jacks. But the time pressure had always been there, hovering over everything, flowing from Lloyd to Glinn and infecting everything they did. So Rochefort had suggested a hundred and fifty, and Glinn had not questioned his decision. The fact was, nobody had said anything to him about the mistake—or even hinted one was made. But that did not negate the fact that he had been wrong. And Rochefort could not bear to be wrong. He felt saturated by bitterness.

  Reaching the bottom, he moved quick
ly along the tunnel, ducking his head instinctively below the lines of fluorescent lights. Chains of ice crystals, formed from the condensed breath of the workers, stuck like feathers to the spars and trusses. Evans, coming up behind, dragged a finger through them as he whistled.

  Rochefort was humiliated, not worried. He knew that even if the jacks in sector six failed—a minuscule possibility—it was unlikely the meteorite would do anything except settle back down into place. It had sat there for untold millennia, and the forces of mass and inertia dictated it would probably stay that way. The worst-case scenario meant they’d be back where they started from.

  Back where they started from … His mouth set in a hard line. It meant setting more jacks, perhaps even digging a few more tunnels. He had strongly recommended to Glinn that all Lloyd Museum personnel be left behind; that it should be strictly an EES expedition; that Lloyd’s only personal involvement should be to take final possession of the meteorite and pay the bill. For some unknown reason of his own, Glinn had allowed Lloyd to get daily updates. This was the sort of thing that resulted.

  The tunnel reached sector one, then veered left at a ninety-degree angle. Rochefort followed the main tunnel another forty feet, then took one of the side branches that curved around toward the far side of the meteorite. The radio burbled and he pulled it from his belt. “Approaching sector six,” he said.

  “Diagnostics indicate that all jacks in that sector, with the exception of four and six, need to be unlocked,” said Glinn. “We estimate you can complete the task in sixteen minutes.”

  Twelve, thought Rochefort, but he responded, “Affirmative.”

  The side tunnel angled around the front of the meteorite and split into three access tubes. Rochefort chose the center tube. Ahead, he could see the jacks of sector six, yellow against the bloodred meteorite. They ran ahead in a long line from the end of the access tube. Walking forward, he examined all fifteen in turn. They looked perfectly secure, their claw feet firmly anchored to the base of the wall struts, servo cables running away in rivers of wire and cable. The jacks did not appear to have moved in the slightest. It was hard to believe they were each frozen under a hundred tons of strain.

  With a sigh of irritation, he crouched by the first jack. The belly of the meteorite curved above him, ribbed as smoothly and as regularly as if worked by a machine. Evans came forward with a small cami-tool for unlocking the hydraulic valves. “Looks like a great big bowling ball, doesn’t it?” he said cheerfully.

  Rochefort grunted and pointed toward the valve stem of the first jack. Evans knelt beside it, gripped the stem with his cami, and began to turn it gingerly.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not going to break,” Rochefort snapped. “Let’s move. We’ve got another twelve waiting.”

  More rapidly, Evans spun the stem through a ninety-degree twist. With a small hammer, Rochefort adroitly tapped out the manual slide on the rear of the jack, exposing the safety plate. A red light went on, indicating the valve was unlocked and ready to open.

  After the first jack, Evans grew less hesitant, and they began to work quickly in tandem, moving down the line, skipping the jacks numbered four and six. At the last jack, number fifteen, they stopped. Rochefort looked at his watch. It had taken only eight minutes. All that was left was to go back down the line, punching the release buttons on each valve. Although the fluid was under intense pressure, an internal regulator would ensure even drainage, slowly easing the load off the jack. Meanwhile, the controlling computer back in the communications hut would be lowering in tandem the hydraulic pressure on all the other jacks. The situation would return to normal, and then all they needed to do was set more jacks and try again. He’d do Glinn one better, set three hundred jacks. But they would need at least a day to ferry them over from the ship, get them in place, wire the servos, run diagnostics. They would need more tunnels, too … He shook his head. He should have started with three hundred the first time.

  “Feels hot in here,” said Evans, tugging back his hood.

  Rochefort didn’t answer. Heat and cold were one and the same to him. The two men turned and began walking down the line of jacks, stopping at each to raise the safety plate and push the emergency fluid release button.

  Halfway down the line, a faint, mouselike sound brought Rochefort to a halt.

  Although it was important to begin releasing fluid from all the jacks together, the sound was so unusual that Rochefort glanced down the row of jacks, trying to determine its source. It seemed to have come from the front of the row of jacks. As he looked in that direction, the sound came again: a kind of whispered, agonized creak. He narrowed his eyes. Jack number one didn’t look right; it seemed oddly crooked.

  He didn’t need time to think. “Get out!” he shouted. “Now!”

  He rose to his feet and sprinted for the access tube, Evans at his heels. He knew that there must be more weight on those jacks than they had guessed in even their most pessimistic assumptions: a lot more weight. Just how much more would determine whether they would get out in time.

  He could hear Evans running behind him, feet thudding, grunting with each step. But even before they reached the access tube the first jack gave with a terrifying crack, followed by a second crack, and then a third, as the jacks failed in sequence. There was a pause, then a stuttering series of pops, like a burst of machine gun fire, as the rest of the jacks failed. Instantly, Rochefort was surrounded by blinding sprays of hydraulic fluid. There was a sound like a whirr of a vast sewing machine as the tunnel’s struts and braces began to unravel. He ran desperately through the spray, the intense force of the pressurized fluid tearing his coat to ribbons and searing his flesh. He calculated that the probability of survival was dropping fast.

  He knew it was exactly zero when the meteorite tipped toward him with a great hollow boom, buckling steel as it came, squirting dirt and mud and ice, looming into his field of vision until all he saw was a shining, inexorable, pitiless red.

  Rolvaag,

  Noon

  WHEN MCFARLANE arrived at the Rolvaag’s library, he found a hushed group scattered among the chairs and couches. Shock and discouragement hung in the air. Garza stared, unmoving, out of the wall of windows, across the Franklin Channel toward Isla Deceit. Amira sat in a corner, knees huddled beneath her chin. Britton and First Mate Howell were speaking in low tones. Even the reclusive Dr. Brambell was on hand, drumming his fingers on the arms of his chair and glancing impatiently at his watch. Of the major players, only Glinn was absent. As McFarlane took a seat, the library door opened again and the head of EES slipped in, a slim folder beneath one arm. On his heels was John Puppup, his smile and sprightly step out of place among the somber group. McFarlane was not surprised to see him: though Puppup was disinclined to go ashore, while Glinn was on board the Rolvaag the Yaghan seemed perpetually at his side, following him around like a faithful dog.

  All eyes turned to Glinn as he stepped into the middle of the room. Privately, McFarlane wondered just how hard the man was taking all this: two of his men, including his chief engineer, dead. But he seemed, as usual, calm, neutral, unaffected.

  Glinn’s gray eyes flickered over the group. “Gene Rochefort had been with Effective Engineering Solutions from the beginning. Frank Evans was a relatively new employee, but his death is no less regretted. This is a tragedy for all of us in this room. But I’m not here to eulogize. Neither Gene nor Frank would have wanted that. We made an important discovery, but we made it the hard way. The Desolación meteorite is a great deal heavier than any of us predicted. Careful analysis of the failure data from the jacks, along with some highly sensitive gravimetric measurements, have given us a new and more accurate estimate of mass. And that mass is twenty-five thousand tons.”

  Despite his lingering sense of shock, McFarlane felt himself go cold at these words. He made a quick calculation: that gave it a specific gravity of about 190. One hundred and ninety times denser than water. A cubic foot of it would weigh … Good Lord. Almost six
tons.

  But two men were dead. Two more men, McFarlane corrected himself, thinking of the pathetic litter of bones that had been his ex-partner.

  “Double overage is our policy,” Glinn was saying. “We planned as if everything would be twice our best estimate—twice the expense, twice the effort—and twice the mass. That means we already planned for a rock that weighed almost this much. So I’m here to tell you that we can proceed on schedule. We still have the means at our disposal to retrieve it, bring it to the ship, and load it into the holding tank.”

  It seemed to McFarlane as if, mingled among Glinn’s cool tones, there was an odd note: of something almost like triumph.

  “Just a minute,” McFarlane said. “Two men just died. We have a responsibility—”

  “You are not responsible,” Glinn interrupted smoothly. “We are. And we’re fully insured.”

  “I’m not talking about insurance. I’m talking about two people’s lives. Two people were killed trying to move this meteorite.”

  “We took every reasonable precaution. The probability of failure was less than one percent. Nothing is free of risk, as you yourself so recently pointed out. And in terms of casualties, we’re actually on schedule.”

  “On schedule?” McFarlane could hardly believe what he heard. He glanced at Amira, and then at Garza, failing to see in their faces the outrage he felt. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “In any complex engineering situation, no matter how much care is taken, casualties occur. By this stage, we had expected two casualties.”

  “Jesus, that’s a heartless calculation.”

  “On the contrary. When the Golden Gate Bridge was being designed, it was estimated that three dozen men would lose their lives during construction. That was neither cold-blooded nor heartless—it was just part of the planning process. What is heartless is bringing people into danger without calculating the risk. Rochefort and Evans knew those risks, and accepted them.” Glinn looked straight at McFarlane, speaking almost in a monotone. “I assure you, I’m grieving in ways you will never know. But I was hired to retrieve this meteorite, and that’s what I intend to do. I can’t afford to let personal feelings cloud my judgment or weaken my resolve.”