The Ice Limit

Lloyd caught the past tense. 'What kind of ships?'

'Tankers and VLCCs.'

'I'm sorry?'

'Very Large Crude Carriers. Over two hundred and fifty thousand tons displacement. Tankers on steroids, basically.'

'She's gone around the Horn on several occasions,' said Glinn.

'Around the Horn? I didn't know that route was still used.'

'The big VLCCs can't go through the Panama Canal,' said Britton. 'The preferred route is around the Cape of Good Hope, but occasionally schedules require a Horn passage.'

'That's one reason we hired her,' said Glinn. 'The seas down there can be tricky.'

Lloyd nodded, still gazing at Britton. She returned the look calmly, unruffled by the pandemonium taking place below her. 'You know about our unusual cargo?' he asked.

She nodded.

'And you have no problem with it?'

She looked at him. 'I have no problem with it.'

Something in those clear green eyes told Lloyd a different story. He opened his mouth to speak, but Glinn interrupted smoothly. 'Come on,' he said. 'I'll show you the cradle.'

He motioned them farther down the catwalk. Here the ship's deck lay directly below, wreathed in clouds of welding smoke and diesel exhaust. Deckplates had been removed, exposing a vast hole in the ship. Manuel Garza, chief engineer for EES, stood at its edge, holding a radio to his ear with one hand and gesturing with the other. Catching sight of them overhead, he waved.

Peering down into the exposed space, Lloyd could make out an amazingly complex structure, with the elegance of a crystal lattice. Strings of yellow sodium lights along its edges made the dark hold sparkle and glow like a deep, enchanted grotto.

'That's the hold?' Lloyd asked.

'Tank, not hold. Number three center tank, to be precise. We'll be placing the meteorite at the very center of the ship's keel, to maximize stability. And we've added a passageway beneath the maindeck, running from the superstructure forward, to aid access. Note the mechanical doors we've installed on each side of the tank opening.'

The cradle was a long way down. Lloyd squinted against the glow of the countless lights.

'I'll be damned,' he said suddenly. 'Half of it's made of wood!' He turned to Glinn. 'Cutting corners already?'

The corners of Glinn's mouth jerked upward in a brief smile. 'Wood, Mr. Lloyd, is the ultimate engineering material.'

Lloyd shook his head. 'Wood? For a ten-thousand-ton weight? I can't believe it.'

'Wood is ideal. It gives ever so slightly, but never deforms. It tends to bite into heavy objects, locking them in place. The type of oak we're using, greenheart laminated with epoxy, has a higher shear strength than steel. And wood can be carved and shaped to fit the curves of the hull. It won't wear through the steel hull in a heavy sea, and it doesn't suffer metal fatigue.'

'But why so complicated an arrangement?'

'We had to solve a little problem,' said Glinn. 'At ten thousand tons, the meteorite must be absolutely locked into place, immobilized in the hold. If the Rolvaag encounters heavy weather on the way back to New York, even a tiny shift of the meteorite's position could fatally destabilize the ship. That network of timbers not only locks the thing into place, but distributes its weight evenly throughout the hull, simulating the loading of crude oil.'

'Impressive,' said Britton. 'You took the internal frames and partitioning into account?'

'Yes. Dr. Amira is a computational genius. She worked up a calculation that took all of ten hours on a Cray T3D supercomputer, but it gave us the configuration. We can't finish it, of course, until we get the exact dimensions of the rock. We've built this based on Mr. Lloyd's flyover data. But when we actually unearth the meteorite, we'll build a second cradle around it that we can plug into this one.'

Lloyd nodded. 'And what are those men doing?' He pointed to the deepest depths of the hold, where a gaggle of workmen, barely visible, were cutting through the hull plates with acetylene torches.

'The dead man's switch,' said Glinn evenly.

Lloyd felt a surge of irritation. 'You're not really going through with that.'

'We've already discussed it.'

Lloyd struggled to sound reasonable. 'Look. If you open up the bottom of the ship to dump the meteorite in the middle of some storm, the damn ship's going to sink anyway. Any idiot can see that.'

Glinn held Lloyd with his gray, impenetrable eyes. 'If the switch is thrown, it will take less than sixty seconds to open the tank, release the rock, and reseal it. The tanker won't sink in sixty seconds, no matter how heavy the seas are. On the contrary, the inrush of water will actually compensate for the sudden loss of ballast when the meteorite goes. Dr. Amira worked that all out, too. And a pretty little equation it was.'

Lloyd stared back at him. This man actually derived pleasure from having solved the problem of how to send a priceless meteorite to the bottom of the Atlantic. 'All I can say is, if anyone throws that dead man's switch on my meteorite, he's a dead man himself.'

Captain Britton laughed — a high, ringing sound that carried above the clangor below. Both men turned toward her. 'Don't forget, Mr. Lloyd,' she said crisply, 'it's nobody's meteorite yet. And there's a long stretch of water ahead of us before it is.'

Aboard the Rolvaag,

June 26, 12:35 A.M.

MCFARLANE STEPPED through the hatchway, carefully closed the steel door behind him, and walked out onto the fly deck. It was the very highest point of the ship's superstructure, and it felt like the roof of the world. The smooth surface of the Atlantic lay more than a hundred feet below him, dappled in faint starlight. The gentle breeze carried the distant cry of gulls, and smelled wonderfully of the sea.

He walked over to the forward railing and wrapped his hands around it. He thought about the huge ship that would be his home for the next few months. Directly below his feet lay the bridge. Below that lay a deck left mysteriously empty by Glinn. Farther below lay the rambling quarters of the senior officers. And a full six stories down, the maindeck, stretching ahead a sixth of a mile to the bow. An occasional dash of starlit spray washed over the forecastle head. The network of piping and tank valves remained, and placed around it were a maze of old containers — the laboratories and workspaces — like a child's woodblock city.

In a few minutes his presence would be required at the 'night lunch,' which would be their first formal meal on board ship. But he had come up here first to convince himself that the voyage had really begun.

He breathed in, trying to clear his head of the last frantic days, setting up labs and beta-testing equipment. He gripped the railing tighter, feeling a swell of exhilaration. This is more like it, he thought. Even a jail cell in Chile seemed preferable to having Lloyd constantly looking over his shoulder, second- guessing, worrying over trivial details. Whatever lay at the end of their journey — whatever it was that Nestor Masangkay had found — at least they were on their way.

McFarlane turned and made the long walk across the deck to the aft rail. Although the thrum of engines came faintly from the depths of the ship, up here he could feel no hint of vibration. In the distance he could see the Cape May lighthouse winking, one short, one long. After Glinn secured their clearance papers through some private means of his own, they had left Elizabeth under cover of darkness, maintaining secrecy to the last. They would soon be in the main shipping lanes, beyond the continental shelf, and would then turn due south. Five weeks from now, if all went as planned, they would see the same light again. McFarlane tried to imagine what it would be like if they did recover it successfully: the furious outcry, the scientific coup — and, perhaps, his own personal exoneration.

Then he smiled cynically to himself. Life didn't work like that. It was so much easier to see himself back again in the Kalahari, a little more money in his pocket, a little chubby from ship's food, tracking down the elusive Bushmen and renewing his search for the Okavango. And nothing would erase what he had done to Nestor —