The Ice Limit

'If we're going to christen this thing, has anybody thought up a name?' Amira asked.

'Sam here wants to call it the Masangkay meteorite,' Lloyd said. He paused. 'I'm inclined to go with the usual nomenclature and call it the Desolacion.'

There was an awkward silence.

'We've got to have a name,' Amira said.

'Nestor Masangkay made the ultimate sacrifice finding this meteorite,' said McFarlane in a low voice, looking hard at Lloyd. 'We wouldn't be here without him. On the other hand, you financed the expedition, so you've won the right to name the rock.' He continued gazing steadily at the billionaire.

When Lloyd spoke, his voice was unusually quiet. 'We don't even know if Nestor Masangkay would have wanted the honor,' he said. 'This isn't the time to break with tradition, Sam. We'll call it the Desolacion meteorite, but we'll name the hall it's in after Nestor. We'll erect a plaque, detailing his discovery. Is that acceptable?'

McFarlane thought a moment. Then he gave the briefest of nods.

Glinn passed the bottle to Lloyd, then rose. They all went out into the brilliant morning sun. As they walked, Glinn came up to McFarlane's side. 'Of course, you realize that at some point we're going to have to exhume your friend,' he said, nodding in the direction of the stone cairn.

'Why?' McFarlane asked, surprised.

'We need to know the cause of death. Dr. Brambell must examine the remains.'

'What for?'

'It's a loose end. I'm sorry.'

McFarlane began to object, then stopped. As usual, there was no arguing with Glinn's logic.

Soon they were standing along the edge of the graded area. Nestor's old hole was gone, filled in by the graders.

'We've scraped the earth down to within about three feet of the top of the rock,' Glinn said, 'taking samples of each layer. We'll grade off most of the rest, and then switch to trowels and brushes for the last foot. We don't want to so much as even bruise the meteorite.'

'Good man,' Lloyd answered.

Garza and Rochefort were standing together by the line of graders. Now Rochefort came over to join them, his face purple with windburn.

'Ready?' Glinn asked.

Rochefort nodded. The graders were manned and idling, their exhausts sending up plumes of smoke and steam.

'No problems?' Lloyd asked.

'None.'

Glinn glanced over toward the graders and gave a thumbs-up to Garza. The engineer, wearing his usual athletic warm-ups, turned, held up his fist and cranked it in a circle, and the graders rumbled to life. They moved forward slowly, diesel smoke fouling the air, lowering their blades until they bit into the ground.

Behind the lead grader, several white-jacketed workers walked, sample bags in their hands. They picked up pebbles and dirt exposed by the graders and dropped them in the bags for later examination.

The line of graders made a pass over the area, removing six inches of dirt. Lloyd grimaced as he watched. 'I hate to think of those big blades passing so close to my meteorite.'

'Don't worry,' Glinn said. 'We've factored in elbow room. There's no chance of them damaging it.'

The graders made another pass. Then Amira came slowly through the center of the graded area, wheeling a proton magnetometer across the ground. At the far end, she stopped, punched some buttons on the machine's front panel, and tore off the narrow piece of paper that emerged. She came up to them, trundling the magnetometer behind her.

Glinn took the paper. 'There it is,' he said, handing it to Lloyd.

Lloyd grasped the paper and McFarlane leaned over to look. A faint, erratic line represented the ground. Beneath, much darker, was the top edge of a large, semicircular shape. The paper shook in Lloyd's powerful hands. McFarlane thought, God, there really is something down there. He hadn't quite believed it, not until now.

'Fifteen inches to go,' said Amira.

'Time to switch to archaeological mode,' Glinn said. 'We're sinking our hole in a slightly different place from where Masangkay dug, so we can sample undisturbed earth above.'

The group followed him across the freshly exposed gravel. Amira took some more readings, tapped a few stakes into the ground, gridded it off, and snapped some chalk strings to make a square two meters on a side. The group of laborers came forward and began carefully troweling dirt from the square.

'How come the ground's not frozen?' asked McFarlane.

Glinn nodded upward at the four towers. 'We've bathed the area in far infrared.'

'You've thought of everything,' said Lloyd, shaking his head.

'You're paying us to do just that.'

The men proceeded to trowel out a neat cube, descending bit by bit, occasionally taking samples of minerals, gravel, and sand as they went. One of them stopped and held up a jagged object, sand adhering to its surface.

'That's interesting,' said Glinn, stepping forward quickly. 'What is it?'

'You got me,' said Amira. 'Strange. Looks almost like glass.'

'Fulgurite,' said McFarlane.

'What?'

'Fulgurite. It's what happens when a powerful bolt of lightning hits wet sand. It fuses a channel through the sand, turning it to glass.'

'That's why I hired him,' said Lloyd, looking around with a grin.

'Here's another,' said a workman. They carefully dug around it, leaving it sticking up in the sand like a tree branch.

'Meteorites are ferromagnetic,' McFarlane said, dropping down and carefully plucking it from the sand with his gloved hands. 'This one must have attracted more than its share of lightning.'

The men continued to work, uncovering several more fulgurites, which were wrapped in tissue and packed in wooden crates. Amira swept her instrument over the ground surface. 'Six more inches,' she said.

'Switch to brushes,' said Glinn.

Two men now crouched around the hole, the rest of the workers taking up positions behind them. At this depth, McFarlane could see that the dirt was wet, almost saturated with water, and the workers were not so much sweeping away sand as they were brushing mud. A hush fell on the group as the hole deepened, centimeter by centimeter.

'Take another reading,' murmured Glinn.

'One more inch,' Amira said.

McFarlane leaned forward. The two laborers were using stiff plastic brushes to carefully whisk the mud into pans, which they passed to the men behind them.

And then a brush swept across a hard surface. The two workmen stepped out of the hole and gingerly troweled away the heavy mud, leaving a shallow layer covering the hard surface below.

'Rinse it off,' said Glinn. McFarlane thought he heard a note of anticipation in the voice.

'Hurry, man!' Lloyd cried.

One of the workmen came running up, unrolling a thin hose. Glinn himself took the nozzle, aimed it toward the mud-covered meteorite, and squeezed. For several seconds, there was no sound except the gentle hiss of water as the last of the mud was rinsed from the surface.

Then Glinn jerked the nozzle shut. The water drained away from the naked surface of the meteorite. A sudden paralysis, an electric moment of suspension, gripped the company.

And then there was the sound of the champagne bottle, heedlessly dropped, landing on the damp earth with a heavy thud.

Isla Desolacion,

9:55 A.M.

PALMER LLOYD stood at the edge of the precise cut in the earth, his eyes locked on the naked surface of the