The Ice Limit

'And have a cable with a ground-fault interrupt able to carry up to twenty thousand watts.'

McFarlane gave a low whistle. 'That'll do it.'

'You have one hour to get your samples. We have no more time.' These words were spoken very slowly, and very clearly. 'Garza will be here shortly. Be ready.'

Glinn rose abruptly and left the lab, the door sucking in a gust of frigid air as it shut behind him.

McFarlane looked at Amira. 'He's getting touchy.'

'He hates not knowing,' said Amira. 'Uncertainty drives him around the bend.'

'It must be hard to live life like that.'

A distant look of pain crossed her face. 'You haven't any idea.'

McFarlane looked at her curiously, but Amira merely pulled down her mask and removed her gloves. 'Let's break down the microprobe for transport,' she said.

Isla Desolacion,

1:45 P.M.

BY EARLY afternoon, the staging area had been prepped for the test. Inside the little shack, the light was brilliant, the air suffocatingly warm. McFarlane stood over the hole, looking down on the rich, deep red surface. Even in the harsh light it had a soft luster. The microprobe, a long cylinder of stainless steel, lay on a padded cradle. Amira was arranging the other equipment McFarlane had ordered: an inch-thick bell jar containing a filament and plug, a set of gold disks sealed in plastic, and an electromagnet for focusing the electron beam.

'I need one square foot of the meteorite cleaned to absolute perfection,' McFarlane said to Glinn, who was standing nearby. 'Otherwise we'll get contaminants.'

'We'll make it happen,' said Glinn. 'Once we get the samples, what's your plan?'

'We'll run a series of tests on them. With any luck, we'll be able to determine its basic electrical, chemical, and physical properties.'

'How long will that take?'

'Forty-eight hours. More, if we eat and sleep.'

Glinn's lips compressed together. 'We can't afford more than twelve hours. Confine yourself to the most essential tests.' He checked his massive gold pocket watch. Another hour, and all was in readiness. The bell jar had been tightly sealed to the surface of the meteorite — an excruciatingly cautious operation. Inside the bell jar, ten tiny sample disks lay on pieces of glass, arrayed in a circle. A ring of electromagnets surrounded the jar. The electron microprobe lay nearby, partially open, its complex guts exposed. Multicolored wires and tubes streamed from it.

'Rachel, please turn on the vacuum pump,' McFarlane said.

There was a whir as air was sucked from the bell jar. McFarlane monitored a screen on the microprobe. 'What do you know. The seal's holding. Vacuum's down to five microbars.'

Glinn moved closer, watching the small screen intently.

'Turn on the electromagnets,' McFarlane said.

'You've got it,' said Amira.

'Douse the lights.'

The room went dark. The only light came from cracks in the walls of the ill-made shack and from the LEDs arranged along the microprobe's controls.

'I'm turning the beam on at low power,' McFarlane whispered.

A faint bluish beam appeared in the bell jar. It flickered and rotated, casting a spectral light across the meteorite's surface, turning the crimson surface almost black. The walls of the shack danced and wavered.

McFarlane carefully turned two sets of dials, altering the magnetic fields around the jar. The beam stopped rotating and began to narrow, becoming brighter. Soon it looked like a blue pencil, its point resting on the meteorite's surface.

'We're there,' he said. 'Now I'm going to bring it to full power for five seconds.'

He held his breath. If Glinn's concerns were justified—if the meteorite was somehow dangerous — this was when they might find out.

He pressed the timer. There was a sudden, much brighter, beam inside the jar. Where it touched the meteorite's surface, there was an intense violet pinpoint of light. Five seconds ticked off, and then everything went dark again. McFarlane felt himself relax involuntarily. 'Lights.'

As the lights came on, McFarlane knelt above the meteorite's surface, staring eagerly at the gold disks. He caught his breath. Each disk was now marked with the faintest blush of red. Not only that, but at the spot where the electron beam had touched the meteorite, he saw — or thought he saw — the tiniest pit, a gleaming speck on the smooth surface.

He straightened up.

'Well?' asked Glinn. 'What happened?'

McFarlane grinned. 'This baby isn't so tough, after all.'

Isla Desolacion,

July 18, 9:00 A.M.

MCFARLANE CRUNCHED across the staging area, Amira at his side. The site looked the same — the same rows of containers and Quonset huts; the same raw, frosted earth. Only he was different. He felt bone tired yet exhilarated. As they walked in silence, the crisp air seemed to magnify everything: the sound of his boots creaking in the fresh snow, the clatter of distant machinery, the rasp of his own breath. It helped clear his head of all the strange speculations that the night's experiments had aroused.

Reaching the bank of containers, he approached the main lab and held open the door for Amira. Inside, in the dim light, he could see Stonecipher, the project's second engineer, working on an open computer box, disks and circuit boards spread out fanwise. Stonecipher straightened up his short, narrow body at their arrival.

'Mr. Glinn wants to see you, on the double,' he said.

'Where is he?' asked McFarlane.

'Underground. I'll take you.'

Not far from the shack that covered the meteorite, a second shack had been erected, even more dilapidated than its cousin. The door to this shack opened and Garza emerged, wearing a hard hat beneath his hood and carrying several others in his hands. He tossed one to each of them.

'Come on in,' he said, ushering them into the smaller shack. McFarlane looked around the dim space, wondering what was going on. The shack held nothing but some old tools and several nail kegs.

'What's this?' McFarlane asked.

'You'll see,' said Garza with a grin. He rolled the nail kegs away from the center of the shack, exposing a steel plate, which he hooked open.

McFarlane drew in his breath in astonishment. The open trapdoor revealed a descending staircase in a tunnel, cut into the ground, and heavily reinforced with steel. White light blazed upward. 'Pretty cloak-and-dagger,' he said.

Garza laughed. 'I call it the King Tut method. They hid the tunnel into King Tut's treasure chamber by locating it beneath the shack of an insignificant worker.'

They descended the narrow staircase, single file, to a narrow tunnel illuminated by dual lines of fluorescent lights. The tunnel was so massively cribbed with I-beams that it seemed made entirely of steel. The group proceeded single file, their breath leaving fog trails in the frosty air. Icicles hung from the overhead struts, and hoarfrost grew in sheets and spikes along the walls. McFarlane caught his breath as he saw a patch of unmistakable color ahead of them, bright red against the shine of ice and steel.

'You're looking at a small section of the meteorite's underside,' Garza said, stopping beside it.

Underneath the lustrous red surface, a row of jacks, each a foot in diameter, sat like squat pillars on fat, clawlike feet, bolted to the metal cribbing on the floor and walls.

'There they are,' said Garza affectionately. 'The bad boys who'll be doing the lifting.' He patted the closest with a gloved hand. 'At go-ahead, we'll lift the rock exactly six centimeters. Then we'll wedge it, reposition the jacks, and lift again. As soon as we get enough clearance, we'll start building the cradle underneath. It'll be