Ice Station

there existed the possibility that one of the residents of Wilkes might be a source of trouble.

'All right,' he said, looking at the door but addressing Hensleigh. 'Twenty-five words or less. What's his story?'

Sarah Hensleigh said, 'Renshaw is a geophysicist from Stanford, studying ice cores for his Ph.D. Bernie Olson is? was?his supervisor. Renshaw's work with ice cores was groundbreaking. He was digging core holes deeper than anybody had ever dug before, at times going nearly a kilometer below the surface.'

Schofield vaguely knew about ice core research. It involved drilling a circular hole about thirty centimeters wide down into the ice shelf and pulling out a cylinder of ice known as a core. Held captive within the core were pockets of gases that had existed in the air thousands of years before.

'Anyway,' Sarah said, 'a couple of weeks ago, Renshaw hit the big time. His drill must have hit a layer of upsurged ice?prehistoric ice that has been dislodged by an earthquake sometime in the past and pushed up toward the surface. Suddenly Renshaw was studying pockets of air that were as much as three hundred million years old. It was the discovery of a lifetime. Here was a chance to study an atmosphere that no one has ever known. To see what the earth's atmosphere was like before the dinosaurs.' Sarah Hensleigh shrugged. 'For an academic, something tike that is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It's worth a fortune on the lecture circuit alone.

'Only then it got better.

'A few days ago, Renshaw adjusted his drilling vector slightly?that's the angle at which you drill down into the ice?and at 1500 feet, in the middle of a four-hundred-million-year-old section of ice, he hit metal.'

Sarah paused, allowing what she had just said to sink in. Schofield said nothing.

Sarah said, 'We sent the diving bell down, did some sonic-resonance tests of the ice shelf, and discovered that there was a cavern of some sort right where this piece of prehistoric metal was supposed to be. Further tests showed that there was a tunnel leading up to this cavern from a depth of 3,000 feet. That was when we sent the divers down, and that was when Austin saw the spacecraft. And that was when all the divers disappeared.'

Schofield said, 'So what does all this have to do with Bernard Olson's death?'

Sarah said, 'Olson was Renshaw's supervisor. He was always looking over Renshaw's shoulder while Renshaw was making these amazing discoveries. Renshaw started to get paranoid. He started saying that Bernie was stealing his research. That Bernie was using his findings to write a quick-fire article himself and beat Renshaw to the punch.

'You see, Bernie had connections with the journals, knew some editors. He could get an article out within a month Renshaw, as an unknown Ph.D. student, would almost certainly take longer. He thought Bernie was trying to steal his pot of gold. And then when Renshaw discovered metal down in the cavern and he saw that Bernie was going to include that in his article, too, he flipped.'

'And he killed him?'

'He killed him. Last Friday night. Renshaw just went to Bernie's room and started yelling at him. We all heard it. Renshaw was angry and upset, but we'd heard it all before so we didn't think much of it. But this time, he killed him.'

'How?' Schofield continued to stare at the locked door.

'He?' Sarah hesitated. 'He jabbed Bernie in the neck with a hypodermic needle and injected the contents.'

'What was in the syringe?'

'Industrial-strength drain-cleaning fluid.'

'Charming,' Schofield said. He nodded at the door. 'He's in here?'

Sarah said, 'He locked himself in after it happened. Took a week's worth of food in with him and said that if any of us tried to go in there after him he'd kill us, too. It was terrifying. He was crazy. So one night?the night before we sent the divers down to investigate the cave?the rest of us got together and bolted the door shut from the outside. Ben Austin fixed some runners to the wall on either side of the door while the rest of us slid the beam into place. Then Austin used a rivet gun to seal the door shut.'

Schofield said, 'Is he still alive?'

'Yes. You can't hear him now, which means he's probably asleep. But when he's awake, believe me, you'll know it.'

'Uh-huh.' Schofield examined the edges of the door, saw the rivets holding it to the frame. 'Your friend did a good job with the door.' He turned around. 'If he's locked inside. That's good enough for me, if you're sure there's no other way out of that room.'

'This is the only entrance.'

'Yeah, but is there any other way out of the room? Could he dig his way out, say, through the walls, or the ceiling?'

'The ceilings and the floors are steel-lined, so he can't dig through them. And his room's at the end of the corridor, so there aren't any rooms on either side of it?the walls are solid ice,' Sarah Hensleigh gave Schofield a crooked smile. 'I don't think there's any way out of there.'

'Then we leave him in there,' Schofield said as he started walking back down the ice tunnel. 'We've got other things to worry about. The first of which is finding out what happened to your divers down in that cave.'

The sun shone brightly over Washington, D.C. The Capitol practically glowed white against the magnificent blue sky.

In a lavish red-carpeted corner of the Capitol Building, the meeting broke for recess. Folders were closed. Chairs were pushed back. Some of the delegates took off their reading glasses and rubbed their eyes. As soon as the recess was called, small clusters of aides immediately rushed forward to their bosses' sides with cellular phones, folders, and faxes.

'What are they up to?' the U.S. Permanent Representative, George Holmes, said to his aide as he watched the entire French delegation?all twelve of them?leave the negotiating room. 'That's the fourth time they've called a recess today.'

Holmes watched France's Chef de Mission?a pompous, snobbish man named Pierre Dufresne?leave the room at the head of his group. He shook his head in wonder.

George Holmes was a diplomat, had been all his life. He was fifty-five, short, and, though he hated to admit it, a little overweight.

Holmes had a round, moonlike face and a horseshoe of graying hair, and he wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that made his brown eyes appear larger than they really were.

He stood up and stretched his legs, looked around at the enormous meeting room. A huge circular table stood in the center of the room, with sixteen comfortable leather chairs placed at equal distances around its circumference.

The occasion, the reaffirmation of an alliance.

International alliances are not exactly the friendly affairs the TV news makes them out to be. When Presidents and Prime Ministers emerge from the White House and shake hands for the cameras in front of their interlocking flags, they belie the deal making, the promise breaking, the nit-picking, and the catfighting that go on in rooms not unlike the one in which George Holmes now stood. The smiles and the handshakes are merely the icing on very complex, negotiated cakes that are made by professional diplomats like Holmes.

International alliances are not about friendship. They are about advantage. If friendship brings advantage, then friendship is desirable. If friendship does not bring advantage, then perhaps merely civil relations may be all that is necessary. International friendship?in terms of foreign aid, military allegiance, and trade alignment?can be a very expensive business. It is not entered into lightly.

Which was the reason why George Holmes was in Washington on this bright summer's day. He was a negotiator. More than that, he was a negotiator skilled in the niceties and subtleties of diplomatic exchange.

And he would need all his skills in this diplomatic exchange, for this was no ordinary reaffirmation of an alliance.