Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  There was more discussion, lost in the roar of the wind as the ship came up to the summit of the following wave. Glinn was at the keyboard, ready to enter the command, the code that only he knew, which would open the dead man’s doors and drop the meteorite. But he wasn’t typing—as Garza knew he wouldn’t. His long white hands fell away from the keys, and he turned slowly to face the others. “The ship will survive.”

  Cut back to the hold. There he, Garza, was again. The meteorite had shifted, several wooden beams had splintered, and the cradle looked bent. “Eli!” he was calling into the radio. “The web is failing!”

  He heard Britton’s voice on the ship’s radio, ordering him to throw the dead man’s switch. His voice answered, “Only Eli has the codes.”

  Britton’s furious answer: “Mr. Garza, order your men to abandon stations.”

  Cut back to the bridge: Glinn refusing steadfastly to jettison the meteorite, despite now universal entreaties.

  And then came the key command, from Captain Britton to the first officer: “All hands, abandon stations. We will abandon ship. Initiate 406 MHz beacon, all hands to the lifeboats.”

  As First Officer Howell broadcast the order over the ship’s intercom, Britton left the bridge.

  27

  AT THE REQUEST of Ronald—a request it had seemed wise to comply with—Sam McFarlane left his battered roller bag in Dr. Hassenpflug’s office and followed the burly, red-haired orderly down echoing corridors and beneath the ornately carved archways of the Neo-Gothic mansion named Dearborne Park. At last, a door of heavy steel sprang open with the clicking of locks, revealing an elegant reception room. Yet as McFarlane looked around he realized this was an orchestrated illusion. The expensive landscapes in oil that hung on the walls were encased in clear Plexiglas. The plush armchairs and sofas had their legs discreetly bolted to the floor. There were no sharp objects anywhere in sight. This, he realized, was not only a reception room, but also an asylum—a lavish, expensive asylum.

  At the far end of the room, an elderly man sat in a high-backed chair. The stiffness and rigidity of the man’s posture radiated a pride that was at odds with the straitjacket snugged tightly around his arms and torso. The man looked at him, his blue eyes glittering with recognition. An orderly had been feeding him some kind of crimson liquid through a plastic cup fitted with a straw. “Take that away,” Palmer Lloyd said in a sharp aside. Then he turned his focus back on McFarlane.

  “Sam. Come closer.”

  But McFarlane did not move. He’d recognized Lloyd’s distinctive voice immediately, of course, when he’d received that call on his cell phone in Santa Fe. Ever since, he’d been mentally preparing himself for this meeting. But now, actually seeing the man in person, he was unprepared for the storm of emotions—anger, hatred, guilt, remorse, grief—that washed over him.

  “What the fuck do you want?” he asked, his voice sounding strange and husky in his own ears.

  Lloyd’s seamed but still vigorous-looking face broke into a smile. “Ha ha!” he laughed. “That’s the Sam I remember.” He pierced McFarlane with his eyes. “That’s the Sam I need. Come closer.”

  This time, McFarlane complied.

  “Guess who came to see me a few weeks ago, Sam?” Lloyd asked.

  McFarlane did not reply. He was shocked by the look in the man’s eyes. The failure of the expedition, the sinking of the Rolvaag, had, he knew, touched all its survivors in one way or another. He’d heard Lloyd had taken it particularly badly. But to see this powerful, confident billionaire reduced to such a state was difficult to take in.

  “Eli Glinn came to see me,” Lloyd said.

  “Glinn?”

  “Ah! Ah, ha! I can see just by looking at your face that you hate him as much as I do.”

  McFarlane grasped the arms of a nearby chair, lowered himself into it. “What did he want?”

  “What do you suppose the son of a bitch wanted? What we all want.” Lloyd glanced at the two orderlies, then leaned in and lowered his voice. “To kill that thing.”

  McFarlane went rigid. For the past five years, as he’d drifted from one place to another—unable to hold a job, disdainful of attachments, restless, aimless, yet never for one minute at peace—he’d been haunted by their shared past. He knew that “thing” Lloyd was referring to. It had never been far from his mind.

  Looking intently at McFarlane’s expression, Lloyd nodded. “We both hate the man. Don’t we, Sam? It was his fault—all his fault.”

  “Not just his,” McFarlane said. “Yours, too.”

  Lloyd sat back up in his chair. “Mine!” He gave a harsh laugh. “Oh—I suppose you’re blaming me for roping you into the expedition in the first place? For ruining your life?” His voice rose tremulously. “As I recall, your life was ruined already. Have you forgotten the Tornarssuk meteorite? I gave you a chance for redemption. It was Glinn, not I, who took that chance away—and you know it.”

  The orderly named Ronald, standing near the door, stirred. “Don’t excite the patient,” he warned.

  Immediately Lloyd became calm again. He gestured for the other orderly to give him a sip from the plastic cup. “What have you been doing with yourself, Sam?” he asked in a quieter voice. “Other than peddling worthless meteorites, I mean.”

  “This and that.”

  “Such as?”

  McFarlane shrugged. “Taught geology at a community college for a while. Worked at a steel mill in Braddock, Pennsylvania.”

  “But you couldn’t stay still, could you? The demons kept driving you on, right? Ha! Well, it turns out you’re not the only one. Glinn, too. He came to see me with that right-hand man of his, Garza, and some younger fellow, can’t recall his name. Seems he’s been haunted by that thing we planted in the South Atlantic all this time, too.” Lloyd leaned in again. “Except his demons are worse than ours. He didn’t throw the dead man’s switch. He sank the Rolvaag. He killed a hundred and eight people. Worst of all: he left that thing there, all these five years. He let it grow. Grow, grow, until now it’s—”

  “Mr. Lloyd,” Ronald said, mildly but firmly.

  “What?” Lloyd said, craning his neck around to look at the orderly. “I’m just talking to an old friend.” He turned back to McFarlane. Now his tone became hurried, almost anxious, as if he knew his time was short. “I’ve thought about Glinn’s visit, ever since he left. I’ve thought about nothing else. He’s going back there, Sam—after all these years. I thought his inaction was cowardice. But it wasn’t that. It was a question of money. Now he’s got it. And he’s down there by now. God only knows what’s going on there, this very minute.”

  He made a gesture from beneath the straitjacket, as if desirous of grasping McFarlane’s hand. The chains on his legs clinked as he shifted in his chair. “But I know what’s going to happen. If you have any brains, you know, too. He’s going to fail—again. He’s born to failure; he seeks it out. The patterns of thought that doomed the Rolvaag are going to doom this expedition, too. He’s acting egotistically, judgment clouded. He’s got no humility, no sense of the uncontrollable randomness of events. He’s made a living out of solving engineering problems, terrestrial engineering problems—and this isn’t like that at all. Oh, no, not at all.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” McFarlane asked.

  “Why do you think, man? You have to go down there. He needs your expertise. Your familiarity with those bad old days. Your ability to stand up to him, tell him he’s wrong to his face. Damn it, he needs somebody who was as—as close—to that thing as he was. He needs an interfering angel—someone as wrecked as he is!”

  “Go yourself,” McFarlane said.

  For a moment, Lloyd stared at him in surprise. Then he dissolved into laughter once again. “Go myself? These gentlemen would protest. Besides, even if they let me out of these restraints, I’d never make it past the front door. I’ve thought of a hundred, a thousand, ways to kill myself. I’d be dead within sixty seconds of being free.” Lloyd stopped lau
ghing. “Look, it’s not a question of money, you have to go, and go now, I’ll bankroll you—”

  “So you’re as big a coward as you thought Glinn was,” McFarlane interrupted. “You know what’s going to happen—what that seed will do to the world—and you can’t stand the thought of it. So you want out before it happens.”

  “Sir—” Ronald said in another warning tone.

  “Well, you know what? You’re right. We’re all dead—or will be, soon. And a good thing. I’ve wandered the world for five years now, and in all that time I haven’t seen a whole hell of a lot worth saving. I hope that thing does destroy humanity—before we go out and ruin the galaxy. Good riddance to us. And you especially.”

  For a moment, Lloyd stared in mute surprise. Then his face colored with rage. “You…How dare you come here and patronize me with your insectile world-weariness, your faux ennui! You’re worse than he is. You disgust me! You’re dogshit! You’re…no, wait! Don’t go. Come back, Sam—don’t go! Don’t go!”

  But McFarlane had risen and was heading quickly for the door—even as the orderlies were hurrying to escort him bodily from Dearborne Park.

  28

  IN THE VIDEO room, Garza glanced at Glinn to see how he was taking it. Once again, he could only marvel at the man’s coolness.

  The video now cut to several quick shots of the ship’s corridors; the running of personnel to the lifeboats; and then to the lifeboats themselves, enclosed orange boats that were not on davits but of the free-fall type, in which the lifeboat sits on a downward-facing track and is launched by sliding off the main vessel.

  Back to the bridge. Everyone had abandoned their stations save for First Officer Howell and the helmsman. The helmsman would die, Garza knew, but Howell would survive. But where had the captain gone? Garza recalled that he himself had ordered his men to abandon their stations and then had followed the captain’s orders, leaving the hold and proceeding to his own assigned abandon station: one of the free-fall lifeboats.

  Another cut to the hold. Glinn could now be seen arriving at the upper catwalk, greeted by the Tierra del Fuegan, Puppup. The hold elevator was broken, and so Glinn began climbing down to the lower catwalk around the cradle, clinging to the ladder as the ship heeled and the ladder departed from the vertical. The hold was filled with the sound of groaning steel and cracking wood. The tarp around the meteorite had torn, exposing its massive crimson surface.

  Garza peered more closely at the screen. Fascination was now replacing his initial shock and horror. These were images he had never seen; events he had never known. Glinn, of course, had never spoken of them.

  Glinn began working the rubber-coated chains that had shaken loose, using the motor-assist to tighten them back around the meteorite. Puppup was helping him, their conversation partially drowned out by noise.

  Then another figure suddenly appeared on the upper catwalk: Captain Britton. “Eli!” she called in a loud voice. “The ship’s about to break up!”

  Glinn said nothing. He continued to work with Puppup, trying to retighten the chains, which had ratcheted loose in the previous roll. Garza himself had tried again and again to tighten the chains in the same way, only to have them slide back out under the immense weight of the meteorite with each roll of the ship, as the ratcheting gears were becoming stripped.

  “Come back to the bridge with me,” she called out. “There may still be time to trigger the switch. Both of us can still live.”

  Now Glinn shouted back, “Sally, the only people who are going to die are the foolish ones in the lifeboats. If you stay here, you’ll survive.”

  The ship heeled once again; the meteorite shuddered; and still the captain pleaded with Glinn to abandon ship. But Glinn refused to stop work on the chains, even as the ship rolled again, more dreadfully, the hold a riot of screeching, tearing metal, the great meteorite shifting with a sound like thunder.

  “I could love you, Eli…” came Britton’s last call to him, but he ignored her—and then she disappeared.

  Her body had been found in the electronics hub of the ship; Garza guessed she must have been trying to bypass the codes and trigger the dead man’s switch from there.

  I could love you, Eli. My God. Garza had had no idea. He hadn’t known just how much Glinn held back from him—just how much he’d been keeping bottled up all these years. No wonder the man had fallen apart on the bridge at the sight of Britton’s body.

  As he watched, the ship continued its long roll. And there was Glinn, climbing on top of the rock itself, holding a wrench, attempting to tighten the chain bolts by hand—a completely insane undertaking. He straddled the massive rock, crisscrossed with ropes and chains, like Captain Ahab astride Moby Dick, wrench in hand, desperately flailing and struggling with a massive chain shackle.

  There was a tearing sound as the meteorite shifted and the tarps rent, the meteorite now almost completely naked, its strange, crimson surface practically glowing. Hull rivets began popping. And still the ship yawed on its side, more and more steeply. There was an almost bestial sound of rending metal, a shower of sparks, a ratcheting of chains…and the web unraveled. The meteorite rolled out of its cradle, almost leisurely, Glinn atop it; the rock impacted the web of struts and beams, splintering wood and pushing steel aside like butter, descending slowly but inevitably in the inexorable pull of gravity. The ship was now canted almost on its side. The hull began to unzip and the sea came roaring in, white with fury. As Garza watched, the meteorite came in contact with the seawater.

  At this point, Nishimura had slowed the video. It now progressed frame by single frame. As the water hit the surface of the meteorite, it seemed to froth or boil, and the meteorite’s skin appeared to split apart and contract, exposing a glassy interior. It reminded Garza of a chrysalis splitting to release a butterfly.

  Now the video slowed even more, one frame every second. The boiling of the water around the meteorite intensified, and the red skin of the rock peeled away explosively as the translucent insides appeared to swell; the water rushing into the hold frothed around it; a rippling flash of white light erupted from the interior of the meteorite; Glinn disappeared—and then the video froze.

  “That,” said Nishimura, “is the last frame before the feed went dark. I’ve enhanced it as much as possible.”

  The image showed the interior of the meteorite, filled with light; and there, suspended in the middle, was the brown, ropy, engorged, melon-shaped thing resembling a brain that they had seen encased in the trunk of the Baobab.

  After lingering on this final image, the monitor went dark and the lights came up. After a moment, Glinn rose and, at last, faced the others. Garza was bathed in sweat, profoundly shaken by what he had seen. Reliving the nightmare had been bad enough, but witnessing the unexpected profession of love on the part of Britton, and the callous rejection by Glinn…It was too much.

  Glinn was standing before them, silently. A strange expression was on his face. For a moment, Garza worried he would collapse again. A single shudder passed through his frame. And then the moment, whatever it was, passed. His look became as cool, as detached, as unreadable, as always.

  He cleared his throat. “Dr. Nishimura and Dr. Sax are analyzing that final image, but it appears that on contact with salt water, the object, which as we now know was not a meteorite, underwent an explosive sprouting or hatching event.” He glanced around. “We hope these last few seconds of footage will provide some insight into the creature’s life cycle and vulnerabilities. In particular, whether that object inside the creature, visible in the final frame, is in fact its brain.”

  Glinn looked around. “Are there any questions?”

  Total silence. People were too shaken up to ask questions now, although they would surely have some later. Having seen what happened, Garza marveled that Glinn had survived at all; the explosion, evidently tamped by water, had blown him free with just enough force to propel him beyond the sinking ship but not enough to kill him. Many others hadn’t been so lu
cky; and some, like Britton, had refused to abandon ship.

  “If anyone has any insights or theories,” said Glinn, “please bring them privately to me. Recall that the details of what you have just seen should be kept confidential—for obvious reasons. And now, good morning.”

  And with that he turned and left the forensic lab without another word.

  29

  ROSEMARIE WONG WAS used to working in labs full of male jerks, but Prothero really took the cake. He was a jackass—a brilliant jackass. And not just brilliant, but a truly creative scientist, something as rare in science as it was in music or literature. He was someone who habitually thought outside the box, whose mind made startling connections across entire categories, who cleaved mundane reality to find the gem within, and whose acidic skepticism ate away at even the most universally accepted truths. Many of his intellectual leaps were crazy, but once in a while they were not. When she had started working with him two years ago, he had just gone through a string of lab assistants, one after the other, nobody lasting more than a few months. Wong had decided that, come hell or high water, she was going to get along with this prize ass because she believed he was a great scientist who, someday, was bound to go somewhere unusual. Somewhere important. And when that day came, she would be there with him.

  In this, she had been spectacularly correct. This secret mission to the South Atlantic was giving Wong a chance to do science beyond her wildest dreams. Just to be part of humanity’s first encounter with an alien life-form was mind blowing. If it meant she had to put up with world-class asininity, juvenile crudeness, and preteen temper tantrums on a daily basis, that was the price to pay. As a protective carapace, she had developed a sort of sarcastic, bantering relationship with him that seemed to earn at least a modicum of his respect—and kept his nasty temper at bay. She also had come to realize the vulgar nastiness was a form of respect: it was Prothero demonstrating to her that he wasn’t going to treat her nicely or gently, because he considered her his equal.