The Ice Limit

meteorite. For a moment, his mind went blank at the astonishing sight. And then, gradually, he became aware of himself again: felt the blood pounding in his temples, the air filling his chest, the cold air freezing his nose and cheeks. And yet the overpowering surprise remained. He was looking at it, he was seeing it, but he couldn't believe it.

'Margaux,' he murmured, his voice small in the snowy vastness.

The silence around him was complete. Everyone had been shocked mute.

Lloyd had made pilgrimages to most of the great iron meteorites in the world — the Hoba, the Ahnighito, the Willamette, the Woman. Despite their widely varying shapes, they all had the same pitted, brownish-black surface. All iron meteorites looked alike.

But this meteorite was scarlet. But no, he thought, as his brain began to pick up speed again: the word 'scarlet' did not do it justice. It was the deep, pure velvety color of polished carnelian, yet even richer. It was, in fact, precisely the color of a fine Bordeaux wine, like the parsimonious drams of Chateau Margaux with which he had been forced to content himself on the Rolvaag.

Now one voice cut through the shocked silence. It had a note of authority that Lloyd recognized as Glinn's. 'I would like everyone to please step back from the hole.'

Distantly, Lloyd was aware that nobody was moving.

'Step back,' Glinn repeated, more sharply.

This time, the tight circle of onlookers reluctantly shuffled back a few steps. As the shadows fell away, sunlight lanced through the crowd, illuminating the pit. Once more, Lloyd felt the breath snatched from him. In the sunlight, the meteorite revealed a silky, metallic surface that resembled nothing so much as gold. Like gold, this scarlet metal seemed to collect and trap the ambient light, darkening the outside world while giving itself an ineffable, interior illumination. It was not only beautiful, but unutterably strange.

And it was his.

He felt flooded by a sudden, powerful joy: for this amazing thing that lay at his feet and for the astonishing trajectory of his life that had given him the opportunity to find it. Bringing the largest meteorite in human history back to his museum had always seemed goal enough. But now the stakes were higher. It was no accident that he — perhaps the only person on earth with the vision and the resources — would be here, at this time and in this place, staring at this ravishing object.

'Mr. Lloyd,' he heard Glinn say. 'I said step back.'

Instead, Lloyd leaned forward.

Glinn raised his voice. 'Palmer, do not do it!'

But Lloyd had already dropped into the hole, his feet landing squarely on the surface of the meteorite. He immediately fell to his knees, allowing the tips of his gloved fingers to caress the smoothly rippled metallic surface. On impulse, he leaned down and placed his cheek against it. Above, there was a brief silence.

'How does it feel?' he heard McFarlane ask.

'Cold,' Lloyd replied, sitting up. He could hear the quaver in his voice as he spoke, feel the tears freezing on his numb cheek. 'It feels very cold.'

Isla Desolacion,

1:55 P.M.

MCFARLANE STARED at the laptop on his knees. The cursor blinked back, reproachfully, from a nearly blank screen. He sighed and shifted in the metal folding chair, trying to get comfortable. The lone window of the commissary hut glittered with frost, and the sound of wind came through the walls. Outside, the clear weather had given way to snow. But within the hut, a coal stove threw out a wonderfully intense heat.

McFarlane moused a command, then closed the laptop with a curse. On a nearby table, a printer began to hum. He shifted again, restlessly. Once again, he replayed the events of the morning. The moment of awestruck silence, Lloyd jumping so impulsively into the hole, and Glinn calling out to him — by his Christian name, for the first time McFarlane remembered. The triumphant christening, the torrent of questions that followed. And — overlaying everything — an overpowering sense of incomprehension. He felt that the breath had been knocked out of him, that he was struggling for air.

He, too, had felt a sudden urge to jump in; to touch the thing, to reassure himself that it was real. But he was also slightly afraid of it. It had such a rich color, so out of place in the monochromatic landscape. It reminded him of an operating table, a vast expanse of snowy white sheets with a bloody incision at their center. It repelled and fascinated simultaneously. And it excited in him a hope that he thought had been dead.

The door to the hut opened, admitting a howl of snow. McFarlane glanced up as Amira stepped in.

'Finish the report?' she asked, removing her parka and shaking off the snow.

In response, McFarlane nodded toward the printer. Amira walked to it and grabbed the emerging sheet. Then she barked a laugh. ''The meteorite is red,'' she read aloud. She tossed the sheet into McFarlane's lap. 'Now that's what I like in a man, succinctness.'

'Why fill up paper with a lot of useless speculations? Until we get a piece of it for study, how can I possibly say what the hell it is?'

She pulled up a chair and sat down beside him. It seemed to McFarlane that, beneath a forced casualness, she was eyeing him very carefully. 'You've been studying meteorites for years. I doubt your speculations would be useless.'

'What do you think?'

'I'll show you mine if you show me yours.'

McFarlane glanced down at the pattern of ripples on the plywood table, tracing his finger along them. It had the fractal perfection of a coastline, or a snowflake, or a Mandelbrot set. It reminded him how complicated everything was: the universe, an atom, a piece of wood. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Amira draw a metal cigar tube from her parka and upend it, letting a half-burnt stogie drop into her hand.

'Please don't,' he said. 'I'd rather not be driven out into the cold.'

Amira replaced the cigar. 'I know something is running through that head of yours.'

McFarlane shrugged.

'Okay,' she said. 'You want to know what I think? You're in denial.'

He turned to look at her again.

'That's right. You had a pet theory once — something you believed in, despite the razzing of your peers. Isn't that right? And when you thought you'd finally found evidence for that theory, it got you into trouble. In all the excitement you lost your usual good judgment and shafted a friend. And in the end, your evidence turned out to be worthless.'

McFarlane looked at her. 'I didn't know you had a degree in psychiatry, along with everything else.'

She leaned closer, pressing. 'Sure, I heard the story. The point is, now you've got what you've been looking for all these years. You've got more than evidence. You've got proof. But you don't want to admit it. You're afraid to go down that road again.'

McFarlane held her gaze for a minute. He felt his anger drain away. He slumped in his chair, his mind in turmoil. Could she be right? he wondered.

She laughed. 'Take the color, for example. You know why no metals are deep red?'

'No.'

'Objects are a certain color because of the way they interact with photons of light.' Amira shoved a hand in her pocket and took out a crumpled paper bag. 'Jolly Rancher?'

'What the hell's a Jolly Rancher?'

She tossed him a candy and shook another one into her hand. She held the green lozenge up between thumb and forefinger. 'Every object, except for a perfect blackbody, absorbs some wavelengths of light and scatters others. Take this green candy. It's green because its scatters the green wavelengths of light back at our eye, while absorbing the rest. I've run a few pretty little calculations, and I can't find a single theoretical combination of alloyed metals that will scatter red light. It seems to be impossible for any known alloy to be deep red. Yellow, white, orange, purple, gray — but not red.' She popped the green candy in her mouth, bit